271. A Dream After Reading Memoirs by Presidential Advisers

First decree of the Word Czar:  No memo submitted to the President by a security adviser will contain the words "evil," "vile," "depraved," "vicious," "monstrous," "heinous" or any other word indicating that the nation is dealing with a ruler of despicable character.  Nothing that a ruler does entirely inside his country or to his own people will be referred to in the context of security.

Second decree: No memo submitted by the Secretary of Defense will contain the word "policy."  The words "objectives," "aims," and "strategy" will be used only with respect to goals already determined by the Secretary of State and the President.  Corollary:  the position Under Secretary of Defense for Policy will be eliminated.

Third decree: The CIA is subject to the above restrictions and in addition is ordered to eliminate the word "action" from its memos.  That agency's memos will be restricted entirely to information.

Fourth decree: No security advisor will be permitted to use, in memos referring to people outside this country, the words "liberty," "freedom," or "self-determination" with respect to their aims, or "oppressed," "exploited," or "deprived" with respect to their condition.

Fifth decree:  Atrocities will never be spoken of as actions characteristic of particular peoples; all peoples will be assumed to be, under the right conditions, capable of atrocities.

Coda:

(1) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Political Adviser, or any adviser for whom words serve the power that gives power to all in the executive branch.  For example, if voters want to hear talk about human rights then the Political Adviser may freely advise talk about human rights.

(2) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Diplomatic Adviser (the Secretary of State), or any of his or her subordinates for whom words serve international power.  For example, if talk about human rights weakens a nation or faction (say by causing internal division) that the Secretary of State finds it useful to weaken, or strengthens a nation or faction that the Secretary of State finds it useful to strengthen, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

(3) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Legacy Adviser, or any subordinates for whom words serve to influence historians.  For example, if the Legacy Adviser thinks talk about human rights will, by indicating that those rights are an aim, raise historians' estimates of a President's performance, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

Note:  All decrees are issued on the understanding that the restructuring of the Executive Branch is complete.  See the President's orders

(1) that all functions of the National Security Adviser and the National Security Council will be subsumed under the Department of State or the Department of the Interior (expanded to include Homeland Security);

(2) that all functions of the CIA having to do with action, covert or overt, will be taken over by the Department of State (to which any agent may be transferred);

(3) that the President will meet regularly only with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, the White House Chief of Staff, and the four new appointees, Political Adviser, Linguistic Adviser, Resource Adviser, and Legacy Adviser (the Permanent Advisers);

(4) that all other meetings of advisers with the President will be ad hoc, or contingency,  meetings, with attendance determined by the contingency and the expertise or wisdom available to meet it;

(5) that for help in selecting attendees at contingency meetings the President will employ the Resource Adviser, charged with matching contingency to available expertise or wisdom, in which he or she will become expert;

(6) that official position will not be a qualification or a disqualification for attendance at contingency meetings (the Vice President will be an attendee only if selected, though he is expected to attend as an observer);

(7) that the Resource Adviser may attend any meeting, as an observer in order to gain knowledge for future selections;

(8) that the Linguistic Adviser (the adviser charged with keeping verbal and conceptual order — the Word Czar) may attend any meeting, as an observer, in order to gain knowledge for future decrees.

Note for those expecting to be observed: It will be well to keep in mind the purposes of the President's restructuring: (1) to avoid the transfer fallacy — taking expertise in one area to be transferable to expertise in another, as, say, from warfare to foreign policy; (2) to avoid the personality danger, where a person (say a general), or a type (say military) has such force or charisma (as gained, say, through past success, as in World War II) that his lack of expertise or wisdom with respect to the immediate contingency goes unrecognized.  (The President's gratitude to and respect for the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not conceal from you the fact that their removal from all advisory meetings — the Secretary of Defense will speak for them — reflects his desire to avoid the charisma danger, clearly evident in their imposing presence in the past.

The President recognizes as a final danger that you, particularly if you come from within the government structure (remember, the Resource Adviser draws on the entire nation for expertise), may be so intimidated by the presence of the Linguistic Adviser that your advice may not be as free and full as it would otherwise be.  That adviser recognizes the problem but believes that if you give single-minded attention to the contingency before you, defining it and locating it to the best of your ability, you will forget him, see what is required, and go on to give the President the best advice he can get.

267. "Evil" in the World

How variously we react to the word "evil."  George W. Bush, in his memoirs, thinks all the fuss about his use of "axis of evil" was over the word "axis," suggesting that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an alliance like the one Germany and Italy had formed.  "Evil" was not worth remark.

Years later, as his memoirs appeared, others were still lamenting the consequences of all that the word had brought into play.  "Oh that Manichaean view of the world.  Oh the demonizing of enemies.  Look where it's left us."  A leader who inserts "evil" into a speech about another nation, as Ronald Reagan first did, has dropped a canister full of bad germs.

Reviewing all that George Bush was unaware of is a fool's task, I know, but here we've got a puzzle.  He and his advisors seemed to be doing their best to make themselves aware.  I can't count the number of places in Rumsfeld's and Gates's memoirs where, sometimes at Bush's insistence, they stop to "review all the assumptions" and make sure they haven't missed any "concealed hazards" in the course they have chosen.  They are highly motivated, they are bright, and they have gone to the best schools.  And yet, as revealed by their casual acceptance of the bomb-word "evil," they are clueless.  Where it may have counted most.

And it wasn't rocket science.  David Loy, a teacher like the rest in our liberal arts philosophy departments, could have told them right away what was in that bomb.  As he did after 9/11, explaining that "evil" is a term that people in our society, in contrast to a Buddhist society (he was living in Japan at the time), need in order to feel good about themselves.  "We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. If you want to be a hero, well, occasionally a natural disaster will do, but the best thing is a villain to battle.  St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George."

Listen to Loy and professors like him and you, as soon as you hear "evil" come out of Bush's mouth, will start wondering whether Iraq was maybe George's dragon. 

You have a lot to go on.  Bush certainly was rooted in the Christian tradition that makes the opposition of good and evil most dramatic.  He himself had fallen into evil and been reborn into good.   He had chosen a speechwriter from fundamentalist Wheaton College, Michael Gerson, who spoke the language of moral dualism most readily.  And for philosophical justification of the Iraq invasion he chose, for a visit to the White House, a University of Chicago theologian, Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose bedrock convictions, according to colleagues, included "the existence of an absolute good and evil" (see Post #213).  For an alert student Bush will look like just the person who would reach for the word "evil," and start the whole Manichaean thing going.

Except he didn't reach for it.  It was fed to him.  By that graduate of Wheaton, Michael Gerson, who sees "axis of hate" in a draft of the State of the Union speech and knows right away it's not going to get the most out of Midwestern voters.  Change it to "axis of evil."  What's wrong with "hate"?   It's "not theological enough."

So we get the word that drove liberally educated people up the wall.  Graduates of Wheaton College are not liberally educated; they are theologically educated.  And this puts them in tune with voters in the Heartland, most of whom still gain their education in church.  This is power, votes in the Heartland.  Manichaeism is in the saddle.

In a liberal education you learn how to stand outside a culture and its vocabulary.  In English courses you learn how words work, and, drawing on what you have learned in history and philosophy courses, you get an idea of the dangers in words.  In the word "evil" you see, or give yourself a chance of seeing, how it turns eyes from threats to be avoided to natures to be abhorred.  "Evil" is an extreme abhorrence word.  And it brings a string of abhorrent-nature adjectives in its trail — vile, monstrous, wicked, vicious, base, depraved.  You see how those who use these words will be carried further and further from the external world and any threats it might present them with. You see (oh history, history) how it polarizes, how it turns opponents into demons, how it makes compromise or surrender difficult.

And that's why, when your president, in apparent innocence (I leave open the possibility that it was cynicism in his speechwriters), opens the bomb bays in his State of the Union Address and drops a canister like this you are going to be halfway up the wall with everybody else who has profited from a liberal education.

And the only way you can go is further up, because nobody in power, and least of all the president, will be noticing you.  With the painful consequences of the president's neglect of the complex external world in Iraq already, after three years, registering on the nation there he is, in the chapel at Camp David, having "one of the best preachers" he's ever heard confirm the stand he has taken.  "Evil is real, biblical, and prevalent.... Some say ignore it, some say it doesn't exist.  But evil must not be ignored, it must be restrained."  There would be a cost, but, according to Bush's memoir, the preacher reminded the president that "there has never been a noble cause devoid of sacrifice" and assured him that "the Scriptures put great premiums on faithfulness, perseverance, and overcoming.  We do not quit or give up.  We always believe there is no such thing as a hopeless situation."  A Christian up against evil can't compromise, and can't quit.  A liberally educated student, standing outside the Christian culture and vocabulary, will observe how easy it is to substitute "Islamist" for "Christian" in the preacher's vocabulary.

And he or she won't be distracted by the goodness or brightness or earnestness of individual Christians or those who help them.  Bush's helpers, the ones who went over and over their assumptions and listed again and again the hazards, were as good and bright and earnest as any you can find.  They thought hard.  They just didn't think broadly.  It was all theological or military.  They all might as well have gone to Wheaton or West Point.

So, another plug for liberal education and English courses.  Parents, direct your children to them.  Children, listen closely and study hard.  Everybody hope that the teachers understand the tradition they work in.  The further it spreads among citizens the wiser the country's foreign policy will be.  Start in the Heartland.

217. Attacking Assad: does analysis matter?

 

 

What is it about the Middle East that makes our best journals, our most thoughtful, our most analytical, journals so dismissive of careful thought, even their own, when they see a chance to act there?  Remember the Times in 2003.  Now look at the August 31 Economist.  The analytical writer (p.20) wipes out the big distinction President Obama has made (asphyxiating gases horrible?  "so are most weapons") but the lead editorial writer cries (p. 9) for us to end the peculiar horror of gassing in Syria.  Is it that they think that the results of analysis have only academic interest?

You don't have to be a Clausewitz to see what's wrong with our taking military action in Syria.  I think you just have to do the kind of ends-means, cost-benefit thinking we demand in our other enterprises.  And carry it through to the end, asking the usual questions, demanding specific answers.  "OK, we take the course of action X to accomplish Y which will bring the outcome Z which will be worth the cost A and be superior to the outcomes of alternative courses of action M, N, O, P, and Q measured against their costs B, C, D, E, and F.  Could you go over your projections for that in the Syrian operation?"

I feel sure, if only by the example of General Shinseki before Iraq, that military men like General Dempsey have put this kind of question, more acutely than I have, to the administration.  Nobody is better at getting the details of execution than those who are going to have to execute.  But nobody, in the case of our military, is more helpless.

But let's just  limit our analytical attention to the end, Y, which will justify the whole thing.  If we don't see that clearly everybody's in trouble.  The ends brought most urgently to our attention are (1) to punish the Assad regime for using gas, (2) to reduce their ability to use it, (3) to bring a better regime to power, and (4) to preserve American credibility.

Punish.  Just to make Assad hurt?  Say he's sorry?  Makes no sense unless you reduce it to (2), the material effect, and (2) imposes a great handicap.  You can't bomb stockpiles of gas shells without bringing about the very thing you're trying to avoid, clouds of people-killing gas.  In any event, there's likely to be enough gas left for him (or anybody who grabs it) to use if he wants to.

So (3), bring a better regime to power, a more co-operative, more enlightened regime?  Anybody who can see the makings of that regime now, in that scramble of guerrillas, has eyesight better than anybody I know.  I think (3) is about the longest shot on the track.

And (4), preserving America's credibility, America's word?  You don't ever want to dismiss credibility.  Too many wars have been avoided by one side backing down in the face of credible power and will.  But you can ask why our credibility is on the line here, and whether it's America's credibility. 

If President Obama had not drawn that red line the question would not have arisen.  He'd have no word to take back.  And here's the place to reflect on analysis, and pickiness with words, and Socrates' demand that we slice nature at her joints.  Obama's line, as I hope I established in Post #215, was drawn far from any natural joint.  It was drawn halfway up the horror bone, up where no knife can get through.  Gassing is not really distinct from other horrors.  Yes, it's horrible, but if you think it's much more horrible than the other horrors of warfare you just haven't looked closely enough at those other horrors.  Your eye, or your mind's eye, needs to take in what's in the stretchers coming back from the Iwo Jima beach, or at the barbed wire rolls on the Somme, with disemboweled draftees hung up calling all night for their mothers.

How do you know you're at a joint and not at the far end of a bone?  When your knife can't slide back.  Lyndon Johnson's cut into Viet Nam at Da Nang, when he ordered the Marines into combat with the Viet Cong, is a perfect example.  He couldn't go back because to do so would be to "lose," "fail," "get beat," "cut and run," and, after the first casualty, "betray those who had given their lives in this cause."  Once he had made it a fight, us against them, those expressions kicked in, and became obstacles to retreat.  None them applied when he was sliding around with advising and training and supplying the South Vietnamese.  He had hit the joint normally recognized in a declaration of war. 

I'm afraid that Johnson's failure to recognize a joint could be Obama's failure.  And Congress's and the Economist's.  And the public's.  We all need Socrates here.  Gassing, he could point out, is one point on a scale (of horrors) that has plenty of degree marks.  There are no degree marks on warring.  You either win or lose, succeed or fail. 

That's awesome, an alternative like that, so you want people facing it to proceed very carefully, even Socratically:  Just what will it take to win here?  What does it mean to win?  What does our experience tell us?  I think General Dempsey is proceeding carefully, and maybe even asking those questions, but I don't think President Obama is proceeding carefully.

213. The villain of the Iraq piece: a theologian.

  

Where did George W. Bush get his confidence as he took his country into war in Iraq?  From a fighting World War II family?  From a carrier-pilot father?  From the Yale fraternity culture?  Or just from Texas, the state where high-testosterone, low-reflection politicians seem to rise from the soil?

No, none of those.  He got it from a professor of social and political ethics at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.  Her obituary in yesterday's New York Times (Jean Bethke Elshtain, 8-16-13) tells us how: through a conference at the White House after the 9-11 attacks, one of several Bush called with "a handful of scholars and religious leaders" to discuss his response to the attacks.

We can guess at what she told him by what she has argued in her publications.  In 1993 she argued against the separation of religion and politics: "Separation of church and state is one thing.  Separation of religion and politics is something else altogether."  Earlier, relying on St. Augustine, she had argued that "while Christians could not justify killing to protect themselves, they could engage in war to protect the lives of others."  That would be "a Just War."

Opinions of those who know her and her work give us another clue.  "Underpinning all her work," colleagues said, "were bedrock convictions derived from her Christian faith."  These include "the existence of an absolute good and evil, the imperative of ethical behavior and the responsibility of all people for the welfare of the vulnerable."

That makes a pretty good fit with the advice Bush was getting from the neoconservatives in the Defense Department and the Wheaton College (Chicago area, fundamentalist) people on his staff, including the one who, by one report, advised him to change "axis of hate" to "axis of evil" because it was "more theological."

What we want from Bush and his staff is a little better look at history, the look realistic statesmen take, the look once-burned generals take, the look Europeans like Jacques Chirac were taking.  Hadn't these religious people noticed that looking to God didn't relieve you of this other kind of looking?  Hadn't they noticed the damage single-vision God-gazers had been doing in the world — taking planes and buildings down with "God is great" on their lips, taking over land because God had given it to them, destroying temples and statues because they weren't the true God's.  All this by people sure of God's will.

OK, I know there were plenty of people on Bush's staff doing rational, realistic analysis.  Their memoirs show it.   But they were over-ruled, or over-powered, or out-faced.  Was it a matter of confidence, and the authority of the office?

Bush himself, at the beginning, lacked confidence.  And what did he do?  Called in experts in God's will, scholars with all the academic credentials.  Get a reading from them and you'll be as sure as you can be.  You can walk into your staff meeting, into your war, with confidence.

There are two things, though, that you can't be confident about, that nobody can be justifiably confident about: that you know God's will, and that you know how to carry it out, down here on earth.

It's the latter, the part President Bush's theologian looked away from, the part generals and statesmen and historians look so closely at, that will make you as president look foolish.  Whether what you're doing is God's work or not you will screw it up.  And God, they say, will not have his work in the world be made manifest by fools.

But before he undertook God's work George Bush didn't need to reflect on that.  The experts from Chicago apparently gave him enough confidence to do what something in him (I'm not leaving out the Texas soil) made him want to do.

167. What Barack Obama learned from my urologist.

 
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The President must have the same urologist I have.  He believes in watchful waiting.

Let me tell you about "watchful waiting."  It's the greatest treatment ever to rise to the top of the options-list doctors give their patients.  You know, in those waiting-room brochures. 

For prostate malignancies "watchful waiting" used to be well below the aggressive treatments — prostatectomy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy.  My first urologist, as soon as he saw the biopsy results, wanted to do major surgery.  A later one wanted to chemically castrate me.  "We've got to go right at this thing."  That fit the temperament of most of his manly patients.  This is malignant, man.  We don't want to mess around.  "OK Doc, let's roll."

This was so common in my town and in the literature that I began to think urologists all had the same mentor.  Some Edmund Burke.  "All that is needed for the triumph of prostate cancer is for good urologists to do nothing."

Well, my present urologist, the one I share with Barack Obama, didn't follow him.  He advised something pretty close to nothing.  You just keep an eye on the tumor and not until you get a reliable sign that it's going lethal do you act.

What led him to differ from his colleagues then, or what led so many of them to come over to his side since then, I don't know.  Maybe they saw so many people (like my brother) suffering so much from the aggressive treatment that they began to have doubts.  Maybe the experience of a few patients (like me, with seven years of normal life) was so happy that they thought it was a good gamble.  Whatever it was, the order on the list was reversed, no dire consequences followed, and my urologist (Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic) is getting praise from all over the country.

Now I want to praise Obama for the way he, ignoring the manly Republicans, has adopted "watchful waiting" as his approach to malignancies in world affairs.  Where George Bush, with nearly all of Congress behind him, wanted to roll in Iraq, Obama wanted to wait.  Where John McCain wants to roll in the Middle East Obama wants to wait.  To Bush Saddam Hussein was clearly malignant.  To John McCain Bashar al-Assad is clearly malignant. " When you've got a malignancy why mess around?"

Maybe by now the suffering caused by the roll into Iraq is changing some minds.  Maybe Congress and the electorate are ready to join the small, unmanly cohort (the French, those accordion players) who wanted to watch and wait in 2003.  They clearly seem less willing to roll against that evil monster Assad.

I use the word "evil" there because that's the word gung-ho spin-doctors use when they want to move a nation's citizens to roll with their client in international affairs.  It's the word George Bush's doctors used for the Iraqi and Iranian and North Korean malignancies.  It's the word Ronald Reagan's doctors used for the Soviet Union.  It makes watching and waiting much harder.  "This is evil, man."  But it's very effective with a religious electorate.  It makes the malignancy more "theological" — as Bush's speechwriter explained when he inserted it.

"Evil" is just one of those words that Republicans (and some Democrats — mainly out of the need to compete with them for votes) use to tap into American testosterone (see "holy testosterone" in Post #158).  And the users are nearly always vague with respect to specific action.  What do you do to stamp out evil?  What do you do to show you are not "soft on" communism?  that you are not surrendering in the "war on terrorism"?

Well, one thing about my urologist, he was not vague.  And he made sure you knew what he meant. "Watchful waiting" did not mean "gentle acting."  If the threat was lethal there would be no limit to his aggressiveness.  He was ready to cut, plant, and castrate.  All in substantive action.  Nothing symbolic. 

OK, here's where I see President Obama, listening to a physician who didn't just say "malignancy!" but asked right away, "How fast is it growing?  What can it do to change this patient's life, in comparison with the other options?  Is it a lethal threat?"  All are specific and precise questions whose parallels I see in the questions I think Obama is asking about the malignancies his countrymen urge him to treat around the world.

166. Changing the Culture at Penn State

How do you change a culture?  Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, thinks you can do it by hurting people who are part of that culture. 

Was there "a culture of reverence for the football program" at Penn State?  Yes.  The NCAA executive committee's findings (or rather the findings of Louis Freeh, which Emmert and his committee followed) showed that it was "ingrained at all levels of the campus community." 

So the NCAA kept the football team out of bowl games for four years, reduced the number of scholarships that could be granted its players, turned 111 of its victories into losses, and fined the school 60 million dollars.  That hurts the students, the alumni, the fans, the players, the coaches, and, thinking of that 60 million, the professors, the librarians, the administrators, and anybody who has a stake in Penn State's reputation in any enterprise that requires money.  All of them.

This action has been subject to some very sharp criticism.  Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, has compared the changing of wins to losses in the record book to the rewriting of history by the communists in Orwell's 1984.  Twenty-nine past chairs of the Penn State Faculty Senate have objected that the Freeh statement about the culture is plain false: not one of them had ever "been asked to change grades for athletes or approve of phantom courses or majors."

Those are big issues but next to culture-change they're small.  Culture-change is beginning to look like the great challenge of the 21st century.  Isn't it what we're trying to do in the Middle East?  Isn't it what Thomas Friedman and so many other editorialists wanted us to do in Iraq?  Now here's Emmert, having a go at Penn State.

And as an old culture-changer — that is, as a teacher, a supplier the arts and sciences to the undersupplied — I have to say that he has the wrong end of the stick.  You don't change culture by hurting people.  Hurting is what you do to change behavior.  You know, the way armies and police forces do.  To change culture you talk, point, sing, dance, and hold up for admiration — the way artists and profs do. 

We profs mainly talk and point.  And we have no doubt we can change a culture.  We do it all the time.  Small-town culture, fundamentalist religious culture, xenophobic Midwest culture, redneck Appalachian culture, he-man culture, more cultures than you can shake a stick at, they all send their products into our classrooms.  There's a lot of resistance there sometimes, but we're eager to, we've got to, overcome it.  Change the fundamentalist culture and you can teach evolution, change the he-man culture and you can teach poetry.  We get right at it (it's slow work) and after a while we have what we need, students assimilated into the academic culture. 

"If you're saying that that is what Emmert ought to be doing I think you have missed something.  He may be a prof but he has taken a policeman's job.  He presides over an organization that's supposed to check for violation of rules and punish violators — that is, hurt them.  That's what he's doing." 

In which case I think you've exposed the real problem here: confusion.  Emmert is trying to use his police powers to do a prof's (or a priest's, or a parent's) job.  Doesn't he see that powers, starting with the big ones named in our Constitution, should be separate?  that Americans are surprised and offended when they are not?  Look at that report he relies on.  Freeh finds "a striking lack of empathy" for the victims.  What's a judge doing talking about empathy?  That's child-psychologist talk.  Parent talk.  "I'll handle the feelings," says the mother. "You law people just tell me what he did."

That's being offended.  Here's being surprised.  The infractions committee of Emmert's own organization didn't take up the Penn State case.  The reason?  According to some former members, "because it involved a cover-up of criminal activity rather than a violation of traditional NCAA bylaws."  It wasn't in their domain.  But (surprise!) there was Emmert, imposing penalties.

By now I think we all have a pretty good idea of the division of labor.  Architects design, builders build, realtors sell.  In America that gets an early boost in our schooling, when we learn about the organization of our government.  We each play our part and avoid playing somebody else's part and we get the benefits of an ordered society.

"Ah," says my friend, "but underneath this division we are all human beings, and that's what Emmert and Freeh, when they look at what was done to those children, can't resist being.  You want to keep them in their compartments, rational and cold.  I prefer having them out as caring, feeling human beings.  I join Emmert and Freeh."

I do too.  In my heart.  What heart can resist the call to do something, to protect childhood innocence and goodness from adult evil?  But my mind holds me back.  It consults adult experience and says, "Calculate the risks."  Here the evil is a culture and what's done to it is a hurtful act against individuals, justified by the fact of evil.  But "evil," like the on-the-spot word, "bad," is not a fact word; it's a judgment word, and subjective.  Use it to justify a hurtful action and there's no place to stop.  If you're not hurting ghetto-dwellers and Roma and Inuit and anybody else whose culture you judge to be "bad" you're helpless before those who do.

How different from punishing people for their behavior.  Before you can do that you have meet all kinds of conditions, set up, usually by governments, for their protection.  Definition of the crime, rules of evidence, guarantees of process.  You can probably find most of these conditions in the books that both Freeh and Emmert have, up to this point, had to follow.  Punish them for their culture, though, and where are the books you follow?

So there's the first risk, making yourself the tolerator, if not the companion, of bigots and kooks, high-handed culture-punishers.  The second risk is that you'll make an intolerable mess.  If you sweep aside all distinctions between assigned jobs what happens to our ordered society?  What happens to order itself, to reason?  Reason says, "Keep things straight."  Humane feelings say, "Make things good."  Follow the latter at the expense of the former and you're going to wind with everything crooked, a mess.

"So, do you say to Mark Emmert. 'Do nothing'?  'Look at an attack on innocence and goodness and do nothing'?  You, my friend, are concerned about risk, and say that punishment for bad culture risks the loss of reason.  I say that failure to punish risks the triumph of evil.  Edmund Burke said, 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.'"

Yes I do say to Emmert, "Do nothing" — though I'd put it as, "Mind your own business."  Looking at Iraq, and now Syria, I have to say that.  And I'd like to add this to Burke: "All that is necessary to make a mess (in international affairs called a 'quagmire') is for good people, every time they see evil, to think they have to do something."

86. "Testosterone"

I think maybe "testosterone" is the best word for what keeps getting Americans into places like Iraq. Not "hubris," not "pride." Those words are too classroom. We need a street word.

Not any old street word, though. It's got to be one we can use with ease and confidence — without losing weight.  And I think that "testosterone" has gone pop enough to work.

How would it go? I see Americans beating their drums for an invasion. We shout, "Check the testosterone! Check the testosterone!" They say, "Oh, oh, too much," and stop to give their action more thought. We eggheads have communicated with all the confidence of a popular talk-show host or advice columnist.

Testosterone is what Thucydides saw in the Athenians, "seldom enjoying their possessions because they are always adding to them.…They are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so." It's what Aeschylus and Sophocles saw in all men. Over-reaching. Dante, under the word "pride," made it the foundation for every other sin. Our word "testosterone" may sound pop but it hooks into a lot of weighty material.

So it gives us a way to tell the nation, and maybe the world, what it needs most: a good hormone manager. Like Elizabeth I. Oh, could she handle testosterone! I mean, half the royal balls in Europe ("Me! Me! Marry me!") and all the important noble ones — Raleigh, Essex, Drake — in England were hers to manipulate. Or like Pope Urban II, who pointed the really loaded ones at the Holy Land.

The whole world lacked such a manager in the years before World War I. What a loss to Europe! Great Power, Great Power, you had to be a Great Power. Think of all those European lions, growling over the carcass of Africa. Not a tamer in sight.  It's a wonder World War I didn't break out sooner.

Why aren't we Americans better at testosterone management? We have a big army. Who learns testosterone management better than a paratroop colonel? All those young men coming out of jump school, West Point, full of beans. Macho bursting out in all directions. Fights in the bars. Swagger in the O-clubs. He's got to channel it toward the enemy. "Keep your goddam mind on the goddam mission," he says to the lieutenant off on some extra-curricular heroics.

Free-floating testosterone, it's such a problem. In the Pacific it wanted to charge right over without waiting for the new carriers. In the poolrooms it wanted France now, now, before we had the landing craft.

What, let me ask you, was behind the Army's closing off Gordon Liddy's career? Fear of free-floating testosterone. Knowledge of it was just what the FBI lacked when they sent him out undercover to a town in Indiana and he blew the mission by swagger in a bar. "Try taking an airport with guys like that," says the colonel, "and you'll learn something about testosterone."

Some of our leaders have been pretty good at blocking unwanted testosterone.  Nimitz put a quick cork on the kind that would have had us charge west without the firepower, and Roosevelt certainly stifled those who wanted Normandy in '43.

It's in men who have had no experience of war — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Liddy — that the testosterone seems to float most freely. They're the ones you've really got to watch. Give in to them and you could be looking at a busted country.

And they're the ones who make Elizabeth look like such a …what? a gift from God.  She had no experience of war, and oh how she handled those guys. Oh what she gave the country. Years of peace and a surplus in the treasury. How did she do it?

I think it has to be imagination. Learning. Ability to speak to ambassadors in their own language. Good tutors, hard study. Attention to detail. Self-control. A little eggy, yes, but what a contrast with George W. Bush!