169. Rome, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran

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No, Romulus, I don't want any ancient Romans speaking on this blog.  You're heartless.  You decimate people.  Forty percent of the human beings in your empire were slaves.  You'll ruin my reputation.

"OK, OK, but if you had listened to me twelve years ago you'd be a lot better off than you are now.  You'd be at least a trillion richer in dollars and 6000 richer in lives."

Yes, but in how much danger?

"Probably in less danger than you're in now.  You'd have concentrated on danger.  None of this restructuring their society, changing their values, training their young men to be government soldiers, getting them (admit it) to love us.  Just wiping out — or scaring the pants off — the people that are a danger to you."

And how exactly do you avoid what we did?  When you break a country it's yours, isn't it?  You're responsible.  And, long-term, making a country a democracy makes it safe, doesn't it?  Democracies aren't aggressive.

"Oh, you are so wrong.  And in so many ways.  I won't even mention your belief that democracies aren't aggressors.  What do you think your wonderful Athens was?  Jeez, read Thucydides.  And have you noticed that the builder of the biggest empire since ours, Britain, was a democracy?"

No, since you haven't mentioned it.

"All right, let that pass.  Go to this: 'breaking a country.'  You don't have to do that.  You just break what's a danger to you.  Do they have elephants?  You say, 'If I find an elephant in here I'm going to zap it and all the people around it.'  Do they have elephant training camps?   You say, 'I find one and I'll zap it too.  Too many elephant camps in your country, Mr. King, and I'll zap you.'  I know you can do that.  I've read about your spying and zapping powers."

But suppose they worship elephants?  Suppose they have a fetish about using them?  Suppose that's the whole problem: they have an elephant culture.  That culture is a thousand miles from our culture and it's what makes them hate us.  You want us to ignore that?

"Yes! Yes!  Yes!  You're not interested in culture.  You're interested in living, breathing elephants, physical creatures that can hurt you, threats to your life — not symbolic beasts contrary to 'everything you stand for.'  The truth is, you don't understand your best interest.  You don't know the most economical way to satisfy it.  You don't know how to display it.  And you don't know how to voice it, not in a way to make sure there's no misunderstanding."

Well maybe you could tell me how to voice it.

"I can't exactly, not in your terms.  But in my terms it's very simple. To a nation you have entered you say, 'Keep your own culture, worship whomever or whatever you want, treat each other in any way you want.  Just keep the elephants out, the roads maintained, and the tribute coming.  Do it the Roman way and we'll get along fine.'"

And if some evil is growing in that nation, if in their schools they are raising a generation of elephant fanatics, you'll just let that ideology or culture or whatever, grow.  Well let me tell you something, something you don't know: we tried that once.  The evil was named Nazism.  And we let it grow until it was too late to stop it.  And you know who we blame now for that?  People like you.  We call them isolationists.  "Ignore other countries as long as the tribute — or in our case, profit from trade — keeps coming in."

"And so, because of that Nazi evil, you'll never be isolationist again.  But there's isolationism and there's isolationism.  Can you conceive of a kind in which, while assuring that no country's rockets or elephants can hurt you, you just sit behind your fences and make yourself attractive?  Attractive enough to induce your enemies to change?  Be such an example of freedom and democracy they won't be able resist.  And yes, be prosperous.  Work hard at that.  You and all your democratic allies.  The outsiders will see the connection."

And really change?  I can't see it.  The religion goes too deep.

"Here's where you go Roman.  With all that prosperity inside the fence you and your allies build it very high, with strict conditions about coming in and joining up. (You're always open to that; for long-term world peace you want everybody inside it.)  You count on the contrast between the ways the two cultures play out.  And on their ability, eventually, to see the connection between culture and prosperity.  (At first.  Later they may see connections to less material benefits.)" 

You're not who I thought you were.  You know a lot about our times.

"I do because I've done some studying.  But I'm still Roman.  I'm still saying, 'Keep your own culture, worship whoever or whatever you want.'  I'm just adding  'and bear the consequences.'  And I'm ready to get really Roman with those who can't bear to watch them bear the consequences, or who try to soften them.  Help those people, send them technology, say 'there, there, your culture's really as good as any other,' and you're out of the alliance.'  A good Roman is able to, well, 'watch them starve.'  Because he thinks suffering the consequences is the best way to learn about your religion and culture, what's wrong with it.   The starvation he watches is a means to a good end: getting them permanently into a proven feeding system.  Good end for them.  For us, it's securing our lives against them."

And that comes first, right?

"Right.  And you get it by holding to the strict conditions.  Nobody gets inside the fence, nobody joins the circle of the well-fed, without checking his elephants at the gate and opening his courts for a check by the others.  Any member of the circle who makes it easier for an entrant to skip this, or reduce the motivation to accept the conditions, you throw him out."

Man, we'd have to have a lot of power to do that, or a lot of sympathy among the other members of our alliance, or both.

"I agree.  At one time I think you had both.  Right after 9-11.  Now it may be too late.  But what else gives you a better chance against something so deep?"

156. If Smart Women Ran Countries

"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.

115. Is Democracy an Ideology?

Is democracy an "ideology"? Does it have "agents"? Would they be "foreign agents"?

"No, you can't talk that way. An agent of a foreign ideology is somebody like those members of the Communist Party in the U.S. in the thirties. Somebody who works to undermine democracy."

Ah, but Marshal Tantawi and Prime Minister Putin are apparently talking that way. When Tantawi's people in Egypt's caretaker government accuse American NGOs of "interfering in domestic politics and stirring unrest" I hear his voice. When Putin's people lay responsibility for "turmoil in the streets" on American democracy-building groups I hear his. Both have gotten louder in the last month, with Putin's people accusing the American ambassador of "promoting revolution" (Huffington Post, 1-18-12) and Tantawi's people putting a travel ban on U.S. pro-democracy activists (Reuters, 1-26-120). What I'm wondering is how exactly their words are different from the words we used when we talked about communists as "agents of a foreign ideology."

"Well, the agents are certainly different and so are the ideologies — whatever the words. These give us enough to identify them."

Maybe so, but by the dictionary I think we're pretty firmly stuck. If an ideology is "the body of doctrine associated with a political movement" and an agent is "a person who acts on behalf of another person or group" and "foreign" tells you that person is from another country then those American-paid democracy-building people in Cairo and Moscow, right up to the ambassadors, are correctly called "agents of a foreign ideology." Putin and Tantawi are right.

"And so the only difference between communist agents in Washington then and democracy agents in Moscow now would be in their ideologies. But, you know, we shouldn't mind being stuck with that as long as we distinguish properly between their ideologies. Putin and Tantawi are each appealing to an ideology peculiar to their nation ("You're in Russia now, Ambassador McFaul") or culture ("Egypt is an Islamic country, sir") with its particular values; our ambassadors and NGOs are appealing to an ideology for the whole human race ("All men are created equal," they are "endowed with inalienable rights"). If democracy is an ideology our agents represent a superior one."

I know, I know. Universal values trump particular values. The American and French revolutions are the best. No nation or culture is justified in opposing them. Wonderful. Our ambassadors and NGOs work for humanity. And you know what? When I look at them all I can think of is "Old Dan Tucker." You know that song? "Get out of the way of old Dan Tucker, running late to get his supper.

"Don't you approve of those values? And of their priority?"

Yes, but they scare me to death. President Bush, appealing to them, loving them in the person of that Western, liberal president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, pushed to get Georgia into NATO. You know what that meant? It meant that if Russian troops invaded Georgia we, by the NATO commitment, would have had to send troops to their aid. All the way to Georgia, a country far from us, and which we could supply only through the Black Sea. Furthermore, it was adjacent to Russia, which still had a load of nuclear weapons. And we'd have had to take them on, or been "humiliated" — as they say of the worst thing that can happen to a Great Power.

The trouble with universal values is that you act on them in particular situations, facing a particular number of troops motivated by a particular culture or ideology. You can, as a friend in the Army once said, lose your particular ass.

"Isn't that the risk, more or less, of acting on any ideal?"

Yes, but risks vary with the ideal, and this one is loaded, especially for Americans. Talk about defending liberty and human rights and we'll line up behind you. How we lined up behind President Kennedy when he said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” It excites me still. But where did that line lead? Into the agony of Viet Nam.

Think of President Bush going into Iraq. Get out of the way of Old Dan Tucker. He was like the other presidents except that he called up the defend-democracy spirit late, after he was already in the particular place. "No weapons of mass destruction? No Al Qaeda? No real threat? OK, we're here to build democracy." The American public will always excuse action toward that ideal. They wouldn't do that for an "ideology."

"That gives me an idea. Call 'democracy' an ideology and they'll quit excusing action in its name. And they won't be so eager to fight for it in every corner of the world. Good verbal move."

Sure, and it's exactly the move Putin is making. Democracy is an ideology like any other, and it happens that this particular country, the United States, is pushing it. On us.

"Is democracy an ideology like any other?"

Only, I suppose, if the American revolution is a revolution like any other.

102. How Should We Speak the Word "Democracy"?

"You don't really believe in democracy, you English-speakers, you believe in it only when the right guys are going to win." Try to answer that and you're hit with the names of the democratically elected wrong guys our guys moved out of office, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Salvadore Allende in Chile. Or, worse, a quote from Dwight Eisenhower backing Ngo Dinh Diem's cancellation of elections in Viet Nam: "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh." Hold on, Vietnamese, you're not going to get any support from us for democracy.

So, if we state, "America is a democracy" proudly we're going to get a lot of noise. Can we quiet it down by making the statement doggedly? "We know, we know, but everybody has to compromise their ideals sometimes. In those times that you mention national self-interest trumped the democratic ideal, sure. But we had a good reason for that: serving our interest served the interest of democracy. The nation keeping democracy alive around the world has to keep itself alive, doesn't it? The Soviets used the same argument about communism and their country."

Say that, and then point out that we still have an election every four years, don't we? Peaceful transfer of power, that's our big claim. Democracy gives "power to the people most likely to be troublesome if deprived of it, the majority" (Post 39). We've got the essentials.

Clearly doggedness in that line can buy us some peace and quiet. But will it ever last? Aren't there always going to be some bad guys we want to keep out of power? And aren't there always going to be people of our own, maybe a majority, crying, "Bad! Bad! Keep them out! Keep them out!" Right now we've got Islamists threatening to win elections all over the Middle East. In Egypt there are some generals ready to keep them out. If we say, "Go ahead, generals, deprive them of power," how dogged can we be about those essentials? That's just what the generals will be violating. "Oh no," they'll hear us saying, "those people aren't going to be troublesome. They're just the majority." Yes, and we're the voice of democracy.

We don't know whether we'll talk like that yet but we know that if we do the word "democracy" is going to stick in our throats. And dogged repetition isn't going to help.

So, how will we speak the word? Should we maybe not use it? Find some other word for what we represent? No, we are still doing many things that only the word "democracy" identifies. And some of these are the ones that get us into the deepest trouble. Why do our leaders listen to those voices crying simply, "Bad! Bad!" — over communists in Viet Nam, or tyrants in Mesopotamia, or Islamists in Egypt? They know that the situations in those places are, or were, very complicated, and simple good-bad calls are very dangerous. They must know that. Educated people know that. Ah, but these educated people must, to stay in power, have the votes of the majority, which has never, in any country yet, had time (or inclination) to educate itself. So there you are. Democracy. There's no other word for it.

All right, we just have to find a becoming way of saying the word "democracy." It's tough. Luckily, though, we have some pretty good guides. Winston Churchill, after admitting that democracy was a terrible form of government, once added that it was "just better than all the others." There's our cue. Say it resignedly, or wryly. "Ah me, America is a democracy." In a store full of trash you've got to make the best of a bad bargain.

72. How Barack Obama and George W Bush Are Alike.

They both took advantage of a crisis to do what they wanted to do. Bush wanted to invade Iraq, Obama wanted laws expanding Headstart, Pell Grants and a host of liberal projects he had been working for. Both men were going to have a hard time getting what they wanted. Then along came, for Bush, the 9-11 attacks and, for Obama, the Great Recession. Have to have military operations. Include Iraq. Have to have a stimulus to the economy. Work in the liberal agenda.

It's hard to see how, without a crisis, either one would have gotten much public and Congressional support. Imagine, out of the blue: "Let us invade Iraq in order to bring freedom and democracy to its people." Imagine: "Let us now finish the New Deal."

Of course I don't know their actual motives. I'm making inferences from their behavior and known views. In Bush's case these are pretty well documented and I don't need a columnist to point them out. I did need one in Obama's case and on Monday Ross Douthat stepped in and supplied the need:

The hope was that the [stimulus] legislation would do more than just kickstart a recovery: It would lay a new foundation for the economy, with an electric car in every garage and a Solyndra solar panel on every roof. The result, predictably, was a bill that looked less like a temporary exercise in crisis management and more like the Democratic Party's permanent wish list. (NYT, 9-12-11)

Obama joined Bush when he went along with that bill.

The difference between the two is seen in their words after the defects in their policies became clear. Obama is now making speeches that, according to Douthat, suggest

that he intends to campaign for re-election on what should have been the blueprint for his first four years in office: a short-term stimulus highlighted by a payroll tax cut, a medium-term push to overhaul the tax code and a plan for long-term entitlement reform.

In this, which Douthat sees as "a request for a presidential do-over," a "second chance to get things right," we see a man who learns by experience and admits a mistake.

That's the opposite of what we see in George Bush, who in his recently published autobiography, Decision Points,, rests in the belief that the invasion of Iraq was thoroughly justified. And, going by what we are now hearing from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, that belief is not likely to change. Those whose views were closest to his (and even, some say, responsible for his) are suggesting that the Arab Spring confirms that justification.

Sometimes the nation benefits when a perceptive leader takes advantage of a crisis. President Roosevelt, with an eye on the long term, added Federal Deposit Insurance, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority to his immediate recovery measures, slipping them in when the opposition was most frightened.

In the end the benefit depends on the perceptiveness of the leader, and the trust of that perceptiveness in the voters who elect him and keep him going. In 2004 voters trusted Bush enough to keep him going. In 2012 they'll have to gauge their trust in Obama. If we judge by reaction to mistakes the men are more significantly different than they are alike.

39. "Democracy"

"Those are bad things the U.S. is doing in Iraq," the Turkish tourist said to me, "and it's supposed to be a democracy." I saw that "democratic" to him meant "good," as in the same loose, worldwide vocabulary "fascistic" meant "bad."

It was 2004, and a teaching moment to take advantage of, since he had obviously seen in me, lagging behind my group at Pisidian Antioch, an opportunity to learn something. He was curious and earnest, with enough English to profit by my explanation. I, well aware that in Turkey the once-high "favorable" rating of the U.S. in the polls had fallen to record lows, was eager to teach him.

How would I (how would you?) define "democracy" for him? And do it without any detectable salesmanship? It was over-enthusiastic salesmanship, I suspected, that made him and a third of the world think "democracy" meant "good." I didn't want him to think of me in the future when he said, "Hey, I've been sold a bill of goods."

I kept that future moment before me as I pondered my definition. I saw him becoming more familiar with the behavior of democracies in history — Britain, first on democracy's poster, fighting two of the least justifiable wars in history, the Opium War and the Boer War; the U.S., goaded by its yellow press, pouncing on the Spaniards and then the Filipinos. Definitely not good. The people can be as brutal as dictators.

I also saw him in the past, though. He had no doubt seen or read about the army stepping in to change the government of his country four times since 1960. He had seen or read about bloody changes in neighboring countries — Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria. He would know about personal or tribal power struggles.

The minimal definition of democracy I produced for him (though of course not at the time) was this: "It's just a way of changing rulers without bloodshed." If he wanted more I would tell him that it gave power to the people likely to be most troublesome if deprived of it, the majority. I think that would do the job but I'm open to suggestions.

3. Did We Dismiss "Deconstruct" Too Quickly?

"Deconstruct MAD," said Timothy Egan (NYT Online, July 14, 2010) about the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. And he went on to show just what should be done. That may not worry most readers but it should worry a lot of English-speaking philosophers and their followers, like me. Egan is using "deconstruct" in a way that looks sensible! That word that we took to be just a Paris fad.

The main complaint was that it was superfluous. We already had "dismantle" and "disassemble" available to tell people to take something apart; all "deconstruct" did was add a little French spice. And there's where Egan snags us. From his pen the word means, "take it apart very carefully, with close attention to what went into its construction, including the intentions of those who constructed it." That's not spice, that's solid referential meaning, and we can't deny it.

Nor, if we attend to history, can we deny the source. Egan got that meaning from the despised Jacques Derrida, who under the name he coined, "deconstruction," carefully took apart Plato's Phaedrus, and gave his followers the model.

Why was Derrida despised? Because, in layman's terms, he was a Fancy Dan. Laughably so. When he analyzed a piece of fiction he would speak deeply of what he called its "double invagination," which meant "the verted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside opens a pocket [and] comes to extend (or encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge."

If you giggle at that, layman, maybe you can understand why philosophers, after (in their way) giggling at it, and therefore despising, the author, are going to have a hard time giving him credit for a sensible coinage. Which they have to do, after reading Egan. There's no way out of it. He's a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. And that's the Times he's writing in.

Might it be, though, that Egan is just one swallow, and there will be no summer for Derrida? Let's check the Times for the last twelve months.

Who would have guessed how many things are now being deconstructed. Patterned fabrics, police shootings, dance steps, Lorenz Hart's song lyrics, the first lady's outfit, blackface minstrelsy, sugar-laden breakfast food, the flavors of a salad, and conceptions of space and matter are all being given the treatment. And those are only the more plausible-sounding things. How do you deconstruct mother's milk, photosynthesis, an automobile, the living conditions of a fossil frog, and a Knicks' loss on the basketball court? Our Anglo analytic professors were right. The word's a continental sell.

When we get to "culinary deconstruction" we're sure of it. Those chefs who put the word on their menus (for a traditional dish broken down into its constituent parts) are using it only for its philosophical flavor. That's not serious usage.

But then we find a choreographer carefully breaking down a predecessor's work and criticizing it. That fits and it's serious. And there's nothing funny at all about a proposal to deconstruct a Congressional plan for national health spending. That's just what Egan wanted done with the State Department's policy of mutually assured destruction.

So the evidence is mixed. Maybe the best thing to do is imagine an occasion where we'd be happy to have the word in our vocabulary. How about the drafting of President Bush's State of the Union speech before the invasion of Iraq? "Axis of evil." Egan arrives at the conference and says, "Come on, deconstruct this." Would we like to have somebody there taking apart Bush's speech as carefully as Derrida took apart Plato's Phaedrus? If so we can be glad we hadn't gotten rid of "deconstruction."