Manly Good or Manly Evil
By Theodore Dalrymple and Brandon Bosworth

There are fashions in virtue, as there are in clothes. Frankness and compassion are in this year, discretion and fortitude are out. Indeed, fortitude is now regarded less as a virtue than as a psychological defect.

There is, moreover, a tendency for virtues, if they are carried to the extreme, to turn into vices. Generosity becomes foolhardiness and irresponsibility, with a large element of pride thrown in. No one would like somebody who is so honest that he never said anything that was not literally true: such a man would be a prig, a bore, and a brute.

As for manliness, it is doubtful whether, if you took a poll in any Western society today, a majority would recognize it as a virtue at all rather than a terrible vice. It had been considered a virtue until fairly recently. Then prolonged linguistic bullying by feminists lent negative moral connotations to almost any word etymologically connected with “man” (which no doubt is why hangman and taxman are among the few exceptions that have not been reformulated to hangperson and taxperson.)

It is ironic that in a book on manliness, by an author who seeks to defend it, even if only tentatively, the impersonal female pronoun should sometimes be used, as well as the ugly and awkward “humankind”: all the more so given that the author himself points out how tyrannical it is for editors at university presses to insist on these inelegant and barbarously literal-minded locutions.

What exactly is the manliness that Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield sets out to defend in this book, in circumspectly moderate fashion? Well, a manly man is one who takes risks, indeed welcomes them. He accepts the consequences without complaint. He is chivalrous towards those in his power or under his protection. He is spirited and adventurous, and does not act in accordance with a narrow calculation of his immediate interest. He defends his honor and seeks glory.

In the present climate of opinion, to have a good word to say about manliness is itself manly. It’s easy to see where the traits of manliness, carried to excess, might lead. They can be made to serve a deeply anti-intellectual purpose, or a vicious, cruel, pagan amoralism.

But not even strident feminists, in their private lives, would wish to do away with manliness altogether. Men whose qualities are entirely feminine are all very well in their own way, theoretically, but they rarely capture the prolonged attention and loyalty of even the most feminist of women.

Mansfield explores the differences between men and women in a sophisticated, one might almost say convoluted, fashion. He accepts the common-sense view that the two sexes are differently constituted, but does not accept that this negates the claims of women to equal treatment in what he calls a gender-neutral society. He argues that a person’s sex should not affect his or her chances of obtaining a position in the public sphere, while roles in private should be in accordance with the natural proclivities of the two sexes. I suspect feminists will see this as a covert justification for women working full-time and then coming home to do the washing up.

Mansfield seems rather too sanguine about the increasingly “gender-neutral” society we have created. His over-optimism is brought about by his focus on the most wealthy and educated households. Here he takes his lead from upper-class feminists (there are no others, at least whose writings reach the public). The typical woman in our society is for him, as for them, an intelligent, educated professional woman who can manage several roles at once, and for whom a purely domestic life would be boring and stultifying. Such women experience the world of work as genuinely liberating and horizon-expanding.

There are a large number of women, however, who find deep meaning and satisfaction in private life. They go to work from financial necessity rather than to avoid boredom. For many of them, work is experienced as drudgery rather than liberation.

The financial independence work supposedly gives women has also given their menfolk an excuse for irresponsibility. Unwilling to place a limit on their own appetites—as a strong masculine sensibility might once have helped them to do—many men in today’s feminist era commit to no one, and society is utterly atomized. Among the most pitiable victims are children. It is notable that Mansfield’s encomium to gender-neutrality pays scant attention to its affect on children.

I do not think Mansfield is always consistent or accurate. For example, he says: “Scientists are professionally required to subscribe to the fact-value distinction...a position in philosophy that sensible people never believed and that trendy people no longer believe.” Yet only a few lines later, he writes, “To evaluate well you must pay attention to the facts.” So it seems there are facts after all which are distinct from evaluations. The philosophical error in which sensible people have never believed cannot therefore be that of naively supposing that there are facts. Rather, the mistake comes in believing that facts are sufficient by themselves to answer all the questions we need addressed.

Still, Mansfield’s defense of what, politically, has become indefensible by anyone wanting to keep his reputation intact is most welcome. His central insight is that manly virtues, which arise from men’s inherent nature, are socially indispensable, and if they find no worthwhile or constructive outlet, they will find a destructive one. Certainly, it is my experience as a doctor working among people at the lower end of the social scale that the deprivation of a manly role for young men has led to a horrible increase in violence, especially that perpetrated against women.

Now women are fighting back—the increase in female violence has been even more startling than the increase in male violence. In their own deeply unattractive way these women are living the feminists’ dream of a society in which men and women behave in exactly the same fashion and have no special sex-determined roles to play.

We need to heed Mansfield’s wise and eloquent conclusion: “A free society cannot survive if we are so free that nothing is expected of us.”

Theodore Dalrymple is a doctor and writer whose most recent book is Our Culture, What’s Left of It.

Literant

Is there an equivalent of the word “foodie” to describe those of us who are passionate about beverages, who love everything from gourmet sodas (Sioux City Sarsaparilla, anyone?) to exquisite high-end bourbon (Van Winkle, aged 20 years) and all that lies in between, hard and soft alike?

The indescribable fans of liquid refreshments will no doubt be interested in Tom Standage’s book A History of the World in 6 Glasses. Standage, technology editor at The Economist, examines how six beverages—beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola—serve as “fluid testaments to the forces that shaped the modern world.”

Standage excels in the earliest chapters, detailing the links between agriculture, beer, and the beginning of civilization. Interestingly, Mesopotamia played a major role in the early history of beer (though Mesopotamians drank their beer through straws, which bothers me more than it should). I hope Iraqis will keep this in mind as they rebuild their country. Baghdad Brew has a nice ring to it.

The scope of Standage’s project is so large (his narrative begins around 10,000 years before Christ) that some details get lost in the shuffle. Still, interesting factoids abound. For example, we learn another reason to be suspicious of French-lovin’ Thomas Jefferson: “He denounced ‘the poison of whiskey,’” and tried hard to make America a land of wine drinkers. I love wine, too, but where would we be without bourbon? (More sober, I guess.)

Speaking of bourbon, this book’s shortcoming is the spirits chapter. Little is said about what makes bourbon bourbon. And the other great Dixie spirit, Tennessee whiskey (no, Jack Daniel’s is NOT bourbon) isn’t even mentioned. Neither is vodka, which surely will annoy some Polish and Russian readers. Gin is curiously absent.

A similar problem afflicts the soda section, which, as the title “Coca-Cola and the Rise of America” implies, is really about Coke. Sure, Coke’s the Big Man on the soft drink campus, but I would have loved a mention of some of its early competitors, like the notoriously bad-tasting Moxie. And yes, Coke did originally have cocaine in it, and descended from a drink called French Wine Cola, which contained both cocaine and alcohol. And I thought having an espresso after a martini was a wild ride.

Another drink Standage looks at—wine—has inspired whole books. A recent example is Hugh Johnson’s A Life Uncorked, which is just as much about wine as it is about the author himself. Johnson has written about wine for nearly 50 years. Back in the days before chirpy sommeliers such as TV’s Andrea Immer, or the rise of Robert Parker Jr., he was toiling (oh, to be so burdened) as a vinocommentator.

Johnson is a wine writer of the old school. He eschews the modern day point systems of Parker and such, stating he “misses the point” of “percentages of perfection.” Nor does he care much for the terminology of contemporary wine critics, whose reviews too often read “like a recipe for fruit salad.” To Johnson, wine tastes like wine.

Johnson’s long experience and deep love of his subject matter allows him to convey far more than Standage could in his chapters on wine. Of course, reading Johnson on champagne doesn’t help you understand the history of mankind. It just makes you want to drop $200 on a bottle of Krug.

Oenophiles will surely disagree with some of Johnson’s opinions. I don’t quite get how he can love Prosecco, yet dismiss Cava. But that’s all beside the point. Johnson is a witty, talented writer, and his love of the grape comes across in his book—which is just as rich and rewarding as, well, a good glass of wine.

—Brandon Bosworth