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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.
Labels: hawks
and doves, Malcolm
Fraser, Putin, testosterone
management, Ukraine
crisis, war
and peace
Hawk and Dove nicely balanced in this piece, thanks. On testosterone, I am reminded of George W. Bush's off-the-cuff remark in Vilnius, November 2002, on the eve of NATO expansion: "my father didn't imagine this."
ReplyDeleteI got my highest testosterone reading from his "Bring 'em on." Can't remember the occasion.
ReplyDelete