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."