The Power of the Herd (17 page)

Washington also had to deal with the damage his reputation would initially suffer upon activating this obscure evasion strategy. It wasn't a matter of swallowing his pride so much as
volunteering
to be
misunderstood
— and knowing he would be mocked for it —
again.
A year earlier, Washington had managed to hold the British at bay on a ruse, suddenly and inexplicably showing restraint in battle, when in fact his troops had run out of gunpowder and didn't have the funds or connections to buy more for a good six months. And the general's reward for keeping this deadly secret from all but his closest associates? To be portrayed as a yellow-bellied, bumbling fool in a well-attended Boston theater farce, by an actor stumbling around in a big, floppy wig, waving a rusty sword.

So here he was again, in the winter of 1777, concealing yet another potentially fatal weakness: if the British had known he'd been left with a mere twenty-five hundred men, they would have attacked without mercy and easily won the war. Through no small amount of intrigue and posturing, Washington managed to obscure the facts while devising a strategy based on what he called “the melancholy Truths” — namely, that the states would never raise enough men or money to wage a conventionally successful campaign. In late March, Washington sent Nathanael Greene to brief Congress on the necessity of fighting an evasive war of attrition, luring the enemy away from port cities to exhaust their men and their supplies. (The British at that time had the best navy in the world, but they were less impressive on solid ground. And in the wilderness, those bright red coats made easy targets.) Yet as Greene subsequently
reported, the idea “appeared to be new” to colonial representatives. Ellis notes that
“Congress was apparently taken aback
, because a Fabian strategy meant that Washington did not intend to defend Philadelphia at all costs if [British general] Howe chose to make it his target. His highest priority was not to occupy or protect ground, but rather to harass Howe while preserving his army.”

Washington's political foes had to be salivating over this seemingly eccentric move, especially when the revised plan and the reason behind it — the sorry state of the Continental army — had to be kept secret from a fickle public to make sure the British stayed in the dark as well. Yet what no one, not even Washington, apparently knew was that the Fabian strategy was not a last-ditch, gamble of a move created by a desperate Roman dictator. It was a
proven
tactic used by a highly successful culture that incorporated equine wisdom into daily life. Fabius himself could have easily gotten the idea from a popular series of books by Herodotus.

In analyzing the Greek historian's brief yet telling accounts of an ancient horse tribe's behavior, we can see that Washington's plan actually had more in common with the strategy's original inspiration than the Roman's subsequent interpretation of it. Fabius had combined evasive maneuvers with a scorched-earth practice to prevent enemy forces from obtaining grain and other resources. Washington blatantly refused to engage in such destruction. Ellis's comparison of Washington's plan to the
“guerilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century”
also falls short in characterizing the Continental army's unusually constructive implementation of this long-neglected technique. Civilians, even those obviously aligned with the British, were never considered expendable for the cause. In this sense, the American general's restraint, compassion, and sensitivity to nuance brought a truly nonpredatory defense tactic back to life, changing the course of history forever.

The first equestrians galloped across that vast sea of grass known as the steppes of Eurasia, and they put on quite a show. Adventurous souls who discovered how to ride about six thousand years ago (in the region now known as Ukraine) eventually took up the nomadic ways of their horses, abandoning the sedentary lifestyle of their agricultural ancestors for three thousand years of freedom.

Nomadic pastoralism, contrary to popular belief, was not a primitive condition. It was a specialization that developed out of settled farming communities, requiring horses and skillful riding techniques. It required the wheel to
allow populations to migrate with their herds by cart and wagon, leaders able to make quick decisions in an emergency, and a variety of craftsmen and specialists, far more than family subsistence farming did. The early horse tribes even managed to raise crops without becoming enslaved by them. They simply planted wheat in patches of fertile soil and returned to reap the benefits during seasonal migrations.

Recent archeological findings also suggest that women were equal to men in many of these tribes. Skeletons of warriors at first thought to be young boys later proved to be female. Over time, it was estimated that nearly 25 percent of warrior graves contained women dressed for battle, some of them obviously bowlegged from years spent on the back of a horse. Yet these wild-riding ladies, mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks, were no less aware of their femininity. Their graves are filled with mirrors, scent bottles, and cosmetics of various colors. And like many women today, they
loved
to groom their horses. In burial mounds across Ukraine and southern Russia, up toward Tuva and the Altai Mountains, human and equine corpses lay side by side among a dazzling array of colorful saddle cloths depicting scenes from daily life. These in turn revealed a culture of decorative mane dressing and fantastic crested horse masks. Four-legged members of the tribe were dressed with as much enthusiasm as their two-legged counterparts.

And that's saying a lot, as it turns out: Contact with Greek colonies along the Black Sea brought a few, well-chosen luxuries. Since nomadic horse tribes only kept what they could carry, they wore their wealth in the form of elaborate, highly symbolic jewelry, gold weapon adornments, richly ornamented belts, and stylish riding clothes. Credited with the invention of pants, warriors of both sexes wore tight-fitting leggings tucked into leather boots, long-sleeved shirts and hip-length coats, all of which were embroidered with intricate designs, and some of which were trimmed in precious metals. In these tribes, later known as Scythians and Sarmatians, there was also a marked preference for “flame-colored” horses. According to Renate Rolle's
The World of the Scythians,
“The rich warriors on the gleaming red animals
, with shining gold clothing and weapons, must have presented an impressive picture in the brilliant sunlight of the steppe.”

More impressive, however, are reports of the nomads' behavior in battle, descriptions that have little in common with standardized legends of fierce barbarians out to vanquish the sacred innovations of the civilized world. Around 450
BCE
, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” wrote about a curious, highly frustrating encounter that King Darius I of Persia had with these tribes before deciding to take on a much easier project and invade Greece. Darius was
chasing a group of Scythians who'd either attacked or offended him in some way, and he was apparently planning to punish them, but good. Gathering his troops together, he entered Eurasia for the first time in 512
BCE
, but when he arrived at the edge of the steppes, none of his officers could figure out how to engage these so-called primitives in combat.

Whenever the troops got too close, the Scythians simply dispersed, riding into the grasslands, leading the king's rigidly disciplined military force farther and farther into the wilderness. For weeks, the horsemen watched from a safe distance, ignoring the king's provocative insults, infuriating him further by breaking ranks to chase a stray rabbit as the Persians made their threatening gestures. The Scythians were sleeping on horseback, drinking mare's milk and playing games along the way, while Darius's men were growing weak from starvation and exposure. Finally, the Persians were forced to turn around and march home as the Scythians cheered and chuckled in the distance.

The horse tribes maintained their culture and their territory by acting like the horses they rode. Choosing flight over fight was not a cowardly act but an obvious, thoroughly natural way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The enemy was ultimately irrelevant because there were no cities to defend. Warrior riders of both sexes led the challengers away from women with young children and mares with foals (who were mobile, though undoubtedly slower). It was only when increasingly materialistic members of these tribes began trading profusely with city dwellers that they sacrificed centuries of freedom. The more possessions they craved and acquired, the more their belongings weighed them down, and the more sedentary they became. Greek gold and wine and decorative vases eventually lured the nomads into a gilded cage of cultural amnesia. The ones who refused to forget fled farther into the grasslands until civilizations developing to the east and west expanded and overlapped right over their graves.

The assumption that nomads were more violent than their “civilized” counterparts has begun to evaporate in light of new research. The Danish archeologist Klavs Randsborg insists it wasn't marauding hordes of barbarians that led to the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, these societies destroyed their environment and, in desperation, moved out to incorporate the lands and cultures nearby — Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian —
“which until then had led an effective and long-standing
existence in harmony with nature.” Citizens of early cities were suffering from anxieties derived from the instability resulting from conspicuous consumption and unchecked population growth. Their only choice was to expand outward, taking over the territories of other peoples, subjugating those peoples and transforming them into the slave labor needed to build new buildings and reap greater harvests. Randsborg and his
colleagues insist that, after nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had brought city dwellers to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them.

City 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
urba
n
center, the hidden scaffolding of your belief system looked like this:

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 non-predatory, 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.”