GREATEST NATION

(Author’s note: Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who with her questions makes it possible for me to write in a style that is for me both different and comfortable. )

My Dear Trill,

      Years ago you amazed me, writing of your adventure riding an elephant through the Khyber Pass. I don’t think you could do that safely now. And now you write of your recent travel adventure to the Antarctic and falling into the water when you leaped from the boat to the pier. You might have chosen a warmer place for a swim!

       Now you ask my opinion on a subject where I’m not an expert by a long shot, but nevertheless do think I have some answers.......some of which would however certainly be questioned by experts. As a  non-specialist, I am in the class of people about whom Murray Gel Mann of the Santa Fe Institute states: “ they dare to take a crude look at the whole.”   You do ask sweeping questions. This time, “What makes you think America is the greatest nation?” merits more than a glib response, and I will try to take you along a road that leads to that conclusion.

      You have to go way back in human history, before the last ice age, when humans were still what we describe as hunter gatherers. They were inherently people of courage, women as well as the men. They survived in two ways, by hunting, drawn in whatever direction the hunting was good, and by following the herds, living in a kind of symbiosis, with a constant source of meat, milk, and hides for clothing. Humans lived this way for thousands of years, survived the ice age and continued for thousands more. A simple calculation tells you that if they moved only ten miles a year, the whole of Earth could have been populated in a thousand years.

        These people were resourceful, but inventive only to the extent that they could do their simple things better..... improved cutting and killing devices, hide preservation, stitching technique. As nomads, what they created and possessed was constrained to what they could carry in their frequent moves. From cave drawings, ornaments, decorations on tools, there is evidence aplenty that they were both sensitive and communal. But like the Gypsies of today, their creativity was limited by the need to move on, daily or seasonally.

         After the ice age things began to change in the populated regions of North Africa and around the Mediterranean that allowed people to stay generally in the same geographic area. Jacob Bronowski writes about this in his seminal book, The Ascent of Man. He tells about the appearance of a strain of wheat that was “a happy conjunction of natural and human events that created agriculture.” It reads like a fairy tale in which a genetic accident crossed goat grass and wild wheat grass to produce a hybrid called Emmer. Emmer spread with the wind, like other grasses. In a second accident Emmer crossed with goat grass again and produced a species we call bread wheat. The beauty was that bread wheat couldn’t be propagated by the wind. It had to be harvested by man to survive, and now, as an agrarian, man had to spread the seeds for his own survival.

That changed the nature of civilization. People could settle in one area and grow culturally and economically. They could think and invent and learn and build. There was still movement, but no longer driven by the need to hunt. Over-population pressures were likely one of the drivers, causing braver elements to move on. In a way, that was nature’s way of upgrading humanity, and that may be key to the idea I am trying to develop.        

Archeologists and historians tell us that the western hemisphere got populated by a migration across the Bering Straits, possibly when the ice age had lowered the ocean levels, into Alaska and then moving south, across the northern continent and further south into Mexico and South America. It is summed up as the Clovis model, after the discovery of tools that go back as far as 13,500 years ago near Clovis, New Mexico. For eighty years, this idea got cemented into place. Recent discoveries of tools at the tip of South America, and also in North America have thrown everything into question. North and South America may have been occupied by humans before the last ice age.  

While in North America they evolved as Indian tribes and remained more or less nomadic. Further south great civilizations evolved, beginning with the Olmecs and later evolving into Mayan, Incan and Aztec populations. How they started is still something of a mystery, but it is more than just a matter of conjecture that each was begun by the braver souls of the societies. So we see the Olmecs develop a startling civilization around 1500 BC and ending around 400 BC. There is something curious about the Olmecs. There seems to be no North American archeological progression from primitive tools to the exquisite artifacts that have thus far been discovered from the Olmec civilization. Although Archeologists have still have little clue regarding the origin of the Olmecs, opinions exist that they originated in Europe, or possibly North Africa. Current scientific opinion is negative on this possibility, based on  DNA studies.  But as we have just observed with the Clovis model, scientific conclusions can be absolutely right until new information proves them wrong.

It seems not too big a stretch, considering the superb quality of artifacts that have been dug up. And why not? By 1500 BC humans were skilfully navigating the Mediterranean. The same boats could easily cross the Atlantic. And coincidentally it was a time when the Pharoahs finally brought the territories around the Nile under stiff rule. In that situation, dissidents who otherwise might have face death could have opted instead to head west. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it, when one considers that the English who landed in Plymouth in 1620 were Brownist dissenters, looking for a place where they could worship freely. I like to imagine that there were craftsmen, builders, toolmakers and architects among them. The structures of those earlier western civilizations are similar to those in Egypt. Differences  have their counterpart in present day building, with architects constantly trying new designs, though still constrained to materials and methods at hand.

America became great because it was largely created out of  populations and cultures  that represented the best from the regions from which they came. Men and women of incredible courage, vision, ambition and ability.
      
      Will Great Nation status continue? It is possible as the country continues to attract persons of great talent (expand). But on the other hand, as it has provided opportunity for some individuals and corporations to acquire great wealth, it has also left doors open for them to pervert the system, buying politicians who were elected to represent the people and subverting them into passage of legislation, or aborting needed legislation in manners that suit their particular desires and interests. This is very bad for the nation as it signals a passage of representative government into an era where a nobility rules and the rest of the people are there to serve and service them. Past experience, highlighted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, showed clearly the inhumanity of such social structures.