Deciding to Be Human

One minor suggestion I made in Diplomacy Lessons, the autopsy report on my Foreign Service career, was that we should study the classics for our own protection. I grew up in Silicon Valley, a land of perpetual sunshine where nothing bad ever happens to anybody. As an FSO, I generally lived in some diplomatic Green Zone.* I currently live and write in Greece, another mythic land of free medical care. So when the army of Agamemnon bashed out the brains of Hektor's infant son Astyanax on the walls of Troy and gave his mother Andromache as concubine to Achilles' son Neoptolemos, it took me a while to grasp what was going on.

Any chimpanzee, however, would have recognized the situation immediately. Dominant males get most of the females, but they don't have many years to breed before a rival snuffs them. Breast-feeding suppresses fertility. Infanticide is thus a rational follow-up to regime change: it gives your genes a few months' head start.

This logic of chimpanzees diverges only subtly from the logic of swift-footed Achilles, the hero of Homer's Iliad. Achilles' peers granted him and his heirs a superior right to pass their genes on to the next generation because of his remarkable ability to fling a bronze spearhead through someone's liver. Something similar applies even in post-mythological times. Y-chromosome research suggests the man with the most living descendants today, about 16 million, was a gifted Mongol politician named Genghis Khan.

We have spent the 2800-odd years since Homer inventing ways to conceal the primal logic underlying our behavior. We have succeeded pretty well. Who now but the victim would ever guess that a smart bomb might be just as unwelcome as a spear through the liver? Who now talks of sacking cities when nubile foreign women can be ordered on the internet and delivered to our door?

This modern delusion that we soar like angels above our chimpanzee cousins makes it easy for us to pry open their skulls. When we do, we discover they have a perfectly recognizable moral code, including Old Testament virtues like strict reciprocity, respect for the social order, and loyalty to the tribe. But if the purpose of "an eye for an eye," is to protect their adolescents from being kidnapped by the band across the river, it falls short in practice. Humans therefore supplement this principle by insisting on a moral intuition that certain behavior is bad regardless of who does it.

Most of us therefore applaud the efforts of the United Nations to impose a universal code of behavior based on respect for borders, peaceful resolution of disputes, and equal human rights for all. But international law is not always compatible with our more Homeric instincts.

For the past umpteen years, a fine retired U.S. diplomat named Matt Nimetz has been the UN special negotiator in charge of persuading Greece and "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (a small Balkan country misfiled under the letter "T" in the UN directory) to agree on a name for the latter that does not violate Greece's sense of historic entitlement to the term "Macedonia." The citizens of the country whose capital is Skopje violated a long cease-fire by naming their airport after Alexander the Great. As a good mediator, Nimetz attempted to lower the stakes by suggesting that this Macedonia warlord was perhaps not a national symbol worth going to war over. Greek outcry forced him to retract his suggestion.

From childhood, King Alexander of Macedon adopted Achilles as his role model. By UN standards, mythological precedent did not entitle a Greek monarch to lead his army of mercenaries thousands of kilometers into Asia to kill, impregnate, or levy tribute on millions of startled strangers. The arguments President Bush used to justify invading Iraq sound almost respectable in comparison. But Alexander was a Greek, not a barbarian. Therefore he was entitled to as many captured concubines as he could carry.

I discovered the pervasiveness of this double standard in the late 1980s watching the eyes of certain Greek human rights activists glaze over when I asked about minorities in Greece. Theirs were firmly set on the plight of ethnic Greeks in other countries. I chided their tribalism. But then I watched Tom Lantos, the distinguished Hungarian Jewish fighter for human rights in the U.S. Congress, make clear that the universal rights he insisted on for Jews and Hungarians in Romania (for which I was State Department desk officer in 1992-94) did not apply to Palestinians in Palestine.

In the late 5th century BC, the Athenian historian Thucydides noticed that the weak insist on moral universals while the strong try to ignore them. This remains discouragingly accurate. In the United States, moral leadership of the human rights movement shifted after 2001 to Muslim groups. They feel vulnerable: "Islamo-fascist," a term invented by aspiring mass-murderers, is flung about freely on the talk shows. Jewish communities, once the standard-bearers for humanist morality in the United States, have retreated, concluding that universal human rights are now a liability rather than an asset for their relatives in Israel.

International law loses its legitimacy, and thereby its power to protect our children, unless it applies to everyone and is backed by the common determination of strong and weak alike. When the United States allows friends to bomb anyone they or we suspect of secret nuclear ambitions, it makes perfectly good sense as tribal morality. We and our friends are strong. More than half of Americans instinctively applaud. But under international law it is improper and also unnecessary. The IAEA has a corps of inspectors, many of them U.S.-trained, equipped to satisfy our curiosity about Syria's intentions without recourse to hurling spears through anyone's liver.

The acceptance of limits on our behavior is prudent selfishness. Neither your columnist nor noble Achilles nor anyone in our respective tribes was born with any internal prohibition against rape and infanticide. The strong eventually become the weak, and a tribal, opportunistic moral code will not save their children when it happens. Unlike chimpanzees, humans have all the tools they need to make their genocides total.

As chimps could have predicted, the murder of Astyanax was followed soon after by the birth of a half-brother, Achilles' grandson Molossos. He in turn, through a long chain of begats, produced the famous King Pyrrhus of Epirus. Had it not been for infanticide, therefore, the pages of history would be empty of Pyrrhic victories. I would trade them all in a heartbeat for a world in which Astyanax survives.

*Alas, this useful metaphor has been perverted by a steady drizzle of mortar shells into the GZ in Baghdad. Last week, Condi informed my old colleagues they could volunteer to serve in Iraq or else be fired.

A shorter version of this piece first appeared in the Athens News.