Older and Younger Cultures

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

The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth.

—CHIEF LUTHER STANDING BEAR

IN MY EARLIER BOOKS ON ADD, I POINTED OUT HOW FROM THE earliest times humans were hunter-gatherers and that some of those behaviors that were survival skills for our ancestors are now problems in many modern schools and workplaces.

The picture that this model paints for some people is one of noble hunters who have been systematically tracked down and destroyed by the ignoble farmers.

While it’s true that there are now only a very few hunting societies left on the earth, as I delved deeper I came to realize that the real paradigm is deeper than just hunters and farmers.

While that does a fine job of explaining why some kids excel or fail in school, or why high-stimulation-seeking people are drawn to jobs like being an emergency medical technician while low-stimulation-seeking people are drawn to jobs like accounting, it misses a larger and more important point.

That point is the one that prophets from Jeremiah to Jesus to Nostradamus to Edgar Cayce have gone to great lengths to indicate to us: “modern” (post–agricultural revolution, since 10,000 BCE) humankind is destroying the world in which we live.

One explanation often put forth for this is that there is a basic flaw in human nature. This concept of original sin is often pointed to as being demonstrated in the biblical story of Eve and the apple.

The problem with this concept, however, is that there have been human societies around for hundreds of thousands of years—people just like you and me—who did not destroy the world. Instead they lived in harmony with it.

I first encountered this possibility as a teenager, reading Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. There were detractors and counterarguments to her view of the noble primitive, however, and even when I first read her book it occurred to me that her Samoan “primitive” people were lacking basic and important things like advanced medical care and communications, which, I assumed, would make their lives better if they’d had them.

My assumption was then, as it had been all my life, that our culture, what we call Western civilization, was inherently better and more valuable than what we called the primitive cultures that preceded it.

Then while in Bogotá for Gottfried Müller, at the Salem program in the La Paz slum, I first heard the story of the Kogi tribe, who live at the top of one of the Andes mountain ranges.

When I heard of the message of the elder brothers, I thought it an interesting spiritual story but figured that the average person would have little interest in it. After all, how could a primitive people who live on simple crops have something important to teach us? We have, after all, conquered the earth. We’ve conquered disease, hunger, space, and even the atom.

I also noticed that the elder brother people, to use my hunter/ farmer metaphor, very much exhibit the characteristics of farmers. And it was on the farmers that I’d been mentally blaming much of the mess of modern civilization.

Yet these elder brothers lived in harmony with the world and had for thousands of years. They trod lightly upon this earth, and even in their architecture they didn’t damage the ecosystems but instead guaranteed their survival over millennia.

And now I was being told that they are warning us, their younger brothers, that we are on the verge of bringing about a global catastrophe.

So, if the elder brothers, and other ancient civilizations that have lived in peace with the world, were farmers and yet didn’t create a civilization that (like other farmer societies of Europe, Africa, and Asia) would ultimately lead to the death of the world, what was different? How could it be that some farmer peoples would leave behind a planet relatively unscathed, whereas others would wreak such incredible damage that it would put all life on earth at risk?

I had similarly paradoxical questions about hunters. Many primitive hunting people (using my metaphor) left only gentle footprints on the planet. Elaborate cave paintings from 30,000 years ago in France and 20,000 years ago in Australia are the remnants they have left us—not piles of nuclear waste that will be lethal for more than a million years into the future.

But other hunting people were exploitative. They burned forests to drive out animals or, more commonly, turned their hunting efforts against their neighbors and became hunters of humans. The Mongols and the Tatars, originally nomadic hunting tribes, rose to conquer most of Europe and ruled it with a brutal iron fist for centuries, every bit as cruelly as had the Roman Empire, which had evolved from an agricultural society.

So, with ADD it may well be something as simple as hunter and farmer material remaining in our genetic code. But from a larger view, the view of the past and the future of the planet, there was a third picture that I began to see only after first visiting the Apaches in 1995.

This is the idea of cultures that are “old” and “young.”

The old cultures, be they agricultural or hunting/gathering, live with an intrinsic connection to the earth. For them the planet on which we live is itself a living organism. It has its own life, its own destiny, and, in a way that the younger cultures could never understand, its own consciousness. Things that run counter to the earth’s nature will (naturally) not work in the long run—although the damage may be too slow to be noticeable on the younger-culture time scale. All we have to do, to tell which is which, is look at what’s happening on the planet.

And that’s why what I’ve seen in my travels is so disturbing.

The younger cultures live quite different lives: they view themselves as separate from the earth, with “dominion” over it, and see the earth’s resources only as things to be used and then discarded. Nature is the enemy, not the mother, father, or brother/sister of these younger peoples, and their disregard for it is so visceral, so intrinsic to their worldview, that many live their entire lives without ever once questioning their own cultural assumptions about humankind’s place in the universe.

The older peoples are so clear in their understanding of humankind’s place on earth that they often pray for the soul of an animal as they kill it for food. Daily they thank God for the life given them and the life around them—all of which is viewed with reverence.

The younger peoples, on the other hand, are so egocentric that in the recent past they tenaciously fought—killed and tortured—to preserve their belief that our planet was at the center of all creation. Many of these younger-culture descendants still argue that the creation of humans marked the creation of all things, and even today they fight to insert such teachings into public schools. They are so ethnocentric that they make it an article of faith to seek out and convert older cultures to their view of the world—or to obliterate them entirely, as was done across much of North and South America, Africa, Australia, and Europe. Their view was so short and their arrogance so great that they believed their “conquest” of disease and hunger with modern medicine and agriculture were signs of a blessing by God.

Older cultures the world over are warning younger cultures of the danger and the stupidity of their ways. I was told by the Apaches and received the message in Colombia. Tribal village elders in Africa asked me to “warn the world” that the famine I was seeing there in Uganda in 1980 would one day be worldwide, the fate of the white man as well.

I cannot imagine it is mere coincidence that the same message would come from all of these disparate peoples, who have no conventional way of communicating with one another.

And all I’d seen of death, famine, children suffering, warfare, and extermination was because of the arrogance, the greed, the limited vision, and, ultimately, the immaturity of the younger cultures. We discovered and developed technology but do not have the wisdom to consistently use it responsibly; we’ve infected the earth’s landmasses like an encrusted sore, and now we’re filling the seas with the pus of our waste.

Gottfried Müller pointed out to me how Jesus warned against this. The earliest Jews had been an older culture, and we can see this in the story of Cain and Abel. The farmer (Cain) killed the earth-respecting herder brother, so God cursed his future agricultural efforts. Surely this was the story of an older-culture peoples and a warning to those who would follow.

But along the course of time, the ancient Hebrews encountered more and more younger peoples and began to adopt their ways. The prophets railed against this and warned over and over about the inevitable results; but as the record of the Bible tells us, the prophets were almost always ignored.

Then came Jesus who, it now appears from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sources, was a member of the Essenes. The Essenes were an older-culture Jewish fragment that still remained in his day, which was dominated by younger-culture Judaism. And his message, not at all well received in his time, was an older-culture message: stop worrying (God will provide), trust others to the point of not fighting them in court, respect and see God in everybody, forgive people no matter how many times they harm you.

Absolutely, the older-culture message is one of harmony and living together. It is not a message of separation, of “us or them,” and it has not a word about dominating others.

He directly challenged the younger-culture notions of destroying one’s enemy, of exploiting the earth with intensive agriculture, and—the ultimate younger-culture idea—that man is independent of God and that human “thinking” is the same as “consciousness.”

These teachings showed older-culture insights that man is not separate from God and nature and that even our thoughts have meaning and impact—and are known to God. We are all a part of a larger, more encompassing consciousness.

In a younger culture, it’s assumed that God is distant, that heaven is far away in time and space, that humans are separate and unique and have to grab what they can, and that the ancient laws that protected the earth, such as a Sabbath for the land, are merely quaint. Jesus challenged all of these and did so with such conviction that it led to his being sentenced to death.

But after his crucifixion, a man who was an enthusiastic member of the younger culture of the then-modern Jews and who circulated freely and comfortably in the younger culture of the Roman conquerors was visited by the Holy Spirit or Christ himself or both and began an aggressive ministry. This man, Saul, later renamed Paul, took much of Jesus’s messages to the far parts of what was then his known world, and the messages he carried became the basis of what was to be today’s Christian Church.

But there were also parts of Jesus’s message—those older-culture warnings and admonitions—that Paul could not understand because of his own cultural upbringing, so he overlooked or ignored them.

Some years ago Herr Müller commented to me that he preferred to read the four Gospels, the Psalms, and the Prophets over the writings of Paul.

It wasn’t until I understood this fundamental difference in world-views that Paul’s writings represent that I understood his comment. A man who worries about the lives of even the tiniest of living creatures certainly has an older-culture view of the world—a view that’s now nearly extinct planetwide.

How many pastors of today, for example, would survive in their position if they preached that people should not have savings or charge interest, should not gather into barns, should trust God totally for tomorrow even if it meant their death, and should not only not fight against their enemies but help them and pray for them?

In the small view, those are all recognized as good words and often cited from the pulpit. But they’re cited only as quaint stories, or perhaps metaphors, or lessons in humility—not as instructions to an entire culture about how it must reform itself if it is to avoid destroying itself and the world.

Herr Müller’s commitment to peace (that’s what Salem means, after all) is so complete he will not eat the products of violence. His older-culture understanding teaches that food must be grown organically—not just to be healthier but out of respect for the earth itself. As we pollute and destroy the earth and ourselves (from our drunkenlike consumption of oil and energy to the very personal pollution of our bodies through nicotine and other drugs), we show how totally disconnected we are from the life we were bred for and the spirit that’s part of it.

Once when Herr Müller embraced a huge pine tree, hugging it, talking with it, giving it his blessing and asking it for its blessing, I asked: “Do trees have souls?”

He shrugged. “I do not know. But the light of God’s life is in all living things.”

“So you see God all around you?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“But some would call that animism or say that you’re worshipping nature spirits or something like that.”

“We are humans, in the image of God, but we are also part of nature,” he said simply. “I save the life of a worm, I have saved life. I touch the life of the tree, I have touched life. Of course, we have a highest obligation to human life, but it is the stupidity of people who do not see the light of God in all living things that has led to this.”

He waved his hand above his head at the browning pine trees, victims of acid rain and pollution. “Who could kill off a forest for a few dollars if he knew that the forest was alive with the light and the presence of God? Only a stupid man, and that is what we have become. Because people do not see the light of God in all life, they are so ready to destroy the world for profit and power. And this is what will end with the end times: in the new times to come, people will know that all life is sacred.”

And so I saw it clearly, at last.

As an enthusiastic member of our science-worshipping modern culture, I’d felt a shock when I first realized as a youth that there might be buried within my religion and education the remnants of an older and wiser culture. This older culture seemed inexplicable and odd: its most famous ancient spokesperson (Jesus) said that we should forgive people regardless of what they did, that we should not worry about the future, and that we should bless and love those who have hurt and used and exploited us. Nobody I’d ever known lived that way.

At the time I didn’t know what to make of this, and I carried the dissonance with me as the years went by.

You can imagine the effect on me when I later did meet a human who actually lived the principles of that older and more mature culture: Kurt Stanley. The things Master Stanley did and taught were inexplicable in the context of my scientific worldview: they were miracles or madness. Yet I knew what I’d seen, whether or not I could explain it. And I later met Herr Müller, who had similar insights and powers.

As I delved into Master Stanley’s and Herr Müller’s lives and teachings, I saw that their older-culture beliefs were firmly anchored in things I had always told myself were the basis for our younger (Jewish and Christian) culture: the words and the acts of Jesus and the prophets who preceded him.

But I also discovered that even these teachings had been turned by the younger culture into machines, mechanistic steps and rituals to be manipulated to suit the purposes of those in power, into do-this-and-you’ll-get-that-result formulas.

We had kept the information, but we’d lost the wisdom.

This loss of wisdom has led to terrible human suffering in our past and has set up potentially severe difficulties in our future.

The early colonists of the United States were fond of the Calvinistic notion that those who won in battle or commerce did so because it was manifest destiny or the will of their god. This rationalization satisfied their consciences as they slaughtered the natives who already occupied the land that the colonists had “discovered” and as they bought, sold, and used human slaves—as had their younger-culture dominator predecessors all the way back into the earliest records of human history.

It’s clearly a story of younger, immature cultures interested in themselves (like any immature entity) to the exclusion of the larger community in which they live. The view was well articulated by Aristotle and Descartes. It holds that those who survive are, ipso facto, better suited for survival. By this logic it follows that those who conquer, who destroy, are superior; otherwise they wouldn’t be around to write the history books.

Further, because better machines make better conquerors, a culture that views the entire universe and all of life as a machine will make the best machines and thus be the best conquerors.

Unfortunately for our culture, this works only in a world of abundant resources. When human populations and their needs outstrip the resources available to them, this cultural viewpoint most often leads to war and famine. If our standard way of interacting with the world is to dominate and subdue it, our first response to other peoples’ competing for resources is to dominate and subdue them too.

Older cultures, on the other hand, view living things as interrelated and interconnected. The world, in the words of an Apache medicine woman I met, “flows from the web of life.” The earth is alive, and all humans are a part of its life, not separate from it. And the valued skills are not machine-building or conquest but love, mercy, forgiveness, and a connection to the power of life.

In a younger culture, consciousness means thinking, considering with a purpose in mind.

In an older culture, consciousness touches an experience beyond thought that has to do with being, with the way we are—the power of life.

From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,
© 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.