"If rulers are smart what do you care whether they're men or women? Don't smarts give you all you want?"
They would if it weren't for hormones. The male one, testosterone, can make a difference. Not much, maybe, if a ruler is really smart, but in the choices that matter most, the ones that take a country into war, often there is very little difference between the choice that leads to ruin and the one that leads to safety. I fear that squirt of testosterone that will push rulers the wrong way.
"Yes, and how about when you need that squirt? Valley Forge. Gettysburg. Midway. How about the Brits' need for it when they stood alone against Hitler? Don't you wish they'd had more of it when Hitler first moved into the Rhineland? How many civilized cities have longed for it when the barbarians were at the gates? Testosterone may bring us disaster but more often it's the only thing between us and disaster."
That's where the smarts come in. "What do we need here?" the smart ruler asks. "What does the particular situation call for?" He doesn't know until he sees how each choice might play out, long-term and short term. If the chance for success (which, this being war, he has to measure against ruin) is high enough, he says, "Release the testosterone!" The other way round he says, "Bottle it." Dumb rulers say one or the other without calculation.
"I see. And you're talking about a calculation that will be testosterone-free?"
As much as it can be. The choice that turns on the testosterone is best made by somebody free of it. That's why I think you're safer with a woman running a country.
"A woman can be free of testosterone and still act as if she has it, especially if voters want to see signs of it. She can want to be an Iron Lady."
Oh yes, just as low-testosterone men do. I know that you've got to watch out for people like that. A ruler faking testosterone can be more dangerous — on television, at a conference — than one simply ruled by it. The fake can't relax long enough to do the calculations. But, aside from the occasional fake, and given the smarts, I trust women to do them. And make better choices than men.
"With very little in history to go on. You'll understand if I find your trust rather quick, if not naive."
Maybe you don't understand how limited my trust is, and what a small difference it is based on. Eliminate all but the critical case. You're down to the casus belli, the thing that finally justifies going to war — the firing on Sumter, the blowing up of the Maine, the firing on a destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf, the possession of weapons of mass destruction. Everything depends on the ruler's standard of evidence. (You know "standard of evidence." It's what made physicists wait so long before they'd say they'd really found the Higgs boson. "Chance of error less than 1:3,500,000? OK, we've got it.")
Do you have the picture? If so, you're ready for my hormone experiment. Put two rulers with equal smarts into position to make the final decision on war. After all the calculations have been made and come out even give one a squirt of testosterone. Watch his standard-of-evidence-dial. Woops, there it goes. Down to 1: 50. Still going. 1:40. 1:30. This fellow wants to go to war.
"But that fellow has diplomats, and he himself has to be a diplomat. Diplomats control their testosterone. They at least hide it. And there you are, seeing it in them so clearly. On a dial for heaven's sake."
All right, try listening. Tune your ears. Listen to those diplomats taking Britain into the Crimea: "I don't see," says the ambassador to Turkey (Stratford), "how we can with honor abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force." Honor, honor, manly honor. The honor of the Royal Navy. "It was unthinkable that it might be deployed and then not used effectively," says our historian, Trevor Royle, explaining the unused Navy's action after Russia had given in. All testosterone.
Tune in on the diplomatic exchanges of that time and you're ready for the others leading up to World War I. What was that at Ems? The Prussian king insulted? The French ambassador snubbed? Grounds for war, sir. France goes at Prussia and suffers losses it pines to repair until 1918, when it "gets satisfaction." Sounds like an aristocrat speaking of a duel. I hear testosterone speaking through the whole Great Power era. High blood in a biker bar.
"That's certainly vivid but, excuse me, you must see how over-simple it is. Testosterone may generate a lot more than war. How about the accomplishments that seem to accompany great conquests — Athenian, Roman, and, yes, British. Darwin. The voyage of the Beagle. Bottle testosterone and you could lose Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare. Maybe it's just the energy that at times whangs out in all directions — including the military."
All right, it's a gamble. Substitute estrogen and we could lose Shakespeare. But you know, I'm still inclined to bet on women — on the throne, in the White House.
"You have more data? Better data?"
No, it's intuitive, and I'm not sure what I'm drawing on. But when I think back to a ruler making those war-peace calculations — imagining the consequences of each choice— I feel that women have an advantage we haven't considered yet: they're better at imagining the suffering consequence. I don't know why this should be, but men are slow at this. They seem to have to be there — for the blood, the groans, the cries of "Mother, mother, help me!" — and women can see it ahead of time.
"I know what you're talking about. It's well established that severely wounded men, dying men — doughboys hung up on barbed wire outside the trenches, Marines being hoisted out of landing craft, the toughest of the tough — call on their mothers. But I don't see how women could see this ahead of time any better than men can."
I don't either. But there's this about women. They carry around inside themselves this three-inch pouch that babies come out of. And that pouch, through the hormones that go with it, must make them think about the babies and their future — even before the future is on them.
"'Think about the future.' That doesn't mean 'foresee.'"
I know. This is not rational. It's an intuition, with no possible base except in observation of women I have known: that somehow women can hear those cries of "Mother, mother, help me" before they are uttered.
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