Vigor, Valor, and Violence

It's probably only coincidence that I came across Josef Joffe's essay in Foreign Affairs, 'The Default Power,' just as I cruised past the central point in reading Shelby Foote's 3000-page Civil War history. Joffe makes a lot of legitimate points in predicting that the United States will remain a default hyperpower for decades to come, despite a financial collapse and the rise of Asia. Where I have a problem is when Joffe chides the European Union for losing its "warrior culture," which the U.S. and even the U.K. maintain in spades, according to Joffe. Of course, he's right. And of course, making the argument that the warrior culture should be purged by degrees seems to play right into the school of Cassandras who warn that an empire is doomed when it "goes soft" - it stops propping up its warriors and seeking the expansion of its own territory, in favor of those wimpy activities like diplomacy.

I was mulling just these sort of cultural images in absorbing Foote. His Civil War: A Narrative History is as much a classic as Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet it is troubling because of the baggage Foote brings to the table. I first became aware of said baggage when he was interviewed shortly after Ken Burns' TV series came out. Foote said that even knowing what he knew now, he would, as a Southerner, have to fight with the South because "these are my people." He made these comments just when the Serbia struggles were at their height. I thought, "How cowardly, to choose allegiance based on family, clan, race, or grouping. If you know your chosen clique is wrong, you should stand up and say so. Tribal loyalties mean nothing compared to the integrity of ideals."

Foote's trilogy is a definite throwback to a previous era, both in its use of inappropriate racial stereotypes that seem inexcusably quaint for the 1960s, when it was written, and also for its use of 19th-century words like "improvement" and "vigor." The last is maddening, as we do not see the word used in histories of warfare written in the last few decades. That's because vigor, in this context, is a synonym for machismo. And it maps into the warrior culture concept Joffe is defending.

I realize that classes at West Point/Citadel/AFA are still filled with tales of honor and the warrior mystique. I have no problem with people relying on personal honor and virtue. But a good part of personal violence is tied to ideas of clan-based honor and virtue, enhanced with the machismo that passes for "vigor." And once we purge people of those group-related concepts of honor, valor, virtue, and vigor, the personal violence in society goes way down.

Islamic culture isn't there yet, which is why honor killings are still prevalent outside the Judeo-Christian realm. But it was not so long ago when duels in the U.S. and Europe were fought over honor, and victory went to the "vigorous." We don't shoot each other in honor duels any more, just as Neanderthal clubs are no longer part of daily fashion statements. Face it, the 'v' words are all tied to violence, and they all represent a lower and somewhat moronic form of conflict resolution.

I've often spoken out against standoff warfare in this blog, due to its dehumanizing nature, and the fact that you rarely see the blood from a UAV strike. But if we can point to something positive from standoff warfare, it's the degree to which it has taken the dimension of honor and virtue out of war. There has not been a true ground-based hand-to-hand conflict between armies, involving the United States, since Korea, and there have been very few such wars worldwide in the past 50 years. Since Vietnam, it's all been guerilla skirmishes and robotic warfare. There is nothing virtuous or vigorous or valorous about such notions of war, which might just lead us to conclude there is little that is worthy about war itself. But before we can move beyond war, we have to purge ourselves of the notion that virtue and honor, at least as they apply to the group rather than the individual, are still worthy concepts that serve the warrior culture. In reality, they are outmoded ideals that increase the levels of violence in society.

Risk-Addicted

Normally, I might have cheered Andrew Cuomo's subpoena of Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, for the billions in bonuses issued to at the end of 2008 to executives of Merrill Lynch before the merger. But I was in the middle of the lead article of Foreign Affairs, where Roger Altman tried to explain why bankers behaved the way they did, competing to create the dumbest and most unstable instruments possible.

Sure, Altman is going to make a partial defense of bankers, but his explanation makes sense. He sees housing as merely the market of random exploitation, and subprime mortgages as the easiest instrument to exploit. To him, the crisis began with excess global liquidity, and a clamoring among institutional investors and foreign investors for the highest risk possible among instruments (since yield is proportional to risk). If this liquidity had been there during the Internet-infrastructure/dot-com boom of 1999, the meltdown might have happened then. Suddenly, bankers were scrambling to approve as many subprimes as possible, and bundle them into futures contracts. (Yes, I know you're thinking of a prosecutor rolling his eyes as all the drug dealers in town claim, "We had to cut the heroin with Comet cleanser, everyone was doing it.")

I've already made the argument for mandating a cap on rates of return on investment (12, 15 percent?), which may be more important than capping executive salaries. Free-market wankers may whine that the Nanny State is once again trying to dictate the level of risk which can be assumed. But if you run a sky-diving or hang-gliding school and have a couple students who always insist on launching from the most dangerous spot to increase their thrill over the risk involved, in a drive for monoamine oxidase overdose, don't you have a responsibility to say something, at least because of your liabilities? If you run a gun shop and a customer boasts of going home to play Russian roulette, isn't there a cautionary tale? Remember, cops can treat a suicide attempt as a crime, if they wish, because the damage is not limited to the individual, it affects the society at large. And if you become addicted to increasing levels of risk, you will eventually die, run the numbers.

None of this is meant to take the heat off bankers, mortgage brokers, hedge-fund managers, or any of the other links in the chain that led to the meltdown. But the next time some conservative blathers on about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Democrats being the sole cause of our problems, or Rick Santelli launches into another mindless rant about how poorer people caught in subprimes were the cause of our miseries, remember the Altman article. A few friends last week mentioned the long-rumored and long-forgotten anonymous conspiracy-theory newsletter, One Great Big Conspiracy. As I watched Cuomo defend his subpoenas, I thought about the apocryphal final issue of OGBC, never finished and never distributed, with a mirror on the cover and the bold declaration, "The problem is YOU." (And me.) Let this be our mantra as we climb out of this mess.

Addict's Last Gasp

Environmentalists may not be planning concretely for living in a world where the North Pole icecap is completely melted, but oil explorers certainly are. Foreign Affairs magazine had a deeply disturbing article by Scott Borgerson in its March/April issue, warning the U.S. that if it didn't ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, it risked losing oil concessions to Russia, Canada, and the Scandinavian countries -- concessions located directly under what is now the polar ice cap.

We have to give credit to Borgerson for believing in global warming and indicating that an entirely melted ice cap would represent grave consequences (a completely-inundated Florida peninsula, for example). But he is sanguine and maybe very realistic in saying that the oil deposits under the North Pole are likely as large as the remaining recoverable resources in Saudi Arabia. This means that oil companies will want to drill off the north coasts of Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Greenland, and that ships will begin regularly using an ice-free Northwest Passage to transport that oil.

Since oil has gotten us into this melting mess to begin with, its over-use should serve as a warning to transition quickly to renewables. Taking advantage of an ice-cap melt by seeking to pull still more oil from the ground seems equivalent to a heroin addict telling himself that one last binge before seeking treatment won't hurt anyone. And given how modern culture uses its resources and how modern oil companies (and nations) behave, Borgerson's scenario seems like the most likely one in our energy future. How scary.