The sneering review in the New York Times Book
Review by a novelist called Walter Kirn of Harvey Mansfield’s
Manliness could have been anticipated, but
its obtuseness — especially when viewed alongside the subtle and
supple line of argument pursued by Professor Mansfield — is
unusual even for the mainstream media culture which Mr. Kirn
represents. He compares the professor to Hans and Franz, the German
body-builders portrayed by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon on
Saturday Night Live back in the 1990s. “Remember how
unwittingly fey they seemed,” he writes, “partly because of their
wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved
the words ‘girly’ and ‘manly’ — a pair of usages that was
poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip
Americans?”
So now are we to suppose that the prestigious New York
Times regards it as a sufficient refutation of a serious work
of political philosophy to say that it isn’t “hip”? There could
hardly be a better illustration of the dumbing down of the culture.
Thought and argument count for nothing with the truly pinheaded Mr.
Kirn, only fashion, “cool” and, perhaps, celebrity, which sets the
tone of what is fashionable and cool. He doesn’t even know that
calling an idea “out of date” is only a comment on its
fashionability and not on its validity. Professor Mansfield, he
says, “shows little awareness of much that’s happened recently —
televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture
that he aims to shake up” — as if not knowing much about what’s on
TV were some kind of disqualification for thinking seriously about
our human and sexual nature.
This kind of mindless moral progressivism is particularly
inappropriate in the circumstances because Manliness is (among other things) precisely
a refutation of moral progressivism — which is essentially the
view that morality can be determined by fashion. It’s like
criticizing Mother Goose for being childish or Shakespeare for
writing in poetry — which is to say that it is a way not just of
missing the point but of missing it spectacularly. Surely, this is
the last thing that any self-respecting reviewer would want to give
anyone grounds to accuse him of, but Mr. Kirn goes on and on, as if
he were afraid that we might miss his point, demonstrating
his own highly-prized “awareness” of televisual and pop cultural
epiphenomena (though of course not of the book) by comparing
Professor Mansfield to Mike Myers’s Austin Powers — like whom he
“seems stuck in a semantic time warp.”
He goes on to accuse the professor of being professorial, of
writing “in a fussy lecture-hall mode” while “taking the wordy,
long way around to prove a few points about the male and female.”
Yeah, and he uses some really big words too. Once again, you’d
think Mr. Kirn would be just the tiniest bit embarrassed to admit
that he has such a hard time following anything not as snappy and
easily assimilable as Austin Powers or Saturday Night
Live. It’s true enough that philosophers of Professor
Mansfield’s caliber quite often are driven by the
difficulties of their material to write difficult prose, but if
they’re doing the job right it isn’t “wordy” or the “long way
around” but just as long as it needs to be. Could it be that the
reviewer doesn’t know this? Certainly the only example he provides
from the book of its author’s writing “at length” — his retelling
of the famous anecdote about Mandy Rice-Davies’s response to being
told that Lord Astor had denied there was any improper relationship
between them by saying “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” — will not
strike many readers, I think, with its prolixity.
As he finds the book so difficult to understand that he cannot
address its substance but only make fun of the way it is dressed,
perhaps he’s not the best person to be reviewing it?
EMBARRASSING AS IS THIS KIND of twaddle masquerading as a book
review, what lies behind it is of course politics — and not just
politics in the larger senses either. For Professor M. also seems
to have nailed his colors to the mast when it comes to party
politics as well, at least if we are to believe Ruth Marcus in yesterday’s Washington
Post. “I have a new theory about what’s behind everything
that’s wrong with the Bush administration,” she writes on the op-ed
page. Guess what it is? Manliness! Professor Mansfield tells us
that “it is out of manliness that men do not like to ask for
directions when lost,” and Ms. Marcus is quick to spot the
connection to the Bush White House. Why, they’re lost too,
at least when it comes to knowing what to do about the mess in
Iraq, and they won’t admit it either. Is that, she asks with a
feminine assurance masked by a satirical show of diffidence,
“really what you want in a government deciding whether to take a
country to war?”
Well, yes, in a way it is. For there are no road-maps, no wise
locals when it comes to the way to go in diplomatic and military
affairs. You can’t check your progress against an infallible
authority and make course corrections on the way. The kind of
doubtfulness and admission of error that she so longs for among the
excessively manly Bush men is regarded as weakness because it
is weakness. In war there is no time for second-guessing
and tergiversation. On any course short of the disastrous, the only
thing you can do is keep pressing on and disregard the armchair
critics. They, like Ms. Marcus, may think things are already
disastrous, and that we are on the point of having to retreat or be
massacred, but they have been saying similar things since the war
began — they were saying similar things in the first Gulf War —
and their own credibility is not of the highest. It’s fair enough,
perhaps, to say that manliness is what’s “wrong” with the Bush
administration, but that’s just another way of saying that a lack
of manliness is what’s “wrong” with her analysis of it. As
Professor Mansfield might say: What else can you expect from a
woman?
