life has marked advantages — and some inherently destructive disadvantages. Early civilizations experimented with gusto, constantly assessing what worked well and what demanded improvement, imagining increasingly sophisticated technical solutions, and constructing ever more impressive architecture, plumbing, food storage, and trade systems that were impossible to achieve without high-level social organization.
The problem was that modifying ineffective thought and behavior patterns turned out to be much more difficult than building the pyramids, especially when city dwellers the world over had already created their own colossal, archetypal conundrum — namely, an extreme, adolescent misuse of the knowledge of good and evil. To justify shortsighted, predatory practices that benefited the few at the expense of the many, ruling classes not only promoted the idea that nature was harsh and had to be subdued, they actively demonized nomadic cultures, especially those in which men and women shared power. To make matters worse, the monarchs deified themselves — at first probably to control slaves through shock-and-awe tactics. But soon enough, they began to believe their own publicity, which gave them even less motivation to admit their mistakes and analyze their own behavior. The gods, after all, must be perfect, their every command unquestionably followed, their every deed informed by a “divine” logic incomprehensible to mere mortals.
In effect, despite the multiple, seemingly unique cultures and religions, if you lived in a large Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, or later, European urban center, the hidden scaffolding of your belief system looked like this:
| SEDENTARY | good, right, civilized |
| NOMADIC | evil, wrong, barbarian |
| PREDATOR | strong |
| PREY | weak |
| HUMAN/MALE | intelligent, rational, moral |
| NATURE/FEMALE | ignorant, instinctual, amoral |
In extremely predatory societies like Rome before the time of Christ, competition and conquest were so ingrained they didn’t even have socially recognized opposites. In this sense, to consider a concept weak, ignorant, wrong, or even evil is preferable to oblivion. After all, what we can name, we can at least debate and, over time, cultivate if it proves useful — when all the kings are dethroned and humanity is truly free to consider its previously suppressed, conveniently outlawed, or simply long-forgotten options.
George Washington’s least-recognized and most impressive innovation hinged on his ability to transcend these long-entrenched opposites, drawing upon masculine and feminine, sedentary and nomadic, predatory and nonpredatory, verbal and nonverbal forms of power and intelligence — fluidly, as needed. A deeply spiritual man who felt a sense of divine calling, he nonetheless dodged the pitfalls of religious grandiosity. Not only did he refuse to be deified; he also avoided the much more common modern affliction of domineering self-righteousness, which, like deification, blocks lucid inquiry and constant behavior modification. Heaven and earth, faith and logic, culture and nature, vision and practicality, fierceness and compassion were all on his side, helping him to win an impossible war by tapping the balanced ecosystem of a fully functioning human psyche.
And at the crucial moment of victory, he did what no man had done before him, resisting the ultimate temptation of military success. British monarch George III was awed by reports of Washington’s refusal to become king of a new country, saying that if the general did indeed hold to his promise, he would be “the greatest man in the world.” After all, as Ellis points out in His Excellency, “Oliver Cromwell had not surrendered power after the English Revolution. Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, and Castro did not step aside to leave their respective revolutionary settlements to others in subsequent centuries.”
In so many astonishing ways, George Washington was a revolutionary among revolutionaries. Two centuries later, we’re still grappling with the gift — and the burden — of freedom he so generously entrusted to the future. It’s time to dust off those stoic, faded images of the father of our country and live the example he set before us.
On an otherwise sunny Saturday morning in January 2011, Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot during an informal meeting with her constituents. Eighteen innocent bystanders were also injured or killed by a single, deeply disturbed gunman.
The tragedy hit home — literally. Giffords and astronaut Mark Kelly had gotten married a few miles down the road from my latest home base, a small, wildly scenic horse property that my husband and I had recently purchased for a downsized version of our equine program. Among many other benefits this charming little ranching community afforded, I had been pleased to learn, our new Amado, Arizona, location put us squarely in Giffords’s district.
I had long appreciated the congresswoman’s intelligence, courage, and willingness to respectfully listen to people with opposing views. Giffords, not surprisingly, was also a lifelong horsewoman. In a brief career overview aired on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered shortly after the attack, producers emphasized that working at a local boarding stable, cleaning stalls in exchange for riding lessons, had been her favorite childhood summer job. “I learned a lot from horses and the stable people,” she told NPR. “There was a unique culture out there, and I think it provided good training, all of that manure-shoveling, for my days in politics ahead.”
Political humor aside, Giffords’s commitment and adaptability, her empathy, strength, patience, and poise under pressure echoed the skills of previously mentioned rider-leaders who had the nerve to take on difficult yet socially significant positions, putting their lives on the line, if necessary, for the chance to make a difference.
In the first confusing hours after the shooting at a Tucson supermarket, reporters were madly trying to determine if Giffords’s wounds had been fatal. With CNN blaring on television and satellite radio throughout the house, I was feeling, like so many people that day, a combination of shock, sadness, and outrage. Yet somehow, the horses and the land outside seemed to temper these tumultuous emotions with an undercurrent of compassion and trust, as if the earth itself were vibrating long, subsonic chords of assurance that the world was not, in fact, coming to an end.
My upstairs writing office overlooks several corrals leading toward miles of open range, with Baboquivari, the sacred mountain of the Tohono O’odham tribe, rising up from the western horizon. On the opposite side of the house, much closer and to the east, a towering rock formation known as Elephant Head serves as a gateway to the Santa Rita Mountains. Only from a considerable driving distance does the trunk of the pachyderm appear, created by an elongated series of hills visible from Tucson, thirty minutes away on one side, and Tubac, fifteen minutes away on the other.
In Amado, the small rural town closest to the formation, Elephant Head looks nothing like an elephant. It’s a massive, vaguely pyramid-shaped, cathedral-like structure that suddenly rises twenty-five hundred feet from its base. At first glance, you might think some ancient civilization carved it out of solid stone — except that the Empire State Building is only about half that tall and it took a good five thousand years of human ingenuity to reach that height.
Around five o’clock I turned off the television, convinced that Giffords would survive that first day and grow stronger with time. As I fed the horses in a melancholy yet appreciative silence, I watched the sun slowly melt behind Baboquivari, setting the elephant’s head and the rest of the Santa Ritas ablaze in outlandish hues of crimson, gold, and lavender. And I wondered: What if scientists, politicians, and religious leaders stopped assuming that evolution and/or creation had already reached its culmination with the innovation of mankind? What if we realized that civilization was neither advanced
