This review appeared in the June 2006 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe, click here.
Manliness
by Harvey C. Mansfield
(Yale University Press, 304 pages, $27.50)
THE DEFINITION OF SHEER JOY is the reaction of a conservative on
learning that a book entitled Manliness has just been
published.
As soon as I heard about it I began churning out promotional
copy in my head: “From the 300 Spartans to the men of the
Titanic…. What women REALLY want: ‘I could not love
thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.’”
Next, I mentally wrote the jacket copy.
“…that prototype of self-discipline, the Color Sergeant in
Zulu.”
“…warfare as minuet: the polished courtesies observed by
gentlemen officers Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens in The Enemy
Below.”
“…the mutual respect that springs up between the hunted white
man and his African pursuers when he wins the test of manliness in
The Naked Prey.”
“…the chivalric ideal displayed at West Point in 1861 when
cadets from Union states presented arms as their Southern
classmates marched off the field to the strains of ‘Dixie.’”
“…Undying admiration: Coriolanus and Custer.”
“…Forgotten manliness: the nameless English soldier who
fashioned a cross for Joan of Arc from the wood of her pyre.”
These are just some lump-in-the-throat examples of manliness
that I expected to find in this book, but Harvey C. Mansfield,
Harvard professor of government, delivers nothing but a lump, the
fatal kind that metastasizes whenever the faculty lounge and the
University Press join hands and lock jaws.
Instead of pumping us up, he tells us everything we’ve always
wanted to know about Plato’s presentation of thumos in
The Republic; women and akuron in Aristotle’s
Politics; virtu in Machiavelli (“To be altogether
bad you have to be good at being bad, thus good”); Nietzsche’s
nihilism, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Rousseau’s philosophy of
education as set forth in Emile, all couched in a prose
style guaranteed to cure insomnia in ten minutes. Trying to follow
Mansfield’s sentences is like trying to keep your hood ornament on
the white line during a snowstorm. To wit:
Epictetus displays Stoicism in its pure form, unadapted
to politics (as distinct from Cicero’s adaptation), hence
completely irresponsible: don’t get involved is the lesson. It
reminds us of the manly confidence (Chapter I) that remains aloof
and does not seek to take charge of risky emergencies….
Canceling all that subjugation requires overcoming the relevant
powers of nature, or, in sum (and for the sake of being sure), deny
nature….
Now, of all the possible virtues, or parts of virtues, manliness
seems most to illustrate virtue by not being either in one’s
interest (narrowly understood) or defined by principle.
Mansfield’s thesis is that manliness still exists whether we like
it or not, and that most of us do not like it because it threatens
the gender-neutral society we have so carefully constructed. Ours
is a society in which one slip of a pronoun can rouse suspicions of
sexism; a society that prefers role models to heroes, weakness to
strength, and guilt to pride in order to fashion the “incentives”
that encourage us to become rationally controlled citizens. The
rationally controlled society, says Mansfield, “fears courage more
than fear,” and so does everything it can to “encourage and compel
behavior conspicuously lacking in drama.”
Manliness is conspicuously dramatic, not always controlled, and
occasionally irrational because it is all about taking risks,
taking charge, and taking credit, often in a loud, commanding
voice. Confronted by this 800-pound gorilla, today’s Sensitive Man
murmurs, “This rationally controlled society ain’t big enough for
both of us,” and Americans, clutching their incentives, rush to
agree with him.
The heyday of manliness was the world of Greek antiquity, where
loud, commanding voices were the norm; Stentor had a voice like
brass, Achilles never spoke below a yell, and women were
akuron (lacking in authority). The aristocratic male’s
most prized quality was thumos or “spiritedness,” a state
of bristling, pawing-the-dirt fighting trim now associated with
low-class drunken louts. Manliness in ancient Greece was the rule
rather than the exception, respected and even cherished by the kind
of men who today would look down on it: poets and philosophers.
MANLINESS LOST SOME OF ITS SHEEN during the church-dominated Middle
Ages when pride became a sin and earthly triumphs took a back seat
to the rewards of the afterlife. Nicolo Machiavelli, writing at the
height of Renaissance humanism, took exception to medieval
passivity and urged men to seek earthly rewards and power, but
warned them to be careful how they went about it. Brute force alone
no longer works, said the author of that guidebook to deceit,
The Prince; the lion must become a fox when the situation
called for it. Slyness, duplicity, and indirection — woman’s ways
— became the keys to success.
It’s hard to believe that Thomas Hobbes, of all people, could do
anything to thwart manliness. He was the grim political philosopher
who famously called life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.” That sounds like the prelude to a good free-for-all — and
it is, which is why Hobbes saw the need for iron control. To
prevent what he called the “war of all against all” he conceived of
an all-powerful state, a government so big and so ubiquitous that
nobody could cause any trouble. To emphasize the size of the state
he had in mind, he called his treatise Leviathan and
commanded its citizens to “lay down your right.”
Manliness fell upon serious hard times when modern liberalism
took root. Liberalism is a two-edged sword to the manly man; its
love of liberty suits him but its desire for security does not, and
its often obsessive concern for the rights of others might just
drive him over the edge, because others are not usually his first
priority. John Stuart Mill, whom the author calls a “wimp” and a
purveyor of “graduate-seminar liberalism,” believed that we must
rule ourselves but never others because “liberty demands
forbearance,” a quality that never mixes with thumos.
Men torn between instinct and reality became a popular theme in
late 19th-century novels. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays Henry Jekyll torn
between the manly ideal of science, which marches on in the face of
risks, and the “unmanning terror” he suffers when he realizes he
has unleashed Hyde’s evil. Other novels treat the conflict with
unconscious humor. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines
is about three determinedly manly Englishmen who go to Africa to
search for a fabulous treasure. The trip quickly turns into a
more-manly-than-thou contest with their guide, revealed to be a
native king, who fears that their unmanly love of money will
contaminate his tribe’s manliness. Watching the Englishmen shoot
elephants for sport, the king remarks that it is unmanly to shoot
animals except for food and arranges “a simple meal of roasted
giraffe marrow.” Reality rears its head in the character of Alan
Quartermain, one of the Englishmen, who wonders if he might be “a
bit of a coward.” It is a question no manly man would ask himself,
and Quartermain blames it on his “detestable habit of thinking.”
Yet it is precisely his habit of thinking that gets the group
safely out of the cave and back to England, where they will tell
manliness stories in the comfortable confines of their club.
Mansfield is convinced that it is the conscious aim of modern
life to put manliness out of business. Some of its notable
successes:
1. We have replaced the manly man with the “professional,” who
judges and is judged by objective criteria; substitutes
“professional courtesy” for chivalry, and never punches anyone out
— that would be “behaving unprofessionally.”
2. Technology has given us a high priest of rational control:
the Customer Support geek.
3. “Health Awareness” (read educated hypochondria) has produced
a universal desire for “a longer, less troubled life rather than a
short, eventful life in the noble manner of Achilles.”
4. The rise of Meritocrats, who “let the educational system do
the manly job of self-assertion for them by awarding them honors
they do not have to fight for.”
5. The rise of Representatives: “…agents, lawyers, various
intermediaries, are unmanly because in representing a client they
discreetly avoid asserting themselves and are content with only a
percentage of the reward.”
6. Commerce in general has made gain more important than victory
and trade-offs more important than justice.
7. About all that is left of manliness is found in the salesman,
who is still free to boast and exaggerate like the bellowing Greeks
of old.
Were it not for its title, this book would sink like a stone,
but precisely because of its title liberals in droves are reading
it, probably through spread fingers like jurors looking at autopsy
photos. I hope they don’t blot anything out because the book
contains a sentence that is even better than the title, a sentence
that could change America overnight, or for that matter, in a few
seconds.
Cast your mind back to the stars of the feminist movement in its
heyday. That was 35 years ago. They’re elderly ladies in their
seventies now. We’ve already lost two of them — Betty Friedan and
Andrea Dworkin — in the last year alone. Shocked disbelief and
towering rage are bad for elderly ladies. If the surviving members
of the sisterhood all read The Sentence…
The Sentence: “In my experience it is difficult for a man who is
attracted to a woman not to find her cute, rather than
intimidating, when she gets angry.”
