“Why?” I asked.
“Because she said she heard people crying here.”
I looked at the hills around us—many of them still unexcavated pyramids and buildings—and tried to imagine what life must have been like here 5,000 years ago. As I looked at the excavated houses, it wasn’t hard to imagine the spirits of the people who lived here so long ago as still being around.
Further reinforcing Dr. Shady’s idea that the square buildings were administrative or governmental and the round areas ceremonial, she and her helpers had found 32 flutes and 38 antaras (a type of carved-bone panpipe) in the round areas, particularly around the amphitheater.
“I think the social organization was complex for the music also,” she said. “These instruments weren’t for solo performances; they were for groups of people to play.”
“And this was another way in which Caral was a mother city? The music? The instruments indicated social complexity?”
“I think the first complex society was born here and was the mother of political organizations that were copied for later civilizations.”
I asked her how a 5,000-year-old city could have been successfully hidden for 4,000 years so it wouldn’t be looted or torn down and built over, as all other mother cities had been.
“When I came here all the pyramids were like this,” she said, waving her arms at what seemed like 30 or so rolling, sand-covered hills—under which her archeologists were discovering pyramids, buildings, and dense housing complexes. “The people in this valley thought they were hills, only hills.”
The reason, she explained, was that around 4,000 years ago there was a change in the climate—a major El Niño–type of event off the Pacific coast, 15 miles away—that produced a multigenerational drought. People couldn’t grow anything, so they moved away. The plants holding the soil died, leaving the sandy soil from the ocean to the west all the way to this valley to the mercy of the continuous winds, which brought, over the years, foot after foot of sand, which covered the buildings and the pyramids and filled in the amphitheater. Whereas Pompeii was covered by several feet of ash overnight, Caral was covered by yards of sand and micro-fine soil in just a few hundred years. The sand became so deep that nobody ever tried settling here again because the soil was too unstable to build anything on and too sandy (and salty) to grow anything in.
The city of Caral had been sealed into such a perfect time capsule that when one of Dr. Shady’s archeologists took me on a tour of the pyramids, he showed me nets filled with stones used to fill in spaces between walls, and the nets—made of 5,000-year-old hand-spun cotton—were still intact, still holding the stones in place. Seeds and food were found in storage rooms, along with clothing, figurines, and musical instruments—it was all there. Quipus—knotted cords used to record events and transactions—were intact. And all could be radiocarbon-dated to accurately prove that this was the most ancient mother city ever discovered intact. A city filled with music. A city with an amphitheater strewn with musical instruments and the remnants of games. A city that lived for 1,000 years in peace.
Are we innately evil or good, warlike or peaceful?
In 1634 in his book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes stated our culture’s assumption of the essentially evil nature of humans, saying that life without the iron fist of church or state would be “war of every man against every man,” resulting in a society where life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
A generation later Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke challenged Hobbes, suggesting that evidence from tribes being discovered across Africa and the Americas by European explorers demonstrated that, instead, the natural state of humankind was good, egalitarian, and peaceful.
The thinking of Rousseau and Locke explicitly and overtly influenced the Founders of the United States, particularly Thomas Jefferson, who saw verification of it in their own contact with Native Americans.
Thus began America as an egalitarian experiment, an experiment that has been expanded and developed by nearly 100 other nations in the world that claim democracy, particularly the countries of northern Europe, where once-feared and warlike people—most notably the Vikings of Norway and Sweden—are now among the happiest and most peaceful and self-sufficient people in the world.
Yet the Hobbeses of the world are currently ascendant, in terms of both war on humans and war on the environment.
But what should be done?
As I said in Leonardo DiCaprio’s environmental documentary The 11th Hour:
The problem is not a problem of technology. The problem is not a problem of too much carbon dioxide. The problem is not a problem of global warming. The problem is not a problem of waste. All of those things are symptoms of the problem. The problem is the way that we are thinking. The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem. It’s at the level of our culture that this illness is happening.
In my books I have shared stories from all around the world of cultures that have matured, awakened, and found ways to live in peace, harmony, and ecological balance, and the fate of others that have not. Some are pre-city aboriginal and tribal cultures, some are modern communities, and some are fully developed city-states moving quickly in the direction of peace. All offer us a new vision of how life can be in a world where the core assumptions of modern culture are challenged and modified.
This is not a radical or New Age or easily dismissed concept. It started with the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century.
Its first experiment was the founding of the United States of America in the eighteenth century.
It flowered around the world throughout the nineteenth century, as nation after nation flipped from warrior-king states to democracies.
It found global acceptance in the twentieth century with the foundation of the United Nations, the first international organization whose single explicit purpose for existence was to create, promote, and maintain worldwide peace.
And now, in the twenty-first century, as war (against humans and against nature) is increasingly being viewed with horror by people around the world, movements are springing up all over the planet to reject the immature cultural paradigms of the past and move us into a postcarbon, postwarfare, egalitarian, and peaceful world where there is room both for humans and for all other life.
Why and When Did War Begin?
If it’s true, as scientists from Peter Farb to Riane Eisler to Ruth Shady point out, that a prime differentiator between warrior societies and peaceful societies is the role of power relationships between men and women, the question is raised: Why and when does war begin, and how is it related to the relationship between the sexes?
Most preliterate cultures, from those in the Arctic to those in the southernmost tips of South America and Africa, were largely peaceful before contact with modern technology and culture. While there was conflict, and often violent conflict, it rarely reached the proportion of organized, sustained, legally sanctioned mass murder that today we call war.
As anthropologist Peter Farb has documented, some Native American societies—for example, the Shoshone—didn’t even have a word for war in their vocabulary. Others used organized games to resolve conflicts.
Many theories have been put forward for how and why the warrior mentality took over. Marija Gimbutas and others suggest it was associated with the beginning of animal husbandry—herding and pastoralism. When we began to domesticate large mammals that share the limbic, or “emotional,” brain with us (something birds and reptiles don’t have), we developed emotional ties to them. In some cases these ties became so strong that people have been known to die to protect animals (many of the people who didn’t leave New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina stayed behind because they were unwilling to abandon their pets).
Building these emotional bonds with cows, goats, sheep, pigs (smarter than dogs!), and camels and then killing those same animals for food required a certain type of disconnected thinking, a breaking of the bond between emotion and intellect, between seeing another living th
ing as a fellow-feeling being and objectifying it as an “it,” seeing it as “just an animal.”
The learned ability to disconnect oneself from the product of mammal-to-mammal killing was, suggested Gimbutas, the emotional/psychosocial disconnect that then led people to more easily objectify and then kill one another, starting around 7,000 years ago with early pastoralism.
One objection to this theory of how war began and the men took over, though, is that there are numerous pastoralist tribes throughout the world that don’t routinely engage in genocidal wars.
Another theory about the emergence of non-food-based warfare and the male dominance that seems to accompany it, first advanced by Walter J. Ong and Robert K. Logan, and later popularized by Leonard Shlain, is that the development of abstract alphabets and the literacy based on them fundamentally rewired our brains as children in such a way as to make us all potential killers.
Broadly speaking, the right hemisphere of our brain is nonverbal and processes music, relationship-based behaviors, and what have been broadly (and with terrible overgeneralization) described as “creative” efforts. This hemisphere is sometimes described as the “feminine” part of our brain. (The left/right male/female brain notion is a pop-culture generalization that makes neurologists cringe, but, like with so many clichés, it also contains a large grain of truth, particularly when viewed in a modern cultural context.)
While most thinking originates in the evolutionarily more ancient right brain (which controls the left side of our bodies), it then passes into the left hemisphere of the brain for final processing. Our left hemisphere is verbal, spatial, and abstract. While the right hemisphere experiences things in a more holistic sense, the left hemisphere makes distinctions, separations, and logical partitions. While the right hemisphere is filled with music or silence, the left hemisphere is filled with words. It is linear, methodical, unemotional, and broadly (again, often too broadly) described as the “masculine” part of our brain.
The left hemisphere is where abstractions—such as alphabets—are processed. Shlain, Ong, Logan, and others suggest that the coup by men (as opposed to balanced egalitarianism) came about when children learned to read at an early age. This over-exercises the left hemisphere; as a result, instead of its behaving cooperatively with the right hemisphere, it rises up and “takes over” the rest of the brain. The result is a colder and less emotional form of thinking and behaving and a feeling of disconnection from all life around us (or, more accurately, a lack of a feeling of connection, as that’s the province of the right hemisphere). This disconnect, Shlain argues, has led directly to centuries of war and even to the Nazi horrors of the Holocaust.
The critical age, it turns out, is around seven years old, when the brain “demylenates,” or prunes away unused cells; if one hemisphere has become dominant, it is “fixed,” or neurologically “burned in,” for life. In support of the idea of teaching children abstractions such as reading only after the age of seven, Shlain points out how during the several hundred years of European Dark Ages, not only was there a boringly consistent (relatively speaking) lack of war in Europe but the major object of worship was a female goddess deity, Mary.
Once the Catholic Church’s ban on literacy was lifted and young people began to learn to read at an early age, Shlain notes, more than a million women were tortured and murdered within a few generations, and shrines to Mary were torn down and replaced with images of Jesus.
A remnant of the language of Caral is still spoken in a few remote nearby towns today, a language with no other clear root from nearby peoples or countries. But the people who lived in Caral were not literate (although they did use textiles and knotted ropes to record events and transactions). This may be one of the keys to their thousand years of peace—that children under the age of seven weren’t taught an alphabet, and so the men and women lived in a relatively equal balance of power.
Is There a Normal Cycle to Cultures?
Most aboriginal/indigenous/tribal peoples around the world live in relative peace and homeostasis with their environment, the result of thousands (and in some cases tens of thousands) of years of trial-and-error cultural development adapted to local conditions. Caral shows that the first transition to city living was also peaceful, further suggesting that war may well be the cultural equivalent of a mental illness.
Given these assumptions (which much, but not all, history suggests are simply facts), the question arises: How do we create city-state cultures that live in peace? Is it even possible, or are we all doomed to cycles of boom and bust, of empire and subsequent crash/poverty? Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair pointed out one of the most interesting—and little noted—modern realities to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in September 2008: “No two democracies,” Blair said, “have ever gone to war with each other.”
This point—that people in a true democracy will never empower their leaders to attack another democracy—is such an absolute article of faith among neoconservatives that it was one of the rationales used to invade Iraq in 2003, to “turn it into a democracy.” Unfortunately, they failed to realize its corollary: that democracies that don’t grow organically from within rarely survive as democracies. As comedian Dick Gregory commented to me when we were traveling to Uganda in 1981, “You don’t have to shove our way of life down people’s throats with the barrel of a gun. If it’s that good, they will steal it themselves!” And in the 30 years since then, country after country has done just that, from South Africa to Ukraine to East Germany to Argentina. (Although Iraq is still in a state of crisis because of the neocon belief that they could bomb a nation into democracy, it appears that the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.)
Cultural history—from what clearly appears to be a self-governing (small-d democratic in the context of that day) Caral to today—and biology tell us that democracy is the normal and homeo-static anchor of peoples who have had enough time to work it out by trial and error. A landscape littered with nondemocratic cultures and civilizations that have risen and fallen and a planet covered on five continents with living or remnant tribal cultures that have been stable democracies for thousands or tens of thousands of years show us the inevitability of culturally egalitarian democracy.
The difference between us today and those who lived in previous times is that we have the luxury of looking back across the whole sweep of world history and “prehistory” to see how it works (and what prevents it from working) and, it is hoped, to finally get it right.
From Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann, © 2009,
published by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
After the Crash
From Imagine: What America Could Be in the
21st Century, ed. Marianne Williamson
DURING THE TIME YOU SPEND READING THIS ESSAY, 500 PEOple—300 of them children—will die of starvation. Two or three species will vanish forever. A quarter million pounds of toxic and cancer-causing waste from corporate polluters will pour into our air, soil, and water. More than 2,000 acres of rain forest will be burned, cut, or bulldozed. In America alone, guns will kill two or three people, and at least one teenager will commit suicide.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Imagine a future America where these problems are part of a bitter past. Imagine an America where people care for one another and life is rich and meaningful, where we actually know the names of our neighbors because we talk, eat, and laugh with them regularly. Imagine America a generation from now—if we make the right choices today.
The resurgence of community imagined in this essay would be brought about by an oil crisis. Nonetheless it would improve the quality of Americans’ lives.
In the ideal America of the future, neighborhoods are again places where people live as neighbors. When one family is in need, it becomes the business of the entire community to fill that need. If one family has a sick child, everybody says a prayer for her or babysits or brings ove
r soup or medicine—often a mixture made from herbs grown in the garden. If one person’s house burns down, everyone else opens their homes to that person and the community mobilizes to erect a new home.
Nearly every neighborhood has a community building, often part of the power station or the place of worship, where people gather during the day to converse and during the evening to share potluck dinners and entertain one another with music, storytelling, dancing, games, and reading aloud. Some communities have saunas or sweat lodges attached to their community buildings, or hallowed groves, stone circles, labyrinths, public crucifixes, or other sacred sites. These are important for prayer and meditation and for the rites of passage that communities conduct as children grow up and adults grow older.
Families tend to stay in the area where they were living at the time of the Crash, so cousins now play together and children are raised with their grandparents’ help.
People walk everywhere, for exercise as well as for social interaction. Extensive systems of hiking trails are set up in the forests. In the cities, historic and other interesting sites are well marked, and residents who would enjoy hosting visitors leave their front doors open. People spend evenings on their porches, simply rocking in chairs or chatting with family and neighbors and offering tea, snacks, or music.
Most goods and resources are locally produced and locally consumed. Lawns—anachronistic twentieth-century imitations of the greenswards of the medieval British aristocracy—are long forgotten; people now grow vegetables and grains in the soil around their homes. Fruit and nut trees are popular both for decoration and for shade. Families grow much of their own food, while the community garden supplies most of the rest.
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 26
