On a recent trip to Iraq, in July 2008, Kim Kagan, wife of Fred Kagan and herself one of the architects of the surge, did something that she had not done on any of her previous trips. She visited “the headquarters of a small Iraqi political party to learn about its campaign for the upcoming provincial and national elections.” Her host, the leader of this “secular and nonsectarian” party and a member of the Iraqi parliament, greets her “wearing a fine suit,” as if she were visiting “a foreign embassy just off 16th Street in Washington.” With this magical sleight-of-hand, momentarily transforming a street in Baghdad into one inside the Beltway, Kagan begins the rhetorical strategy by means of which she hopes to demonstrate that the people of Iraq are assimilating themselves to the political way of life of the great democratic nation that liberated them from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.


For example, the headquarters itself “is strikingly familiar, reminiscent of hundreds of town and county election headquarters in the United States.” Widescreen televisions are tuned to news channels; a “freshly photocopied stack of flyers” awaits “door to door” distribution; young enthusiasts are busy “writing and designing the party’s newspaper.” During a break for tea, Kagan talks politics with “30 party members,” about half of whom “are in their twenties, like the bright and earnest recent college graduates one finds working for any U.S. election campaign.”

These party members are illustrative of the revolution taking place in Iraqi political life. “Over the past year,” Kagan says, “the struggle for power in Iraq has shifted from military conflict to political competition.” The leaders of the various ethnic and sectarian factions in Iraq “are thinking ever less about how to use armed might to seize or retain control of all or part of the country and ever more about winning votes.” Iraq is becoming precisely what the neocons have always intended it to be: a democratic state in which transfers of power are accomplished peacefully by means of an electoral process that is free, fair, and transparent. More important, the state is founded on, and gains legitimacy from, citizens who place allegiance to the democratic process above allegiance to a faction, whether that faction is a family, a clan, a tribe, a religious sect, or an ethnic group. The party members that Kagan describes are first and foremost liberty-loving Iraqis, dedicated to a politically secular and nonsectarian Iraq in which individuals are free to express their beliefs without fear of government reprisal. The neocon vision of a transformed Middle East is thus being vindicated.

Kagan, of course, is using a very small and selective sample in order to reach her conclusions concerning political life in Iraq. But she is aware, very aware, that there are political forces in Iraq whose view of Iraqi politics diverges radically from that of the party members in the headquarters she visited. One radical force especially concerns her: the movement led by Muqtada al Sadr. She speaks of the Sadrists in this essay, but her evaluation of Sadr and his movement differs fundamentally from her evaluation of the party whose headquarters she briefly explored. It differs because it lacks a quality that she applies to the party members she visits in Baghdad. I’ll return to her treatment of Sadr and his followers later in this post. First, I’ll revisit the ground I’ve covered so far in this series, and then I’ll discuss the quality that is lacking in Kagan’s evaluation of the Sadrist movement: empathy.

1. Cracks in the Neocon Edifice

In Part I of this series I observed that some neocons have been chastened by the Bush administration’s fumbling attempt to introduce into Iraq an American-style liberal democracy. Specifically, they have in retrospect been dismayed by the arrogance and foolishness of Bush and his advisors who swaggered into a major conflict without first assessing its complexities and anticipating its consequences. These neocons are now seeking to return neoconservatism to its ideological roots. Most important, they want to put a renewed emphasis on prudence and caution, and they argue that America’s leaders must thoroughly, with a cool and cautious realism, assess the consequences of a political act, foreign or domestic, before initiating action. Peter Berkowitz, for example, argues that a fundamental tenet of neoconservatism is to transform authoritarian regimes into democratic ones. But, drawing on the classic neoconservative distinction made by Jeane Kirkpatrick between an authoritarian state and a totalitarian one, Berkowitz further argues that such transformation is not to be undertaken rashly but only after the situation into which America intends to intervene is fully assessed and the consequences of intervention realistically anticipated.

The cool-headed realists such as Berkowitz make up only one faction of neoconservatism. Another and no less important faction is made up of the flamboyant idealists who chafe at the restraints that the cautious realists attempt to impose on their visionary mission. Robert Kagan, for example, bases his assessment of America on a simple historical fact. Since the end of the Cold War America has stood alone as the most imposing economic and military power on the planet. And just as powerful nations have done in the past, America, he argues, will use its power to expand its sphere of economic and political influence.

But America, according to Kagan, is not just the latest in a long line of powerful nations intent on using their power to advance their interests. America is also and quite singularly a moral power, the nation that was born into history to accomplish a unique mission: to expand the sphere of liberty until this universal ideal has indeed been universalized. America, Kagan argues in his essay “Cowboy Nation” and in his book Dangerous Nation, has since its inception been an expansive nation, seeking to expand its territory and the reach of its economic power. But the truly dangerous aspect of America as a nation has not been its drive to expand the reach of its economic and political influence, but its drive to expand the reach of its moral influence, to carry the universal gospel of liberty to every corner of the globe.

Powering this drive, giving it its fundamental motivating force, is the spirited energy that the Greeks called thumos. Kagan borrows this idea from the philosopher Harvey Mansfield, and in Parts III and IV of this series I examined Mansfield’s concept of politics, an activity that is powered, according to Mansfield, by anger and thumos. In his Jefferson Lecture Mansfield argues that politics is an arena in which an actor asserts the importance of a cause to which he has become passionately attached. He has attached himself to this cause—a political party, a leader, a nation—by accident of birth or association. Though the attachment occurs by accident, the cause becomes a deeply rooted aspect of his identity and takes on predominant importance in his life. It is his cause—his leader, his party, his nation. Other causes aggressively assert themselves against his cause—other leaders, other parties, other nations—and he reacts against their aggression with the emotion that typifies politics: anger. That which fuels his anger is the irrational animal energy the Greeks identified as thumos. Thus, for Mansfield, the arena of politics is in essence an arena of the irrational, the adherents of one cause striving aggressively and angrily against those who dare to assert in opposition another cause.

2. Reason: an Indispensable Element of Courage

In his book Manliness, Mansfield defines the actor who enters the arena of politics in order to assert the importance of his cause, a cause in whose defense he is prepared to sacrifice his life: the manly man, driven by thumos. The manly man has not rationally assessed his cause and, based upon the best available evidence and sound argument, found it superior to all others. The cause to which the manly man adheres is his cause, and his attachment to his cause, whatever the derivation of that attachment, is sufficient to motivate him in his struggle against alien causes: those causes that are not his cause.

The manly man’s assertion of his cause in the arena of politics is thus an irrational assertion, and Mansfield recognizes that such assertion, if not reined in, can slip over into the excess of tyranny. He does not, however, question the manly man’s assertion of his cause. Such manly assertion Mansfield finds not only necessary in a political arena defined by thumos and anger but also in and of itself praiseworthy and admirable. Nonetheless the self-assertion of the manly man can exceed rational bounds, and Mansfield posits a restraining force external to the manly man: the political philosopher, who has rationally reflected on all matters political and who can persuade the manly man to moderate the irrationality of his temper, his thumos. The manly man, though longing to assert himself and achieve honor and glory, remains susceptible to the advice of the philosopher. He allows his temper to be restrained and his tyrannical tendencies reined in by his advisors, the philosophers whose arena of struggle is the transcendent realm of reflective argument.

Following his master Aristotle, Mansfield relates the energy of thumos to the virtue of courage. The manly man is not only a man who displays an assertive energy in the arena of politics but also a man of true martial spirit, a man of warrior courage. In the Ethics, as I explained in my last post, Aristotle indeed identifies courage as the virtue or excellence that characterizes the warrior in battle. The man of courage, as Aristotle defines it, is the man who confronts without flinching the greatest of all fears, the fear of violent death, and it is in battle that violent death is most typically confronted. But Aristotle is quite explicit about another and indispensable quality of the man of courage: he is a man of reason. Before entering battle the man of courage assesses the situation clearly and realistically. He confronts, that is, the likelihood of his imminent and violent death. He does not irrationally exaggerate the anguish of such a death nor does he irrationally minimize it. He sees it clearly and accurately for what it is and goes to meet it, knowing that his courage will be honored if he does not survive the battle.

Aristotle says nothing about the cause for which the man of courage is prepared to die. He emphasizes rather the fear of violent death and the courageous man’s response to it. The man of courage assesses the situation realistically and prepares to meet it with equanimity and poise. This emphasis on a realistic and accurate assessment of a situation separates Aristotle’s man of courage from Mansfield’s manly man who is not disposed to engage in clear and accurate assessments of the situation at hand but who is driven, instead, by the irrational impulse of thumos to assert his cause against all others.

Aristotle’s concept of warrior courage is, however, related to the realism of those neocons who, in the wake of the Bush administration’s Middle East adventurism, now call for prudence and caution in America’s foreign policy. As Peter Berkowitz has pointed out, the imprudent actors of the Bush administration barged into Iraq without realistically assessing the situation and heedless of the consequences of their act. In this they were abetted by the supposed wisdom of their advisors, the neocon pundits and philosophers (and their confederates, the liberal hawks) who were certain that the cause of universal liberty would find fertile ground in the autocratic aridity of the Middle East.

Berkowitz and other chastened neocons now call for a return to the neoconservative tradition of realism, a tradition of prudence, caution and clear-eyed judgment. I doubt, however, that the neocons can renounce their brand of idealism and their dangerous adventurism. As their continuing adherence to the prospect of victory in Iraq amply demonstrates, an adherence that has been emboldened by the alleged success of the surge, they lack a quality that, though Aristotle does not discuss it, is essential to the courage that without flinching assesses a situation rationally and realistically and then goes out to meet it: empathy.

3. Empathy: Basic and Reenactive

Empathy is often used as a synonym for sympathy, one person’s emotional identification with the suffering and distress of another. This is an appropriate use of the term, but as I am using it, empathy is not a synonym for sympathy. Empathy, rather, enables me spontaneously to recognize other people as minded, that is, as rational agents. I recognize them as rational in the sense that their acts proceed from reasons. These reasons, in turn, spring from long-held beliefs and desires that to them make sense, even though from my perspective those beliefs and desires might be irrational and unmoored from reality. My empathetic response to others then does not mean that I sympathize with the positions they put forward or the acts they perform. It means only that I recognize that their positions and acts spring from reasons that, in turn, are grounded in beliefs and desires that form the ultimate context for their action in the world.

Karsten Stueber, in his book, Rediscovering Empathy, calls this form of empathy basic empathy, the same empathy that the infant displays when it differentiates between minded objects in its environment and unminded objects. Such empathy, Stueber suggests, has its neurobiological foundation in mirror neurons, those neurons that fire both when I experience a specific emotion, such as anger, or perform a specific act, such as reaching for an object, and when I observe another agent display the same emotion or perform the same act. However, though such basic empathy enables me to recognize others as rational agents whose acts proceed from reasons, it does not disclose to me the specific reasons that initiate their acts.

In order to specify the reasons for someone else’s behavior, in order that is to explain his behavior, I engage in what Stueber calls reenactive empathy. “Basic empathy,” Stueber says, “allows us to recognize, for example, that another person is angry, or that he intends to grasp a cup” (21). But that is as far as basic empathy takes us. We also need, Stueber argues, “to understand why that person is angry, or why he responded to a particular situation in a certain manner” (21). In order to explain another person’s behavior, then, we need reenactive empathy as a supplement to basic empathy. Indeed, Stueber argues, “only through reenactive empathy…are we able to conceive of another person’s more complex social behavior as the behavior of a rational agent who acts for a reason” (21).

When I engage in reenactive empathy, I reenact in my own mind the process of thought that took place in the other person’s mind and that led ultimately to his act. There are, however, as Stueber recognizes, limits to such reenactive empathy. We must, for example, “acknowledge certain epistemic limitations in using empathy to interpret agents who are from very different cultures” (196). I might not, for example, have sufficient information concerning the other person’s beliefs and desires to form in my own mind an accurate reenactment of the thought process that occurred in his. Worse, I might project into the other person’s mind beliefs and desires that are not resident there or deliberately erase from consideration beliefs and desires that not only reside in his mind but are the true origins of his behavior.

But though we are limited when dealing with agents from other cultures, we are not without recourse. “In such situations,” Stueber argues, “our attempt to make sense of other agents by trying to reenact their reasons for their actions has to be supplemented by further cognitive strategies” (196), specifically by recourse to “further knowledge about the constitution of an agent’s social surroundings” (201). In order, that is, to construct in my mind as accurate a reenactment of another person’s thinking as possible, I must establish as best I can the context of beliefs and desires that serve as the source of his behavior.

Establishing such a context is especially important when the other person is my opponent in the political arena. As Mansfield says, in the political arena the manly man is motivated by a cause to which he adheres passionately often for no other reason than that the cause is his cause. Conversely, his opposition to other causes has no other motive than that they are not his cause. The concept of reenactive empathy, however, changes the dynamic of this mindless clash of cause against cause. In order to respond to my opponents effectively in the political arena, I must empathetically understand the reasons that initiate their acts. And in order to understand those reasons, I must understand as best I can the personal and historical contexts in which they are embedded. If I do not empathetically understand those contexts, I can misconstrue their reasons and formulate not an effective response to their acts but a woefully ineffective one.

For example, if as a proponent of the surge I want to deal effectively with the faction in Iraq that is adamantly opposing American presence, the Sadrists, I must first establish the reasons for their opposition. In order to specify those reasons, I must explore and investigate the contexts in which the leader of the movement, Muqtada al Sadr, operates. That includes both his personal context and the historical context of the Shia in Iraq. I must also explore and investigate the contexts both personal and historical in which his supporters operate, especially since the reasons that propel their behavior are many and varied. Only then, having filled in these contexts, can I explain their opposition to American occupation and formulate a strategy that will neutralize their influence. Of course, establishing these contexts for Sadr and his followers might compel me to recognize that his influence cannot be completely neutralized and that some strategy which recognizes his continued impact must be devised.

4. Puppets in a Melodrama

We can grant, I think, that in her estimation of the Iraqis whose headquarters she visited in Baghdad Kagan is showing some degree of empathy. Although she seems to be projecting her own cultural preferences on these Iraqis by so blatantly assimilating them into an American context, nonetheless they seem to be as politically secular and nonsectarian as she claims. But when she turns her attention to another group of Iraqis who are openly and adamantly Islamic, her capacity for empathy deserts her completely. And it is no accident that it does so.

In Kagan’s view, one precondition for the transformation of Iraq into a fully Americanized democracy is the elimination of that Iraqi faction most stubbornly opposed to the presence of American troops in Iraq: the Sadrists. Kagan’s wish has, according to her reading of the situation, been fulfilled, at least temporarily. The “destruction of the Sadrist Trend not only as a paramilitary force but also as a cohesive political force” was achieved in the spring when Prime Minister Maliki’s use of Iraqi Security Forces in Basra, Amara, and Sadr City “shattered the Sadrist and Iranian-controlled leadership” not only “of Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi army” itself but also “of the Special Groups more tightly controlled by Iran.”

By means of the word “control” Kagan performs a magical act of erasure: she deprives of rational agency those Iraqis who support Muqtada al Sadr. The leadership of the Mahdi army, she says, is “Iranian controlled.” The Sadrist leaders do not, that is, author their own acts but submissively follow the script written for them by their Iranian masters. Kagan also deprives of rational agency the Iraqis who compose the so-called Special Groups, whose acts originate not in themselves but in the schemes of their Iranian leaders.

These Iraqis, in Kagan’s view, though native born and raised are not independent initiators of their own actions. They oppose American occupation of their country not for reasons that originate in themselves, in their histories as native Iraqis, but in the nefarious machinations of the theocrats in Tehran and Qom. They are, in other words, mere puppets whose strings are tweaked by faraway Iranian overlords, passive instruments in the hands of those who are the true authors of their acts. Kagan thus blithely rips these Iraqis from the personal and historical contexts that would help her understand the reasons for their opposition to American occupation.

But she has no real desire to empathetically understand the Sadrist opposition. By depriving them of agency, she achieves a standard neocon goal. She reduces an enormously complex economic, political, and cultural situation to a Middle East Melodrama. Rather than a country in which certain native factions aggressively oppose American occupation, Iraq becomes a battleground on which two world-historical forces, and only two, fight for the souls of the Iraqi people: the gallant proponents of liberty and democracy on the one hand, the nefarious advocates of theocracy and tyranny on the other.

For Kagan there is no doubt that in this momentous melodrama the forces of good will vanquish the forces of evil. As provincial and national elections approach, Shia leaders, “eager to appear strong and independent”—independent, that is, of America—“exaggerate their own capabilities” and the capabilities of the Iraq Security Forces. “But even the most extreme of these hubristic Shia advisers strongly favor a partnership with the United States.” Over dinner, one of these hubristic Shia tells her that “Iraq is flying west,” away from the autocratic Iranians and toward the liberal and democratic Americans.

The surge has thus been vindicated, since its goal was from the outset “to transform the conflict over power in Iraq from a military to a political struggle.” The Iraqi people are now “passionate about democracy,” a liberal, American-style democracy in which factional disputes are periodically brought to provisional reconciliation in the arena of politics. In Kagan’s view America cannot now abandon the first fragile shoots of Iraqi democracy and leave the Iraqis vulnerable to the despotic Iranians and their Iraqi minions, those puppets who claim freely to adhere to a fellow Iraqi, Muqtada al Sadr, but who in reality are manipulated and controlled by the theocrats in Tehran.

I’ll return to the surge in a forthcoming series, and I will argue that far from vindicating the neocon narrative of the Iraq War, the counterinsurgency operation referred to as the surge has been a signal failure. In my next post, however, I will return to Robert Kagan and will summarize his neocon view of the Cowboy Nation and its historical destiny.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Labels: Bastoche, Cowboy Nation

“The world has become normal again.” So Robert Kagan begins his latest effort, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he says, the world had in the 90s a “tantalizing glimpse of a new international order” in which an expanding global system of commerce and communication would break down national barriers and dissolve ideological conflict. But that glimpse of a new international order has proven to be “a mirage.” The nation-state, Kagan says, “remains as strong as ever, and so, too, the nationalist ambitions, the passions, and the competition among nations that have shaped history” (3). The end of the Cold War seemed to put an end to that competition and thus to history. But that “end of history” was nothing more than a brief pause in which new poles and configurations of power were fortifying and organizing themselves in order to recommence the struggle. And the struggle has now recommenced. Competition among nations for power and prestige has returned and with it history. The world has indeed become normal again.


The Enlightenment dream of a world in which military confrontation between nations would be displaced by the peaceful competition of industry and trade is a seductive one. It is predicated, however, on the doubtful notion that the peoples of the world “would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history” (8). The ancient Greeks, according to Kagan, knew better. They “believed that embedded in human nature was something called thumos, a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state” (8). Although that aggressive spirit can be restrained, it cannot be eradicated. Indeed, according to Harvey Mansfield in his 2006 book Manliness and in his 2007 Jefferson Lecture, not only can we not eradicate it, since it is an inherent element of our animal nature, but we also do not want to eradicate it, since it is the motivating force that impels us to enter the arena of politics and fight for the cause that expresses our value and importance.

1. Reason, Temper, and the Struggle of Politics

Kagan has also used this ancient Greek concept of thumos or temper in his essay “Cowboy Nation” in order to explain the elemental energy that has impelled America in its grand march through history. From our earliest days as a new and dangerous nation, Kagan says, Americans have, with distinctive flair and exuberance, “exhibited the kind of spiritedness, and even fierceness, in defense of home, hearth, and belief that the ancient Greeks called thumos.” This irrepressible spirit has impelled Americans not only to defend hearth and home from attack but also to expand their nation’s territory and the reach of its commerce. But that is not all. Their fierce and idealistic temper has also impelled Americans to expand the scope of the universal principle that their nation, above all others, epitomizes and embodies: liberty. Prior to the twentieth century America did not possess the military might to defend and promote the principle of liberty on a global and universal scale. But during the twentieth century America came into its own as a military power, and though some Americans balked, preferring to remain isolated and ensconced behind their great oceanic barriers, most Americans, in characteristic displays of energy and assertiveness, were eager to use their nation’s unequalled strength to oppose and defeat the threats to global liberty posed by Nazism and Soviet Communism.

Americans thus have not hesitated and do not now hesitate to assume, when necessary, the stance of a warrior nation. But as I explained in Part V of this series, Mansfield recognizes that thumos, precisely because it is an elemental and irrational energy, can cause the person who is acting under its influence to exceed the bounds of moderation. The man who enters the arena of politics determined to achieve victory for himself and his cause—the manly man, as Mansfield calls him—can become carried away by the propulsive force of his energy and seek not only to defeat his opponents but also to tyrannize and oppress them. In order to prevent himself from lapsing into the despotic and tyrannical, the manly man must sublimate the elemental energy of thumos and raise it to the status of a virtue. He can perform this sublimatory act only by making thumos submit to reason, that is, by firmly grounding his cause on a foundation of coherent and rational argument.

Unfortunately the manly man inclines much more to aggressive action and warrior impulsiveness than to the painstaking effort of rational argument. Mansfield, though, proffers a solution. The manly man, the warrior whose natural habitat is the arena of political conflict and strife, must submit to the guidance of philosophers, those warriors of the intellect who have attained to the virtue of wisdom and who can moderate the manly man’s impulsive energy and prevent him from tipping into the excess of tyranny.

In many particulars Mansfield’s discussion of the manly man draws on Aristotle’s discussion of courage in Books II and III of the Ethics. But at certain points Mansfield diverges from his master, and nowhere more decisively than in the relation between thumos and courage. I’ll return to Kagan at the end of this post and to the three struggles that, he claims, define our modern world, including the struggle among nations for prestige, status, and honor. But first I want to take a closer look at Aristotle’s discussion of courage in the Ethics and the differences between Mansfield’s portrait of the manly man and Aristotle’s portrait of the man of courage.

Both Aristotle and Mansfield identify thumos as an irrational, elemental, animal energy and courage as a virtue grounded in reason and an undistorted grasp of reality. But they differ in the motivational importance they attach to thumos on the one hand, reason on the other. For Mansfield, the manly man is motivated primarily by thumos. Though the manly man is susceptible to rational argument, in Mansfield’s view he is pushed into politics first and foremost by the irrational energies of thumos and anger. Asserting the superiority and importance of himself and his cause, the manly man enters the political arena and struggles for victory and vindication. Indeed, so enraptured is he by the superiority of his cause that he will seek not only to defeat but also to oppress his adversaries. Only the wisdom of his advisers can restrain the exuberance of his temper and prevent him from lapsing into the irrational excess of tyranny.

For Aristotle, on the other hand, motivational primacy rests with reason. Though influenced by the elemental energy of thumos, the man of courage is intrinsically rational. When confronted by an extreme situation, he reacts not extremely but reasonably and moderately. He assesses the situation clearly and accurately and does not allow irrational impulse to distort his assessment. He sees the critical situation for what, in reality, it is and neither exaggerates nor minimizes it. In the thick of the crisis, Aristotle’s man of courage remains always and immovably rational.

2. The Man of Courage is a Man of Reason

Aristotle begins the Ethics by asking one of the fundamental philosophical questions: What is the chief human good? For Aristotle the answer is clear: the chief human good is happiness. What is not clear is the answer to the obvious follow-up question: In what does happiness consist? Some maintain that happiness derives from indulgence in physical pleasure. Others argue that happiness results from the acquisition of fame and honor. Aristotle rejects both answers and argues that happiness derives from an internal source: the configuration of a person’s character. The person who achieves happiness is the person who develops a character that is disposed to virtuous action. Every person is born with a potential for wisdom, moderation, justice, courage, and the other virtues or excellences. Not all individuals realize their potential for excellence in action. When an individual, by means of training and the consistent application of reason to human affairs, achieves a firm and settled disposition to display the virtues in practical action, that individual has attained to a condition of happiness.

Aristotle of course recognizes that many individuals achieve firm and settled dispositions to display not virtues in practical action but vices. Rather than divorcing virtue and vice by an unbridgeable abyss, however, he ingeniously posits that the rational, virtuous character and the irrational, non-virtuous character are related to one another. Specifically, each virtue is related to two vices. In order to make the relation clear between a specific virtue and its corresponding vices, Aristotle constructs a moral continuum in which the virtue occupies the moderate mean or rational middle ground between the two immoderate and irrational extremes, one an extreme of excess, the other an extreme of deficiency.

Each extreme is opposed to the moderate mean. Further, as excess and deficiency, each extreme is diametrically opposed to the other. However, though opposed to one another, the two extremes have one thing in common that unites them in opposition to their associated virtue: each has escaped the rule of reason. It is often the case that a person’s characteristic response to a situation is either too much (in excess) or too little (deficient) and, Aristotle says, “neither is good.” But, he adds, “to be affected when one should, at the things one should, in relation to the people one should, for the reasons one should, and in the way one should, is both intermediate and best, which is what belongs to excellence” (Book II. Chapter 6). For Aristotle reason is the indispensable power that enables a person to make these discriminations. And by making them, by responding appropriately to all these “shoulds,” the person finds the moderate mean of virtue between the immoderate extremes of vice and achieves the “excellence of character” that manifests itself in right and virtuous action.

These “shoulds” are effectively displayed in the first virtue that Aristotle treats, courage. Courage, according to Aristotle, is the virtue or excellence that a person exhibits in response to fear. Aristotle, though, is very specific about both the object that elicits the fear to which courage responds and the circumstances in which it is elicited. The object that elicits the fear is the “most fearsome” object of all: violent death. And the circumstances in which the fear of violent death is elicited are the “finest” circumstances of all, those that prevail in war. As Aristotle puts it, the courageous person is “the one who is fearless about a fine death…and those that occur in war are mostly of this sort” (III. 6). Of central importance to Aristotle is the attribute without which the death would not be “fine”: honor. The person who suffers violent death in battle acquires that which is eternally commendable, honor, and avoids that which is eternally reprehensible, shame. And it is courage that enables the person to enter the arena in which is found the death that is both the most fearsome and the most fine.

For Aristotle such courage is moderate and virtuous because at every step in the process of feeling fear and responding to it, the courageous person acts rationally. Initially, the courageous person fears what anyone “who has any intelligence” fears, the prospect of violent death in battle. But the courageous person responds to that most fearsome of objects as he should: rationally and, by extension, courageously. He neither minimizes the anguish of such a death nor exaggerates it. He sees it clearly for what it is, fully and without distortion. Having assessed it accurately, he responds to it appropriately, in the way that he should: He deliberately decides to meet his death head-on. He is fortified in this decision because he knows that by dying in battle he achieves that which is surpassingly fine: everlasting and incontestable honor. And so, temperately and without flinching, he goes to meet that most fearsome and most honorable of things, death in battle. Thus, for Aristotle, “the person who withstands and fears the things one should [violent death] and for the end one should [the acquisition of honor], and in the way and when one should [unflinchingly in battle]…is courageous: for the courageous person feels and acts as the occasion merits, and following the correct prescription, however it may direct him” (III. 7).

The two extremes that flank on either side the moderate mean of courage have in common their detachment from the rational and their submission to the irrational. The irrational excess that corresponds to courage is typified by the person who does not fear what any rational person would fear, who indeed fears nothing at all. Aristotle does not have a term to designate such a person, but he says that “he would be some sort of madman, or someone immune to pain, if he feared nothing, not even an earthquake or stormwaters” (III 7). The irrational deficiency that corresponds to courage is typified by the coward, who “fears the sorts of things one shouldn’t and in a way one shouldn’t” (III 7). The coward, that is, fears objects that no rational person would fear or runs away from the object that any rational person would fear but that the courageous person would unflinchingly face: violent death in battle.

In spite of his emphasis on the rationality of courage, Aristotle recognizes that this most manly of virtues rests on or derives from an element of the irrational. The courageous, he says, “are thought also to include people who act through temper [thumos], like wild animals that rush at the people who have wounded them…” (III. 8). Those who act under “the impulse of temper” cannot in the strict sense be called courageous, since they rush into action “without seeing in advance any of the frightening aspects of the situation.” That is, they lack the indispensable element of reason that enables them to correctly assess the situation as one that would in any rational person incite fear. Rather, they act only out of an immediate and animal impulse of distress or anger.

Nonetheless, Aristotle says, aggressive behavior that derives from thumos “does seem to be the most natural form" of courage. And this most elemental form of courage can attain to the status of true courage “once the factors of decision and the end for the sake of which have been added” (III. 8). The courageous person is not immune to the elemental impulse of thumos but neither does he intemperately succumb to it. He does not rush into battle, blinded by distress and anger, but rather confronts his prospective death temperately, with full knowledge of the pain and distress that await him. And having beforehand clearly and accurately assessed the object that incites his fear, his prospective and violent death, he makes the firm and deliberate decision to go out and meet it. Just as important, the end for the sake of which he puts his life in jeopardy, the acquisition of eternal honor, fortifies him in his decision. Thus is the elemental impulse of thumos raised to the status of the rational and rendered sublime.

Aristotle makes it completely clear that courage cannot be separated from reason. The prospect of an imminent and violent death provokes fear in any reasonable person. The man of courage responds to that object as he should, that is, rationally: he neither distorts it nor runs from it. He unblinkingly faces the object that provokes fear in him, assesses it realistically, and goes to meet it courageously. But as Aristotle admits, one can argue that at the very core of this virtue, ineradicable and inescapable, is an element of the irrational: thumos, an elemental and animal-like impulse of distress and anger. The irrational therefore cannot be relegated to the two extremes of the moral continuum whose moderate mean courage inhabits. The person deficient in courage who fears what he should not and the person of unlimited boldness who does not fear what he should are both equally irrational. But so too the courageous person who inhabits the moderate and rational mean is fueled by an element of the irrational. He modifies his animal temper by raising it to the level of the rational and making it sublime. But he never escapes his temper, his animal energy, nor transforms it completely. At its core his courage retains an impulsive and ineradicably irrational component.

3. The Manly Man is a Man of Temper

In his portrait of the manly man, Mansfield has both drawn on Aristotle’s discussion of courage and modified it to fit his own purpose. According to both Mansfield and his master, a person displays courage in an arena of struggle against an opponent. Aristotle restricts that arena to the field of battle and defines the courageous person as the one who faces without flinching the prospect of death in battle. Mansfield, however, expands the arena of struggle to include the whole of politics and defines the manly man as the one who is willing, in the arena of politics and if need be on the field of battle, to fight in order to assert and defend a cause.

Not only will the manly man fight for his cause, Mansfield argues, he will without hesitation sacrifice his life for it. His cause embodies for the manly man a value that both transcends his individual life and expresses his sense of himself as an important and prominent actor in the world. For such a cause no effort is too extreme, no sacrifice too great. When his cause achieves victory against its competitors in politics or in war, the manly man feels vindicated and honored: he and his cause have achieved preeminence. When his cause is defeated by its competitors in politics or in war the manly man feels invalidated and shamed: he and his cause have been rendered impotent and null.

Though Aristotle does not speak of courage in the context of a cause, transcendent or otherwise, he does emphasize that an important factor driving the behavior of the man of courage is his sense of importance—his sense of honor. Honor derives from the estimation of others and therefore can only be earned by means of public display, and no public display draws more praise than the one which the man of courage puts on in that most glorious of public arenas, war. That which fortifies a man’s courage on the field of battle and helps him defeat his greatest enemy—his fear of violent death—is thus the prospect of achieving a fine and glorious end to his life, a death that, though violent, will earn for him everlasting honor.

Mansfield also follows Aristotle by placing his manly man on a moral continuum, positioning him in the moderate mean between two extremes, one of excess, the other of deficiency. In this instance, though, Mansfield diverges significantly from the master. Aristotle identifies the extremes as excessive boldness on the one hand, cowardice on the other. Mansfield, however, populates the extremes of his continuum with those whom the neocons have identified as the modern enemies of individual freedom. At the extreme of excess stand the totalitarian advocates of Nietzschean nihilism: Soviet Communism, Nazism, and Radical Islam. At the extreme of deficiency stand the modern liberals who strive to eliminate conflict by imposing a regime of rules that reduces everyone, inferior and superior alike, to one vapid level of mediocrity and dullness.

Finally, Mansfield follows his mentor by connecting the virtue of courage to the elemental energy of thumos. And it is here that Mansfield departs most significantly from Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle makes thumos a subordinate aspect of the courageous man’s motivation, Mansfield makes thumos the primary motivating force of the manly man’s behavior. Aristotle certainly recognizes that the elemental force of thumos, an irrational force, is connected to the courageous man’s behavior. But Aristotle is clear in his description of courage as a rational response to the fear of violent death. The courageous man, facing the prospect of his death in battle, neither minimizes the anguish that such a death entails nor exaggerates it. He assesses the situation as in reality it is and responds accordingly: he fears the coming battle. But even though he fears it, as rationally he should, he does what needs to be done: he triumphs over his fear and enters the fight, supported by the knowledge that although his death will be painful and even agonizing, it will also be honorable.

Thus, according to Aristotle, the man of courage is characterized by his rationality, by his firm and settled disposition to look at his situation realistically and assess it accurately, without distortion. According to Mansfield, on the other hand, the manly man is characterized by his temper, his thumos, his aggressive drive to enter the political arena in order to uphold a cause that expresses his honor and sense of importance. True, the manly man can bring forward reasons that justify his devotion to his cause, but those reasons are circumstantial and arbitrary and are not grounded in a clear and accurate assessment of the situation. They derive rather from accidents of birth and association. The manly man asserts the cause of his nation or of his party for no other reason than that the cause represents his nation or his party.

His assessment of the situation thus goes no further than his settled conviction of his own importance and that of his cause. Without hesitation, prompted not by reason but by thumos and anger, he asserts the indisputable superiority of his cause and the equally indisputable inferiority of his opponent’s. He does not pause to engage in a rational assessment that exaggerates neither the worth of his cause nor the worthlessness of his opponent’s. Rather, he throws himself into the struggle, propelled by thumos and by anger—anger that his cause is being denigrated and attacked. Firm in the conviction that his cause is superior, because it is his, and all others inferior, because they are not his, he aggressively stakes out his partisan position and fights unremittingly so that his cause prevails and achieves final victory. And he will sacrifice all for that victory because he knows that without it he will be forever deprived of that which gives his life meaning and importance: vindication, validation, honor.

4. History Has Returned and With It the Struggle for Power and Honor

Three great struggles define the modern world, according to Robert Kagan in The Return of History (3-4). One is the “old competition between liberalism and autocracy.” Another is the even older struggle “between the radical Islamists and the modern secular cultures and powers that they believe have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world.” The last is the oldest and remains perhaps the most important. The struggle “for status and influence” among the world’s established and newly arrived powers “has returned, with Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, Iran, the United States, and others vying for regional predominance.”

Regional predominance is based on economic and military power. With power come such tangible benefits as a high standard of living and security from external attack. But to the nation that possesses indisputable power come the equally important intangible benefits of status and honor. A nation does not live by self-interest alone. Its sense of importance, of its place among other and competing nations, also drives its behavior. As Kagan says in his essay, "End of Dreams, Return of History," from which The Return of History partly derives, the current Chinese leadership is “powerfully motivated to return their nation to what they regard as its traditional position as the preeminent power in East Asia,” a preeminence based on both economic and military power. “Perhaps more significant,” Kagan says, “is the Chinese perception, also shared by Americans, that status and honor, and not just wealth and security, are important for a nation.” Japan too, according to Kagan, is driven by a “national ambition to be a leader in East Asia or at least not to play second fiddle or ‘little brother’ to China.” And “Russia, like China and Japan, is moved by more traditional great-power considerations, including the pursuit of those valuable if intangible national interests: honor and respect.”

In the past, the pursuit of national power and national honor has created conflict between and among nations, which in turn has created history. Of course, the national pursuit of power and honor has often proven to be more an irrational pursuit than a rational one. Kagan seems to admit as much when he argues that America in its long rise to global preeminence has been impelled by that distinctively irrational energy the Greeks called thumos. Harvey Mansfield is more explicit and straightforward than Kagan in this regard. For Mansfield, the arena of politics, national and international, is motivationally defined by thumos and anger and hence by the irrational in the human psyche.

History supplies ample evidence that Mansfield’s claim is correct. History also supplies evidence that the rational has been, at least on occasion, a decisive factor in the political arena. Politics has not been and need not be exclusively defined by the irrational. The arena of political conflict has been and can be again rescued from the irrational and reclaimed for the rational. Indeed, Aristotle’s portrait of the man of courage shows us that conflict, at least to some extent, can be grounded in the rational. Before he enters the fight, the man of courage assesses the situation realistically and without distortion. But this capacity for realistic and undistorted assessment seems itself to be grounded in another aspect of human rationality, one that Aristotle does not treat in his Ethics. And it is that aspect of human rationality—empathy—that I will discuss next time.

Note

All quotations from the Ethics are taken from the translation by Christopher Rowe (Oxford UP, 2002). This volume also provides an extensive and very helpful “Philosophical Introduction” by Sarah Broadie.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Labels: Bastoche, Cowboy Nation

Dean Barnett has read George Packer’s essay heralding “the fall of conservatism “and judges it “not particularly insightful.” Barnett specifically takes Packer to task for failing to acknowledge a “simple fact”: it is not conservatism that is heading for a fall but the Republican Party. Conservatism is one thing, Barnett argues, the Republican Party quite another, and one cannot conflate the enduring principles of conservatism with the party that is serving as their vehicle in the political arena. Those principles, according to Barnett, include “a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation.” These are not talking points that will pass with the political season. They make up a “set of core principles” that are now and will always remain “timeless…pure and, in the eyes of conservatives, true.”



The Republican Party may well be headed for defeat this year, but its defeat will stem from its “inability or unwillingness to govern according to its conservative core principles.” The crucial point that Packer fails to see, according to Barnett, is that although the Republican Party has become flabby and unreliable, the core principles of conservatism “remain solid.” And Barnett is confident that “they’ll remain solid and relevant well beyond 2008.”

1. Neocons Retrieving, Reengaging, and Revising

The conservative principles Barnett enumerates can, I think, be more properly construed as neoconservative principles. Certain traditional principles that some conservatives have faithfully adhered to, such as opposition to big government and an unwillingness to meddle in the affairs of other countries, have been crucially modified if not rejected outright by the neocons. But as I said in Part I of this series, the neocons, in the wake of the Iraq muddle, have been engaged in a return to and reengagement with first principles. The neocon writer who has been most original in this reengagement with and revision of principle is Robert Kagan.

Like Barnett, Kagan believes that the principle of freedom is uniquely connected to America and its people. Barnett, however, in his enumeration of the core principles of conservatism stumbles into a contradiction. If conservative principles are timeless, the greatness of America and its people cannot be one of them since America is a nation that came into existence some 230 years ago and is therefore, obviously, bound in time. By means of an adroit maneuver, Kagan has resolved this contradiction. In his book Dangerous Nation and in his essay “Cowboy Nation,” which I am examining in this series, Kagan has argued that America and its people have a unique relation to the principle of freedom. Kagan, like Barnett, argues that freedom is a universal value, applicable to all peoples and all nations, and therefore in a sense is timeless since it transcends any specific historical tendency or moment. Kagan, though, takes the argument a step further. In his view, America is the nation that was born into history in order to make this timeless and abstract ideal a real and concrete element in human history. That which is timeless and universal, freedom, was first embodied and made flesh in America and its people, and it has been the mission of America, since its momentous birth, to see that universal principle embodied and made flesh in every other nation on earth.

Dedicated from its birth to the realization of freedom in history, America, in Kagan’s view, is thus, inherently, a progressive and an expansive nation: it seeks progressively to expand the realm of freedom in the world. Conveying freedom to all the nations of the earth is, however, no easy thing. A nation and its people must have sufficient drive to bring such a mission to a successful conclusion. And indeed America was born with such a dynamic spirit, an energy and drive that manifested itself throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the expansion of America’s territory and the growth of its commerce. That daring and expansive spirit is now engaged in carrying to its completion the task that history has bestowed on America: the complete realization in human history of the timeless, pure, and true principle of freedom.

Kagan, however, makes an interesting point about this drive inherent in the American character. It is a dangerous and irrational force, a drive and energy intimately connected to the warrior ideal of honor. Kagan refers to this energy and drive as thumos, a Greek term derived from Plato and Aristotle. In his book Manliness, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield retrieves this ancient term and uses it to critique the “gender-neutral society” of modern America. But Mansfield’s discussion of thumos in Manliness goes far beyond his critique of gender neutrality. Like Kagan, Mansfield recognizes that thumos is an irrational force. Though irrational it is a force that drives the human activity we call politics and, especially, the individual who excels in the arena of politics, the man of thumos and courage or, as Mansfield calls him, the manly man. Thumos drives the manly man to assert his own importance, and when the manly man links his own importance to a cause, he enters the arena of politics to do battle with those who resist his assertion and attempt to defeat his cause.

Since thumos is an irrational force, the manly man can get carried away asserting the superiority of his cause and begin to impose it on those who, he deems, espouse an inferior cause. He can, that is, give way to an excess of manliness and become tyrannical. But just as a man can give way to an excess of thumos and courage, he can also suffer from a deficiency of those distinctively manly attributes. In order to position the manly man in the arena of contemporary politics, Mansfield borrows Aristotle’s idea of a moral continuum in which a specific virtue occupies a moderate mean between two extremes of vice. In Mansfield’s scheme, manly courage inhabits the moderate and virtuous mean between two corresponding and vice-like extremes, the extreme of manly excess and the extreme of manly deficiency. Excessive manliness leads to tyranny. Deficient manliness leads to the rationality of the modern liberal.

In the neocon narrative of modern history, America has had to defend the realm of freedom against three expansive and tyrannical opponents. Two of those opponents, Nazism and Communism, it has successfully overcome, and the third, Radical Islam, it is currently fighting and, in Iraq at least, thanks to the surge, close to defeating. But even if America does soon defeat Radical Islam, or at least diminish its power, the fight for freedom, according to Kagan, will not soon conclude. Autocracy, especially in China and Russia, is making a comeback, and America will have to band together with its fellow democracies in order to defend the realm of freedom from these expansive and potentially dangerous opponents.

In the neocon narrative, America has been beset by another and internal enemy, the modern liberal, who has tried, by means of rules and regulations imposed by an imperious and overweening government, to restrict and even diminish the realm of individual freedom. In Manliness, Mansfield sets himself the task of defending individual freedom against its enemies and especially against the insidious campaign being waged against it by the modern liberal. I’ll return to Kagan’s vision of autocracy’s resurgence and The Return of History (his latest book) in future posts in this series. First, though, I want to explore a bit further Mansfield’s neocon notion of political courage and its embodiment in the manly man. As we shall see, according to Mansfield, the manly man’s current crisis is that he must on the one hand fight against those who embody manly excess, the Islamic fascists, while defending himself against those who embody manly deficiency, the modern liberals.

2. In Which the Manly Man Falls Into the Clutches of the Liberal

The Radical Islamists are a new threat to the universal principle that the manly man has always vigorously defended, the individual’s freedom to assert his importance. But for some decades now the manly man has been defending himself and his importance from another and different threat, a threat posed by those seeking to strangle his spirit in the constraints of regulations and rules: the modern liberal.

While the manly man welcomes struggle and dispute, the modern liberal seeks above all else to defuse and avoid conflict. Deficient in thumos, in manly spirit, he has no stomach for the aggressive assertion of cause against cause that defines the arena of politics. He cringes before any display of anger and seeks to appease his adversary by removing politics from the arena of partisan struggle into the auditorium of amicable debate in which agreement can be reached quickly and without pain. He seeks, that is, to substitute cooperation and peace for struggle and war.

The modern liberal, Mansfield argues, has identified and is waging a “calculated campaign” (228) against one of the chief obstacles to his regime of cooperation and peace: the spirited assertion of the manly man, convinced of his importance and superiority. Comfortable in that conviction, the manly man is more than willing to get angry and confrontational, and he is always ready to fight for himself and his cause, vigorously and aggressively, both in the arena of politics and on the battlefield of war.

Deficient in manly spirit, in dread of conflict and of those who provoke it, the modern liberal defensively seeks a way to neutralize manliness and constrain those who exhibit it. And he has found just the right trick. To the impetuous and aggressive irrationality of the manly man the modern liberal opposes the soothing force of reason and rules. Whereas the manly man acts on the basis of egotistic impulse, the liberal acts on the basis of universal reason. Whereas the manly man asserts the importance of only himself and his cohort, the liberal defends the equality of all men and women. Whereas the manly man self-servingly imposes on others his own partisan view, the liberal humbly submits to rules established for the good of the whole.

Though the modern liberal seems principled in his adherence to reason, progressive in his defense of equality, and self-effacing in his submission to rules, such is not the case. The liberal’s overt appearance, Mansfield argues, masks a covert and disturbing agenda. The reason to which the liberal adheres is not principled but instrumental and technocratic. The equality he defends is meant not to preserve but to nullify individuality. And the rules to which he submits are abstractions designed to benefit the leveled mass at the expense of the superior and meritorious individual.

The modern liberal entertains a utopian dream: he wants every institution in society—school, corporation, government, etc.—to operate efficiently, productively, and without conflict. In order to realize this dream, the modern liberal strives to organize all institutions in society according to rules that, he submits, are fair, impartial and reasonable. In every instance, however, the rules that govern an institution are predicated on an abstract notion of personhood. The person who inhabits the institution is one that has been stripped of all disruptive individuality and reduced to a function of the organizational routine. Every organization, is, of course, segmented into levels of unequal status and responsibility, but within each level a functional equality exists. Each member who inhabits a specific segment or level, as defined by the operational needs of the organization, is interchangeable with every other member of that segment. Such functional equality, however, is diminished and dehumanized, an equality based on parts that are standardized and interchangeable. And it does not tolerate that which does not fit into its abstract and generalized notion of the human person: the exceptional man who chafes at routine and rebels against conformity.

The desire on the part of some individuals to assert their importance and superiority is, however, ineradicable. The organization—and the liberal regime in general—must therefore domesticate that spirit and reroute it into channels that do not disrupt the routine of the organization or the placid tranquility of society as a whole, and the modern liberal has found two methods that have successfully tamed the manly man’s assertive spirit. Within the organization individuals must always abide by the operational needs of the system and strictly conform to organizational guidelines and rules. As long as they do so, they can assert their importance and satisfy their ambition by “getting ahead,” that is, by advancing into the organization’s higher levels of status and income. Outside the organization, the manly man’s assertive spirit is channeled into the domain of his private life and reduced to “lifestyle choices” based on commodity consumption. The manly man is still allowed to feel important, but his importance in now defined by the degree to which his personal consumption can be rendered cool and conspicuous.

Sufficiently tamed by the liberal regime of reason and rules, no longer daring to raise his voice in defense of a cause that reflects his own importance, the manly man allows his spirit to fall into disuse. Though he might now and again nostalgically think of politics as an arena in which to struggle and sacrifice for the success of a cause, he no longer has sufficient drive to translate dream into action. Reduced in all spheres of his private life to a passive consumer, he treats politics as if it were just another shopping mall, a gallery of commodities in which he bases his choice on the suavely tailored messages broadcast by candidates and on that most powerful of persuasive tools, public opinion.

This potential in liberal democracy, Mansfield reminds us, was long ago identified by Tocqueville who “sees democracy in a long trend toward similarity in its citizens and conformity in their behavior” (235). This trend, if not vigorously opposed by those who value the importance of the manly individual, inevitably results in a tyranny of the timid majority, a “new democratic despotism” that neutralizes the assertive spirit of the manly man and lays the groundwork “for a dull bourgeois society lacking in both love and ambition” (236).

Liberal propaganda reinforces this despotism of the timid majority. The man who suppresses his spirit and, for the sake of communal order and tranquility, submits to organizational rules and public opinion is the good man, the “role model” (233). This role model refuses to assert himself or display his superior abilities for fear that he might rise above the general level and disrupt the communal harmony. In fact, having internalized the rules established by his community, he will inflict on himself an inward punishment for harboring the merest temptation to assert his own importance. He will, that is, feel guilt for the impulses of his own manly spirit. The modern liberal thus achieves his greatest triumph. He no longer has to externally coerce the manly man to abide by the rules. The manly man will internally coerce himself to submit and conform. He will allow his superior strength and skills to be neutralized, and for the sake of equality and peace he will strive to blend in inoffensively with the other, and inferior, members of his community.

3. In Which the Manly Man Liberates Himself From Liberalism

The liberal, it seems, invokes rules and instills guilt for an overt end that is, without doubt, commendable: the establishment of a peaceful and productive community based on mutual respect and toleration. But the liberal’s real motive is covert: to protect himself from those endowed with an aggressive sense of their superiority and importance. The modern liberal is deficient in precisely those attributes that the manly man has in abundance, aggressiveness and the capacity for anger. Unlike the manly man, the liberal has no confidence in his ability to assert himself. Alone, he is a poor and pathetic thing, incapable of carrying a cause or defying the opinion of the crowd. Though he is also incapable of anger, the liberal is full of a sullen spite whose origin is his envy of that which he lacks, the manly man’s exuberant and independent spirit.

Driven by fear and fueled by envy, craving security and terrified of standing apart, the liberal bands together with others of his deficient kind in order to neutralize the manly man’s dangerous and unpredictable spirit, chasten it, render it meek and unthreatening. By the imposition of rules and the instillation of guilt the liberal regime achieves its overt goal, the elimination of conflict, but it also achieves its covert and predominant agenda: the suppression of thumos and the acquisition of power.

Though temporarily subdued and suppressed, the manly man will not long tolerate the subjugation of his importance beneath the rules of a timid and liberal elite. He knows that the origin of his action cannot be located outside of himself in a set of abstract and alien rules. Submission to such a regime is a betrayal of his nature, and as a free agent he must, finally, answer to no other authority than his own inherent spirit.

But in his rebellion against the rules that the liberal elite have devised to rob him of his agency, the manly man is in danger of flinging himself into the opposite extreme, the extreme of excessive manliness—the extreme of Nietzschean nihilism. As I explained in my last post, the manly man, according to Mansfield, asserts his cause on the basis of reasons that, he claims, identify it as superior to all other causes. Convinced of both his own superiority and that of his cause, the manly man without hesitation seeks to make all other causes subservient to his own. This inclination to dominate and tyrannize is an inherent aspect of the manly man’s character. When he gives way to this inclination, Mansfield says, the manly man is no longer asserting his cause but using it as a means to another and very different end: his own power and prestige. He reduces his cause to an instrument in the service of his true ideal and cause: himself. He then becomes a figure of irrational and nihilistic excess, and his spirit, his thumos, is transformed into a vehicle for tyranny and a “terrifying imperialism” (217).

The philosopher who prefigured the modern excess of manliness is Nietzsche. According to Mansfield, Nietzsche deplored the fact that “modern softness” had produced a bourgeois order based on “herd morality.” Seeking a transvaluation of all timid and inoffensive values, Nietzsche advocated a regeneration of individual will. Nietzsche understood that the exercise of the will contained a danger, namely that “men will rather will nothingness than not will” (236). But he chose nonetheless to discount the danger of the excessive and immoderate will, and thus, Mansfield says, “with his call for will to power,” Nietzsche “illustrated the danger he warned of” (236).

That danger—the drive to will nothingness and destruction—was subsequently embodied in three great totalitarian excesses. Though Nietzsche, Mansfield allows, would “not have agreed with the Nazis,” nonetheless “he inspired them” (236). And though of course he did not inspire Lenin and the Bolsheviks, his doctrine of the will-to-power reveals the underlying motivational impetus of Soviet Communism. “The communists spoke of ‘the struggle for peace’,” Mansfield says, “but they were always much more interested in struggle than in peace. They were war lovers as much as the Nazis and with the same ruthlessness” (236). Nazi Fascism and Soviet Communism were secular movements, but the corrupt will-to-power of excessive manliness has also had a religious manifestation. “The Islamic radicals of our century overflow with the same spirit; though they say they are pious, they use the name of God to strengthen and serve their own will, not to direct it” (236).

Mansfield thus cleverly and neatly distributes at the extreme ends of his Aristotelian continuum the traditional neocon enemies: totalitarian tyranny and modern liberalism. The modern liberal is relegated to one extreme of the continuum, the extreme of deficient manliness. The liberal dreams of realizing his utopian ideal of a community based on rationality and rules, in which toleration, equality, and mutual respect are the enforced values and in which no one angrily and aggressively asserts his importance and disrupts the established harmony. Such a utopian community achieves its desired goal, the suppression of all conflict, but the peace it imposes is the peace of mediocrity and vapid uniformity. The totalitarian tyrannies of Nazism, Communism, and Radical Islam are relegated to the other extreme, the extreme of excessive manliness. Each of these tyrannical regimes seeks to impose its ideal violently and despotically, crushing all opposing views in order to establish its autocratic version of universal peace: the peace of the omnipotent master and the impotent slave.

Inhabiting the moderate mean between the tyrant and the liberal is the manly man, the man who refuses to suppress his dangerous and disruptive spirit but who also and at the same time masters it and prevents it from lapsing into the excesses of tyranny and despotism. He is capable of maintaining his poise and balance between the extremes that threaten him because he has at his disposal a weapon of exceptional power and efficacy: manly reason.

4. In Which the Manly Man Is Rescued From Excess and Tyranny

Manly men, however, are not always ruled by reason and are all too often impatient of reflection. Most often they are moved by their passion for importance, by the spirit and energy that spurs them to assert their cause against its opponents in the arena of politics and especially in that most honorable and glorious of all arenas, war.

But even though they bristle at having their self-assertion bridled and reined in, manly men are susceptible to the power of reason. Mansfield once again takes his cue from his favorite philosopher: “Aristotle draws a distinction between thumos, which is uncultivated, and the habit of a virtue” (207). Thumos is an inborn and instinctive energy on which the manly man draws in order aggressively to uphold and assert his cause. But it is not a virtue. Virtue “is reasoned, reflective, deliberate rather than spontaneous”(192). The manly man certainly advances reasons that his cause should prevail, but those reasons are often arbitrary and dependent on circumstance. In order to preserve himself from the extremities of a tyrannical ambition, the manly man must rise above the arbitrary and circumstantial and ground his cause in arguments that are cogent and coherent. He must, that is, abide by the rules and strictures of a manly reason. He must always remain wary and refuse to submit to the technocratic rules put forward by the timid and liberal majority. But by grounding his irrational energy on the secure foundation of rational argument, on the foundation, that is, of manly reason, he not only moderates thumos but sublimates it and raises it to the status of a virtue, the true virtue of the manly man: courage.

Since rational reflection is not an activity that the manly man, with his penchant for struggle in the competitive arena of politics, is inclined to pursue, he must, at least, be willing to accept instruction from those men whose manliness is exhibited not in physical or political struggle but in the higher, more refined precincts of intellectual struggle: the philosophers. “Politics,” Mansfield counsels, “has to be shown moderation by those who know best how to live in peace, the philosophers” (218). Achilles must accept the guidance of Socrates. And if the philosopher truly is Socratic in spirit and temperament, the warrior will be well served.

Such a philosopher, attuned to the diverse potentials of manly men, knows that his task is not to expunge their exuberant and dangerous spirit. Indeed, he “tolerates and even endorses their often misguided forwardness” (210). That forwardness, however, can quickly tilt to an extreme, and the philosopher remains acutely aware of the manly man’s proclivity to excess and tyranny. To help the manly man achieve moderation, the philosopher warns him that even though his cause is an honorable one, worthy of victory in the arena of politics, he must not transgress limits and impose it despotically on his opponents. Unfortunately, the philosopher “can offer advice to manly rulers but not with confidence that it will be listened to” (210). Often it is not, and the manly man, reducing his cause to a mere instrument in his grandiose quest for power and predominance, lapses into the extreme of tyranny.

But sometimes the manly man accepts and heeds the philosopher’s advice. He does not inflate himself into an ideal but remains aware that his cause and the ideal it embodies transcend the limits of his individual self. He then becomes the virtuous warrior, the warrior of tempered impulses and wise judgment. He attains to the indispensable virtue, courage, and achieves the true ideal: a moderate manliness.

5. In Which the Manly Man Surrounds Himself With Philosophers

Dean Barnett sees the situation clearly and accurately: “the Republican politicians entrusted to put conservative principles into action have proven a disappointment as a class.” Pure and timeless principles were put in their care, and rather than respecting those principles, the Republicans marginalized them and dedicated themselves to the personally advantageous and politically expedient. Because of their intellectual and moral cowardice, they deserve to lose.

John McCain, on the other hand, deserves to win. Though Barnett does not mention McCain, he does hold up Ronald Reagan as perhaps “the last successful Republican politician to fully personify” the true conservative standard. “Not only did Reagan come to office with a full set of conservative principles to guide him,” Barnett says, “he only sought office because his passion for those principles compelled him to do so.”

McCain, a warrior in the true sense, is, like Reagan, passionately committed to the core principles of conservatism. More than any other presidential contender, McCain proudly endorses the greatness of the American people and the nobility of America’s mission to carry freedom to all corners of the globe. True, McCain sometimes lapses into manly excess and angrily confronts those who question his honor or the honor of America. But during his long career of service to his nation, he has learned to moderate his aggressive spirit, and he has the wisdom to surround himself with advisors who are warriors in the philosophic mode. These advisors, dedicated to the true, timeless, and pure principles of neoconservatism, will help him maintain his equilibrium and poise when he confronts, as inevitably he must, those who oppose America’s ideals and America’s interests.

Robert Kagan will be among those advisors should McCain become president. Unlike Mansfield, who in Manliness focuses on the deficient liberal, Kagan is most concerned with those who occupy, in Mansfield’s scheme, the extreme of excessive manliness. For Kagan the greatest challenge to the pure and timeless principles of neoconservatism comes not from American liberals. In fact, Kagan’s neoconservative celebration of freedom and American power has struck a responsive chord in those liberals who do not balk at using America’s military power to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations. The focus of Kagan and his liberal allies, rather, is on those autocratic nations—Iran, China, Russia—whose expansive and dangerous spirit pose a growing threat to America’s historical mission.

I’ll return to Kagan and his neoconservative vision later in this series. Next time, I’ll discuss the force that, according to Mansfield, drives politics—anger—and argue that there is an essential difference between rational anger and irrational rage. I’ll also, with a little help from Aristotle, take a closer look at Mansfield’s concept of courage and make a related argument, namely that courage cannot be understood apart from another distinctively rational attribute: empathy.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and at Politics and Letters

Labels: Bastoche, Cowboy Nation

In his recent Washington Post article, Michael Leahy lays out the evidence in support of a contention that few would dispute: John McCain has a temper. Few would dispute it because, as Leahy reports, many have witnessed McCain erupt in volcanic and memorable displays of anger. What is more interesting, however, is that these witnesses interpret McCain’s outbursts from two contrasting viewpoints. Some portray McCain as “an erratic hothead” whose anger is provoked by “either disloyalty to him or irrational opposition to his ideas.” Bob Smith, for example, opines ominously that McCain’s sometimes uncontrollable temper “would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger.”


Others, however, characterize McCain’s temper as a positive, even laudable trait, one that makes him “a firebrand who is resolute against the forces of greed and gutlessness.” Among these bullish optimists is Joe Lieberman who reassures us that McCain’s temper “has never been enough to blur his judgment….If anything his passion and occasional bursts of anger have made him more effective.” One important piece of evidence seems to corroborate Lieberman’s view: McCain himself recognizes that his temper is a flaw. This willingness to admit to his imperfection testifies not only to the soundness of his judgment, as Lieberman argues, but also to his humility—traits important for a leader of the world’s most powerful nation.

They are also, of course, traits important for any politician campaigning to become that leader, and McCain’s advisers seem eager to incorporate them into a narrative that showcases their candidate’s character. Like any other candidate for president, so the story goes, McCain offers to the American electorate both strengths and weaknesses. But unlike most other candidates, McCain neither boasts about the former nor tries to conceal the latter. He does not, that is, talk crookedly, nor does he try to sell to the American people an image of himself patched together from focus groups and suavely tailored by Beltway consultants. He is a savvy enough politician to know that images are unpredictable and uncontrollable things: the candidate who lives by the image can die by the image. More important, he has such confidence in his abilities that he can present himself to the American people realistically and without the varnish and gloss of campaign artifice. These attributes of character—humility and the ability to see himself realistically and without exaggeration—appeal strongly to the American people. Americans do not seek in their president someone who is without foible or flaw. But Americans do seek in their president someone who has the wisdom to recognize his flaws and the humility to admit them.

Of course, the humility to recognize flaws is useless without the courage to correct them. But this too is an attribute that McCain possesses. Indeed, as Leahy reports, one of those who has borne the brunt of McCain’s temper, former Phoenix mayor Paul Johnson, now claims that McCain has “mellowed.” McCain, that is, has examined unflinchingly his propensity to anger and has taken steps to mitigate it. He has not eradicated his temper nor should he eradicate it: Americans do not want a president who is deficient in spirit and unwilling to fight for his principles. But McCain now strives to channel the energy of his temper constructively and to put it to wise and effective use.

An important campaign theme thus emerges. John McCain has always had a remarkable strength of character. He has also had a tendency to assert that strength a little too forcefully. Years of experience, however, have taught him to control his displays of temper and to put his personal strength to constructive use.

John McCain, in other words, has mellowed into a wise and moderate leader.

1. An Education in Honor

But the vague and unspecific idea of “mellowing” sheds no appreciable light on McCain’s long and profound journey of personal discovery. Mark Salter intends to correct that deficiency. In her recent Boston Globe article, “Inventing John McCain,” Sasha Issenberg provides a portrait of Salter, McCain’s “closest aide and one frequently described as his alter ego.” Having co-authored with McCain a number of books, including McCain’s two volumes of memoirs, Faith of My Fathers and Worth the Fighting For, Salter obviously is very well acquainted with his alter ego’s life, both its overall trajectory and its significant details. And as McCain’s most devoted and imaginative image-maker, he is now deep in the process of familiarizing the American electorate with the narrative of John McCain’s journey to personal and political greatness.

Like any good campaign narrative, the story of McCain’s personal journey contains a number of mutually reinforcing elements organized around a central theme that is simple, edifying, and easily grasped: McCain’s life has been an education in honor. McCain admits that as a young man he often struck back in anger when provoked, and he specifies the incitement that touched off his outbursts: “I would respond aggressively and sometimes irresponsibly to anyone who I perceived to have questioned my sense of honor and self-respect.” McCain, as a young man, was certainly not exceptional or out-of-the-ordinary in that regard. His focus was on his own personal honor, and his anger would flare up when he felt his honor denigrated or traduced. But McCain was fortunate to have available to him two men who, through their example, showed him that honor must attach itself to something other than the individual self. Both his father and his grandfather, through military service, devoted their lives to a cause, America. Through their undeviating and patriotic devotion to our great nation, they showed the young McCain that one must rise above all trifling and small-minded concerns and put oneself in the service of an ideal that transcends the individual self.

The examples of his father and grandfather deepened McCain’s understanding of duty and of honor and rescued him from his youthful narcissism. Honor achieves true significance when it attaches itself to an ideal that transcends the narcissistic self committed only to its own importance. McCain’s forbears attached themselves to one of the most honorable of all transcendent ideals, the nation. They were willing to sacrifice their energies and even their lives not only for their own individual honor but also for the honor of America and the principles it embodies: freedom and democracy. Their own personal honor and the honor of their nation became one. From their example McCain learned that personal honor divorced from a transcendent ideal is a meager and impoverished thing. And having dedicated himself and his honor to a cause higher than his own isolated self—the cause of America and its principles—he came to own those qualities without which no politician can hope to lead a nation effectively: humility, judgment, and courage.

In spite of his dedication to the interests and the honor of America, McCain remains touchy regarding his own personal honor. As Salter readily admits, “many of McCain's run-ins with colleagues and activists have resulted from McCain's conviction that his honor in some way has been questioned.” But though his temper is still quick to ignite, McCain knows that he must bridle his spirit and channel its energy to the benefit of his party and his nation. In that sense he has mellowed. He has learned that a man achieves true honor by devoting himself to a cause that transcends the petty concerns of his individual self. And in this culminating stage of his great career, McCain willingly and without stint devotes himself and his remarkable energy to the greatest cause of all: America.

2. The Cowboy Learns the Benefits of Moderation

McCain’s choice of Robert Kagan as his foreign policy “guru” reinforces this narrative. As I discussed in my last post, Kagan was one of the writers who contributed to the foreign policy speech in which McCain referred to himself as a “realistic idealist.” As an idealist, McCain still supports America's mission to spread freedom and democracy to all the nations of the earth. But in his moderation and wisdom he knows that America must temper its idealist spirit and approach its mission realistically, with prudence and caution. He is therefore calling for a League of Democracies in which America, in alliance with its great democratic allies, will forge a new and multilateral path to global peace and security.

McCain’s League of Democracies is the campaign version of the Concert of Democracies that Kagan, along with such liberal interventionists as Ivo Daalder, G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, has been touting as a counterpoise to the giant autocratic states, China and Russia. Like many other neocons, Kagan, as a result of the current muddle in the Middle East, has tempered his idealistic fervor and has come to see that America must, at least for the moment, forego unilateral action in world affairs and build new multilateral alliances with its fellow democracies. But although he has embraced a new realism, Kagan remains a firm and unfaltering idealist. For Kagan, America is history’s pivotal nation, and although it must forge new means to carry forward its world-historical mission, that mission is still the one that history bequeathed it at its birth.

America, according to Kagan, was born into history as the embodiment of freedom and democracy, and its world-historical mission is now and has always been to universalize those universal ideals, that is, to spread them throughout the world. America is capable of carrying out this great historical mission because it is endowed with the expansive energy, the spirited aggressiveness that the Greeks called thumos. That America has always been an aggressive and expansive nation is the central argument of Kagan’s book, Dangerous Nation, and of the essay I am examining in this series, “Cowboy Nation.” From its inception, according to Kagan, America has put its aggressive spirit in the service of two goals: the expansion of its territory and its commerce and, even more important, the expansion of its core principles, freedom and democracy, to every corner of the globe.

If America must now rein in its expansive spirit, it must not go to the opposite extreme of eradicating it. Like any other neocon, Kagan adheres to his idea of America as the most potent and commanding force in world affairs. But he has assessed our present situation realistically, and he recognizes that America’s new leader must curb, at least temporarily, his nation’s idealistic zeal. At the same time, that leader must allow his nation sufficient scope to express its idealism and to carry forward its world-historical mission. He must, that is, balance idealism with realism, and a Concert of Democracies seems to be one instrument by which such a balance can be achieved.

John McCain subscribes to the idea of such a Concert or League. Passionately committed to the ideals embodied in his great nation, McCain recognizes that in a League of Democracies America, though constrained by its allies, will be able to use its power and energy to advance the cause of freedom. Unfortunately, a powerful and vocal faction in America resents and seeks to neutralize any leader who is intent on committing America’s energy and strength to the cause of freedom, in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. And that faction is determined to defeat McCain in November and to scale back America’s commanding role in world affairs.

As I also discussed in my last post, Harvey Mansfield in his 2007 Jefferson Lecture argues that if we want to understand the dynamics of political conflict, we must once against make use of the concept of thumos. In his controversial 2006 book Manliness Mansfield argues that our modern liberal society is openly hostile to thumos and to the person who epitomizes its aggressive and expansive energy, the man of courage or, as Mansfield calls him, the manly man. In fact, modern liberalism, according to Mansfield, is waging against thumos and manliness a “calculated campaign” (228). This campaign has two complementary goals: the neutralization of manliness in the political arena and the establishment of a “gender-neutral” society characterized by a diminished and effete equality.

Mansfield, however, though he is staunch and unwavering in his defense of the manly man against those on the liberal left who would domesticate him, does not sentimentalize the man of thumos and courage. He recognizes that in the character of the manly man resides a capacity for excess and extremity. Specifically, the manly man is prone to nihilism and tyranny. To avoid these inevitable outcomes of excessive and extreme manliness, the manly man must learn moderation. The manly man must do what John McCain has done: he must temper his tendency to excess by subordinating himself to a higher and more noble cause than his own ambition. As Mansfield argues, following his master Aristotle, the manly man at his best is a moderate man.

And as a man of moderate though still potent energy, the manly man will defeat and scatter those who oppose his expansive spirit: the liberal elite.

3. In Which the Manly Man Enters the Arena of Politics and Honor

Manliness, according to Mansfield, is propelled by the spontaneous and instinctive energy or spirit that Aristotle and Plato called thumos. An aggressive and animal spirit, thumos manifests itself both defensively and offensively: defensively when the animal or person is attacked, offensively when the animal or person must fight to obtain the materials it needs in order to survive and reproduce.

Thumos in its distinctively human form, however, manifests itself when the person is prompted to fight for something more than material self-interest. “Manliness is not mere aggression,” Mansfield says; “it is aggression that develops an assertion, a cause it espouses” (49). The manly man asserts himself aggressively for the sake of a cause to which he attaches the utmost value, worth and importance. But there is nothing unselfish about his devotion to the cause. He attaches value and importance to it because it is his cause. He identifies with the cause and devotes himself to it because the cause expresses his sense of his own value and importance. His importance and the importance of his cause merge and become one.

As a result, on the success of his cause depends that without which the manly man cannot live: his honor, his sense of himself as worthy of the esteem and respect of others. Should his cause fail, should it be exposed to shame, humiliation, and disgrace, the manly man will himself feel shamed, humiliated, and disgraced. The manly man is thus willing to endure hardship and to sacrifice his material interests and even his life to carry his cause to success or to rescue it from defeat. “Other animal species seek to survive,” Mansfield says; “humans want to survive with honor” (60). The manly man can easily endure material deprivation. Indeed, he scoffs at the prospect of material loss and physical danger. But what he does not scoff at, what he finds intolerable and resolutely sets himself against, is the denigration and defeat of his cause. Mansfield is emphatic: the manly man “finds his survival only in his honor” (37).

The cause to which the manly man devotes himself is not a mere whim, peculiar to himself and to no one else. His cause embodies a principle or ideal that transcends his individual self, a principle or ideal that claims, in addition to his own, the allegiance of many other individuals. Finding that his cause—and the principle or ideal it embodies—is shared and espoused by others, the manly man joins his energy to theirs and forms a group or community committed to the defense and promotion of the cause. This community—an advocacy group, a political party, or, at its furthest extension, a nation itself—seeks to advance the cause that expresses the manly man’s sense of importance and honor, and the manly man, as one member of the party or nation whose honor he sees as coextensive with his own, will strive to assert its predominance against competing groups.

And there are always competing groups. Though espoused by many, the cause to which the manly man attaches himself is not espoused by all. It falls short of universal acceptance and remains limited, specific to one group, one party, one nation. And precisely because its reach is not universal, it finds itself in opposition to and in conflict with other groups and parties and nations that uphold different and competing causes and ideals. Out of this opposition and conflict arises the arena of struggle that we call politics. The struggle that takes place in the political arena is often difficult and demanding, but the manly man does not flinch from it. Quite the contrary, he welcomes the struggle and is always eager to defend his cause from the assaults of those who oppose it.

But what truly activates the manly man’s spirit, his thumos, is the opportunity to assert the predominance of his cause against its competitors. And as Mansfield emphasizes, the manly man’s assertion of his cause is not polite and diplomatic but aggressive and bold. For the manly man politics is not a quiet conference room in which rational people timidly seek to appease one another by glossing over their differences and disagreements. Politics is a gladiatorial arena of competition and deadly struggle. It is the field of battle on which the manly man, by asserting the predominance of his cause, gains for his leader, his party, his nation, and himself that without which his life would be empty and void: victory and honor.

4. In Which the Manly Man Succumbs to Nihilism and Tyranny

Politics is thus, for Mansfield, the arena in which opposing ideals and causes and ways of life contend aggressively against one another for dominance and control. On the battlefield of politics one group or nation asserts its ideals and values against those of another, firm in the belief that its ideals and values are superior to those of its opponent. “Every political association,” Mansfield says, “is deliberately partial by excluding the rest of humanity and determinedly partisan by thinking itself to be a superior way of life” (206).

As Mansfield has said, the manly man does not devote himself to a cause and assert its superiority out of mere whim. He can adduce reasons that his cause is superior to the cause of any other group in the political arena. But it is often the case that the manly man adheres to a cause and asserts its superiority for reasons on which he has not reflected. For example, the manly man has been born and raised in a specific nation with a specific history and culture and politics, and he will adhere to the cause of his nation and assert its superiority with an aggressive and unstinting courage because it is his nation. The simple fact that he is American—or Russian or Chinese, etc.—is sufficient reason for him to sacrifice his material interests and even his life in defense of his nation and the ideals it embodies. Thus, although the manly man’s devotion to a cause is not based on mere whim but on reasons, those reasons often remain circumstantial and arbitrary.

Mansfield, following Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, points out that the manly man, by arbitrarily asserting the superiority of his cause, and by extension the superiority of himself, becomes a potentially dangerous force. “The ‘self’ being asserted is not only compatible with tyranny,” Mansfield says, “but in its desire for superiority has an inherent element of tyranny” (216-17). If the manly man judges his way of life superior to all others, why should he not aggressively seek to assert it and expand it until it has subordinated to itself all inferior ways of life? A politics based on manliness, Mansfield says, thus “has a problem it cannot resolve: the manly men in taking responsibility for others cannot stop themselves from ruling their inferiors and from treating them as slaves” (217). The manly man treats his inferiors as slaves, of course, for their own good. He is introducing those he has defeated and enslaved to his own superior values and ideals and thus, even though they resist what he seeks to impose, they are still, in their defeat and enslavement, better off than they were when they foolishly adhered to their previous and demonstrably inferior way of life.

When the manly man thus attempts tyrannically to assert the superiority of his way of life over all others, he is no longer asserting a cause or ideal. Rather, according to Mansfield, he has detached himself from his cause and is asserting in its stead the supreme importance of his most glorious ideal: himself. He has, in fact, renounced all other causes and devotes himself no longer to a group or party or nation but to the only cause that has meaning to him: his own power and predominance. The manly man, in his grandiose pride, has stepped beyond good and evil and entered a realm of Nietzschean nihilism, as Mansfield calls it. Rather than subordinating himself to his cause, he subordinates his cause to himself, and even though he still deploys his energy and spirit in the service of his cause, loudly asserting its preeminence and superiority, his overt behavior masks his covert intent. In reality he has reduced his cause to an instrument, a mere means to achieve his true end: his own honor and glory. He has become the ideal whose predominance he seeks to assert.

5. A Wise and Moderate Old Warrior

When he was a young man John McCain was his own ideal. By following the examples of his forebears, however, and putting himself in the service of a higher cause—his great nation, America—he tamed his temper and brought it into prudent and reasonable bounds. True, he can still erupt in noteworthy displays of anger when he feels the honor of his nation slighted. But Americans respect and admire the man who enters the arena of politics willing to fight, and fight hard, for the principles to which he has dedicated his life. Even if, now and again, his temper champs at the bit, the American people know that years of experience have taught McCain the wisdom of humility. He will use his manly spirit to fight for America in the arena of world politics, but he will never allow it to transgress the bounds of decent and honorable conduct.

To put it in Mansfield’s terms, McCain has taken his aggressive and manly temper in hand and rescued it from the extreme of nihilism and tyranny. He has, that is, transformed his spirited temper into a virtue, the virtue of courage. Mansfield follows Aristotle in locating courage or manliness at a moderate mean between two extremes, the extreme of excess and the extreme of deficiency. The extreme of excess, as we have seen, results in nihilism and tyranny. But Mansfield is even more concerned about the opposing extreme, the extreme of deficient manliness. This extreme, according to Mansfield, is characterized in our era not by nihilism and tyranny but by rationality. This deficient rationality is certainly not the rationality characteristic of the true philosopher, the manly Socratic philosopher who, as we shall see next time, admires the manly man and strives to keep his excesses in check by means of reasons—not arbitrary reasons, but reasons embedded in cogent and convincing arguments. In our era, however, a new and different kind of rationality is at war with manliness. This rationality denies the manly man his exceptional stature in society and strives to reduce all differences—political, cultural, sexual—to the status of an effete and diminished equality. This new rationality, deficient in manliness and openly hostile to it, is, of course, the rationality of the liberal elite.

I’ll return to Kagan’s arguments in “Cowboy Nation” and in his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, later in this series. Next time though, I’ll examine the deficient rationality that, according to Mansfield, is characteristic of our era, an era dedicated to gender-neutrality and to the neutralization of thumos and the manly man.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and Politics and Letters

Labels: Bastoche, Cowboy Nation