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There’s a Genghis Among Us! The Rev. Dr. Mark Edmiston-Lange, August 26, 2007 One week ago Saturday was the 780th anniversary of the death of Genghis Khan. It is estimated that he was born in 1162 and died August 18, 1227. Depending where you live in the world, you would celebrate either one date or the other. As you might suspect Genghis Khan is greatly beloved in Mongolia. Other places, not so much. By the time he was through he was the undisputed ruler of Mongolia, most of the modern day countries China, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, North Korea, South Korea, and Kuwait. Busy, busy, busy. The Empire he founded lasted for approximately 130 years. He had four wives, four male children from his first wife Borte, and numerous other children with this other wives. It is estimated that over ten million people died as a result of his rather unrestrained battle technique. When Genghis came to town—you did not want to be there. In doing some research on the fabled Khan I came across an interesting data base which, with the assistance of a not too complicated mathematical formula, determined the identification of the surviving descendents of the great Khan. And, while this might seem surprising to you, it is not to me, that there is a descendent of the Khan in the Emerson congregation. I felt it was imperative as your minister that I should alert you to the identity of this person. You might want to give this person a wider berth than you have heretofore might have thought necessary. Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to be the first to meet a daughter of the great Genghis Khan, Jo Irwin! Those of you who know Jo are perhaps in shock. But you shouldn’t be, because it turns out that you too are descendants of the great Genghis. He is your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, oh forget it—a total of 36 greats in all, grandfather. But what could I possibly mean by asserting that Jo Irwin and each of you is a descendent of Genghis Khan? And I am not talking “descendant” in a purely poetic sense. I mean “descendant” in the genetic sense. A little math will make my argument plain. Each of you, unless there is a clone in the congregation, has exactly two parents. Those parents had two parents. And those parents had two parents, etc. When you keep the addition moving backwards through time it does not take long before the numbers begin to get enormous. When you reach back to the American Revolution, for instance, you have a potential for 8,192 ancestors living during the year 1777. But go back to Sir Walter Raleigh’s landing at Jamestown and you have 1,048,576 potential ancestors living in 1607. From that point on the number of potential ancestors begins to get profoundly ridiculous. When Columbus sailed, 67,108,864. When Genghis Khan swept across the Eurasian continent the number of potential ancestors equals 549 billion, 755 million, 813 thousand, 888. Well, there must have been some incest going on among our ancestors. The total world population at the time of Genghis Khan’s death is estimated to be only 408 million. But the point of the math is that there is an extremely high likelihood that somewhere in your DNA there’s a little bit of Genghis. Well, there’s also a little bit of the considerably less famous Oscar and Meyer, Genghis’ servants; not to mention the tavern maids in Tashkent, Uzbekistan who were perhaps descended from the marriage of Alexander the Great and Princess Roxana in 327 BCE. You might think there was not a lot of intermarriage between Asians and Europeans, for instance, but it would not take more than a few such liaisons to start the genetic arithmetic going. Even so, the great majority of your DNA does come from a smaller area. Geneticists can now calculate with great precision what parts of the world the bulk of your DNA comes from, and when. Because patterns of ancestry and mutation are very consistent scientists can reliably determine much of your ancestry from a sample of your DNA. I read a story not long ago about a man who proudly celebrated his African heritage as a black man living in the United States until he sent in his DNA. The results revealed that he was actually everything but African. Spain, yes. Syria, yes. Africa, no. It was quite a shock to him as he set about trying to conjure up an entirely new sense of his personal identity. You and I might profit from some re-configuring our own sense of biological ancestry. It turns out that the geneticists who analyzed the Spanish Syrian’s DNA were not entirely right. In a whole other sense, that man did come from Africa—as in fact have we all come from Africa. Every human being alive today on the planet is the son or daughter of one of a small population of homo sapiens, 20,000 in total, or about 5,000 less than the entire population of Seguin, Texas, who lived in Africa about 50,000 years ago. Some of those individuals stayed in Africa, some, moved out. But it is quite clear, we are all Africans. The point, of course, of all these genetic formulas is that almost all of our sense of “the people” from whom we are descended is inaccurate, and often, pure fiction. Those 20,000 Africans were fruitful and did multiply. Today there are 6 billion, 612 million people on the planet. By the time we reach the first of the year the population will have expanded by an additional 29 million people, or about the entire population of Peru, to reach 6 billion, 641 million. That’s a comparison that might make one sit up and take notice. A little over four months and we add Peru? Ouch. Homo sapiens have doubled in population since 1960 when we were only 3 billion. We are on track to reach 9 billion by the year 2042. Is this a problem? I think so. Do we understand the dimensions of this problem? No. Are there things we can do? Yes. Will those things succeed? They can. Will they be easy? Some yes, some no. As always, much depends on the depth of our understanding. In the 12th century BCE the Dorian Greeks with iron weapons from southern Macedonia swept southward through the Greek mainland and defeated the existing bronze age culture. After crossing the narrow Corinthian isthmus the Spartan clan of the Dorians set up shop in Peloponnese. They enslaved the local population, the Messenians. It is estimated that the Messenians outnumbered the Dorian Spartans by 9 to 1. As long as the Spartans kept the iron to themselves, the ratio was not dangerous. But the presence of a large hostile population led the Spartans to develop their intensely militaristic way of life. They always had to be on their guard. And for good reason. The Messenians did revolt from time to time. It seems that the Spartans forced the Messenians to grow their crops. And, of course, crop yields would be better when you gave those field hands tools. Those yields would be even better if those tools were sharp—better still if those sharp tools were made of iron. Uh-oh. Somebody didn’t have their thinking cap on here. The Spartan word for the Messians was helot, which means “conquered.” And using the experience of the Spartans we might devise a rule of thumb when it comes to relationships between peoples who have dramatically different powers. That rule of thumb is, “You can do things which cause people to be very annoyed with you, or you can give them sharp implements. But do not ever ever cause people to be very annoyed with you and give them sharp implements. One or the other—but not both. We might call this the helot rule. It is probably an “iron-clad” rule. Currently it appears that we in the United States are violating the helot rule. The easiest example is the Middle East, to which area we have been shipping great wads of cash, some of which is used to buy sharp implements; and providing multiple opportunities for people to be annoyed. But the Middle East is not an isolated phenomenon. We are running out of places where corporations can make money and not have some of that cash end up in the hands of people who have not been pleased by our presence or will take advantage of our presence, or who are just jealous and have so little to lose in wrecking havoc. We like to think that the anger that people feel is unjustified. Maybe so, maybe not. But almost everyone, when annoyed, feels that their anger is justified. Unemployment, most noteworthy among young men, is quite high in many of the areas of the undeveloped world where we conduct business. Unemployed and thus very easily annoyed young men in sizable numbers is always something that one would wish to avoid, particularly when we put some of them on our payroll, some of which pay is used to buy sharp implements. Well, even though we have been violating the helot rule with increasing regularity we think, “Hey we have modernity, we have great know how, we have great power!” Yes, we sure are something. An up-armored High Mobility Multipurpose Vehicle, aka Humvee, costs $140,000. Very impressive. But a bomb to disable that Humvee costs $25. Hmm. That is not a good ratio. The great powers and empires of the past have always thought that they had modernity, great know how, great power. The great powers and empires of the past have always thought they were damn near invincible. But the marauders and terrorists have eventually always won because their cost to maraud and terrorize has always been so low in comparison to the cost to defend. Defenders cannot keep it up indefinitely when the cost ratio is so disproportionately unfavorable. The good news—while the cost ratio has always been in the marauder’s favor, we are now in an unprecedented situation. That is, we may be at a major crossroads in human history for two reasons. 1. There are now so many of us that we cannot help but annoy some significant portion of people. 2. Our technological achievements have so vastly increased our capacity that we are making a mess of things on every square inch of the planet. In the past human beings could not only imagine, but actually go to some new promised land when life became difficult. There were always frontiers of opportunity where a fresh start could be made or a fortune could be found. Also, distant frontiers have in the past always provided an outlet for society’s troublemakers. Eric the Red, father of Lief Erickson, is most often remembered as a bold adventurer. He was the first European to set foot on Greenland sometime around 970 ACE. What you may not know was that Eric sailed to Greenland because he had first been banished from Norway to Iceland, and then was banished from Iceland. Wow, if the Vikings don’t like you—who can? Now, of course, there is no frontier. Now we are forced to deal with what we have here with all these people, none of whom can be safely banished to some distant place. Human beings are still trying the normal human strategy—kill off those who might cause trouble. But it does seem that for every marauder killed, five more take his place. But then add to the pressure of increasing numbers of annoyed marauders the fact that we are also running out of places were we can mine and drill and cut down and till and fish, and dump trash with unrestrained abandon. In short we are reaching the limits of our biosphere to carry us as we have carried on. Because there is no other place, we are finally forced to make do with what we have here and now. This is an entirely unprecedented human situation. We human beings have never been in this spot before. The very, very good news is that because we have reached the limits of business as usual we finally are forced to consider fundamental changes. And one change is staring us in the face. Following the “helot” rule, if we cannot keep people from getting sharp implements, and we cannot; then we must find ways to stop annoying people with whom we must share every inch of the planet. And the only strategy that will reduce the potential for being annoyed is our turning the rhetoric of justice for all, of peace and good will for all, of fair prosperity for all into the reality of justice, peace, good will and fair prosperity for all. We have finally reached the point in human history where justice, fair play, and prosperity for all have become convincingly cost effective. We can try the Humvee approach, and no doubt others will so argue that it alone is tried and true. But the math is not on the side of that argument. How many trillions of dollars have we spent in Iraq? And what has it got us? We have been told that the real choice is between coddling malcontents and thugs or rolling out the armaments. That is now a false choice. The real decision is between a future of abject misery for all, or of doing what we must to turn our entire planet into the promised land of peaceable neighbors. That is our real choice—we get to pick one. I know which one I like. How about you? Misery comes in so many forms. Illness both routine and terrifying, family problems, stress at work, stress from having no work—there are so many reasons for sadness. Much of the time we manage, as best we can with whatever comes to hand. Thank god for supportive family, friends, for being part of a larger community such as this congregation. All of these relationships can help to provide comfort to blunt the effects of personal tragedy. But in addition to the personal networks in which we each give and receive support, there is also the still larger world of community, nation, even the entire planet in which we each must make our way. And it makes a tremendous difference in our capacity for support, for finding happiness, if these larger arenas of community, nation and planet are experienced as supportive or are not. When they are not, our personal troubles can be greatly magnified. It’s as simple as this, if you break your leg, well that’s a tough problem. But if you break your leg, and your house is on fire, that’s a catastrophe. Lucky for you Emerson has provided us all with an opportunity to enhance our firefighting skills. The Social Action Council has prepared a Social Action Fair on Sunday September 16 during which you will be able to explore different opportunities for indulging your desire for justice, peace, good will and fair prosperity for all. There are clearly things which you and I can do. But, this novel time in human history brings with it an opportunity not only to do the right thing, but also to take one additional unprecedented step in creating the promised land. That step is learning how to be the kind of person who could live in a promised land. This distinction between doing the right thing and learning how to be the right kind of person is crucial. The transformation of rhetoric into reality will only follow when we create a much more profound understanding of who we are as human beings. You see, it turns out that even the best intentions have been too easily subverted by some fundamental errors all of us make in how we understand each other, and how well we think others understand us. Just one small example: which do you prefer; to offer help or receive help? As you know most people are very eager to help; but except under conditions of desperation, most people are very reluctant to be helped. You might think, “That’s just human nature.” But can you see how this fundamental mismatch about something so simple might easily cause resentment and excessive, or justified, fears about vulnerability? And it might not have occurred to you that the mismatch is caused by routine errors in judgment about who we are, and what we think others are to be for us. And when we invoke “human nature” all we may be doing is justifying behavior that, if we stopped and thought about it, turns out to be just weird. And this “help or be helped” mismatch is just one small example of the numerous errors we make in understanding ourselves and others. The real natural fact is, we don’t have to keep doing things this way. And it is even more important to understand that unless we learn to correct such routine errors in our understanding of each other our actions, even when motivated by the best of intentions, will inevitably reflect these fundamental errors. We can correct these errors. We can build a much more profound understanding of our relationship with each other. We can reform who we are as human beings. This reformation is an inherently spiritual task in that it goes to the roots of our human reality. It is deeper than politics and deeper than ethics. This reformation is even deeper than religion as we have known it. Reformation requires reflection, a great deal of personal and interpersonal honesty, and individual commitment to oneself and to others. This reformation is an inherently spiritual task because it addresses our great longing to know who we individually truly are in this large and bustling world in which we desperately long to feel at ease, at home. This transformation is an inherently spiritual task because we greatly long to feel that we will someday no longer ever be a stranger, but will find ourselves in the midst of companions, who can readily understand us, and we them. We can correct these errors and devise the means by which we relearn to live with one another. One final little interesting factoid. You know how the Brits and the Irish have not exactly got along with each other for some time. It has been the typical oppressed/oppressor relationship for centuries. Well, one of the ways by which oppressors learn to live with themselves even while being so mean involves coming up with reasons to justify the behavior. And one of the most common justifications used by human beings everywhere is the belief that the people who are treated poorly deserve it—they are in some ways inferior. And so the Brits have tended to look down their noses at the Irish. Nothing unusual here but for one little newly discovered detail. It turns out that the majority of people who live in Britain are not hardy Anglo Saxon stock. Their DNA tells a different story. Genetically speaking, the Brits are actually Celtic. You got that right—they’re Irish. Human beings have been living with meaningless and manufactured distinctions for millennia. Some have always known that such divisions in the human family were false. But now, finally, the rewards of more deeply understanding who we are outweigh the rewards of living by lies. As we learn more, we will some day find that we do live in a promised land, not a different far away place, but this place, all of it. It will be a promised land because we will have finally learned how to be its citizens. |
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