NYT and WaPo Vote Against "Manliness"

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.