I love to watch nature channels on TV, and I especially love animal shows about our fellow mammals. I will watch any show about mammals, but shows about lions are my favorite.
A mother lion has a litter of cubs. They are kept in a den for several weeks, until their eyes are fully open and they have fully bonded with their mother. Papa lion is out there somewhere doing king of beast things; the mother does the nurturing. After a couple of months the cubs are allowed to explore their surroundings. Momma, watching, keeps them within strict boundaries close to home. If they stray outside her box she calls or drags them back inside.
With time the cubs grow and they master the territory inside the mother’s box. The boundaries of the box grow larger. Later, she takes them roaming with her outside the box and teaches them how to hunt, but continues to provide food and structure. They are still learning.
At about two years old, the cubs are allowed to drift off on their own. But before that step, as young cubs they learn the collective wisdom of a thousand generations by observing their parents and relatives. They learn how to survive as a lion and what it is to be a lion. They learn the proper way to behave in the group. They learn to hunt by watching and following the adults, not by being briefed by PowerPoint. They learn what is expected of them the same way. The adults guide them and don’t let them get ahead of their age and experience level. To be abandoned by parents, especially by mom, is usually certain death.
I also love elephants.
I will never forget a National Geographic elephant documentary I saw years ago (it’s still shown frequently). Several adolescent male elephants were removed from their herd and transferred to an isolated reserve where there were no other elephants. All hell broke loose. Within weeks the adolescents started acting erratically, becoming generally belligerent, even attacking and killing rhinos, who are not natural enemies or competitors. Their testosterone levels were out of control.
The park rangers began to worry that they would have to destroy the adolescents. Wiser heads prevailed. They imported several adult male elephants. The adult males asserted themselves, and almost immediately, in the presence of the adults, the juvenile delinquents settled down and learned that elephants don’t kill rhinos. Even testosterone levels went down as centuries of elephant experience was conveyed to the juvenile delinquents.
I don’t speak elephant, but I can imagine tough but loving conversations like: “Hey, dude, elephants don’t do that.” Or: “Don’t make me come over there and slap you upside the head with my trunk.”
The best advice I ever received did not come in the form of words or aphorisms. I got it from watching my parents. Yes, they lectured me, passed down the usual old wives’ tales and collected family wisdom of several generations. I am sure I internalized and benefited from all that. But the most valuable advice I got was from their example, how they lived their lives. Children may or may not listen to what parents are telling them, but they are always watching what their parents do. “Do unto others” is timeless universal advice. Children will learn and live by that injunction forever if they see their parents reaching out to help others in need. If parents respect each other and create a climate of love in the home, children will see the value of that environment and will try to replicate it as they grow up.
Are we the only mammals dumb enough to forget where we came from, what we are, or what we can’t do without if we are going to live and grow well? Are we beginning to lose our understanding of the importance of tribes? I’m afraid the answer is yes.
We don’t live on our own. Tens of thousands of years ago, when humans were emerging on the African savannas, our ancestors did not survive as solitaries; they survived and worked together in bands. They learned and grew and optimized their capabilities in bands and tribes, not on their own. That remains true.
Adults need to pass on all our generations of experience. Children need to know that their herd is their family, always there for them. They belong to a tribe. A tribe that will protect and guide them. They should know all this and have that tribal support when they start school.
Education begins the moment a baby hears her mother’s voice and realizes the voice is her mother’s. Babies need nurturing and structure. They need boxes to be safe in and in which to grow and learn, with parents and families watching, correcting, and above all, loving them. Children need to be taught early in life what is expected of them and how they must never shame their family. They must be taught to mind their adults. If a kid isn’t spoken to properly, read to, taught numbers, colors, time, how to behave, how to tie his shoelaces, play nice, share, respect others, and know the difference between right and wrong, he will be miles behind by the time he reaches the second grade; it takes that long for the kid to know he’s behind and to start acting behind. He will from then on have trouble keeping up with other children—an all too familiar problem in our society.
But it can be fixed. Early childhood programs like Head Start and after-school programs, as well as inspired teachers, coaches, ministers, successful people willing to mentor—all of these interventions can keep kids from joining a bad, failing tribe.
Above all, kids must be taught that they are ultimately responsible for what they achieve or fail to achieve. Overcoming obstacles is a part of life.
There is nothing complicated about this. Without the example I saw in my home and in my extended family, I wouldn’t have succeeded in life. They always let their “light so shine before them that all knew of their good works.”
I once watched a television piece about Arrupe Jesuit High School in Denver, which serves poor inner-city neighborhoods. All seventy-one graduates that year were going to college. An interview focused on a student named Jose, who was the valedictorian. He was the first member of his family to finish high school.
“How was that possible?” the interviewer asked.
“I was never, ever given the opportunity to fail,” Jose answered simply. “People kept pushing me. They picked me up when I fell. They believed in me. If they felt that way about me, I had to feel that way about me.” And then he added, “I have changed the history of my family.”
Yes, he has. He will achieve success after college and in time will raise children who will never be given the opportunity to fail and who will follow in his footsteps.
The Army is neither a tribe, a herd, nor a family, but it’s not completely different from them, either. They all, for example, shape young members into the group in much the same way. Military organizations, naturally, require a far higher level of discipline than nonmilitary ones. You mold young men and women into soldiers only with order and structure. In the Army, the people who fit the raw recruits into its ordered and structured mold are the sergeants—the experienced elders who model for recruits the way you have to live and act in the Army.
The first thing a recruit learns is how to stand at attention in formation—an efficient way to put him into a structured box and to move numbers of them about efficiently. It also teaches conformity. If the drill sergeant says “right face” and Joe Six-pack goes left, his whole platoon looks goofy, and it’s his fault. Faults are immediately recognized and have immediate consequences.
The new recruit shares an identical haircut with his buddies and wears the same clothes. No bling, no distinction.
Drill sergeants cut recruits no slack, work them to exhaustion, and allow only three answers to any question: “Yes, Sergeant. No, Sergeant. No excuse, Sergeant.” As in, “I don’t care how many times you cut your face, you need a shave.”
“No excuse, Sergeant.”
Try something like that with a sixteen-year-old in your house.
So it goes for a number of weeks. The recruits come to resent, nay, detest, the drill sergeant. Then something fascinating happens. They start to learn things. By the time basic training is over, they don’t hate their drill sergeants, as tough as they have been. Instead, they want to please them. They would just as soon never see them again after graduation, but they will never forget them. I once asked the late senator Ted Kennedy if he remembered his drill sergeant. Yes, he certainly did; he regaled me with stories for half an hour.
In 1989, during my time as Commander of the Army Forces Command, I was taken on a tour of the weapons systems at the Army’s Air Defense Artillery School at Fort Bliss, Texas.
At the Patriot missile system display, a young Hispanic soldier (he looked no older than nineteen) was waiting beside the control system van to brief me. We chatted for a moment before he started his presentation. I was curious about where he was from; his slight accent gave me no clues. Lo and behold, he was a public high school graduate from New York City like me—a New York street kid. He had been in the Army about eighteen months.
When he swung into his presentation, he flawlessly described every component and function of the control system—the range of the radar and the missiles, the number of targets it could track and engage, and the electronics in the van, at which point I got lost in the technical details. As a general, my facial expression had to display total comprehension, but my actual incomprehension just reminded me of why I dropped out of engineering at the City College of New York.
How did this street kid have all this complex information at his fingertips? I wondered. Did he really understand what he was talking about? Or was he just going on rote memory? I interrupted him a couple of times with questions to see if he could pick up his flow again. He didn’t lose a beat. He really knew it.
This didn’t surprise me. I’d observed scenes like this hundreds of times. I glanced around to confirm my instinct. Sure enough, a sergeant was standing just around the corner of the van, barely visible, but close enough to hear everything the GI said. As the soldier talked, the sergeant was mouthing his words. When I broke in with questions, the sergeant froze; the GI was on his own to handle the answers. When the GI fielded my questions perfectly, the sergeant relaxed.
He was the soldier’s sergeant, his boss, the one who had trained him, drilled him, tested him, and expected the best from him. He was the one who had filled this New York street kid with the confidence to stand there and belt it out to a four-star general and a bunch of other senior officers. The soldier had someone who believed in him. The soldier would not let him down.
When the briefing was finished, I congratulated the young man, wished him well, and proceeded toward the next display station. I’ve been around the Army a long time. When I was maybe twenty feet from the van, I glanced over my shoulder, knowing what I would see. The sergeant was high-fiving the kid, and all his crew buddies where giving him a “Hoo, hah.”
All followers need to feel they belong to a team, a tribe, a band. Leaders are leaders because they pass on the generations of experience they have amassed. They give purpose to the team, give it structure, hold it to standards, nurse and nurture the team, slap it upside the head, as needed, and above all give the followers someone to look up to.