Читать книгу The Power of the Herd - Linda Kohanov - Страница 15
ОглавлениеThe human psyche is a dynamic ecosystem. Without the right balance of day and night, sunshine and rain, predator and prey, culture and nature, a landscape originally designed to support life turns into a desert, a dust bowl, an apocalyptic, postnuclear nightmare of desolation and alienation. In symbolic terms, daylight represents conscious awareness: what we can see and name, predict and command. Much of that “other 90 percent” operates subconsciously or unconsciously, moving stealthily through the night, resisting full explanation and domestication. Yet people don’t just shy away from darkness in favor of the light. Some odd quirk of human behavior forces each generation to relive the fall of Adam and Eve in all kinds of crafty, covert ways.
Scientists and atheists are not immune. Practical modern minds tend to glorify what is “light” — that which is logical, socially acceptable, profitable, and/or controllable. Anything outside each person’s current worldview is shrouded in darkness — not just unknown, not just suspect, but damned. This includes forms of perception. If you’re fanatically religious, you’re likely to revere faith and submission to established theological doctrine while distrusting reason, intuition, and feeling. If you’re a genetic researcher, on the other hand, you’re much more apt to promote reason and established scientific doctrine while discounting faith, feeling, and intuition. Either way, significant forms of nonverbal awareness are outlawed, remaining grossly underdeveloped. Families, tribes, and religious and political organizations accentuate this self-limiting tendency, socializing members to accept a particular set of static judgments, inspiring people to smugly dismiss, actively ostracize, threaten, or even kill those who operate from a different perspective.
No wonder so many of us reach middle age thirsting for something indescribable while feeling frightened or guilty about it. We’ve been reared by a culture of desert dwellers: obsessive, rain-phobic sun worshippers who shine massive spotlights at the stars to chase away the night. The mysterious, nourishing waters of emotion, empathy, instinct, artistic and mythic insight, gut feelings, and intersubjective awareness have all but dried up in many schools and professions. And it promises to get worse in the information age. After all, how do you quantify love or tweet your deepest, most elusive dreams?
To people who aren’t particularly religious, the fall of Adam and Eve may seem like a quaint little folktale, but it’s actually a brilliant teaching story, a perceptive, richly nuanced assessment of the flaw behind all human flaws: the premature acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil. The first man and woman, as you may recall, ate the forbidden fruit and were promptly expelled from paradise. But debates about why a benevolent God would put that disturbing tree in the garden usually ignore the possibility that it was planted for some future use: that the fruit would swell to ripeness as humanity itself matured.
Newly created and innocent to the core, Adam and Eve simply couldn’t fathom the master plan of a fluid, multifaceted intelligence. From their pristine, undeveloped consciousness, parental cautions to stay away from that one compelling tree sounded stern and arbitrary. And so, like a couple of curious five-year-olds with no impulse control, they tasted the bitter knowledge of good and evil, resulting in the uniquely human compulsion to judge everything as either innately right or wrong, useful or useless, blessed or sinful.
Then, of course, they looked for someone else to blame. Adam complained that the woman tempted him to disobey God. And Eve became the first human to claim that “the devil made me do it.” Waves of fear and shame followed these stunned, overstimulated little creatures out of Eden, leaving their descendants to manage the divine gift of judgment from a confused, hopelessly dualistic, dangerously limited point of view.
Historically and across all cultures, groups of people mutually reinforce the tendency to deny wholeness in favor of the light, forgetting that God is not the sun but the one who invented day and night, sound and silence, form and formlessness, freedom and restraint, male and female, heaven and earth, and a host of other opposites as tools of the creator’s trade. Adventurous souls sometimes plunge into darkness, engaging in obsessively hedonistic, risky, or outright criminal behavior as a form of rebellion, but here again they fail to achieve balance — and usually look for a scapegoat (society, parents, divorce, drugs, or alcohol) to blame for their destructive, shortsighted ways. Only by exploring and integrating light and dark, spirit and matter, verbal and nonverbal awareness, predatory and nonpredatory power can we ever hope to reach our true potential.
I’m not saying anything new here. Thousands of books on psychology, mythology, art, religion, and symbolism explore ways to access parts of the mind that elude logic and language yet still prove essential to mental and emotional health. What I’m excavating in this brief history of power involves a lesser-known aspect of the optimally functioning psyche, one that has been repeatedly, sometimes dramatically, brought to our attention — then promptly ignored — for at least the past twenty-five hundred years. I’m talking about the inner, redemptive relationship between predator and prey, and, more specifically, the cultivation of nonpredatory wisdom as a key to, perhaps even a mandate of, human evolution.
Natural Horsemanship
I don’t think I would have grasped the importance of the predator/prey dynamic had I not been investigating horse-training techniques in the early 1990s. Around that time, a small group of Western cowboys were actively bucking the system, promoting empathy and respect for the horse’s perspective over traditional rough-riding, bronc-breaking practices. Through their increasingly popular books, videos, and public exhibitions, innovators like Bill and Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, Pat Parelli, and Monty Roberts came to be known as founders of the “natural horsemanship” movement, influencing a new generation of trainers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Regardless of the individual methods these men created, a core principle they all share involves the notion that humans are predators and horses are prey animals. Difficulties arise when people unconsciously act predatory with animals designed to flee large cats and packs of wolves. The intensity of our gaze alone can be unnerving. Horses have eyes on the sides of their heads, emphasizing peripheral vision, while humans, like lions, look directly ahead, reinforcing a goal-oriented perspective originally designed for stalking. Some trainers also insist that, to horses, we move around in a perpetual rearing position, poised for attack with our grasping, clawlike hands. And we smell like what we eat: meat.
In the 1970s, when I was investigating vegetarianism, I read a number of books making the opposite case. Human physiology, they said, proved that meat eating was unnatural for us. After all, we have no fangs, and our nails can’t rip through paper, let alone flesh. With the teeth and digestive system of an herbivore, we have to cook our steaks and cut them into bite-size portions. Some of us suffer colon cancer for our carnivorous sins.
The simple truth of the matter is that we are omnivores, with characteristics of both predator and prey. As a result, we all have Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde moments as we struggle to bring these opposites into balance. The problem is that we’ve grown up in a culture of conquerors, where predatory behavior is reinforced in school and rewarded in business. Those who refuse to claw their way to the top often have trouble imagining an alternative, because the “wisdom of the prey” has been educated right out of them. Some accept the role of victim simply because they can’t stomach becoming a tyrant.
Horses have much to teach us about the middle ground between submission and aggression. They’re not cowardly weaklings designed merely to panic and run. Mature horses can seriously maim or even kill a mountain lion. They’ve served in countless bloody battles; some have been rewarded for unusual bravery. Psychologically, however, horses are designed to outsense, outguess, and outwit predators. Many behaviors people misinterpret as equine stupidity are in fact intelligent, highly successful evasion tactics.
In working with these animals, people find that predatory aggression is a colossal waste of energy, because a horse isn’t giving full attention to a lesson when he’s feeling threatened; he’s figuring out how to escape. Anyone who relies on fear and intimidation will spend a great deal of time blocking the increasingly inventive evasion techniques their horses will devise. This dynamic creates the adversarial relationships many riders consider normal.
In Almost a Whisper, Oklahoma-born trainer Sam Powell summed up his own awakening to the limitations of master-slave, “power-over” paradigms, mirroring the journey that most of his colleagues took in achieving breakthroughs characteristic of natural horsemanship:
I was a terrible kid, always into something. I was hot-headed and would fight at the drop of a hat. I’d fight a buzz saw if one challenged me. I had no interest in school or anything else; I just wanted to be a cowboy. By the time I was twenty years old, I was a full-time cowboy and all that entailed, including a catalog of broken bones that grew larger year after year.
By my early forties, I had worked my way up to assistant manager of the horse division of a 128,000-acre ranch not far from Bartletsville, where I lost my passion for the cowboy ways, but fortysomething is a time when men take stock of their lives, weigh their successes and failures, confront their own limitations, sense their own mortality, and adjust their attitudes.
I had broken just about every bone in my body, some more than once. I had seen a lot of cowboys and horses injured or permanently crippled by the methods we were using and I knew I was getting too old for that. Out of curiosity and physical necessity, I began to wonder if there might be a better way.
Powell and other natural-horsemanship proponents began saying some radical things, in public. They talked about treating the horse as a being rather than an object, of communicating with his mind rather than controlling his body. They recommended learning about prey-animal psychology and equine culture, which many of these men were uniquely qualified to document for one simple reason: they were living out on vast tracts of land with horses who had reclaimed an autonomous herd-based lifestyle. There, among the wolves and mountain lions, the storms and droughts, the hot summers and cold winters, horses exhibited surprisingly agile forms of intelligence, collaboration, and leadership that their stall-bound counterparts, and the overcivilized people who rode them, had long forgotten.
As these cowboys learned to harmonize with their herds, some men hinted at profoundly transformational experiences, not because they were trying to hide the details, but because they couldn’t translate their life-changing insights into words. Investigating equine culture meant traveling ever farther away from conventional human thought and behavior patterns, ever deeper into those mysterious realms of the “other 90 percent.” Brave and dedicated students of the horse came back, however, with a shine in their eyes, a confidence in their gait, and a calm yet powerful presence, insisting that horses had more to teach humans than the other way around.
Keep in mind the courage involved in sharing this information with others: when the term natural horsemanship was coined around 1985, the movement’s most basic principles were practically sacrilegious to fundamentalists who saw animals as soulless, God-given objects for human use, and to mainstream, twentieth-century scientists who treated animals as purely instinctual, emotionless machines. But the proof was in the pudding. Large numbers of professional and amateur riders began listening to these mavericks. At increasingly popular clinics and larger stadium exhibitions, people saw, unequivocally, that training techniques working with natural horse behavior were safer, more efficient, and much more enjoyable than fear and intimidation, dominance-submission practices.
And no matter how successful and charismatic these horse whisperers were, the very best of them were clear about one thing: the horses themselves had converted the original innovators, professional cowboys who came back from the open range with marked appreciation for the wisdom of the prey. As these men subsequently discovered, respectfully collaborating with a nonpredatory species had expanded their minds and their hearts, giving them a leg up on human relationships as well. But the original motivation was purely practical, a better way to get the job done. As one Arizona-based cowboy told me, “I had a reason to change, and it was called pain.”
The Yin Factor
We often think of the relationship between predator and prey as synonymous with that of perpetrator and victim. Horses, however, embody a different approach to power, modeling the strengths of nonpredatory behavior: relationship over territory, process over goal, responsiveness over strategy, cooperation over competition, emotion and intuition over reason. And yet, they can be focused and assertive when the situation calls for it. They quite literally follow the ancient Taoist recommendation to “know the yang, but keep to the yin,” which often appears in translation as “know the masculine, but keep to the feminine.” The Chinese sage Lao-tzu made this recommendation in the Tao Te Ching more than twenty-five hundred years ago; conquest-oriented civilizations emphasized the opposite. When a culture, like ours, keeps to the yang, discounting and degrading the yin, our ability to harmonize with other people, let alone nature, is seriously compromised.
At the same time, horses have little tolerance for timid, retiring, passive-aggressive people. If you sweetly ask for respect, without the conviction to hold your ground, they’ll herd you around for sport and become increasingly dominant, even dangerous, over time. Horses demand a balance of strength and sensitivity. If you have too much predator in you, they’ll become evasive. If you don’t engage enough assertiveness, they’ll treat you like a plaything. As nineteenth-century trainer Dennis Magner observed, working with horses requires “the delicacy of touch and feeling of a woman, the eye of an eagle, the courage of a lion, and the hang-on pluck of a bull-dog.”
The dynamic interplay between a more considerate, empathetic form of masculine power and a rise in feminine power was crucial to the rapid success of natural horsemanship in the 1990s. “For the first time in human history, women dominated the horse industry,” notes Robert Miller and Rick Lamb in The Revolution in Horsemanship and What It Means to Mankind. “The clinicians who pioneered this movement will tell you that without the prevalence of women in their audiences, they probably could not have stayed in business.” According to the authors, it took “the emancipation of women in the twentieth century combined with an elevated standard of living” to create the now-common phenomenon of the female pleasure rider.
If this has been fortuitous for the equine industry — those who sell tack and riding habit, horses, horseshoes, and horse products — it has been a blessing to the horse. Why? Because most women are nurturing by nature and try to avoid conflict. They are less aggressive than most men, less intimidating in their stance, speech, or movements, and less inhibited about crooning to or petting animals. These are exactly the qualities to which horses are most responsive.
Yet, these qualities, which are less intimidating to the horse and less likely to precipitate the desire for flight, can also cause the horse to be less respectful and to feel dominant to the woman.
The authors conclude that “both masculine and feminine traits are needed for effective communication,” that the “ideal” trainer “is a man who is in touch with his feminine side or a woman who is in touch with her masculine side.”
Natural-horsemanship philosophy, however, went beyond reuniting yin and yang. It brought to light a long-neglected pair of opposites essential to an advanced understanding of power. Thanks to the outback revelations of a few open-minded cowboys, the practical, lifesaving, and life-enhancing advantages of prey-animal wisdom echoed the biblical prediction that the lion shall lie down beside the lamb in paradise.
Built on the spoils of conquest, our civilization gave rise to a situation in which the lion became a ruthless, unstoppable killing machine. These days, it’s common for the predatory side of an individual’s personality to devour the prey aspect early in life. People may go to church on Sunday and sit through tales of disciples taking up a gentler lifestyle, but when Monday morning arrives the beast rears its ugly head and the rabid carnivore is unleashed once again. For change to occur, the human psyche has to accept another matrix of wisdom capable of balancing the violent nature of the predator inside. Still, with modern humanity’s potential for widespread nuclear and environmental destruction, the image of the hunted who outwits a hunter of such monstrous proportions is not likely to be the lamb, a much more innocent manifestation of prey philosophy. But the horse might capture the beast’s attention as an innovation of this ideal in its most mature, most elegant, most powerful, most regal manifestation.
When we develop the complementary strengths of predator and prey, the lion transforms from aggressor to protector, from the murderer of sensitivity to its champion, helping us access the courage to feel and the willingness to act. A human who embodies the wisdom of lion and horse neither suppresses emotion nor becomes paralyzed by it. She uses her keen prey-animal instincts to sense aggression underneath the toothy smile of a colleague and employs her agile, nonpredatory intelligence to evade trouble without engaging in a carnivorous battle to the death. She holds her ground without ordering everyone else around. She embodies true assertiveness, becoming neither tyrant nor victim. She develops focused, goal-oriented thinking alongside a responsive, heartfelt, process-oriented mind capable of nourishing relationship.
Bringing our predatory nature back into balance is the challenge of a lifetime for individuals, and a multigenerational project for humanity. Luckily, we have living, breathing horses to help us reawaken the wisdom of the prey while demanding that we own our inner lion and put it to good use.
The Hidden Revolution
If might always made right, and survival of the fittest depended solely on competition and brute force, American revolutionaries could never have defeated the British. As the grossly outnumbered colonial army ran out of guns, food, clothing, shoes, men, and finally, morale, it was nonpredatory wisdom that repeatedly turned the tide, challenging widespread, long-standing notions about the nature of power, ultimately paving the way for a truly collaborative society of free men and women.
In this respect, George Washington was at the head of a hidden revolution, changing the face of leadership itself. Early in the war, he blatantly rejected flamboyant, alpha-style dominance tactics in favor of a more thoughtful and compassionate approach, leading by example rather than by intimidation, adopting a role similar to what trainer Mark Rashid calls the “passive leader” in a horse herd. Remember, this is the strong yet steady, collected leader that others choose to follow, one who conserves energy for true emergencies, who doesn’t cause the group “unnecessary stress or aggravation,” someone with “quiet confidence, dependability, consistency, and a willingness not to use force.”
As Ron Chernow reveals in his intricate biography Washington: A Life, the general was consciously evolving a style of leadership the likes of which the world had never seen, working tirelessly to educate and uplift his long-suffering soldiers while dealing with constant assaults from a capricious, inexperienced, in-fighting Continental Congress and a skeptical public. Battling accusations that he was weak and indecisive (accusations by people who either wanted his job or were afraid that his popularity would make him too powerful), he nonetheless stayed the course, eventually proving himself worthy of the public’s trust through the very act of valuing that trust to begin with.
Washington’s tenure as commander in chief featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that “the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion.” No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories. His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.
Rejecting slash and burn, rape and pillage, techniques that the British still used at times, Washington guarded against needless trauma perpetrated by and on friends and foes alike. During those long stretches between battles, he recognized the value of a feminine presence in camp to counteract the despair and disillusionment of an army stretched to the limit, enlisting the support of women, not as prostitutes, but as social activists capable of providing comfort, care, and a host of other essential services to the soldiers. Even on the battlefield, his willingness to adopt a nonpredatory perspective saved the army on more than one occasion and, arguably, won him the war. In this respect, he managed to tame the inner lion of his own naturally aggressive, risk-taking, goal-oriented personality, resurrecting long-forgotten evasion maneuvers used by an ancient nomadic culture three thousand years earlier.
The Fool’s Progress
Despite being vastly outnumbered, sometimes three to one, by the British, Washington made several bold attempts to win the war quickly, heroic efforts that ultimately cost lives and territory. Like the ill-fated plan to tame his mother’s sorrel colt, a casualty of aggressive teenage idealism, Washington’s initial wartime experiments in gutsy, overtly confrontational strategies backfired for the most part. By January 1777, American forces had lost New York City and were about to lose Philadelphia. Colonial troops, which had numbered twenty thousand a year earlier, had dwindled to less than three thousand when enlistments expired that winter, as did the kind of popular support capable of producing new recruits. As one French observer remarked, “There is a hundred times more enthusiasm for the Revolution in any Paris café than in all the colonies together.”
Washington had two choices: surrender or adopt a “Fabian strategy.” Named after Fabius Maximus — a Roman general who, in the third century BCE, fought off a much larger enemy force through less-confrontational, defensive tactics — the second option was still hard for Washington to embrace. In His Excellency, Joseph Ellis reports that the general had to grapple with his own self-image and long-standing beliefs, finally relenting “less out of conviction than a realistic recognition of his limited resources.” As Ellis explains, “A Fabian strategy, like guerilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century, was the preferred approach of the weak. Washington did not believe that he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself. He regarded battle as a summons to display one’s strength and courage; avoiding battle was akin to dishonorable behavior, like refusing to move forward in the face of musket and cannon fire.”
Washington also had to deal with the damage his reputation would initially suffer upon activating this obscure evasion strategy. It wasn’t a matter of swallowing his pride so much as volunteering to be misunderstood — and knowing he would be mocked for it — again. A year earlier, Washington had managed to hold the British at bay on a ruse, suddenly and inexplicably showing restraint in battle, when in fact his troops had run out of gunpowder and didn’t have the funds or connections to buy more for a good six months. And the general’s reward for keeping this deadly secret from all but his closest associates? To be portrayed as a yellow-bellied, bumbling fool in a well-attended Boston theater farce, by an actor stumbling around in a big, floppy wig, waving a rusty sword.
So here he was again, in the winter of 1777, concealing yet another potentially fatal weakness: if the British had known he’d been left with a mere twenty-five hundred men, they would have attacked without mercy and easily won the war. Through no small amount of intrigue and posturing, Washington managed to obscure the facts while devising a strategy based on what he called “the melancholy Truths” — namely, that the states would never raise enough men or money to wage a conventionally successful campaign. In late March, Washington sent Nathanael Greene to brief Congress on the necessity of fighting an evasive war of attrition, luring the enemy away from port cities to exhaust their men and their supplies. (The British at that time had the best navy in the world, but they were less impressive on solid ground. And in the wilderness, those bright red coats made easy targets.) Yet as Greene subsequently reported, the idea “appeared to be new” to colonial representatives. Ellis notes that “Congress was apparently taken aback, because a Fabian strategy meant that Washington did not intend to defend Philadelphia at all costs if [British general] Howe chose to make it his target. His highest priority was not to occupy or protect ground, but rather to harass Howe while preserving his army.”
Washington’s political foes had to be salivating over this seemingly eccentric move, especially when the revised plan and the reason behind it — the sorry state of the Continental army — had to be kept secret from a fickle public to make sure the British stayed in the dark as well. Yet what no one, not even Washington, apparently knew was that the Fabian strategy was not a last-ditch, gamble of a move created by a desperate Roman dictator. It was a proven tactic used by a highly successful culture that incorporated equine wisdom into daily life. Fabius himself could have easily gotten the idea from a popular series of books by Herodotus.
In analyzing the Greek historian’s brief yet telling accounts of an ancient horse tribe’s behavior, we can see that Washington’s plan actually had more in common with the strategy’s original inspiration than the Roman’s subsequent interpretation of it. Fabius had combined evasive maneuvers with a scorched-earth practice to prevent enemy forces from obtaining grain and other resources. Washington blatantly refused to engage in such destruction. Ellis’s comparison of Washington’s plan to the “guerilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century” also falls short in characterizing the Continental army’s unusually constructive implementation of this long-neglected technique. Civilians, even those obviously aligned with the British, were never considered expendable for the cause. In this sense, the American general’s restraint, compassion, and sensitivity to nuance brought a truly nonpredatory defense tactic back to life, changing the course of history forever.
Traveling Light
The first equestrians galloped across that vast sea of grass known as the steppes of Eurasia, and they put on quite a show. Adventurous souls who discovered how to ride about six thousand years ago (in the region now known as Ukraine) eventually took up the nomadic ways of their horses, abandoning the sedentary lifestyle of their agricultural ancestors for three thousand years of freedom.
Nomadic pastoralism, contrary to popular belief, was not a primitive condition. It was a specialization that developed out of settled farming communities, requiring horses and skillful riding techniques. It required the wheel to allow populations to migrate with their herds by cart and wagon, leaders able to make quick decisions in an emergency, and a variety of craftsmen and specialists, far more than family subsistence farming did. The early horse tribes even managed to raise crops without becoming enslaved by them. They simply planted wheat in patches of fertile soil and returned to reap the benefits during seasonal migrations.
Recent archeological findings also suggest that women were equal to men in many of these tribes. Skeletons of warriors at first thought to be young boys later proved to be female. Over time, it was estimated that nearly 25 percent of warrior graves contained women dressed for battle, some of them obviously bowlegged from years spent on the back of a horse. Yet these wild-riding ladies, mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks, were no less aware of their femininity. Their graves are filled with mirrors, scent bottles, and cosmetics of various colors. And like many women today, they loved to groom their horses. In burial mounds across Ukraine and southern Russia, up toward Tuva and the Altai Mountains, human and equine corpses lay side by side among a dazzling array of colorful saddle cloths depicting scenes from daily life. These in turn revealed a culture of decorative mane dressing and fantastic crested horse masks. Four-legged members of the tribe were dressed with as much enthusiasm as their two-legged counterparts.
And that’s saying a lot, as it turns out: Contact with Greek colonies along the Black Sea brought a few, well-chosen luxuries. Since nomadic horse tribes only kept what they could carry, they wore their wealth in the form of elaborate, highly symbolic jewelry, gold weapon adornments, richly ornamented belts, and stylish riding clothes. Credited with the invention of pants, warriors of both sexes wore tight-fitting leggings tucked into leather boots, long-sleeved shirts and hip-length coats, all of which were embroidered with intricate designs, and some of which were trimmed in precious metals. In these tribes, later known as Scythians and Sarmatians, there was also a marked preference for “flame-colored” horses. According to Renate Rolle’s The World of the Scythians, “The rich warriors on the gleaming red animals, with shining gold clothing and weapons, must have presented an impressive picture in the brilliant sunlight of the steppe.”
More impressive, however, are reports of the nomads’ behavior in battle, descriptions that have little in common with standardized legends of fierce barbarians out to vanquish the sacred innovations of the civilized world. Around 450 BCE, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” wrote about a curious, highly frustrating encounter that King Darius I of Persia had with these tribes before deciding to take on a much easier project and invade Greece. Darius was chasing a group of Scythians who’d either attacked or offended him in some way, and he was apparently planning to punish them, but good. Gathering his troops together, he entered Eurasia for the first time in 512 BCE, but when he arrived at the edge of the steppes, none of his officers could figure out how to engage these so-called primitives in combat.
Whenever the troops got too close, the Scythians simply dispersed, riding into the grasslands, leading the king’s rigidly disciplined military force farther and farther into the wilderness. For weeks, the horsemen watched from a safe distance, ignoring the king’s provocative insults, infuriating him further by breaking ranks to chase a stray rabbit as the Persians made their threatening gestures. The Scythians were sleeping on horseback, drinking mare’s milk and playing games along the way, while Darius’s men were growing weak from starvation and exposure. Finally, the Persians were forced to turn around and march home as the Scythians cheered and chuckled in the distance.
The horse tribes maintained their culture and their territory by acting like the horses they rode. Choosing flight over fight was not a cowardly act but an obvious, thoroughly natural way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The enemy was ultimately irrelevant because there were no cities to defend. Warrior riders of both sexes led the challengers away from women with young children and mares with foals (who were mobile, though undoubtedly slower). It was only when increasingly materialistic members of these tribes began trading profusely with city dwellers that they sacrificed centuries of freedom. The more possessions they craved and acquired, the more their belongings weighed them down, and the more sedentary they became. Greek gold and wine and decorative vases eventually lured the nomads into a gilded cage of cultural amnesia. The ones who refused to forget fled farther into the grasslands until civilizations developing to the east and west expanded and overlapped right over their graves.
The assumption that nomads were more violent than their “civilized” counterparts has begun to evaporate in light of new research. The Danish archeologist Klavs Randsborg insists it wasn’t marauding hordes of barbarians that led to the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, these societies destroyed their environment and, in desperation, moved out to incorporate the lands and cultures nearby — Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian — “which until then had led an effective and long-standing existence in harmony with nature.” Citizens of early cities were suffering from anxieties derived from the instability resulting from conspicuous consumption and unchecked population growth. Their only choice was to expand outward, taking over the territories of other peoples, subjugating those peoples and transforming them into the slave labor needed to build new buildings and reap greater harvests. Randsborg and his colleagues insist that, after nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had brought city dwellers to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them.
The Gods of Adolescence
City life has marked advantages — and some inherently destructive disadvantages. Early civilizations experimented with gusto, constantly assessing what worked well and what demanded improvement, imagining increasingly sophisticated technical solutions, and constructing ever more impressive architecture, plumbing, food storage, and trade systems that were impossible to achieve without high-level social organization.
The problem was that modifying ineffective thought and behavior patterns turned out to be much more difficult than building the pyramids, especially when city dwellers the world over had already created their own colossal, archetypal conundrum — namely, an extreme, adolescent misuse of the knowledge of good and evil. To justify shortsighted, predatory practices that benefited the few at the expense of the many, ruling classes not only promoted the idea that nature was harsh and had to be subdued, they actively demonized nomadic cultures, especially those in which men and women shared power. To make matters worse, the monarchs deified themselves — at first probably to control slaves through shock-and-awe tactics. But soon enough, they began to believe their own publicity, which gave them even less motivation to admit their mistakes and analyze their own behavior. The gods, after all, must be perfect, their every command unquestionably followed, their every deed informed by a “divine” logic incomprehensible to mere mortals.
In effect, despite the multiple, seemingly unique cultures and religions, if you lived in a large Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, or later, European urban center, the hidden scaffolding of your belief system looked like this:
| SEDENTARY | good, right, civilized |
| NOMADIC | evil, wrong, barbarian |
| PREDATOR | strong |
| PREY | weak |
| HUMAN/MALE | intelligent, rational, moral |
| NATURE/FEMALE | ignorant, instinctual, amoral |
In extremely predatory societies like Rome before the time of Christ, competition and conquest were so ingrained they didn’t even have socially recognized opposites. In this sense, to consider a concept weak, ignorant, wrong, or even evil is preferable to oblivion. After all, what we can name, we can at least debate and, over time, cultivate if it proves useful — when all the kings are dethroned and humanity is truly free to consider its previously suppressed, conveniently outlawed, or simply long-forgotten options.
George Washington’s least-recognized and most impressive innovation hinged on his ability to transcend these long-entrenched opposites, drawing upon masculine and feminine, sedentary and nomadic, predatory and nonpredatory, verbal and nonverbal forms of power and intelligence — fluidly, as needed. A deeply spiritual man who felt a sense of divine calling, he nonetheless dodged the pitfalls of religious grandiosity. Not only did he refuse to be deified; he also avoided the much more common modern affliction of domineering self-righteousness, which, like deification, blocks lucid inquiry and constant behavior modification. Heaven and earth, faith and logic, culture and nature, vision and practicality, fierceness and compassion were all on his side, helping him to win an impossible war by tapping the balanced ecosystem of a fully functioning human psyche.
And at the crucial moment of victory, he did what no man had done before him, resisting the ultimate temptation of military success. British monarch George III was awed by reports of Washington’s refusal to become king of a new country, saying that if the general did indeed hold to his promise, he would be “the greatest man in the world.” After all, as Ellis points out in His Excellency, “Oliver Cromwell had not surrendered power after the English Revolution. Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, and Castro did not step aside to leave their respective revolutionary settlements to others in subsequent centuries.”
In so many astonishing ways, George Washington was a revolutionary among revolutionaries. Two centuries later, we’re still grappling with the gift — and the burden — of freedom he so generously entrusted to the future. It’s time to dust off those stoic, faded images of the father of our country and live the example he set before us.
