Alan Simpson, the U.S Senator from Wyoming who died in 2025, once remarked: “I couldn’t have gotten into Harvard if I had picked the lock.”
Neither could I. But had I “gotten into Harvard,” I would like to think it was with the foresight to take courses taught by the distinguished Professor of Government, Harvey C. Mansfield, described as “the rarest of beasts – a conservative professor at Harvard.” And since fantasy puts me in Boston, I would have also studied under Peter J. Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. My imagination has a happy reciprocity between those universities, each dedicated to a common goal - - veritas.
Mansfield is a political philosopher and Kreeft a classical one. They are late in their years. Mansfield was born in 1932 and Kreeft in 1937. Both men continue to write. Their writings offer reasoned moral insights that I think worth considering.
Mansfield’s most recent book is a collection of his opinions from essays, speeches, and presentations at faculty meetings on the harmful effects of progressive education, entitled Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell on Deaf Ears, Encounter Books (2026). Kreeft’s most recent book is titled The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written, The Wisdom of The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov, Word on Fire Press, 2025.
Mansfield’s works have been mainly addressed to academia and national government as opposed to the common reader. Kreeft’s writing is instructive, but not pedantic, and easy for an amateur philosopher to follow. They seem to share an unpretentious wisdom and wit.
In 1990 Mansfield wrote: ‘It doesn’t seem to occur to those who demand more diversity in the universities that the most important diversity is not in sex or class but in opinion.”
A noted academic medical publication has observed that today in sociology and social psychology it is still felt that any differences in cognition and behavior between male and female are cultural. Those social scientists charge natural science researchers with “neosexism” for reporting their findings.
By using 21st century technologies, a recent study in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported creation of “a deep neural network model” that was more than 90% successful in determining whether brain scans came from a man or a woman. “The findings . . . help resolve a long-term controversy about whether reliable sex differences exist in the human brain and suggest that understanding those differences may be critical to addressing neuropsychiatric conditions that affect women and men differently.” (“Stanford Medicine study identifies distinct brain organization patterns in women and men”, Stanford Medicine News Center, February 20, 2024; at biox.stanford.edu.)
In plain language, Professor Mansfield described this difference in the sexes when he noted that “statistics on crime [show] that men surpass women by far in the reckless aggression that draws the attention of the law” and women are “way behind men in natural, easy-going, effortless vulgarity,” referring to male habitual inclinations to “spit, cuss, tell dirty jokes, read porn, and drink beer.” (Manliness, p. 64, Yale University Press, 2006.) However, he also recognized “a sense of honor [that] is the source of protectiveness so characteristic of manliness.” This protective side of manhood “leads to patriarchy, a form of rule in which the rulers behave as if they were protective fathers . . . the sense of every government based on manliness [whether or not] the government is staffed by males or females.” (Id.)
Mansfield concludes that “our situation is not so different from the ones faced by the classical philosophers.” But “while we claim to be more rational,” the modern history of totalitarian regimes makes this questionable. He notes the destruction of divine authority, self-government, and human life brought about by those whose goals are to change and control human nature. Historically, and presently, those goals are found in the totalitarian governments of Chinese and Russian communism and Nazi and Islamist fascism. They are also the goals of modern liberalism which ignores “the behavior to which men and women are naturally inclined and in which they need moral education.”
Prof. Kreeft points out that the goal of classical philosophy, beginning with Socrates, is the use of human reason to find objective truth. “Socrates is to philosophy what Jesus is to religion.” (Philosophy 101 By Socrates, Ignatius Press, 2002, p. 25) “Philosophy is unpopular, by its very nature, because it does not satisfy our material desires.” That is because the most important questions are not “factual” ones, “like what causes the tides,” but “value” ones, “like what justice is and why we should pursue it.” This applies to the societal and political questions confronting America.
Statewide and nationally, Mississippians and Americans are faced with clear choices when they vote. A free society cannot survive if it fails to recognize the most important questions. Today, those questions concern Western Civilization’s cultural, economic, and moral values and how they are reinforced, or denied, under the contrasted philosophies of the two political parties and in the persons of their candidates.
Chip Williams is a Northsider.
