Thoreau famously wrote, in Walden,  that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and I suppose he was right.  Remember, though, that’s only most men.  Some men lead lives that are so full of accomplishments, derring-do, scrapes, fights, learning, loving and adventure that it almost defies the imagination.  Some men lead lives that make James Bond look like a homebody.

One of those men was named Richard Burton.

No, not that one.  The other one.

Not this guy.

This guy.

If you ask one hundred people on the street who Richard Burton was, probably ninety-nine of them will say “that Welsh dude who was married to Liz Taylor.”  To me, this is indicative that we are a fundamentally unserious people.

Since there’s nothing wrong with being unserious from time to time, but there’s a lot wrong with being, you know, fundamentally unserious, let me tell you about Richard Burton.  The other one.

The other Richard Burton is one of my true, genuine, authentic heroes, a man who excelled in fields as diverse as sword fighting, sex, ethnology, languages and exploration.  Born at a time when the sun never set on the British Empire, Burton traveled in India, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, in service to King and Country and his own restless, insatiable curiosity.

Wikipedia introduces Burton as  “an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat.”

Born into a poor Anglo-Irish family, and from the very beginning he was one of those fellows who never quite fits in.  His father was distracted, and a chemist, and the family knocked about Europe, living in both France and Italy during Richard’s formative years.  During that time, he showed his linguistic ability by learning French, Italian, Neapolitan and Latin, and some of the Roma language.

In England and Ireland, the Roma, or gypsies, are called Tinkers.  Due to his dark good looks, there was some speculation that Burton was a gypsy . . . but that was probably the malicious gossip of jealous men.

Burton attended Trinity College, Oxford, where he added Arabic to his linguistic repertoire, and spent the rest of his time flying falcons, fencing, and going to steeplechases in violation of college rules, which led to his expulsion.  Leaving for the last time, he drove his carriage through the flower beds of the college—-not the last time he’d whizz in the Imperial Wheaties.

Exasperated, his father purchased him a commission in the Indian Army, which, of course, meant the East India Company.  Burton said dismissively of himself that he was “fit for nothing more than to be shot at for sixpence a day.”  More languages followed—-Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Persian and additional refinements to his Arabic.  In the army of John Company, Burton continued to not fit in.

At the time, British India was changing.  In the early stages of colonialism, the British had run things very few people indeed.  As time marched on, more people began to come over to India from England, and increasingly, “people” meant women as well as men.  This changed the social dynamic of the British in India.  Whereas previously, it was considered no bad thing for an Englishman to consort with natives, the arrival of Englishwomen meant that native mistresses—or, God forbid—wives!—were increasingly frowned upon.

Well, Burton was having none of that.  He was, you might say, interested in sex, and he was interested in India, and he thought that one of the best ways to learn about a new culture, to learn a new language, was to engage in what they used to call the Act of Venus with locals.  (To this day, many linguists will admit that a “pillow teacher” is the best way to learn a new language.)

This was, of course, the Victorian age, and Queen Victoria had famously been advised on her wedding night to “Lie still and think of the Empire”—-it was a time when female sexuality was, shall we say, not enthusiastically celebrated among the English.

We do not ‘get jiggy’

He also kept a menagerie of monkeys, in the hopes of observing them long enough to crack the code of their language.  History doesn’t confirm that one of the thirty or so languages he spoke was Monki.

The more time he spent learning languages, learning customs, and making the beast with two backs, the less he fit in with the regular Britishers he served among.  He was admired for his ferocity—his nickname was “Ruffian Dick”  both because of his “demonic ferocity” and because he had “fought in single combat more enemies than perhaps any other man of his time.”

What do you do with a soldier who doesn’t fit in?  A soldier who is darker than the average Englishman, and speaks the languages?  You send him on detached duty, in other words, you make him a spy.  There isn’t a whole lot of information about Burton’s spy-like activities around, but one of his detractors wrote, in an obituary, that Burton traveled extensively in areas that later became of interest to the Empire, and if you can read between the lines at all, that says “Burton was a spy.”  He was officially attached to the Survey of India,  in the Sindh region.

No, I’m not a spy.

That led to Burton deciding to see what Mecca was like.  So, in Burtonesque fashion, he up and went.  He disguised himself as a Muslim, actually as a variety of Muslims, including a Pashtun tribesman, had himself circumcised to lower the risk of detection, and went to Mecca, enduring bandit attacks on the caravan he was traveling with.  Now, at that point in time, Europeans basically got to see Mecca if they were slaves, and no other way.  Non-believers (i.e., “kaffirs”) discovered in Mecca tended to get ripped, as the phrase goes, limb from limb, or occasionally just hacked to death.

Yeah, they made a board game

England must be indeed rich in talent when she can afford to waste in the routine of consular duties a man of the courage, the capacities, and the vast acquirements of Burton. It is true he was ill fitted to run in official harness, and he had a Byronic love of shocking people, of telling tales against himself that had no foundation in fact, but he might have rendered greater service to his country had a sphere of activity been found for him adapted to his special qualifications. The knighthood bestowed upon him in 1886 was but an empty honour.

Check out Uncle Lew’s other columns in his series Wolves Among Dogs, here in The Paleo Garden.  

1066 and all that is a quasi-satirical look at English history—-a Dummies’ Guide before there were Dummies’ Guides—in a short hand, breezy iteration.  I haven’t read it, but I like the idea of it, and plan, one of these days, on picking it up.  But if you’re a careful reader, you’ve noticed that the title of this post isn’t 1066 at all—it’s 1055.

1055?  What the heck?  Why, as we all know, Harald Hardrada and William the Bastard hadn’t even decided to tag team Harald Godwinson at that point!

Where did all these dang Vikings come from?

Now, I’ve always loved history, and as I get older and read more, I’m continually amazed, to my consternation, at the gaping holes in my knowledge.  This is one of those good news/bad news situations, as its always a pleasure to read more history and find out new things.  I think George Santayana said something about ignoring the lessons of history only means you’re going to repeat them.  I think Karl Marx said something about history repeating, first as tragedy and then as farce.  I think William Faulkner said something about the past not only not being over, but not even being the past.  Didn’t they?

History does what again?

Recently, I’ve been reading more history, again.  I read me some historical fiction, I do me some wiki-wanders.  (If you want to think of the internet in a positive way, tell yourself it’s an electronic Library of Alexandria.)  As a Westerner, as a child of the Anglo-Celtic migration, I tend to see history through the lens of my tribe.  Isn’t that natural?  I am a product of my time, yes, and of my place, yes, but I am also heir to the history of my peoples, my clan, my tribe, my line, going back to the beginning.

As a product of where and when and who I am from, I know, of course, about 1066.  1066 was a big year in the story of the British Isles, the year William the Conqueror, well, conquered England, the year of the Norman Invasion.  1066 was a pivot point for England, a paradigm shift, the substitution of a new mythology for the old mythology.  (One, of course, of many such shifts—-history, she is always on the move, even if we don’t notice.)  The Normans sailed over from France and seized England, and things were never the same.  Of course, the Normans weren’t really French, or they were just barely French—they were the sons of Norsemen who had seized the coast of France and settled themselves there.

O Lord, deliver us from the fury of the Northmen!

As big a year as 1066 was, however, it wasn’t the only year in the 11th century that was a pretty big deal.  1055 was another very big year.  You could make a good faith argument that 1055 was as important a year as 1066 was, maybe even bigger.

You see, in 1055 the Seljuk Turks seized the Caliphate of Baghdad.

This was big.  This was important.  This changed everything.  The Seljuk Turks, you see, didn’t come from Turkey.  The Seljuk Turks came out of Central Asia.  Ah!  Central Asia.  The cauldron of nations.  Central Asia, the heartland of the world.  The geographical pivot of history.    The Seljuk Turks, you see, were Tartars.

Or Tatars.  But not ‘taters.

Someone give this man a bow!

The Tartars came out of Central Asia like a whirlwind, like a hurricane, like a storm.  They came out of Central Asia like a thunderbolt.  That’s pretty much what tribes from Central Asia did, for a long, long span of human history.  The job description for a tribe from Central Asia could be summed up as “Go conquer those settled peoples, kill them, and take their stuff.”  This is kind of like the job description for a tribe from Scandinavia, only with more horses and less ships.

The Seljuk Turks weren’t the first tribe to come howling out of the wilderness with fire and sword, we’ve got records of that happening pretty much as far back as we’ve got records.  The Huns, anyone?  The Scythians?   Well, yes, but we’re talking about the Seljuks.  Pushing West from the Oghuz Yabgu state—coincidentally centered around Lake Issyk-Kul —the Seljuk Turks took over Persia, and then captured Baghdad in 1055.  At that time, the population of Baghdad was over one million souls—maybe twice that.  Baghdad was huge, not merely in size, not merely in population, but in importance.  It was the center of the Muslim world.  The Islamic world, up to that point, had been pretty much an Arab affair.

And Toghrul Beg, leader of the Seljuks, grandson of the Seljuk himself, took it.  Oh, he didn’t take it for himself, mind you.  He “restored order and constitutional government” (to coin a phrase) on behalf of the Abbasid caliph.  Then the Abbasid caliphate began to learn one of the old, old lessons about using barbarians to help you fight your enemies.  The Romans, a few centuries earlier,  had learned this lesson as well.  The long and the short of it is this: the Abbasid caliphate became less Abbasid, and more Turkic, at about that time.  Funny how that works.

The Seljuks took Baghdad, and took power, and then they all lived happily ever after.  That’s how fairy tales end, right?  Oh wait, I forgot, this isn’t a fairy tale, this is history.  Because taking Baghdad was just the start.  Once they had Baghdad, they started looking around for other sheep to shear, and they saw Constantinople.  Although the Seljuks never succeeded in sacking Constantinople, they did trim down the edges of the Byzantine Empire pretty good, especially under Alp Arslan at the battle of Manzikert.  And they didn’t live happily ever after, or at least not all of them did.  Because just as the Seljuks had moved West and taken over, other tribes coming out of the cauldron of nations, the womb of nations, Central Asia, began to do the same thing.

You talkin’ to me, Frank?

The stories of those tribes, the Osmanli Turks, Temujin, Tamerlane, like the stories of the tribes before the Seljuks—-your Huns, your Alans, your Scythians—are stories for another time.  But there is a reason these stories fascinate me, and a reason I write about them here at the Paleo Garden.  All of these tribes that came out of Central Asia were pastoral nomads.  Since agriculture includes the domestication and cultivation of animals, we can’t call these tribes truly “paleo,” but there’s now way to deny that they were primal as all get out.  They were free range humans, they were wolves among dogs.  They lived off of animals—-meat, milk, airag.

For a thousand years, the settled peoples of the world had no answer to the riddle posed by these nomads.

Check out Uncle Lew’s other columns in his series Wolves Among Dogs, here in The Paleo Garden.  

I’ve always been fat.  Not “fat fat” and not “American fat” in that I have always been able to walk, and touch my toes with a little grunting and straining.  The only time BGP (Before Going Paleo) that I was in decent shape was when I was in the Marine Corps.  I got into shape at boot camp, and maintained that shape, more or less, until I got out.  Then I fell back into my cheap civilian ways and started getting fat again.

I’ve never liked being fat.  It’s no fun.  Clothes never quite fit, or if they do, the clothes feel as if they were made by the infamous tailoring firm of Omar Tentmakers, LLC.  (They’re quite a big–ha ha—firm, and do a lot of business in America.)  I never liked wheezing my way up stairs.

I didn’t, of course, do much of anything about it, although I had a pretty strong belief that I could, with sufficient willpower and sufficient grinding exercise, do something about it.  I knew, or believed, or thought, that with hours and hours on a treadmill, and day after day, week after week, and month after month of minuscule portions of bland, boring food, I could lose weight.

Frankly, I’m something of a sybarite.  I like comfort, and ease, and good food.  I’m not a hedonist, but I do have hedonistic characteristics.  I consoled myself with the thought that I was, in essence, a hobbit, and that hobbits, as Tolkein wrote, incline to stoutness.

Everything in life is a trade-off.  Time and energy, like money, is fungible, and the time, energy and money I thought I would have to spend getting in shape looked to be a considerable lump sum.  Using the informal calculus of desire, I more or less decided that the return on investment wasn’t worth the investment.

When I said I was something of a sybarite, I didn’t mean that I simply wallowed in rich living.  I took in the generalized dietary advice that The Man handed out.  You know what I’m talking about: don’t eat eggs, don’t eat bacon, avoid fats in general and saturated fat in particular, eat lots of whole grains, eat pasta.  They pointed the way, and I followed it, and sure enough, I not only did not lose weight but I continued to slowly pack on the pounds.

Then Zach started talking to me about this weirdo in California, some sort of movie economist, with a fancy pants schmantsy “de” in the middle of his name.  (That’s Art de Vany, folks!)  I thought about it a little, but it seemed to me to be one of those faddish things.  Zach kept talking de Vany up, though, and started sending me “risque” pictures, showing the weight loss he (Zach) was achieving.

Eventually, I figured I’d give it a try.

Oh my goodness.

I started tapering off on my carbohydrate load.  That was kind of tough, both as a matter of mental habit, and of physical habit.  Remember, for most of my adult life the PTB (Powers That Be) have been pushing carbohydrates as the right fuel for the human body.  I was mentally predisposed to favor foods like rice and beans, cooked up with just a bit of ham, and thought that Hamburger Helper made a great meal for the family, being cheap, easy and nutritious (said in context!).  It required a fairly severe mental shift to turn away from that folkway.

It also required a fairly severe physical shift.  I like paradoxes, and one of my favorite paradoxes has always been how easy it is to kill people, and how hard it is to kill people.  The human body is a marvelously adaptable organism, and the human body WILL run on sugars and carbohydrates and High Fructose Corn Syrup.  It really will.  Now, it won’t run all that well, but it will run.  Marvelously adaptable little monkeys, that’s us.

And my body had adapted to the fuel I was running it on.  Changing that wasn’t all that easy.  I still remember those first few weeks, as I put myself into ketosis.   I was shopping at a local HEB and made the mistake of walking through the bakery.  The aromas of all the fresh breads almost drove me wild.  My mouth flooded, literally flooded, with saliva.  I was gulping like a politician in front of a grand jury, I swear.

Somehow I toughed it out.  I’d already read enough, from de Vany, from Cordain, from Taubes, from Nikoley, and from Sisson, to think that this whole paleo/primal/Evolutionary Fitness thing made some sense.  I was already beginning to feel, and see, the results of the diet.

Diet?  Yeah.  It’s funny, how we’ve changed the meanings of words.  I’m sure Orwell would get a chuckle out of how we Americans have reshaped the word diet.  Today, a diet is something grueling you put yourself through in order to lose weight.  Isn’t that how we think of it?  “I need to go on a diet.”  Diet is just die with a t at the end.  But is that really what diet means?  To my way of thinking, diet is simply a description of what you eat.    Hey, and not to quibble with the Monolith of Certainty that is Wikipedia, but do you notice how that entry talks up carbohydrates?  Feh, says I.

Anyway, I left the bakery section, bought a ham sandwich at the deli and ate the ham, lettuce and tomato, and threw the bread away.  Another week went by and I went back to the bakery section.  Guess what?  My mouth didn’t flood.  I smelled the bread, and yes it still smelled good, but I didn’t crave it.

I’ve been living the paleo life for a little over a year so far.  I’ve only lost about fifty pounds.  Yeah, “only.”  That’s fifty pounds gross weight, I’ll hasten to point out.  The paleo way isn’t just about diet, although diet plays a vitally important role.  The paleo way is also about activating your body.  As Mark Sisson has said, you should also move around a lot, and lift heavy things.   I don’t do dead lifts, bench press or chronic cardio, but I walk a dozen or so miles a week, and I carry Genghis the Medicine Ball, and I do “around the world” with a one pood  kettlebell, and I’ve packed on about fifteen pounds of muscle that didn’t use to be there.

And it’s easy.

They say repetition is important for emphasis, so let me emphasize: and it’s easy.

The exercise I get doesn’t feel like a chore, doesn’t feel like drudgery—it feels like playtime.  I don’t say that I need to go work out, I say I need some play time.  When I sit down to eat, I don’t confront, with trepidation, another boring, bland meal of pottage, I sit down to  steak and eggs, or solyanka,  or beef stew light on potatoes and heavy on carrots and onions.

And it’s easy.

I always knew I could get in shape, with sufficient effort, and I always thought that the effort would be high and prolonged.  Although it pains me to admit it, I was flat-out wrong.  I’m losing weight, I’m getting stronger, I’m getting healthier, I sleep better, I feel better . . . and it’s easy, and getting easier all the time.  I spend more time cooking, and a little more on food (I’ve pretty much switched over to grass fed, hormone free and antibiotic free beef), but the results I’m getting are simply outstanding for such a low investment.

I think it’s paleo-riffic.

Check out Uncle Lew’s other columns in his series Wolves Among Dogs, here in The Paleo Garden.

Merry Christmas from all of us here at The Paleo Garden.  

My wife is with child.  As I write this, she’s right at seven months along, and we’re sitting here two weeks after receiving a diagnosis of gestational diabetes.

It’s my opinion that one of the worst, most painful things in this world of ours is to have a loved one be sick.  I don’t care to be sick or in pain myself, but given the choice, I’d rather it be me than my wife or children.  (As regards my friends, hey, it’s a toss-up!)  I experienced, after the diagnosis, a few moments of the kind of sheer terror, the mind-blanking fear, that I mostly haven’t felt since normalizing my lifestyle.

(Normalizing?  Damn straight.  There’s nothing abnormal about the evolutionary fitness approach to life—it’s how we were evolved to live.  That stuff most people we know are doing?  The processed foods, the mainlining of HFCS with every bite and every sip, the fluorescent tans, the high heels, the life lived enclosed in machines and cubicles?  That’s not normal.  None of that’s normal.)

Well, the good news—the almost peculiarly good news—is that I am getting closer and closer to being a wolf among dogs.  That entails, here, two advantages.  First off, like they used to say about Dick Nixon, I’m tanned, rested and ready.  My body, my mind, and my spirit are stronger, calmer, more in tune with how they are supposed to be.  Stressed, malnourished animals react more poorly to fresh challenges than calm and nourished animals do.  (And we’re animals.)  The second part of the good news is that over the last year to eighteen months, I’ve been reading about carbohydrates, sugars, Vitamin D, autoimmune diseases, n=1 experimentation, the importance of healthy saturated fat, insulin uptake, and in general the “civilizational diseases” that go along with the SAD (Standard American Diet).  By fate or happenstance or coincidence (pronounced “koinkidink”) or as a small cog in the unknowably vast plan of God, I have been preparing myself over the last year or so to fight this very fight.

My family has been supportive of my evolutionary fitness lifestyle and appreciative of the results . . . but they haven’t exactly been in the foxhole with me, if you take my meaning.  They’re slowly coming along, but they still haven’t taken the plunge, and my daughters, 9 and 5, are still indulged on Fridays with Doritos.  Natasha remains a native Russian’s fondness for bread, rice and pasta.  (Fortunately, another Russian favorite, buckwheat, has a very low glycemic index.)

During our diabetes consult, the patient education nurse, herself a diabetic, advised measuring blood sugar levels for a week and then determining what kind of insulin levels my wife needed.  Well, since my mantra is, “We’re meant to be strong, vigorous and healthy, unless we’re doing something wrong, and if we stop doing the wrong thing we will be as we are meant to be, strong, vigorous and healthy,” I decided to try and control the diabetes through diet.

Grains?  Not quite gone, but heavily regulated and diminished.  My wife has remarked with some surprise that she doesn’t even really miss bread anymore.  More eggs, more whole fat buttermilk, more leafy greens.  We went in to see the doctor again yesterday.  The doctor looked Natasha (that’s my wife!  yay!) over, checked the record Natasha’s been keeping of her blood sugar levels and ketones, and said we were doing wonderfully and should keep on with what we were doing—with no need for medication.  It was nice to get the doctor’s thumbs-up, but it wasn’t really necessary.  We were doing for ourselves (like wolves) instead of running to our human master (like dogs) for what we needed.  We are all, in the end, responsible for ourselves, and, informed of a problem, my wife and I are solving it.

Natasha (she’s my wife!  yay!) feels the difference.  This pregnancy has been harder than the other two—as the ob/gyn says, “We’re not eighteen any more.”  Mornings have meant wooziness, disorientation, nights have meant mere snatches of sleep.  That’s all been changing.  She’s been sleeping better at night, waking up easier, moving easier on her feet.  I’m not surprised.  It’s like the difference between pigging out on a burger from Burger King or Jack in the Box, and eating a big burger home made of grass fed, hormone free beef, hold the bun.  You end up feeling “agile full”, like you could still move around and do something, without the dreaded HFCS narcolepsy.  That’s where my wife is now.

We saw a problem, and we’re correcting it.  Now she gets it, now she understands.  In the movie The Ghost and the Darkness Michael Douglas’ character, the hunter Remington, said something like “Everyone has a plan until they get hit.  You just got hit.  What’s your plan?”  We got hit.  The diagnosis of gestational diabetes was a blow.  Well, when we got hit, we still had a plan.  We reacted.  We’re beating it.

Can you ever really, in the end, beat life?

Probably not, but in the words of Robert Heinlein, “While we live, let us live!” and as Edgar Rice Burroughs said, through John Carter of Mars, “I yet live!”  We yet live—and we are living.

Check out Uncle Lew’s other columns in his series Wolves Among Dogs, here in The Paleo Garden.  

This is part II of “Capacity for Violence”, the latest installment of Wolves Among Dogs.  Part I may be found here.

Since I live in America, I associate violence with firearms.  Yeah, I’m a firearms enthusiast.  Somehow firearms enthusiast just sounds better than “gun nut,” right?  I own several rifles, a goodly number of pistols, and used to own a couple of shotguns.  The ability to use each of them, to my mind, is integral to being a modern competent human being.

I hasten to point out that I’m not a particularly good shot, with a rifle or a pistol.  I’m a competent shot, I understand the basic concepts and mechanics that go into shooting, and when I practice at it I’m pretty good.  I haven’t practiced in a while, and so, doubtless, my skills have declined some.  A couple of years ago, I had a good source for reloaded .38 Special ammunition, and a membership at a local shooting range, and a whole passel of Colt double action revolvers in .38 Special (and .357 Magnum, but the .357 Magnum is just a lengthened .38 Special case, so you can load .38s in your .357 if you want to).  Out of the 52 possible weeks, 47 times I went to the range.  At each range trip I shot double action, offhand, at a silhouette target placed at 15 yards.  I shot either 100 or 200 rounds.  By the end of the year, heck, by the middle of the year, I could keep all hundred (or 200) rounds in an 8 inch circle, firing at a controlled pace of about one round per second.  I liked that.  As my competence went up, my comfort with the revolvers went up too; the sixgun became a tool with which I was thoroughly familiar.

I hasten to point out that I carjacked no one, practiced not highway brigandage, and called upon none to “Stand and deliver!”  I haven’t even gunned down some random stranger in a fit of pique.

While I associate violence with the use of firearms, we have to bear in mind that there was violence even before there were firearms.  In a later posts I hope to address more fully the histories of  “cold” combat and unarmed combat, and here I am addressing more philosophical than practical issues, so I will reserve most of my comments for later.  I will just point out that while firearms have made spears, knives, axes, swords and our antediluvian friend the club obsolescent (i.e., they’re probably not your best choice), they are in no way, manner or form obsolete  (i.e., they will still kill you thoroughly dead).  Also, they’re still with us.  I believe that a fairly large portion of Chinese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War were armed with swords, there was that nasty business in Rwanda a few years back, when terrible execution was wrought with machetes, and of course the Gurkha units still prize their kukris.  Heck, every so often there will be a sword fight here in America.  Accordingly, I think that everyone ought to have some basic concept of how to fight empty handed, or with IFIs (Improvised Fighting Implements).  Walls, umbrellas, pens, car keys, the impedimenta of daily life.

At times, in our modern industrialized Western environment, I’ve wondered about this relish I have, this appreciation and enthusiasm I have for my capacity for violence.  Does it mean I’m a monster, that I am proud of the ability to maim or kill someone?  Am I liable to hurt someone just because I can?  After thinking about this a goodly bit, I’ve decided that there’s nothing wrong with it, not one jot, not one tittle.  The thing about violence is, it can be your friend, or it can be your enemy.  It’s value-neutral.  (Like fire, like gravity: it just is.)  The skill of using violence is just a skill, like any other, and it’s a skill I’m proud to have some de minimis proficiency in.

Jeff Cooper, a man who both thought considerably on the subject of violence (his master’s thesis was on the Spanish conquest of the Americas), who refined some of the techniques of modern pistolcraft and who once posed the question to his correspondents: “Why do men fight?”  After considerable discourse upon the subject, the answer that Cooper came up with was one a reader had submitted: “Men fight because they like to fight.”  I think there’s a good bit of truth to this answer.

Why, though, do men like to fight?  I’ve already mentioned Lorette’s comment that the mind and the body work together, are together, are one, but I’ll circle back to it anyway.  (Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them!)  We are our bodies, our bodies are us.  Whether it’s been simply a matter of growing older, or of growing up, or of watching my daughters being born, or of beginning to adopt the evolutionary fitness principles, I’ve come much more to accept biological bases for our behaviors.”

Every day, I see the biological bases for my behavior, when I’m getting my daughters ready for school, when I’m cooking for them or reading to them or tickling them.  Life wants to continue, and since men die, they can only live on in their children.  In defense of my children, well, there may be things I wouldn’t do, theoretically, I suppose.

Men fight because they like to fight, and they like to fight because it is in man’s nature to fight.  My opinion is that men fight to protect their families, and to provide for their families.  Once more, I will point out that this can be bad ends—we’re going to go crush that tribe over the hill, and take their stuff, and thus will I provide for my family!  (The more moral counterpoint is, “Those guys from over the hill are coming to take our stuff, let’s organize to repel them.”)  Nonetheless, I think that the genetic predisposition to violence that men have arises from the need to protect their families.  I know that’s true in my case.

Yes, yes—I am pretty much saying that women are more nurturing than men (as a rule) and that men are more violent than women (as a rule).  Different plumbing, different genetic expression, different strengths, different weaknesses, different roles.  Throughout human history, on every continent and in every culture, until about forty years ago, people have universally understood that men and women are different.  It is only recently that it became received wisdom that we differ not at all, and only recently that a thought such as a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy could take hold.  And no, I’m not saying women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen (except to the extent I think everyone should be barefoot and in the kitchen, and that having children is a biological imperative).

I’m prepared to do violence in self-defense and the defense of my family and friends.  Like ripples extending from a rock tossed in a pond, the circles of affiliation I feel emanate outwards, weakening as they go.  And my willingness to use force in defense of my circles of affiliation, like those ripples, extend and extend, weakening as they go.  In the military, the use of deadly force is authorized in self-defense, defense of others, the protection of vital national assets, the protection of national critical infrastructure, and to prevent serious offenses against people.   While this is only directly applicable to the military, it sets forth a good solid moral underpinning for when the use of violence is authorized.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using violence, in the appropriate situation.  I think that’s a natural way to be, and, used defensively, is admirably moral.   

I’m a go-along, get-along kind of guy.  I like people.  Save only for those who have done me a personal injury or other wrong, I have no hate in my heart for any man—even for men that live differently than I do, and espouse different belief systems than mine.  And yet, at the same time, I relish my capacity for violence.

In the modern industrialized West, we regard “violence” into a bad thing, an evil word, an evil deed, a mark of the depraved.  That’s just silly.  I think it betrays distressing signs that we are becoming a society of Eloi.  Yes, violence can be a bad thing.  Violence can, also, be a good thing.  Violence is value-neutral.  The context of the violence, the realm in which it takes place, the identity and nature of the perpetrators, all of these things are vitally important if we are to say that violence is “good” or “bad,” justified or unjustified.  Context is all important.  (Didn’t George Washington say something about fire being a useful servant and a dangerous master?)  Growing up in Texas, I remember absorbing, as if by osmosis, the story of Charles Whitman.  Now, Charlie was pretty clearly depraved, and the violence he perpetrated was a bad thing.

What’s that?

You don’t know about Charles Whitman?  As Lyle Lovett might say, “That’s right, you’re not from Texas.”

Hmm, maybe Kinky Friedman could explain it some for you.

As a sidebar, that’s Kinky Friedman of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys fame.  I hate bumper stickers, so I don’t have any on my car, but I’ve got one tucked away that says, “He ain’t Kinky, he’s my Governor.”  He ran for governor of the state of Texas, but he didn’t win, some typical machine politician won.  But that’s another story entirely.

Now, when you watch the video, you may notice that ordinary Texans, or at least ordinary Texas rednecks, saw what was happening and unlimbered their deer rifles to return fire.  The very first vintage clip in Kinky’s exposition, in fact, shows an impact up against the Texas Tower, fired by someone down below.

Now that’s some justifiable violence, right there, if you ask me.

I see it, in fact, as maybe one of the last expressions in America of the “hue and cry.” Free men, armed, responding as a fluid and voluntarily formed temporary collective, working to deter one who aggressed against them and theirs.

Anyway, I don’t want to get carried away by Texican nostalgia, this is all about me and how I see things, so let’s talk about me.  Like I said, I relish my capacity for violence.  I should clarify and qualify: I don’t want to hurt anyone.  My capacity for violence is a capacity for defensive violence—-protecting me and mine.  (Like the old joke about the shotgun-armed Quaker confronting a prowler:  “My friend, I wouldst not shoot thee, but thou standeth right where I am about to shoot!”)

I’ve never fought much.  I was in a couple of mostly-for-show fights in high school.  You know the kind, shoves and getting all bowed up and puffing at each other, a few ill-aimed blows.  When I was in boot camp I swapped four or five punches with another recruit who tried to walk off with an extra hot chocolate.  (It’s a long and boring story.)  I don’t fight for fun, I don’t fight to prove I’m a man, I haven’t been in a fight for years and years now, and I think that if it comes to a fight it means you’ve already let someone get all up in your OODA loop . . . but I do relish my capacity for violence.

Part II of “Capacity for Violence”, the latest installment of Wolves Among Dogs, will appear soon.    

I grew up as a child of the Cold War.  My father’s reserve unit in the Marine Corps was activated during the Cuban Missile Crisis.    That’s the Cuban Missile Crisis that Dana Perino didn’t know about.  I remember Jimmy Carter, then President of these here United States, announcing the decision to forbid US participation in the Olympic Games in 1980 as a way of punishing the Soviet Union for its liberation of Afghanistan.  I watched the wretched ABC mini-series special event “The Day After.”  I regarded the Soviet Union as the font of all that was bad, evil, inefficient and wicked, and conversely, thought America was the greatest thing ever.

And then I grew up and learned Russian, and began to travel some in (by then the former) Soviet Union.  Most of my travel was in Central Asia, in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia.  I only made one trip to Moscow, which I honestly didn’t much care for.  While my travels were mostly in Central Asia, these were still heavily sovietized places, and had been in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union an equivalent amount of time as, say, California and the southwest had been in the United States, and just as California is definitely in the United States, Kazakhstan was definitely in the Soviet Union.

During the presidency of Vladimir Putin (currently Prime Minister of the Russian Federation), much hay was made here in the States about Putin’s comment that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst tragedy of his lifetime.  Here in the States, the collapse of the Soviet Union was regarded as the collapse of a sclerotic, inefficient, heavily centralized, economically bankrupt, morally bankrupt, top-down command and control monster, and good riddance to it.  At the time, i.e., in the very early 1990s, I mostly felt the same way.

Of course, traveling tends to open one’s eyes.  During my travels, I met many former Soviet citizens, now grappling with their new identities as citizens of newly independent states, which had formerly merely been constituent republics of the Soviet Union.  I began to realize that, guess what, they were people too.  As a youth, I’d thought that every morning mostly everyone in the Soviet Union awoke and thought, “Today is the day we destroy the running dogs of capitalism!”  And that, at night, mostly everyone in the Soviet Union sighed sadly as they put on their sleeping gowns, “Well, maybe tomorrow!”

In conversations with people in Kiev, in Almaty, in Bishkek, and in villages and smaller towns throughout the region, I realized that this was, ahem, a mistaken impression.  Most mornings, most people in the Soviet Union had wondered, as people throughout the world wonder, if the girl in the kiosk would smile at them, or what they’d have for supper that evening, or if the weather would be good.

It is a cliche that Americans don’t know much about the broader world out there.  Like many cliches and stereotypes, there’s a good reason for that cliche’s existence: it’s mostly true.  Before I traveled in the former Soviet Union, I didn’t realize, didn’t understand, just how hard the collapse had been.  I celebrated our victory in the Cold War, and just didn’t think about the downside for the “losers.”  And I was a Russian speaker, not entirely fluent but pretty conversant, with a long history of interest in Russia and the Soviet Union.

For the citizens of the Soviet Union, the collapse—the “Raspad” —was a disaster.  They became citizens of new countries, with the same old elites in charge of smaller ponds.  The economy went into the tank, in a way that makes the Great Depression look like a mild dip in a bull market.  The Soviet Union had been ’scientifically planned’ so that all of the republics were interdependent, with a lightbulb factory in this republic, a lamp factory in that, and electrical generation in a third, and when the walls came tumbling down, like Humpty Dumpty from his perch, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put it back together again.  Trained from birth to rely on the state, Soviet citizens found themselves without a state to rely on.

In 1992, the inflation rate in Russia was 2520%.   That means prices were doubling every month.  Every month.

William F. Buckley had famously argued, back in the 1950s, that when confronted by a menace like the Soviet Union, it behooved the United States to adopt a “Soviet lite” system of government.

[W]e have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington—even with Truman at the reins of it all.

At that time, it might have seemed like a good bargain, but as the internet snarkers like to ask, “How’s that working out for you?”  We looked long into the abyss, and the abyss looked long into us, and we became what we beheld.  What has America become, since the 1950s, but a totalitarian bureaucracy?  We looked at the Soviet Union and saw a monster, and just as Nietzsche warned, we became, in opposing a monster, a monster ourselves.  We traded our heroes for ghosts, we traded our patrimony for bureaucratic centralism.  The government is deciding what type of things can be sold at garage sales.   (At law school, during con law, I must have missed the constitutional provision authorizing this action; maybe I was asleep, or flirting.)

Part II of “It Can Happen Here” will appear tomorrow.

I suppose that many people have a place that looms large in their imagination, a place that fascinates them.  I know I do.  Now, since it’s a place that looms in the imagination, it doesn’t have to be a place you’re from, or a place you’ve been to.  I guess, since it’s a place that looms in the imagination, it doesn’t even have to be a real place.  I know that there are people for whom the world, or, better phrased, the universe of Star Trek is vitally important, and other people who can relate the geography and ethnography of Tolkein’s Middle Earth far better than I can describe my own neighborhood.

Like I said at the beginning, I think that there’s a place like that for many people, maybe even most people.  I’ve got a place like that.  It’s a big place, vast in the physical world, and vast also in the temporal world, a place that stretches from the first glimmerings of recorded history up to the present day, and from Southern Europe all the way through to China.  Maybe that vastness speaks to a certain vastness of my imagination, or maybe it means that my imagination is so limited that it needs to fix on big things.  Naturally, I prefer the first interpretation, but I could consider the argument that a really big imagination could be endlessly fascinated by, say, a single tomato.  In the event, we are not here to discuss tomatoes.

My place, my special place, the place the looms largest in my imagination, is the vast sweep of grasslands, the steppe, that runs from Hungary through Ukraine to Kazakhstan and Mongolia and the fringes of China, a place that has caused no end of grief to Western civilization, and Eastern civilization too.

Did I say grief?  Yes, and in spades, but like most places, most things and most people, it’s hard to look at it and say, “This is all bad.”  It’s done great things, too, this place I like so much.  It is a place that has given us some of the most feared names in history, names like Attila, Babur, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Subotai, the Manchus, the Seljuk Turks.  Some of my favorite names from the West, too, have ventured out onto the steppe, names like Halford Mackinder, Roy Chapman Andrews, that “absolutely first class man” Frederick Bailey, Fitzroy Maclean, Francis Younghusband, to say nothing of Aurel Stein and Sven Heidin.  It’s given us literary works by Alexander Pushkin and Rudyard Kipling and Harold Lamb and Nikolai Gogol, and through it ran the great Silk Road that transmitted goods and ideas, faiths and fighting styles, from India to China and to Rome and beyond, all through Europe.

My special place, the steppe, was a place that was unchanged for thousands of years, and a place that, today, is still very unchanged.  It is a place that has brought forth the best in man, and the worst in man, and with apologies to Charles Dickens I can say that it is the best of places, and it is the worst of places.  It is my special place, and hopefully, I’ll have the chance to tell some stories about it.  

This is part II of Ninja Warriors from the ongoing series, Wolves Among Dogs.  Ninja Warriors part I may be seen here.