Speaker 1: It's great to welcome back to the program today.
Thom Hartmann, of course, host of the Thom Hartmann program and author of The Hidden
History series.
The latest edition of this book.
The latest in the series is The Hidden History of American Democracy Rediscovering Humanity's
Ancient Way of Living.
You know, Tom, as I was preparing for the interview, I, I recently read Jared Diamond's
book about traditional societies, the world, until yesterday.
And I couldn't help relate the two books.
You talking about the history of American democracy and what works best in terms of
how we organize government and society to produce ideally, peace, ideally happen, happiness,
prosperity, etc..
And I couldn't help but think of the similarities in terms of some of the things that Diamond
discusses in his book about the pros and cons of modern democracies versus more traditional
societies like he'd studied in New Guinea, etc..
Maybe we'll get to some of those overlaps, but maybe just to start, you argue that elements
of how the United States is organized today, important elements, are actually the best
way to organize societies.
Can you talk a little bit about your research, your process and the alternatives and why
they are not so good?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it's not just humanity, it turns out.
And this was one of the more fascinating findings back a little more than a decade ago.
Conradt and Roper, two scientists in the U.K., postulated that our understanding of decision
making in animals is all wrong, that, you know, we've got this superimposition of of
ancient European kingdoms on the animal kingdom.
In fact, we call it a kingdom, you know, with the assumption that alpha animals make all
the decisions.
And they suggested that, you know, in along with the lines along the lines of Darwin's
theory of natural selection, the alpha animal would have first choice of sexual partner
to pass along its strongest genes, but that would be it.
And the decision making would be made democratically by majority rule, essentially.
And they published this in Nature, and James Randerson and a few other scientists decided
to test it.
They started out with a herd of red deer in the forest near the university, Essex University,
and found that sure enough, the deer made decisions democratically when they had to
decide what time and when and which watering hole to go to, they would start pointing their
body toward one particular watering hole.
When they hit a 51% threshold, the whole herd would just assemble itself and go to that
watering hole.
When they put a predator or what the deer thought might be a predator was a stuffed
wolf near one of the watering holes.
It actually lifted the threshold from 51% to 66%, which is, by the way, something we
built into the Constitution for really serious stuff, like amending the Constitution itself.
So I you know, I called Kent Conrad and I said, you know, what happened when you published
this?
And he said, we heard from all these different disciplines.
You know, the bug guy said that, you know, a ball of gnats in the summertime, you know,
in the air, and they'll be just kind of hanging out there and then the whole ball and ants
will move, you know, two feet to the left.
He said, What's going on?
You do the slow motion photography and you find that they're all voting with each wing
beat.
And when 51% of the of the gnats move, move their bodies three degrees to the right, the
whole ball and ants moves three degrees to the right.
A fish guy said we see the same thing with schooling, behavior and fish and you know
bird guy.
This is how bird flocks decide.
Literally every wing bead is a vote and the votes are constantly being measured, monitored
and counted by everybody in the in the flock.
So it turns out that democracy is the default state of humanity.
If that's the case, then you would expect that in societies that have spent thousands,
tens of thousands of years fine tuning and experimenting with how to live successfully,
and that you would find a lot of democracy.
And in fact, that's true.
Not all Aboriginal and indigenous societies around the world are organized in a democratic
fashion, but the majority are.
And you go back to Peter Farber's book in 1968, Man's Rise to Civilization is his recounting
first contact with 34 different Native American tribes in the 1600s.
The majority of them were democratic.
You you look at, you know, how the the Iroquois Confederacy influenced our our experience
and Ben Franklin's famous statement that, you know, if if five nations of ignorant savages
have been able to forge a bond that has lasted in peace for a thousand years, it should be
a surprise if 13 nations of or 13 states of educated Englishmen can't do the same democracy,
it turns out.
Is our default mode as as humans.
And, you know, there's always going to be people rising up and trying to violate that
typically out of greed or out of fear and, you know, accumulate great wealth.
But but that's how it works.
Fact there was a piece in Nature just last week about some archeologists working in Central
America where they're finding all these ancient cities buried under the, you know, under the
jungle and whatnot.
Now that they're using x ray mapping from from the air.
And as they excavate them, they're discovering repeatedly no evidence of great wealth, no
evidence of great poverty, and no evidence of a ruling class that that these were apparently
democratically run societies.
And the points that they made in this nature article was that when you compare the democratic
societies from small towns to fairly large communities of hundreds of thousands in Mesoamerica
to their neighbors that were run dictatorial, i.e. the democratic societies were the most
resilient, they were the most likely to survive for a long period of time through things like
famine, extreme weather and even invasion by other tribes.
So, you know, I haven't read that book by a diamond.
I've read two of his previous books, but, you know, so I can't speak to it.
But that's what I know about democracy and and and why the democratic experiment in America
has lasted as long as it has.
Speaker 1: So if we think about democracy in two categories, direct and representative,
one of the really interesting things is that if you read sociology, anthropology, psychology,
there seems to be this convergence of the idea that at a human level, once you get beyond
groups of about 150 people, representative democracy of some kind, specialization and
delegation, some kind of central organizing structure, representatives of sorts are ideal
all the way to necessary depending on what you're what you're reading.
The idea that it becomes practically difficult to direct to to to employ direct democracy
and involve everyone in every decision after about 150 people.
Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe how there are some modern political ideologies,
some versions of libertarianism, for example, that seem to run directly counter to what
the sociology, anthropology and psychology have to say about that idea?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was.
I want to say Malcolm McDowell.
That's not his last name, though.
He popularized this back about 15, 20 years ago.
Speaker 1: Anyway, do you mean Malcolm Gladwell?
Yes.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Speaker 2: You know, he popularized this this notion that that our brain structures, our
were physically our brain is organized in such a way that we can basically manage up
to 150 friends, acquaintances, neighbors, community members in our tribe.
And then once you exceed that number, anonymity becomes possible at below that number and
anonymity is not possible.
And with anonymity comes the ability to violate social norms with little consequence.
And that's when you hit the point where you can't have, you know, pure democracy.
It's one of the one of the arguments about why the Greek democracy failed.
You know, it was not a representative democracy.
It was direct democracy, more or less.
I mean, it required 6001 people to show up, to vote on anything.
And and your showing up was a matter of being chosen by lottery.
Basically, it was like jury duty.
And in fact, the people who didn't show up were referred to as the Idi OTA, which is
where our word idiot comes from.
So and, you know, as as as the Greeks expanded this out of the you know, out of a out of
a single city state, it reached those limits that you're talking about, David.
And, you know, and I mean, it didn't have it wasn't helped by Aristotle and by the,
you know, the the the revolution of the 300 and then the revolution of the 38, which basically
rich people saying, okay, enough already with this experiment, we want to be in charge.
But and that's, you know, one of the reasons why I think the founders thought that representative
democracy was going to be the best the way to go.
So, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Excellent point in the book.
You to some degree, I would say pretty, pretty effectively dispel the idea of the US as a
supposedly Christian nation.
And over the last five, seven, eight, ten years we've seen more brazen and.
Not even really veiled statements from people like you're Marjorie Taylor GREENE and Lauren
Boebert types where rather than saying it subtly or with coded language, being much
more upfront about their belief that actually Christianity should directly bear on civil
government and law, etc., and you usually get folks who, you know, they'll get a talking
point or two from some think tank and they'll say all of the founding fathers were deists
and their intention was A-B-C.
And they'll pull some letter and point to one line or something along these lines and
say, all of you people talking about separation of church and state are simply wrong.
The Founding Fathers did want the U.S. to be a Christian nation.
Of course, you view that as incorrect and you dispel that myth in the book.
What is the best for for my audience who may be confronted with people at Thanksgiving
who put forward such a belief or whatever the case may be?
What is the best empirical case to shut down that argument that we're increasingly hearing
from some?
Speaker 2: Well, an easy one is the treaty that George Washington negotiated with the
Barbary pirates.
They were referred to as pirates of the Barbary states.
I call it the it's called the treaty, a treaty of Tripoli that was ultimately signed by John
Adams and ratified by a majority of members of the United States Senate in 1790, whatever
the year was, I forget.
And that treaty says explicitly is I mean, you know, Article 11 of the treaty says, as
America was in no way founded based on the Christian religion.
I mean, that's that's verbatim.
That's literally the words.
Therefore, there should be no an enmity between the United States and Mohammed, two nations,
Muslim nations.
You know, that that was the consensus.
There were some fanatical Christians of the founding of the republic.
Probably the most famous is Patrick Henry.
Mister, give me liberty or give me death.
He was the richest man in Virginia or one of them.
He was the largest slaveholder in Virginia.
He held over 360 humans in bondage and one of the cruelest slave masters, apparently.
And he was a fanatical, born again Christian who used his Christianity to justify his slavery
is enslavement of people.
He also opposed the Constitution.
It was his opposition to the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention that
caused James Madison to modify the Second Amendment from for the security of a free
nation to the for the security of a free state.
To satisfy Patrick Henry's fear that a president might use Article one, Section eight, to mobilize
the the Virginia National Guard and move it out of state, because the Virginia National
Guard was also the Virginia slave patrol.
And he saw, you know, his own slaves rising up against him if that happened.
But, you know, setting aside Patrick Henry, George Washington was a deist.
You know, he referenced Christianity in a couple of speeches, but barely.
Thomas Jefferson was a deist and openly spoke against Christianity.
His Bible, the Jefferson Bible, is still in print.
He took a basically a razor blade to the to the four gospels and cut out all of Jesus's
miracles.
He presents Jesus as a philosopher, basically.
There were some Christians among the founders, enthusiastic Christians.
James Madison, Jefferson's protege, was a was a churchgoing Christian.
And his big fear was that and he and Jefferson had a 20 year running debate about this.
Jefferson was afraid that if a priest, his word, you know, it was a kind of a generic
term back then for a minister or a pastor was that if a priest ever became president,
it would be the end of the republic.
Madison wasn't so worried about that.
He was worried about what would happen if the government tried to regulate religion
or even try to help religion.
In fact, in 1809, when Madison became president, his first veto was to veto legislation.
George Washington had set up a poor house in Washington, D.C., that was paid for with
federal money to house, clothe, provide medical care and feed indigent people.
And there was a minor religious revival in America in the early 1800s.
And so in 1809, Congress renewed the funding for George Washington's Poor House.
It's his first attempt at American socialism, and but they mandated that the money be routed
through a church in D.C.
And Madison vetoed that, saying that this would be destructive, not only would not only
be contradictory to the principles of the Constitution, but it would be destructive
to the church that churches should not take money from the government.
It's corrupting and corrosive thing.
And, you know, so it turns out that both he and Jefferson were right.
So John Adams, you know, another one, John Adams in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson.
And later in life, and I reprint some of it in the book.
John Adams was a fervent Christian.
He would sometimes go to three different church services on a Sunday.
He took notes is, you know, that survived his death, you know, notes from all of the
sermons that he heard.
I mean, he was really into it.
And he was equally emphatic that our government was not Christian.
It was not based in Christianity.
It should not be based in Christianity.
I mean, if you look at the Ten Commandments, there's only two of them that have any parallel
in law.
You know, don't don't murder and don't steal.
You know, there's no law that says that you have to be stoned to death if you speak back
to your parents, Although it says that Deuteronomy, there's no law that says that you had to be
stoned to death if you worship a God other than the, you know, the 13th century Bronze
Age sky, God, you know, of of the Hebrews.
It's just this idea that America is a Christian nation.
It's had two major revivals, well, really, arguably three major revivals, one in the
1830, one in the 1950s, which is when, you know, in 54 and 56 was when in God We Trust
went on our currency.
And one nation under God was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.
But that kind of faded out with the sixties.
And now we've got another one of these revivals going on.
Both both the one in the fifties and the one today are being driven largely by people who
claim to be, you know, pastors of God who are really seeking political power and wealth.
And many of them are getting a lot of both.
You know, Pat Robertson died a billionaire last month.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is something.
Something we discussed extensively at the time.
The book is The Hidden History of American Democracy Rediscovering Humanity's Ancient
Way of Living.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Thom Hartmann.
You can also learn more about Thom's program at Thom Hartmann dot com.
Tom, always great having you on.
Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for inviting me.
David.
It's always great talking with you.