Nyt And Wapo Vote Against Manliness - Road to the Middle Class

ANYONE FOR Manliness? No thanks, old chap, say the book reviewers at The New York Times and The Washington Post in their review of Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. Writes Walter Kirn in the NYT Book Review:

Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men."

And in the Washington Post Ruth Marcus sneers

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think -- it's just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I'm sure we could work it out -- Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it's overemployed -- nowhere more than in this administration.

You can understand the problem. Professor Mansfield argues that manliness is “confidence in the face of risk.” The whole point of the liberal project is to create a world without risk, a world in which you would not need people with the quality of dealing with riskiness. So we’ve got to put a stop to this right away.

But if you go to the reviews on Amazon, the shock and outrage isn’t quite as thick. Here’s a self-described “free-thinking, liberal, confident female” who agrees with Mansfield.

I absolutely agree with Mansfield's opinion that being a man is about having "confidence in risky situations".
...
However, when a man is not courageous or confident, he simply cannot feel like a man, and loses self-respect -- which has a disastrous effect on his life, in his raltionships with women in particular, but also in relation to men; and that negatively affects his overall functioning in society.
...
I also agree with Mansfiled's assertion that a man cannot be a gentleman until he is a man first.

Yes. Well, that is not the sort of thing that a president of Harvard is allowed to say in public. And evidently, just to be on the safe side, it is not something you would want to write in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Is it permissible to suggest that the world needs the complementary masculine and feminine attributes of manliness and womanliness? We need people who can take calculated risks and not lose their heads. And we need people who focus on nurturing and caring. Both skills are needed in the central task of life, getting fledglings off the nest.

The core of the great western project is the socialization of men to the team instead of the gang. It is this achievement, getting men to work in productive, profitable teams instead of destructive gangs, that has raised the west to world-historical domination. As Lee Harris wrote in Civilization and its Enemies, the war on terror is a conflict between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

To beat the trickery of reckless, ruthless men and their gang you need a team of trustworthy men trained and confident in the face of risk.

That is something that our liberal friends just do not understand. That is why they have been in a consistent funk over the war on terror, forever talking about exit strategies. That is why they want to take risk out of the workplace, replacing the employment at will contract with worker protections, tenure, benefits, and regulation. That is why environmentalists want to impose the “precautionary principle” on economic actions. They don’t want to be exposed to any risk.

Unfortunately the world don’t work that way.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

mysql close 0