The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  We walked out across the frozen and slick ramp to the plane and climbed ice-covered stairs. A de-icing truck came out, and two men began to listlessly spray something on the plane, blowing off the accumulation of snow and ice from the previous night. It took them an hour, and I cringed as I watched one of them walking on the wing, one foot on the flaps, walking all over areas that, on US planes, are clearly marked “NO STEP” and, on this plane, had a similar-looking marking in Cyrillic.

  Finally, we took off for Berlin. The plane smelled musty and my seat kept falling back into the lap of the man behind me, but we wobbled up into the air and two hours later landed in Berlin during one of the heaviest blizzards I’ve flown through in years. Stepping into the Berlin airport, with all its shops and signs and products and well-dressed people going one place or another, I remembered the people back in Russia. How long would it take them to rebuild their country? Von Heyer thought it would be at least two generations; Olga was more optimistic and thought 10 to 15 years. And the politicians, of course, are promising to do it in two.

  Traveling to Russia for Salem taught me an important lesson. I saw how the communist concept—once embraced by the Russians as the solution to the problems of the West—destroyed the human spirit because it detached people’s actions from any response. What happened in the Soviet Union, for generations, is that although people acted (did their jobs), it made no difference in how their lives went; whether they worked hard or not, there was no change in their standard of living. With no connection between initiative and outcome, their productive spirit died.

  On my visit I’d seen people whose spirit was destroyed by centuries of repression, by alcohol, and by a total lack of hope. I’d also seen and come to know those who believed change was possible, that there could be a future for Russia if only the “older” wisdom of the peasants could be brought back and enough people could see and sense the possibility of success.

  Salem is a start. The impact we’ve had on a small region is already startling, with 120 families going from being suspicious and skeptical to enthusiastically wanting to jump on the bandwagon. Because the media is so centralized and pervasive in Russia, it’s possible that once the Salem program is up and running at full speed it could be a model that will quickly spread across the country, teaching the basics of free enterprise, agriculture, food storage, and nutrition.

  The next step, Lipfert says, is to help upgrade the local hospitals and change the way the orphanages are run, moving them to the Salem family model. With enough help, and if the government doesn’t turn in on itself or experience a total economic collapse like the one that in part led to World War II, I believe it just may work.

  From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,

  © 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.

  Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace

  From Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture

  Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind…. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  When you realize how small the earth is in relation to the cosmos, and how small we are in relation to the earth, then you can understand the appropriate place of humans in relation to the earth. These people looked up at the stars and understood this. We look at the earth too much and miss the big picture, the stars. We must see a larger view if we are to live in peace.

  —DR. RUTH SHADY

  THROUGHOUT HUMANITY’S 160,000-PLUS-YEAR HISTORY, CULtures ranging from tribes to city-states have undergone a three-stage process. They start out (stage one) immature: exploitative of one another and of the world around them. Like children, as a society they think they’re the center of the universe, the only “real people” and thus unique from all other forms of life (and other cultures), so they think they have the (often divinely ordained) right to dominate and exploit everything around them. This exploitation inevitably leads to stage two: environmental and cultural disaster. Cultures then disappear, disperse, or reach stage three: maturity.

  Ecological disasters—in most cases manmade—are at the root of virtually every historic disappearance or dispersal of cultures. (Even Rome fell because of deforestation: the felling of the last forests in Italyled to a currency crisis when there wasn’t enough wood to fuel the furnaces to smelt silver; this provoked Rome’s outward expansion across the rest of Europe—which led to the fall of the Roman Empire.)

  Similarly, the American Empire—and arguably many others (Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and European)—is setting up ecological disasters that are already producing catastrophic consequences. From deforestation to global warming to changing ocean currents (which could plunge the world into a new ice age in a period as short as two years) to massive species loss, the planet is dying. Duke University professor Dr. Stuart Pimm documents how about a quarter of all species alive just 200 years ago are now extinct; and if current trends continue, half of all species will be extinct within 30 years.1

  The planet is a living organism, and the species on it are parts of an interconnected whole, a grand web of life. Just as a person can live and function without a few body parts—an eye, a kidney, a limb, or even an entire hemisphere of the brain—when a certain critical mass of body parts or blood is gone or damaged, the entire body will cease to function.

  What is driving all this is our culture and the core cultural assumption that we are born to dominate one another, primarily through the instrument of war. Thus one of the great debates among those who study the arc of human history has been whether maturity is based on war or whether war is an aberration in a mature society. And it’s not just war of one human against another, one society against another, but also war against nature, humans behaving in ways that destroy the natural world.

  Is the natural state of humans warlike? Is that why we naturally organize into clans, tribes, cities, states, and nations—to protect ourselves from other naturally warlike humans?

  Or is the natural state of humans peaceful, and war an aberration? Do we organize ourselves into cities to achieve our highest potential instead of to defend ourselves from our lowest nature? Is the purpose of “society” supportive, nurturing, and ennobling?

  These are critical questions for us for two reasons. The first is that we today stand at the precipice of environmental and war-driven disaster. The second is that the United States and most other modern liberal democracies were founded out of the Enlightenment notion that the true natural state of humankind is peace, not war; enlightenment, not hatred; integration with “natural law,” not defiance of it.

  For a significant majority of tribal societies around the world, the question was settled tens of thousands of years ago: the natural state of humankind is peaceful. Hundreds of examples are easily found extant today among historically stable aboriginal peoples on all continents and detailed by anthropologists such as Robert Wolff and Peter Farb—and extensively by Thomas Jefferson.

  But what about “modern civilizations”—cities and nations?

  For most of the 7,000-year history of city-states, conventional wisdom has held that they were created to defend people from nearby warriors. Castles are essentially defensive institutions, developed to protect their inhabitants from instruments of warfare. In Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, the largest early cities were essentially giant castles, and evidence of warfare is everywhere, from ancient instruments of war to ancient murals of warriors at battle.

  But is this why these cities were started, as defensive fortifications? Until now nobody has known because the ancient cities we’ve excavated so far around the world are built layer upon layer over themselves, one conquering group after another; so, after a few thousand years, some are hundreds of feet higher than they were when they were first built and a dozen to a hundred layers of successive cultures deep. Excavating all the way down to the “mother city”—the fi
rst city, with its original artifacts and clues to its original purpose and way of life intact—has never been done successfully. The evidence of the mother city, in every one of our known ancient civilizations, is gone, destroyed by the ravages of time and the builders of subsequent layers upon the foundation of the original.

  Until 1994.

  That’s when Dr. Ruth Shady of the University of San Marcos at Lima, Peru, began excavation of a site spreading over hundreds of acres that for 1,000 years or more had simply appeared to be a series of seven huge sand-covered mounds. By 2002 she realized she had found an ancient city; in 2004 she found artifacts that could be carbon-dated, and she discovered she had uncovered the oldest known intact city in the world—the world’s first excavatable mother city.

  This city, called Caral, predated not only the Bronze and Iron Ages but even the Ceramic Age, yet it had huge plazas, giant pyramids, elaborate homes, and the remains of art, music, and a complex culture. The citizens of this city lived in peace for more than 1,000 years before climate change covered their city over and they abandoned it. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of war or the instruments of war. Instead everything, from the art to the musical instruments to the burial sites, indicates that the people of Caral lived in peace and harmony.

  In September 2008 I made the trek to Peru to meet Dr. Shady and hear and see for myself what could be learned from a human culture that, though ancient, existed in harmony within its environment and in peace with neighboring societies.

  It was a cold, gray morning in Lima as Renan, my interpreter, and two large, tough-looking guys picked me up at the hotel. Renan had lived in the United States and was fluent and well spoken in English; our two bodyguards, Lucho and Gilberto, spoke only Spanish.

  We drove for miles past squatter slums along a highway that runs up the west coast of South America. Renan said you can follow this highway all the way to the United States. Much of the road was empty and barren—sand-covered hills stretching into the distance, the product of millions of years of sand blowing in from the Pacific Ocean coast.

  The slums rolled up and over the hillsides along the highway, shacks made of scrap materials but located close enough to the road that their residents could catch a bus ride into Lima to work. Raw sewage ran in open gutters along the dirt “streets” of the slums, and the odor occasionally reached our car. The sky was gunmetal gray and the air chilly when we left Lima, but as we traveled north up along the coast, climbing steadily, the sky opened up and the air became warm.

  This long stretch of highway was where Renan said that bandits will sometimes roll large boulders out onto the road, and when you stop to move them you find yourself with an AK-47 in your face. Our bodyguards, Lucho and Gilberto, were former SEALs in the Peruvian navy. I asked Renan if they were armed, and he said, “Yes, and so am I.” I hoped the guns would not be needed.

  After traveling almost two hours north, we came to a large truckstop-style gas station with an attached restaurant. Here we met Dr. Shady with her driver/bodyguard and shared some breakfast and coffee. Dr. Shady is a pleasant-looking woman of middle years, with a broad smile and a contagious enthusiasm for archeology and for Caral, the city she is largely responsible for excavating.

  As we sat and ate, I asked her what was most significant about Caral.

  “Here the civilization was different,” she said, contrasting the Caral of 5,000 years ago with the city-states that were emerging in Egypt, India, and Asia. “The focus [of the culture] was different. When this civilization was formed here, peace was very important. There was no war.” She paused and looked at me with a glint in her eye. “Why? Why was there no war?” she asked, as if quizzing me.

  I shrugged. “Many people think that the only reason cities were originally created was to provide fortifications for war.”

  But that was not the case in Caral, Dr. Shady said. There were no fortifications built at any time during the city’s 1,000 years of continuous, peaceful occupation.

  “I think it is very important for the people in the world to ask [how Caral could live without war] because it is different in the modern world. I think the Caral civilization has a very important message to the world about how societies can live in peace.”

  Dr. Shady noted that Caral was a complex society and had complex interactions with many other societies in the region, many of which lived in radically different ways. “Caral had state or political authorities because this civilization had interactions with societies that lived on the coast, the highlands, and the lowlands—all different environments,” she said. “They were interacting because they were very different. Different resources. The religion was very important. I think most important was that the political authorities used religion for social cohesion and political coercion rather than using violence and war.”

  But was it just religion, I asked, that made for peace?

  “We had information that women were very important,” she said. “In Caral we found two figures, a man and a woman together. The woman had a dress very similar to the white of the Incas, and I think she was a very important person. She had two necklaces made of a very special material with an important design of a cross. Her face had tattoos and holes for earrings—the symbol of political importance until the Incas. The man had only one necklace, and his eyes were looking at her.”

  Dr. Shady added that the figurines were consistent with other ancient artifacts from peaceful societies and that even among the much later Incan Empire—a warlike empire—“the wife of the Inca, as the Spanish chronicled, had the special role of diplomat and negotiated peace.”

  An hour later, after driving into an incredibly remote valley through miles of dense scrub and then miles of desertlike dust, and then through a valley where the road was only barely discernable, we came to the site where the city of Caral was being excavated. The sun was bright and so intense at this elevation and latitude that by day’s end my face was bright red. Dr. Shady put on a scarf and a hat to protect herself from the sun. We walked among ruins and hills concealing ruins that were from two to 10 (modern building) stories tall, and we talked.

  “We began to work in the valley in 1994,” Dr. Shady said. “Soon we were working all the valley. We found a site with monumental buildings. But nobody knew the age of the site. After the first month, I could see that there weren’t any ceramics, only textiles [among the remains], and the techniques of these textiles were similar [to those of] another very old site that we know of in this country from the Archaic period.”

  “Pre-Ceramic?” I asked. This would have made the city a transition point from Stone Age cultures to city-living cultures, dating it from about 5,000 years ago—long before iron or bronze or any other metal was refined, long before glass was made, before even kiln-based pottery techniques were developed.

  “Yes,” she said. “This was pre-Ceramic. But here the difference [from most pre-Ceramic societies] was the very big buildings—the human design.”

  We walked along a pathway that was defined on both sides by small stones, to keep people from wandering randomly around the site. We passed a place where the sandy soil had been dug deeply, revealing stone buildings that looked like the rooms of a house. “Under all this sand are homes?” I asked.

  Dr. Shady pointed to the excavation and said, “One group here.” We stood along a long ridge, a flat area with bare, sand-covered hills in the far distance. A mile or two behind us, a few hundred feet below in elevation, was a lush valley with a river that had been running through it for tens of thousands of years or more. She pointed to 30 acres or so of hillside. “Another group here. And I think all these people lived here because it’s so near to the valley.”

  She explained that the people were agriculturalists who worked the valley but that their primary crop was cotton, which was formed into fishing nets and then traded with coastal-living people in exchange for everything from anchovies (primarily) to whales. The societies were interdependent and symbiotic rather than competiti
ve.

  There was also a strong emphasis on the family unit, she said, as shown by the way the housing was organized. Even today the local people of the Caral area continue with traditions that Dr. Shady believes trace back thousands of years ago to when the ancient city of Caral was occupied.

  She described to me how the locals she’d hired for excavation asked her every year to bring a shaman into the community to keep the site sacred and thus keep them safe. “Each year I have to do a religious event here,” she said, “because the people think that if I don’t, they can have accidents because they work in this sacred site. So every October I have to do this ceremony of the Pago a la Tierra—I have to pay the earth.”

  I asked her about the shamans (sometimes a woman) she brought in every October. Where did they conduct the ceremony?

  She noted that there were two parts or sides to Caral, one on a slightly higher plain, with large administrative buildings and plazas, all square or rectangular and with all the public areas laid out in straight lines. And then there was another site, essentially on the other side of a slight hill and road that bisected the area, where the public areas were round, including a dramatic round public amphitheater that was dug 20 or more feet into the ground. Its acoustics were perfect—you could stand in the middle of it and speak and then hear a perfect echo of your voice—and this was the area where, Dr. Shady said, they had found most of the musical instruments. And it was the only area where the shamans were willing to perform their sacred ceremonies.

  Dr. Shady noted that a colleague, Dr. R. Tom Zuidema, professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Illinois, suggested to her that the “round” areas were probably under the control of women rather than men, an idea that made sense to her.

  And, apparently, it made sense to the shamans. “When the person who conducts the religious ceremonies comes here, she won’t make them here,” Dr. Shady said as we stood in the “square” part of town.