Deep History and the Biopsychosocial Paradigm

Richard Bolstad, 2026

This is a “Taster” – Full Article Coming Soon!

A Deeper Materialism

In 1885, Karl Marx wrote famously about his historical materialist approach to history “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” (Marx and Engels, 1975, p. 96). Anthropologist and Archaeologist Michael Winkelman explains why he thinks that we need to go deeper, to understand that this “dead weight of tradition” is neither dead, nor a weight. It is in fact a biological inheritance which forms the materialist basis for human decision-making, and which prioritizes bliss and safety over even economic survival. It provides us not merely our nightmares but also our most beautiful dreams, and without understanding this, any materialist view of history will fail to provide a practical guide for human action in the present (as indeed Marxism has failed).

Winkelman argues “First I would say that the cross-cultural principles, even universals, of magicoreligious practices, especially shamanism, speak to some underlying biological factors that produce these similarities. Certainly the physical and social environment provide influences, but I think the notion of cross-culturally distributed principles of shamanism, religion, meditation and spirituality speaks strongly to the underlying biological bases as the structural foundations.” Put simply, biology trumps economic theory.

Why did history, until recently, ignore the grounding of the human story in biology, which the Darwinian revolution in biology made quite clear? Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail (2011, p. 8-9) suggest “As creation gave way to nature, the assumption that humans are part of nature, and that human systems are natural systems, slowly took hold in the biological and behavioral sciences. Among historians and cultural anthropologists, however, the equation of cultural systems with natural ones has never been easy, nor has it been easily historicized. Both difficulties, we believe, are related to the lingering power of the metaphors that dominated history writing in the nineteenth century. The human story, in this worldview, is centered on the conquest of nature and the birth of political society.” That is to say, history, and most especially Marxist materialist history, has largely been the history of the human “conquest” of nature. This absurd misunderstanding (“Animals live in harmony with nature. Humans, by contrast, are at war with nature.” – Shryock and Smail, 2011, p. 9) leads us not to some communist utopia but to self-destruction.

To move beyond that, we need to confront the fact that we are an intrinsic part of nature and that the ‘dialectic” of nature has more control than the superficial patterns of economic production and social organization studied by Marx. It will help if we can accept that nature has not gifted us nightmares so much as loving guidance for survival. As someone who works both with healing collective social trauma, and with the neuroscience of transcendent states, this is a crucial reframe which I believe has not even been understood in the behavioural sciences, let alone in history. It is my purpose in this article to restate this self-evident truth, in terms of modern biology.

The Biological History of Suffering

The Biological History of Joy

Moving Beyond “Grand Schemes of History” to the Grander Scheme of Nature

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Bibliography:

  • Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D., 2021, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
  • Green, A. and Troup, K. 2016, The houses of history: A critical reader in history and theory, second edition, Manchester University Press, Manchester
  • Marx, K. 1845, “Theses on Feuerbach” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm
  • Marx, K. and Engel, F., 1975, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow
  • Shryock, A. and Smail, D.L., eds. 2011, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, University of California, Berkeley
  • Winkelman, M. & Fortier, M., 2019, “The evolutionary neuroanthropology of consciousness Exploring the diversity of conscious states across cultures: An interview with Michael Winkelman”. ALIUS Bulletin 3. 45-97. 10.34700/krg3-zk35.
  • Winkelman, M., 2010, Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing, Praeger, Santa Barbara