The Ascent of Man (8 page)

A machine is a device
for tapping the power in nature. That is true from the simplest spindle that the Bakhtiari women carry, all the way to the historic first nuclear reactor and all its busy progeny. Yet as the machine has tapped larger sources of power, it has come more and more to outdistance its natural use. How is it that the machine in its modern form now seems to us a threat?

The question as it strikes us
hinges on the scale of power that the machine can develop. We can put it in the form of alternatives: Is the power within the scale of the work for which the machine was devised, or is it so disproportionate that it can dominate the user and distort the use? The question therefore reaches far back; it begins when man first harnessed a power greater than his own, the power of animals. Every machine
is a kind of draught animal – even the nuclear reactor. It increases the surplus that man has won from nature since the beginning of agriculture. And therefore every machine re-enacts the original dilemma: does it deliver energy in response to the demand of its specific use, or is it a maverick source of energy beyond the limits of constructive use? The conflict in the scale of power goes back all
the way to that formative time in human history.

Agriculture is one part of the biological revolution; the domestication and harnessing of village animals is the other. The sequence of domestication is orderly. First comes the dog, perhaps even before 10,000
BC
. Then come food animals, beginning with goats and sheep. And then come draught animals such as the onager, a kind of wild ass. The animals
add a surplus much larger than they consume. But that is true only so long as the animals remain modestly in their proper station, as servants of agriculture.

It is unexpected that the domestic animal should turn out exactly to contain within itself, from then on, the threat to the surplus of grain by which the settled community lives and survives. Most unexpected, because after all it is the
ox, the ass, as a draught animal that has helped to create this surplus. (The Old Testament carefully urges that they be treated well; for instance, it forbids the farmer to yoke an ox and an ass to the plough together, since they work in different ways.) But round about five thousand years ago, a new draught animal appears – the horse. And that is out of all proportion faster, stronger, more dominant
than any previous animal. And from now on that becomes the threat to the village surplus.

The horse had begun by drawing wheeled carts, like the ox but rather grander, drawing chariots in the processions of kings. And then, somewhere around 2000
BC
, men discovered how to ride it. The idea must have been as startling in its day as the invention of the flying machine. For one thing, it required
a bigger, stronger horse – the horse was originally quite a small animal and, like the llama of South America, could not carry a man for long. Riding as a serious use for the horse therefore begins in the nomad tribes that bred horses. They were men out of Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan and beyond; in the west they were simply called Scythians, as a collective name for a new and frightening creature,
a phenomenon of nature.

For the rider visibly is more than a man: he is head-high above others, and he moves with bewildering power so that he bestrides the living world. When the plants and the animals of the village had been tamed for human use, mounting the horse was a more than human gesture, the symbolic act of dominance over the total creation. We know that this is so from the awe and fear
that the horse created again in historical times, when the mounted Spaniards overwhelmed the armies of Peru (who had never seen a horse) in 1532. So, long before, the Scythians were a terror that swept over the countries that did not know the technique of riding. The Greeks when they saw the Scythian riders believed the horse and the rider to be one; that is how they invented the legend of the
centaur. Indeed, that other half-human hybrid of the Greek imagination, the satyr, was originally not part goat but part horse; so deep was the unease that the rushing creature from the east evoked.

We cannot hope to recapture today the terror that the mounted horse struck into the Middle East and Eastern Europe when it first appeared. That is because there is a difference of scale which I can
only compare with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939, sweeping all before them. I believe that the importance of the horse in European history has always been underrated. In a sense, warfare was created by the horse, as a nomad activity. That is what the Huns brought, that is what the Phrygians brought, that is what finally the Mongols brought, and brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much
later. In particular, the mobile hordes transformed the organisation of battle. They conceived a different strategy of war – a strategy that is like a war game; how, warmakers love to play games!

The strategy of the mobile horde depends on manoeuvre, on rapid communication, and on practised tactical moves which can be strung together into different sequences of surprise. The remnants of that
remain in the war games that are still played and that come from Asia, such as chess and polo. War strategy is always regarded by those who win as a kind of game. And there is played to this day in Afghanistan a game called Buz Kashi which comes from the kind of competitive riding that was carried on by the Mongols.

The men who play the game of Buz Kashi are professionals – that is to say, they are retainers, and they and the horses are trained and kept simply for the glory of winning. On a great occasion
three hundred men from different tribes would come to compete, though that had not happened now for twenty or thirty years, until we organised it.

The players in the game of Buz Kashi do not form teams. The object of the game is not to prove one group better than another, but to find a champion. There are famous champions from the past, and they are remembered. The President who supervised this
game was a champion who no longer played. The President gives his orders through a herald, who may also be a pensioner of the game, though less distinguished. Where we should expect to see a ball, there is instead a headless calf. (And that macabre plaything says something about the game, as if the riders were making sport of the farmers’ livelihood.) The carcass weighs about fifty pounds and the
object is to snatch it up, defending it against all challengers, and carry it off through two stages. The first stage of the game is riding off with the carcass to the fixed boundary flag and rounding the flag. After that the crucial stage is the return; as he sweeps round the flag, constantly challenged, the rider heads for home and the goal, which is a marked circle in the centre of the mêlée.

The game is going to be won by a single goal, so no quarter is given. This is not a sporting event; there is nothing in the rules about fair play. The tactics are pure Mongol, a discipline of shock. The astonishing thing in the game is what routed the armies that faced the Mongols: that what seems a wild scrimmage is in fact full of manoeuvre, and dissolves suddenly with the winner riding clear
to score.

One has the sense that the crowd is much more excited, and more involved emotionally, than the players. The players, by contrast, seem committed but cold; they ride with a brilliant and brutal intensity, but they are not absorbed in playing, they are absorbed in winning. Only after the game is the winner himself carried away by the excitement. He should have asked the President to sanction
the goal and, by missing that point of etiquette in this uproar, he has jeopardised the goal. It is nice to know that the goal was allowed.

The Buz Kashi is a war game. What makes it electric is the cowboy ethic: riding as an act of war. It expresses the monomaniac culture of conquest; the predator posing as a hero because he rides the whirlwind. But the whirlwind is empty. Horse or tank, Genghis
Khan or Hitler or Stalin, it can only feed on the labours of other men. The nomad in his last historic role as warmaker is still an anachronism, and worse, in a world that has discovered, in the last twelve thousand years, that civilisation is made by settled people.

All through this essay there runs the conflict between the nomad and the settled way of life. So it is fitting by way of epitaph
to go to that high, windy, inhospitable plateau at Sultaniyeh in Persia where ended the last attempt by the Mongol dynasty of Genghis Khan to make the nomad way of life supreme. The point is that the invention of
agriculture twelve thousand years ago did not of itself establish or confirm the settled way of life. On the contrary, the domestication of animals that came with agriculture gave new
vigour to nomad economics: the domestication of the sheep and the goat, for example, and then, above all, the domestication of the horse. It was the horse that gave the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan the power and the organisation to conquer China and the Muslim states and to reach the gates of central Europe.

Genghis Khan was a nomad and the inventor of a powerful war machine – and that conjunction
says something important about the origins of war in human history. Of course, it is tempting to close one’s eyes to history, and instead to speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organised war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned
and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that we saw in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower. That is the beginning of war.

Genghis Khan and his Mongol dynasty brought that thieving
way of life into our own millennium. From
AD
1200 to 1300 they made almost the last attempt to establish the supremacy of the robber who produces nothing and who, in his feckless way, comes to take from the peasant (who has nowhere to flee) the surplus that agriculture accumulates.

Yet that attempt failed. And it failed because in the end there was nothing for the Mongols to do except themselves
to adopt the way of life of the people that they had conquered. When they conquered the Muslims, they became Muslims. They became settlers because theft, war, is not a permanent state that can be sustained. Of course, Genghis Khan still had his bones carried about as a memorial by his armies in the field. But his grandson Kublai Khan was already a builder and settled monarch in China; you remember
Coleridge’s poem,

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree.

The fifth of the heirs in succession to Genghis Khan was the sultan Oljeitu, who came to this forbidding plateau in Persia to build a great new capital city, Sultaniyeh. What remains is his own mausoleum which later was a model for much Muslim architecture. Oljeitu was a liberal monarch, who brought here men from all
parts of the world. He himself was a Christian, at another time a Buddhist, and finally a Muslim, and he did – at this court – attempt really to establish a world court. It was the one thing that the nomad could contribute to civilisation: he gathered from the four corners of the world the cultures, mixed them together, and sent them out again to fertilise the earth.

It is the irony of the end
of the bid for power by the Mongol nomads here that when Oljeitu died, he was known as Oljeitu the Builder. The fact is that agriculture and the settled way of life were established steps now in the ascent of man, and had set a new level for a form of human harmony which was to bear fruit into the far future: the organisation of the city.

In his hand

He took the golden Compasses, prepar’d

In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe

This Universe, and all created things:

One foot he center’d, and the other turn’d

Round through the vast profunditie obscure,

And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds,

This be thy just Circumference, O World.

John Milton
described and William Blake drew the shaping of the earth in a single sweeping motion by the compasses of God. But that is an excessively static picture of the processes of nature. The earth has existed for more than four thousand million years. Through all this time, it has been shaped and changed by two kinds of action. The hidden forces within the earth have buckled the strata, and lifted and shifted
the land masses. And on the surface, the erosion of snow and rain and storm, of stream and ocean, of sun and wind, have carved out a natural architecture.

Man has also become an architect of his environment, but he does not command forces as powerful as those of nature. His method has been selective and probing: an intellectual approach in which action depends on understanding. I have come to
trace its history in the cultures of the New World which are younger than Europe and Asia. I centred my first essay on equatorial Africa, because that is where man began, and my second essay on the Near East, because that is where civilisation began. Now it is time to remember that man reached other continents too in his long walk over the earth.