努斯鲍姆：男性气概书评
Intervent - Man Overboard
HARVEY C. MANSFIELD (2006), Manliness
Suppose a
philosophi
cal scholar—let uscallthisscholarS—with high standards, trainedinandfon
dofthe worksof
Plato and Aristotle, wished toinvestigate, fora contemporary American audience, the conceptof “manliness,” a concept closely relatedtoth
eonethat
PlatoandAristotlecalledandreia
,
forwhichtheusual
English rendering is “courage.”(Harvey Mansfield
himself
tells us that andreia ishissubject.)How wouldthis
scholar go about it?Well,followingtheleadofAristo
tle,
S would probably
begin by layingoutthe variouswidespread beliefs about the topic,especiallythose heldbyre
putable
people. S would also considerthe opinionsof well-known
philosophers. In
settingdownalltheseopinions,S would
be careful to getpeople’sviewsrightandtoreadtheir
writings carefully, looking notjustforasse
rtionsbut
also for thearguments
thatsupportthem.
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 theymake 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’ 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 befound 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. (Catharine 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 clichés 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 highspirited
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’ 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’ 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’ 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, ambiguity- riddled 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 tothink 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
ofgender,a society in which men and women have the sametraits.This is a
dangerous mistake,because manlyaggression,though not altogether
reliable,suppliessomething without which we cannot have a good or
stablesociety.(Mansfield connects manliness not only to militaryperformance 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 thesame traits will have to be
lacking in manliness.We shouldreject this aim,and,with it,modern feminism.
The second half of the book contains,as Mansfield haswarned his reader,a
more complex set of assertions,thoughthey all lead to the same bottom
line.Taking TheodoreRoosevelt as his more complex icon of
manliness,Mansfieldnotes that traditional John Wayne-style manliness is
notnecessarily combined with virtue.Indeed,traditionalmanliness 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 somany readings in
the book,is not defended by any close lookat an actual text.Is this the
Nietzsche who prizes thedisciplined virtue of the dancer,who teaches that
laisseraller;the absence of restraint,is incompatible with anygreat achievement
of any sort?)Theodore Roosevelt,though,did combine traditional manliness with
virtue,thus showingthat 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. Rousseaushows 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 Emile-Sophie 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 tothe 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
nondiscrimination 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 nondiscrimination (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).
