Thom Hartmann on the Crisis of Western Culture

Thom Hartmann is the bestselling author of 19 books and host of a news and opinion show on XM and Sirius Satellite radio. Hartmann’s latest, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, claims that the root of the world’s economic, political, environmental, and demographic woes is our culture. He chatted with Zócalo about the good and bad of Western culture, why corporations should be more socially responsible, and why having a worm in the gut can be a good thing.

Q. What prompted you to write this book?

A. I’ve been an observer of the state of the world for most of my life, and I’ve been writing about these kind of topics. This book in some ways is a sequel to a book I wrote in 1996 called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late, that Leonardo DiCaprio sort of made into a movie called “The Eleventh Hour.” It’s about the end of oil and the transitions we’re going through. It seems time a decade later to reexamine those issues that brought us to where we are and how we might get out of them. I can’t claim any extraordinary expertise or concern beyond that of a citizen of the Earth, I guess. I’m a pretty good reporter. That’s what I’m doing in this book-compiling the story of our history and/or our culture and the state of our planet, how we got where we are, how we move forward.

Q. You identify a number of thresholds that we’re currently on. Can you discuss these?

A. There’s an ecological threshold that we stand at the edge of. All over the world we’re seeing ecosystems are crashing, forests are being cut, oceans are dying, the atmosphere is deteriorating. That is a threshold that could bite us collectively in a very very big way. There are political and economic thresholds. Our political system is increasingly under the control of our economic system. Democracy has become subordinated to capitalism in the U.S., in the U.K., and increasingly in other countries around the world, which is helping to drive the environmental disaster in some way. Then there’s a population threshold that we’re at, and where we’ve definitely exceeded the comfortable carrying capacity of planet Earth, of human biomass. You can probably argue we exceeded that around 1930 when we passed two billion people. And we’re now approaching seven billion.

This confluence of issues and problems, I submit, is both a challenge and an opportunity. The core concept of the book is that these are all derived not from autonomous processes, not from natural processes, not from logic. It’s not, “Gee, that’s the way it is, people have too many babies.” These are all distortions in the biological world in which we live, in the cultural world in which we live, in the economic world in which we live. These are all distortions that are the consequences of dysfunction in our culture. A culture is a collection of stories we all agree are true and that we tell each other about who we are and our relationship to everything on Earth. Embedded within our culture are dysfunctions that are threatening us. To solve the problem, and not to oversimplify it, we need to awaken to the problem, awaken to the dysfunction, and see where the solutions are and see how they can be brought forward.

Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, by Thom HartmannA simple example is the population threshold. It’s widely acknowledged that we’re having a population crisis, that all of human history produced the first billion; the second billion only took 130 years; the third only took 30 years; the fourth 17 years; the fifth 13 years; and the sixth 11 years. Now we’re working on our seventh billion. That’s not the story of the human race, that’s just the story of our culture, largely Western culture, and it’s the story of Eastern culture and aboriginal cultures that have been influenced by our culture. The story we’ve been telling ourselves is that this is how it is, and in fact, there are societies and communities and cultures around the world that are not experiencing a population explosion, and have never experienced a population explosion. Their populations have been stable for thousands and thousands of years.

The reason why, and in fact the way how we can solve the population crisis as it were, is that in those societies where women have relatively equal power as men, population is stable. Where women are subordinate, population explodes. It’s just that simple. Even back in the 1600s, when Thomas Malthus was writing, we’ve been trying to figure out what is the key to controlling population. All these solutions have been put forward. An economic solution was proposed, saying when countries get rich, average family size gets smaller, so let’s make the world richer and turn everybody into America. There are seven billion people and if all were living at the level of the U.S., it would require four planet Earths, for that level of consumption of resources. Economics has nothing to do with it. There are countries in the Middle East which are very rich and families there still have 11 children. Some say it’s a problem of technology, that we just need more birth control. That’s a real problem-people want access to birth control, but that’s not the solution. Looking at for example these Middle Eastern countries, what you have is a situation where the average family size is 10, 11, 12, yet they’re rich and have access to technology. It comes back to that power relationship between men and women. We haven’t achieve equality by any means in the U.S. but we have crossed some sort of a threshold, where we’ve flipped the switch, where women have enough control over their bodies and reproductive capacity, for lack of a better term, that family sizes become rational. If we want to solve many problems of the world which derive from overpopulation, you could do it in a straightforward fashion.

Q. You mentioned Middle Eastern countries – it could be said they have the “we society” values that you offer as an alternative to the Western world’s “me society” values. Yet clearly the “we society” brings its own problems, notably the suppression of women. Do we need to strike a balance between the we and me societies?

A. Virtually all the problems have to do with the me society as opposed to the we society. In egalitarian societies, there tends to be equality across gender as well as across racial, cultural, regional lines. In highly hierarchical societies, the hierarchy tends to be kept in place by patriarchy. Another way to say it is that testosterone is the most dangerous drug in the world.

Q. What is the importance of considering all these issues as a whole, as few do?

A. The point of the book is that it’s not our production of carbon dioxide that’s killing us; it’s not our food production system; it’s not our population; it’s not fill-in-the-blank, all the things we could identify. Those are all symptoms. The problem is our culture, the way we think, the collective stories we have, our relationship to the world. When we awaken to those dreams of dysfunction into a culture of function, and get that egalitarianism is more practical and functional than hierarchy, that we can resacralize the world, in a totally secular way. Carl Sagan talked about the first time he looked through a telescope and had a religious experience, although he’s an atheist and was till the day he died. He could look through a telescope and get that “Oh my God,” that sense of the sacred that we have disconnected ourselves from, which facilitates hierarchy. We’ve disconnected ourselves from nature which has facilitated the destruction of the natural world. In the process of these great disconnects we’ve brought ourselves to these thresholds. They come out of the way we think and the stories we tell ourselves. Changing a culture is a challenge, but it’s something that historically has been done over and over again, with considerable success. I think we can do it again.

Q. Does technology – and our belief that we could always find a technological solution for our problems – make it harder to change our culture this time around?

A. It does. Technology is very seductive. The Cartesian worldview-that the universe is a machine, that we’re machines, that if we can just find the right lever and pull it-is one of the dysfunctions of our culture. The reality is we’re not machines, the world is not a machine. We’re living organisms, and the world is a living organism. I can take my car apart, or at least an old car apart, and put it back together and it would run. I could turn it on. If I took a cow apart and tried to put him or her back together, she would never moo. There’s a difference that Rene Descartes and the world view that has come along with his perspective, and that is at the core of our culture, fails to recognize.

I tell a story in the book about how we’re discussing now that having certain kinds of parasites in us is actually good and kind of essential. We’ve spent the last 100 years trying to get rid of parasites and we discover there’s bacteria we need, and we’re chowing down yogurt to get bacteria in our gut. People who have the relatively nonpathogenic kinds of worm, like whipworms and hookworms, those worms modify the immune system, and we coevolved with them over a million years. Our systems expect them to be there and these worms produce proteins that regulate the immune system just like steroids do. People who have parasites don’t get things like arthritis, Crohn’s Disease, Celiac Disease, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and lupus. All these conditions, where the body attacks itself, are exploding in our society because in the last 40 years, routine antibiotics began being toxic to the parasites in our guts. If you go back to our grandparents’ generation, everybody had worms. Every now and then people would do purges, and purge is just a super strong laxative, and it would be so strong that it would knock loose most of the worms, then everyone would do another purge six months later. Now nobody has these parasites.

This is radical stuff but what it teaches us is this idea that we know everything, and that this is all a machine and we have to disconnect, and oh my god, I have worms? I have bacteria? This is an insane idea. We’re designed as a part of nature. When we do separate ourselves from nature, at the micro level of not having acidophilus in our gut or at the macro level of believing it doesn’t matter if we cut down that rainforest, we do so at our own peril.

Q. You mentioned Descartes as a negative influence. What in Western culture could we draw on to help create what you call a culture of function?

A. There are bits and pieces. Rudolph Schneider advocated not teaching kids how to read and write till they’re seven years old. There seems to be a biological basis for that. Children who learn to read before the age of seven are more likely to be authoritarian personalities, and more likely to be attracted to or want to participate in hierarchies or patriarchal cultures. They are left-hemisphere dominant, their brains are literally out of balance. That’s one example. [Schneider’s] Waldorf schools live on and they don’t teach kids to read till they’re seven in Sweden. At seven there’s this massive biological change in brain structure, and it’s a transition time for the brain.

Another example is the Nordic countries’ emphasis on egalitarianism, on reducing the imbalance between the very rich and very poor. They do this mostly by heavily taxing the very rich and by subsidizing and creating a social safety net underneath the very poor, so it’s impossible to have crashing, crushing, totally wiped out poverty, and it’s impossible to get master-of-the-universe, Bill-Gates kind of wealth in those countries. The result of that is as societies become more equal, rates of obesity, child abuse, heart attack, infant mortality go down, mental health improves, homicides go down. Virtually all social indicators and health indicators improve as a consequence of that. We intuitively know this but there are only a few societies on Earth where it’s being done, and we need to learn from them. I use the example of Denmark in the book.

Q. There’s another example you cite of a much older society – Caral. Tell me about Caral, and why it seems to be so rarely discussed.

A. It’s fascinating. There is controversy within the archeological and anthropological cultures about whether Dr. Ruth Shady has discovered the first known mother city but it looks like this is very much the case. National Geographic did a whole issue on it, and there have been some TV specials, but it’s been discussed mostly in the realm of archeology geeks. I don’t think it ever hit pop culture.

What’s fascinating about Caral is we’ve been looking for mother cities for centuries. A mother city is a city where people stop living as hunter-gatherers and started living in cities. What caused that transition, and how did people live in the early cities? We know there’s a bunch of mother cities around – Paris may have been one, Jerusalem was almost certainly one, Cairo was almost certainly one, Mexico City. But they’ve been torn down and built over so many times that we’ve never been able to get to the first layer, when it was the mother city, the original. Because of a change in local climate around 5,000 years ago in Peru, Caral got covered over with sand, and people fled into the interior and probably became the Mayans, according to Dr. Shady. The city was left intact and under sand. She’s been excavating it for 20 years. There is absolutely no evidence of warfare or conflict. There’s an amphitheater that is acoustically astounding, I’ve stood in it. You can speak softly and hear your own voice echo from all around. They found all these musical instruments. Apparently this is a place people came and played music. But no weaponry, or evidence of war, no defensive fortresses, were found, for 1,000 years.

It looks like warfare is something that came out of a warping in our culture, a twisting, and that our original nature, our real true core, is to be egalitarian and to be peaceful, to make love and not war. There’s another chapter in which I talk about the red deer, observing these animals shows that they function democratically, not hierarchically. We always thought the alpha male – or alpha female, like with wolves – was decision-maker. But groups make democratic decisions. The alpha has first choice of sex partners, which makes sense in a Darwinian sense. The group making decisions democratically makes them the most highly adapted to survival.

Q. That would be an optimistic note to end on, but I have to ask you about the economy, particularly corporations, which you discuss in Threshold. How would you characterize corporations today, and how would you change them?

A. Business is a game just like baseball is a game. Instead of winning a certain number of outs, the goal of the game is to make money. We as a society have decided to subsidize and sanction that game and facilitate it. We create rules for it, just like in baseball. We create a playing field for it: the court system to enforce contracts; our banking system, where you can move money around; our legal system, which establishes how things are done; our tax system – there are benefits to incorporating.

It used to be that we said, if you’re going to play the game of business, you have to do it in a way that produces a social good in addition to making money. The business has to be somehow beneficial to society, and after you’ve done that, you can think about making money, or do them at the same time. This was in the corporate charter laws of all the states in the U.S. up until the late 1890s. Then, John Rockefeller got busted in Ohio for engaging in illegal trust activities, anticommercial activities, and the state of Ohio threatened to put him out of business. So he says, “What state will change their laws?” New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Connecticut engaged in this competition to undo those laws that said you had to operate in the public interest. Delaware ended up with the least restrictive laws, which is why half the Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in Delaware. But New Jersey was first to do so, and that’s the period referred to as the charter-mongering era, because corporate charter laws were being changed, and basically horse-traded, and we no longer have those laws. We need to get back to that. We need to say, if you’re going to do business, that’s fine, we like the idea of running a business and making money, but it has to be done in a way that’s good for all of us. And if not, a corporation gets the death penalty, and gets put out of business.


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