September 04, 2005

Mansfield Featured on C-SPAN

Harvey Mansfield was the focus of this month's In Depth on Book TV. The mild-mannered Harvard professor immediately became provocative by suggesting that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt. He mentioned ancient Greeks would seriously consider whether rebuilding a city was the wisest course of action. This isn't a question of if New Orleans will be rebuilt to what it was pre-Katrina. I see no political possibility that it wouldn't happen. But should the city be rebuilt on a spot where another disaster like this could happen? If it was just insurance companies and Louisiana governments covering the bill then I wouldn't care, but billions of federal dollars will go into rebuilding. Is this a wise use of money?

Mansfield should generate more intellectual controversy with his book Manliness due out next year. Martin Marty writes:

Mansfield swings widely, at left and right: "Here is gristle to chew for liberals and conservatives, both of whom -- except for the feminists -- have abandoned manliness mostly out of policy rather than abhorrence." Mansfield's second review book, you guessed it, is on "manliness." His two predictable cracks at feminism aside, he sticks to his praise of manliness and his attack on being sensitive. I wonder, however, what planet Mansfield lives on and what he reads and watches. I won't document in detail here what anyone who spends an hour with cable news shows and shouts, politicians' rhetoric, defenses of our go-it-alone foreign policy, and some Christians' defenses of all the above, will find: consistent attacks on sensitive people as being unworthy and un-American, maybe even un-Christian.

...

Professor Mansfield misplaces his worries as to which virtues have priority in our emerging culture. Sensitive virtues, pace Mansfield, do not have much cultural cachet and are rarely prized.

"Mansfield's Manliness"