158. Handling Testosterone: Through the Ages

Is the history of the West just a history of well-handled or poorly handled testosterone? 

If you start with Athens Thucydides makes you think so.  There's Pericles warning his eager countrymen to stay within their walls.  "Wait out the Spartans; they'll smash you if you don't."  There's Alcibiades, coming along with his call for an expedition to Sicily, a call to the blood.  There's the Athenian army, smashed to the ground at Syracuse.

Jump to Queen Elizabeth (preceding Post) because she's such a contrast with Alcibiades.  One after another her eager English lords get themselves to the Continent with what they hope will be a conquering army and she cuts off their funds.  "War costs too much."  What about our honor, our pride?  "Sorry, the loss of it is not worth the loss in lives and treasure."

You can't hear that without thinking of those nineteenth-century British cabinets, finding it "unthinkable" that the Royal Navy "might be deployed and then not used effectively," of the "loss of honor" if "we abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force (Post #157)." Think of sensitivity to honor there and you have to think of France's war party in 1870, unable to bear Prussia's snubbing of their ambassador (same post).  Neither England's queen nor France's emperor could handle that testosterone.

The good handler isn't always a restrainer, of course.  Elizabeth wasn't before the Armada and Wellington wasn't before Waterloo.  "Up Guards, and at them!"  "Once more into the breach..."   "We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the airfields...."

The stronger the let-'er-rip people are the more strength it takes to restrain them.  We're talking about moral strength, social strength, face-to-face strength, Raymond Spruance looking at Bull Halsey and saying, "Keep the planes aboard, we're going back."  In World War I it would have meant saying to generals with armies mobilized at the borders, "Stand down" — what honor prevented every ruler or general from saying at the time.  You know what I hear Elizabeth saying?  "Mobilized, schmobilized.  This is going to cost too much."

And you know, at the end of history I think that she'd have a lot of admiring men around her, the most perceptive men, the men most capable of appreciating conference-room courage.  Bull Halsey and George Patton, men who knew what it took to rebuke them.  "What balls she must have had."

What's the most dangerous kind of testosterone?  No doubt about it: holy testosterone, testosterone serving God, testosterone that wars against Evil.  You have to fear this kind most because it's beyond rational deterrence and it goes all the way.  Serve your country and you take seriously the cost-benefit calculation rational people make before they go to war.   Serve God and you set that aside.  If your opponent is Evil there's no reason to stop short in anything you do to him.  If your God likes martyrdom you can scorn death and even seek it.  Give this kind nuclear weapons and instant massive retaliation means only instant, massive martyrdom.

What kind of testosterone is hardest to handle?  I guess it would be free-floating testosterone, the kind waiting to attach itself to a cause. Poolroom testosterone, the testosterone of the undrafted and inexperienced, is this kind of testosterone.  It's got to show that it's there and as potent as anybody's.  It's hard to handle because it's so diffuse.  Touchy testosterone, the kind honor-conscious ambassadors and generals have, is right in front of you, there at the conference or mobilized at the border.  You can give it orders, as Elizabeth did.  Poolroom testosterone is spread through the country, which, if the country is a democracy, lets it power war parties.  From far in the background.  Who do you give orders to?

It's possible that free-floating testosterone is more dangerous than holy testosterone.  It looks, especially at first, as if symbolic gestures — a carrier sent here, some missiles installed there, a few soldiers landed to show the flag — could satisfy it.  And sometimes, with the right rhetoric, they do.  A feeling of potency is all the boys in the poolroom really want and a show of hardness is often enough to give it to them.  Remember the advantage being "hard on communism" used to give candidates at the polls?  (Or was that just a reflection of what the other candidate's softness cost him?)  Anyway that, in the long decades of the Cold War, was most of the time harmless.  And a lot of it, now, looks comical, politicians walking around perpetually hard just to get the poolroom vote.

The trouble is that sometimes symbol becomes substance, as President Reagan discovered after the force he sent to Beirut was cut down in one explosion.  "You know that 'peace-keeping force' that couldn't really be a peace-keeping force because it exerted no force, the one we sent to show the flag, the symbol of our might?  Well those were real people in that force!  They died!"  And there you have a new and far more difficult reality to deal with.

Viet Nam was far more complicated than Beirut but you don't have to be a Walter Lippmann to see how much of our entry there was pushed by symbol-need, behind which was this vague hard-on-soft-on testosterone need.  Or to see how much testosterone need added to the push, through symbols, that took us into other real quagmires.

"You've gone too far.  There were good reasons to enter Viet Nam and Afghanistan and possibly good reasons to enter Iraq.  And as for your 'poolroom testosterone,' it behooves every country to have a reservoir of male hormones ready to tap.  How, otherwise, will armadas be defeated and holocausts avoided?"

All right, until I can argue in detail I'll say only this about testosterone: that it interferes with the cost-benefit calculations that tell us how to handle it.  And since these are often about life-or-death matters, and always complicated, such interference can be disastrous.  Testosterone should be treated, then, as if it truly is what Michael Gilbert (in The Disposable Male) called it: "the most dangerous chemical in the world."

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.

36. "Defense"

Words change meaning. Twenty-five years ago "defense" in the mouth of an American Secretary of Defense meant defense against attack by Soviet nuclear weapons. The NATO treaty provided it to European nations, with U. S. weapons making an "umbrella."

Yesterday Secretary of Defense Robert F. Gates warned those nations that the U. S. was getting tired of expending "increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources...to be serious and capable partners in their own defense" (NYT 6-11-11).

Same word, referring to the same treaty. Coming from the same country, through the same official source. But not the same ears hearing it, and not processed the same way by what's between them.

Let me guess that process, as it might be going on between the ears of Angela Merkel, leader of one of several nations failing, the U. S. believes, to play their NATO part. Make her also a leader in word inspection, always starting with what words actually refer to. Here she sees that being a partner in Germany's own defense means joining an attack on the Libyan army. Merkel: "Ah, Gates's 'defense' now means 'offense.'" She, a good listener, hears that the word reverses its dictionary meaning (root: "to ward off") so she adjusts her internal vocabulary to fit the situation.

If she goes the other way, and tries to find something in the situation to fit the word Gates wants her to use, she can do it. Germany can be thought of as defending itself against her partners' impulse to go to war. That's what practically all of Europe saw itself doing when George Bush called for allies going into Iraq. But what in this case? She'll have Germany defending itself, in the end, against the humane instincts of Barack Obama. That doesn't fit the reality of diplomacy and world opinion. There are just too damned many realities.