253. The Case of the Transformed Leader

 
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I'm talking about public intellectual leadership, like that of Le Monde in Paris.  I thought the editors of The Economist were providing that for us.  When they decided to back the invasion of Iraq their spokesman, in the leading "leader" (editorial), stuck to what mattered in international relations.  Only once did he (or she) refer to Saddam Hussein's personal qualities ("violent and murderous") and not once did he refer to his behavior inside his country, like gassing his people.

Contrast that with the leading leader in the current Economist, urging more forceful action in the Ukraine.  It's all about Vladimir Putin — trying to get an "unwilling" world to see him "as he really is."  That is, basically, as a liar, a point reinforced by the picture of a sinister-looking, grey-faced Putin looking out from the middle of a spider web on the magazine's cover.

Yet theirs is not just a case against a person.  It ends with a recommendation for action.   America has been "talking tough but has done nothing new."  Then the rock-em, sock-em conclusion: "Bridge-building and resets will not persuade [Putin] to behave as a normal leader.  The West should impose tough sanctions now, pursue his corrupt friends and throw him out of every international talking shop that relies on telling the truth."

Which international, truth-reliant talking shops, we wonder, does The Economist have in mind?  The UN Security Council, with Colin Powell laying out the evidence for WMD?  The General Assembly, where Andrei Gromyko denied the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba?  Or maybe just the world television theater, where Lyndon Johnson explained the aggression against us in the Tonkin Gulf? "

Suppose the Economist editors win on this issue.  Suppose they get the West to impose really severe sanctions.  And then, when they don't work, more severe sanctions, and more.  Isn't there a point where Putin will ask, "How much more have I got to lose if I just invade and take over the place?"  After he bites the bullet on lost trade he can do that so easily.  For this job he's got overwhelming military weight, his countrymen are behind him, and the battlefield is on his doorstep, not ours.

I see the Economist editors gathering in the office the next day.  They see that those responsible in our government face the choice of a backdown or World War III.  In any case, another gigantic mess — with the promise of worse in a renewal of the Cold War.  My guess is that somebody in that room will be conceiving the kind of blog post recently produced about the decision to support the Iraq invasion.  It's titled "Anniversary of a mass delusion," and the author, M. S., was apparently privy to the discussions at the New York Times when its editors decided to back the war.  His post, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/iraq-war,  is said by The Economist  to come from "one of our blogs."

It is so full of regret.  What they had taken as justification for war is now seen to be "all a fever dream" in the minds of "otherwise intelligent men."  The author is left with a very sad conclusion:

that all of us, including those of us considered the most responsible, well-trained and serious, are entirely capable of talking ourselves into lurid fantasies; that the actions we believe constitute difficult but necessary choices may in fact be the gestures of sleepwalkers battling phantoms.

He has in mind discussions in which the thinking looks very much like the thinking of the present Economist editors.  Just as much concentration on irrelevancies (Putin's and his country's vices), just as many ideas presented in inflammatory way (Putin in a spider web on the cover).  It's not too much of a stretch to see the editors as Cold War sleepwalkers.

I think our last thoughts, though, should be on this blogger's regret.  What he's regretting is hawkishness that's different from the hawkishness in The Economist's present leader.  In its leader on Iraq The Economist reasoned its way into a position we had to call "hawkish."  In its leader on the Ukraine the Economist argued in a way we can hardly distinguish from that of the emotional hawks writing for the newspapers we once cast aside in favor of The Economist — because it was more balanced and thoughtful, more focused on the relevant.

252. How do you get the most peace with the least change in human nature?

 

The title question asks us to see the world as cynical utilitarians see it, and that's not an attractive way, but for a while let's do it, and conscientiously.  We'll have no minister, no priest, no eloquent President, no teacher bringing out the best in people, no moral rearmament, no inner transformations whatsoever.  Yet we've got to do something to end all this warring.

What we utilitarians go for is quantity, not quality.  People on one side can be as hostile, menacing, intimidating, abusive, exploitative, domineering, mean, and selfish as they can be, and on the other as cowering, intimidated, exploited, resentful, envious, grudging, mean and selfish as they can be, and both can set records for worried, tense, sleepless nights, but, as long as they are not killing each other in a big way, we are going to say they are enjoying the benefits of peace.

Since terrorists kill people only in a little way they do not deprive us of the benefits of peace.  Show-killing, gaining TV publicity, may deprive us of serenity and ease, but that only lowers the quality of the peace.  We've got to keep our eyes on the numbers.

That means not listening to people with high standards.  "You call this peace?" they ask.  They'll go to war for a better peace.

We're doing numbers so that we can compare benefits.  How does the Pax Romana fare against the Pax Mongolia?  So many Mediterranean people living without war for so many years vs. so many Asian people living without war for so many years.   Plot it, number of people against number of years, and you can see it clearly.  And measure it.  It's the area under the curve.

It's when we're most intensely suffering under war, and most aware of the great difference between low-quality peace and any kind of war, that we look most longingly at periods producing the highest scores, and inquire most carefully into how they were made.  That Pax Romana.  That Pax Mongolia.  And that long, golden peace during the Han Dynasty in China, called the Pax Sinica.  How were they brought about?

Variously, we see, but in all the variables I think we have one constant: a recognized monopoly on killing.  One person (emperor, king, ruler — the hegemon) says, "If you kill on your own I'll kill you," and the others (nobles, warlords, rivals, satraps, everybody in the region affected), believing him, refrain from killing.  You get peace in the region the same way you get peace in a nation, where the government has to have a monopoly on killing.

So, do these hegemons show us the way to a long Pax?  Not quite. Their countries could kill on their single say-so.  Our country, a democracy, has to wait for its citizens' (or their representatives') say-so.  Even in apparent autocracies rulers now have to be much more responsive to the people.

That makes our question harder but in one respect it makes it easier.  We know a lot more about our fellow citizens than we do about hegemons.  We can question them.  "What, friend, is necessary inside you for you to vote for a war?" 

It might take further questioning but, judging by my own reaction, I'd guess that the eventual, most common, answer would be, "Belief that my nation can win."  I think instinct forces that ground answer, instinct as in male lions, between whom fights (with the destructive weapons predation has built) could drain the gene pool.  They glare at each other, estimating capabilities, and one of them backs down.  You can see alley cats back down, though less often, for the same reason.  Humans may not do that but if they don't we are going to call them "foolish," the right word for people who start wars they expect to lose. 

You can see where this leads: if every nation accurately measured a potential enemy's capabilities against its own, no foolish wars would be started and the total number of wars would be reduced by subtraction of the foolish ones.  That would leave a much smaller number.  There's your utilitarian payoff.

You're not going to get that payoff, though, unless (assuming democracy) your people make that accurate measurement of capabilities.  How do you get that?  

I think there's only one way: through study, study of what gives nations military power, study of what gave them power in the past, study of what constitutes power now, study of present choices in the light of what you have found out.  Somebody has to do that.

But how do you get ordinary people to listen to people capable of this study, and act on what they say? 

There'd have to be more widespread study of history.  More citizens going to college, and there more of them taking history courses.  Until you've got an electorate able to use, realistically, what the past can teach.

That may be asking a lot, but if we're going to avoid military folly that's what it will take.  Whatever it takes, though, it will have us asking for a lesser change in human nature than if we ask people to overcome their acquisitiveness or pride or whatever else moves them to go to war.  It's always easier to change the mind — filling it with knowledge, the lessons of history — than it is to change the heart, the change utilitarians don't want to take any chances on.

Do we want to be utilitarians?  Well, do we want to pass up our best chance at a long peace?  A Pax Americana , decades, maybe centuries, with no big killing going on?  Utilitarians clearly offer it. 

What will we lose if we accept their offer? 

For one thing we will lose many chances to act in admirable, wonderful, even thrilling, ways.  As the Nazis invaded Greece the British heart said, "Help them! Help the Greeks."  The British mind said, "Folly.   Our army will be thrown into the sea."  The help was sent, and it soon became clear that the British Army was, unless the Navy responded to their calls for help with an evacuation that would cost it dearly, going to be thrown into the sea.  After the Navy had responded, and met the cost, Admiral Cunningham said, "You can rebuild a ship in three years.  It would take three hundred to rebuild a tradition." 

It's a tradition longer than that of the British navy, it's the tradition of selfless service, the tradition Birhtwold acted in when he chose to die fighting the Vikings, though the battle was lost and his leader was dead on the ground.  "By my lord's side I intend to die."

Choose what the mind tells us, choose not to risk being called a fool, and we will pass up so many chances to satisfy the heart, so many chances to be called noble and honorable.

So do we want to be utilitarians and call Cunningham and all who, out of honor or respect for tradition threw themselves into a lost cause, fools?  Do we want to call the Melians fools?   "We are not prepared, in a short moment, to give up the liberty our nation has enjoyed from its foundation for 700 years," they said, defying the Athenians, who then, as they expected, destroyed their city, killed the men, and made the women and children slaves.  How about the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, throwing themselves at machine guns?  The Spartans at Thermopylae?

There's a test for you, a good, character-revealing test.  The utilitarians will be calling all of those people fools.  Will you join in?  Or will you call the utilitarians, these people who know the best way to a long peace, will you call them fools?

251. In the Grip of Our Highest Priority

 

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?  Get used to him, fellow Americans.  We're in the grip of our highest priority.

I know, it's pretty hard to take, a dictator telling John Kerry one day that he's on the path to progressive government and the next day letting his  kangaroo court sentence journalists to jail for doing nothing the public will be told about, but you've got to understand: this all follows logically from America's priorities, as confirmed by its Secretary of State.  It differs from other plays on those priorities only in that this dictator (I use the de-euphemized term) is a little smarter than other players and a little quicker to take advantage of them.

The priority here is the survival of Israel.  That makes us favor governments who let us exercise that priority over governments who don't, or possibly won't.  Mubarak's and el-Sisi's  governments let us; Morsi's government possibly wouldn't.  We favor the dictators over the democratically elected president because our ideals of democracy have a lower priority than our commitment to the survival of Israel.

When our number one commitment was the containment of communism we subordinated our democratic and humane ideals in the same way.  Smart dictators played this to their advantage.  They knew that, whatever our idealistic talk, we would have to stomach their abominations. 

Not that we wouldn't be allowed to relieve our indigestion from time to time.  In an Arab Spring, when pressure for democracy builds up worldwide, we, the leader, may have to expel a dictator or two, but the smart ones know that this is temporary.  The dictator, Mubarak, will be back with a new name, el-Sisi.

And the smarter he is the more he will squeeze out of us, materially and psychologically.  He will get money, he will get arms, and, maybe best of all, he will get flattering rhetoric.  The dictator will, judging by what our Secretary of State said about el-Sisi yesterday, give him "a very strong sense of his commitment" to "a re-evaluation of human rights legislation" and "re-evaluation of the judicial process" (NYT 6-23-14), or something like that.

If the dictator is exceptionally smart he will know how to play on American fear of being culturally intolerant.  When he uses the iron fist he will say, "Look at us with Egyptian eyes" and "don't apply your culture, your regimes, your development"  (NYT 6-24-14)

And he will be able to get away with that.  You know why? Because he knows how firmly we are attached to our priorities, and how rigorously, how rationally, we, in our Western way, make deductions from this one.  With that knowledge he can squeeze us to the last drop.  "Complaining are you?  Well, do you want protection in the Sinai or don't you?" He's already seen that our attachment was strong enough to bear such things when, on the occasion of his coup we refused to deny his aircraft spare parts, the action that could have defeated that coup.  He knew he had us.

I know of nothing that describes his so far successful dismissal of our ideals better than the vulgar expression used by CIA realpoliticians to dismiss idealists during the Viet Nam War.  The idealists thought we should win minds and hearts and elections first, before we used our overwhelming military force.  "When you've got 'em by the balls," said the realists, "their hearts and minds will follow."  Well, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has us by the balls of our highest priority, and unless we, unthinkably, change that priority, we might as well get used to the squeezes.

250. To Arms, America, Against the Boko Haram!

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You know my kind.  Every time our president gestures toward action abroad we start yelling, "Hold back! Hold back!"  Well, it's time to change.  With these guys who, because little girls are trying to get a Western education, kidnap them and try to sell them, with these guys I say go all out. 

Sic the CIA on them, drop SEALs on them, grind them with your boots (there, on the ground), drone them, bomb them, make grease spots of them.  Anything to get those girls back.  And if you wipe out their culture in the process it's OK with me.

That's the passion of it.  Here's the reason: you can be a hero in the world's eyes and you've got nothing to lose. The deed can be done without any of the hazards of any of the other interventions we've feared or experienced. e

First, you're not going to get bogged down.  Not in Nigeria.  It's a friendly country.  And these guys have no constituency there, not any that counts.  Nigeria is nothing like Viet Nam or Iraq or Somalia or the Balkans.

Second, you're not going to get any flak from the American people.  On Twitter they're going nuts for action already. 

Third, you're not going to get any clucks from foreign heads of state.  Their people are out-twittering the Americans.  No intelligent leader is going to go against a Twitter-tide like the one moving now.

Fourth, and best of all, you're not going to get any flak from Congressmen.  Not any that won't take down their own planes.  Say you do all the stuff the opposing party loves to show shock at, like breaking your word and putting American boots on the ground.   Weren't those troops you sent there?  Did you lie about their presence?  Or did you simply rename them, as "advisers" and "trainers"?  Did you COVER UP?

"Yes, I did.  To save the girls.  And I did it the way you have to do such things these days," admits Obama, less tersely.

Can you picture a Republican getting huffy?  "Well, I certainly wouldn't have done such things."  Can't you hear the twitter?  "What kind of naive idealists speak for this party?  Are they afraid of dirtying their hands in a good cause? Do they think saving little girls is not good?"  Republicans, Republicans, will be coming off as wimps.  Heartless wimps.  They're not going to let that happen.

Of course you have to do this with the permission of the Nigerian government.  Will you get that permission in an open and upright manner?  Will you exceed its terms?  Will you cover up your maneuvers and excesses in dealing with them?  Maybe.  But have no fear.  When he's riding a Twitter-tide a politician can do practically anything.

If you're in doubt, picture the Congressional hearing.  "Did you get clear permission from the Nigerian government to do this?"

"Well, yes and no." 

"Aha," thinks the Congressman, "we've got a cover-up." 

Let him think it.  You need think only of the birds on Twitter: "Screw permission.  Get those girls."

249. Baseball and Life. Again.

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Last night Zack Cozart is on third in the ninth, score tied, two out.  The batter, Heisey, bunts.  Cozart doesn't go for home. He would probably have been thrown out.

Cozart is a man who doesn't know how to live.  If he had been such a man he would have understood that you don't make choices in life according to whether you will succeed or fail, that probability, but according to whether your chances of failure or success are better than those in your other choices. 

You can distinguish between players by whether they know how to live or not, and you can distinguish between spectators on the same grounds.  Say Cozart goes for home and gets thrown out.  "Idiot," says the fan ignorant of life.  "Everybody could see how slim his chances were."

The fan is like the historian who blames a general for entering a battle he clearly has a good chance of losing.  "He did the wrong thing."  Good historians, like good fans, look at all the options.  They know that you can't make a right-wrong call just by what you see, the results.  You have to imagine the things you can't see. 

OK, there's Cozart on third.  Let's make him a wiser Cozart, a philosopher.  He thinks through that section of life that lies ahead.  What will he do in each eventuality?  A bunt with two out is unlikely, but a good base runner will figure everything in — so that he doesn't have to hesitate when the moment comes.

  Wise man Cozart will crank in his chances of making it.  Say he figures that they are one in four.  That means, among other things, that three out of four times fans will be crying, "Idiot!"  But, being a philosopher, Cozart ignores the multitude.  He sees that his lot in life is to be standing on third with the winning run for a team that has had a terrible time scoring runs, and that the weakest hitters in that team's batting order, Soto and Barnhart, are coming up after him.  Say that he figures their chances of hitting him in, if he stays on third, are at best one in five.

Philosopher Cozart takes his lead at peace with himself.  Unless the ball is dumped in front of the catcher, or bunted hard at the pitcher, he will go.  Without hesitation.  A 25% chance is better than a 20% chance.  And if he's thrown out he will walk back to the dugout still at peace, knowing he did the right thing.  Whatever he's hearing from the stands.

As it played out, Cozart remained at third, the next batter struck out, and the Reds lost in the twelfth inning a game they could have won in the ninth.  The bunt was perfect, the third baseman was surprised, and the Boston announcers thought that Cozart had a very good chance of making it.

If the Reds miss the playoffs by one game we'll remember this.  It's the pain of being a baseball fan who sees his team playing for him, giving him success or failure.  And who does that fan want out there?  Only philosophers.  One Zack Cozart and there goes the whole season.

248. "Check your privilege"

 
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How put-downs change!  Especially in political discussions.  In the forties, in the student joints around Tulane, a big one was, "Are you home?"  It suggested that you hadn't been following the train of argument.  "Is your brain in gear?  Are you keeping up with the rest of us?"  There you were, the only one too dumb to see that Socialist contradictions could only lead to....

In our decade, in the joints around Princeton, the big one, apparently, is "Check your privilege" (see NYT 5-3-14).  It suggests that you look into your attitudes.  Are your statements tainted by your class or race status?  There you are, too biased to be trusted.

I know how easy it is to read great sea-changes in a little flotsam washed up on shore but here I think we've got something.  Princeton has given us a clue to what happened, what most deeply happened, in American college classrooms in the decades leading up to ours: the ideal of objectivity was replaced.  By an ideal of goodness.  It was better to be morally upright than to be intellectually sound.  Facts became less important than attitudes.  If there are sea-changes in education, that's a sea-change.

Students get their notions of what's cool, intellectually, from their profs, and in 1946 the profs behind the coolest intellectuals at Tulane, those from New York, were not far to seek.  They were Morris Cohen, of CCNY, and Ernest Nagel, graduate of CCNY (who went on to Columbia), authors of the textbook Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method.  If you wanted to dispute the finer points of cool, the justification for a put-down, you could go through that book:

  Bob says, "That's just what you'd expect a plantation-owner to say." 

"Whoa," says Nathan.  "Definitely not cool.  Look, here it is.  Argumentum ad hominem. "

As a matter of fact, there was a plantation owner (or member of a plantation-owning family) among the arguing leftists at Tulane, Al Maund, whose radical novel, The Big Boxcar, I notice, has just been reprinted by the University of Illinois Press.  I can imagine trying to put him down in the 2014 way.  Remember, you're idealizing the proletariat, so it would come out as, "Check your lack of privilege."  Say that to an Old Leftist who has just nailed down the case against Norman Thomas's social program and your irrelevance silences the table.  Who cares about Al's proletarian credentials?  Anybody home up there?

Who are the profs behind the students who argue politics today, as at Princeton?  I can't identify their persons but I have already (in Post 97) categorized them.  They're in a class with the Smothers brother who, to the statement, "Your shirttail is out," replied, "Why do you hate me?"  They put attitude ahead of fact.  What your words show about you — your values, your politics — is more important than what they refer to.  Measure a prof's distance from Tom Smothers and you've measured, inversely, his responsibility for today's undergraduate cool.

It doesn't have to be a prof, though.  Consider Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.  She (see Post 207) gives you the easiest measurement you could make.  She blesses a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she is different.  Ignoring the fact that the woman is a fortune-teller and a vessel of demons, a person we disapprove of, a person presented for our disapproval, she turns our disapproval into a moral deficiency, making it part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That's about as close to Tom "Attitude is All" Smothers as you can get.

Schori has a better justification for her position than profs do, though.  She's a Christian preacher, and Christian preachers, moving out from the Sermon on the Mount, are bound to put values ahead of facts.  The kingdom of God is within you.  That's her tradition.  The prof's tradition, up to now, has been to put facts ahead of attitudes.

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So, no sea-change up in the pulpit.  But a sea-change at the lectern.  And the interesting thing is, we're winding up with very much the same thing, judging by the behavior of the audience.  How did it happen, in a few decades, that pulpit and lectern drew so close to each other?  How did we reach the point where, sometimes, we have a hard time distinguishing a prof from a preacher?  Culture warriors on the right have been asking that question for some time, and here we see what they're talking about.

247. A Dream of World Peace

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For peace in the world human beings need to develop a gentler, less grasping nature, right?  A deeper love of their fellow man.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their brothers.

Well, that certainly would do it.  But not, I think, as well as its opposite, development of a more grasping nature, a more intelligently grasping nature.  A deeper love of money.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their trading partners.

We have a wonderful illustration of this at the moment, with John Kerry bristling in the face of Vladimir Putin and half the foreign ministers in the European Union saying, "Hey, wait a minute.  We do business with Russia!" 

How different from the Cold War when nobody did business with Russia, and everybody could cheer our foreign ministers on.  When Russia, doing business with nobody, faced no deterrent other than what was in our silos. 

It's the great discovery of our time, that economic sanctions work.  Do them right (we're learning) and they change the behavior of nations (South Africa, Myanmar, Serbia, Iran).   The very threat of them changes behavior.   And the more dependent economies become on trade with other economies the better sanctions will work.  It's possible now to dream of economies so interdependent that war will be unthinkable. 

And it all depends on the profit motive.  The good sin, greed.  Anger becomes the bad sin.  People sore enough at other people to make war against them are put in their place.  "What are you trying to do, strangle the golden goose?"  Foreign ideological systems, evil empires, become golden geese.  As China now is.   As we are to China.  "Launch against suppliers like that? Bomb that kind of market?"

Of course there are problems.  We've got these angry cries for justice.  Rage against oppression.  Zeal for liberation.  High ideals in general.  "Life should be better than this.  Why stick in the old mud?  Why not the best?"  Somebody is always trying to break out, or secede, or realize their independent destiny. 

Well, that's anger.  And, if you're going to have peace, it's got to give way to greed. 

The trouble is, anger is so much easier to romanticize than greed.  Nobody was angrier at England than the Highland chiefs, and nobody fared better in English literature.  Freedom-loving, brave-hearted, mountain-air-breathing fighters for Scottish independence, that's what Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, and Ossian saw. 

And what did the Lowland merchants see, when they looked up from their ledgers?  A lot of crazy, illiterate, innumerate warlords unfit for civilized life.  Wreckers of the organized state.  Wreckers of the balance sheet.  And so at war with each other that they'd never be able to rule the independent state they bagpiped about.

And the descendants of those merchants, like me, what do they see?  I see desert warlords.  With more vegetation around them.  Same clan crap.  Same violence.  And same weakness confronting a country, like England, that knows how to organize its violence.  Go the angry Highlanders' way and you'll get one foolish, uncomprehending (of enemy capabilities, of new weapons, of logistics) war after another.  The wars will be multiple because angry romantics are so bad at learning from experience.   (What they're good at is repeating a failed rising.  You know, 1698, Bonnie Dundee, getting their asses shot off; 1715, Bobbin' John Mar, getting more shot off; 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, getting a record number shot off.)

Well, that's anger for you.  Greed now.  Down in the Lowlands it has our merchants casting a beady eye on their 1707 accounts.  Red ink getting redder.  Go with the Highlanders — liberty, honor, pride, Scottishness, self-determination, independence — and you're on your uppers.  Go against them, join with Britain, and you're in clover.  You've got a line under your losses, a big black line.  You've got a market for 50% of your exports.  And you're hooked into a system that's going someplace.

Was it ever going someplace!  Wealth from all over the world was, in the next 200 years, going to roll into industrializing England at an astonishing rate.  And the Scots would play a big part in it, far out of proportion to their numbers.  But best of all, for the point here, they were at peace with the British.  More than at peace.  They were snuggling in bed with them.  Pockets bulging.  And that's the way it's been, ever since the commercial side won and joined Scotland to England to make what was at the time "the greatest free trade area in the world."

There it is, the road to world peace, seen when we first got on it.  The one paved with gold.  A road like those in heaven, a road like the one Mammon admired so, before he fell.

What a problem, though, getting a Peace Through Lucre campaign going.  Peace Through Might is so far ahead.  They've got the uniforms and the ribbons and the statues, they've got the ceremonies, the carrier decks, the slogans, they've got the models, the Caesars, and oh Lord the rewards, the final prizes, the Pax this and the Pax that, beginning with the Pax Romana.

What do we money people have?  Right now the example of Scotland.  Joined maybe by Switzerland.  Those banks.  On the outside maybe a Scandinavian country or two.  And the prize, the terminus?  Can there be a Pax Caledonia?

We're where William James was in 1906. He was trying to find an equivalent in the moral sphere to all the heart-lift in the military sphere, the "manliness," the "cohesiveness," the "tenacity," the "health and vigor," the sight of human nature "at its highest dynamic."  We're trying to find an equivalent in the commercial sphere.  God help us.

And it's got to be competitive, this equivalent to the  "strong life."  And we, classed among James's "clerks and teachers," are going to have to build it out of books and diagrams and blackboard demonstrations.  The wimp life.  Ending in a vision of what?  For James, a "pleasure economy."  Everybody peacefully enjoying the world's material comforts.  

There's so much to be said against that.  “It is the preoccupation with possessions," Bertrand Russell warns us, "that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”  And he's only at the end of a long line.  "Things," said Goethe, make us their "slaves."  They get in the saddle and "ride mankind" (Emerson).  What else can you say after Jesus said, "Love of money is the root of all evil"?  What good does it do you to "gain the whole world and lose your own soul?"

So greed, to nobody's surprise, is going to be a hard sell.  And there's not much to recommend our usual tricks.  We (or our PR people) can rename some of our functionaries.  We can make the people in charge of a "financial sector" into "theater commanders."  We can encourage colorful nicknames for those commanders (SEC Chairman, Treasury Secretary, World Bank President), something to match "Bull" and "Stonewall."  We might even have a "Light Horse Harry," or an "Iron Duke."  For the lower bureaucrats we could find names with more animal force, like poilu ("the hairy ones") or "Rough Riders." But none of that is going to get us very far.

Maybe greed is an impossible sell.  People know a bad bargain when they see one.   They'll certainly be suspicious of this one.  You give up spirituality and freedom and honor and vigor and nobility and justice and equality, all your great causes, all your high ideals, and all you get is peace.

And even if you get peace you're still not home.  You've got to fix up your vocabulary.  How are you going to use the word "moral"?  You've got world peace, something everybody has longed for, something that, for some, appears as "mankind's greatest good."  And what name will you give to those who brought it to you?  To their motives?  To their characters?  To their souls?  Remember, you're looking at Wall Street.

Oh, it's so hard to call those guys "moral."   They may be smart and shrewd and realistic and foresighted and yes, with the help of their kind in the State Department, they may be socially responsible, making the world's interest their interest, but are they really moral? 

It's the pain of questions like that that makes us realize that there is a prior question: Do I really care?  Do I have to have a higher compliment-word?  Why aren't "smart" and "prudent" and "realistic" and "foresighted" and "socially responsible" good enough?  What, here, is the difference between somebody who has all those virtues and somebody who is "moral"?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to put "moral" in a class with "art" and "philosopher," words that cast auras, words that we can drop from our vocabulary without much loss.