Word: mansfield
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Professor Mansfield last spring berated the achievements of Black students on campus, where were the legions of groups lining up in support of the BSA? A few letters offering a few scanty remarks from a few members of a few organizations flickered across the editorial pages of a few campus publications. But most people sat on the sidelines thinking to themselves, "That doesn't concern...
Prudence is better than idealism. Mansfield and Paglia reject the naivete of idealism and advocate prudence instead. Prudence is a political and personal virtue suited for real humans who inhabit a world filled with danger, risk, irrationality, prejudice, conflict and instability. Other words for prudence are realism, common sense and street smarts...
Today's liberals have naively bought into too many bad European ideas. Paglia and Mansfield point to two fundamental ideas in particular--both with bad consequences. The first is the presumption that "human nature" is a fiction and that man is a complete product of society. This idea, which came from Europe and was promulgated by Rousseau, has ultimately infiltrated the American university and is now taken for granted in many intellectual circles. On this view, bad things--like rape and homophobia--have been socialized into good people by a bad society. The solution? More socialization: With the right combination...
There is such a thing as human nature. Paglia and Mansfield agree with the time-worn proposition that there are intractable facts about human behavior that we would be stupid to ignore and naive to try to change. This includes the fact that people tend to be selfish, that people tend to hold prejudices and that there are fundamental differences between women...
Paglia and Mansfield teach us that the purpose of justice should not be, as some would have it, to make the world ideal. Given human nature and the fact that people don't agree on what the ideal society should look like, making the world ideal would entail an unacceptable amount of coercion. It's true that liberty has its own costs and hazards, including risk, conflict, hostility, insecurity--even rape. But like the very first liberals, paglia and Mansfield both think the price of freedom is worth paying...