Masculinity and the Greek alphabet
Nick Adams would like for American male children to eschew Fortnite and read the Bible instead. In his view, these children should play sports outside, go to church, and read the Bible so as to be alpha males, rather than the beta males that playing Fortnite makes of them, a claim that he asserts is incontrovertible. He concludes by saying that we need alpha males “because alpha males get hot women like this,” at which point he gestures at a cardboard image of Melania Trump.
Well then. As I often explain to those who commend the Bible to me, I have read it. I have read parts in the original Hebrew, especially for the purpose of writing a thesis on Genesis, and I have read the books that Protestants leave out. I have read much of the source material—the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, and the Greek philosophers who influenced early Christians—that provided the cultural context in which the Bible was written, and I have read a number of works of major Jewish and Christian theologians. And I periodically add to this list as time allows.
I am only vaguely aware of what Fortnite is—some video game, it seems, and my lack of interest keeps prompting me to spell its name as Fortnight, leaving me to wonder what is so insidious about a period of two weeks. Perhaps this is how long the game takes to complete?
Do not conclude from this that I am either a baby boomer or puritanical. Sid Meier’s Civilization games and Aces of the Deep were frequent relaxations during my undergraduate and graduate days. It is simply that games on computers have become much more expensive both in buying the game itself and in the outlay required for equipment that will run it that spending money in that way would cut into my ammunition budget. And I have so much writing to do.
Why Nick Adams—a sometime Australian politician and current immigrant to the United States who, along with Ken Ham, makes me think that Oz is not sending us their best—is worked up about these subjects is anyone’s guess. I would presume that an alpha male would need a tribe of following Greek letters to do his bidding, and in any case, even alpha males must sleep occasionally, making a perpetual Hobbesian struggle somewhat of a drag. And while I do not know what kind of Christian, if any, Adams regards himself as being, I wonder if he has read the anthology that he tells others to study. The verses that praise the meek and label the followers of Jesus as sheep suggest to me that Adams has been tucking up in the evening more often with A Dummy’s Guide to Friedrich Nietzsche than with the New Testament. And when it comes to acquiring what Adams calls hot women, perhaps King David would sympathize with a president who is on his third unfaithful marriage, but I cannot shoehorn such notions into the thinking of Jesus or Paul.
What Adams is fantasizing about, a dominant male striding into the struggle for life, reminds me of another Greek letter used as the title of a film that starred the future five-term NRA president, Moses himself, The Omega Man. Things do not go so well for that character—and a previous adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel, I Am Legend, was led by everyone’s perception of a tough guy from the black and white era, Vincent Price—but such a scenario would allow self-assessed alphas to go about hunting and gathering at will with no social annoyances to restrain them.
The irony here—or irony it would be if right wingers cared anything about facts—is that this notion of an alpha male arises out of a distortion of two areas of animal behavior research, studies of wolves and chimpanzees. The wolves in question lived in captivity, which set up a condition of artificial stresses in the group, leading to aggressive behavior by the most powerful individuals. If Adams wishes to reside in a maximum security prison, this sort of personality might be useful—at least if he were the strongest among the pack—but otherwise, not so much. In the case of the chimps, as Frans de Waal, whose book on chimpanzee politics has been its own kind of Bible for right wing aspirants to Congress or the presidency, points out, the alpha in a chimp society is not the one who is the most bullying, but is instead the one who builds coalitions by feeding infants and soliciting the support of the group’s females.
Oh dear. If Adams really wants to see more alpha males, he might do better to advise the reading of The Gate to Women’s Country in place of a book that treats women as property to be captured or exchanged like cattle among the tribes of the Near East. But then, as he is a part of the Trumpist politics under which we are all laboring these days, I can only conclude that he is trolling, specifically that he is saying whatever makes the males who await his every pronouncement feel better about themselves—at least until the hormonal hit wears off and the id goes back to sleep.
What we all should be doing is to involve ourselves in a variety of activities under all the letters of the alphabet and to seek excellence—surely another meaning to being an omega—in at least one, not as a competition with those around us, but as a challenge to see how far each of us can rise, both individually and with the cooperation of others.
And we all should read a lot more than just one book.