Harvey C. Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University, has taught there since 1962. But don’t hold that against him. He is an esteemed political philosopher, one of our leading thinkers about the American political system, Tocqueville, Machiavelli, and so much more. He has also, among other things, written eloquently about manliness, both in his book of the same name, and recently for National Review. In a recent podcast with Yascha Mounk, Manfield, now 89, shows that he hasn’t lost a step, and remains eminently worthy of consideration.
The conversation covers the current debates over liberalism, the problems with democracy, and more. It’s all worth digesting. Puerile mind that I am, I will present as a sample his amusing (and insightful) remarks on . . . automatic toilets. In the context of describing Tocqueville’s concern about what might come of America, Mansfield says:
So politics loses its sense of accomplishment, achievement, and potential power. And this means that you settle into a kind of centralized bureaucracy, where the government does everything: it takes over from you the pain of living, Tocqueville says. It lives things for you. This is aided by modern technology: for example, toilets that flush themselves. Even this elementary duty of disposing of your effluvia is taken over from you. We see this with the great advance of bureaucracy in the universities and, during COVID, all the ways in which our lives are planned for us, and we are given experts who mainly show us how, not why, to obey different rules, and not how to act on your own.
You can listen to the whole thing — or consult a transcript — here.