前貼杜念中文章，有朋友問杜念中是否是新保守派；最近哈佛大學政府系教授Harvey Mansfield由耶魯大學出版社出版Manliness一書，杜在蘋果日報上為文介紹。Mansfield是著名（有人會說惡名昭彰）的新保守主義者、馬基維利學者、史特勞斯派（有點像三合一敵人了）。他在1994年美國國會參眾兩院落入共和黨之手時說：「【羅斯福】的新政終結了」（當年美國眾院乃是自1954年以來第一次由共和黨掌握多數；共和黨至今仍掌握多數，民主黨期待今年的期中選舉能扳回來）。紐約時報的書評大加嘲諷，但激起德國的著名外交評論家Josef Joffe投書抗議。

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19kirn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

    這裡貼出Mansfield受紐約時報雜誌專訪與波士頓環球報的報導；在網上搜尋，據說討論本書的部落格達五百多篇，多數大概沒有讀過此書（我也沒有）。Mansfield所講的，部分是「夫唱婦隨」、「男主外、女主內」，覺得這些概念古板的人，現在知道有位今年73歲的哈佛大學教授也是這麼主張的。

紐約時報有另一篇報導，說有位金髮碧眼的健美先生捐贈精子銀行，已知用他的精子生出的子女有21個，他們的父母包含四對女同性戀伴侶、三對異性戀夫妻與六位單親媽媽，現在成立網路BBS，還打算集體出遊…另一篇報導哈佛商學院教授研究捐精人的身高，平均是五呎十吋（美國男人平均與此差遠了）。

    如果說「生命的意義在創造宇宙繼起之生命」的話，那這位健美先生顯然蠻成功的…

     附帶值得一提的是，杜念中提到Mansfield新譯的托克維爾《民主在美國》，他忘了提這是Mansfield和他太太合譯的(參考附圖)。

Of Manliness and Men. (THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: QUESTIONS FOR HARVEY C. MANSFIELD)(Interview) Deborah Solomon.

The New York Times Magazine, March 12, 2006 p15

Q: As a staunch neoconservative and the author of a new feminism-bashing book called "Manliness," how are you treated by your fellow government professors at Harvard?

Look, if I only consorted with conservatives, I would be by myself all the time.

So your generally left-leaning colleagues are willing to talk to you?

People listen to me, but they don't pay attention to what I say. I should punch them out, but I don't.

In your latest book, you bemoan the disappearance of manliness in our "gender neutral" society. How, exactly, would you define manliness?

My quick definition is confidence in a situation of risk. A manly man has to know what he is doing.

Hasn't technology lessened the need for risk taking, at least of the physical sort?

It has. But it hasn't removed it. Technology gives you the instruments, and social sciences give you the rules. But manliness is more a quality of the soul.

How does someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger stack up?

I would include him as a manly man.

But doesn't he exemplify the sort of man whose overdeveloped muscles are intended to mask feelings of insecurity?

Yes, but then he stepped up to become governor of California. He took a risk with his reputation.

What about President Bush? He's a risk taker, but wouldn't his penchant for long vacations be a strike against him?

I wouldn't say industriousness is a sign of manliness. That's sort of wonkish. Experts do that.

What about Dick Cheney?

He hunts. And he curses openly. Lynne Cheney is kind of manly, too. I once worked with her on the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In your book, you say Margaret Thatcher is an ideal woman, but isn't she the manliest of all?

I was told by someone who visited her that she is very feminine with her husband.

Why is that so important to you in light of her other achievements?

We need roles. Roles give us mutual expectations of what is either correct or good behavior. Women are neater than men, they make nests, and all these other stereotypes are mostly true. Wives and mothers correct you; they hold you to a standard; they want to make you better.

I am beginning to wonder if you have ever spoken to a woman. Your ideas are so Victorian.

I have a young wife who grew up in the feminist revolution, and even though she is not a feminist, she wants to benefit from it. I wash the dishes, and I make the bed.

How young is she, exactly?

She's 60. I'm 73.

Were you sorry to see Harvard's outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, attacked for saying that men and women may have different mental capacities?

He was taking seriously the notion that women, innately, have less capacity than men at the highest level of science. I think it's probably true. It's common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are.

But couldn't that simply reflect the institutional bias against women over the centuries?

It could, but I don't think it does. We have been going a couple of generations now. There are certain things that haven't changed. For example, in New York City, the doormen are still 98 percent men.

Yes, but fewer jobs depend on that sort of physical brawn as society becomes more technologically adept. Physical advantages are practically meaningless now that men are no longer hunter-gatherers.

I disagree with that.

When was the last time you did something that required physical strength?

It's true that nothing in my career requires physical strength, but in my relations with women, yes.

Such as?

Lifting things, opening things. My wife is quite small.

What do you lift?

Furniture. Not every night, but routinely.

CRITICAL FACULTIES

The manly man's man

Harvey Mansfield, conservative political theorist and academic provocateur, argues that women--and society--need to come to terms with 'manliness'

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/03/12/the_manly_mans_man/

By Christopher Shea  |  March 12, 2006

WHO IS NOT JUST a man, but a manly man? And who today can even say the words ''manly man" without smirking?

These questions are at the heart of ''Manliness" (Yale), the new book by Harvard government professor Harvey C. Mansfield, who has long shouldered a reputation as the campus's most outspoken conservative.

In answer to the first question, Mansfield nominates, among others, the marshal played by Gary Cooper in ''High Noon." When the town's sniveling semi-men slink away from the task, Cooper boldly goes out to fight the thugs arriving in his town. As for the second question-well it just shows how wanly gender neutral our society has become: Manly men scare us.

Liberals at Harvard may balk at the suggestion that Mansfield is an academic Gary Cooper. But while some of his conservative colleagues complain privately about affirmative action or grade inflation or women's studies, Mansfield has unfailingly stepped forward with his rhetorical Remington blazing away. Most recently, he stood by president Lawrence H. Summers, whom Mansfield says he considered a manly man-at least until Summers's every third sentence became an apology.

While polishing his role as the Last Conservative Standing at Harvard, Mansfield has also built a reputation as a political theorist solid enough that even liberal political scientists see him as a model for how to practice a humanistic brand of political science. His books ''Machiavelli's Virtue," ''Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power," and ''America's Constitutional Soul" are dense, learned, and steeped in classical thought.

''Manliness," which mates his interest in Great Books and culture-war combat, confronts two trends he has long deplored: academic gender studies, which see ''male" and ''female" as fluid categories constructed by society, and feminism, which says there is almost nothing that men can do that women cannot.

Nonsense, Mansfield thinks. For better and worse, men are more willing than women to stick out their necks for causes, ideas, and people. They possess a greater taste for the physical and intellectual combat that has led to mankind's (yes, mankind's) greatest achievements. ''I don't think we need to preserve manliness," he said in an interview. ''I think there is plenty of evidence that manliness is around us. But women need to come to terms with it-society as a whole does." The gender-neutral society is by definition a mediocre one, with male greatness viewed as threatening to the social order and men and women crammed into boxes they don't fit in.

Needless to say, Mansfield's rhetoric evokes visceral reactions. ''I think you have to say it is a cry of desperation," says Robin Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley. ''Here is guy who has seen his male privilege vanish as society became more equal. He wants to turn the clock back." But if it weren't such a controversial topic, it wouldn't be manly to take it on.

. . .

Mansfield's definition of manliness is maddeningly imprecise: Basically, he says, you know it when you see it. Mansfield sees it in firefighters, warriors, and great thinkers, but also, interestingly, in Margaret Thatcher. It is a ''quality of the soul," he writes in one typically opaque passage. ''A manly man asserts himself," he writes in another, ''so that he and the justice he demands are not overlooked."

Mansfield believes that the great philosophers understood the manly man, and his own idea of manliness becomes a bit clearer when he let's them do the talking. Plato and Aristotle, for example, described how the quality called ''thumos," or spiritedness, which men supposedly have in abundance, helped keep cities safe and spurred vigorous debate in the agora. Thomas Hobbes, in ''Leviathan," puzzled over how to keep manliness in check so that men who come together under government would not hack each other to bits. And Nietzsche famously idolized the ''superman," whom Mansfield would applaud if Nietzsche had tempered him with a bit of mercy.

In describing manliness, Mansfield trusts common stereotypes more than social science-a move sure to endear him to feminists. When it comes to believing in male-female differences, Mansfield makes Summers look like a piker: Mansfield cites the relevant psychological studies, but he does so disdainfully. Statistical social science, he believes, is unmanly. It breaks men and women down into measurable attributes while failing to see them whole.

Stereotypes, on the other hand, are ''democratic," possessing a respect for the wisdom of the past. The common understanding is that men are aggressive while women are caring; women are ''faithful or at least unadventurous" in sex relative to men; they are ''soft," ''sensitive," and ''indirect"; they cry and complain more. Of these clichés, ''not one has been disproven" by social science, Mansfield writes.

Thumos plus vaulting ambition has its rewards. It is no accident that corporate boardrooms remain largely male, despite two generations of gender-neutral ideology. ''Men," Mansfield writes, ''have the highest offices, the leading reputations; they make the discoveries, conceive the theories, win the prizes, start the companies, score the touchdowns." Nor should it surprise that women are losing the housework battles. ''Manly men," he writes, ''disdain women's work."

Mansfield allows that women can sometimes do manly deeds-Thatcher prosecuting the Falklands War, for example, or Grace Kelly picking up a rifle at the climax of ''High Noon." But Mansfield says it should be obvious they are doing something unusual for their sex. Forcing manly men to wash dishes, or to curb their aggressive ways in politics or business out of deference to ''sensitive" women, does violence to nature and gelds modern society.

. . .

As might be expected, Mansfield's critics in the academy are many. Theda Skocpol, a colleague in the Harvard government department, says Mansfield has ''identified some qualities that are very important in human endeavors," but flatly rejects his binary view of humanity. ''I don't think Harvey realizes to what extent we have moved beyond these traditional ideas about men and women. Most people believe that to be an effective leader you need to combine traditionally male and traditionally female abilities."

And while few scholars today say that there are no behavioral differences between men and women, surely most scholars will say Mansfield exaggerates their depth and permanence. He cites the Berkeley linguist Lakoff, for example, for her work documenting how women frame requests in an apologetic, super-polite way. But Lakoff says much social science work has shown that these linguistic quirks are based on social circumstance. Low-status males are apologetic, too, in the presence of high-status men, and women in positions of authority shed many ''female" traits.

Anne Norton, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, says Mansfield takes a ''cartoonish" view of modern masculinity and ''projects it backward into history," ignoring scholarly work that shows how the concept of manliness has changed over time. It would make his story a lot more interesting, she says, if he acknowledged that Achilles, in Mansfield's words ''the manly hero par excellence without whom a book on manliness can hardly be composed," probably slept with other men-and is described as being as pretty as a girl.

Mansfield gives the impression that he'd rather live in ancient Greece, but even he does not propose undoing a century of feminism. He endorses, perhaps as the most that could be achieved, the mommy-track world. Women would be free to compete for any job, but no one would expect women to have 50 percent of the top jobs-and taking time off to raise children, or staying home to begin with, would be applauded. In private, women would be ''free to be women." In sexual matters there would be a reversion to female modesty and male gentlemanliness.

Of course, the big question here, what readers really want to know, is: Does Mansfield do housework? Indeed, he confesses to doing an unmanly amount-the dishes, laundry, and bed making. ''I am sure he finds household work undignified," says his wife, Delba Winthrop, a lecturer in the Harvard extension school, who does the cooking. (They have hired help to do the cleaning now, but didn't always.) ''But that holds for women, too. Somehow, it gets done." Sometimes even manly men have to compromise.

Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.