Читать книгу The Power of the Herd - Linda Kohanov - Страница 13
ОглавлениеImagine if a supervisor asked you to complete a project with only 10 percent of the information available to you, if schools were only committed to teaching 10 percent of what you would need to succeed in life. And yet that’s precisely what’s happening as we overemphasize the spoken and written word in business, education, and relationships. Once we realize that only 10 percent of human interpersonal communication is verbal, we can also recognize that telephone, computer, and text messaging innovations are deceptively seductive tools that limit human potential. Excessive dependence on these convenient devices creates voluntary learning disabilities in the realms of emotional and social intelligence that ultimately foster a kind of devolution if left unchecked over generations.
The tendency to treat the body as a machine already has a good four hundred years of history behind it, starting with René Descartes’s influential philosophy in the seventeenth century and reaching its apex in the twentieth-century assembly line. Frederick Taylor’s famous time-and-motion study technique, for instance, attempted to reach maximum productive efficiency by essentially turning workers into robots. Luckily the same scientific methods that, for a while, promoted a form of “mechanomorphism” in dealing with living beings have recently given us some very good reasons to reconsider the body’s innate, richly nuanced intelligence.
In his book The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life, Robert K. Cooper actually predicts that the “dinosaurs of the future will be those who keep trying to live and work from their heads alone. Much of human brilliance is driven less by the brain in your head than by newly discovered intelligence centers — now called ‘brain two and brain three’ — in the gut and the heart. The highest reasoning and the brightest ingenuity involve all three of those brains working together.”
Physiologists now know that there are more neural cells in the gut than in the entire spinal column. As a result, the enteric (intestinal) nervous system can gather information and adapt to the environment. The heart also serves as an organ of perception. “In the 1990s,” Cooper reports, “scientists in the field of neurocardiology discovered the true brain in the heart, which acts independently of the head. Comprised of a distinctive set of more than 40,000 nerve cells called baroreceptors, along with a complex network of neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells, this heart brain is as large as many key areas of the brain in your head. It has powerful, highly sophisticated computational abilities.”
“Gut feelings” can no longer be dismissed as whimsical or delusional: both the intestinal track and the heart have been shown to generate neuropeptides, molecules carrying emotional information. In this way, the body serves as a magnificent tuner, receiver, and amplifier for all kinds of information. It feels, learns, and has definite opinions that sometimes contradict those of the brain. As author and researcher Dr. Candace Pert asserts, your body is your subconscious mind. Imagine the edge, the power and insight, the sheer genius available to those who make this somatic wisdom conscious!
While science is finally embracing this concept, we already have a term for people who tap the wonders of those other two corporeal intelligence centers: we say they have “horse sense.” The expression, dating back to the 1800s, refers to sound practical wisdom, a combination of finely tuned awareness, common sense, and gumption. People with horse sense pay attention to that “other 90 percent.” They “listen to their gut” as well as their minds when making decisions and really “put their heart into it” once they commit to action. There’s also an element of intuition involved, as in: “She’s got too much horse sense to believe his story.” For this reason, it’s often thought of as a mysterious gift that certain lucky people possess from birth.
You can develop horse sense at any age, most efficiently through actually working with horses. In fact, it was that first spirited mare who taught me to stand up for myself and read the true intentions of others. I was in my thirties at the time, dealing with an aggressive yet secretive supervisor at the radio station. As I learned to motivate and set boundaries with a thousand-pound being, my two-hundred-pound boss suddenly seemed less intimidating. I not only found that I could effectively challenge unreasonable demands, I gained greater cooperation and respect as a result.
The practical applications were useful, of course. But something even more exciting began to happen. The training my horses provided encouraged me to gaze ever more deeply into the limitations of my own socially conditioned mind, allowing me to glimpse “civilized” human behavior through a wider lens. Staring at historical and current events from this new perspective, I realized that whether I was a left-wing Democrat, a right-wing Republican, a fundamentalist Christian, a radical feminist, a gay-rights advocate, a communist, fascist, creationist, or scientist, my effectiveness in the world was likely to be impaired by the same unconscious habits. Our ancestors had sailed across a potentially hostile ocean to escape the ravages of persecution and tyranny, hoping for a fresh start in the land of the free and the home of the brave, only to build the wildly hopeful structures of democracy on the same faulty foundation of long-buried, largely nonverbal assumptions and behaviors. For this reason, I doubted technology would save us; neither would liberal or conservative agendas based on the same worn-out neural pathways meandering through our fearful, body-phobic, increasingly dissociative, egotistical, machine-worshipping heads.
Pioneering Spirit
For thousands of years, people explored the world on horseback, charting territory they would have struggled to traverse on foot, reveling in a primal experience of freedom, strength, and speed so exhilarating that we still measure our most sophisticated engines in units of horsepower. But there was something much more profound happening in those interspecies associations. Learning to form effective, working partnerships with horses provided the most elusive yet important education a human leader could acquire — that “other 90 percent” exercised at a wholly nonverbal level. Now that the entire planet has been mapped, consciousness itself is the new frontier. Twenty-first-century pioneers are looking for ways to tap the vast resources of all three of their brains — those interconnected sensory and intelligence centers in the head, the heart, and the gut. In this respect, horses, once again, provide the ultimate shortcut.
I’m not talking only about developing balance, will, timing, focus, courage, and assertiveness. I’m talking about exercising intersubjective awareness. The fact that few people truly understand what intersubjectivity is explains why we have such a hard time understanding the “mechanics” of relationship and, ultimately, training innovative leaders of all kinds, whether they be CEOs, parents, teachers, or politicians.
In our culture, we prize and overdevelop objectivity, the ability to stand back and observe without affecting, or being affected by, what we are observing. Subjectivity is considered the artist’s prerogative. We appreciate people who communicate their feelings, dreams, and views to us in evocative ways. Yet it’s really intersubjectivity that we value in a fine work of art, the ability of the artist to depict a truth that we, too, feel deeply but may not have found the right poetry, visual symbol, or music to express. Artists in our culture are worshipped more widely than mystics, because no matter how practical we think we are, we’re willing to pay good money for songs, films, photographs, books, and paintings that reflect what we crave to understand about deeper layers of nonverbal awareness and experience.
Intersubjectivity has an immensely more practical purpose as well, in daily relationships, in business, and most certainly in cultivating the skills associated with leadership and team building. Basically, intersubjective awareness involves paying attention to your own nonverbal experiences and body language cues and those of the people you’re interacting with at the same time. It’s easier said than done. Most adults, in fact, just aren’t very good at this, because the skills associated with intersubjectivity have been seriously neglected in our culture. But when we become conscious of what we’re communicating to others nonverbally, and what they’re communicating to us nonverbally, a whole new universe of information is suddenly available to us. This information virtually demands that we develop the ability to improvise as we respond and adapt to these subtle cues on our way to achieving any goal.
With modern education overemphasizing intellectual and verbal arts, people who somehow manage to train all three of their “brains” become more influential in, even irresistible to, populations who lack this full-bodied charisma. Take Ronald Reagan, whose firm yet congenial, focused, larger-than-life presence was, in fact, the mark of a rider capable of harnessing power and intelligence without repressing the spirit that brings it to life. He so swayed public opinion that the phenomenon of “Democrats for Reagan” was cited by Barack Obama as an inspiration for cultivating cross-party support.
Photos of Reagan on horseback — heading across the range in any number of old Western movies, mounted on his regal gray Arabian at the ranch, and later, riding English-style with Queen Elizabeth — are plentiful on the Internet. Most people would consider this a colorful, perhaps elitist, pastime. Yet the fact that Reagan loved to ride speaks volumes about what kind of intricate, nonverbal training he received that led him to become the noteworthy leader history has since proven him to be.
During the election of 2000, I couldn’t help contrasting the former president’s engaging presence with the stiff, tentative, overintellectual style of Al Gore, a candidate whose ideas and policies I did, in fact, support in several key areas. While he has since gone on to win the Nobel prize, Gore’s demeanor was unduly skewed toward the brain in the head. The “other 90 percent” was missing, at least during his public appearances. Whether or not the election was rigged, the race itself was close. George W. Bush’s style of engaging with the public involved a bit more heart and gut, and that gave him a palpable edge in the nonverbal communication department.
Over time, however, the winner of that controversial vote did not demonstrate the level of horse sense that Reagan possessed. The most telling example was Bush’s response to the news that New York City’s Twin Towers were falling — a response caught on film while he was reading a story to some blissfully unaware schoolchildren. George W. had that deer-in-the-headlights look, which means he wasn’t actively creating a calming presence; he was dissociating. Had he slipped into a similarly disconnected state on the back of a panicking horse, he would have ended up on the ground, temporarily unable to remember that he was the president of the United States.
What Would George Washington Do?
At this point it’s important, enlightening actually, to appreciate the sophisticated combination of intellectual ability and horse sense possessed by our country’s first president. George Washington was a prolific letter writer with progressive views on education and leadership even by today’s standards. It wasn’t nearly so easy to document his considerable nonverbal talents, of course, but many of his soldiers and colleagues wrote home about him, capturing intriguing anecdotes and observations of his particularly striking effect on others. Washington not only commanded respect, he moved people deeply, inspiring loyalty during periods of extreme hardship, mind-boggling uncertainty, and dramatic change. And he accomplished all of this with a reputation for being a man of few words, at least in public.
When I began studying Washington’s career in earnest at the end of 2009, the country he fought so long and hard for was struggling with Wall Street betrayals, record unemployment, fear-mongering pundits, and hostile relations between, sometimes even within, the two political parties. Scared, angry people were burning the current president in effigy over health-care reform, shouting racial slurs, bemoaning the end of civilization itself. Uncompromising red-faced fanatics on both sides of the issue were threatening to move to Canada or Costa Rica if they didn’t get their way. Like many people caught in the middle, I was disgusted with the greed, egotism, irresponsibility, manipulation, and extremism running amok in the name of patriotism. To say I was becoming jaded would be an understatement.
And then the spirit of George Washington rode up on his powerful steed. Little-known facts about the man’s life captured my imagination, not only invigorating my research on leadership but renewing my faith in the sanity our country’s original vision. I was, for a time, filled with such sincere and fervent feelings of patriotism that friends and family members would stare at me wide-eyed, leaning backward, glancing toward the door. “We were cheated by the public school system,” I’d declare. “Our naive yet well-meaning teachers were making us memorize dates and names and superficial facts when they could have been teaching us the process Washington went through to become the ultimate leader and citizen of a free society. True democracy can’t possibly thrive in this country until the abilities that Washington modeled become the rule rather than the exception, not just in politicians, but in the population at large!”
Then I’d practically shout, pounding the dining room table, “This ambitious yet essential goal cannot be achieved exclusively through verbal-oriented education!”
I’ve since calmed down considerably, but I still believe I was on to something. While my high school history teachers were devising coolly objective multiple-choice tests involving dates like 1776, names like Benedict Arnold, and events like the Boston Tea Party, essential facts about George Washington’s true genius were languishing in obscurity, information that would have given me a road map to becoming a more courageous, adaptable, and insightful leader. I would have understood the hardships, mistakes, and betrayals he endured, how he rose above these challenges without losing his heart and soul. I would have glimpsed the power of charisma balanced by integrity and empathy. And perhaps most important, I might have understood the extent to which visionary leadership in particular demands qualities a lot more sophisticated and mysterious than passion, idealism, and a talent for risk management. Innovators charged with transforming society must develop a paradoxical combination of conviction and adaptability, demonstrating a level of endurance so high it’s contagious while consciously engaging in the lesser-known, largely nonverbal art of fear management.
The Presence of Power
In the winter of 1777, George Washington somehow inspired a ragged group of soldiers not only to stick around for the Second Battle of Trenton but to actually win it. John Howland, a young private from Rhode Island, lived to tell the story. In an account published fifty-four years after the event, he struggled to remember what the general said but never forgot how it felt to borrow the man’s courage.
“Lord Cornwallis was on the march from Princeton with, as it was said, ten thousand men to beat up our quarters,” Howland reported, estimating that the “whole army of the United States” at that time was “supposed to amount to about four thousand men.” And that wasn’t even the worst of the news. The odds were against them in so many other, thoroughly demoralizing ways: “If any fervent mind should doubt this,” he emphasized, “it must be from not knowing the state of our few, half-starved, half-frozen, feeble, worn-out men, with old fowling pieces for muskets, and half of them without bayonets, and the States so disheartened, discouraged, or poor, that they sent no reinforcements, no recruits to supply this handful of men.”
As the British and their fierce allies, the Hessians, marched on Trenton, New Jersey, from their garrison in Princeton, Howland was one of a thousand troops assigned to delay the enemy’s advance through a gutsy attack and retreat/ambush, across Assunpink Creek. “The bridge was narrow,” he remembered, “and our platoons were, in passing it, crowded into a dense and solid mass, in the rear of which the enemy were making their best efforts.” Yet in that moment of utter confusion and desperation, Howland touched a vision of power, gaining, in the crush of battle, a sense of steadiness, renewal, and awe: “The noble horse of Gen. Washington stood with his breast pressed close against the end of the west rail of the bridge, and the firm, composed, and majestic countenance of the general inspired confidence and assurance in a moment so important and critical. In this passage across the bridge rail, it was my fortune to be next the west rail, and arriving at the end of the bridge, I pressed against the shoulder of the general’s horse, and in contact with the general’s boot. The horse stood as firm as the rider, and seemed to understand that he was not to quit his post and station.”
Washington alone did not create that transformational effect. It was the dedication and poise his mount exhibited that inspired the same in young Howland. Yet to fathom what an outrageous achievement it was for Washington to find and train an animal capable of enduring such a scene, you have to appreciate, first of all, the horror of the sound alone. For thousands of years, warriors fought with swords, spears, and arrows. The Revolutionary War seethed with musket fire and cannon blasts. And something else: “Horses were screaming on the battlefield,” historian James Parrish Hodges reminded me during an interview in which we talked about Washington’s leadership abilities. Riding a prey animal, a vegetarian, a species that much prefers flight over fight, anywhere near the scent of blood — let alone the din of absolute chaos and unmitigated agony — goes against every hardwired impulse the horse possesses. If the general’s mount had been a machine programmed for survival, incapable of transcending instinct, such an act would have been impossible. Luckily, the general didn’t believe this was true, or he wouldn’t have been able to ride the same two trusted equine companions through the entire revolution with the odds stacked against them all, horse and human alike.
“It was a miracle,” Hodges says of the colonists’ success. “Washington tapped more in his people than they themselves thought they could give.” And he never would have lived through the first of those battles if he hadn’t inspired similar acts of heroism in his horses. After all, a good twenty years earlier Washington had received a promotion to the rank of colonel when Joshua Fry, commander of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War, had died after falling from his horse.
The Silence of Power
While brief, eyewitness accounts of Washington’s impressive riding skills were commonplace, historians past and present have failed to recognize the importance of his distinction as one of the finest horse trainers on either side of the Atlantic. To be sure, Thomas Jefferson characterized him as “the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.” Yet few politicians and writers at that time understood the equestrian arts well enough to fathom the general’s genius in that arena. Our only glimpse comes from the marquis de Chastellux, a French nobleman, military officer, and philosopher who served as liaison between Washington and the French forces that ultimately helped defeat the British during the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. Chastellux published his complete recollections of the American War of Independence five years later, including a description of his subsequent travels through the newly formed United States. Because of his literary talent and acute sense of observation, he produced what are still considered the most vivid descriptions of George Washington as an effective yet profoundly human leader in wartime. A peacetime visit to Mount Vernon gave Chastellux a still deeper understanding of his former comrade in arms.
Two crucial aspects of Washington’s life and personality made it difficult for anyone to know him intimately, let alone write about him effectively: his preference for silence over casual conversation and the vast amount of time he spent in the saddle, for business as well as pleasure. As an accomplished equestrian himself, Chastellux was simply able to go where few men had gone before — riding with the Revolutionary War hero, on one of his exquisitely trained horses, no less.
“The weather being fair,” Chastellux wrote, “I got on horseback, after breakfasting with the General. He was so attentive as to give me the horse he rode on the day of my arrival, which I had greatly commended. I found him as good as he is handsome, but above all well broke and well trained having a good mouth, easy in hand, and stopping short in a gallop without bearing on the bit. I mention these minute particulars, because it is the General himself who breaks all his own horses, and he is a very excellent and bold horseman, leaping the highest fences, and going extremely quick, without standing upon his stirrups, bearing on the bridle, or letting his horse run wild.”
Washington could not have used abusive dominance techniques to create a mount of this caliber. In equestrian terms, he taught the horse to “carry himself” with the utmost grace and responsiveness. The general rode with a light yet persuasive touch, creating an agile, thoughtful partner rather than a dissociative, machinelike mode of transportation. And Chastellux, a man who’d visited the stables of European royalty, was impressed.
In addition to a long-standing, vigorous devotion to horse breeding, racing, and foxhunting (an athletic equestrian sport that involves racing cross-country and leaping over fences with packs of baying hounds), Washington’s postwar and postpresidency “retirement” routine at Mount Vernon involved rising with the sun and literally rousting many of his own workers. After providing meticulous instructions on a variety of farm tasks and repairs, he ate a light breakfast at seven o’clock and then spent a good six hours in the saddle. In His Excellency: George Washington, Joseph J. Ellis describes him riding around the farm, “ordering drainage ditches to be widened, inspecting the operation of a new distillery he had recently commissioned on the premises, warning poachers that the deer on his property had become domesticated and must not be hunted, inquiring after a favored house slave who had recently been bitten by a dog.”
What historians consistently fail to mention about his daily schedule (no doubt because Washington himself didn’t discuss it much) concerns when and how he trained his horses, who would have needed years of careful development to reach the level of expertise under saddle that Chastellux reported, let alone exhibit the courage under fire Washington’s favored war mounts possessed. The general trusted those horses with his life, and they proved worthy of his confidence in so many subtle yet remarkable ways. When he returned to the mansion around two o’clock each afternoon, Ellis reveals, “no one needed to take the reins off his horse. Washington simply slapped him on the backside and he trotted over to the barn on his own. (Horses like men, seemed disposed to acknowledge his authority.)”
That authority rested to a great extent on Washington’s instinctual understanding of the leader’s role as educator rather than dictator. He cultivated trust, courage, and devotion as much as he commanded it. It’s a crying shame he didn’t write a book on horse training, but the art form, being almost exclusively nonverbal, probably eluded his efforts to describe it in the brief journal entries he had time to record at the end of the day. Washington was too busy building an agricultural empire at Mount Vernon, fighting a revolutionary war, and negotiating the parameters of the very first U.S. presidency. Still, his success in all of those realms was without a doubt tied to his profound mastery of the human-equine relationship. As Thomas Jefferson later complained when he and Washington became political rivals, the persistent image of the elder statesman on horseback always seemed to trump the most eloquent speeches and persuasive intellectual arguments anyone else devised in opposition. Without saying a word, the man radiated dignity and power.
And there was no arguing with him. Not because he wouldn’t listen — Ellis describes a crucial element of his presidential style as “leading by listening.” He’d spend hours, even days, letting people speak their piece, sometimes to the chagrin of younger, more action-oriented members of his entourage. Once he considered the options and came to a strong conclusion, however, he had no problem herding large groups of people around with the infectious combination of poise, courage, energy, and conviction he exhibited in launching his twelve-hundred-pound war charger into a bloody battle with a thousand shoeless, half-dressed men running behind him.
This frustrated intellectually based idealists like Jefferson and James Madison to no end. The fact that Washington didn’t talk a whole lot made them even crazier. As Ellis observes, “He possessed a nearly preternatural ability to remain silent while everyone around him was squirming under the social pressure to fill the silence with chatty conversation. ([John] Adams later claimed that this ‘gift of silence’ was Washington’s greatest political asset, which Adams himself so envied because he lacked the gift altogether.)”
Washington’s influence would forever remain a mystery to men with little horse sense, men who sat in chairs debating ideas while their colleague became “first in war and first in peace,” literally riding through the richly nuanced, wholly nonverbal realms of that crucial “other 90 percent.”
Empathy and Equality
As civilization progressed toward the Age of Reason, it became increasingly out of fashion, taboo even, for people to acknowledge animals as sentient beings, let alone companions, colleagues, or, heaven forbid, influences on human leadership potential. Add to this Washington’s own penchant for keeping his feelings and thoughts under wraps until he was ready to make an official public statement on the many controversial topics of the day, and you begin to understand why little is written about the relationship he had with his most loyal and revered equine companions Old Nelson and Blueskin. At a time when most horses were not afforded palliative care, the fact that Washington’s mounts were well nourished in retirement speaks volumes about how highly our first president regarded these four-legged war heroes.
In 1795, John Hunter, an English visitor to Mount Vernon, made the following casual yet telling observation in a letter to a friend:
When dinner was over, we visited the General’s stables, saw his magnificent horses, among them “Old Nelson,” now twenty-two years of age, that carried the General almost always during the war. “Blueskin,” another fine old horse, next to him, had that honor. They had heard the roaring of many a cannon in their time. “Blueskin” was not the favorite on account of his not standing fire so well as venerable “Old Nelson.” The General makes no manner of use of them now. He keeps them in a nice stable, where they feed away at their ease for their past services.
This brief glimpse illuminates subtle yet important elements of Washington’s philosophy. As he matured, his immense powers of influence, courage, endurance, and motivation were enhanced by an ever-widening, ever-deepening sense of compassion and appreciation for the contributions of others that crossed cultural, racial, and species boundaries. In Washington’s world, respect for the intelligence of all life trumped concern for social norms and historical precedent, manifesting as a sort of empathy-in-action capable of sensing and tapping potential in unexpected places. Short-term gain became increasingly subservient to long-term goals, in terms of not just profit but also behavior, as Washington actively modeled how members of a free society would be expected to treat their colleagues and subordinates, even those who currently ranked as enemies or possessions.
Most soldiers and farmers, after all, considered a bullet to the head a humane, economically prudent way to retire an arthritic workhorse. Yet Washington’s very survival during the war depended on choosing the best horse for the job, relying on that one animal in a million whose capacity for heroism matched his own. Seeing his prospective mounts as interchangeable machines to be used and discarded without conscience could actually have been fatal.
During the Battle of Monmouth Court House, for instance, his second in command, Charles Lee, panicked and began to lead a frantic retreat against firmly expressed orders. Washington relieved the man on the spot. Then, as Ellis observes, he rallied his troops to attack on more favorable terrain “while calmly sitting astride his horse in the midst of a blistering British artillery barrage.” Old Nelson showed more courage and poise under fire than a highly experienced senior general like Lee, and Washington treated his loyal charger as an equine officer worthy of reward for exceptional service.
From there, the general’s attitude toward “Negro slaves,” “Indian savages,” and the uneducated, often destitute immigrants who became his soldiers evolved as well. People who showed real talent, integrity, courage, and dedication were given positions of responsibility acknowledging their gifts and experience, regardless of race, religion, or social standing. Washington’s valet, a slave named Billy Lee (no relation to the aforementioned senior general), assumed command of the servants and valets for all Washington’s officers during the very same Battle of Monmouth Court House, leading them on horseback to safer positions behind the action. An exceptional rider himself, Lee also served as Washington’s huntsman during peacetime fox hunts. In his memoirs, Washington’s stepgrandson George Washington Parke Custis described Lee’s formidable skills: “Will, the huntsman, better known in Revolutionary lore as Billy, rode a horse called Chinkling, a surprising leaper, and made very much like its rider, low, but sturdy, and of great bone and muscle. Will had but one order, which was to keep with the hounds; and, mounted on Chinkling. . . this fearless horseman would rush, at full speed, through brake or tangled wood, in a style at which modern huntsmen would stand aghast.”
Lee had no trouble keeping up with Washington throughout the eight-year war, ready to hand over a spare horse or telescope in the thick of battle, facing every major threat, enduring the incredible hardships at Valley Forge, and enjoying the fruits of victory, including, eventually, his own freedom. Revolutionary War veterans visiting Mount Vernon often stopped by to reminisce with Lee, who was, in later years, disabled by a serious knee injury and fitted with a brace. While the formerly spirited, athletic man dealt with the physical and emotional pain through increasing alcoholism, his contribution was never forgotten. Washington’s will provided him a stipend of thirty dollars a year and the option of remaining at Mount Vernon if he chose. Billy Lee lived the rest of his life as a free man on his former master’s lush estate.
Washington’s expanded view of human dignity and potential did not weaken his resolve to get the job done, however. High-born dilettantes who entered the war to make a name for themselves were given several chances to prove their worthiness — and unceremoniously relieved if they showed up lacking. This, of course, made Washington a controversial character at times, costing him considerable popularity among certain members of the upper classes. Still, he had no qualms about dismissing General Charles Lee (who had friends in high places and an inflated sense of his own importance) after the Monmouth Court House incident. Further acts of insubordination led to Lee’s court-martial — and a certain amount of trouble for Washington to enforce it. Still, he managed to amass and train a multiracial, multicultural force of soldiers with the sheer nerve to achieve the impossible. Long before he ever took office, America’s first president demonstrated, daily, the practical benefits of equality. It’s doubtful he would have won the high-stakes War of Independence without such a radical sense of it.
Policy of Humanity
Of all the miraculous feats Washington performed during the war, surviving it was certainly one of them (considering his willingness to plunge headlong into the thick of battle, let alone lead such a seemingly lost cause to begin with). Even so, his ability to inspire others to transcend justified, deeply ingrained human impulses stands out as his greatest achievement. Hoping to quash any signs of rebellion, British soldiers had been systematically traumatizing the entire country, creating opportunities for the more sadistic members of their ranks to exercise their darkest instincts. King George’s edict to provide “no quarter” to American troops must have been hard for some of his own men to stomach, however: Regulars and mercenaries were severely punished if they showed mercy to surrendering revolutionaries. Most colonial soldiers were killed on the spot as a result, though some were tortured, starved, and mistreated aboard prison ships.
Washington’s troops, then, had good reason to exact revenge when the opportunity arose. Yet with the first major American victory came a wholly unexpected demand they do the exact opposite. Washington not only spared the lives of a thousand Hessians captured during the Battle of Trenton, he literally marched them toward the promise of a new life. “Treat them with humanity,” he wrote in orders handed down to all his officers, “and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren. . . . Provide everything necessary for them on the road.”
Through this extraordinary, thoroughly unprecedented move, Washington instilled tremendous self-control, and more than a hint of compassion, in his men. As James Parrish Hodges observed in Beyond the Cherry Tree: The Leadership Wisdom of George Washington, his reasons were both practical and idealistic. By introducing what John Adams later called a “policy of humanity,” Washington was protecting his own soldiers, hoping the British might reciprocate in future altercations, if only to trade colonial troops for valued officers. He also correctly assumed that some of the Hessians might desert their cruel taskmasters and join the American cause. To encourage them, he “marched the prisoners through the German villages in Pennsylvania so they could see how prosperous their former countrymen were.” Over time, Congress officially recognized the respectful treatment of enemy combatants as a strategic advantage that also exemplified the goals of the American Revolution.
“We were fighting for the rights of ordinary people,” Hodges emphasized. By showing mercy when the British insisted on giving no quarter to his own troops, Washington set an example for the world, manifesting a new dream, a new way of being. The experience of the ideal profoundly affected his very first prisoners of war. Hodges reports that “about 40 percent of the Hessians stayed outright or went back to Germany, got their families, and came back over.” As a result, Washington’s eloquence of action demonstrated what Abraham Lincoln later so eloquently described in words: “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”
British leaders eventually conceded the negative effects of their own institutionalized cruelty. In 1778, Colonel Charles Stuart wrote to his father, the Earl of Bute: “Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observed in a 2005 Los Angeles Times editorial:
In the end, our founding fathers not only protected our national values, they defeated a militarily superior enemy. Indeed, it was their disciplined adherence to those values that helped them win a hopeless struggle against the best soldiers in Europe.
In accordance with this proud American tradition, President Lincoln instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. Lincoln’s order forbade any form of torture or cruelty, and it became the model for the 1929 Geneva Convention. Dwight Eisenhower made a point to guarantee exemplary treatment to German POWs in World War II, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered application of the Geneva Convention during the Korean War, even though the U.S. was not yet a signatory. In the Vietnam War, the United States extended the convention’s protection to Viet Cong prisoners even though the law did not technically require it.
The very fact that Kennedy had to write an article opposing torture in the twenty-first century shows how easy it is for people to slide back into old habits. But if scenes of American soldiers waterboarding suspected terrorists and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners would have saddened Washington, recent acts of corporate greed would have inflamed his legendary temper. After all, when you consider that Washington fought the entire Revolutionary War as a volunteer — and I mean he literally did not collect a salary during the eight years he dodged artillery fire on horseback and begged for funds to feed and clothe his soldiers — well, you begin to understand how rarely the entrepreneurs and politicians who most profited from his efforts have bothered to follow his example.
And it is here, curiously enough, that Washington’s long and varied career offers yet another revolutionary example, one of hope that people can actively change their ways despite aggressive personality traits and egregious past transgressions. In this respect, his horses may have provided the ultimate nonverbal education in the counterintuitive benefits of nonpredatory power.
