The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  Because members of older cultures assume that there are Many Right Ways to Live, each unique to a particular time, place, and people, they avoid evangelism. Instead they respect other cultures and beliefs, carefully protecting their own ways and beliefs from outsiders and accepting “converts” in only the rarest of circumstances.

  Believing in the flawed or “fallen” nature of humanity allows people to rationalize the various genocides, past and present, committed against humans and nonhumans. According to this worldview, some of us will act out “human nature” (whether it’s biologically caused as the neo-Darwinians suggest or a curse from an upset god as some religions suggest) and commit all sorts of crimes against the human and natural world.

  But if evil is fundamental to human nature, how could it be that it doesn’t exist in all cultures? Few ever pause to question whether the evil or dysfunction may be in the nature of our culture rather than in the humans our culture comprises.

  If We Could Just Find the Right Lever

  Something-will-save-us beliefs—whether rooted in technology or religion—suggest that our problems are always solvable by new and improved human actions: they’re things we can control and manipulate if only we have the right science or can figure out the right prayers to motivate the right god(s) or space aliens.

  The technological something-will-save-us believers say that we haven’t yet mastered the technology of efficient and nonpolluting energy use, equitable economic and political systems, simple and widespread methods of food and birth control (and their distribution), better medicines, and efficient communications. Their refrain always begins, “If only there were more of …” or “If only everybody would…” and is then followed by the doxology of the particular solution being recommended.

  Religionists say we just haven’t yet mastered the technology of pleasing the particular god of their sect: if every last tribe is found and converted to a particular institutionalized religion, or if all the ancient prophecies are fulfilled, or if enough people would meditate with the right technique or say the right magic words or the right magical name, we’ll be saved from doom. We haven’t yet gotten that system perfect, they feel, so we need to work harder on it.

  Older Cultures and the Synergist Worldview

  The true problem we’re facing is a natural and predictable result of this way of viewing the world. The problem is the stories we tell ourselves, what we see and hear and feel as we move through the world, our disconnection from the sacred natural world, and our insistence on quick-fix/external-to-us solutions to natural-world crises that we ourselves created.

  Most of us can’t even imagine what it would be like to live with a different worldview from our own. (We do, though, keep getting glimpses—most often in the words of our “enlightened ones”—and we usually ignore those glimpses because, being older-culture wisdom, they’re so inconsistent with our way of life.)

  The younger culture says, “Who cares what our children’s children will inherit: that’s their problem, and they can work out their own salvation just as we must work out ours.”

  The older-culture perspective says, “We’re here, now, and must deal with the practical realities of this life. Any decisions we make must consider the impact on our grandchildren seven or more generations from now.”

  I find value in many of the technological suggestions people are exploring and promoting worldwide, and many must ultimately play a role in the transformation of our world if we are to avoid utter disaster. But none attacks the problem at its core. We must begin to live a sustainable, egalitarian, peaceful way of life. This can happen through political or religious transformation, but at its core its cultural transformation.

  This is not a secret: Older-culture people have been shouting it at us since we first began our genocide against them 7,000 years ago. Most of them are still trying as hard as they can, but we’re not capable of hearing because our culture has plugged our ears to their message. Here it is:

  Return to the ancient and honest ways in which humans participated in the web of life on the earth, seeing yourselves and all things as sacred and interpenetrated. Listen to the voice of all life, and feel the heartbeat of Mother Earth.

  Living from this place, all other decisions we make will be appropriate.

  The good news is that this is a very clear solution, embodying, as it does, only a single issue and a single change in a single culture (ours). The bad news is that that single issue is the most difficult and wrenching change I can envision—but we must begin, now, to take the first steps.

  It’s the same problem with which the prophets of old wrestled: their message was most often Change your way of seeing and living in the world because the path you’re currently walking will lead to disaster. As secular and Bible history show, such prophets were almost always ignored, at least until the predicted (and inevitable) disasters struck, and even then the responses to the disasters were reactive: more animal sacrifices, building bigger temples, developing new medicines, drilling deeper wells, seizing distant and more-fertile lands, and so on.

  The worldview of older cultures rarely brought them to the inevitable and cyclic crises that younger cultures have faced since their first eruption 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. Because people in these older cultures assumed that humans were intrinsically good, emphasis was on nurturing and healing rather than controlling and punishing. Because they believed that humans and natural systems were not separate but rather interpenetrated and interdependent—synergistic—they developed cultural, religious, and economic systems that preserved the abundance of their natural environment and provided for their descendants generation after generation.

  So What Are the Easy Answers to Difficult Problems?

  Unlike many of our self-assured gurus, ecologists, and technologist something-will-save-us believers, I don’t claim to know the exact details of our future. What I do know is that if we are to save some part of this world for our children and all other life, the answers won’t simply rest in just the application of technology, economy, government, messianic figures, or new religions, sects, and cults.

  True and lasting solutions will require that a critical mass of people achieve an older-culture way of viewing the world—the perspective that successfully and sustainably maintained human populations for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Because I’m convinced that our problem is rooted in our world-view, the solutions I offer derive from ways we can change that, which will then naturally transform the technological/political/economic details that emerge from that new perspective. For example:

  ■ History demonstrates that the deepest and most meaningful cultural/social/political changes began with individuals, not organizations, governments, or institutions.

  ■ In helping “save the world,” the most important work you and I face is to help individuals transform their ability to perceive reality and control the stories they believe because people do tend to live out what they believe is true. This has to do with people’s taking back personal spirituality, finding their own personal power, and realizing that most of our religious, political, and economic institutions are younger-culture dominators that must be transformed if we are to prevent them from destroying us.

  ■ Then, out of this new perspective, we ourselves will come up with the solutions in ways that you and I right now probably can’t even imagine.

  In the reality and the experience of an older-culture perspective—a life-connected worldview—we find a life rich and deep with wisdom, love, and the very real experience of the presence of the sacred in all things and all humans. It is a world that works for every living thing, including our children’s children’s children.

  From The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, © 1998, 1999, 2004, published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  PART V

  Journeys

  THOM HARTMANN’S TRAVELS ALONE COULD FILL A VOLUME. HE has circled the globe many times over on humanitari
an missions, journalism assignments, or doing research for a book. An inventory of the countries he’s visited, and the timing of his visits, invites the observation that he should consider traveling with a bulletproof vest: He was in the Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country, in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot, and in Germany when the Berlin wall came down. He was on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down, in Venezuela during one of the 1992 coup attempts, and in Beijing during the first student demonstrations. And that’s just the beginning of a long list linking Hartmann’s name to revolution and general mayhem around the world. In one sense the timing is coincidental, but in another it gets to the core of what drives Hartmann. He is drawn to turbulence, to “places fermenting with change”—those edges, again—because that’s where the action is, that’s where one has the opportunity to confront reality, whether it’s a shining beacon or an intolerable glare.

  In 1980, following the ouster of dictator Idi Amin, Hartmann went to Uganda with Gottfried Müller to negotiate with the provisional government for land to build a Salem refugee center. Uganda during that era was in violent confusion, and Hartmann said the experience, related here in “Uganda Sojourn,” was both “shattering and strengthening.” “I’d been in the slums of America and much of the developing world but had never experienced children dying in my arms or people starving to death as I watched.” He realized he had to accept the reality of Uganda as it was and do the best he could. The refugee center he helped start on the site of a former prison farm evolved into a comprehensive community center that today provides health and social welfare services and conservation education to scores of people in eastern Uganda. It confirms Hartmann’s philosophy that even when something seems impossible, one must still “Do what’s right, without regard for the seemingly overwhelming odds.”

  Russia in 1991 was also a country in turmoil, though for different reasons and with different results. Notebook in hand, Hartmann confronts the ineptitude, lack of motivation, and learned helplessness that was so pervasive in post-communist Russia, and the resulting essay, “Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns,” is an almost surreal portrait of a society in the midst of a painful yet extraordinary transition.

  In 2009 Hartmann went on a very different sort of expedition—a research trip to the excavation of an ancient city, as told in “Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace.” He’d been contemplating questions stirred up by his travels. A year earlier he’d gone to Darfur, where he found the same kinds of crises he’d seen in Uganda nearly three decades earlier: starvation, disease, and ethnic violence. What was driving all this human wretchedness? What causes such breakdowns? Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes again and again? In the ancient city of Caral, Hartmann found his answers. Caral is a “mother city,” the remnant of a stable civilization that existed peacefully for a thousand years with no evidence of warfare or conflict. It defies conventional wisdom that cities are really citadels, meant to defend their residents from attack from other societies. Hartmann shows how the lessons of Caral can help nurture our own young democracy.

  The last piece in this section, “After the Crash,” is a journey not of miles but of imagination, as Hartmann invites us to share his dramatic vision of one possible future after the world’s oil runs dry. Take this journey if you want to see how an American community might look if we were to abandon our addiction to oil, bring corporations to heel, and reconnect to our families, our communities, nature, and ourselves. This essay puts a human face on some of Hartmann’s most closely held beliefs and theories, depicting a way of life that some may find idealistic but which he proves is actually utterly practical.

  Uganda Sojourn

  From The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

  You can’t say, “Civilization don’t advance,” however, for in every war they kill you a new way.

  —WILL ROGERS, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  kAMPALA, THE CAPITIAL OF UGANDA, COVERING SEVERAL SQUARE miles, is built on seven hilltops. Before its destruction it must have been one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Now everywhere are burned-out buildings, broken glass, and tens of thousands of hungry, haunted faces.

  Young boys urgently cry out “cigarettes” among the thick crowd. Burlap bags lay empty upon the ground, with small piles of tobacco and salt upon them. They are part of sales in the vast, teeming black market. Corrugated metal and cardboard shacks house thousands of people in endless rows of fetid squalor. Urine and rotted waste clog the dirt paths of the market, as we gingerly navigate through the crowd, avoiding mud and pools of overwhelming stench. There has been no running water in this city for more than two years. Young children everywhere stagger about in dazed desperation, their parents brought to death by famine, disease, war, and the insane, random murders by soldiers and associates of the former president, Idi Amin.

  Night is approaching. We must flee the market before the eight o’clock curfew falls and an army of young Tanzanian soldiers, their rifles puncturing the night sky with staccato bursts of machine-gun fire, fans through the city. Two years ago, when Amin was overthrown and his brutal dictatorship ended, Ugandans welcomed the Tanzanian liberators from the south. But the combination of an unprecedented drought in this area, as in other parts of East Africa, and an escalating civil war by factions still loyal to Amin and other dissidents have plunged this once-peaceful and fertile land into another round of fear and chaos.

  In the morning we find the bodies of those who could not find shelter before the night descended. During a short walk, Herr Müller counts nine corpses, huddled in death next to buildings or sprawling naked in the streets.

  Everywhere we come upon razed buildings, bullet holes, and the devastated ruins of a once-beautiful country. The first night we stay in a church dormitory with no water or electricity. The only food is white rice and stale white bread. Boiled rainwater is served on request, caught from the gutters, runoff from the roofs. We sleep on small steel cots in concrete-block rooms. There are half-inch steel bars on the windows, and the massive gray door of our cell has only a small glass-with-embedded-wire window. We are locked in for the night.

  In the morning we rise early and leave by eight o’clock for Mbale, a small town on the fringe of the famine district and the site of a large refugee camp. Our route will take us through miles of jungle and over the waterfall that is the source of the Nile.

  We arrive at the Mbale camp just as the sun begins to set, a heavy grayness covering the jungle. Approaching the first cluster of mud huts, we are surrounded by perhaps a hundred people: children, adults, enfeebled elders at the end of their lives. Sweat, urine, and the smoke of hundreds of small twig fires make the air bite and cut into my nose and lungs. The earth is as hard as stone, a red clay, and all about us are littered small bodies—crying, moaning, yelling for food or water, staggering about or sitting, staring emptily. Hunger haunts us as we walk about, incessantly tapping us on the shoulder as everywhere we are brought face to face, hand to hand, skin to skin with the hollow pain of empty bodies and frightened souls.

  A toothless, graying old woman makes her way slowly through the crowd toward us. Her shuffle is slow, and she seems to wince with every step. Her breasts lie flat and dry, hanging down to a wrinkled and shriveled stomach. She cries out softly to us in Swahili. Rev. James Mbonga, a government official who is accompanying us, interprets: “I am a widow with eight young children. As my husband is dead, no one will help or care for me and my children. We shall die. Will you please help us?” A lump fills my throat.

  “Soon,” says Herr Müller gently. “Soon, I promise, we shall return with some food for you.”

  As we walk back to our car through the makeshift village, night descends. The air becomes cold, and people retreat into their huts. Outside one deserted hut we find three young children lying on a mat, naked to the approaching chill. Two of them are nearly dead. Their bodies look like skeletons, swollen heads on shrunken skin, too weak to even lift up or to make a sound. The third,
a bit older, lifts himself up with obvious pain and tells his story. Their father is dead, their mother has never returned from a trip looking for food. Tears choke my eyes as we turn and walk away from these dying children. Forcing down the trembling in my throat, I whisper a silent prayer. I recall that back home in the United States today is Thanksgiving.

  Tonight Sanford Ungar of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered show has arranged a satellite call to us, routed to our hotel. He interviews me about the situation in the camps and the bush, and I later learned that the interview ran that night in the United States as ATC’s Thanksgiving special. Twice while we’re talking to NPR, we’re cut off by the military when Ungar asks me questions about troops and the dangers of being shot.

  The next morning we leave for the northern region of Karamoja, where starvation and disease are reportedly at their worst. We load into an aging Mercedes and pull out of town. The sky is a vast expanse of blue, the sun burning down, scorching both earth and people alike. As we travel north on the dusty, broken road, the terrain gradually becomes more and more desertlike. We pass through expanses of scattered grass-covered plains dotted with occasional mesquitelike trees. A game preserve, this area was once home to herds of lion, buffalo, zebra, elephant, and other African mammals. Now all are gone, the victims of poachers and hungry, fleeing troops and refugees.