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.
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