Manly good or manly evil.(BookTalk: Words may be deeds--Aesop)("Manliness")(Book review)

Manliness By Harvey Mansfield Yale University Press, 304 pages, $27.50

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.