In focusing on this issue, Frontpage Symposium did something a little different this time: we joined forces with The American Enterprise and co-ordinated a symposium together. Excerpts of this symposium are published in the current issue of The American Enterprise. Meanwhile, Frontpage Symposium brings you the full on-line version.

In this joint Frontpage Magazine-American Enterprise symposium on The Return of Manhood, we are joined by: Lionel Tiger, a Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and a Bradley lecturer at AEI. He is the author of The Decline of Males. Forthcoming is The Apes of New York in summer 2003; Michael Ledeen, a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the new book The War Against the Terror Masters; David Gutmann, Emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at North-Western university Medical School, in Chicago. As a clinician, he has practiced and taught intensive psychotherapy. As a researcher, he has studied universal or "Species" trends in human development across a variety of peasant societies. He is currently investigating patterns of aging among Israeli kibbutz members; and James Bowman, a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. He is writing a book about honor in the 20th century. 

Interlocutor: Welcome gentlemen, to our symposium. Let me begin with this question: has America fallen in love, once again, with soldiers, firemen, policemen and other traditionally male (and masculine) professions requiring courage and strength? Is manhood held in high esteem again?

Bowman: Yes. Fashion's pendulum has once more swung back in the direction of the warrior and the manly man. But this should not blind us to the enormous forces that our culture still has arrayed against him. So long as the soldier, the policeman, the fireman retains his new popularity, we can expect the culture wars to heat up. The academic, intellectual, artistic and  entertainment worlds will be even more unanimously opposed to any return to the honorable and chivalric standards that were admired before the First World War than they are to other forms of traditionalism because they are more threatened by them. Nor should we underestimate the difficulties of bringing them back even if we were not so opposed. Modern individualism is also against it. But the return of honor for our boys in uniform is an encouraging first step.

Tiger: Obviously 9/11 and now the Iraqi action have provided a strong sense of the bedrock nature of what males can provide to the social system. But if manhood as such has a somewhat enhanced reputation it may well be because women with light skin in this community are beginning to understand what women with dark skin have long known, which is that men are intricate and flighty and that securing the goods and services which husbands and durable partners are able to provide requires some thoughtful management and even respect.

The increased respect for manhood clearly threatens the simple gaseous Women's Studies notions of patriarchy as a device sustained by all men against all women. One of the strongest responses I had to my book The Decline of Males was from the mothers of boys who had realized that their sons faced truncated opportunities in the school system and hence, later, in both the productive and reproductive spheres. And with 57% of college students females, the educational industry has begun, however dimly, to perceive that it has both a marketing and - even - a moral problem. The Mrs. degree has been abolished but not the practicality of women marrying men who are slightly older and with more resources than they have. A good arena in which to meet such men has been in the educational system but now less than ever. Perhaps health clubs are a moist alternative.

Ledeen: I think most Americans have remained very positive about fighting men.  The intelligentsia, or significant parts of it, rebelled against military heroes as part of the feminization of much of American intellectual life.  Of late, beginning with the Gulf War and continuing through Operation Iraqi Freedom, there have been defections from the intelligentsia, including some of our most brilliant journalists (e.g. Michael Kelly).

Gutmann: Two psychological states - guilt and shame - are, in greater or lesser degree, active in most adults. Shame has to do with the fear of one's own passivity, and the sadism that it invites from others; guilt has to do with the fear of one's own aggression, and the damage that it can do to more fragile beings. Both are mobilized in wartime, and - depending on which is uppermost - greatly influence our reactions to warriors, to enemy, and to the martial virtues.

A surprise attack, such as 9/11, favors the primacy of shame-related motives: unjustly attacked, most Americans feel little guilt about striking back. Instead, we fear cowardice and incompetence, and we idealize our soldiers who coolly face death, while imposing fear and shame on the enemy. But this war reveals a sizeable minority of Americans who preserve the guilt orientation even in the midst of a just war. Concentrated mainly in the universities and the Leftist parties, they persist in viewing enemies and allies through the filters of guilt. Our soldiers, they say, caused "untold numbers of civilian casualties," leaving irreplaceable museums to be vandalized while they guarded oil fields. Are these "Great Souls" saints, fools or exhibitionistic holdouts against the patriotic norms of wartime?

Interlocutor: Why do you think that the male professions in question fell out of favor with American elites during the dark 1970s?

Bowman:  They actually fell out of favor much earlier than that. Almost all the worst features of the 1960s and 1970s were anticipated in the 1920s, and the disfavor into which masculine honor fell then was owing to the slaughter of the First World War and the simultaneous rise of feminism and psychotherapy. The discredit these developments brought to masculine honor was offset by the need for it during the Second World War, though it was very different then from what it had been 25 years earlier. But the brief swing back towards tradition of the 1950s was undone by the same culprits in a new guise: the dirtiness of counter-insurgency warfare, second-wave feminism and the romance of victimhood, especially with post-traumatic stress disorder, a new and poetical illness that, seemingly, everyone who had been to Vietnam (and a great many who had not) wanted to claim for themselves.

Tiger: Elites are surely principally interested in what interests them - other elites, their money, their jobs, their housing, their associations. Beat cops and corporals have rarely been the foci of interest and admiration of elites, especially females, because they promise little in the way of resources, status, fun, and opportunities for children. As well, the training and disposition of those in the lower echelons of the male professions were relatively thin and, yes, macho.

Now, however, soldiers and policeman are more sophisticated, operate more and costlier equipment, and are clearly more than trench-diggers or bouncers. So there's been an upgrade of occupational tone of especially indigenous working males while the muckwork of the world is increasingly performed by immigrants who don't figure in any of this palaver for at least 20 years of their American residence. Traditional concepts of sex were changed into skeltonless notions of "gender" and a vast and successful tsunami of bad science about the social construction of sex as well as everything else - to say nothing of the bizarre separation of the social from the natural sciences - squashed any empirical naturalism on the subject. It has been Lysenko at his most effective.

Ledeen: Here I defer to Lionel Tiger and Christina Hoff Sommers.  Surely Vietnam was very important, as was the temporary triumph of radical feminism.  But I think Lionel's point is enormously important:  the pill changed the basic male/female relationship.

Gutmann: The  causes of masculinity-bashing went deeper than 1970’s headlines or fashions, and had to do with tectonic changes in the inner character of American elites. These were the first "Me" decades, an era when the claims of narcissism – the idealizaton of the imperial self and its accessories - were elevated above the competing claims of profession, offspring or even gender. The inflated self as celebrated by Beat poets was omni-inclusive, harmonizing all the polarities that lesser souls would find mutually exclusive: Revolutionary and Pot-head, libertine and ascetic, Yogi and Commissar, male and female. The goal was to be neither exclusively male nor female, but both, a psychological androgyne. The person who committed to a single gender identity was a stunted soul, conned by a life-hating establishment into playing its empty games. Aggravated narcissism led also to a rejection of all social definitions imposed on the self rather than chosen by it: "you have decided for me, without prior consultation, that I will be a white American male. Unacceptable: I declare myself to be a transgendered, omnisexual Viet Cong." It is only now, after masculinity has been declared contraband, that our youth begins, once more, to find it attractive.

Interlocutor: Why do you think grumpy, cantankerously masculine politicians like Rudy Giuliani, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld are so popular with many Americans today? Is the answer connected to the popularity of reality television shows like Survivor where traditionally masculine survival skills (and pixilated private parts) are venerated?

Bowman: They are popular because they look like guys who will get the job done at a time when, for a change, we want guys who will get the job done rather than striking attitudes, as guys like Bill Clinton used to do. There is no connection with reality TV, except that both on TV and in public life nice is less interesting than not-nice.

Tiger: Why are Giuliani, Cheney, Rumsfeld considered masculine here? Maybe they're simply effective and don't use too many dangling sub-clauses. G. and R. in particular simply had major challenges and lots of t.v. time. The issue of language is perhaps more important than it seems - plain speaking is attractive intrinsically and may link specifically to neither the x or y chromosome. However, language linked to an aggressive posture works for a lot of people. Thatcher's an example. The spurious Survivor notion has less to do with maleness surely than with its suggestion of a fine dieting opportunity and inspection of the dating/sexing game played on a 24 hours basis. The fallacy of the games is of course that successful humans have always had to cooperate to survive. The loner is left to read the collected works of Ayn Rand all alone.

Ledeen: I don't watch television,  aside from sports and the occasional old movie and of course The Sopranos, so I'm not qualified to comment here.  But cantankerous males have always been very popular in America.  I mean, Archie Bunker was there a long time before Rudy Giuliani...

Gutmann: I think that their appeal has a lot to do with the fact that they are so obviously and refreshingly anti-Clintons. Clinton is a classic NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), whose favorite political manoeuvre was triangulation. That is, at whatever cost to honor and integrity, he tried to please everybody. Clinton came to grief when it finally became clear that he was lying to all the occupants of all the triangles. By contrast, Giuliani, Rumsfeld (and to some degree Cheney) do not need to be loved. They can be trusted therefore to tell the truth a good part of the time, regardless of the cost in affection and acclaim.

For a generation that is becoming uncomfortably aware of its own narcissism, Clinton demonstrated the dangers of that condition, while men like Rumsfeld and Giuliani dramatize the rewards of true adulthood. As happy warriors, who seem to delight in controversy, they show us that that one can be happy and engaged, without being constantly adored. After eight years of Slick Willie, and in the midst of a new kind of war, men like that were a revelation.   

Interlocutor: I think it is pretty obvious that Bill Clinton was especially appealing as a leader to women, while George Bush is especially appealing as a leader to men. Why is this? Is it related to the possibility that the Democrats have become a feminine Mommy party and the Republicans a masculine Daddy party?

Tiger: Were the Democrats a feminine Mommy party, women voters should be thrilled that 8 men want their support. But they appear not to care. Bill Clinton was a masterful communicator and endlessly interesting creature. Even ur-wonk Hillary Clinton has announced she was first attracted to his hands. But the underlying wholly tacit interest of female voters is in the safety net. One third of babies born in the industrial world are to unmarried women who have an understandable concern about the helping hand they know they will need. European politics expresses this more crisply than our own but the principle is sustained here too. The assumptions behind this question should be rethought and whoever does it best gets Karl Rove's office.

Ledeen: Clinton was a symbol of the "feeling" culture, which started with Rousseau, and which holds that feelings are more important than thinking. It's a bid odd that Bush is taken to be a symbol of the latter, given his lack of apparent intellectual brilliance.  I think that Bush is the third president since WW II--along with Truman and Reagan--to have a clear bond with the American people, and to disdain the applause of the intelligentsia.  The appeal of Truman/Reagan/Bush is plain speaking, firm conviction, and personal courage.  they are seen to have solid instincts rather than attractive emotions or intellectual preparation...the American archetype, in short.

Gutmann: I think that Clinton appeals to women because, as a moral and psychological androgyne, he has a good deal of the feminine in him (was he our first Black woman president?). Raised without a father, he is a mother’s son, who clearly knows a great deal about charming and manipulating women. It’s not so much that Clinton was the leader of the Mommy party, but that he is himself in need of a Mommy – a hunger that he perhaps disguises as an "adult" appetite, for sex.

Bush appeals to men because he heads the Daddy Party, but also because he wears important masculine stigmata: He is a Texan, he is not afraid of war, and in the face of a worldwide storm of criticism, he sticks to his guns, makes the tough choices, and wins the victory. In sir Isaiah Berlin’s taxonomy, Bush is not the fox – who knows a lot of little things - but the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. It’s my impression that most men prefer hedgehogs to foxes.

Incidentally, the fact that he is relatively inarticulate does not hurt Bush’s standing with men: he may not talk the talk, but this deficit only highlights his capacity to walk the walk.    

Bowman: Women simply don't have the masculine understanding of honor and are only too ready to believe, like Maureen Dowd, that the male need to assert oneself and gain respect in the world is just a little-boy thing that can easily be bred out of the kind of "mature" males they pretend to admire. In this sense, the Democrats are the mommy party: in that they believe in moral progress away from what they regard as the cave-man standard of honor, so that they don't have to stand up to bad guys but can make them good guys by being nice to them. There is at the moment a majority in this country that regards this idea as dangerous nonsense, though another prolonged period of relative peace may well erode it again.

Interlocutor: Wait a second Mr. Bowman, I think we need to qualify this a bit. I think that feminists don’t have the “masculine understanding of honor.” There are, I am sure you are aware, many normal down-to-earth women who love their man to be a “man” in all the ways that people with their head screwed on right understand that to mean. In my own social circles, I don’t know any women of the nature you describe. But then again, I abandoned the academic and “artsy” milieu a long time ago and I haven’t been within arm’s reach of a feminist for years (except when I accidentally bump into one at a party or the grocery store). So it depends what kind of women we are talking about, right? 

Bowman: I'm afraid I don't agree. Though many women admire men with a highly developed sense of honor, that doesn't mean that they have the same sense themselves. Even Maureen Dowd, on the very day I wrote, was expressing her dislike of the sensitive, girly man who goes shopping with the missus: "I hate to play into stereotypes," she writes, "but when I see men following women around the couture departments of Bergdorf's on a rainy Saturday afternoon like trained poodles, it crosses my mind that they should be home on their Barcaloungers watching ESPN and eating a Jerry's sub." This is another way of saying the same thing: what is shameful for men is not shameful for women and vice versa. That's why it's fighting words to call a man a wimp and a woman a slut but not the other way around. We just recognize that the sexes are different by honoring different kinds of behavior in each. But of course that doesn't mean that women can't honor men for being manly (without being manly themselves) any more than it does that men can't honor women for being womanly. They're just not the same thing.

Interlocutor: Is the idea that there are no significant differences between men and women still the official creed on the College campus, or has there been a backlash against androgyny even in this Leftist hideout? Seeing that so many documented works prove that differences between women and men are based in nature, this whole ludicrous thing about gender being “socially constructed” has surely, by now, been totally delegitimized, right?

Bowman: I don't think it has been "delegitimized." Certainly the unquestioned faith of the professoriat in a moral and biological equivalence of the sexes has yet to be shaken. But I think we are too frightened by this idea of social construction. Of course "gender" is socially constructed (though it also has some biological foundation) -- but what's wrong with that? Throughout human history people have bred boys to be men and girls to be women, according to the traditional understanding of those terms, precisely because it doesn't happen naturally. Or not entirely naturally. Social construction as we find it in particular human societies, including our own, is also natural to us, and it must be supposed to serve some useful social purpose -- such as providing the ethos necessary for a society to defend itself -- since it takes such similar forms (at least with respect to masculinity and femininity) in such widely disparate societies.

Tiger: While the notion of androgeny no longer has total imperial domain over the intellectual landscape, nevertheless there has been little effort to examine the consequences of this shift. For one thing, there is the routine effort, usually successful, to link anti-androgeny to reductionist sociobiology which is implicitly suspicious politically to large neighborhoods of the campus. Legal instruments such as Title 9 regarding college athletics compel policy on the basis that males and females are the same, or at least life should be shaped in the image they are. The law has become even more influential than academe, particularly since many graduates of women's studies programs who did not find congenial employment teaching women's studies have migrated into the offices of Representatives, Senators, and the rest of the corps of concernocrats who seek to coerce life. As well, Women's Studies programs - among which there are excellent and responsible scholars but relatively few  -remain an almost total sexual ghetto.

Not a single serious women's studies program would pass a diversity assay. Hardly any males are involved. It is both hilarious and an outrage at once. Furthermore, they are often outrightly socially activist, in violation of norms of academic neutrality. And as someone pointed out, my book Women in the Kibbutz of 1975, which showed decisive sex differences thoughout this utopian system, is one of the least-referred-to books in existence. To the deconstructed zealots, bad news is no news. The virus having first come from Europe, it is now returning to re-infect European academe - an unduly fragrant result of American political dominance.

Ledeen: Pass. They don't let me on campus.

Gutmann: I have the good luck to teach on a medical school rather than a liberal arts campus. There, where faculty and students deal with questions of life and death, one quickly learns that reality must be at least grudgingly respected, as something prior to the mind that encounters it.

So I don't know how the hard-wired realities of our sexual nature are currently regarded in the women's study centers of the main campus. But my hunch is that nothing much has changed there. The radical feminists did not intimidate the liberal arts campus by virtue of their superior reason and scholarship, but by their bold playing of the victim card - the card that, these days, trumps all others.

But while the sisterhood continues to insist that they are the cutting edge, I suspect that today’s students, for whom the Libbers are part of the tired establishment, pay them little mind, and are exploring the traditional sex-roles as though they were the latest thing. However, as long as the Flat-Earth Feminists can bully foundations and administrators into giving them grants and faculty hires, they will continue to dictate the academy’s party line.

Interlocutor: Women have shown they can succeed, often brilliantly, in some traditionally male professions like law, academe, and police work. There are many fewer high profile stories about men doing well in professions like nursing and kindergarten teaching. If we keep trying to remould males, as the radical feminists would have us do (i.e. give them dolls to play with at a young age, dress them like girls, etc.) will males one day finally be just as good as women at these things? And then, if we just keep at it, and break down the oppressive, racist, sexist, classist, homophobic and patriarchal social order, will males also, one day, be liberated and start having menstrual cycles and be able to get pregnant and have babies?

Bowman:  No. 

Tiger: This is not a serious question. 1) females prefer not to have males care for their young children. 2) transexuals require profound surgery and life-time hormones to conform to the dream body they craved for themselves and in the production of which the medical profession miserably colludes. The school system tries to remould males and doesn't do so well. Hence only 43% of college students are male, 9 times as many males as females are victims of Ritalin which is an effort to turn them behaviorally into females. At last there are murmurings of the need to attend to the real males, not the conjectured ones, in the school system. It is difficult to be opimistic about the likely result because of the power of the existing orthodoxy. For one thing, the neo-theological conviction persists that there is something I've called "male original sin" so that males are suspect until they prove otherwise.

Ledeen: This is a wild provocation, of course.  There have been endless stories about male mommies, even books and movies.  Your exaggerated language is exactly what "they" want.  I think it's burning out, but we still do not have "new" definition of masculinity and femininity.  Males have retreated to their favorite pursuits--pornography and sports--and the women are increasingly co-opted into the capitalist structure, so they take on more and more of the old "male" characteristics.  It's a mess, in short.  But the increasingly high prestige of military men -- and women -- helps, I think. I'm really impressed with the numbers of young men from good families -- even elite families -- who are pursuing military activities, careers even.  

Until very recently I was unaware, for example, of an interesting subculture in America:  men and women who go to college in order to become military officers. The Marines ONLY take college students for their Officer Training School, and so the kids go to college because they want to be Marine officers.  The competition to get in is really fierce and now the Marines, for the first time ever, I believe, are using SAT scores and the like to screen the applicants.  So the quality of our military officers is increasing.  That's a real change, and gives the lie to the old left-wing generalization that the military is composed of poor kids who join the armed forces in desperation.

Gutmann: Clearly, women have more incentive than men do to succeed in crossover professions. For some women it is payback time: they are planting their flag in the opponent’s camp. In addition, the boundary-crossing women are usually upward mobile – going from, say, paralegal to lawyer – while the equivalent men are usually downward mobile: their fathers were Docs, and lo, the sons are nurses.

But while early doll play might leave some men more adapted to women’s roles, such femininity training would not reduce their achievement drives. Even "Feminized" men would continue to seek social rank in the ‘masculine" professions, where status is typically gained.

The benefits and deficits of male and female androgyny depend on life stage. Androgyny is debilitating for young men, who – usually against competition - have to win a mate, and a place in the world.  But androgyny is pleasing to older men, particularly now that our society has become more tolerant of softness in males. Women derive the greatest benefits from androgyny: when young, a whole menu of careers is available to them; and, as older women, they can enjoy greater assertiveness and self-esteem. However, while androgyny accelerates women’s career development, it may stunt the psychological development of their mother-absent children.

Interlocutor: What do you think is behind the male interest in guns? In cars, trucks, and big vehicles?

Bowman: It's all to do with hunting and exploring and fighting, one supposes. Those traditionally male tasks must have some foundation in biology, as this division of labor between the hunters (male) and the gatherers (female) was obviously highly adaptive in primitive societies -- which was why it was always reinforced by social construction. What it means to be a man has to be taught, like other survival skills, but that doesn't mean that the whole idea of manliness is unnecessary and socially dispensable. What a bizarre idea!

Tiger: I tell students that when they are looking at living systems, including human ones, the shortest analytical difference between two points is a normal curve. Male and female curves will almost invariably differ with respect to particular items, such as gun-lust or split-ends concerns, but there will also always be overlap between the curves - sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, as with size. This is now a boring issue. We should expect diversity, not just legislate for it or against it.

Ledeen: Freud.

Gutmann: There is a basic division of labor in Human Development. Women’s bodies and emotions have evolved to create and nurture life in protected, domestic settings. Men’s bodies and important emotions have evolved to take life from prey or enemy on the community’s borders.  

Thus, young men wish to populate their worlds with targets, weapons and rolling stock; and when these are not available they "hallucinate" them, in their play. An example: My wife and two young kids camped in a Mayan village, where I did field research. One day, a Mayan kid about my son’s age of five approached our compound. He and my son stared at each other warily and wordlessly until the visitor lunged for a stick and yelled "BANG!!" Absolutely delighted, my son BANGED! back. From then on the chorus of BANGS! rarely ceased. Meanwhile, my daughter, then about seven, made friends with a neighboring Mayan girl. Wordlessly, they played together in our yard, making dolls from the same flotsam that the boys had fantasized as guns.

Arguably, my American children and their Mayan playmates had all been brainwashed according to the same social protocol: guns for boys, dolls for girls. But how is it that two such different cultures have devised the same gender rules?    

Interlocutor: Will physical strength, aggressiveness, courage, a preference for action over reflection, and other traditional male qualities ever be made irrelevant by the evolution of modern society? Is it true that in some settings today—like in many of our schools—these traditional male qualities are discouraged and, therefore, detrimental to “performance” under the prevailing rules? What are the consequences?

Bowman: To some extent this is true -- but not because of "the evolution of modern society." I remain a skeptic about such Whiggish and progressive ideas. Rather, we have come to regard the manly virtues as unnecessary because of an accident of history, namely the American hegemony which has brought over half a century of peace to the developed world. In the third world where wars are still being fought every day the revisionist and feminist view of traditional masculinity is for obvious reasons very much less popular than it is in fat, happy and peaceful America and Europe, which haven't got anything better to worry about. If we were ever to be threatened again by a rival power of similar military capacities, the manly virtues would make a comeback. But the consequence of their long desuetude might be that there would be nobody left in the older generation who remembered them, so as to be able to teach them to the younger.

Tiger: One consequence which some participants raised in some discussions after lectures for the State Department I recently gave in Germany indicated that the behavior of homosexual males was much more acceptable and congenial to teachers than of rough-tumble males and subsequently they did well in the school system. Neither action or reflection are necessarily sex-linked but cooperative aggression to achieve certain goals is likely to remain a male rather than female tendency. When fuzzy thinkers such as Carol Gilligan announced that boys and girls do morality differently and girls were better, the reason given was that girls were, well, better. Human girl strategies for social life are crisply echoed in the behavior of other primates. But the law of parsimony is not observed here, and the notion that there is a genomically-linked sex difference overwhelms the explanatory circuits of people subject to that cult of non-explanation.

Ledeen:  Nonsense.  The whole point of military training is to integrate reflection with action.  The anti-military crowd does not understand that.  But one of the great benefits of the "embedded" reporters in Iraq was to show us how our soldiers have mastered both, as they must.

Gutmann: Modern urban societies provide, via technology, the physical security – food, shelter and protection – that is the responsibility of tough men in rural settings. Young, urban men are free to remain psychologically "soft" and to explore less physically demanding occupations. If this male relaxation was universal, then our boys could loiter forever undisturbed, in the Seinfeld condition.

But unfortunately, the whole world does not go flabby all at once. When we go soft there remain plenty of "Hard" peoples – the Nazis and Japanese in World War 2, the Radical Islamists now - who will see us as decadent sybarites, and who will exploit, in war, our perceived weaknesses.

Thus, even in peacetime, Democracies must preserve the masculine virtues, usually in special cadres of professional warriors. In times of trouble, when technology may not be enough, Veterans teach the rookies how to fight, and demonstrate that our deceptively mild young men are sleeping tigers. Thus, young Americans are going – with only normal bitching – halfway around the world to defeat the Taliban and the Republican Guard on their own desert turf. Some girls could do it, but not in the numbers required. Slaughter en masse is still called for, and it remains man’s work.

Interlocutor: How effective as warriors are young 21st century Americans?

Ledeen:  They are amazing. What a question!

Tiger: The answer is, very effective because the DOD has stimulated sophisticated and thoughtful training programs, is self-conscious about its internal promotion structure, and continuously monitors its own successes and failures and returns the information to the system. Remember that we are dealing with a volunteer military. Americans like any other population who elect a course of action - the consequence of free choice - are very likely to pursue it skilfully, or at least with some ongoing zeal. Many if not countless improvements could of course be made. For example Depy Defense Scy for Personnel David Chu has produced a comprehensive and exceptionally thoughtful plan for intelligent and effective employment of personnel. How much will be adopted is another question. But the main questions are being asked, and the resources to produce answers are in place. The young men and women who are involved in the process will almost certainly fulfill their obligations.

Bowman: Very effective. But the array of high-tech weaponry available to 21st century Americans and to no other country's soldiers makes it more difficult to answer the question of how effective as warriors they are in the more traditional sense. I would like to think that if today's soldiers had to fight a war, as America has not had to do since Vietnam, with large numbers of casualties that they would be up to the task, but they have not been tested. Let's hope that their technical advantages over any potential enemies mean that they won't be for a long, long time. But it could happen. Which brings up.

Gutmann: The answer depends on your standards for judging warrior effectiveness. I really doubt that a modern American army – or citizenry - could tolerate the losses incurred during the Civil War, or even during WWII. Could we - who agonize over every casualty in Iraq – have accepted the massive body counts of D-Day, Iwo Jima, or Antietam?

But what we have lost in blind obedience and dumb courage has been made up for by increases in the average trooper’s intelligence, firepower, technical know-how and individual initiative. Today’s grunt packs as much firepower as a WWII platoon, he is familiar with a variety of high-tech weapons, and he can operate on his own, or take over command when his officers fall. And while he might refuse to make a Banzai charge, we know that such suicidal tactics are no longer called for on the modern battlefield.

In short, the returns from Afghanistan and Iraq indicate that young Americans who choose the military are equal to the many demands of a global war, fought against seasoned foes, and across a variety of usually unpleasant environments.

Interlocutor: Let us suppose that it is true that manhood -- and its veneration -- truly has made a comeback in American society. And let us suppose that its resurgence will sustain itself and grow. Will this phenomenon help America in combating the War on Terror?

Ledeen: It is indispensable, because we have to fight, and if Americans don't support this war, we will lose it.  But I think that we've seen, very clearly, that Americans do support it, and indeed love it, as we almost always have.  Americans support fighting when they believe we are well led, and are doing well.  They hate it, as in Vietnam, if they think they are being lied to, are badly led, and are doing poorly.  That's what happened in Vietnam, for example, and then in Somalia.  It's all about winning and losing.  As Patton said in the opening scene of his favorite movie, Americans hate losers.  

Bowman: Obviously it will. But it remains to be seen how far the manly man has made his comeback. For I think that something else is required for effective soldiering, and that is not just individual machismo but also the loyalty and esprit de corps that comes with the sense of honor. We remain perhaps the most individualistic country in the history of the world but also one of the most patriotic. We need to learn something more of the old-fashioned virtues of teamwork and group loyalty -- and that sometimes patriotism requires sacrifice. It's not yet clear to me how far our admiration for manliness is still focused on the Rambo/Super-hero type who does it all alone rather than the more modest but realistic types that actual armies require.

Tiger: It is not clear that manhood as such is an isolable component of contemporary military effectiveness. It is however certainly a factor in social and intimate relations, which will presumably have a spin-off to more public activities. Combating the War on Terror has nothing to do with Manhood but much to do with. Smarthood, with careful assessment of the potentially gruesome consequences of dramatic religious belief both here and abroad (which is unduly privileged), and the sustained cultivation of formal adroit paranoia about the unpredictable implacability of persons who regard  present lives and deaths as means to wholly arbitrary cosmological goals microphoned-in by zealots wielding divinity.

Gutmann: There are many kinds of masculinity; the war on terror, if it is to succeed, will have to mobilize and train some of the less attractive varieties. True manhood allows for feeling and sympathy, but in the dark war against terror, nothing that resembles sentimentality is permitted. That war is largely fought in urban precincts among civilians who will often sympathize with and abet the terrorist. As the Israelis have had to learn, the war against the terrorist will often involve them in a fight with his civilian groupies. They sometimes have to fire airborne missiles into crowds, blow up the homes of the terrorist’s family, take down flowering orchards that could mask ambushes, or try to snipe around the hostages or human shields that the terrorist hides behind.

The terrorist himself is usually a nasty piece of work, who fights with skill, cunning and ruthlessness. Counter-terror and even torture are sometimes required to extract vital information before the next bomb goes off. In effect, the counter-terrorist will only gain his enemy’s respect if he shows a savagery that is equal to his own. We can be thankful that such qualities are not prized among us; but some Americans will have to acquire them.     

Interlocutor: Thank you Michael Ledeen, David Guttman, James Bowman and Lionel Tiger. It was a pleasure.  I would also like to thank Karl Zinsmeister and Eli Lehrer over at The American Enterprise for the idea for this co-ordinated symposium, for their help in organizing it, and also for their invaluable help in formulating many of the questions. We hope that all the readers of Frontpage and American Enterprise enjoyed this symposium, as we are now considering another co-ordinated symposium for the fall.

I also welcome all of our readers to get in touch with me if they have a good idea for a symposium. Email me at jglazov@rogers.com.