222. "No, it's just men wanting to fight."

 

You see people going to war.  You hear it's because they want to remove a threat, or stop aggression, or maintain their credibility, or bring democracy.  You see people rioting.  You hear it's because they find their government, or their employment, or their justice system, or their educational system, unbearable.  Those may be good explanations.  But for many people it's simply what my mother would say it was, "men wanting to fight.'   It's something in human beings, or male human beings.

The craving for physical fulfillment, you can see it in a walk, as in the way Willie Stark's athletic son "balanced on the balls of his feet."  A coiled spring, longing for release.  You could see it in George W. Bush, the swagger that "in Texas we call walkin'."  I saw it in the freshmen entering the out-of-Vietnam marches, carrying ballbats.  I was not seeing readiness to fight for something, or rebel against something; I was just seeing readiness to fight.

See this kind of man fighting and you see a happy man.  See him fighting in a good cause and you see a man as happy as men can be.  He is not only physically fulfilled he is morally fulfilled.

I should have known this long ago when I told my mother I had seen a man pounding another man because he had called his mother a bad name, "son of a bitch."  My awed friend said he was defending his mother's honor.  "No," she said, "it's just a man wanting to fight."  All that about defending a loved one, that was there so he could fight more happily. 

Men in motorcycle gangs are coiled springs, wound tighter the longer they ride, sitting, waiting for the happy occasion.  A guy in an SUV hits a bike and they have what they need, a wrongdoer.  Off the bike and smash his window.  Happiness, fulfillment, physical and moral.  (NYT 9-30-13)

I'm about to say that all men want to feel moral but some men would show me wrong.  They just want what their society makes necessary, a moral cover.  In any case moral cover is desirable, and no generation had a better cover than mine: Adolf Hitler.  I remember an instructor in hand-to-hand combat telling us how to garrote a sentry from behind with a wire, and, if that failed and he tangled with you how you could try to "get at least three fingers under his upper lip so you could rip his face off."  His own fingers showed that he longed for the chance. If anybody doubted that he was a defender of good people against evil monsters, there was the evidence of the death camps. 

Nothing's worse than the loss of cover when you're ready to advance against the enemy.  There we were at the end of the war with thousands of men (among the millions just wanting to go home) on the balls of their feet, ready to go, realizing suddenly that they would be making a naked advance.  No moral cover whatsoever.  No evil enemy.  It took a while for it to hit me: how war-lovers need, how Christian men need, how testosterone needs, an enemy.  We needed one after World War II and we need one now.  Who better, for some, than the old one, the one that served us for fifty years?  So don't propose welcoming Putin as a partner in peace in Syria.  You're taking away our enemy.  (The Weekly Standard, 9-23-13)

in a Christian society, more than in others, I think, the enemy has to be bad.  If he isn't bad you have to paint him bad.  Christians hunger and thirst for signs of unrighteousness.  Evil empires and axes are a godsend.

Among the godsend Hitler's great crimes I'd like to add, if it's not already on your list, this one: a simplification of the moral world so great that generations to come would be unable to complicate it.  Evil existed, by God, and had to be warred against.  And that translated into a simplification of the military world: estimates of enemy capabilities, calculation of assets and liabilities, projection of needs, war-gaming for outcomes, looking ahead.   Those can be skipped, or rushed through.  If your cause is good you've just got to fight for it.  (Looking for good causes now?  None better than the humane relief of suffering, as in Syria.)

To me Bush's cabinet was clearly bursting with testosterone, free-floating testosterone, the kind most powerful in those (like Donald Rumsfeld) who have never been to war.  But you never know.  Every cabinet for a long time has been a mixture of the war-eager and the war-chary and the proportion, from our distance, is hard to make out.  In ignorance you just look for signs.  Which is why a story like last Monday's (NYT 10-14-13) about José Bustani grabs you.  Bustani was head of the international agency (the one that just won the Nobel Peace Prize) that monitors chemical weapons and a Bush man, John R. Bolton, got him fired.  Behind this action, according to Bustani, was "the Bush administration's fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would interfere with Washington's rationale for invading it."  I've seen so many signs of Bush-administration testosterone by now that I say, "Yep, interfere with its release."  They're craving fulfillment, they've got a good moral cover, and here's this Brazilian guy about to blow it for them.

The Times story lets me put down the war-eager in the Bush cabinet but it doesn't let me put down the war-eager in all cabinets.  How we needed them in the Roosevelt cabinet in 1938.  If the aircraft-carrier program hadn't been pushed then there'd have been no Hornet to stop the Japanese at Midway.  That's looking ahead carefully, and that distinguishes them from the war-eager in the Bush cabinet, but the latter, I'm afraid, are the norm.

And we all know that there are times when you just don't care about the thought.  When high-testosterone types are coming after you you've got to have high-testosterone types to hold them off.  "The Vikings are coming up the Seine.  Who will save Paris?"  Nobody.  Charlemagne is dead.  "Call in some other Vikings. "  You don't say 'thinking Vikings.'"  They'll be your heroes regardless.

Ah heroism.  We look back on so many ages we call "Heroic." Achilles' time, Samson's time, Beowulf's time.  We've idolized the ancient warriors as heroes, but failed to recognize in them the warlords we presently deplore, whether on motorcycles in nearby gangs or on camels in distant deserts.  If we categorize accurately, face up to the implications of our categories, and see where nature has to be sliced, we're stuck.   The joints are in the world, not us.  There's no separation between the Samson of old and the suicide bomber of today.  They're one bone, giving their lives for their tribe in order to take down as many of the enemy tribe as possible.  Sit down in Valhalla, Habib, there with the kamikazes.

What did Homer sing?  Warlords.  Were they superior to the warlords in Asia or Africa?  Were their gangs different?  Up against other gangs?  Odysseus finds a gang on the coast at Ismaros:

I stormed that place, and killed the men who fought,

Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,

to make division, equal shares to all —

How about that treatment of women?  Here's what it felt like to be one, a wife, mourning

                                                                for her lord

on the lost field where he has gone down fighting

the day of wrath that came upon his children.

At sight of the man panting and dying there,

she slips down to enfold him, crying out;

then feels the spears , prodding her back and shoulders

and goes bound into slavery and grief.

You're mine now, baby.  Hold the boat, Odysseus.

We should feel superior to those gangsters, right?  Hell, we're humane Christians.  Good Christian boys stay out of those plundering ships, yes?  I was a good Christian boy and where was I, in my mind, when I read this in Homer, about a gang's setting out:

They pushed the fir mast high and stepped it firm

amidships in the box, made fast the forestays,

then hoisted up the white sail on its halyards

until the wind caught, booming in the sail;

and a flushing wave sang backward from the bow

on either side, as the ship got way upon her,

holding her steady course.

Now they made all secure in the fast, black ship.

and, setting out the winebowls all a-abrim,

they made libation to the gods,

                                                                the undying, the ever-new,

most of all to the grey-eyed daughter of Zeus.

And the prow sheared through the night into the dawn.

I'm right with them, tingling, on into the Aegean.  Bring on the Kikones!  Me, a humane Christian.  Chalk up another one for testosterone.

I should end this on the moral hazards such a chemical in men's bodies presents us with but that's too complicated.  I'll be content to say a few words about the physical hazard: death to all of us.  Put the mind unsettled by the old tingle in charge of war-or-peace decisions and you're obviously not going to get much deliberation.  You're going to get, as I hope is obvious in the preceding paragraphs, haste and carelessness, especially if you give it the kind of moral cover we've been talking about.  Fine if your war is going to be fought with swords, less fine if it's going to be fought with gunpowder, and possibly disastrous if fought with much beyond that.  No news to anybody.  But hard to remember during a drive for physical and moral fulfillment.

We need reminders, and when we had 70,000 nuclear warheads hanging over the world we had good, hard-to-ignore reminders.  There's death to all of us.  The consequences will be less awful  now (just immersion in a quagmire, with death only to thousands) but given the way any American enterprise develops, with shame to leaders for failure, or simply insufficient success, there is always a chance that a little 21st-century war will lead, by little shame-avoiding steps, to a 20th-century-type disaster.  If you accept Clausewitz's estimate of the force of escalation (very high) you will take the chance to be high.  Too high to tolerate haste and carelessness, whatever the moral imperatives.

No, I can't end there.  There remains a caution to teachers, especially to teachers of history: if you share my doubts about testosterone here, and pass it on to the next generation, who might pass it on to the next, you could end the possibility of golden ages in history.  Damp down testosterone, reduce the pressure, and you may be surprised.  The flow into the warfare you lament may have the same source as the flow into art and philosophy and scholarship and exploration, everything that makes some chapters in your book so much bigger than the others.  Talk to the young the way I have been talking and what could you have?  A flat sequence —this one, then this one, then this one.  No Periclean Age, no Elizabethan Age.

That Periclean Age.  A perfect example.  If you want to see testosterone disastrously at work all you have to do is put yourself in the company of Athenian men setting out to invade distant, little-known Sicily.  The rowers, later to be soldiers, are poised on the ships, the citizens are gathered on the shore, the prayers are said together, the hymns are sung, then "out to sea, first sailing out in column then racing each other as far as Aegina" (Thucydides, 32).   Be a young man on one of those fast black ships, feeling the rush, the band of brothers around you.  Be the captain.  Feel the competitive urge.  "Think your boys can row?  Watch this."  You break from the column and pass the wimp whose stern you were about to bump.  They all break and the race is on.  That break.  You don't need a biology lecture to know what's in the blood, or gauge its level.

And where did its overflow lead them, nearly all 5000 of them?  To a miserable death on the island they knew so little about.  Along with the 5000 sent after them to avoid the shame of defeat.  Along with a weakening of their city that eventually put them at Sparta's mercy.  One could hardly have greater cause for lament.

The question is, How freely can we lament, knowing that in the city behind them so many men, so many ambitious, fired up, competing men, were achieving things we can't stop rejoicing in.  Think only of what the competition for drama prizes gave us.

Note: I have received a suggestion from Mary Anne that what we need to do is put a woman in charge of all this testosterone.  If she's right then my nomination would be somebody like Elizabeth I, as explained in Post 157.

221. Our word "Democracy": How serious is the wound in Egypt?

 
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I know, I know.  What we have done to our political vocabulary by supporting the Egyptian generals who took power from the elected Muslims is too obvious to comment on.  Everybody knows that our word "democracy" no longer means "power to the majority of the people through elections."  Everybody knows that if it doesn't mean that then it has no spine.  And everybody knows that the next time we use it to go nyah nyah to the Russians we will fall on our asses.  But still.

And here's something else everybody, including word-picky English teachers like me, knows: that your linguistic ass is sometimes the last thing that needs protection.  Anybody who doesn't know that should read Michael Gordon and Mark Landler's story in Thursday's New York Times (10-10-13), identifying what currently most needs our protection in the Middle East: the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.  The generals are our best guarantee that the treaty, and therefore Israel, and several hundred American Congressmen, will remain upright.  Gordon and Landler point to what every patriot old in statecaft knows: the political comes before the linguistic.  But still.

But doesn't the ethical come before the political?  If it does then we've put the linguistic further back in the line.  I tell myself that it would be unethical to betray Israel now, after so much support, so much common interest, so much sympathy after the Holocaust.  And betrayal, man that's what Dante said was the worst sin, to be punished on the floor of Hell.  And Dante was speaking for Thomas Aquinas, who spoke for Aristotle, who in ethics spoke for all of Western Civilization.  If you've got that kind of support for your move on the Muslims how can you hold back?  And, more to the point, what excuse do you have to whine about word use?

Well, you might have an excuse, the ever-ready realpolitik excuse, if you were persuaded that what you see as ethical behavior is really tribal behavior.  Loyalty to the Judeo-Christian tribe, upped to Western Tribe, is what drives our actions in the Middle East.  It's a war of tribe against tribe out there, and words are soldiers in that war.  We had some pretty stout ones — like "democracy" and "human rights," with "Enlightenment" backing them up — that are no longer standing up so well.  For the strength of the tribal army alone our generals (word-generals, PR guys) need to know that.  Telling them of the reality is not whining.

But even habitual whiners are making no comments.  Might it be like commenting on a cripple?  After Secretary of State John Kerry, said, right after the coup, that Egypt’s military leaders were “restoring democracy” (NYT 8-1-13) everybody looked away from the word — as they surely will do again after the statement he made Thursday, that "the United States will consider resuming aid to Egypt 'on the basis of performance' that encourages democracy through elections" (Reuters, 10-10-13).  I have no doubt that, as he keeps flogging the poor, broke-back word along, we will keep averting our eyes.

And I suppose we will keep biting our tongues because only the socially clueless, the out-of-it prof, would speak in such poor taste.  That's it, I guess, but maybe not all of it.  There is another reason: consistency, unwillingness to contradict oneself.  This is the way you play the tribal game once you have committed yourself to it.  Tribes fight pragmatically, with rhetoric.  Their test is not, "Is it true?" but "Does it work for us."  When an untruth works better (or in this case, less disastrously) than a truth you use it.  Pointing out that your tribe's spokesman speaks an untruth keeps it from working.  That weakens the tribe.  Good tribesmen don't weaken their tribe.  Ethics again, plus logic.

But there's a remaining question, still realpolitikal, still intra-tribal: what weakens a tribe more, breaking the backs of its words or calling attention to their brokenness?  And, as so often with that kind of question, we have to look long-term and short term.  For the short term I think we might well say that it's best not to call attention to the fact that our finest word-soldier is crippled.  But we can't forget the long term.  Broken backs don't heal quickly, and we don't know what battles lie ahead, what regimes we'll have to claim a difference from.

220. Congress: Debt Ceilings and Term Limits

What does the debt ceiling, due to screw up national decision-making again on October 17, have in common with the two-term limit on the service of our presidents?  Both are cases of the ignorant tying the hands of the knowing.

People living in the past are always going to know less about the needs of the nation in the future than the people living in that future.  The men of 1789 knew very little about what the U. S. would need in the way of a President in 1940.  The people of 1917 didn't know a damn thing about the expenditures needed in 2013.  Hell, nobody in the world could, even a year ahead of time, tell what the nation was going to need in 2013.

Yes, there is a difference between those people.  The men of 1789, however willing they were to bind men of the future in other ways, refused to bind them in this way.  They left it to the choice of the men on the spot at the time.  Washington declined a third term, and established a custom; Roosevelt went for a third term, and broke the custom.  Then the people of the time could make their choice.  Binding by law didn't come until 1951.

The men of 1917, on the other hand, were not only willing to bind men of the future to what they thought best for them, they were willing to give men of any party the ability to bind all the men who came after them, at any distance — decades, years, months — to what they thought best for them.  I know, the men of 1917 did this by accident, and it took the men and women of 1995 (the new Republican Congress), to do it by intent, but still it was done.  Both oppose the democratic notion that people, by majority vote, should be free to determine what's best for them.

Where do knowledge and ignorance come in?  In the claim that justifies such apparently undemocratic action: we're smarter people.  There's nothing new there.  All people in parties think they're smarter than people in other parties.  But these people, or whoever put the binding into law, were saying that they were smarter than everybody, including those who might come along later.  "We know the nation's needs at that time better than they will know them."  No, it's worse than that.  It's the howler, "We know the nation's needs better than we ourselves will know them."  In the case of the debt ceiling they will be referring to the on-the-spot measures they will have knowledgably passed, or let pass, but which still, maybe a week later, have to be funded.  They assert, practically simultaneously, A and not-A.

I think we can bear the arrogance here — "Since we are smarter than all the dumb bunnies who follow us, we'll fix it so that they'll have to recognize our wisdom" — but I'm not sure we can bear the stupidity.  How smart do you have to be to recognize that people facing a problem are going to know more about it than people guessing at it from the past? 

No, you can't argue that that's what our Founding Fathers believed.  "Didn't those fathers see the need to protect dumb bunnies from themselves?  And aren't we all dumb bunnies?" Of course we are, and they devised a Constitution to protect us from ourselves, binding us.  But none of those bindings, like the one to keep us from uniting church and state, are like these, binding one set of Congressmen (or voters) to another, earlier set, on the grounds that the later set will be less wise in the choice of a candidate or budget.  And you can't argue that the Athenians, our models, did that, by setting limits.  They did, but only for offices chosen by lot.  For the rest they trusted elections.

"Yes, but there's nothing in our Constitution to protect dumb-bunny voters from the demagogue who learns how to make his position permanent, or from spendthrift Congressmen who break the bank." 

That's just wrong.  Elections are specified in the Constitution and they protect us.  But that appeal to the Constitution, like so many others, is beside the point.  It's not that debt- and term-limit setters are saying that voters are dumb bunnies; it's that they're saying that some bunnies are less dumb than others, and that's them.  With no basis whatsoever.

Where did they get the idea that future voters could not identify a three-term-hungry demagogue (or a bank-breaking Congressman) but that they could?  The idea that future voters couldn't throw him out with an election but that he had to be thrown out by a law?  If they were so smart why didn't they see that along with the bad demagogue they were going to throw out all the bright, good, non-demagogic nation-savers that might be there in the same bathwater.   I think they got their idea of future incompetence from the conviction that they themselves were the nation-savers.  They couldn't wait for history to bestow that title.

Oh how a democracy needs that, ability to wait.  Leaders who wait for history, citizens who wait for an election.  It's the ability Egyptians so needed if they were to have a democracy, ability to bear the Muslims in power long enough to meet the requirement that they throw them out in an election.  No, they saw nation-destroyers, and needed nation-savers.  And got what Thomas Jefferson could have predicted, a tyrant, one who, like all tyrants and demagogues, sells himself as a nation-saver.

Well, nation-saving is as nation-saving does, and maybe Egypt needed such saving.  Maybe we can come up with a justification of General el-Sisi, and maybe we can justify our democracy in supporting him.  It's hard but it probably can be done.  Worse things can happen to a country than loss of democracy, I suppose.  But of all the kinds of saving we try to justify I think the saving of our nation from its dumb bunnies by another set of dumb bunnies must surely be the hardest.