March 27, 2006

A JOHNSONIAN REVIEW OF HARVEY C. MANSFIELD'S "MANLINESS"

AND

HOW IT FITS IN WITH VIEWS OF MANLINESS AROUND THE WORLD

Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON. ‘I have looked into it.’ ‘What, (said Elphinston,) have you not read it through?’ Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, ‘No, Sir, do YOU read books THROUGH?’
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, by James Boswell, ch. 28

Dr. Johnson, having grown up in the world of books and booksellers, must have early grasped the notion that a book is a commercial creation rather than an intellectual one. Most authors can be brilliant for twenty or thirty pages at a time, and can create an essay on the subject of X or Z which is imaginative and felicitously written. If an author takes such a work to a publisher the latter will see it as something he can sell for only one or two pence—a paltry amount for him. So he will tell the author, “You must bulk it up, Sir. Bulk it up!”

So the poor bedraggled author will take his brilliant but meager work and proceed to “bulk it up.” Two years later he will bring it back two hundred and sixty pages heavier with chapters entitled “The History of Z,” or “The Anatomy of Z,” or “The Economics of Z,” or “Z and the Jewish Question.” All works of dreary drudgery, but bulky. “Splendid,” says the publisher, and issues an economical edition for a pound and ten shillings, and a deluxe edition with a fine leather binding at 3 pounds-five.

Fortunately, Horsefeathers twigged on to Dr. Johnson’s insight early enough to save ourselves many dreary hours of reading, unlike the righteous Mr. Elphinston. We had recently heard of professor Harvey C. Mansfield’s new book called “Manliness,” and did not want to appear feckless about such an important matter, even at our advanced age.

To the writing of books, there is no end.

To see this, all you have to do is to enter the word “manliness” into the search field of Amazon.com and 59 book titles instantly pop up, and if you enter “masculinity” another 941 titles appear in less than two seconds. A thousand books on the same subject in the blink of an eye. How long would it take you to read 1000 books? At two a week it would take ten years. And by then there might be another two thousand titles.…

Our curiosity stirred, we clicked over to Google to see how many web-sites were interested in manliness/masculinity. Ten million, it turns out. No wonder a thousand books have been written on the matter. But maybe all important human issues yield such huge numbers, we worried. So, let’s try “happiness.” After all Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the old gang spent a good deal of papyrus on “happiness.” In went “happiness” into the Google maw. Out came 440,000 references. Clearly, a non-starter compared to the ten million of “manliness.” Just to confirm our findings we clicked back to Amazon to find the number of books that had been written on the important subject of human “happiness.” A paltry eight, we found. It was indubitably clear that amongst the literate and computerati “happiness” was a dying issue and “manliness” was in the center of the whirlwind. And considering that we couldn’t recall very much in Plato or Aristotle on “manliness” but much on happiness, much must have happened to the human soul in the last couple of thousand years.

“Manliness,” by Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, has succeeded in ruffling the feathers of feminists and liberals alike. The New York Times felt that professor Mansfield needed more than one intellectual assassin—like Rasputin—and sent two (at least so far) to lay him to rest. The Times published a fresh-mouthed, snarky interview with the affable professor a couple of weeks ago (click HERE), and last week it published a review of his book in the Book Review by Walter Kirns (click HERE). The latter, with the soul of a girly-man, wrote a dismissive review dripping with sarcasm and bitchiness which only made us more curious about the book. So, inspired by Dr. Johnson’s approach to books, we strolled to our local Barnes and Noble and grabbed a copy of professor Mansfield’s book off the pile in the front of the store and found a comfortable place in one of the upstairs window-seats looking out over Broadway.

Quickly, we grasped that professor Mansfield was a nineteenth-century man devoted to common sense and that the book was one of those books written by academics for other academics on their six-month sabbatical—an interesting but slow read. Seeing that American Manhood has been on the ropes for the past quarter century, under attack from the radical feminists, the gay liberators, and the post-modern left, “Manliness” is an attempt to rescue this valuable social asset from its declared enemies.

Mansfield tries to define manliness with Johnsonian brevity as
“confidence in the face of risk,” or as an “easy assumption of authority” that leads to corollary qualities stereotypically associated with men. Men, he says, naturally tend to dominate. And he argues that these inclinations are not social artifacts, but a reflection of our biological nature. These are the central ideas and arguments of the good professor’s book—the rest is bulking up.

Having taken his editor’s good bulking advice he tells us about manliness in art and literature—from “The Red Badge of Courage” to “High Noon.” Then there are discussions of manliness in Plato, Hobbes, Darwin, Homer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Machiavelli. He tells more than we want to know about the Greek thumos, which can be translated as “spiritedness” or courage. Thumos means diaphragm (the muscular layer that separates the abdominal cavity from the pulmonary cavity) in Greek. The Greeks had the notion that the thumos was the seat of the emotions. Odysseus was forever talking to his thumos in times of need: “Up thumos and help me against the swift and wily suitors.”

Academics are masters at bulking and professor Mansfield is one of the best, being a named professor of political philosophy, and a manly academic in the bargain—he is famous for his crusade against grade inflation at Harvard, and his public support of President Summers when there was yet time. But bulk is bulk nevertheless and the feeling of drudgery began to creep into our perusal of his book.

Reminding ourselves that we were not on sabbatical, we harkened to Dr. Johnson’s caution and replaced professor Mansfield’s book upon it’s pile in the front of the store and quietly left.

In my boyhood—during the depression and World War II—the one issue we didn't have to worry about was what a man was or how a man was supposed to act. In real life you knew that a man earned a living for his wife and children, like my Dad, and was responsible for fixing things around the house and carrying the heavy stuff when you went to the beach or off on a vacation. You knew he was kind of the boss because the money came from him and he could drive. He was pretty nice and he'd let you do pretty much anything, but there were times when you knew not to cross him no matter what because he could shout louder than anyone else in the family when he was mad.

You knew how men were supposed to dress because your dad and Dick Tracy wore the same outfit: a dark suit with a vest, a white shirt and a striped or polka-dot tie and a fedora hat-gray in my father's case and yellow in Tracy's. And oh, how I longed for my first suit with long pants which didn't come until I was about 10 or 11. Until then you wore short pants in summer and knickers in winter.

I also knew that my father had been a soldier in the British Army during World War I, a member, he told me when I asked, of the Royal Fusiliers, who were part of General Allenby’s Army in Palestine fighting the Turks. There were old photographs of him to prove it, looking very gallant and handsome in his solar topee and uniform. And at times when he was in a jolly mood—on a trip usually¬—he’d sing old British army songs and take an occasional puff on a cigarette which he took out of a dark green package with the name " Lord Salisbury" written in gold letters across it. That's how men dressed: cigarettes, fedoras, dark suits with vests—and, oh yes, a fountain pen and mechanical pencil in the upper left vest pocket.

But that was only real life. You also learned how men were supposed to act from reading, going to the movies, and listening to the radio—our mythography—what The Iliad and The Odyssey were to boys of early Greece. You discovered that it was important to be decisive—a man/boy of action—like Smilin' Jack, the aviator, and Jack Armstrong the all-American boy. Like Tom Mix and his very intelligent horse, Tony, and all his white-hatted cowboy pals like Buck Jones and Hoot Gibson. (That was before cowboys went soft and began to sing and dress fancy like Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.) And it did not seem perverse to you then that cowboy heroes, even though they risked life and limb to rescue the beautiful woman, in the end seemed to have a more affectionate and intimate relationship with their faithful horses.

You discovered, too, that these men of action were motivated by high principles. Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood taught you that; so did The Shadow, that mysterious aide to the forces of law and order (in reality Lamont Cranston, the wealthy man about town). And besides being resourceful, they always had some wonderful power or skill: Errol Flynn's power to split an arrow at a hundred yards or Lamont Cranston's hypnotic power to cloud men's minds and thus become invisible—a little trick he had picked up years before in the Orient. Whatever they did, these men were always struggling against insurmountable odds and finally, through an act of cunning or skill, triumphing.

From there it was only a short step for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and The Warner Brothers to introduce you to Spencer Tracy, who, you may remember, fighting against insurmountable odds, invented the elec¬tric light, and Paul Muni, who, against even greater insurmountable odds, discovered Pasteurization and the treatment for rabies, and which led you naturally to the rest of Paul De Kruif's wonderful Microbe Hunters—scientist heroes, all of whom were patient, deter¬mined, resourceful, and adventuresome. That's how you found out how to be a man when I was a boy.

Nowadays you can see that it's harder. Cultural gurus tell us that a sea change has occurred in the last decade or two. With the end of the sixties and the emergence of the radical feminist movement, the sexual revolution, the gay activist movement, and the rapid spread of AIDS, what may be an inevitable drift toward androgyny appears to have accelerated. Chicken or egg? Have cultural gender values contributed to changes in individual gender psychology, or has indi¬vidual gender psychology resulted in changes in cultural gender values?

Psychoanalysis until about twenty years ago had little to say about the matter. Until then psychoanalysts believed, as I did when I was a boy, that they knew what a real man was—what normal masculinity looked like. They were thus able to identify deviations from this norm and assert what was pathological and what was not.

Much has changed since then. Views about homosexuality have changed radically since the American Psychiatric Association de-listed it as a diagnosis. The issue has become controversial and politicized and there are probably as many opinions about the matter as there are psychiatrists. In addition, work on transsexuality and gender identity disorders has opened and enriched the field of sexuality and sexual development, forcing a review of cherished ideas and accepted view¬points. Some of these, no doubt, will have to be revised, while others will stand the test of time.

Whatever bulking professor Mansfield did for his book, it was not in the field of anthropology. Pity. He would have saved himself some drudgery and a wrong turn in his discussion of the origins and causes of “manliness.”

Actually, anthropologists have been making observations on this matter in a large variety of cultures for decades and have accumulated a large body of facts that are extremely useful in understanding manliness/masculinity. One book, “Manhood in the Making,” by David Gilmore, still current and studied in scholarly circles, stands out although bypassed by the New York Times Book Review, and provides the most thorough review and modern analysis of the subject.

The book asks what it means to be "manly" and sets out to find similarities and differences in manhood in a wide variety of cultures from the most primitive to the most developed. These compelling descriptions of how various peoples grow their boys into "real" men and how they practice their manhood is based in part on Gilmore’s own observations and in part on a review and synthesis of an extensive array of anthropological field work by others.

What they have found out about manhood is illuminating and sometimes puzzling. They say that in most societies manhood is a challenge, a test. Since life is, for the most part, nasty, mean, brutish, and often short, males must be forced by inner sanctions and outer conventions to assume their roles. And manhood is that ensemble of' inner sanctions and outer conventions which gradually develops in each culture in order to inspire boys to become "real" men. This ensemble of values and mores is akin to an ideology—a gender ideology—that is socially inspiring and morally compelling. Each culture provides an unwritten script by which the male children and adolescents can guide themselves or be guided by elders. Although each culture allows some individual expression, some more, some less, in the enactment of the manhood script, it must be followed in general, and the culture provides serious sanctions if it is not.

In looking over a broad range of cultural data, Gilmore finds that there is a spectrum along which these manhood ideologies fall. At one end of the scale there are the machismo ideologies found around the Mediterranean Basin and in a number of other societies. At the other end of' the spectrum are the much rarer (perhaps anomalous) "flower-children" ideologies found in Tahiti and the Semai people of central Malaysia. In the latter cultures there is little social distinction between the sexes and all forms of assertiveness are taboo. Between these poles there are a group of'cultures that provide their men with somewhat more complex scripts that appear to partake of both ends of the spectrum, like those of modern urban America, India, and China.

In those societies in which manhood is important, which is to say most societies, Gilmore found that whatever differences exist between the varied expressions of' manliness, certain essential similarities re¬main—the universal components of manhood. "To be a man in most of the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin.... `Real' men are expected to tame nature in order to recreate and bolster the basic kinship units of their society; that is, to reinvent and perpetuate the social order by will, to create something of value from nothing."

These three imperatives of' manliness—impregnation, protection, and production—are dangerous and highly competitive, and boys and men must be induced to master their anxieties and give up the narcissistic pleasures of childhood in order to face pain, hardship, and even death willingly. The ideology of manhood exists to achieve this transformation.

The anthropologists find that there is a correlation between the socioeconomic forces operating in the culture and the form of gender ideology. It makes intuitive sense to say that a culture which must protect itself from warrior neighbors will have to develop warriors too and will need an ideology of manhood that inspires courage, ruthlessness to¬ward outsiders, physical strength, and martial attitudes.

There is a psychological dimension, Gilmore says, " that provides the necessary third factor to the manhood equation, aside from ideology and environment." He asserts that there is a powerful universal psychological motivation in men (and women) to avoid pain and hardship, which he calls psychic regression. And regression is the "main impediment to ... manly constructivity." Thus, what must be built into manhood scripts are counterphobic mechanisms to help individuals master their tendency to regress.

Unfortunately, in the last twenty years, there have been strong cultural forces—teachers, mythmakers, political activists—that reinforce these regressive tendencies, feminizing and softening our boys, just when we have encountered powerful enemies from whom we must be protected by our “real” men.