Classics and the Alt-Right: Not All Dead White Men — a review
CONTENT WARNING: Extreme misogyny, sexual assault/rape and generally displeasing views of far-right lunatics.
Classical scholars must accept that, in the twenty-first century, some of the most controversial and consequential discussions about the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome are happening not in the conventional realms of literature, theatre, and scholarship, but on the internet.’
This is one of the conclusions of Dr. Donna Zuckerberg’s excellent book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. The book details online reactionaries known, variously, as the ‘Manosphere’, ‘Pick-up Artists’, or ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ who exist under the wider umbrella of the ‘Red Pill’; Dr. Zuckerberg aims to chart how Red Pill communities use classical themes, imagery, and ideas to legitimize their movements and undermine progressive politics, and how classicists — and progressive activists — can rebut and repackage classics to combat reactionary politics.
Dr. Zuckerberg singles out the Red Pill’s attitudes towards women for two reasons: 1. because the Red Pill’s views on women are coherent throughout the movement and, 2. because ‘the use of the ancient world to understand gender and sex is bidirectional: the men of the manosphere see their own misogyny reflected back at them, theorized, and celebrated in ancient literature.’
Her writing is aimed at an audience with little knowledge of the Red Pill or Classics, and classical scholarship, but introduces all topics excellently and has enough detail to satisfy the classical scholar.
I: Introducing the Red Pill
The Red Pill is, broadly, a reactionary right-wing political group of disillusioned men who believe — incorrectly — that the world is ‘gynocentric’; that is to say, that cis-gendered white men are discriminated against by our ‘feminized society’. According to Zuckerberg, ‘self-reported surveys suggest that more than 3/4 of the Red Pill are white, heterosexual, politically conservative, have no strong religious affiliation and are between the ages of 18 and 34.’ They see themselves as having some secret knowledge, indicated by the term ‘red pill’, a reference to the Matrix film(s), where the red pill indicates learning some truth about reality. The ‘truth’ is that ‘sexism… is a form of enlightenment and that they are the only rational people on the internet’, views which they rationalize and legitimize through the ancient world.
Whilst they are not a unified group per se, Zuckerberg identifies 3 main groups, each with subsets. These are:
- Men’s rights activists (MRAs): MRAs believe that, due to the supposed gynocentric society, there are structural barriers in place that makes being a man harder or worse than being a woman. It is, in many ways, similar to feminism in that MRAs identify structural issues within society that hold one gender back. For example, certain MRAs and feminists believe that custody laws are unfair; feminists believe that it ‘reflects a deeper problem of gender normativity’ which forces childcare duties upon women. MRAs believe they are unfair because of the gynocentric society that holds men back. The difference, I think it is fair to say, is that MRAs are wrong; the world has not and does not discriminate against men, especially not straight white men.
- Pick-up Artists (PUAs): PUAs focus their energies on mastering the techniques to seducing and sleeping with as many women as possible — this is known as having game. This stems from the belief that women are conditioned, by nature and society, to try and be attractive to men. Therefore, according to PUAs, a man can learn how to be attractive to women and how to seduce them. They view women as sex-objects by nature and that only through sleeping with as many women as possible can a man be a ‘true alpha [male]’.
- Men Going Their Own Way: MGTOWs are a group of men who believe they can live without the bounds of gyrocentric society by living separately from women and engaging in marriage strikes.
These are, broadly, the groups that create the ‘Red Pill’ - however - it should be noted that the ‘Red Pill’ is a highly partisan affair and these groups often clash online. This, however, does not undermine looking at them and their use of the classics, as, according to Zuckerberg, both groups have begun to merge with the ‘Alt-Right’; ‘…a neoreactionary white nationalist group that has been gaining prominence since 2015’. Zuckerberg argues that ignoring these groups of men, disparate and pathetic as they might seem, would be foolish in the face of the burgeoning support for white nationalism across the world, specifically a post-Trump United States.
II: The Red Pill and Stoicism
The Red Pill philosophy, born out of internet trolling and chan sites such as 4chan, has the same problems as all the Alt-Right. Aside from typical fascistic views of white nationalism and gender superiority, they don’t believe anything. To highlight this and go deeper into the matter I would highly recommend this video from Innuendo Studios, although my article/review is perfectly understandable without it (it is also a tad long…).
Because of this history in channing and trolling, the Red Pill embodies this multiplicity of views; it means that when trying to debate them in public fora they say whatever they want in attempt to look correct. Once again, Innuendo Studios does a good video on this, which they call ‘Never Play Defense’:
Never playing defense is a tactic seen throughout the Red Pill and in debating progressives, especially women and people of colour”.” They use this technique to show they’ve won on an emotional level. Zuckerberg points out that through disingenuous debate the Red Pill plays up tropes — such as the angry black (wo)man and emotional woman/feminist — to emphasise their supposed superiority.
How then does Stoicism fit in to this? Stoicism is a humanist philosophy that, whilst it has its problems, emphasises a cosmopolitan (κοσμοπολίτης — a term they coined meaning, literally, ‘citizen of the world’) outlook where every person can care for and think of everyone else. It is, on the whole, not a philosophy anyone who knows anything about Stoicism would think appropriate for the Alt-Right, not least the Red Pill. However, as Zuckerberg points out in contemporary America as well as in Stoicism, control of one’s emotions is seen as ‘a sign of moral superiority’ and this is where the Red Pill come in. In appropriating Stoic thought, the Red Pill aim to change their look from angry white men to rational Stoic sage. They deny anger with one Red Pill writer saying:
‘the manosphere is not angry. Most of the men who’ve expressed a genuine anger with me… are angry at themselves for having been blind [to the gyrocentric society] for so long’
Thus, the Red Pill see themselves as more rational and less emotional than anybody else and the appropriation of Stoicism only serves to legitimize that thought. Moreover, the Red Pill’s understanding of Stoicism is not perfect; in fact, the Red Pill quotes out of context and reworks sections of Stoic texts that fits their narrative — they, obviously, do not read scholarship (which they see as belonging to the liberal agenda that accompanies universities) and do not engage critically with the texts. Most often they read Stoicism for the mere appearance of seeming Stoic, as Zuckerberg notes:
‘For writers in the Red Pill, however, seeming to be Stoic and talking about Stoicism are at least as important as becoming a dedicated practitioner of the philosophy… instead, they project the appearance of emotional control by quoting Stoic authors.’
Once they’ve established themselves as rational and emotionally secure, they can underscore and legitimize their positions with a call to antiquity. Seneca for example writes in De Ira that women and children are more likely to get angry than men (1.20) and Epictetus judges that ‘not even [Epicureanism is] appropriate for women’, implying that women are seen as less competent than men. Whilst it should be of little surprise to us that the ancients were misogynistic, it is at odds with the cosmopolitan spirit of Stoicism. Indeed, the nature of Stoicism and the onus it places on the individual who can control their body has been seen as at odds with progressive movements. Simone de Beauvoir for example made an anti-Stoic statement when she wrote:
‘If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and we are free… but no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.’
Zuckerberg fits this into a riveting discussion of Stoicism where she ways up whether Stoic philosophy can be used by progressives at all. She concludes that the best way to deal with the Red Pill’s appropriation of Stoicism is not nitpicking their arguments and exposing the flaws in their understanding of Stoicism. As we have seen above, the point of Alt-Right “debate” — and the Red Pill’s use of Stoicism — is to score points, not make good arguments. Moreover, Stoicism could be a genuinely useful and healthy philosophy for men in the West today; the high number of male suicides could be assuaged (perhaps) if a Stoic doctrine of understanding emotions and accepting inevitables were to be adopted.
However, whilst the discourse is tainted by the Red Pill any young discouraged man could quickly slide from fringes of society to full Red Pill member. Therefore, Zuckerberg writes that if the world of neo-Stoics ‘wants to ensure they are not perpetuating systemic oppression along the axes of gender, race and class’ they will have to interrogate Stoicism and truly embrace the philosophy as something that can help people — all people — cope. Stoicism is uniquely placed within ancient philosophies as it ‘helps both the oppressed (by helping people cope with their situation and make the best of it) and the oppressors (by drawing attention away from systemic injustices)’ and, therefore, classicists and neo-Stoics must interrogate the literature and work out why the Red Pill finds ancient Stoic literature so attractive as an intellectual precursor and what can be done about it.
III: Ovid and Pick-up Artists
Ovid is also a distinctly difficult poet to study for classicists. He always seems to evade labeling and being boxed in. Zuckerberg quotes Julia Hejduk’s introduction to the Ars Amatoria:
‘Ovid’s Ars Amatoria has one of the funniest premises of any work of literature; namely, that Love — by which he means the initiation and maintenance of sexual relationships — is a field of study, like chess of astronomy or agriculture, whose strategies can be analysed and taught.
The Ars is an instruction manual for sex. It comes in three volumes teaching 1) how to seduce a woman, 2) how to keep her interested and 3) how women can seduce men. As a piece of classical literature it is hard to critique but many modern scholars now believe that — due to the awkward juxtaposition of Love and seduction being forced into an instruction manual like that for agriculture or ethics — Ovid is playing a poetic game with the reader’s expectations and, therefore, the Ars is not only essentially funny, it is technically and poetically clever.
However, such nuance is lost on the communities of the Red Pill. Pick-up artists see Ovid as ‘the father of seduction’ and believe that his manual is the ancient predecessor of such venerable pick-up artist guidebooks as ‘Bang Poland’ — which, as might have been implied, is a guide on how and where to have sex in Poland. There is overtly not much different from ‘Bang Poland’ explicating the best Warsaw pickup spots and Ovid telling Roman men to pick up women at various Augustan monuments. Whist classicists would surely defend Ovid and invoke subversion against Augustan moral legislation and the bumbling, seemingly contradictory, and often bad advice of the narrator of the Ars, there is, in the eyes of PUAs, no difference between the Ars and Bang Poland. Whilst Ovid’s Ars might seem innocuous, ‘reading game advice and the Ars Amatoria alongside each other often reveals disturbing subtext lying just beneath the surface of apparently innocuous texts.’ The Ars is full of moments that cross the line into what we, today, would call sexual harassment, sexual assault and even, rape. This is then appropriated by PUAs as not only acceptable behaviour but desired behaviour. For example, Ars 3.765–68 reads:
‘A woman lying in a puddle of Lyaéus? Disgraceful. / She’s worthy to suffer any sex whatsoever. / Nor is it safe to lie there asleep when dessert’s been served; / many shameful things often happen through sleep.’
Ovid seems to say that if women get drunk, they deserve to be raped. This compliments 1.596ff where Ovid uses being drunk as an excuse for any aggressive sexual behaviour on the part of the man. Excessive drinking, both male and female, seems to excuse sexual assault. It is a woman’s job to stay sober and stay away from drunk men. These sentiments are, in a vacuum, awful and deserve mention in scholarship and commentaries of the texts. However, when one sees how PUAs utilize statement’s like these in Ovid, they are transformed:
‘I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent… but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated… If a girl is willing to walk home with me, she’s going to get the dick no matter how much she’s drunk.’
Suddenly, Ovid’s sentiments are no longer excusable because of the nicety of his verse or the clever poetic games with genre he plays. They become a terrifyingly real and modern problem exemplified by the mere existence of PUAs. Moreover, both Ovid and PUAs operate in similar fashion. Zuckerberg writes:
‘Ovid’s praeceptor is someone the pickup artists might wish to emulate. He has so deeply internalized the idea that women are inferior that he doesn’t not need to instruct the reader not to care what he thinks… the social differences and hierarchies will not be permanently overturned if you pretend she is superior to you for long enough to convince her to sleep with you for free.’
This is the nub of the issue. Pick-up artists do not realize they do have power over women whereas Ovid does. Pick-up artists are dangerous because they are deluded by their own beliefs, and those beliefs happily normalize sexual harassment and sexual assault.
However, it is not all bad. As Zuckerberg says, the pick-up artist movement can be broken down into 5 categories:
- The Analysts, who use seduction methodology “to help them understand sex and gender.”
- The Freaks and Geeks, “guys so shy and awkward that they’ve never had a single date.”
- The Hedonists, who are looking for as much sex as possible.
- The Leaders, “community organizers who want to teach men.”
- The Sharks, “looking to monetize the community.”
- The Darth Vaders, misogynists who “feel resentment, contempt and distrust for women.”
The silver lining is that as much as 80% of the movement are ‘Freaks and Geeks’, many of whom leave the movement once they find sexual partners. Moreover, many of the Leaders and Analysts also seem to be Sharks. Some of the textbooks on how to pick-up women cost nearly $100, and most of the major websites are monetized in some way, shape, or form. Therefore, the actual prevalence of people willing to act out the dangerous parts of the Ovidian/PUA ideology are thin on the ground. Furthermore, progressive social policies and welfare can make women ‘immune’ to PUAs: one of the PUAs writes of his failures to pickup women in Don’t Bang Denmark, because they do not rely on men:
‘Danish women don’t need to find a man, because the government will take care of her and her cats, whether she is successful at dating or not.’
Denmark’s social services and ‘highly feminist society’ render its women unattainable — and, therefore, unattractive — to sex tourists. The best societies for a PUA is a highly patriarchal society, which is why Ovid appeals. The depiction of Denmark in Don’t Bang Denmark is, as Zuckerberg says,
‘inadvertently utopian… [and] although seduction guides claim to level the playing field between men and women, pickup artists in fact flourish in societies that oppress women.’
By painting this picture, both in PUA ideology and in Ovid’s Ars, seduction manuals teach men ‘how to identify and utilize women’s social weaknesses’ and, in a society where women are supported — like Denmark — ‘seduction advice also empowers aspiring pickup artists to lash out at women who reject them’, something also found in the Ars. Therefore, as left-wing social progress makes game tactics ineffective, the Ovidian obsession of PUAs is understandable; their ideal society is that of ancient Rome.
IV: Remembering Rome
One of the watchwords of the Alt-Right is ‘Western Civilization’ and their raging desire to “defend it” or “save” it. Western Civilization is a myth invented in the late 19th century by a bunch of white supremacists. However, for the Alt-Right and Red Pill communities the idea of Western Civilization — a patriarchal, white supremacist society — is ideal. The Red Pill writers who write about the ancient world want to put forward an image of a straight line from antiquity to today, as one PUA writes:
‘For the bulk of human history, [female] behaviour was significantly controlled or subject to approval through mechanisms of tribe, family, church, law or stiff cultural precepts.’
The idea of strict control over women couples together with this idea of continuity as part of a motivated strategy to ‘resurrect ancient norms in the present day’. Zuckerberg rightly points out that:
‘the Alt-Right use the Classics to make their radical, reactionary gender politics seem not only normal and natural, but thoroughly, traditionally European.’
This appropriation of the Classics by the Alt-Right is part of a long tradition — as seen in the invention of the term Western Civilization — of appropriating the highly esteemed position of the Classics to push for a traditionalist, often nationalist, agenda. The Red Pill plays up these ideas through their obsession with false rape accusations, as Zuckerberg writes,
‘[a] rhetorical strategy [which] is part of a larger project of advocating for a white society in which female consent to sex would be immaterial.’
The question of rape and false rape accusations are based on the definition of rape. Said definition of rape depends how patriarchal the society is: the more patriarchal the society, the more favourable the definition of rape is to a man. This is why the Red Pill authors long so much for ancient Rome, where women were tightly controlled and men had the say in marriage. In practice, the legal definition of rape, both in ancient Rome, Red Pill societies, and our own society, is set ‘not at the level of women’s experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men’.
In ancient Greece and Rome, the idea of rape is inherently looser than ours. For example: Lysias in ‘Against Eratosthenes’ defends his client saying that seduction of a wife is a greater crime than rape, as seduction undermines the trust of a husband and wife and questions the paternity of the offspring — whereas rape is merely damaging property. This is the ideal world that the Red Pill wants to return to. The men of the Red Pill find the society of Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus, of Lucretia and Sextus Tarquinius, ‘aspirational’. One PUA writes that a woman must be controlled by a kyrios or paterfamilias:
‘two different options for protecting women… the first is to have a designated male guardian give approval on all decisions… She must seek approval by her guardian concerning diet, education, boyfriends, travel, friends, entertainment [etc.]’
Blending the Stoicism and longing for ancient mores, the writer states:
‘I make these sincere recommendations not out of anger… They would not like it, surely, but due to the fact that I’m male and they’re not, my analytical decision-making faculty is superior to theirs’
The assertion of superiority, rationality, and a lack of anger stem directly from and are validated by Red Pill interpretations of Stoicism (see above). Zuckerberg makes the point that wives in ancient Rome might have had preferable circumstances to that proposed by the Red Pill:
‘Red pill writers never clarify whether women would be allowed to own property and whether their consent would need to be obtained before entering a marriage’
Thus, the Red Pill do not just long for an ancient society, they want an antiquated society that is specifically designed to put women in the same class as property. As Zuckerberg notes,
‘The Phaedra myth does not work for the Red Pill as an accurate reflection of the world in which we live: it is a worst-case scenario for the world in which they wish we lived.’
V: Conclusions
The Red Pill are not the greatest threat to the world right now. Nor are they the greatest threat to classics. However, the Red Pill is worth talking about: especially in a post-Trump world. The men of the Red Pill have been emboldened by the election of Trump and the power of social media and the internet enables them to make themselves very loud, making them seem more important than they are. They have found lots in classical literature to support their ideology and they happily appropriate ancient sources to legitimize said ideology. One of Zuckerberg’s most important conclusions is this: even though the Alt-Right use the sources incorrectly or without nuance, their use of the literature is excellent at fitting their narrative.
The solution, as has been hinted at above, is to combat these antiquated views by pushing for social progress and not be dispirited by the, often, depressing realm of the Red Pill and Alt-Right. The Red Pill community might not last, but, as Zuckerberg rightly says:
‘the use of ancient Greece and Rome by these far-right online groups are clues to what the future of Classics may look like and could look like.’
The danger here is in stepping away. As I quoted above, modern classics — the truly ‘consequential’ discussions — occurs on the internet; we cannot afford to step away. Dr. Zuckerberg’s message is a positive one: if we work to make classics more diverse and open to all people, regardless of gender, race and class, and acknowledge the problems that certain groups have of becoming classicists we can improve not just classics as a scholarly discipline but also (inter)national discourse in the face of the Alt-Right.
Dr. Zuckerberg puts her money where her mouth is, so to speak, as the founder and editor-in-chief of Eidolon, an online progressive classics journal that aims to diversify classics as a discipline, which promotes female and people of colour voices and tone; Even if, in the near future the Red Pill community disappears, classicists need to push for a world where discourse on the ancient world is:
‘free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissing.’
and books like this, and blogs like Eidolon are a start.
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