Our next speaker is Harvey Mansfield, who is a Professor of Government at Harvard where he studies and teaches political philosophy. He is also been named recently to the Carol G. Simon Fellow position at the Hoover Institution and will serve on as a member of the Boyd and Jill Smith taskforce on values of a free society, which has been launched and also supported principally by Bill Simon. Harvey is the recipient of a national humanities medal in 2004. He has written on Edmond Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, and on the discovery and development of the theory of executive power. His most recent book is entitled a provocative title "Manliness" and you have a copy of it in your bag. Harvey's topic this morning is "Anger and Self Importance." So please join me in welcoming a truly distinguished academic person, Harvey Mansfield. Thank you and good morning ladies and gentlemen. What I say is a short version of a talk I gave in Washington last May, the Jefferson lecture, which was about understanding politics. So I am going to discuss anger and self importance in the context of understanding politics. And I want to discuss it from standpoint of the difference between the humanities and science including political science. You might think that it would take some nerve for a political scientist to come out of a university and tell everyone else how to understand politics. In my case, I mean to show more modestly, how to understand and not how to practice politics. But the understanding I am going to talk about comes from practice and not really from a university, and it has something to do with nerve which is not often found in universities. Still less is it understood there. A person with nerve thinks himself more important than he is. But how do we back up the reprove? How important is he? How important are we? This is a central question in politics. Politics is about who deserves to be more important, which leader, from which party, with which ideas. Politics assumes that the contest for importance is itself important. In a grander sense politics assumes that human beings are important. Science political science today avoids this question. It is inspired by the famous the title of a book by Harold Lasswell you may very well not have read. Published in the 1936 and the title is "Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How?" You see there the benefit or the focus is on the benefits that you get what, when and how. But it ought to be on the who; on who you think you are and why you are important enough to deserve what you get. Poets and philosophers have an answer or at least address the question. Science does not. Political science ignores the question of importance because it has the ambition to be scientific in the manner of natural science which is the real science. Scientific truth is objective and is no respecter of persons. It regards the concern for importance as a source of bias, the enemy of truth. Individuals in science can claim prizes, Nobel prizes and nations can take pride in that. With this sort of recognition is outside science which is in principle in fact are collective, anonymous, enterprise. And so political science which by studying politics ought to be sensitive to importance to the importance of importance, aims to abstract from individual data with names in order to arrive at universal propositions. Survey research is an example. Yet human beings and their associations always have names. This is how they maintain their individuality. Names mark off the differences between individuals and societies or other groups and they do so because the differences are important to us. You can think your way to an abstract individual or an abstract society without a name. But you cannot live in wander, be one. Science is indifferent to proper names and confines itself to common nouns. But all human life takes place in an atmosphere of proper nouns. To make a name for yourself as we say is to become important; to lose your good name, to suffer a stain on your reputation, to live thinking less well of yourself, or among others who think less well of you. Obviously, human beings like to think they are important. Does this matter? Perhaps, they have to think so if they are to live responsibly. For how can you do your duties if they are not ascribed to your name? I want to suggest two improvements arising from the humanities for today's understanding of politics The first is to recapture the notion of Thumos; that's spelt T H U M O S or T H Y M O S. I am teaching you a word in Greek this morning, Thumos or spiritedness usual translation, spiritedness. Referring to the part of the soul, that makes us want to insist on our own importance. The second improvement is the use of names proper to literature and foreign science. Literature tells stories of characters with names and places with names and times with dates. While science ignores names or explains them away literature uses and respects them. Let us make our way to this notion of Thumos from an elementary observation. Politics is about what makes you angry, not so much about what you want. Your wants do matter, but mainly because you feel you are entitled to have them satisfied and get angry when they are not. Many times people who seem towards poor do not complain of their wants because they do not feel entitled to those wants. When you complain, it is not so much that you lack what you want; as such you will find slighted or offended in not having what is rightfully yours. In our democracy, politics is especially motivated by the sense that you are not being treated equally. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, are obviously recent examples. They were initiated, not for the sake of gaining benefits but to receive equal honor and respect. We do not worry so much about the wants of the rich and of their desire for inequality. In a democracy that desire is latent and suppressed. Though in our kind of democracy, a liberal democracy, we make room for the rich and allow inequality in practice, if not in principle. But the rich are not allowed to get angry unless their democratic rights are violated. You can tell who is in charge of a society by noticing who is allowed to get angry. And for what cause, rather than by trying to gauge much each group gets. Blacks and women wanted benefits only as a sign of equality, not to give themselves greater purchasing power. Power is too vague a term when separated from honor. When we say that people are empowered, we mean they have the power that goes with honor. Those not empowered are disssed a word invented by blacks to designate the feeling of being disrespected. Political scientists have generalized the honor seeking movements of blacks and women in the concept of identity politics. Illustrating the tendency of political science to perform abstractions and to avoid proper names, for how can you have a politics of identity or of meaning without using the names that go with identity and meaning. Lyle Lovett has a song "You are not from Texas" that ends like this "that's right, you are not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway." Lyle teaches us to central problem of multiculturalism. If it's so important to come from Texas, how can Texas want you, if you are not? Those of us not from Texas have to live with the shame of it, rather doubtful that Texas wants us anyway. For with honor goes the shame of dishonor, with honor also goes victory the Red Sox for although you can lose with honor you must gain it in a contest as supposed to a calculation. Politics is not a fluctuation of gain and loss as in an investment account, or the seeking of power after power. It is a series of victories and defeats in which every victory for one side is a defeat for the other. True, the series really ends in a final victory. The left will never finally defeat the right, nor vice versa unfortunately. Just as war will always return in the next war, and sports always looks forward to next year. Yet along the way, politics is punctuated with victories and defeats, many of them ephemeral but some of them decisive. As in war and sports, politics delivers winners and losers bearing pride and ejection, resentment or shame, not negotiated percentages of power or generalized self esteem. Thumos is by nature, complicated. Your self interest, by which you may calculate your gain, is a simplified or simple notion. Sometimes translated as spiritedness, Thumos names a part of the soul that connects one's own to the good. Thumos represents the spirited defense of one's own characteristic of the animal body, standing for the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat. It is first of all a weary reaction rather than an eager forward movement, though it may attack if that is the best defense. The reaction often goes too far, when the animal risks its life in on an attack in order to preserve it self. To risk one's life, to save one's life, is the paradox of Thumos, the display of an apparent contradiction. As a human animal, you can even condemn your own life and say you are sorry and ashamed. For shame is due to Thumos. Is shame in your interest you could think. Is it in your self interest to be ashamed? It's hard to say yes. And just as hard to say no. Apparently you have a self above yourself that sometimes critical of yourself and makes you ashamed. Let's call that a soul. Soulful people are complicated by virtue of holding themselves at a certain distance from themselves. But aren't we all like this, more or less. In Thumos we see the animality of man for men and I think especially males, but not only males often behave like dog's barking, snake's hissing, bird's flapping, but precisely here we also see the humanity of the human animal. A human being not only bristles at a threat but also gets angry, which means reacts for a reason, even for a principle, a cause. Only human beings get angry. When you lose your temper you look for a reason to justify your conduct, thinking out that reason may take a while, after the moment of feeling of wronged has passed. But you can not feel wronged without a reason good or bad, well considered or taken for granted. Now, consider what happens when you produce that reason. What did Achilles do when his ruler Agamemnon stole his slave girl? This is right at the beginning of Homer's Iliad. What Achilles did is he raised the stakes, he asserted that the trouble was not in this loss alone stealing his girl, but in the fact that the wrong sort of man was ruling the Greeks. Heroes or at least "He-Man" like Achilles should be in charge rather than lesser beings like Agamemnon who have mainly their lineage to recommend them and who therefore do not give He-Man the honors they deserve. Achilles elevated a civil complaint concerning a private wrong to a demand for a change of regime. The revolution in politics to be sure, not every complaint goes that far. But every complaint goes in that direction from anger and reason to politics. The reason is not that Achilles is making a point everyone would concede as with self interest. Just the contrary, because the reason he gives opposes the rule of Agamemnon and challenges the status quo. We expect it to be contested. To complain of an injustice is an implicit claim to rule, it is a demand that the rulers adjust their rule to provide for you. Not merely as a personal favor but as one case of a general principle. Since the rulers already hold their own principles you might well want to remove them, to make way for yours. Politics is about change or to speak frankly, let us say about revolution large or small, active or latent. It is not about stability or equilibrium the goal that political science today borrows from the market. In a contested situation the asserted reason typically has to be made with bombast and boast, because one cannot prove it. Certainly one cannot prove it to the satisfaction of one's opponent or enemy. That is why the atmosphere of politics is latent with reasons that convince one side but not the other. Assertion is a passionate statement with a conclusion to which the assertor is far from indifferent. Socrates said that reasoning means following the course of the argument, regardless of where it goes and if how it much it might hurt you. This is the dispassionate spirit of science. But in politics people make assertions that they try to control and spin. The argument goes where you wanted to go. Sometimes of course the argument turns around and comes back to bite you. As for example, when your party gains the presidency after you have loudly attacked the imperial presidency. Here we see the resistance of logic to imperious political assertions. But let us not underestimate human ingenuity in reasoning its way around reason. So politics is not an exchange between the bargaining positions of a buyer and a seller in which self interest is clear and the result either assailed or not all with out fuss. As it happens self interest does not explain even commercial transactions that we get angry if we feel cheated or that we succumb to the charm of salesmanship shows that more than a small measure of ego enters into the behavior of those who pride themselves on calculation. Self interest when paramount cools you off and calms you down. Thumos, pumps you up, makes you hot. In politics there is bargaining as in commerce, but with a much greater degree of self importance. People go in to politics to pick a fight, not to avoid one. Self interest tends towards peace and if it could replace the Thumos in our souls it would accomplish universal peace. Meanwhile however people want to stand for something, which means opposing those that stand for something else. In the course of opposing they will often resort to insults and name calling, which are normal in politics, though never in your interest. The demand for more civility in politics today should be directed toward improving the quality of our insults, seeking civility in wit rather than blandness. Here is a recent example from Senator Harry Reid talking about the Vice President. "I am not getting in to name calling contest with an attack dog." Well may be that's enough on the for me on this subject and we could now go in to a brief question and answer session. What I have been arguing is that there is a contrast between honor and gain gain being self interest and honor being based on Thumos. That therefore there is an insistence on victory in human beings. You may compromise, but you compromise in order to get victory and not to come out even. There is a function of protectiveness which is connected to our honor as opposed to self interest, we want to protect those who are close to us and not merely pursue what is to our own benefit alone. There is a stubbornness in partisanship, in human affairs and especially in politics, its not some thing that we are going to get rid of. There is there is a role for assertiveness in human argument, raising the stakes and leading to the paradox of Thumos that you risk your life to save your life, neither of which is in your self interest. And there is the ever presence of ones own which one can get away from. There is the task of religion to address the question how important are we. We are not as important as god but we are more important to than nonhuman animals. Science has no answer to this question. There is the result of individuality. How can you be important without a sense of self importance which is designated for you by your name? And last there is the ambition of greatness; self importance culminates in the self importance or pride of a great man or a great person. I will end with the four lines of poetry. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor's at the stake. That was said by Hamlet. Thanks very much.
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