How Roy Cohn Created Donald Trump and His Narcissistic Nihilism

 

In 2018, Donald Trump became enraged because he thought Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not doing enough to protect him from investigations of Russian support for his 2016 presidential campaign.  At one point, he shouted, "Where's my Roy Cohn?"  

Roy Cohn (1927-1986) had been Trump's lawyer and fixer for thirteen years from their first meeting in 1973 to Cohn's death in 1986.  For me, the two best accounts of how Cohn created Trump are Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark's new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Scribner, 2026) and the 2024 biographical movie The Apprentice, which is easily available at Amazon Prime Video.  Trump described this film as "a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job" and described those involved in the film as "human scum."  That means it's totally accurate.

Cohn first gained national prominence as a young Justice Department prosecutor who won the court case that led to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for Russian espionage in 1953.  He then became the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who was attempting to expose government employees who were communist spies or those who were homosexual and thus "security threats" because they could be blackmailed into becoming spies.  

In his work with McCarthy, Cohn became known for his ruthless methods that were often illegal and unethical.  He was also known for his hypocrisy in exposing homosexuals in government.  He was a homosexual although he always denied it publicly.  

From the late 1950s to his death, Cohn was a practicing lawyer in New York City whose clients included the most powerful and prominent people in politics and business as well as organized crime.  He was often prosecuted for his criminal behavior, but he was never convicted.  Finally, however, in 1986, he was disbarred by the New York State Supreme Court for unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients' funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a change to a will.  A few months after his disbarment, he died from the complications from AIDS. 

When Cohn first met Trump in 1973, Trump was working for his father's real estate company.  The Justice Department had just filed a suit against Fred Trump's company charging them with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act.  According to the Justice Department, thirty-nine Trump-owned apartment buildings in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island had systematically barred blacks from renting.  Their applications had been marked by a large "C," to identify the applicants as "colored."  Four Trump building superintendents were willing to testify to this.

The Feds proposed that if the Trumps signed a consent decree by which they agreed to integrate their sixteen thousand units, then there would be no fines and no admission of guilt.  But Cohn's legal strategy was always attack, attack, attack.  So he persuaded Trump to countersue the Department of Justice on the grounds of defamation, seeking $100,000 in damages.  Cohn and Trump held a press conference at the New Hilton to announce their suit.  They got a lot of newspaper headlines.  A federal judge dismissed the suit as frivolous, telling Cohn that he was "wasting time and paper."  But that was the point: Cohn's favorite tactic was to file totally bogus lawsuits that would delay the legal process and wear down his opponents.

Cohn dragged out the legal proceedings for twenty-one months.  He charged that FBI agents were coercing witnesses with "gestapo-like interrogation," and they were acting like "stormtroopers."  When the judge reprimanded him for making charges that were "utterly without foundation," Cohn retracted his statement.

Then he filed a contempt motion to have a young prosecutor--Donna Goldstein--removed from the case because she had been calling prospective witnesses in the middle of the night and threatening them with jail time if they didn't testify against Trump.  It was an absurd claim with no evidence to support it, but Goldstein was scared because such a charge could end her legal career.  U.S. District Judge Edward Neaher was forced to halt the main case and hold a hearing on the contempt motion.  A prosecutor spent two hours proving that the charges were baseless.  Cohen was silent throughout.  The judge then spoke to Cohn: "Mr. Cohn, I think it would be in the best interest of everyone if you would just withdraw your motion."  Cohn replied: "Well, I think the girl [Goldstein] has learned her lesson and I'm sure she won't do it again."

Eventually, in June 1975, Trump settled by signing the same consent decree that he could have signed in 1973.  He agreed to advertise his rentals in Black owned newspapers and list vacancies with the Urban League.  In effect, Trump had agreed to adopt an affirmative action program.

Trump and Cohn held a press conference and declared victory.  Trump has often claimed that this was his first great victory in the courts with Cohn as his lawyer.  As Bird and Goldmark have observed: "Trump learned from Cohn that the court of public opinion is far more important than the court of law" (265).

Three years later, the Feds filled another suit claiming that the Trumps were still discriminating against Blacks.  Cohn told reporters that the charges were without "the slightest merit."  But Cohn and Trump signed a new consent decree without admitting wrongdoing.

Bird and Goldmark conclude: "Roy had taught him that the pyrotechnics of publicity were more important than the law. What counted was controlling the images in any narrative" (266).  They quote from Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter who covered city politics in the 1970s: "Roy was a master of situational morality.  He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. counterattack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat."

In all of this, I see four character traits shared by Cohen and Trump: power-seeking, no ideology, narcissism, and nihilism.

1. Power-seeking.  Like Cohn, Trump has sought power--or at least the appearance of power--and it's power for its own sake, not power as a means to any end.  There are only two kinds of people in the world--winners and losers.  The winners are those who are powerful.  The losers are those who are not.  

As I have pointed out in a previous post, Trump's ambition cannot be satisfied by the limited powers granted to the President in the American Constitution.  As he told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan when they interviewed him on March 16 of this year, it is not even enough for him to be the most powerful president who has ever lived, because he must be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," which is what "a historian" had told him he was.  Haberman and Swan later found out that this "historian" was not a professional historian but the long-time caddie for the golfer Gary Player.

But notice that the mere appearance of power is enough for Trump.  For that, all he needs is the testimony of a golf caddie to his world-historical power.

2. No ideology.  Cohn was assumed to be a McCarthyite anti-communist Republican conservative.  Trump has been assumed to be a populist Republican conservative and an "America First" isolationist.  But in fact neither man was devoted to a coherent ideology.  Although Cohn was an informal adviser to both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he became a powerful member of the Democratic Party machine in New York.  Harvard law school professor Alan Dershowitz knew both Cohn and Trump in the 1980s, and he has said that neither Cohn nor Trump were ideological.  "Roy Cohn didn't really have any ideology, even anti-communist ideology.  He was somebody who rewarded loyalty and punished disloyalty," Dershowitz observed.  He saw that while both Cohn and Trump "wanted to win," they were "among the two least ideological people I knew."

Both Cohn and Trump pretended to have a populist ideology.  But as Bird and Goldmark note, this was a purely opportunistic stance by which they "used their personal resentments to tap into raw populist emotions that have long festered in American society" (382).  This pretense of populist ideology was only an instrument in the pursuit of power for its own sake.  Consequently, their ideology could be set aside if they thought some other position would better serve their pursuit of power.

For example, in all three of Trump's presidential campaigns, one of the preeminent themes was an "America First" foreign policy of isolationism and "no more foreign wars," particularly in the Middle East.  But then many of his most fervent MAGA supporters (such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson) were shocked when he launched his war against Iran.  They thought Trump was committed to an ideology of "American First" foreign policy.  

When Trump was asked by Haberman and Swan how helping Israel fight Iran could be consistent with his theme of "America First," he answered: "Well, considering that I'm the one that developed 'America First,' and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that" (194).  In other words, "America First" means whatever Trump says it means, and his followers will have to accept that.  

Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah of Iran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Trump was 32 years old, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States; and Trump throughout those years has complained that America has been humiliated by the failure of every President to defeat Iran.  

Benjamin Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to meet Trump at the White House at the beginning of his second term, and he shrewdly began working on Trump's psychology of power-seeking to persuade him that he could be the first president powerful enough to defeat Iran in cooperation with Israel.  Haberman and Swan report that Trump ignored the warnings of his military and intelligence advisors that Netanyahu's plan for "regime change" in Iran was wildly unrealistic and that going to war with Iran would be a foreign policy blunder of massive proportions.  Trump could not listen to them because Netanyahu had seduced him with the prospect of displaying his power to the whole world by defeating Iran in war.

3. Narcissism.  I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism.  Cohn showed the same narcissistic personality.  And for both the prominent sign of their narcissism was shamelessness.  Cohn's cousin David Marcus has observed that both men didn't care what other people thought about their behavior.  "Roy would just make light of the fact that people in the family just didn't care about him.  He did not care.  That's the odd thing."  Marcus thought Trump was the same way, but there was a difference.  Trump showed "a narcissism combined with insecurity.  But in Roy it was a total security in who he was--except for the fact that he didn't want people knowing in public he was gay."  Mary Trump--Trump's niece, the daughter of his older brother who died young--has made a similar assessment of Trump as a psychopathic narcissist with the insecurity of a little boy who fears the abusive scorn of his father.

4. Nihilism.  Narcissism is intertwined with nihilism because if one believes the nihilist claim that truth and morality are not real, if they are just fictions of one's own mind, then the narcissist can create his own truth and his own morality.  Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, has Cohn telling the young Trump that "there is no right and wrong.  There is no morality.  There is no Truth with a capital T.  It's a construct.  It's a fiction.  It's man made.  You create your own reality."  Cohn once told an interviewer: "Certain rules are made to be broken.  They're designed to screw the little guy.  I decided long ago to make my own rules, to act according to my own choices, my own judgments, and my own conscience."

Compare this with what Trump recently said in an interview with the New York Times.  He was asked if there were any limits on his global powers.  He answered: "Yeah, there is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It's the only thing that can stop me."  Notice the emphasis by both Cohn and Trump: my own rules, my own judgments, my own conscience, my own morality, my own mind.  That's narcissistic nihilism.

For Cohn and Trump, their narcissistic nihilism is even expressed in the way they talk, in certain telling phrases.  Roger Stone noticed that Cohn would always say, "If you wanna know the truth," or "I can tell you," or "to be absolutely frank," and then you would know he was going to lie to you.  Listen to Trump when he's speaking casually to reporters or to audiences at his rallies, and you'll hear the same phrases.  Trump's phrases are all Roy Cohn's phrases, and they are always introducing a big lie.

So that's how Roy Cohn created Donald Trump and his narcissistic nihilistic politics.

The day after Trump was first elected president in November of 2016, Roger Stone called him to congratulate him.  At the end of their conversation, Trump said, "Wouldn't Roy love to see this moment?  Boy, do we miss him."

Are MAGA Voters Opposed to Trump's Immigration Crackdown?

 

Representative Maria Elvira Salazar Sends a Message to Trump on His Immigration Crackdown

I have written a series of posts on Trump's unconstitutional crackdown on immigrants.  I have also argued for an open borders immigration policy as rooted in America's Lockean liberal tradition.  And I have suggested that Trump's brutal detention and deportation of immigrants would provoke a backlash even among his MAGA voters because most Americans realize that America's success depends on being open to immigrants.

We're now seeing clear evidence for this because Trump's Republican candidates are losing the support of their voters because they feel betrayed by Trump's immigration crackdown.  Today the most dramatic evidence is a political ad just released by Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, who is running for reelection as a Republican in Florida's 27th Congressional District, which is in South Florida in Miami-Dade County.  She won reelection in 2024 by 20 percentage points.  Trump carried her district two years ago with 57 percent of the vote.  And Trump has given her his endorsement.  So you might think she should be confident of reelection.  But actually polls suggest that she is in a neck-and-neck race with her opponent Democrat Eliott Rodriguez.

Apparently, she has decided that she has lost voter support because of Trump's unpopular immigration policies.  So in this new political ad, she sends a warning directly to Trump:

Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.  In July, 50 percent of the 50,000 people who were detained had no criminal record.  Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy.  The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.

This might provoke Trump into withdrawing his endorsement of her.  But that might be what she wants because in this election a Trump endorsement could become a curse.

In recent months, Salazar has proposed legislation in Congress that would give illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years with no criminal background a path to legal status and work permits.  More than a dozen Republican congressmen have supported her proposal. 

Salazar is implicitly pointing to the incoherence of the MAGA movement as a political coalition of both liberal and illiberal elements.  We saw the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election and in his Second Inaugural Address.  The American illiberal tradition defends the national cultural homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies.  (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.)  But Trump's electoral victory in 2024 depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.  As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump.  As Trump's presidency has given into his illiberal propensities, he has alienated those MAGA voters.

Many scholars--like historian Stephen Hahn, for example--have argued that the success of the MAGA movement would show the triumph of Illiberal America over Liberal America.  On the contrary, the disintegration of the MAGA movement that we are seeing now shows that Liberal America will always prevail.

"Shall We Let America Die?" David Atwell Zoll and Frank Meyer Debate Order and Freedom in Response to the New Left

The most distinctive feature of the Trump conservatives is their apocalyptic rhetoric--their claim that to save America from being destroyed by Radical Left Democrats, conservatives must set aside their conservative principles of limited government and individual liberty so that Trump can become a Red Caesar and suppress his opponents.   Trump has embraced this rhetoric, such as when he posted an image of Napoleon Bonaparte riding into battle with the text: "He who saves his country violates no law."  Previously, I have written about how Abraham Lincoln warned about the danger of someone like Trump who would thirst for the splendid glory that would come from becoming America's Napoleonic Dictator and thus destroy the American constitutional order.

There are some precedents in the history of American conservatism for using fear-mongering rhetoric to justify authoritarian one-man rule as the only way to save the country.  For example, in its issue of December 16, 1969, National Review published an article by David Atwell Zoll with the title "Shall We Let America Die?"  Zoll warned that in response to the violent revolutionary activity of the New Left, liberalism was showing a death-wish.  To save America from revolutionary overthrow by the New Left, American liberals would have to engage in autocratic repression.  But they refused to do this because this would violate their "libertarian commitments."  Consequently, liberalism was helpless before its enemies.

Zoll wondered whether contemporary conservatism was infected with a similar death-wish.  Conservatism "does share many civilized values with liberalism: most conspicuously, the values connected with libertarianism and legalism."  But if conservatives adhere to the values of libertarianism and legalism, that will hold them back from employing the repressive methods necessary for defeating the New Left revolutionaries.  "The serious conservative will not be pleased with the choice he might then have to make between some crude neo-fascism and the despotism of the new evangels of the Left."  Surely, however, Zoll declared, "a Bismarck is much to be preferred to a Robespierre."

As Chancellor of the German Empire (1871 to 1890), Otto von Bismarck sidelined the Imperial Reichstag and ruled autocratically through a strong bureaucracy with power concentrated in the hands of the Junker elite.  So in pointing conservatives to Bismarck as their model of rule, Zoll was clearly recommending autocratic repression of dissent as the only way to save America from a New Left Jacobin revolution.  He concluded by saying that this would affirm the most basic principle of conservatism--the commitment to order.

The readers of National Review in 1969 would have known that in speaking about "the revolutionaries of the New Left," Zoll was referring particularly to the left-wing militant group known as the "Weathermen," who had first arisen in June of 1969, when they took over the national office of the Students for a Democratic Society, and then began a series of militant activities that included bombings, jailbreaks, riots, and shootings.  The Weathermen justified this primarily as a way of protesting the Vietnam War.  When the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the Weathermen Underground slowly began to disband.

A few weeks after the publication of Zoll's article, National Review published Frank Meyer's response to Zoll (December 30, 1969).  Meyer agreed with Zoll that conservatives should see "that the restoration and preservation of order is the outstanding political issue of our present crisis."  But the question at issue here, Meyer insisted, was--what kind of order?

Instead of Zoll's proposal of an authoritarian order that would suppress liberty and civility, Meyer argued that American conservatives should support the American tradition of order--"the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers"--that would be compatible with individual freedom.  Within the American constitutional order, "there is no contradiction between the defense of order against criminal elements or rampaging mobs and a free polity."  Thus, "the alternative to a Robespierre always present to the consciousness of American conservatism is not a Bismarck but a Washington, not the agent of a Wilhelmine order, but the agent of a free constitutional order."

A few months later, Zoll responded to Meyer (National Review, March 10, 1970).  To Meyer's charge that Zoll was rejecting "the American tradition, the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers," Zoll pled guilty as charged.  But he observed: "any stabbing sense of guilt on my part is assuaged by the fact that these stentorian platitudes convey very little precise meaning to me, and if I do glean their general purport, one thing is clear enough: They have nothing to do with the intellectual history of conservatism."

Zoll then indicated that his conservatism was "high Toryism."  And the high Tory would see the American crisis created by the revolutionary New Left as a choice "between two forms of social repression: the insurrectionary tyranny of the Left and the primitivistic and irrational retaliations of the Right."  The Tory conservative "must not only confront the dangers of the New Jacobinism, but must also moderate the potential excesses of a right-wing radicalism."

Meyer responded with two more articles in National Review (March 24 and April 7, 1970).  Against Zoll's purely Tory conservatism, Meyer insisted that "we American conservatives" as defending the American constitutional republic "are at the same time both Tory and Whig, both traditionalist and liberty."  That's Meyer's "fusion" of traditionalism and libertarianism (more on that in the next post). 

To Zoll's claim that there are only two alternatives in the present crisis--the "insurrectionary tyranny of the Left" or the "primitivistic and irrational retaliations of the Right"--and that the only role for conservatives is to oppose the Left while seeking to "moderate the potential excesses of a right-wing radicalism," Meyer makes two objections.

First, Meyer says that Zoll is foolish in recommending that Tories "limit themselves to the gentle ministrations of a von Papen or a Hindenburg, ameliorating the excesses of barbarian right-wing radicalism--predictably, with as much success."  That is to say, no success.  Most of the readers of National Review would know that Franz von Papen, a national conservative, pressured German President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor and himself as Vice-Chancellor in 1933, with the thought that Hitler could be moderated once he was in government.  Well, we know what came of that.

Meyer's second objection is that Zoll's choice between left-wing tyranny and right-wing tyranny is a false dilemma because there is a third alternative.  "The obvious and desirable course for Americans is the preservation of our constitutional republic by restoring the rule of law and the authority of our institutions."  In doing this, he insisted, "no radical extra-Constitutional steps are necessary," because the "Constitution and the laws on our statute books are generally sufficient, if they are enforced."

Meyer made a few suggestions about what could be done.  Leftist criminals should be punished under the criminal laws.  Organizations engaged in violent insurrectionary attacks on constitutional institutions should be prosecuted.  It might be necessary to ban all outdoor assemblages that are intended to become violent.  Such riotous gatherings do not fall within the constitutional right (in the First Amendment) to "peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Indeed, over the next five years, hundreds of Weathermen would be arrested and convicted for their crimes.  Many of them became fugitives who were tracked down by the FBI.  Some of the fugitives turned themselves in.  Eventually, the Weather Underground disbanded.  Thus was Meyer vindicated in his foreseeing that the American constitutional order provided all the means necessary for defending America against the New Left revolutionaries without violating the moral and legal principles of a free society.

From this, we can imagine what Meyer would have said to the Trump conservatives who argue that a Trump dictatorship is the only way to save the American way of life from being destroyed by the radical Left.  The election of Biden in 2020 was not a "Flight 93 Election"--a life or death election--because the Biden Democrats did not use their power to kill, imprison, or enslave innocent conservative Republicans.  And when Biden's presidency became unpopular, the constitutional order allowed Trump to return to power through a free, fair, and peaceful election.  Now that Trump's presidency has become unpopular, we can foresee that the Trump Republicans will be defeated in the coming elections.

This shows how the American constitutional system allows peaceful and orderly partisan political competition within an order based on civility and freedom. 

Conservatism After Trump

"God Gave Us Trump."  A Video Displayed by the Republican Nartional Committee at the Dallas Midterm Convention.  

Now that Trumpist conservatism has failed, conservatives need to ask themselves what conservatism after Trump should look like.  In her new book--Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right--Stephanie Slade makes a persuasive argument that conservatives will need to revive the fusionist conservatism of Frank Meyer that once dominated the conservative movement, particularly during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Meyer's claim was that in the best society, as was established by the American Founders, government secures individual freedom, which is the condition for human beings to pursue a virtuous life.

I agree with Slade.  But I will argue that Meyer's fusionism needs to be grounded in a Darwinian Lockean liberalism that explains why a free and virtuous society as proposed by Meyer conforms to our evolved human nature.

First, however, I need to indicate why Trumpist conservatism has failed.

WHY TRUMPISM AND THE DISSIDENT RIGHT HAVE FAILED

The essence of Trumpism is captured in three statements by Trump.  In August of 2016, in accepting the Republican nomination for President, Trump said that the system is rigged to favor the elites rather than ordinary Americans, and then he declared: "I alone can fix it."  In his second term, he has said: "As president, I have the right to do anything I want."  Recently, he has said that he is "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known."

All three of these statements are false.  "I alone can fix it" was based on his claim that his success as a businessman showed that he was uniquely qualified to fix what was wrong with America.  Some years ago, I claimed that this fundamental argument in Trump's political campaign rhetoric depended on his myth of himself as the self-made multi-billionaire businessman.  This argument can be put into the form of a syllogism:

Major premise:  Because of stupid politicians, America no longer wins; and America will not win again until a successful businessman who knows how to win is elected president.

Minor premise: Donald Trump is unique in his business success and his shrewdness in knowing how to win, because he is a self-made multi-billionaire.

Conclusion:  Therefore, Americans need to elect Trump president.

Both of the premises are open to dispute.  I have challenged the minor premise by pointing to the evidence that Trump's business career shows many failures from his imprudent decisions, that he was saved from ruin by his father's life-long transfer of money to him, and so he is not the self-made billionaire that he claims to be.  He had a long string of bankruptcies that would have destroyed him were it not for the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled to him from his father.  This started early.  By age 3, the young Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars as an employee of his father.  By age 8, Donald was a millionaire. 

But now Trump has driven the national debt to over $40 trillion, and he doesn't have his father or anyone else to save the country from bankruptcy.

Trump's claims that as president, he can do anything he wants, and even become the most powerful man in history, are also false.  The Constitution limits the powers of the President and allows the other branches of government to check those powers.

Since American conservatives have generally upheld the constitutional system of limited government, it is hard to understand why any conservative would support Trump's claim of dictatorial power.  But those conservatives who have backed Trump's presidency--Slade calls them the "Dissident Right"--have argued that only a man like Trump with absolute power can save America from being destroyed by the Radical Left.  This argument was first made by Michael Anton in an essay published on September 5, 2016, with the title "The Flight 93 Election."  

Anton was referring to the United Airlines Flight 93 that was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists as part of the 9/11 attacks.  The terrorists had planned to crash the plane into a government building in Washington, DC, perhaps the Capitol Building.  But some of the passengers in the plane had learned by telephone about the hijacked planes that had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and into the Pentagon in Washington.  So the passengers realized that their plane was probably on a similar suicide mission.  They decided to charge the cockpit, hoping that if they fought off the hijackers, they could take over control of the plane.  To prevent that, the hijacker who was piloting the plane crashed it into a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on the plane.

Anton's essay began this way:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway.  You--or the leader of your party--may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane.  There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don't try, death is certain.  To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.  With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

If you believe that American politics is a life-or-death struggle between friends and enemies of the American way of life, and the enemies want to destroy that way of life, then you must do anything necessary to defeat those enemies, even if it means electing a man president who could himself bring about the end of that way of life.

A few years later, in his book The Stakes and in a podcast conversation with Curtis Yarvin, Anton suggested that Trump might have to become a "Red Caesar."  His book was about the high stakes in the election of 2020--making it the most important election in over a hundred years.  Anton concluded the book by warning that while his "fondest political dream is for a restoration of the American constitutional order," the conflict between Blue America and Red America could lead to the total collapse of the constitutional order.  Then what?

He considered various possibilities.  One of them was Caesarism.  "Caesarism is a particular form of one-man rule: halfway, as it were, between monarchy and tyranny.  It is monarchical in that a single person rules.  It is tyrannical in that there is no appeal; Caesar's word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law" (341).  Caesarism, therefore, can be defined as "authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity," where that necessity is the breakdown of the republican, constitutional order caused by the people becoming so corrupt that they lack the republican virtues required for liberty (342).

Anton explained that Caesarism has five kinds of benefits, which he saw in the history of ancient Rome's Caesars.  First, the benefits of Caesarism to Caesar are obvious--it satisfies his ambition for absolute power.

But there are also at least four benefits for a nation.  Caesarism can hold together a large nation and prevent it from breaking up.  In the case of the Roman Empire, it might have been broken up by factional conflict if Julius Caesar and is successors had not taken command.

Caesarism can also provide stability by preserving most of the formal institutions of the nation.

Caesarism can also calm factional conflict by subordinating all the factions to the rule of Caesar.

And it can preserve and even enhance the cultural and economic achievements of a great civilization, as was the case for Roman civilization under the Caesars.

Of course, Anton admitted, the great cost of Caesarism is the loss of liberty.  And yet when Caesarism comes, it's because liberty has already been lost (342-43).

In 2021, in a podcast conversation with Charles Haywood, Anton suggested that with the election of Biden as president, liberty had indeed been lost, because the Democrats would suppress all their opponents, so that the leftists would never give up their grip on power.  Anton said that he had "very little hope that a Republican can win a national election again, ever."

That prediction was proven false by Trump's election in 2024 to a second term.  Through a free and fair election, power was peacefully transferred from one party to another.  That was not a "Flight 93 Election."  That showed that American political liberty has not been lost.  (That election can be compared with the presidential election of 1800: the country's political polarization was so fierce that many people expected a civil war, and yet power was peacefully transferred from John Adams and the Federalist Party to Thomas Jefferson and the Republican Party.)

This shows that the American liberal democratic system can mediate partisan disputes by shifting power away from a party when it becomes unpopular.  Data from Gallup show this.  During Trump's first term, Trump's Republican Party became unpopular.  When Biden was elected in 2020, 49% of the people leaned more to the Democratic Party as compared with 43% leaning more to the Republican Party.  When Trump was elected in 2024, this was reversed--47% for the Republican Party, 43% for the Democratic Party--because Biden's policies had become unpopular.  But now, after less than two years of Trump's second term, Americans are leaning back towards the Democrats--49% for the Democratic Party, 39% for the Republican Party.  This shows that Trump's attempt to become a "Red Caesar" in his second term has made him even more unpopular than he was in his first term.

Clearly, then, the Trump conservatives have failed to win an overwhelming popular mandate for a Trumpian dictatorship.

To be continued in the next post .  .  .

Are Rape, Polygyny, and Unjust War Desirable and Thus Good for Homer's Men?

THE GOOD IS THE DESIRABLE

I have been persuaded by Aristotle that “the good is whatever is desirable for its own sake” (Rhetoric, 1362a22; NE, 1113a10, 1139a36-b6).  In his biological studies, Aristotle saw that in their voluntary activities, animals move to satisfy their desires in the light of their information about opportunities and threats in their particular circumstances (On the Movement of Animals).  This does not mean that the good is whatever an animal happens to desire at any moment, because an animal can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable.  Furthermore, what is desirable differs for each kind of animal, because each species has its own species-typical range of desires.  What is desirable also differs for different individuals with different natural temperaments and propensities.  

Human beings have a distinctive range of natural desires, and they are unique in their capacity for deliberate choice in choosing to intelligently manage their desires for the fullest and harmonious satisfaction of their desires over a whole life, which requires prudence (practical reasoning) in judging what is desirable for particular individuals in particular circumstances.

There are at least 20 natural desires: human beings generally desire (1) a complete life, (2) parental care, (3) sexual identity, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social status, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) social membership, (10) political rule, (11) courage in war, (12) health, (13) beauty, (14) property, (15) speech, (16) practical arts, (17) aesthetic arts, (18) storytelling, (19) religious transcendence, and (20) intellectual understanding.

Homer's men went to war so that they could win the glory of courageous fighting and then rape the enemy's women and take them as enslaved concubines.  If the good is the desirable, and if Homer's men fought in unjust wars to satisfy their natural desires for sexual mating, social status, and courage in war, was this good for them?  

No.  Lacking good practical judgment, they mistakenly desired what was not desirable for them.  That's why Homer's epics are tragic stories of heroes who suffer from their imprudent choices.  Sexual mating, social status, and courage in war are not truly desirable if they are pursued in such a way as to contradict the other natural desires.  For example, men who satisfy their desire for sexual mating by raping or abducting the wives of other men will provoke violent retaliation by those men who desire the justice of reciprocity--as in Menelaus' retaliation against Troy for Paris' abduction of Helen.

The Trojan War was deeply tragic because both sides lost.  With the fall of Troy, the Trojans were either massacred or enslaved.  And it is said that the best of the Greek warriors were killed in the war (Odyssey 3.108).  At the end of The Iliad, when Priam meets with Achilles to beg for Hector's body, both Priam and Achilles weep for the suffering the war has caused (24.475-550).  None of the Greeks who survived the war could recall the war without tearful regret, which included Nestor, Odysseus, and Menelaus (Odyssey 3.102-115, 4.75-112, 8.521-35).  And when Odysseus met Achilles in the underworld, Achilles regretted his imprudent choice to die fighting in the war for the sake of a glorious fame after death rather than living a long, peaceful life on earth: "Never try to reconcile me to death, glorious Odysseus.  I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the servant of another, some landless man with hardly enough to live on, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished" (11.489-92).

WAR AND PEACE

On at least two occasions during the war, Trojans and Greeks attempted to end the war so that they could enjoy the peace they all desired.  At the beginning of Book 3 of The Iliad, Menelaus sees Paris on the battlefield, and he runs towards him "thinking that he could get vengeance" for Paris's abduction of his wife.  Paris is so shaken with fear that he retreats to avoid being killed (3.21-37).  Seeing this, Hector--Paris's brother--shames him: 

Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling, better had you never been born, or killed unwedded. . . . Were you like this that time when in sea-wandering vessels, assembling oarsmen to help you, you sailed over the water, and mixed with the outlanders, and carried away a pretty woman from a remote land, whose relatives by marriage are strong spearmen, but bringing a big sorrow to your father, your city, and all our people [demos], to yourself shame but pleasing to your enemies?  And now you would not stand up against Menelaus, loved by Ares?  Thus, you would learn what manner of warrior he is whose lovely wife you have taken.  The gifts of Aphrodite will not help you--your lyre, your hair, and your attractiveness--when you are lying mingled with the dust.  But the Trojans are such cowards!  Were they not, they would have dressed you in a shirt of rocks for all the evil you have done to us (3.39-57).

"Shirt of rocks" is a euphemism for death by stoning. 

Paris responds by saying that Hector has rightly scolded him and not beyond what he deserves.  He does not attempt to justify what he did in abducting Helen and provoking the Greeks to attack Troy.  

He then proposes that he and Menelaus should meet in single combat to the death, so that whoever wins will take Helen and all her wealth.  The Trojans and Greeks should swear oaths of friendship and peace.  After the duel is decided, the Trojans can stay in Troy in peace, and the Greeks can "return home to horse-pasturing Argos and Achaia the land of fair women" (3.59-75).

Hector was happy to accept this proposal.  He began separating the Trojan and Greek warriors and telling them to be seated.  He explained the coming duel and how this would allow all of them to go home in peace.  

Menelaus agreed: "I think the Argives and Trojans can go free of each other at last.  You have suffered much evil for the sake of my quarrel since Paris began it.  As for that one of us two to whom death and doom are given, let him die; the rest of you be made friends with each other."  He asked for Priam to seal the pledges of friendship with sacred oaths because his sons were not to be trusted.  "Always it is, that the hearts in the younger men are unstable, but when an elder man is among them, he looks behind him and in front, so that all comes out far better for both sides."

It is said that both the Greeks and the Trojans were "joyful, hoping now to be rid of all the sorrow of warfare" (3.76-112).  They stripped off their armor and laid it on the ground around them.  They were all seated in silence.  The fighting had ended.

Priam called for his senior advisors, "the elders of the people [demos]," who were known to be "men of prudence" who were the leaders of the Trojans.  When they saw Helen approaching them, they spoke to one another: 

The Trojans and the Greeks in their fine armor should not be blamed for suffering so long for such a woman, being as she is.  It is uncanny how she seems to look like the immortal goddesses.  But still, though she is like this, let her sail away, or she may bring about catastrophe for us and for our children in the future (3.156-60).

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle cited this passage in Homer as illustrating how in the exercise of practical judgment or prudence, we must be on guard against pleasure, because "when pleasure is on trial, we are not impartial judges."  (Here the Greek word adekastoi for "impartial" literally means "unbribed.")  "The right course is therefore to feel towards pleasure as the elders of the people felt toward Helen, and to apply their words to her on every occasion; for it we roundly bid her be gone, we shall be less likely to err" (1109b8-13).  Homer's heroes allowed their lustful desire for sexual pleasure and women's beauty to distort their judgment about when courage in war is truly desirable.  This explains why, Aristotle thought, that while the courage of Homer's heroes resembled true courage in being moved by the desire for the noble and the sense of shame, it was not really true courage as dictated by reason or prudential judgment (1115b15-21, 1116a15-30).  The Trojan elders of the people saw that fighting courageously in a war over Helen was not true courage because it did not serve the best interests of the Trojan people and was therefore imprudent. 

Before the duel began, there were two kinds of appeals to divine providential justice.  Agamemnon prayed to Zeus and other gods to enforce the sacred oaths that they had taken, so that the gods should punish anyone who breaks the oath to accept the outcome of the duel (3.275-291).

Another kind of appeal to divine justice was when the "common people" (laoi)--the ordinary Greek and Trojan warriors--prayed to Zeus:

Father Zeus, nursed on Ida, you are the most magnificent and greatest!  Whichever of these two men is to blame for what is happening to Greece and Troy, let that man die and so descend to Hades, and may we have a truce and pact of friendship (3.320-324).

This was followed by Menelaus praying to Zeus:

Lord Zeus!  Grant that I punish this man who wronged me first, this godlike Paris!  Bring him down low beneath my hands, so that all people in the future shrink from harming a host who treated them with friendship (3.352-355). 

Tragically, the hope of the Trojans and the Greeks that a duel between Menelaus and Paris would resolve the dispute over Helen and end the war was frustrated.  In the duel, Menelaus got the upper hand, but Aphrodite rescued Paris, scooped him from the battlefield, and put him in his bedroom, where Aphrodite forced Helen to join him.  Menelaus ranged like a wild beast looking for Paris.  "None of the Trojans or their noble allies could find where Paris was--though if they had, they would not have concealed him out of friendship.  Indeed, the Trojans detested Paris, as if he were black death" (3.450-54).

Agamemnon spoke to the Trojans, saying that since Menelaus had clearly won the duel, they should return Helen and her treasure and pay an extra compensation as a lesson to people in the future.  The Greeks shouted their agreement.

But then, in Book 4, the gods gathered around Zeus, and they argued over whether they should stir up war again in Troy or allow the warring sides to reconcile in peace.  Hera and Athena wanted the Trojans to be destroyed, and they persuaded Zeus to send Athena down to Troy to spur the Trojans to violate the truce, which would provoke a resumption of the war.

Athena fell to earth as a shooting star, and all the Trojan and Greek warriors who saw this were amazed.  They spoke to one another saying: "Either there will be evil war and dreadful battle, or else friendship will be set between both sides by Zeus, who is appointed to serve up war to human beings" (4.82-84).

Athena entered the crowd disguised as a Trojan named Laodocus, who was looking for Pandarus, the leader of the Trojan allies from Zelea, who was known for his skill as an archer.  She told him that if he shot and killed Menelaus with an arrow, Paris would surely give him great gifts.

"So spoke Athena, and she persuaded his mindless mind [phrenas aphroni]" (4.104).  Phrenai refers to the organs of sense, judgment, understanding, or thought, usually located in the chest.  Aphronos means "lacking in phrenai" or "foolish."  So Homer suggests that this was the mindless mistake of an imprudent man.  Pandarus did shoot an arrow at Menelaus that wounded him, but Menelaus survived.  

Believing that the Trojans had broken their sacred oath of friendship, Agamemnon roused the Greeks to fight.  But he had to persuade the leaders of each military company to persuade their warriors to resume the war.  And "when he saw men shirking from the danger of hateful war, he scolded them in anger" (4.240-241).

The Greek warrior Antilochus was the first to kill a Trojan when he killed Echepolus, a Trojan leader (4.456).  Apollo shouted to the Trojans to enter the battle, while Athena roused the Greeks to fight.

After gory descriptions of some of the fighting in this first day of the new war, Homer concludes Book 4: "So many Greeks and Trojans on that day lay face-down in the dust beside each other" (4.545).

This sequence of events in Books 3 and 4 of The Iliad manifests the fundamental tragedy of the Trojan War and of Homer's world generally.  The tragedy is that Homer's men stumble mindlessly into unjust violence and war despite the fact that their social structure of decision-making allows them to recognize the desirability of peace and the need for moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  That tragedy is deepened by the failure of the gods to support those impartial rules of justice that would peacefully resolve disputes if they were enforced by punishment of those violating the rules.

THE ONE, THE FEW, AND THE MANY

I have written about how the natural desire for political rule often leads to a social structure of public decision-making in which power is distributed between three groups--the one, the few, and the many.  Both the Greeks and Trojans show that three-part structure of power.  

First, there is one preeminent leader--Agamemnon for the Greeks, Priam for the Trojans.  This preeminent leader is often called the basileus.  This is sometimes translated as "king."  But "chief" might be a better translation.

Second, there are a few high-status men who are "leaders" (hegemones) of the community.  This includes the council of elders and the leaders of each company of warriors.  So, for example, Odysseus is the leader of the men he brought to Troy from Ithaca.

Third, the "common people" (designated by the Greek words demos and laoi) constitute the majority of the people in the community, who are not leaders, but who do have some power in so far as they can express their opinions, and they must be persuaded to obey the leaders.  And so, the ordinary Greek and Trojan warriors could shout their support for the truce to end the war, and when the truce was broken, they had to be persuaded by their leaders to resume the war.  While this is certainly not a democracy in any strict sense, the demos do have a voice in decision-making.  We might see here the early roots of democracy in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations of the Bronze Age, which will eventually evolve into Athenian democracy.

IMPARTIAL RULES OF ACTION

We can also see here the evolution of laws as moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  

The Greeks and the Trojans have to choose a side in the conflict between Menelaus and Paris.  It's not surprising that the Greeks take the side of the Greek Menelaus.  But it's surprising that the Trojans don't take the side of the Trojan Paris.  The Trojans hate Paris for his bad conduct in abducting Helen and for thus provoking the Greek attack on Troy.  Even Paris's brother Hector condemns him and says that the Trojans should stone him to death.  Amazingly, everyone blames Paris as the cause of the war, while no one blames Menelaus because they all assume that he is justified in taking vengeance on Paris.

They seem to have adopted the impartial moral rule that anyone who is guilty of raping or abducting another man's wife should be punished.  This rule is impartial because it applies to anyone guilty of such bad conduct.  Even if the perpetrator is your brother or a member of a powerful family, you must agree to his punishment.

In this case, Paris' punishment would have come from being defeated by Menelaus in the duel, except that the gods allowed Aphrodite to save Paris from being killed, and then the gods allowed Athena to trick Pandarus into attacking Menelaus and provoking a resumption of the war.

THE FUTILITY OF PRAYING FOR DIVINE JUSTICE

Homer shows us that the Greeks and Trojans were mistaken in appealing to the gods to enforce justice.  They prayed to the gods to enforce the religious oaths supporting the truce and to decide the guilt of Paris or Menelaus through trial by combat.  The gods answered these prayers by tricking a man into violating his oath and by saving Paris from defeat in the duel.

Previously, I have written about the problem of relying on divine revelation to resolve conflicts in "The Last Duel" -- the movie and the book.  It's about the last legal trial by combat in France in 1386.  

The film stars Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight who challenges Jacques Le Gris (played by Adam Driver) to a legal duel after Carrouges's wife, Marguerite (played by Jodie Comer), accuses Le Gris of raping her.  Ben Affleck stars as Count Pierre d'Alencon, the lord to whom Carrouges and Le Gris are pledged as vassals.

In the Middle Ages, in legal cases where it was difficult for the courts to reach a decision, one of the parties in the dispute could challenge the other to a duel, in which God would intervene to allow the innocent party to kill the guilty party, who would be condemned to eternal damnation.  In this case, Carrouges was fighting as the champion of his wife, so that if he were killed, this would show God's judgment that both he and his wife were guilty of lying under oath, and Marguerite would be immediately stripped naked and burned at the stake.  Both of their souls would be eternally punished in Hell, while Le Gris's soul would win eternal reward in Heaven.

I have argued that this story--both in the book and in the movie--suggests that we cannot rely on God's Revelation of the truth to resolve legal and moral conflicts.  Rather, we must rely on our human reason to search for the truth.  To decide whether Marguerite was telling the truth about Le Gris raping her, we must use our reason in examining the evidence to decide whether it is probable or not that she was telling the truth.

Similarly, Homer suggests that human beings must formulate and enforce impartial rules of justice on their own without expecting divine support for justice.  If Homer's men had understood this, the Trojans would have stoned Paris to death, they would have punished Pandarus for violating the truce, and they would have negotiated with the Greeks to preserve the truce.

They would have seen that while courage in a just war is desirable and thus good, courage in an unjust war is not.

But, of course, if this had happened, Homer's story of the Trojan War would not have been the epic tragedy that it is.

Was This the Face that Launched the Thousand Ships? Homeric Fighting over Beautiful Women

In Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, Faustus conjures up the spirit of Helen of Troy and says: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"  

Many readers of Homer have asked the same question--with the same hint of disbelief.  Was this the face that launched over a thousand Greek ships to Troy for a ten-year long war?  Surely so many men would not engage in such a destructive war just to settle a dispute over one woman. 

But as Jonathan Gottschall has pointed out in The Rape of Troy, the primary conflicts in the Iliad and the Odyssey are over sexual access to women.  Moreover, Homer's men compete not just for any women but for beautiful women.  Homer also suggests that this competition for access to women was rendered especially intense by the shortage of available women.

Helen was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.  She was the daughter of Zeus and Leda.  She married Menelaus of Sparta.  Her abduction by Paris of Troy (or perhaps her elopement with him) started the Trojan War.  But this is only one of many examples in the Iliad and the Odyssey of men attempting to gain sexual access to women claimed by other men.  The Greek warriors fought the Trojans not just to recover Helen for Menelaus but with the expectation that with the fall of Troy the Greeks could rape and enslave the Trojan women as their concubines, which they did.

And, of course, the primary conflict in the Odyssey arises from the suitors' meddling with women that Odysseus claims as his exclusive sexual property--his wife Penelope and his enslaved concubines.  Eventually, Odysseus massacres all the suitors and kills the twelve slave women who have been raped or seduced by the suitors.  He tells Telemachus and two male servants: "Hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them.  They will forget the things the suitors made them do with them in secret, through Aphrodite" (Odyssey 22.442-45).

Now it is true that Homer's men are competing with one another not just for women but also for wealth and social status.  But these proximate categories of competition--for status, wealth, and women--all serve the ultimate goal of enhanced reproductive success.  Wealthier high-status men have more sexual access to women, which means greater reproductive fitness.

Men with wealth and high status could be polygynous.  Although Homer's world was legally monogamous in that a man could have only one wife, it was effectively polygynous in that a man could have exclusive sexual access to multiple women, including enslaved concubines.  As a consequence of this polygynous mating by rich and powerful men, many low-status men had no mates at all.

Gottschall shows that the violent competition among the men for sexual access to women was a consequence of a shortage of available young women relative to young men.  This would explain why so many unmarried young men were willing to go to war or join raiding parties with the hope of capturing women.  

There were two reasons for this shortage of female reproductive capacity--the polygynous institution of slave-concubinage that allowed high-status men to monopolize many women and female infanticide (killing female infants either by abandoning them or by feeding the boys more than the girls).

Gottschall concedes that the practice of female infanticide is never explicitly acknowledged in Homer's poems.  But the poems do convey the cultural preference for sons over daughters.  They also suggest that in many families sons outnumbered daughters.

Priam's sons outnumber his daughters four to one; Zeus mentions many illegitimate sons and no illegitimate daughters (Iliad 14.312-28); among the dead 'wives of the might' (11.227) that parade by Odysseus in the underworld we hear of seventeen sons and only one daughter (Odyssey 11.23-332); Nausicaa is apparently an only daughter among five brothers (Odyssey 6.57-65); Briseis mentions three brothers and no sisters (Iliad 19.291-300); Andromache mentions seven brothers and no sisters (Iliad 6.414-30); Hector, Sarpedon, Achilles, and other young warriors have sons and no daughters; and, while we never hear of Nestor's sisters, we know he has eleven brothers along with seven sons (11.692-93) (Gottschall 2008, 128).

The strongest predictor of violence within and between societies is a male-biased sex ration--especially when the number of available young men exceeds the number of available young women.  There is a good biological reason for this: unmarried men have, on average, higher levels of circulating testosterone than married men of the same age.  Testosterone levels also drop when men become fathers and care for their children.  We can assume, therefore, that Homer's world was especially violent because it was saturated with testosterone, particularly in those young men who went off to war hoping to capture women that they could rape and enslave as their concubines.  Charles Darwin recognized this: "When, owing to female infanticide, the women of a tribe were few, the habit of capturing wives from neighboring peoples would naturally arise" (Descent of Man [2004], 660).

Escaping from Homer's world of manly violence, the best way to lower the violence in any society is to enforce a strictly monogamous marriage system, with a roughly equal ratio of available men to available women, so that men are equal in their chance to find a sexual mate.  Indeed, as I will argue in a future post, the evolutionary spread of monogamy among the modern Western liberal societies was largely responsible for the declining violence in those societies.

I will also have to show that while the good is the desirable, what Homer's men desire--rape, polygyny, and unjust war--are not truly desirable and thus not good.

Why Do Homeric Men Fight So Much? "Don't Ask Such a Stupid Question! It's Women! We Fight Over Women!"

Prompted by the popularity of Christopher Nolan's movie based on Homer's Odyssey, the Iliad and the Odyssey have become bestselling books.  Surely many of those people now reading (or rereading) Homer's epic poems will ask the one question that Homer's readers have been asking for thousands of years:  Why?  Why do Homer's men fight so much?  

Some of the readers might also think about how this question about the male warrior culture of Homer's world can be generalized as a question about the human nature of male violence: why is it universally true--across time and across cultures--that most of the perpetrators and victims of violence are men and not women?

This is a perplexing question because male violence is so self-destructive that it seems that everyone suffers from it--everyone loses.  The men in Homer's poems clearly recognize that a peaceful life--with the pleasures of home, wives, and children--is more desirable than a life of "terrible warfare" (Iliad 2.291-96, 22.64; Odyssey 6.180-85).  So it's hard to understand why they don't choose to live a more peaceful life.  

Of course, men like Achilles and Odysseus fight because the heroic warrior wins fame (kleos) and honor (time).  But both Achilles and Odysseus weep when they think about their suffering lives (Iliad, 24.508-555; Odyssey, 8.520-585, 9.1-20).  And when Odysseus sees Achilles in the underworld, Achilles tells him that he regrets his choice to die heroically and win immortal glory in the Trojan war rather than to live a long life in peace: "I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead" (Odyssey, 11.489-492).

To the question of why they fight, Homer's men seem to answer that they have no choice--that events are beyond their control.  Odysseus declares: "We are men to whom Zeus gave the fate of living through hard wars, from youth to old age, until we perish, each of us" (Iliad, 14.85-87).  But this begs the question:  why does Zeus give them this fate, and why do they resign themselves to this fate?

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin's answer was what he called the "law of battle": "With savages, for instance the Australians, the women are the constant cause of war both between members of the same tribe and between distinct tribes.  So no doubt it was in ancient times; nam fuit ante Helenam mulier teterrima belli causa. ['For even before Helen of Troy a woman was a most hideous cause of war.']" (627).  Darwin concluded from this "that the greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and energy of man, in comparison with woman, were acquired during primeval times, and have subsequently been augmented, chiefly through the contests of rival males for the possession of the females" (674).

Anthropologists have studied many foraging bands and horticulturalist tribes who live by Darwin's "law of battle."  For example, the Yanomami are an indigenous tribal people of the Amazonian rainforest who live as foraging horticulturalists, and they have been called the "fierce people" because 25% to 40% of all male deaths are caused by war.  When anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon asked one Yanomamo man why they were always fighting, the man thought this was a ridiculous question: "What?  Don't ask such a stupid question!  It is women!  Women!  We fight over women!" (Chagnon 1979, 87).  Chagnon confirmed this when he found that the most successful warriors had the largest number of offspring. 

But why is it men fighting over women rather than women fighting over men?  The Darwinian explanation of this was best developed by Robert Trivers in his Parental Investment Theory of sexual selection (1972).  Females typically invest more in reproduction than do males, and thus the greater parental investment of the females becomes a valuable resource for the males who invest less, and consequently the males will compete among themselves for access to those females' reproductive capacity.  

The difference in parental investment starts with the different sizes of the gametes.  The biological definition of a female is the member of the species with larger sex cells, while the male is the member with smaller sex cells.  Females have a few large and expensive eggs.  Males have many small and cheap sperm.  From the beginning, therefore, reproduction is usually more costly for women than for men.  And once an egg is fertilized, the mother must invest in nine months of pregnancy, followed by years of feeding and rearing her offspring.  Consequently, women need to be discriminating in their choice of mates--hoping to find a male willing and able to invest more in the offspring than just a sperm.

By contrast, men can attempt to produce many offspring with multiple women.  But if every man attempts this, some men will succeed, and other men will not reproduce at all.  It comes down to supply and demand, with a shortage of female reproductive capacity relative to male demand.  As a result, men are inclined to engage in risky, even deadly, competition with other men for access to scarce female reproductive capacity.  Of course, most men most of the time are not fully conscious of their being driven by violent competition with other men for reproductive success.  But evolution has shaped male psychology to fight for sexual access to women and thus maximize their reproductive fitness even without men being fully aware that the ultimate goal of what they are doing is reproductive success.

That this Darwinian explanation of male violence applies to Homer's heroic ethic of masculinity is well argued by Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (2008).  That will be the topic for my next post.