What's in a Word?
Mansfield, Harvey C.
BOOKS IN REVIEW Efraim Halew sat at the right hand of power in Israel during one of the most fateflfl and significant periods in Middle East histo W, and if he does not reveal all that he knows,...
...Manliness fell upon serious hard times when modern liberalism took root...
...What women REALLY want: "I could not love thee...
...Other novels treat the conflict with unconscious humor...
...and libertarian-anarchists who embraced, at least in theory, the verve and chutzpah of 19th-century anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, who famously feuded with Karl Marx himself over Bakunin's rejection of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...True to its subtitle, Power and the Idealists uses the political firestorm set JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...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...
...JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 BOOKS IN REVIEW The heyday of manliness was the world of Greek antiquity, where loud, commanding voices were the norm...
...virtu in Machiavelli ("To be altogether bad you have to be good at being bad, thus good...
...As soon as 1 heard about it I began churning out promotir real copy in my head: "From the 300 Spartans to the men of the Titanic...
...women and akuron in Aristotle's Politics...
...2. Technology has given us a high priest of rational control: the Customer Support geek...
...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...
...That sounds like the prelude to a good free-for-all-and it is, which is why Hobbes saw the need for iron control...
...It's hard to believe that Thomas Hobbes, of all people, could do anything to thwart manliness...
...brains and courage are still the decisive forces of human history...
...All under the headline, "Student Protests in France Lack Spirit of'68...
...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...
...Thus, a large segment of those who came to fall under the umbrella of the New Left were all the more susceptible to seeking common cause with any movement with left-wing revolutionary rhetoric backing it...
...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...
...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...
...Tryingto follow Mansfield's sentences is like trying to keep your hood ornament on the white line during a snowstorm...
...Manliness by Harvey C, Mansfield (Y~tF UNIVERSITY PRESS, 304 PAGES, $27.50) Reviewed by Florence King T IlE IIEFINITION OF SHEER JOY is the reaction of a conservative on learning that a book entitled Manliness has just been published...
...If you took the most ardent revolutionary," Bakunin once noted all-tooprophetically, "vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself...
...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...
...They went to the movies...
...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...
...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...
...Stentor had a voice like brass, Achilles never spoke below a yell, and women were akuron (lacking in authority...
...Canceling all that subjugation requires overcoming the relevant powers of nature, or, in sum (and for the sake of being sure), deny nature...
...Yet as Berman points out, even the libertarian contingent of the New Left, while critical of Stalinism, "kept falling for the Third World fantasies of the modern Marxists, kept wantingto celebrate Ho or some other tropical Communist as the hero of the libertariPower and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath by Paul Berman (SOFT SKULL PRESS, 310 PAGES, $23.95) Reviewed by Shawn Macomber an cause-an odd thing to do...
...Ironically enough, in his brilliantly witty, brazenly honest (if occasionally overly sympathetic) warts-andall study of the 1968 generation, Power and the Idealists, New York University professor and confirmed man of the idiosyncratic left Paul Berman notes that one eras romantics were another eras failures...
...7. About all that is left ofmanliness is found in the salesman, who is still free to boast and exaggerate like the bellowing Greeks of old...
...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...
...The results were seldom pretty...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Efraim Halew sat at the right hand of power in Israel during one of the most fateflfl and significant periods in Middle East histo W, and if he does not reveal all that he knows, what he does choose to tell us about his own exploits, and about the organization he once headed, is enough to remind us that today, as in the past...
...that prototype of self-discipline, the Color Sergeant in Zulu...
...An anarchist salt and a Marxist pepper, sprinkled together...
...In The Strange Case of Dr...
...Berman labels the movement's rough schisms as threefold: Retro-Marxists blissfully celebrating Leninist orthodoxy despite the Russian Revolution's quick turn to murderous totalitarianism...
...the mutual respect that springs up between the hunted white man and his M'rican pursuers when he a4ns the test of manliness in The Naked Prey...
...He was the grim political philosopher who famously called life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...
...It reminds us of the manly confidence (Chapter D that remains aloof and does not seek to take charge of risky emergencies...
...Forgotten manliness: the nameless English soldier who fashioned a cross for Joan of Arc from the wood of her pyre...
...H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines is about three determinedly manly Englishmen who go to Africa to search for a fabulous treasure...
...They dreamed, therefore...
...we've always wanted to blow about Plato's presentation of thumos in The Republic...
...It is a question no manly man would ask himself, and Quartermain blames it on his "detestable habit of thinking...
...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...
...Instead of pumping us up, he tells us everything Florence King ~ books im'lude Confessions of a Failed Southern t,ady, The Florence King Reader, and, most recenth...
...Left without an obvious fascist enemy to fight and Shawn Macomber is a Boston-based writer and frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...The anarchisants spoke of freedom and personal autonomy and, at the same time, nodded respectfully at Che's self-sacrifice, even though Che's unmentionable achievement was to have established Soviet-style labor camps in Cuba...
...It is not 1968 revisited...
...The trip quickly turns into a more-manly-than-thou contest with their guide, revealed to be a native king, who fears that their unmanlylove of moneywill contaminate his tribe's manliness...
...6. Commerce in general has made gain more important than victory and trade-offs more important than justice...
...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) (22" defined by principle...
...Slyness, duplicity, and indirection-woman's ways--became the keys to success...
...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...
...That was 35 years ago...
...Mansfield is convinced that it is the conscious aim of modern life to put manliness out of business...
...They pretended to resist, even so, and pretending merely aggravated their self-doubts...
...Demoralized" by "finger-wagging lectures" from those who had resisted the Nazis or Spanish fascism, the young people who took over the left-wing movement in the 1960s and 1970s suffered from an acute inferiority complex...
...Ours is a society in which one slip of a pronoun can rouse suspicions of sexism...
...Neo-Marxists of the Ho, Mao, Che, and Fidel variety, who believed the revolution was being perfected outside of its early environs...
...They're elderly ladies in their seventies now...
...the lion must become a fox when the situation called for it...
...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...
...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...
...dear, so nmeh, loved I not h o n o t l r lnoFe.'" Next, 1 mentally wrote the.jacket copy...
...STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, l qC)l to 2002 6~atiomff Review Press...
...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...
...The Spirit of '68 E VEN AS FRENCH YOUTH took to the street last March to protest new labor laws allowing employers to fire them without massive compensation packages, Elaine Sciolino sniffed in the International Herald Tribune that while the protest "called forth memories of that exhilarating, romantic leftist youth movement" of 1968, "this is not a revolt...
...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW 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...
...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...
...Brute force alone no longer works, said the author of that guidebook to deceit, The Prince...
...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...
...If the surviving members of the sisterhood all read The Sentence...
...warfare as minuet: the polished courtesies observed by gentlemen officers Robert Mitchum and Curt 3urgens in The Enemy Below...
...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...
...Cast your mind back to the stars of the feminist movement in its heyday...
...Some of its notable successes: 1. We have replaced the manly man with the "professional," who judges and is judged by objective criteria...
...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...
...ANLINESS LOST SOME OF ITS SHEEN during the ] ~ / | church-dominated Middle Ages when pride .k_ Y _l_became a sin and earthly triumphs took a back seat to the rewards of the afterlife...
...eager to prove themselves as true revolutionaries, the generation of 1968 in Europe gazed upon the world, straining their eyes until the ghosts of Nazism were summoned forth here, there, and everywhere...
...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...
...the chivaMc ideal displayed at West Point in 1861 when cadets fl'nm Union states presented arms as their Southern classmates marched off the field to the strai ns ~f'Dixie.'" %.1 :ndying admiration: Coriolanus and Custer...
...substitutes "professional courtesy" for chivalry, and never punches anyone o u t - t h a t would be "behaving unprofessionally...
...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...
...Men torn between instinct and reality became a popular theme in late 19th-century novels...
...Liberalism is a two-edged sword to the manly man...
...Shocked disbelief and towering rage are bad for elderly ladies...
...Western democracies were hardly exempt from this apparitional summoning...
...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...
...S O IT WAS IN THIS HEADY, somewhat confused milieu (subsidized and made possible byAmerican military might, as Robert Kagan ably argued in Of Paradise andPower) that many of Europe's future leaders first cut their political teeth...
...The students were rdsistan ts who had nothing to resist...
...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...
...The liberty such governments provided stoked fears, Berman says, of "an iron cage cleverly designed to resemble the open air of freedom...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...They were the generation of the second rate--the less-thanMalraux, less-than-Camus generation;' Bermanwrites...
...The aristocratic male's most prized quality was thumos or "spiritedness" a state of bristling, pawing-the-dirt fighting trim now associated with lowclass drunken louts...
...at's in a \Vbrd...
...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...
...We've already lost two of them--Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin--in the lastyear alone...
...The New Left that emerged was by no means monolithic...
Vol. 39 • June 2006 • No. 5
