Harvey Mansfield: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve argued in writing that manliness has declined. You don’t see that in your students over time, or you do? Less courage, or how is that evolving? No, I don’t think manliness is in decline. It’s in eclipse. Yes, you don’t see it as much as you did, except in bad versions such as the Bronze Age Pervert. At the end of my book on manliness, I had a chapter called “Unemployed Manliness. ” I think that is the danger now, that this part of human nature that men are different from women and want to be and need to express that is something that we need to hold onto. That can’t be repressed without trouble arising. The decline in manliness is also a rise in bad manliness. The assassinations, for example, that you mentioned before, can be accounted for by the bad education that we get and, to some extent, the influence of points of view that deny manliness, particularly feminism. Very last question. As we all get older and each day face increasing risks of death, does that influence how we think about politics, and should it influence how we think about politics?…

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