271. A Dream After Reading Memoirs by Presidential Advisers

First decree of the Word Czar:  No memo submitted to the President by a security adviser will contain the words "evil," "vile," "depraved," "vicious," "monstrous," "heinous" or any other word indicating that the nation is dealing with a ruler of despicable character.  Nothing that a ruler does entirely inside his country or to his own people will be referred to in the context of security.

Second decree: No memo submitted by the Secretary of Defense will contain the word "policy."  The words "objectives," "aims," and "strategy" will be used only with respect to goals already determined by the Secretary of State and the President.  Corollary:  the position Under Secretary of Defense for Policy will be eliminated.

Third decree: The CIA is subject to the above restrictions and in addition is ordered to eliminate the word "action" from its memos.  That agency's memos will be restricted entirely to information.

Fourth decree: No security advisor will be permitted to use, in memos referring to people outside this country, the words "liberty," "freedom," or "self-determination" with respect to their aims, or "oppressed," "exploited," or "deprived" with respect to their condition.

Fifth decree:  Atrocities will never be spoken of as actions characteristic of particular peoples; all peoples will be assumed to be, under the right conditions, capable of atrocities.

Coda:

(1) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Political Adviser, or any adviser for whom words serve the power that gives power to all in the executive branch.  For example, if voters want to hear talk about human rights then the Political Adviser may freely advise talk about human rights.

(2) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Diplomatic Adviser (the Secretary of State), or any of his or her subordinates for whom words serve international power.  For example, if talk about human rights weakens a nation or faction (say by causing internal division) that the Secretary of State finds it useful to weaken, or strengthens a nation or faction that the Secretary of State finds it useful to strengthen, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

(3) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Legacy Adviser, or any subordinates for whom words serve to influence historians.  For example, if the Legacy Adviser thinks talk about human rights will, by indicating that those rights are an aim, raise historians' estimates of a President's performance, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

Note:  All decrees are issued on the understanding that the restructuring of the Executive Branch is complete.  See the President's orders

(1) that all functions of the National Security Adviser and the National Security Council will be subsumed under the Department of State or the Department of the Interior (expanded to include Homeland Security);

(2) that all functions of the CIA having to do with action, covert or overt, will be taken over by the Department of State (to which any agent may be transferred);

(3) that the President will meet regularly only with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, the White House Chief of Staff, and the four new appointees, Political Adviser, Linguistic Adviser, Resource Adviser, and Legacy Adviser (the Permanent Advisers);

(4) that all other meetings of advisers with the President will be ad hoc, or contingency,  meetings, with attendance determined by the contingency and the expertise or wisdom available to meet it;

(5) that for help in selecting attendees at contingency meetings the President will employ the Resource Adviser, charged with matching contingency to available expertise or wisdom, in which he or she will become expert;

(6) that official position will not be a qualification or a disqualification for attendance at contingency meetings (the Vice President will be an attendee only if selected, though he is expected to attend as an observer);

(7) that the Resource Adviser may attend any meeting, as an observer in order to gain knowledge for future selections;

(8) that the Linguistic Adviser (the adviser charged with keeping verbal and conceptual order — the Word Czar) may attend any meeting, as an observer, in order to gain knowledge for future decrees.

Note for those expecting to be observed: It will be well to keep in mind the purposes of the President's restructuring: (1) to avoid the transfer fallacy — taking expertise in one area to be transferable to expertise in another, as, say, from warfare to foreign policy; (2) to avoid the personality danger, where a person (say a general), or a type (say military) has such force or charisma (as gained, say, through past success, as in World War II) that his lack of expertise or wisdom with respect to the immediate contingency goes unrecognized.  (The President's gratitude to and respect for the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not conceal from you the fact that their removal from all advisory meetings — the Secretary of Defense will speak for them — reflects his desire to avoid the charisma danger, clearly evident in their imposing presence in the past.

The President recognizes as a final danger that you, particularly if you come from within the government structure (remember, the Resource Adviser draws on the entire nation for expertise), may be so intimidated by the presence of the Linguistic Adviser that your advice may not be as free and full as it would otherwise be.  That adviser recognizes the problem but believes that if you give single-minded attention to the contingency before you, defining it and locating it to the best of your ability, you will forget him, see what is required, and go on to give the President the best advice he can get.

257. Toward a New Great Game. With Great Women Players?

 

The reason I get so worked up about male competitiveness is that it's what ruined my century.  Men around a table in London playing the Great Game in Africa, bristling when men around a table in Berlin tried to horn in.  Men so touchy about their honor and prestige that they send warships when one of their flags is insulted (China), or when one citizen's house, just one, is invaded during a riot (Greece).  Let no one think the British are lesser men than the Romans, who, by God, protected their citizens.  And the other Great Powers were just as bad, or, if they had the power and balls, would have been just as bad. 

And where did it all end?  With them going at each other in The Great War, which, causing so many deaths (20 million), pumped the winners with such a desire for revenge that they lost their heads and made such a stupid, vindictive peace that they couldn't (hell, wouldn't; when they got their senses back they knew it) enforce it and guaranteed a renewal of the war that would break all records for deaths (60 million) and horrors.  And when people look at my tombstone they will say, "Gee, this guy lived through the century that damn near ruined the human race.  Poor guy."

"And you would rather have them say, 'Gee, this guy lived through that century where God shut off the male hormone.  Merciful God.  Lucky guy.' ? You're talking about testosterone, my friend, and let me tell you something.  Even God, by now, this late in his creation, is not going to be able to shut it off.   There's too much of it, it's too hot, it comes from down too deep."

Alas.

"No.  No alas.  Alas shows that you don't understand testosterone, or whatever you want to call it.  It surges into many channels, and if you could shut it off at the source you'd have a lot of dried up ground, all around you.  Literature, art, architecture.  Why is it that conquering, warlike people, winners in a Great Game, produce, as ancient Athens produced, so much in so many fields?  Just contenders in the Game do, as in Europe when Britain and France were leading the competition, and had been leading it through all the period of European ascendancy (1750-1914), sciences and the arts advancing in so many European countries at such breakneck speed, taking over the world, taking over the calendar, the navigation, the mapping, the measurement of time (from Jesus' birth) and place (from a spot outside London), as they took over territory.  Territory from which, I might mention, now stream thousands of the once oppressed, or less endowed, to gain the benefits — wealth, medical treatment, science, technology — of their overflowing testosterone, their competition."

So the World Wars were just the climactic result of a burst of male energy that gave us all these good things.  And male energy is just what I saw so much of in Robert Gates' memoirs, all those Cold Warriors searching for the right grip on the balls.  Only thing, the brains at the other end had developed weapons that could blow up the whole arena.  Squeeze too hard and there we are.

"It's the old problem of testosterone management, the one you saw Elizabeth I solving so well (Post 157).  But I think Plato was way ahead of you.  According to Mark Edmundson (NYT 8-15) his word for the 'fundamental aspect of the human psyche' we are dealing with here was 'thymos,' and that takes us a lot deeper, to something we don't have a word for in English.  Edmundson thinks we come closest with 'spiritedness,' as in 'a spirited competitor.'  Anyway it, according to Plato, 'is a marvelous quality that needs to be developed and strengthened, especially in those who represent the community as soldiers.'

"But here's something that Plato also knew: that thymos can be dangerous. The spirited part of the soul can take control and turn what would have been an admirable man or woman into a beast. At one point in The Republic Plato imagines a state in which the ruling value is spiritedness. He calls it a timocracy, and he is fully alert to its dangers: constant battles for first place and ongoing war.  Edmundson believes that 'in paying close attention to both the promise and the peril of thymos, Plato learned something that we apparently have forgotten.'"

Well, when we think about what it is to be human now,I;d say that we too rarely take thymos into account. I know of no influential mode of modern psychology that takes up the Greek wisdom and treats spiritedness and the education of the spirited part of the soul as central aspects of human development."

"No, no book of psychology now, maybe no book at all now.  But once there was a book by an Italian, Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, that taught Renaissance males how to be spirited, with humanity and learning and, above all, grace, grace which (while it attracted females) eased the relationship between males.  Il Cortegiano was translated into nearly every European language, coming out in England (where it produced Sir Philip Sidney) as The Book of the Courtier.  There ought to be enough copies around now for it to give us a start."

Grace isn't the problem.  William J. Casey had plenty of grace.  Grace and courtesy are just cover-ups for balls.  It's the balls you've got to change.

"Like maybe the way Jesus tried to change them? By holding out blessing?  Be poor in spirit, be meek. Get reborn.  All I can say is, lots of luck."

 I can't confirm any of your pessimism in books but in my own responses I certainly can.  There I am in the Gates book admiring the clever competitor, the good grip on the balls.  There I am in Katherine Graham's book at one of her dinner parties with "Hear, hear" when a smart Democratic-Party hawk speaks. "Good move."  Me, an ardent admirer of Obama's patience.  What am I going to do at such a dinner? Raise my glass and say, "Here's to a program of watchful waiting"?   What do I think the Soviet Union is, an enlarged prostate?  No, I'm "Go, Rusk. Go Bundy." 

"And if anybody wanted to know how to go, I, the resource person, would refer them to Machiavelli.  'Put down your Castiglione.'  I'm afraid I'm with you in the cheering section.  And I should have known I'd be, that all men would be.  I've read Housman, haven't I?  He knows where the lads are going, to death on distant fields.  But he also knows that when he hears the fifes and the bugle calling he will be helpless.  'Woman bore me, I will rise.'"

OK.  I see we're not going to change it.  And I see the only course of action left: We've got to give testosterone something else to do. 

"Like sports?  I know what you're thinking.  And my advice is: forget it.  You're on another hunt for the moral equivalent of war, and history says you're not going to find it.  Can you imagine Palmerston going back to his Harrow soccer field, satisfied, even when he's booting game-winners?  Can you picture our Casey, CIA Casey, tipping his hat to a few thousand in Mudville, and going home content?"

I was thinking of something much bigger, something never tried before: the whole world organized into different leagues, a pyramid of leagues in every sport, where you knew where each nation stood, and inside each nation where each town stood, and inside each team where (if the game were like baseball) each player stood.  With today's technology you could set such a thing up, and with today's communications you'd know instantly where each player, team, town, and nation stood.  A few morning minutes on the net and you could run around with your notebook in the air: "We're number 756! We're number 756!"

"What a laugh."

No, not a laugh.  Not a laugh if the rival you hate is 761.  Not a laugh if, having an average of your position in all leagues, your nation has the best.  You're cock of the walk!  That's where you have to put Palmerston's winning goal: it gains the point that puts England at the top.  Above Russia!  You think, in similar circumstances, Casey is going to underestimate his last of the ninth homer that sinks the Soviet Union?

"Fine, but only if the world is all jocks.  Some of us are nerds, you know.  Intellectuals.  And we design and use some pretty destructive weapons.  That's part of your modern world."

Your imagination isn't keeping up.  There will be a chess league.  New Yorkers spreading homeland dirt for Bobby Fischer to walk on as he approaches the payoff match in Reykjavík.  For the middle brains there'll be checkers, and cribbage.  The national colors on thousands of backs, at hundreds of tables, on scores of fields, doing or dying for their country.  And, since markets depend on them. every morning on Bloomberg and in the Wall Street Journal the most complete set of statistics and standings the world has ever seen, with condensed versions everywhere else.  And every year a great conference at the UN assigning weights to each sport, giving debaters, politicians, and diplomats their chance for glory.  "He got curling's weight lifted to .068.  What a man!"  It will be a super, super, super Olympics.

"Will you be offended if I ask for a Plan B?"

No, because I have a Hope B.  It's that when men can't manage this, women will take over.  Women haven't been in positions of power long enough for us to be confident of how it will go, but I'm hoping that a change, by removing the testosterone factor, will do something to remove that damn game board.  The one on which men have made so many dumb mistakes.

"You think women rulers haven't made dumb mistakes?  You think removing the male board will end game-playing?"

I don't know.  I just think that 'Don't do dumb things' is a great strategy, and just the one for our time.  And I think a woman could be a great player, heading the CIA, or calling the shots from the White House.   Maybe I think that for personal reasons.   Maybe it's because the women I have known have done fewer dumb things than the men I have known.  Maybe it's because in history I read Elizabeth I as a genius at not doing dumb things.  And Angela Merkel as a knockout.  Anyway, that's my fallback hope, labeled B.

254. The Hawk in Us, the Dove in Us.

 
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Men are 76% hawk and 24% dove.  Women are 68% dove and 32% hawk.  Seventy-five years of watching human beings consider war have given me those figures.

My mother gave me an explanation of the difference: "If men had to give birth they wouldn't be so quick to kill each other."

"Hawk" and "dove" have no permanent value.  Sometimes you want the hawk in man's nature to kick in and sometimes the dove.  It all depends on what analysis of the always-complicated particulars has shown.

If the analysis comes out with a "can't win" or "can't win without prohibitive cost" or "can't win without shame," you want to release your dove enzyme.  You are a citizen in a democracy and, since war or peace will depend on the number of individual enzyme triumphs, your squirt, one way or the other, is going to count.

Can enzyme squirts be controlled?  Enough to matter, I think.  We control that enzyme that makes us lust, whatever it is.  We put off looking at dirty pictures.  We, if we are in the priesthood, take cold showers.  When it's the hawk enzyme we're trying to stay on top of we can avoid looking at displays of atrocities, newsreels full of goose-steppers, leaders' faces made to suggest Stalin or Hitler.  Those are dirty pictures.

If analysis goes the other way, go ahead and look.  You'll need that testosterone.  Your country's leaders will need it.  Say we're attacked.  "Release the testosterone!" says the President, coming out of a cabinet meeting, and his people go to work on the pictures.  In a good cause.  Properly done.  We all do our best to control the dove enzyme.

No enzyme release, dove or hawk, is proper without analysis.  What The Economist released with its editorial on Putin's vices (along with putting his grey face in a web on its cover, that dirty picture) is improper.  Putin's vices, internally practiced, are no more appropriate in an analysis of international power than the Pope's virtues.  The question is, How many divisions does he have?  And where?

And the answers here are (1), "more than enough to take over the Ukraine any time he wants to" and (2) "right there on the border, or nearby" — in any case, a lot nearer than any we can muster.  Russian military forces have come a long way since 1993, when Yeltsin settled on an internally focused National Guard of about 100,000.

If that doesn't tighten your ducts there remain the nuclear weapons.  In November, 2012, "the Federation of American Scientists estimated that Russia has approximately 1,499 deployed strategic warheads, and another 1,022 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads."

So put away those dirty pictures, Economist.  Take a cold shower.  You can do it.  Determined Christians, Christians brought up reading Dante and Milton, have done it for centuries.  It's called "reason governing the passions."

Would you like to have an example of a man governing his passions in our day, and in the face of these very temptations?  Malcolm Fraser, former prime minister of Australia, provides it in a piece he wrote for the Guardian on March 2, advising everybody to quiet down over Russia's incursion into Crimea.

Nobody can say Fraser lacks balls.  He's the Secretary of the Army who, against rising cries, managed and stuck to the program to conscript Australian youth and send them to fight in Viet Nam.  He's the Minister of Defence who brought a government down because the prime minister was interfering with his work.

So he was sitting on top of something when Putin threatened to intervene in Ukraine. And he kept on top of it long enough to consider why Putin was threatening.  A big reason was that he thought that the U.S. had promised his predecessor, Gorbachev, that if Russia agreed to the joining of then-communist East Germany to West Germany, and make it part of the West (membership in NATO), then NATO (the West) would not "move one foot East" — into "an area of traditional Russian influence."

Fraser counts on us to fill in his hints for the main reason that Russia is concerned about its sphere of influence.  It's not that it presides over an evil empire that it longs to see grow; it's that twice it's been invaded so appallingly from the West, first by Napoleon, then by Hitler.  We Americans easily blow away sphere-of-influence thinking as obsolete in a globalized family of nations, but we live safely with oceans all around us.  As does this Australian, Fraser.

But Fraser is analyzing now, and trying to see a problem "from the other fellow's point of view" (as the principal of my elementary school put his advice to us playground fighters).  That effort leads him to see NATO, which many thought "had done its job," move eastward "to the borders of Russia."  Right where Napoleon and Hitler had started from.

Fraser concludes that the move east "was provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia: we are not willing to make you a co-operative partner in the management of European or world affairs; we will exercise the power available to us and you will have to put up with it."

In other words, playground belligerence.  That "belligerence" is the right word we confirm when we see President Bush trying to put elements of the anti-ballistic missile system into Poland and the Czech Republic, claiming that they're aimed at Iran. What other word would we use if Russia tried to put missiles into Nicaragua?  (Fraser didn't ask that; a little of my own enzyme is getting mixed in here.)

Even without my additions, though, Fraser makes a strong enough case to get a good dove surge, and it might have been even stronger if he had ignored the close studies showing that the U. S. did not, in fact, make that promise to Gorbachev. Enough people believe he did, enough to give him the necessary surge.  But no, he admits that Gorbachev "almost certainly" was mistaken.  And there goes Fraser's chance to produce an orgasm for peace, and get the big credit.  But so be it.  An analysis that comes out 75-25, rather than 90-10, still calls for the right enzyme.

What an exciting fallback Fraser makes!  It makes me so glad I chose him as my example of a man governing his passions in our day. Reason, demanding fairness and accuracy, was clearly in control.

hawks and dovesMalcolm FraserPutintestosterone managementUkraine crisiswar and peace

252. How do you get the most peace with the least change in human nature?

 

The title question asks us to see the world as cynical utilitarians see it, and that's not an attractive way, but for a while let's do it, and conscientiously.  We'll have no minister, no priest, no eloquent President, no teacher bringing out the best in people, no moral rearmament, no inner transformations whatsoever.  Yet we've got to do something to end all this warring.

What we utilitarians go for is quantity, not quality.  People on one side can be as hostile, menacing, intimidating, abusive, exploitative, domineering, mean, and selfish as they can be, and on the other as cowering, intimidated, exploited, resentful, envious, grudging, mean and selfish as they can be, and both can set records for worried, tense, sleepless nights, but, as long as they are not killing each other in a big way, we are going to say they are enjoying the benefits of peace.

Since terrorists kill people only in a little way they do not deprive us of the benefits of peace.  Show-killing, gaining TV publicity, may deprive us of serenity and ease, but that only lowers the quality of the peace.  We've got to keep our eyes on the numbers.

That means not listening to people with high standards.  "You call this peace?" they ask.  They'll go to war for a better peace.

We're doing numbers so that we can compare benefits.  How does the Pax Romana fare against the Pax Mongolia?  So many Mediterranean people living without war for so many years vs. so many Asian people living without war for so many years.   Plot it, number of people against number of years, and you can see it clearly.  And measure it.  It's the area under the curve.

It's when we're most intensely suffering under war, and most aware of the great difference between low-quality peace and any kind of war, that we look most longingly at periods producing the highest scores, and inquire most carefully into how they were made.  That Pax Romana.  That Pax Mongolia.  And that long, golden peace during the Han Dynasty in China, called the Pax Sinica.  How were they brought about?

Variously, we see, but in all the variables I think we have one constant: a recognized monopoly on killing.  One person (emperor, king, ruler — the hegemon) says, "If you kill on your own I'll kill you," and the others (nobles, warlords, rivals, satraps, everybody in the region affected), believing him, refrain from killing.  You get peace in the region the same way you get peace in a nation, where the government has to have a monopoly on killing.

So, do these hegemons show us the way to a long Pax?  Not quite. Their countries could kill on their single say-so.  Our country, a democracy, has to wait for its citizens' (or their representatives') say-so.  Even in apparent autocracies rulers now have to be much more responsive to the people.

That makes our question harder but in one respect it makes it easier.  We know a lot more about our fellow citizens than we do about hegemons.  We can question them.  "What, friend, is necessary inside you for you to vote for a war?" 

It might take further questioning but, judging by my own reaction, I'd guess that the eventual, most common, answer would be, "Belief that my nation can win."  I think instinct forces that ground answer, instinct as in male lions, between whom fights (with the destructive weapons predation has built) could drain the gene pool.  They glare at each other, estimating capabilities, and one of them backs down.  You can see alley cats back down, though less often, for the same reason.  Humans may not do that but if they don't we are going to call them "foolish," the right word for people who start wars they expect to lose. 

You can see where this leads: if every nation accurately measured a potential enemy's capabilities against its own, no foolish wars would be started and the total number of wars would be reduced by subtraction of the foolish ones.  That would leave a much smaller number.  There's your utilitarian payoff.

You're not going to get that payoff, though, unless (assuming democracy) your people make that accurate measurement of capabilities.  How do you get that?  

I think there's only one way: through study, study of what gives nations military power, study of what gave them power in the past, study of what constitutes power now, study of present choices in the light of what you have found out.  Somebody has to do that.

But how do you get ordinary people to listen to people capable of this study, and act on what they say? 

There'd have to be more widespread study of history.  More citizens going to college, and there more of them taking history courses.  Until you've got an electorate able to use, realistically, what the past can teach.

That may be asking a lot, but if we're going to avoid military folly that's what it will take.  Whatever it takes, though, it will have us asking for a lesser change in human nature than if we ask people to overcome their acquisitiveness or pride or whatever else moves them to go to war.  It's always easier to change the mind — filling it with knowledge, the lessons of history — than it is to change the heart, the change utilitarians don't want to take any chances on.

Do we want to be utilitarians?  Well, do we want to pass up our best chance at a long peace?  A Pax Americana , decades, maybe centuries, with no big killing going on?  Utilitarians clearly offer it. 

What will we lose if we accept their offer? 

For one thing we will lose many chances to act in admirable, wonderful, even thrilling, ways.  As the Nazis invaded Greece the British heart said, "Help them! Help the Greeks."  The British mind said, "Folly.   Our army will be thrown into the sea."  The help was sent, and it soon became clear that the British Army was, unless the Navy responded to their calls for help with an evacuation that would cost it dearly, going to be thrown into the sea.  After the Navy had responded, and met the cost, Admiral Cunningham said, "You can rebuild a ship in three years.  It would take three hundred to rebuild a tradition." 

It's a tradition longer than that of the British navy, it's the tradition of selfless service, the tradition Birhtwold acted in when he chose to die fighting the Vikings, though the battle was lost and his leader was dead on the ground.  "By my lord's side I intend to die."

Choose what the mind tells us, choose not to risk being called a fool, and we will pass up so many chances to satisfy the heart, so many chances to be called noble and honorable.

So do we want to be utilitarians and call Cunningham and all who, out of honor or respect for tradition threw themselves into a lost cause, fools?  Do we want to call the Melians fools?   "We are not prepared, in a short moment, to give up the liberty our nation has enjoyed from its foundation for 700 years," they said, defying the Athenians, who then, as they expected, destroyed their city, killed the men, and made the women and children slaves.  How about the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, throwing themselves at machine guns?  The Spartans at Thermopylae?

There's a test for you, a good, character-revealing test.  The utilitarians will be calling all of those people fools.  Will you join in?  Or will you call the utilitarians, these people who know the best way to a long peace, will you call them fools?

247. A Dream of World Peace

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For peace in the world human beings need to develop a gentler, less grasping nature, right?  A deeper love of their fellow man.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their brothers.

Well, that certainly would do it.  But not, I think, as well as its opposite, development of a more grasping nature, a more intelligently grasping nature.  A deeper love of money.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their trading partners.

We have a wonderful illustration of this at the moment, with John Kerry bristling in the face of Vladimir Putin and half the foreign ministers in the European Union saying, "Hey, wait a minute.  We do business with Russia!" 

How different from the Cold War when nobody did business with Russia, and everybody could cheer our foreign ministers on.  When Russia, doing business with nobody, faced no deterrent other than what was in our silos. 

It's the great discovery of our time, that economic sanctions work.  Do them right (we're learning) and they change the behavior of nations (South Africa, Myanmar, Serbia, Iran).   The very threat of them changes behavior.   And the more dependent economies become on trade with other economies the better sanctions will work.  It's possible now to dream of economies so interdependent that war will be unthinkable. 

And it all depends on the profit motive.  The good sin, greed.  Anger becomes the bad sin.  People sore enough at other people to make war against them are put in their place.  "What are you trying to do, strangle the golden goose?"  Foreign ideological systems, evil empires, become golden geese.  As China now is.   As we are to China.  "Launch against suppliers like that? Bomb that kind of market?"

Of course there are problems.  We've got these angry cries for justice.  Rage against oppression.  Zeal for liberation.  High ideals in general.  "Life should be better than this.  Why stick in the old mud?  Why not the best?"  Somebody is always trying to break out, or secede, or realize their independent destiny. 

Well, that's anger.  And, if you're going to have peace, it's got to give way to greed. 

The trouble is, anger is so much easier to romanticize than greed.  Nobody was angrier at England than the Highland chiefs, and nobody fared better in English literature.  Freedom-loving, brave-hearted, mountain-air-breathing fighters for Scottish independence, that's what Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, and Ossian saw. 

And what did the Lowland merchants see, when they looked up from their ledgers?  A lot of crazy, illiterate, innumerate warlords unfit for civilized life.  Wreckers of the organized state.  Wreckers of the balance sheet.  And so at war with each other that they'd never be able to rule the independent state they bagpiped about.

And the descendants of those merchants, like me, what do they see?  I see desert warlords.  With more vegetation around them.  Same clan crap.  Same violence.  And same weakness confronting a country, like England, that knows how to organize its violence.  Go the angry Highlanders' way and you'll get one foolish, uncomprehending (of enemy capabilities, of new weapons, of logistics) war after another.  The wars will be multiple because angry romantics are so bad at learning from experience.   (What they're good at is repeating a failed rising.  You know, 1698, Bonnie Dundee, getting their asses shot off; 1715, Bobbin' John Mar, getting more shot off; 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, getting a record number shot off.)

Well, that's anger for you.  Greed now.  Down in the Lowlands it has our merchants casting a beady eye on their 1707 accounts.  Red ink getting redder.  Go with the Highlanders — liberty, honor, pride, Scottishness, self-determination, independence — and you're on your uppers.  Go against them, join with Britain, and you're in clover.  You've got a line under your losses, a big black line.  You've got a market for 50% of your exports.  And you're hooked into a system that's going someplace.

Was it ever going someplace!  Wealth from all over the world was, in the next 200 years, going to roll into industrializing England at an astonishing rate.  And the Scots would play a big part in it, far out of proportion to their numbers.  But best of all, for the point here, they were at peace with the British.  More than at peace.  They were snuggling in bed with them.  Pockets bulging.  And that's the way it's been, ever since the commercial side won and joined Scotland to England to make what was at the time "the greatest free trade area in the world."

There it is, the road to world peace, seen when we first got on it.  The one paved with gold.  A road like those in heaven, a road like the one Mammon admired so, before he fell.

What a problem, though, getting a Peace Through Lucre campaign going.  Peace Through Might is so far ahead.  They've got the uniforms and the ribbons and the statues, they've got the ceremonies, the carrier decks, the slogans, they've got the models, the Caesars, and oh Lord the rewards, the final prizes, the Pax this and the Pax that, beginning with the Pax Romana.

What do we money people have?  Right now the example of Scotland.  Joined maybe by Switzerland.  Those banks.  On the outside maybe a Scandinavian country or two.  And the prize, the terminus?  Can there be a Pax Caledonia?

We're where William James was in 1906. He was trying to find an equivalent in the moral sphere to all the heart-lift in the military sphere, the "manliness," the "cohesiveness," the "tenacity," the "health and vigor," the sight of human nature "at its highest dynamic."  We're trying to find an equivalent in the commercial sphere.  God help us.

And it's got to be competitive, this equivalent to the  "strong life."  And we, classed among James's "clerks and teachers," are going to have to build it out of books and diagrams and blackboard demonstrations.  The wimp life.  Ending in a vision of what?  For James, a "pleasure economy."  Everybody peacefully enjoying the world's material comforts.  

There's so much to be said against that.  “It is the preoccupation with possessions," Bertrand Russell warns us, "that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”  And he's only at the end of a long line.  "Things," said Goethe, make us their "slaves."  They get in the saddle and "ride mankind" (Emerson).  What else can you say after Jesus said, "Love of money is the root of all evil"?  What good does it do you to "gain the whole world and lose your own soul?"

So greed, to nobody's surprise, is going to be a hard sell.  And there's not much to recommend our usual tricks.  We (or our PR people) can rename some of our functionaries.  We can make the people in charge of a "financial sector" into "theater commanders."  We can encourage colorful nicknames for those commanders (SEC Chairman, Treasury Secretary, World Bank President), something to match "Bull" and "Stonewall."  We might even have a "Light Horse Harry," or an "Iron Duke."  For the lower bureaucrats we could find names with more animal force, like poilu ("the hairy ones") or "Rough Riders." But none of that is going to get us very far.

Maybe greed is an impossible sell.  People know a bad bargain when they see one.   They'll certainly be suspicious of this one.  You give up spirituality and freedom and honor and vigor and nobility and justice and equality, all your great causes, all your high ideals, and all you get is peace.

And even if you get peace you're still not home.  You've got to fix up your vocabulary.  How are you going to use the word "moral"?  You've got world peace, something everybody has longed for, something that, for some, appears as "mankind's greatest good."  And what name will you give to those who brought it to you?  To their motives?  To their characters?  To their souls?  Remember, you're looking at Wall Street.

Oh, it's so hard to call those guys "moral."   They may be smart and shrewd and realistic and foresighted and yes, with the help of their kind in the State Department, they may be socially responsible, making the world's interest their interest, but are they really moral? 

It's the pain of questions like that that makes us realize that there is a prior question: Do I really care?  Do I have to have a higher compliment-word?  Why aren't "smart" and "prudent" and "realistic" and "foresighted" and "socially responsible" good enough?  What, here, is the difference between somebody who has all those virtues and somebody who is "moral"?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to put "moral" in a class with "art" and "philosopher," words that cast auras, words that we can drop from our vocabulary without much loss.

158. Handling Testosterone: Through the Ages

Is the history of the West just a history of well-handled or poorly handled testosterone? 

If you start with Athens Thucydides makes you think so.  There's Pericles warning his eager countrymen to stay within their walls.  "Wait out the Spartans; they'll smash you if you don't."  There's Alcibiades, coming along with his call for an expedition to Sicily, a call to the blood.  There's the Athenian army, smashed to the ground at Syracuse.

Jump to Queen Elizabeth (preceding Post) because she's such a contrast with Alcibiades.  One after another her eager English lords get themselves to the Continent with what they hope will be a conquering army and she cuts off their funds.  "War costs too much."  What about our honor, our pride?  "Sorry, the loss of it is not worth the loss in lives and treasure."

You can't hear that without thinking of those nineteenth-century British cabinets, finding it "unthinkable" that the Royal Navy "might be deployed and then not used effectively," of the "loss of honor" if "we abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force (Post #157)." Think of sensitivity to honor there and you have to think of France's war party in 1870, unable to bear Prussia's snubbing of their ambassador (same post).  Neither England's queen nor France's emperor could handle that testosterone.

The good handler isn't always a restrainer, of course.  Elizabeth wasn't before the Armada and Wellington wasn't before Waterloo.  "Up Guards, and at them!"  "Once more into the breach..."   "We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the airfields...."

The stronger the let-'er-rip people are the more strength it takes to restrain them.  We're talking about moral strength, social strength, face-to-face strength, Raymond Spruance looking at Bull Halsey and saying, "Keep the planes aboard, we're going back."  In World War I it would have meant saying to generals with armies mobilized at the borders, "Stand down" — what honor prevented every ruler or general from saying at the time.  You know what I hear Elizabeth saying?  "Mobilized, schmobilized.  This is going to cost too much."

And you know, at the end of history I think that she'd have a lot of admiring men around her, the most perceptive men, the men most capable of appreciating conference-room courage.  Bull Halsey and George Patton, men who knew what it took to rebuke them.  "What balls she must have had."

What's the most dangerous kind of testosterone?  No doubt about it: holy testosterone, testosterone serving God, testosterone that wars against Evil.  You have to fear this kind most because it's beyond rational deterrence and it goes all the way.  Serve your country and you take seriously the cost-benefit calculation rational people make before they go to war.   Serve God and you set that aside.  If your opponent is Evil there's no reason to stop short in anything you do to him.  If your God likes martyrdom you can scorn death and even seek it.  Give this kind nuclear weapons and instant massive retaliation means only instant, massive martyrdom.

What kind of testosterone is hardest to handle?  I guess it would be free-floating testosterone, the kind waiting to attach itself to a cause. Poolroom testosterone, the testosterone of the undrafted and inexperienced, is this kind of testosterone.  It's got to show that it's there and as potent as anybody's.  It's hard to handle because it's so diffuse.  Touchy testosterone, the kind honor-conscious ambassadors and generals have, is right in front of you, there at the conference or mobilized at the border.  You can give it orders, as Elizabeth did.  Poolroom testosterone is spread through the country, which, if the country is a democracy, lets it power war parties.  From far in the background.  Who do you give orders to?

It's possible that free-floating testosterone is more dangerous than holy testosterone.  It looks, especially at first, as if symbolic gestures — a carrier sent here, some missiles installed there, a few soldiers landed to show the flag — could satisfy it.  And sometimes, with the right rhetoric, they do.  A feeling of potency is all the boys in the poolroom really want and a show of hardness is often enough to give it to them.  Remember the advantage being "hard on communism" used to give candidates at the polls?  (Or was that just a reflection of what the other candidate's softness cost him?)  Anyway that, in the long decades of the Cold War, was most of the time harmless.  And a lot of it, now, looks comical, politicians walking around perpetually hard just to get the poolroom vote.

The trouble is that sometimes symbol becomes substance, as President Reagan discovered after the force he sent to Beirut was cut down in one explosion.  "You know that 'peace-keeping force' that couldn't really be a peace-keeping force because it exerted no force, the one we sent to show the flag, the symbol of our might?  Well those were real people in that force!  They died!"  And there you have a new and far more difficult reality to deal with.

Viet Nam was far more complicated than Beirut but you don't have to be a Walter Lippmann to see how much of our entry there was pushed by symbol-need, behind which was this vague hard-on-soft-on testosterone need.  Or to see how much testosterone need added to the push, through symbols, that took us into other real quagmires.

"You've gone too far.  There were good reasons to enter Viet Nam and Afghanistan and possibly good reasons to enter Iraq.  And as for your 'poolroom testosterone,' it behooves every country to have a reservoir of male hormones ready to tap.  How, otherwise, will armadas be defeated and holocausts avoided?"

All right, until I can argue in detail I'll say only this about testosterone: that it interferes with the cost-benefit calculations that tell us how to handle it.  And since these are often about life-or-death matters, and always complicated, such interference can be disastrous.  Testosterone should be treated, then, as if it truly is what Michael Gilbert (in The Disposable Male) called it: "the most dangerous chemical in the world."

157. Handling Testosterone: Elizabeth I.

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OK, here's how you do it.  You, ruler of England, have this gung-ho general over in the Netherlands going way beyond his orders.  He's going to put you in a big war in no time.  You're a woman who's not supposed to know much about these things.  You were educated in classical languages, for Heaven's sake, Latin and Greek.  He's been brought up to be a warrior, as were all these bloods around you — Raleigh, Drake, Essex.  What, with them listening, do you say to him?  Here's what, in the next letter by emissary:

We could never have imagined...that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us...would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly touches us in honour....And therefore our express pleasure and commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently upon the duty of your allegiance obey and fulfill whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do in our name. Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your utmost peril.^[109]

In short, "Bottle it, Leicester."  And did it work?  You bet it did.  Leicester had to stand there while the emissary read out the whole letter, including the above words, before the Dutch Council of State.  That was her commandment.

All right, that's turning off the testosterone.  How about turning it on?  We know (from the preceding Post, #156) how necessary that might be at times.  Here's Elizabeth at a time when the need, by the known circumstances, could hardly have appeared greater: the Spanish Armada is bearing down on England.  A landing is expected at any time.  The troops are gathered at Tilbury, near the coast.  Elizabeth appears before them "wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress."  Imagine yourself a young lord, mounted before your company.  I'm going to keep an eye on your testosterone gauge, male readers, as she speaks:

I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust.  I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

Are you not banging on your shield?  I am.  I, an American in the 21st century.  How much louder, then, will those aristocrats in the age of chivalry, looking there at the frail woman who needs their protection, be pounding. 

Now, the intelligenc.  It's easy, with Elizabeth, to miss the full range.  You already know that she was hard as nails.  She had to be, right from the beginning.  Declared illegitimate, imprisoned, her life threatened, she comes, at the age of 23, to the throne of an England torn by faction and plagued with plots, many against her.  Her world, the one she learned to survive in, is not just "a man's world" in the sense that every important world before recent times was a man's world; it's "a man's world" in the sense that expression has when we rebuke somebody for their illusions.  "You expect pity on Wall Street? at the bank? from NATO?  Those are real worlds, free of sentiment — you know, free of what women are always bringing in."

We have Elizabeth, then, walking into a man's world and playing the game played there realistically and coolly and, yes, ruthlessly.  Threaten her throne and she, though not quick to do it, will take off your head.  It's not surprising then that, in the crowd of medieval and renaissance women, she, for feminists, stands out like a giant.  She was no poor-little-me-needing-protection. 

"But wasn't she a poor-little-me before her knights at Tilbury?" 

Of course, but that was no slide back into old roles, that was a move in the game, a very powerful one, and it showed her resourcefulness.   Got some knights?  Use them.  Tap that testosterone.  You can say she' s using feminine wiles but you can't say she's backsliding, no more than you can say that a female reporter who bats her eyes at a male Congressman to get an interview ahead of a male reporter is backsliding. That's the way the game is played.  It's a man's world, you work every angle, and the female reporter is never more of a "man" than when she bats her eyes.