The New Republic

is Ernst Freund Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago
and the author, most recently, of Frontiers of Justice: Disability,
Nationality, Species Membership (Harvard University Press).

Manliness

By Harvey C. Mansfield

(Yale University Press, 289 pp.,$27.50)

I.

Suppose a philosophical scholar--let us call this scholar S--with
high standards, trained in and fond of the works of Plato and
Aristotle, wished to investigate, for a contemporary American
audience, the concept of "manliness," a concept closely related to
the one that Plato and Aristotle called andreia, for which the
usual English rendering is "courage." (Harvey Mansfield himself
tells us that andreia is his subject.) How would this scholar go
about it? Well, following the lead of Aristotle, S would probably
begin by laying out the various widespread beliefs about the topic,
especially those held by reputable people. S would also consider
the opinions of well-known philosophers. In setting down all these
opinions, S would be careful to get people's views right and to
read their writings carefully, looking not just for assertions but
also for the arguments that support them.

Inevitably this welter of opinions would contain contradictions--not
just between one thinker and another, but also within the
utterances of a single thinker. People are amazingly able to live
with contradictions, since most people do not stop to sort these
matters out in the way that Socrates recommended. People also use
terms imprecisely and ambiguously, so S's inquiry would uncover
much fuzziness and equivocation. Nor do most people most of the
time, when they make statements of the form "Manliness is X," pause
to tell us whether they mean to say that X is a necessary condition
of manliness, or a sufficient condition, or both, or neither. So S
would have to sort all this out, too. ("Don't use your feminine
logic on me," I can already hear my partner saying teasingly in the
background, as he typically does when words such as "necessary
condition" are wheeled onto the stage.)

Carefully, S would set out the puzzles, untangling opinions like
tangled strands of yarn. (Women do so well at logic, says
Aristophanes's Lysistrata, because they have all that experience
detangling and delousing, whereas men, who are impatient creatures,
just like to wave their shields around.) Finally S would try to
produce an account that seemed to be the best one, preserving the
deepest and most basic of the opinions, and discarding those that
contradict them. S would then hold this definition out publicly,
inviting all comers to try things out with their own reasoning, and
then accept the proposed definition or improve upon it.

Being a friend of the Greeks, S would naturally have curiosity about
the cross-cultural aspects of this particular topic. It is evident
that Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. had rather
different ideas about manliness from those of modern Americans. A
lot of them thought that manliness naturally expressed itself in a
preference for young men over women as sexual partners, and that
the most manly of the gods, Zeus and Poseidon, enjoyed such lovers.
Most Americans, even if they grudgingly grant that men in same-sex
relationships are potentially manly, would shrink at the thought
that Jesus or Jehovah had any such inclinations. Many Athenians,
moreover, and even more Spartans thought that erotic attraction
between males was a fine cement for a military combat
unit--something that the American military is so far from thinking
that it would rather not think anything at all about the topic. So
S would investigate these differences, and these would naturally
lead S to the copious cross-cultural literature on manliness that
by now exists: to the work of, say, Daniel Boyarin, on how Jewish
males refashioned Roman norms of manliness, making the astonishing
claim that the true man sits still all day with a book, and has the
bodily shape of someone who does just that; or to work on Indian
conceptions of manliness, contrasting the sensuous Krishna, playing
his flute, with the tougher norms of manliness recommended by the
Raj. A scholar with S's curiosity and love of truth would find in
this material rich food for reflection.

Harvey Mansfield's credentials suggest to the reader that he will
behave like S. He is a prominent political philosopher, recently
retired from a chair at Harvard University, who has written widely
about philosophical texts. He regularly taught a well-known class
in the classics of Greek political thought. By his own account, the
works of Plato and Aristotle are particularly important to him.
Moreover, Mansfield has become famous as a defender of high
academic standards and an opponent of "grade inflation." He likes
to excoriate his faculty colleagues for their alleged laxness and
looseness.

It quickly becomes evident, however, that Manliness is not the book
that our imagined S would have written. To begin with, it is
slipshod about facts--even the facts that lie at the heart of his
argument. He repeatedly tells us that "all previous societies have
been ruled by males," producing Margaret Thatcher as a sole recent
exception. Well, one has to forgive Mansfield for not adducing
Angela Merkel or Han Myung-Sook or Michelle Bachelet, since these
female leaders won their posts, presumably, after his book went to
press. One might even forgive Mansfield for not knowing about
female heads of state in Mongolia, Argentina, Iceland, Latvia,
Rwanda, Finland, Burundi, Bermuda, Mozambique, Jamaica, Nicaragua,
Dominica, Malta, Liberia, and Bangladesh. Those are relatively
small countries, and one would have to be curious about what is
going on in them. But one can hardly overlook Mansfield's neglect of
the very newsworthy recent or current female leaders of New Zealand
(Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark), Turkey (Tansu Ciller), Poland (Hanna
Suchocka), Norway (Gro Harlem Brundtland), France (Edith Cresson),
Canada (Kim Campbell), Sri Lanka (Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and now
her daughter), the Philippines (Corazon Aquino, Gloria Arroyo), and
Pakistan (Benazir Bhutto, a government major at Harvard who might
have taken Mansfield's class). And what might one say about
Mansfield's utter neglect of Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, two of
the most influential politicians of the twentieth century? Don't we
have to think, in the face of these cases, that his assertions are
some sort of elaborate charade, a pretense that the world is the
way some audience would like it to be, whether it is that way or
not?

So Mansfield is not overly concerned with fact. A few minutes on
Google would have made these facts available to a minimally
inquiring mind. Is he, then, at least concerned with logic? Only if
his concern is to demonstrate, boldly, his disdain for it. After
being confronted with a bewildering range of attributes of
manliness--confidence, aggressiveness, protectiveness,
independence, ability to command, eagerness to feel important, love
of attention--we think that we are finally getting somewhere when
Mansfield announces that his own definition of manliness is
"confidence in the face of risk." We might have some issues with
the proposal. Don't brave people often feel afraid? Aristotle
thinks they do, and rightly, for the loss of life is especially
painful when one has a good life. And what about risk? Doesn't
manliness also come into play in facing the inevitable, such as each
person's own death? And what sort of risk? Are we talking about the
physical realm or the moral realm? Barry Bonds has a lot of
physical confidence while being (apparently) a moral coward.
Socrates probably wasn't up to much furniture- moving, and Seneca
is always whining about his stomach problems; but both had the
confidence that counts morally, when they stood up to unjust
governments and went to their deaths. So the candidate definition--
"confidence in the face of risk"--needs to answer a lot of
questions. But at least it is something, a definite proposal from
which we can move forward.

Imagine the shock to the feminine logic-loving mind, then, when
within two pages the definition is, if not withdrawn, at least
ignored, and quite different formulations, inconsistent with it,
trot forward like eager children vying for attention. Manliness is
aggressiveness, combined with promiscuousness in sex. It is the
"brute spirit of aggression." It is not mere aggression, but only
"aggression that develops a cause it espouses." It is "a claim on
your attention." It is the "willingness to challenge nature
combined with confidence ... that one can succeed." "In the end
aggression is all there is." It is "stubbornness added to
rationality."

Mansfield does tell us that his definition will shift as he moves,
in later chapters, "from aggression to philosophical courage." But
these examples are all quite close together in the early portion of
the text; and the later chapters do not supply a new, coherent,
contradiction-free account. Things do not get better, then.
Philosophers get mentioned more often, but are never emulated. We
never find Mansfield even worrying about his mass of contradictions
or trying to clean up the account. On the logical principle that
from a contradiction everything and anything follows, I conclude
that Manliness says it all. Try that out on the back jacket.

As for the careful reading of other thinkers' works that our friend
S would recommend, such reading is nowhere to be found in these
pages. Mansfield is horrendous when he reads feminist thinkers. He
gives us a hasty, superficial summary of several bits of some early
works (de Beauvoir, Millett, Greer, Firestone), but absolutely no
sense of how any of these women argues, and no sense of what the
women's movement has produced since the early 1970s. (Cursory
references to Carol Gilligan and to an exchange between Judith
Butler and Seyla Benhabib do not tell us anything about the
framework of their ideas.) Susan Okin is mentioned once in the
text, and Andrea Dworkin is ignored altogether. (Catherine
MacKinnon turns up in the bibliography.) By such strategic
omissions, Mansfield is able to hoodwink his implied reader into
thinking that all feminists want to have a lot of sex without
commitment, and that they ignore or denounce the family, and that
they "do not worry about violence in sex, and they do not refer to
the respect in which one should hold one's partner." This last is
the most extraordinary claim of all. If any topics could be said to
be absolute cliches of modern feminist thought, they would be the
topics of sexual violence and sexual respect (treating a person as
a person instead of as an object).

But never mind. It turns out that Mansfield is an equal opportunity
misreader. Male philosophers get the same slipshod treatment. To
mention a typical example, Mansfield evidently believes, and
asserts with high-spirited glee, that for him to require the
reading of Mill's On Liberty in his class at Harvard, a private
university, is "contrary to [the work's] main thesis." He seems to
think that Mill's "harm principle" supplies limits on all human
conduct, not just on the legal regulation of conduct: nobody can
require anything of anyone, including the young, unless that person
is harming others. This "reading" flies so flatly in the face of
Mill's elaborate views about education, not to mention the plain
meaning of the text of the fourth chapter of On Liberty, that one
thinks with distress of this jokey aside being retailed to
pseudo-knowing undergraduates almost as another example of
manliness: "See? I can teach Mill as a required text, thus showing
that I have contempt for his main idea."

Indeed, when we compare Mansfield to our decent-if-not-very-flashy
S, it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching
great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell
a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high
ones--especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the
bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while
to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care
about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of
them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and
verbal ambiguity their teacher's pronouncements are. That is the
sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other,
older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake
in Socrates's heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical
seriousness?

If the author of Manliness is far from being the patient
philosophical type for whom we have been searching, who might he
be? Plato's dialogues knew the answer: he is a rhetorician or a
sophist, one of those theatrical types so admired by the
conventionally ambitious men amply on display as Socrates's
interlocutors. Far from seeking truth, the sophist seeks to put on a
good show. Far from wanting premises that are correct, the sophist
seeks premises that his chosen audience will find believable. Far
from seeking analytical rigor, he offers a show of rigor in
arguments that are riddled with ambiguity and equivocation and
logical error. Far from submitting bravely to Socrates's
questioning, he slinks away when the going gets tough, or cranks up
the volume in order to try to drown out the courageous voice of the
truth-seeking philosopher. Audiences love him--because, says
Socrates, he is like a clever cook: instead of promoting true
health, he goes after what his audience will eagerly gobble up.

That is Mansfield to a T. In this book that repeatedly proclaims its
own manly boldness, offering its author as a John Wayne of the
intellect, he serves up a concoction that is contrived mainly to
delight the conservative audience that already lionizes Mansfield
as the hero of high standards, the enemy of grade inflation, and
the foe of feminism. Mansfield's daring physical prowess, he told a
New York Times Magazine reporter, is displayed in his ability to
move furniture around his house. His daring moral prowess is
displayed in his ability to make speeches on the floor of the
Harvard faculty opposing the creation of a women's studies program,
a risky feat indeed. Should average readers wonder whether this
does indeed bring him into competition with John Wayne, or even
with the questionable Barry Bonds, Mansfield does not care an iota,
because he has his expected audience dead to rights. Readers of The
Weekly Standard and National Review, they are already devouring the
logic-free, ambiguityriddled concoction he has served up and
smacking their lips.

Mansfield's intended readers do not care what modern feminism really
says, and they know so little about the subject that they are
likely not even to see how little of it Mansfield has described.
From their youth they remember the chilling names of Millett,
Greer, and Firestone, and they are sure that feminism cannot have
had a thought since then. They certainly relish the tasty claim
that sexual promiscuity is a central goal of the new feminism. And
just to be sure that they are utterly delighted, Mansfield smears
all over the top of his dish a thick layer of sneers and jibes,
rather like anchovy paste, delicious to some but revolting to
others--patronizing characterizations of women as harboring a
"secret liking for housework," or enjoying "the pleasurable duty of
henpecking." Or this: "One has only to think of Jane Austen to be
assured that women have a sense of humor, distributed in lesser
quantities to lesser brains." At this point, I think, even some of
the implied readers of this book might turn away. In fact, I
suspect that Mansfield underestimates the care and the acuity of
his chosen audience (or some of it) throughout his book.

II.

Mansfield's assertions (I cannot quite call them arguments) seem to
be as follows. Manliness, the quality of which John Wayne (says
Mansfield) is the quintessential embodiment, is a characteristic
that societies rightly value. But modern feminism wants a society
that has effaced all distinctions of gender, a society in which men
and women have the same traits. This is a dangerous mistake,
because manly aggression, though not altogether reliable, supplies
something without which we cannot have a good or stable society.
(Mansfield connects manliness not only to military performance but
also to the ability to govern a nation, and, as we have seen, he
denies that women who are not Mrs. Thatcher have this trait.) Since
women are only rarely capable of manliness, a society in which both
sexes have the same traits will have to be lacking in manliness. We
should reject this aim, and, with it, modern feminism.

The second half of the book contains, as Mansfield has warned his
reader, a more complex set of assertions, though they all lead to
the same bottom line. Taking Theodore Roosevelt as his more complex
icon of manliness, Mansfield notes that traditional John
Wayne-style manliness is not necessarily combined with virtue.
Indeed, traditional manliness is often linked to a Nietzschean sort
of "nihilism," which accepts no restraints and desires to soar
"beyond good and evil." (This reading of Nietzsche, like so many
readings in the book, is not defended by any close look at an
actual text. Is this the Nietzsche who prizes the disciplined
virtue of the dancer, who teaches that laisser aller, the absence
of restraint, is incompatible with any great achievement of any
sort?) Theodore Roosevelt, though, did combine traditional manliness
with virtue, thus showing that it is both possible and valuable to
do so.

On the whole, however, men will allow the constraints of virtue to
drag down their manly flights only if women insist on virtue as a
condition of sex. So women's non-manly inclinations hold men in
check. This old saw, which one encounters over and over again in
the writings of Leo Strauss's followers, seems to derive not from a
realistic look at life but from an opportunistic reading of
Rousseau's Emile, minus all Rousseau's complexity and nuance.
Rousseau shows clearly that the difference between Emile and Sophie
is produced by a coercive regime that curbs Sophie's intelligence
and even her physical prowess--she would have beaten Emile in the
race had she not had to run in those absurd clothes. He also
demonstrated, in his unpublished conclusion to the EmileSophie
story, that a marriage so contracted would be a dismal failure,
since parties so utterly distinct in moral upbringing would be
totally unable to understand one another.

But back to feminism. Feminism (exemplified in Mansfield's book by a
few carefully selected bits of early 1970s authors) wants women to
reject virtue and to seek sexual satisfaction promiscuously. In
effect, it teaches women to be as "nihilistic" as men. But women
are doomed to dismal failure at this task, because their manliness
is puny. Meanwhile, they will lose the hold they once had on men
through modesty and virtue. They will therefore be more endangered:
Mansfield actually asserts that a woman can resist rape only with
the aid of "a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense
at unwanted encroachment"! (How does he handle the well-known fact
that a large proportion of rapes are committed by men with whom the
victim has already had an intimate relationship, or with whom she
currently has one?) Society, meanwhile, will come to grief. So,
once again, the lesson is that we ought to rid ourselves of
feminism.

Where to begin? Since in Mansfield all roads lead back to the bogey
of feminism, let us begin there. Modern feminism is a hugely
diverse set of positions and arguments, but almost nobody has
seriously suggested that gender distinctions ought to be completely
eradicated. Indeed, much of the effort of legal feminism has been
to get the law to take them seriously enough. Thus feminists have
urged that rape law take cognizance of women's unequal and
asymmetrical physical vulnerability. Some courts had refused to
convict men of rape if the woman did not fight her attacker. In one
recent Illinois case, the conviction was tossed out because the
woman, about five feet tall and less than one hundred pounds, did
not resist a two-hundred-pound attacker in a solitary forest
preserve. But in a situation of great physical asymmetry, feminists
have urged, fighting is actually a stupid thing to do, and in the
Illinois case even crying out "No!" would have been stupid, given
the extreme solitude of the place and the likelihood that shouting
would provoke the attacker to violence. (I take this example from
the feminist legal scholar Stephen Schulhofer. Mansfield utterly
ignores the existence of male feminists, though they are many.
Feminism is a concern with justice, not an exercise in identity
politics.)

Feminists have also taken exception when insurance companies refused
to offer pregnancy benefits and then claimed that they were not
discriminating, because their policies protected all "non-pregnant
persons" and refused to protect "pregnant persons," male and
female. Catharine MacKinnon made the valuable observation that
sameness of treatment is not enough for the truly "equal protection
of the laws," when there are underlying physical asymmetries that
significantly affect women's social functioning. The "equal
protection of the laws" requires, instead, that society dismantle
regimes of hierarchy and subordination. MacKinnon's strategy was
based upon existing law in the area of race. Laws against
miscegenation had been defended on the ground that they treat
everyone alike: blacks cannot marry whites and whites cannot marry
blacks. Yet the Supreme Court held that these laws violate the
equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because they
uphold and perpetuate "white supremacy." The denial of pregnancy
benefits, MacKinnon argued, was like that, a regime of male
supremacy. The refusal to offer pregnancy benefits is now seen as a
form of sex discrimination, thanks to feminist argument.

Feminists, then, have not typically sought a society in which there
are no gender distinctions. They have challenged imposed and
unchosen gender norms that interfere with women's freedom and
functioning--seeking clothing, for example, in which one can do
what one wants to do and is capable of doing (not like Sophie's
absurd doll clothes). Anne Hollander has written eloquently of the
way in which women have claimed the suit, that attribute of the
successful man the world over, as their own, replacing with it
those billowing petticoats that made women seem vaguely like
mermaids, human on top and some hidden uncleanness below. But
women's suits never have been and never will be precisely like
men's suits--perhaps because women have better fashion sense,
perhaps because color-blindness is a male-sex-linked gene.

What feminists have sought above all is a society in which there are
no sex- based hierarchies, in which the sheer luck of being born a
female does not slot one into an inferior category for the purposes
of basic political and social functioning. Just as society now
refuses to discriminate on grounds of religion and race, so too it
should refuse to discriminate on grounds of sex.

If we now consider the example of religion, we can easily see that
non- discrimination does not entail homogeneity. Indeed, the
connection, if any, works in the opposite direction. Precisely
because the United States does not have an established church, and
refuses to discriminate politically on grounds of religious
membership, people are extremely free to choose any religion they
want, to make one up if they want to, or to have none if they want
none. Wherever political privileges are attached to religious
membership, this freedom, even if nominally protected, is not
total: most people want to be in the dominant group, so it is not
surprising that there are lots of Protestants in officially
Protestant nations, and so forth. What makes the United States the
most religiously diverse and colorful nation in the world (perhaps
in company with India) is its firm commitment to non-discrimination
(which it also shares with India). Go and convert to Buddhism if
you want, or to the newest sect of Pentacostalism. Be a Jew and do
not feel pressure to convert to Christianity, as Jews always did in
Establishmentarian Europe. Your political privileges will not be
affected by your religious choices.

What non-discrimination means for gender difference is not yet
clear, because people have only begun to experience
non-discrimination. Using the religion analogy, however, we might
predict that once gender is no longer a source of hierarchy and
subordination, people will express themselves more and more
personally where gender is concerned. Even now, some women wear
skirts and others feel more comfortable in pants. Some wear their
hair very short and others very long. More and more, form follows
function. Women's athletic clothes are not the same as men's
athletic clothes; gone are the bad old days when female runners had
to wear an ill-fitting garment designed for the male torso. But
they are suited to running, which is what matters here; and the
same garment is not suited to the office (whereas Sophie had to
wear her modest housewifely clothes for running and studying and
flirting alike).

In sum, when people are not forced, their choices make sense for
them and the lives they want to lead. So, too, in relationships:
some women will choose flirtiness, others a "manly" directness.
Some men will like taking care of children (if government and
employers give them decent support); others will try to avoid care,
and women will be able, let us hope, to see that one coming in
advance and make the choices they want to make in response. Some
women will attach great importance to their identity as women (as
some African Americans attach great importance to that identity),
and others will care less. What really troubles Mansfield, I fear,
is personal liberty itself, and the diversity that a culture of
personal self-expression, fostered by non- discrimination, brings
with it.

III.

But what about manliness? Do we want John Waynes around, or don't
we? Manliness, all of Mansfield's singulars and abstractions
notwithstanding, is clearly not a single trait. It is a family of
traits: upper-body strength, aggressiveness (and there are many
forms of that), physical endurance, mental endurance, physical
courage, moral courage, and probably many more. Barry Bonds might
be said by many to be "manly," but if we are thinking of the Gary
Cooper of High Noon as our paradigm, we will find Bonds quite
unmanly. When the Chicago Cubs catcher Michael Barrett slugged the
Chicago White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski, unprovoked, callers on
Chicago sports talk shows (overwhelmingly male) generally agreed
that Barrett's gesture, "manly" by the Mansfield standard of "brute
aggression," was a sign of weakness, not strength. They understood
that he was cracking under the stress of a miserable season, and
that a "real man" would (like Gary Cooper) avoid conflict unless it
were inevitable.

Sure, we need upper-body strength, at least in some functions,
though these are fewer today, even in the military. (Even Mansfield
grants that women outdo men in endurance, another valued physical
characteristic.) And sure, we need some of that old punch-'em-out
aggression, though boys need to learn that some types are better
and other types are worse. (Significantly, all Chicago White Sox
fans, including this one, applauded rookie Brian Anderson when he
ran out of the dugout and joined in the ensuing brawl, punching
Barrett's teammate John Mabry and thus standing up for his own
teammate--the very teammate who had made the six-foot-two,
215-pound rookie walk around in a female cheerleader's outfit, as a
comic form of hazing.)

Above all, we need to follow Aristotle's lead and distinguish the
sort of courage that stands up for a valuable goal from both
upper-body strength and punch-'em-out aggression. That sort of
courage, which was the only sort that Aristotle thought a true
virtue, always good no matter what the circumstance, requires the
ability to reflect on what risks are worth running, on what goals
are noble and what goals trivial or even base. It is because the
Gary Cooper character exemplifies this sort of reflection, and not
only because he is unafraid to face a villain, that he is deemed a
hero; but one can have that sort of reflection and not have much in
the way of physical strength. If we take Mansfield's candidate
definition, "confidence in the face of risk," and ask which
American presidents have exemplified this trait--when understood in
Aristotle's way, meaning risks for ends that have been reasonably
deemed to be important--who could be a better candidate than the
other Roosevelt, who is mentioned only once in Mansfield's book?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had that famous optimism that kept a
nation together through the dark times of the Depression and then
through global war. He stood up for people in situations that were
risky in all sorts of ways (the danger of a socialist revolution,
the dangers of countless deaths of innocent people, the dangers of
Nazi Germany and imperial Japan). His ends can be plausibly seen as
valuable and good. And yet he was hardly an icon of manliness in
Mansfield's sense. He was reassuring more in the way that a good
parent is reassuring than in the way that T.R. was (if he ever was)
reassuring. Yes, he dissembled, making people think he could walk
at least a little bit. So he did understand that the American
public needed (and perhaps still needs) to see its president as
manly in a more vulgar sense. But how many would have thought him a
John Wayne, even then? There are some things to be said for T.R.,
but for Aristotelian manliness I'll take FDR any day.

Now let us come back to the gender question. If we ask whether the
Aristotelian virtue of courage belongs more to men than to women, we
will need to ask, first, what it is that makes people willing to
take enormous risks for the sake of others. It is difficult to
study that topic, but a beginning was made by Samuel P. Oliner and
Pearl M. Oliner in their book The Altruistic Personality, a famous
study of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. With careful social
science techniques, they identified a number of variables that
might be highly correlated with those courageous acts, and then they
questioned rescuers to discover what traits they had. The two
traits that they found most highly correlated with this sort of
courage were what they call a "caring attitude" and a sense of
"responsibility." The rescuers had all been brought up to think
that people ought to care for one another, and that it was
unacceptable to shirk responsibility for someone else's suffering if
one could do something about it. That was why (the Oliners
conclude) they stood up for strangers as they did, risking their
lives in the process. Rescuers were, of course, both male and
female. Their common bond was, however, a set of traits that, at
least in terms of common gender stereotypes, are more "feminine"
than "masculine." Kristin Monroe, working with the list of
"righteous gentiles" from Yad Vashem, came to a similar conclusion
in The Heart of Altruism.

If this is right, and if we want to produce young people who have
the sort of courage that these rescuers embody, then we will want
to be sure that boys and girls both grow up with the capacity for
concern and care, and the ability to take responsibility for the
situation of others--traits that seem to be sorely lacking in
American society at present. It would have been nice to have a book
on manliness that focused on this problem. Clearly ordinary people
can become virtuous in the way that Aristotle recommends, and
clearly neither gender has a monopoly on the virtue in question.
The problem we have is that so many young people in our money- and
fame-focused society do not get much experience taking care of
anyone or anything, and are all too lacking in a sense of
responsibility, as has been clearly shown in Dan Kindlon's Too Much
of a Good Thing and other recent social scientific research on
American adolescents.

What might one do about this, if one thought it a problem? A
mandatory program of national service might be one way to begin
bootstrapping courage--or true "manliness"--even if the
materialistic and competitive culture of our high schools has left
character in a pretty bad way, and even if families are all too
uneven in the values they communicate to their children. We could
also try to make primary and secondary education settings in which
children learn the importance of care and social responsibility--a
goal that has been greatly set back, of late, by the constant
harping on scientific and technological proficiency, so important
for competition in the global market, and the relative neglect of
history, the humanities, and the arts.

Such reasonable and decent goals will be greatly impeded, however,
if we do not even get to the point of distinguishing Franklin
Delano Roosevelt from Michael Barrett, or, worse still, if we
encourage young people to believe that the latter is better than
the former. Even die-hard Cubs fans know better. Harvey Mansfield
does not utterly reject such goals (I think), but his cavalier way
with logic, his lack of definitional clarity, his ideological
enthusiasm, and his tendency to romanticize characters similar to
Bonds and Barrett make his book, well, uncourageous, just when we
badly need to think well about how better to cultivate true
courage.

By Martha C. Nussbaum

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