Читать книгу Soldiers of Peace - Paul Chappell - Страница 8

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, but a realist. Today the word “realism” is rarely used to describe reality, but has instead become a disguise for cynicism. As I show in my other books, I am a realist because extreme trauma, a lifetime of studying the human condition, and my experiences in the military have allowed me to understand the many causes of violence and rage, along with their potential cures. As I will show in this book, I am a realist because I perceive the nature of time realistically, which has given me an abundance of realistic hope.

My existence has also given me realistic hope. In 1958 only 4 percent of Americans supported interracial marriage between blacks and whites. By 2013 the amount of support had grown to 87 percent.¹ I am living proof of the change in attitude toward interracial marriage, because my mother is Korean, my father was half black and half white, and I grew up in Alabama.

My father, Paul B. Chappell, was born in 1925 and grew up in Virginia during the Great Depression. Half black and half white, he lived under segregation. My father was a career soldier who served in the army for thirty years and retired as a command sergeant major—the highest enlisted rank. He met my Korean mother while he was stationed in Korea. They married in 1975, and I was born in Maryland in 1980 when he was fifty-four years old. My parents moved to Alabama when I was a year old. I was their only child.

Since my childhood, my father told me that the only place in America where a black man had a fair chance was in the army. Because he grew up before the civil rights movement, and the army had desegregated prior to the major civil rights victories, he believed that black men were treated better in the army than in civilian society. In fact, one of the influences that led Rosa Parks to oppose segregation was her job as a secretary on a desegregated military base. Historian Jeanne Theoharis, in her book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, tells us:

One further insult in Montgomery [Alabama] came from the disconnect between the treatment blacks encountered on the integrated trolley on Maxwell Air Force Base and the city’s segregated buses and other public spaces. Indeed, blacks and whites worked together at the Maxwell base, which had an integrated cafeteria, bachelor hall, and swimming pool. Rosa had worked at Maxwell for a time, and [her husband] Raymond’s barber chair was on the base. “You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up,” Parks noted. “It was an alternative reality to the ugly policies of Jim Crow.” Parks sometimes rode the bus [on the military base] with a white woman and her child, sitting across from them and chatting. When they reached the edge of the base and boarded the city bus, she had to go to the back. Thus, Rosa Parks had direct personal contact with desegregated transportation in her own hometown. This visceral experience highlighted the sheer arbitrariness of segregated public transportation and made riding the city bus even more galling.²

My parents pressured me to go to West Point, not only because they thought I would have limited opportunity as a result of being part black, but also because they had seen how white people, African Americans, and Koreans rejected me as a racially mixed outcast. After all, white people were not the only ones who opposed interracial marriage, which was illegal in nearly all southern states prior to the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia. Marrying when interracial marriage was still controversial in many parts of the country, my parents did not feel welcome in African American or Korean communities. Many Koreans did not like that my mother had married a black man, and many African Americans did not like that my father had married an Asian woman.

When I told my mother in 2009 that I was leaving the military, she shouted, “Are you out of your mind? Nobody is going to hire you. It’s bad enough you look Asian, but you’re also part black. Nobody is going to give a job to a black man who looks Asian.”

My parents did not tell me lies. On the contrary, they told me their truth. They were describing life as they had experienced it and trying to protect me from the suffering they endured.

I left the army in 2009 as a captain and began working as the Peace Leadership director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a nonprofit organization cofounded by its current president, David Krieger. When I told my mother about this new job, she asked me, “When David Krieger hired you, did he know you’re part black?”

“Yes,” I replied.

She said, “Well you need to thank him, because he is a white man and he hired you, even though he knew you were part black.” I have thanked David Krieger in words many times for giving me the opportunity to work full-time for peace, and I thank him with my actions by doing my best to serve the mission of peace.

The United States of America is far from perfect today and has a long way to journey on the road to peace, but I’d much rather be part Asian and part African American in 2015 (the year I am writing this book) rather than before the civil rights movement in 1915 or during slavery in 1815. Today I often meet people who respond in a positive way to my mixed racial background, which is something I could not imagine as a child in the 1980s. This is also something my father, who died in 2004, could not imagine. Again, our country has a long way to journey on the road to peace, but if we have made progress, why can’t we make more progress?

I am treated much better than my ancestor Wyatt Chappell, a slave born in Alabama in 1835. Today I have the freedom to read books filled with life-changing wisdom and I can also express my ideas through writing, but he was born into a world where it was illegal for slaves to learn to read and write. Wyatt Chappell lived during an era when an ordinary white person could murder a black person, admit to the murder without claiming self-defense, not even accuse the black person of committing a crime, and not be put on trial. Slaves were treated as pieces of property with no rights, and both enslaved and free black people were deemed too incompetent to testify in court against white people.

Under the system of state-sanctioned slavery, slaves had no legal protection against their owners. A slave owner could murder disobedient slaves, rape his female slaves, and punish his male slaves by castrating them. William Lloyd Garrison, a white man who dedicated his life to abolishing state-sanctioned slavery, said, “There is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more horrible state of society?”³

Racism is still a problem in America today. I have experienced this problem firsthand, but African Americans are no longer subjected to the full horror of state-sanctioned slavery, which denied literacy to slaves and gave them no legal protection against being beaten, murdered, raped, worked relentlessly without pay, bought and sold as property, and stolen as infants from their mothers. As I explain in The Cosmic Ocean, if someone during the era of American state-sanctioned slavery looked white but had inherited a small amount of African American blood from an ancestor, that person could also inherit the status of a slave and be denied basic education and any legal protection against being raped and murdered.

Due to the sacrifices of countless people, I grew up with far more freedom than my ancestor Wyatt Chappell, but how else has our country and the world changed for the better? Although injustice still exists in many places, what other examples of progress give me realistic hope that more progress is possible?

Today I often hear people say that our world has always been kind to white people. But this is not true. Many white people have been slaves throughout history. It is a myth that Europeans have never suffered from racism, when racism for most of human history was not based on skin color, but where a person was from. To offer just one example of racism based on location, for hundreds of years the English saw the Irish as a separate, sub-human race. The English also treated the Irish like slaves. English writer Charles Kingsley, who lived during the nineteenth century, called the Irish “white chimpanzees.” He said, “To see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.”⁴

Under Anglo-Norman law, an English person could murder or rape an Irish person, and because the victim was Irish the English person would not be punished. In his book The Invention of the White Race, historian Theodore Allen explains how the Irish under English rule were treated in a way similar to how the U.S. government treated African Americans and Native Americans during the nineteenth century:

If under Anglo-American slavery “the rape of a female slave was not a crime, but a mere trespass on the master’s property,” so in 1278 two Anglo-Normans brought into court and charged with raping Margaret O’Rorke were found not guilty because “the said Margaret is an Irish-woman.” If a law enacted in Virginia in 1723 provided that “manslaughter of a slave is not punishable,” so under Anglo-Norman law it sufficed for acquittal to show that the victim in a killing was Irish. Anglo-Norman priests granted absolution on the grounds that it was “no more sin to kill an Irishman than a dog or any other brute.”

If the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in 1851 that “the killing of a negro” was not a felony, but upheld an award of damages to the owner of an African-American bond-laborer murdered by another “white” man, so an English court freed Robert Walsh, an Anglo-Norman charged with killing John Mac Gilmore, because the victim was “a mere Irishman and not of free blood,” it being stipulated that “when the master of the said John shall ask damages for the slaying, he [Walsh] will be ready to answer him as the law may require.”

If in 1884 the United States Supreme Court, citing much precedent authority, including the Dred Scott decision, declared that [American] Indians were legally like immigrants, and therefore not citizens except by process of individual naturalization, so for more than four centuries, until 1613, the Irish were regarded by English law as foreigners in their own land. If the testimony of even free African-Americans was inadmissible [in court], so in Anglo-Norman Ireland native Irish of the free classes were deprived of legal defense against English abuse because they were not “admitted to English law,” and hence had no rights that an Englishman was bound to respect.⁵

The Irish were hated not only because of where they were from, but also because so many of them were Catholic. Racism toward Irish Catholics was common in the United States, especially in the nineteenth century. The Irish have far more rights today than they did in the past, and if an English or American politician living in the twenty-first century said Irish people were subhuman, many would call that politician insane. During my lectures I rarely meet people who know the full history of how badly the Irish were treated. Most people today think of the Irish simply as “white people.”

Italian Americans are another group considered “white” today, yet in the past they were viewed as a subhuman race. The largest mass lynching in U.S. history did not involve African Americans, but Italian Americans. Although many people assume that lynching is synonymous with hanging, the term lynching actually refers to mob violence that targets and executes a specific person (who is accused of committing a crime or offense) without approval of the legal system. Hanging is only one way a person can be executed by a mob—only one form of lynching.

Encyclopædia Britannica defines lynching as “a form of mob violence in which a mob executes a presumed offender.”⁶ A lynching is different from a massacre, because lynchings target specific individuals who are accused of committing a crime or offense, and as Richard Gambino clarifies in his book Vendetta, massacres target groups of people “without regard to their individual identities and in which no specific offense on their part is alleged.”⁷

Today Italian Americans are widely regarded as white people, but for many years Italian immigrants (particularly Sicilians) were treated as subhuman. This is a part of American history that many of us living today did not learn about in school. Author Ed Falco explains:

The largest mass lynching in U.S. history took place in New Orleans in 1891—and it wasn’t African-Americans who were lynched, as many of us might assume. It was Italian-Americans. After nine Italians were tried and found not guilty of murdering New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, a mob dragged them from the jail, along with two other Italians being held on unrelated charges, and lynched them all. The lynchings were followed by mass arrests of Italian immigrants throughout New Orleans, and waves of attacks against Italians nationwide.

What was the reaction of our country’s leaders to the lynchings? Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said they were “a rather good thing.” The response in The New York Times was worse. A March 16, 1891, editorial referred to the victims of the lynchings as “… sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.” An editorial the next day argued that: “Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans …”

John Parker, who helped organize the lynch mob, later went on to be governor of Louisiana. In 1911, he said of Italians that they were “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous …”

The decades go by, they turn into centuries, and we forget. We’ve forgotten the depth of prejudice and outright hatred faced by Italian immigrants in America. We’ve forgotten the degree to which we once feared and distrusted Catholics. If we remembered, I wonder how much it might change the way we think about today’s immigrant populations, or our attitudes toward Muslims?⁸

Although prejudice is still a problem in the United States, never have so many people from various ethnic backgrounds and religions fallen under the label “American.” If that seems hard to believe, it is because so much history has been forgotten that we do not realize how bad things used to be, and also because people so often romanticize the past (a topic I will discuss later in this book). America certainly has problems with race today, but if we have made progress, why can’t we make more progress? By learning to wield the weapon of nonviolence with maximum force, we can create this much needed progress within our communities and throughout the world.

History shows us that progress is possible. The question we must ask now is, how much more progress is possible? The only way to truly answer this question is not with words but with actions—by waging peace and becoming literate in new ways. To create more progress we must become literate in our shared humanity. If we do not spread this new form of literacy, humanity will not be able to cooperate to solve its most serious problems, because racism is very effective at surviving, adapting, and growing. Racism is an idea, and violence cannot kill an idea. Only education, in the form of literacy in our shared humanity, can bind racism with the chains of love and truth. Progress is never invincible and is easily lost if we do not protect it, which is why we must not be complacent in the struggle against racism or any injustice.

Spreading literacy in our shared humanity is a challenging mission, but our ancestors also embarked on challenging missions against seemingly impossible odds. For example, in 1800 American women could not vote, own property, or go to college, but the women’s rights movement changed this. Imagine what would happen today if an American politician running for president said on national television that women should not be allowed to vote, own property, or go to college. How would the American public react? How would the many women politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties respond? Many Americans would call this person insane. Most men in the Republican and Democratic parties, such as former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, would fiercely oppose the argument that their daughters should have been denied entry to college and no woman should be allowed to vote or own property.

Although an American politician who says women should not have the right to vote would sound insane to most Americans today, probably less than one percent of Americans supported women’s right to vote in 1800, because it was not yet a publicly debated issue and many women did not yet believe they should have the right to vote. In 1800 many women did not even believe they should have the right to own a bank account, sign contracts, or own property. Women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose, who was born in 1810, had difficulty in the 1830s getting her fellow women to support women’s right to own property. In historian Judith Wellman’s book The Road to Seneca Falls (which is about the first women’s rights convention that took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848), she describes the struggles of women’s rights activists in the early nineteenth century:

In the course of [Ernestine] Rose’s travels, she circulated a petition among women to support Herttell’s bill for married woman’s property rights. It was with “a good deal of trouble,” she remembered, that she convinced five women to sign this petition. “Women at that time had not learned to know that she had any rights except those that man in his generosity allowed her,” Rose explained.⁹

The rights that women have today would have seemed impossible to most people living centuries ago. In 1800 women did not have the universal right to vote in any country, but by the late 1960s women could vote in over a hundred countries.¹⁰ Women’s rights don’t exist in every country today, but wherever you find a lack of women’s rights, you will also see a women’s rights movement. Today there are women’s rights movements in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. But three hundred years ago, there was not a single women’s rights movement anywhere in the world asking for full political, social, and economic equality.

When people suffer from injustice today, I certainly do not tell them, “Well, at least you don’t have it as bad as an African American living under state-sanctioned slavery, an Irish person living with no rights under English rule, or an American woman living before the women’s rights movement,” because I despise all injustice, no matter how small it is. Just as a tiny amount of cancer cells can threaten our body, a tiny amount of injustice can threaten a community. Like cancer, injustice can also spread if we do not resist it. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”¹¹

However, it is important to have a broad historical perspective that reveals how progress can occur. The broader our perspective is and the better we understand how to walk the challenging path to progress, the more realistic hope we can have. Recognizing how much progress has happened in history can also protect us from becoming bitter, hopeless, and cynical as we strive to overcome the unjust systems that still exist in our world.

Attitudes in the United States and around the world have changed in many other ways. Imagine what would happen if an American politician running for president in the next election said on national television that the sun revolved around the Earth, and people who don’t believe that should be put on trial. How would the American public react? Again, many Americans would call this person insane. Nicolaus Copernicus, who lived during a time when people believed the sun revolved around the Earth,^* realized the Earth actually revolved around the sun, but he was afraid to express his realization because it might cause him to be put on trial, imprisoned, and executed.

According to Erik Gregersen, senior editor of astronomy and space exploration for Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Aristotle’s view of the universe [with the Earth at its center] became doctrine in the Catholic Church and stayed so through the Middle Ages. But during the Renaissance, many people began to question old ideas. Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) deduced that Earth revolved around the Sun, which meant that Earth wasn’t the center [of the universe]. Copernicus was so afraid of the Catholic Church’s reaction that he was reluctant to put his theory in writing. His book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was not published until he was on his death bed in 1543 …

In 1632, Galileo published a book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which confirmed Copernicus’s idea that Earth moved around the Sun, not the other way around. For his views, he was summoned from his sickbed at age 70 and put on trial by the Catholic Church [and forced to publically recant his ideas], which resulted in his being put under house arrest for the remainder of his life.¹²

To offer another example of how viewpoints in the United States and around the world have changed, imagine what would happen if an American politician running for president in the next election said on national television that earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts were caused by angry gods, and we had to sacrifice human beings to please these gods. How would the American public react? Yet again, many Americans would call this person insane.

I am not exaggerating when I say Americans would call this person insane. People in our society are called insane for having views far less extreme than this. If a person running for president suddenly advocated human sacrifice as a way to stop natural disasters, people would think this person was suffering from a serious psychological disorder and would want medical professionals to get involved. If an American president currently in office suddenly advocated human sacrifice as a way to bring rain and end drought, there would be a massive public outcry for this president to be medically suspended from office and deemed unfit to serve. Insanity is also a legal term, and if an American president today advocated human sacrifice as a way to end drought and intended to act accordingly, many people would use this legal term to describe the president’s psychological state and would want some form of legal intervention to take place before innocent people were killed.

Although sacrificing human beings to prevent natural disasters and influence the weather would sound insane and extremely unjust today, virtually every major agricultural civilization practiced some form of human sacrifice during at least one point in their history. This included the ancient Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Maya, Hebrews, Chinese, and Carthaginians, just to mention a few. As I explain in The Cosmic Ocean, these people were not insane at all, but were reacting logically to inaccurate assumptions they had about their world. These inaccurate assumptions also caused them to practice animal sacrifice as a matter of government policy.

Animal sacrifice was an official government policy frequently used by countless ancient governments, including the ancient Athenians, who invented Western democracy. Although animal sacrifice is still practiced by a few religious groups in some parts of the world today, no government in the modern world takes animal sacrifice as seriously as the ancient Athenians did.

Describing the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 BC, the Athenian general Xenophon (born in 430 BC) discussed how the Athenian government used animal sacrifice during national emergencies: “The Persians and their friends came with an enormous army, thinking that they would wipe Athens off the face of the earth; but the Athenians had the courage to stand up to them by themselves, and they defeated them. On that occasion they had made a vow to [the goddess] Artemis that they would sacrifice to her a goat for every one of their enemies whom they killed, but, since they could not get hold of enough goats, they decided to sacrifice five hundred every year, and they are still sacrificing them today.”¹³

As a testament to how much progress has happened, many ideas that people believed in the past sound insane today, and many ideas we know to be true today would have sounded insane in the past. Also, what if there are ideas that people in the future will know to be true, but these ideas sound insane to most people living today?

The reason I am discussing how attitudes have changed toward race, women’s rights, the structure of our solar system, human sacrifice, and animal sacrifice is because there are two possibilities we must consider. The first possibility is that our society today is right about every single issue, which has never before happened in human history. The second possibility is that our society is so wrong about certain issues that people in the future will look at us the way we look at those who treated the Irish as subhuman, or those who supported state-sanctioned slavery, or even those who practiced human and animal sacrifice as official government policy.

What seems more likely? Our society is right about every issue? Or there are issues our society is very wrong about? Certainly, there is much debate about many issues in our society, but those are not the issues we are most wrong about.

How do we know if our society is very wrong about an issue? The issues we are most wrong about are the ones that aren’t considered issues yet, because they haven’t even reached the point of being publicly debated. For example, universal women’s right to vote was a publicly debated issue in 1870, but it was not an issue a thousand years earlier in 870. Ending state-sanctioned slavery was a publicly debated issue in 1850, but it was not an issue in the fifth century BC. We don’t know of anyone in the fifth century BC who even conceived of the idea that humanity could end state-sanctioned slavery.

In ancient Greece, democracy was a publicly debated issue in the fifth century BC. Back then Athenians were debating the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, but it was not an issue in the twelfth century BC. Greeks born long before the fifth century BC, such as Homer and Hesiod (who were born around the eighth century BC), did not seem aware of the concept of democracy. Homer and Hesiod probably knew what voting was, because there are stories from the Trojan War (which took place hundreds of years before they were born) about Greek soldiers voting on some decisions. But the idea of democracy as a form of government where monarchies should be abolished, or given so little power that they function more as figureheads, is not an idea that Greeks from Homer’s and Hesiod’s time period seemed to be aware of.

There might have been some people thinking about these issues back then whose ideas were not written down—we will probably never know— but we do know that ideas such as universal women’s right to vote, ending state-sanctioned slavery, and democracy were once so obscure that they had not yet become publicly debated issues. Homer and Hesiod seem to have never heard of democracy as a form of government that could serve as an alternative to monarchy and oligarchy, yet it would be difficult to find any person living in a modern society today who has never heard of democracy.

Before it became a democracy, ancient Athens was ruled by kings for hundreds of years, but democracy became a new idea in ancient Greece around the fifth century BC. Rome had also been ruled by kings for hundreds of years, but representative democracy (rather than direct democracy) emerged in Rome when the Roman Republic formed in 509 BC. Then democracy seemed to withdraw from our world. After democracy ceased to exist in Rome, it did not gain dominance in any country ruled by a monarchy until centuries later.

Democracy is the most fragile form of government, requiring a significant amount of stewardship to sustain. Democracy is like a vulnerable garden, which cannot survive unless people protect and nurture it. Otherwise it will wilt and die. To reap the many fruits of democracy, we must nourish it with the water of waging peace, despite living in a society that doesn’t teach us how to wage peace. History offers abundant evidence that democracy is fragile and easily lost if enough citizens do not serve as good stewards of democracy.

Democracy is not only a vulnerable garden, but it is also a garden that is still growing, because humanity’s understanding of democracy continues to evolve in new ways. For example, neither America’s Founding Fathers nor the ancient Greeks and Romans saw democracy as a form of government that should include all women. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, full women’s equality became a new plant in the garden of democracy. In the fifth century BC in ancient Athens, the idea of democracy included free men’s right to vote, but as the trial of Socrates shows, the Athenian garden of democracy did not include plants such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press (journalists and newspapers did not yet exist), and universal human rights.

We must also remember that democracy is not all or nothing, but can exist across a broad spectrum in varying degrees, just as gardens can possess varying degrees of vigor, diversity, and health. Many of the plants in the garden of democracy flourished in ancient Athens, and some of these plants also grew in other parts of the world. Although the Aztecs were not democratic as we understand democracy today (they did not have democratic ideals such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to vote, universal human rights, or believe that monarchs should have little to no power), a few of the plants in the garden of democracy flourished in Aztec civilization. Archeologist Michael E. Smith explains:

There is a stereotypical model of ancient government in which all-powerful, autocratic god-kings ruled with an iron fist over a powerless and cowering mass of commoners. In the Aztec case, however, the institutions of government gave commoners and nonroyal nobles some level of say and participation in civic affairs … The actions of kings were limited by the royal council—nobles who selected kings and on occasion may have deposed bad kings …

These observations pertain to a body of thought, originating in political science, known as collective action theory. Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher were the first to apply this approach systematically to ancient states and kingdoms, where they find wide variation in the extent to which rulers were responsive to the needs of commoners. The Classical Greek poleis, for example, lies at the more “collective” end of the spectrum, whereas various indigenous African kingdoms are among the more “despotic” or autocratic of states. In Blanton and Fargher’s analysis, the Aztecs are closer to the Greek city-states than to the African kingdoms.¹⁴

Today the idea of democracy, especially democratic ideals such as the plant of human rights, has become so popular around the world that many despotic governments try to create the illusion that they are somewhat democratic, whether through rigged elections, a constitution that pays lip service to human rights, or some other means. In the twenty-first century, humanity is still experimenting with the garden of democracy. We are still figuring out what democracy truly means and what new plants are missing from our current understanding. As a result, we have to consider the likely possibility that our understanding of democracy is still in its early stages, and that most people hundreds of years from now will have a much more evolved understanding of democracy than most people today.

By evolving our understanding of how to nourish the many plants in the garden of democracy, we can reap the fruits of democracy that will nourish humanity. In order for human understanding to evolve, not everyone has to be convinced. As I explain in The Art of Waging Peace, we can never convince every single person about a particular issue, but we don’t have to. We only have to convince enough people, which creates the critical mass necessary for progress to happen. Because we cannot convince everyone, we need laws. For example, was every single man in America convinced women should have the right to vote? No, and there are still men in America who don’t think women should have the right to vote.

During my lectures around the country I often talk to diverse groups. When I speak with a group of fifty people and mention how the women’s rights movement greatly inspires me, I realize there might be one or two people in the audience who wish women never gained the right to vote. Two out of fifty is only 4 percent of the audience. That might seem like a tiny percentage, but what if 4 percent of the American population believed women should not have the right to vote? How many would that be? As I write this the American population is around 300 million, and 4 percent of that is a whopping 12 million. That is why we need laws to protect people’s rights.

Just as the need for universal women’s rights was not a publicly discussed issue for most of human history, what if humanity is facing serious problems today that have not yet become issues? For example, racism and sexism have been two of the biggest problems in human history. But did you know there was no word for racism in the English language until around the 1930s, and there was no word for sexism in the English language until the 1960s? Prior to 1900, racism and sexism certainly existed, but these problems had not yet become words or concepts for most people around the world. To solve any problem we must first give it a name so that it can no longer hide.

If you were to travel back in time to the 1830s and tell Ralph Waldo Emerson (who was considered racially progressive for his time period) that he had racist views, he would probably say, “What does that mean?” If you said, “You think the Irish are subhuman,” he would likely say something such as, “But of course they’re subhuman! They’re Irish!”

Although Emerson opposed slavery, he believed that a small group of people, which included the English, were racially superior to all other people including most Europeans. During the nineteenth century when there was overt racism toward people from Ireland, Italy, and even Germany, it was rare to find white people who weren’t racist against other white people, let alone against Africans and Asians. Emerson said, “I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.”¹⁵

What if all of us in the twenty-first century are facing problems just as big as racism and sexism, but these problems have not yet become words or concepts for most people living today? I will discuss one problem even bigger than racism and sexism that does not yet have a name, a problem that most people living today are not aware of. Before I can describe this problem, however, I must first emphasize that the people who lived before us were not insane, even though their views might seem insane at first glance when compared to our modern understanding.

To offer an example of knowledge that seems obvious to people living today, but did not seem obvious in the distant past, imagine trying to convince people in 1400 that the Earth revolves around the sun. Would that be an easy or difficult thing to do? In fact, it would be extremely difficult.

To revolve around the sun, the Earth is moving at about sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. But if the Earth is moving through space so quickly, then why don’t we feel a sense of motion? Why aren’t buildings falling over? If we gaze up at the sky, it looks like the sun is revolving around us. Even in the twenty-first century, we still say “sunrise” and “sunset,” even though the sun is not actually moving. It is merely an illusion. Also, if you are on a merry-go-round that is spinning very rapidly, what happens if you let go? You will be propelled off the merry-go-round. Yet in addition to moving through space at about sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, the Earth is also rotating at about a thousand miles per hour, so why aren’t people propelled off the surface of the Earth?

If you told people in 1400 that the Earth was not only moving quickly around the sun but also spinning like a top,^* they would probably think you were insane. Back then an extremely intelligent person might respond, “Are you crazy? I have physical proof the Earth is not moving. The proof is all around us, because nothing is moving! And look up at the sky! I can see the sun moving around me!”

When I mention this during my lectures, people often say, “Just explain gravity to them, and then they will understand.” But do you realize how difficult it would be to explain gravity to people living in 1400? Galileo Galilei (born in 1564) thought he had figured out the mystery of why the tides happen. He thought the tides were caused by the motion of the Earth, like a cup of water that moves around, causing the water to slosh back and forth. But scientist Johannes Kepler said the tides were caused not by the motion of the Earth, but by the moon exerting an invisible force that pulled on the Earth’s water. Kepler was describing gravity, yet Galileo thought Kepler’s idea was one of the most ridiculous things he had ever heard. To Galileo, Kepler’s theory sounded like magic.^*

However, Kepler was correct and Galileo was wrong. Kepler was trying to explain gravity, yet Galileo, one of the greatest scientific geniuses who ever lived, did not grasp the concept of gravity. So explaining gravity to people living in 1400 would not be easy at all. You might have a difficult time explaining gravity to Galileo since he lacked so much of the commonsense knowledge that we take for granted today.

After Galileo died, Isaac Newton’s revolutionary discoveries about gravity revealed that the same fundamental force that causes the apple to fall to the ground also causes the Earth to revolve around the sun. The same fundamental force that causes rain to fall from the sky also causes the moon to revolve around the Earth. Gravity is a fundamental force of nature that moves tiny objects and entire worlds. But again, if you told that to people living in 1400, an extremely intelligent person might respond, “But if that’s true, then why doesn’t the moon fall into and collide with the Earth, just like every other object that is affected by Earth’s gravity? Why doesn’t the Earth fall into and collide with the sun?” Isaac Newton had to invent calculus to help explain this. Calculus did not exist when Galileo was alive.

We must remember that our earliest human ancestors were not given an instruction manual that explained how our world works. A thousand years ago, people did not even know what viruses and bacteria were. In a world without microscopes, how could they have known? Our ancestors had to discover all of this knowledge, which so many people today take for granted, and I am amazed that humanity has been able to discover so much.

Each chapter in this book will reveal new truths that are essential for solving our most serious problems, while also shedding light on one of the greatest paradoxes in human history. This paradox is that we know so many truths that people living in the ancient world did not know, yet some of these ancient people knew vital truths that most of us living today don’t know. This book will discuss timeless truths that were expressed in the ancient world, which have largely been forgotten in the modern world, and that are necessary for human survival in the twenty-first century and beyond.

In The Cosmic Ocean, I explain how intelligent people could believe the reasoning that supports human sacrifice and even state-sanctioned slavery, based on the limited knowledge they had about the world and how that knowledge was filtered through their worldview. If viewpoints have changed so much, does this mean human understanding is completely arbitrary? Not at all, because there is such a thing as truth, and humanity is journeying toward truth.

Some people who believe in moral relativism have told me there is no such thing as truth, but there is such a thing as truth. For example, the myth that women are intellectually inferior to men has been used to justify the oppression of women, and the myth that African Americans are subhuman was used to justify state-sanctioned slavery. However, it is a scientific fact that women are not intellectually inferior to men, and it is also a scientific fact that African Americans are not subhuman. These statements express as much scientific truth as Copernicus and Galileo did when they claimed the Earth revolved around the sun. The underlying purpose of the women’s rights movement was to expose the truth about women’s equality, and the underlying purpose of the civil rights movement was to expose the truth that African Americans are human beings.

Furthermore, it is a scientific fact that Irish people are not subhuman. It is also a scientific fact that no ethnic group is subhuman, and that we are all members of the same human race. Humanity is journeying toward the truth of our shared humanity, and today we must also reveal many more truths. Humanity is facing serious problems that threaten our survival, yet we do not have names for these problems,^* just as people for thousands of years did not have words such as “racism” and “sexism” to describe these harmful attitudes. One of the serious problems that threatens human survival, which has not been given a name until now, is what I call being “preliterate in peace.”