Miss Zuckerberg Regrets  

3,460 words

The men of the Red Pill are predominantly white.
—Not All Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg, PhD

Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.
—Miss Otis Regrets, Cole Porter

***

I wrote a piece here at Counter Currents recently about Plato’s Theaetetus, and classical philosophy in general. It seems to me that classical philosophy is essential to any variant of the dissident right that would rather rationalize than emote – or at least know when either response is appropriate – and to return to Plato in particular is a natural place to begin for anyone unfamiliar with philosophy. The discipline has, of course, drawn the fire of the new academic commissars, who have been cancelling long-dead philosophers for a range of retrospective offences. But it is not just the philosophers of the classical world (and playwrights, and notaries, and poets, and senators) who have enraged and engaged the new left. It’s the people who read their work. Even if it is archaic, the literature and art of the classical world is still information, more readily accessible than ever, and for the new cultural regime, information must be curated and controlled.

Classical philosophy is, of course, part of a wider classical body of work, much of it lost, but enough having survived to make the study of classics rewarding and stimulating. And it is not all philosophical or aesthetic; documents which leave a record of social conditions in Greece and Rome are a respected part of the classical field of study. What it certainly is, however, is the product of white culture, and so it is inevitable that some classicists will incorporate the new practices and attitudes of critical theory into their subject and cast a stern eye over the ancient past with regard to race and gender.

Towards the end of the piece on Plato, I quoted Donna Zuckerberg, younger sister of Mark. Donna Zuckerberg is a classicist, and some years ago I came across a couple of excerpts from her doctoral thesis, which partly concerned the fascination the classical world holds for what she then, in 2018, called the Alt Right, as well as misogyny in that classical world to which this Alt Right had apparently fastened itself. The classics, she opined, “are read by the worst men on the internet”, and she wished to warn the world of the sinister relationship between the Alt Right and the Greek and Roman writers who are in large part the key-stone of Western civilization. (She makes no mention of what the worst women on the internet read, or even if such a category exists). But, with just these snippets from Dr. Zuckerberg’s thesis, I felt like an Egyptologist with a few scraps of papyrus, trying to piece together the whole, and I’ve wanted to read her contribution to classical studies since I came across them. But how does one get hold of Mark Zuckerberg’s sister’s doctoral thesis? I can’t even contact him and ask, as I am permanently banned from Facebook. But, with a little amateur sleuthing and my habitual good fortune in hunting down obscure texts, I found something even better.

Dr. Zuckerberg published a book in 2018 entitled Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. I believe it is based on her doctoral thesis. The book certainly aims to chart the influence of the classical world on the Alt Right, and its introduction is clear about the author’s aims:

This book is about how the men of the Red Pill use the literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome to promote patriarchal and white supremacist ideology. My goal is to lay bare the mechanics of this appropriation: to show how classical antiquity informs the Red Pill worldview and how these men weaponize Greece and Rome in service of their agenda.

Cultural appropriation. She doesn’t use the exact phrase but that’s what she means. Zuckerberg may be opening doors she might be well advised to keep closed. If she is suggesting that reading Hesiod or Herodotus is equivalent to being a white guy in a sombrero and a fake moustache on Cinco de Mayo, then she is going to get her equivalences in a knot very quickly. As for the “Red Pill Community”, it is a little disappointing for a classicist to use an analogy drawn from a modern film, but “the men of the Red Pill” has a pleasing, clannish feel to it. We’ll take it. We also note that “patriarchal and white supremacist ideology” are givens. Even at this early stage, we hope that Zuckerberg has paid sufficient attention to Plato to define her terms, or at least showed willing in trying, if only to side-step the ex cathedra statements favored by many of her academic contemporaries, which arrive as simple formulae with no workings.

The problem starts for the author in the same year many of the left’s psychological problems began on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, after elections which favored Donald Trump and Brexit. In 2016, an alarmed Donna Zuckerberg began to see posters appearing on American college campuses featuring photos of classical or neo-classical statues such as the Apollo Belvedere. The “white nationalist group” Identity Evropa were responsible, and what was shocking to those of Dr. Zuckerberg’s persuasion is that the posters had “an actual, physical presence”, rather than merely existing online, which is another area in which she finds creatures of the right disturbingly drawn to the classical world. Real humans put these posters in place. They live. Worse, they are using the iconography of the classical world – the preserve of classicists alone – to perpetuate their own brand of misogyny and racism.

And so a tension is built up at the very start of the book. Is Zuckerberg jealously protecting her academic specialty from the predations of the yahoos of the Alt Right, or is she secretly fascinated? The book has a little of the psychological “whodunit?” pulp novel about it. Much has been written about the relationship between the ancient world and its history, which Zuckerberg finds that the Greeks did not dissociate from myth as readily as we do. Except that we do. It’s just the myths that have changed.

Dr. Zuckerberg concentrates on the “Manosphere” in her first chapter, including Men Going Their Own Way, various pick-up artists, and websites such as Chateau Heartiste and Roosh V. She is a little exercised at the habit of these miscreants of referring to her elder brother as “Mark Cuckerberg”, or “Zuck the Cuck”, but I think we ought to applaud the natural defensive nature of the sibling. The usual suspects Zuckerberg lines up for the Alt Right mugshot parade seem to me to be weak specimens, intellectually negligible, and really just grifters. Even she has no respect for the enemy, describing their “apparent disorganization and undertheorized positions.” But we’ll return to this by way of Zuckerberg’s book.

I didn’t approach it with the set intention of sneering at it, that is always pointless and a waste of energy. I genuinely want to know what animates the animus, as it were, some women have towards intellectually literate men, and how it can be linked to the literature and statuary of the classical world. I am no classicist, but Dr. Zuckerberg’s book is not written for classicists. It is short and approachable, and does not get tangled in the minutiae of, perhaps, the traditional male classicist such as Benjamin Jowett or Enoch Powell. Zuckerberg is informative and also sufficiently self-aware to pre-empt some the of the criticism liable to come at her from the right, and even from the left. She is regularly accused, for example, of hating her own subject, but she argues convincingly and simply that to find your chosen subject matter problematic is not to judge its value in your life. I think she enjoys her work, and I learned a lot from the book.

The problem is that fascinating sketches of Greek and Roman life can be drawn by concentrating on the female role without constantly thematizing rape, misogyny, and a generally beastly state of affairs two thousand years ago in an alien nation. I wanted to know more about oikonomos, for example, the Greek word for the management of the household which becomes our own “economy”, but it was all marital rape, rape allegations, and the potential for rape. And the classical models provided and analyzed are supposed to have cast a classical spell over a bunch of guys who rate European countries on how easy it is to get the girls drunk there and go to bed with them in great number.

Thus, if the author wished, like Diana or Actaeon, to chase down her prey on the far right (that fever-dream from which the left can never truly wake) then she has gone hunting for stag and bagged only a few rabbits. The Alt Right, for the purposes of Zuckerberg’s book, is comprised largely of people who design posters for an almost unknown group called Identity Evropa and which have classical statues on them, Andrew Anglin for a bit of sneery racism, Steve Bannon for constantly quoting from Marcus Aurelius, and a bunch of semi-literate pick-up artists on Reddit. It’s not exactly a Reich. Why does the author not mention the webzine you are reading, for example? Counter-Currents regularly publishes long-form essays on classical literature and is undeniably everything Dr. Zuckerberg despises. Poor research skills, for a classicist.

There is a chapter on Ovid, not the Metamorphoses so much but rather the Ars Amatoria, a raunchy piece of sophisticated Roman smut which those young scamps on Reddit have been referencing as a sort of antique pick-up manual. I know little about Reddit, but even a brief investigation indicates a fairground of mental dysfunction, boy-men on a damp underfloor, comforted by a warped notion of sexual relations. Again, Dr. Zuckerberg is hunting snipe when surely there is bigger game online.

Stoicism also merits a chapter, and there may be a clue as to why this famous school of classical thought might disturb the author, as she sets out to show that the worst men on the internet “use stoicism to justify their belief that women and people of color are not just angrier and more emotional than men, but morally inferior as well.” These are the stakes for which Donna Zuckerberg is playing. What if there really is a natural order which the Greeks and Romans portrayed in a realistic way very different from those which obtain today? That’s what has to be disproven, that’s the puzzle. That’s not quite how she puts it, however:

[B]y analyzing and deconstructing this Red Pill enthusiasm for ancient Greece and Rome, I hope to articulate a different vision for a feminist, radical place that classical antiquity can occupy in contemporary political discourse.

Always with the deconstruction. Stoicism centers, of course, on the acceptance of that which it is not within your power to change. The word is one of the few that has travelled to our times relatively unscathed, and we still talk of a stoical attitude towards life or a particular situation within it. Now, take that to its conclusion, and this means you can’t go up against nature and its dictates. “Not even the Gods”, writes the Plato of the Theaetetus, “war against necessity”. If men are men and women are women and that represents a natural binary, you can beat your fists against the ideological walls you have created all you like, ladies. Only your fellow cell-mates are listening.

As for women themselves, the Alt Right are driven by a hatred of feminism, the author writes. Feasible as far as it goes, but it assumes that feminism is a monolith, a united cause, which it is not, as modern feminists are discovering via the bizarre TERF wars. No satirist as subtle as Sextus Empiricus is needed today to depict the modern West, which does a good enough job of satirizing itself. The various waves of feminism, from women burning their bras in the 1960s, through the Steinems and the Dworkins, and on into today’s carnival of neuroses, gave us one major gift; standpoint epistemology. Thanks for that, ladies. Now, pick-up artists on Reddit won’t know this is the reason they hate feminism, but it is. Standpoint epistemology is the most ruinous effect of what goes under the rubric of “woke” ideology.

The reader does feel like stepping back and looking at the framing of Zuckerberg’s argument and animus. She can’t be comparing Roosh V, a pick-up artist, with Ovid, one of the few Roman poets whose name most people who have read more than a cereal packet would recognize. But she is apparently linking the two via the dubious relation of influence. I say dubious not because literary influence does not exist, even over vast spans of time, but it just doesn’t stack up that young men whose role model is Andrew Tate spend their spare time devouring Suetonius and Cicero.

There is another internal weakness to Zuckerberg’s argument. It’s not the application of morality retrospectively, although that is a fault all literature of this type exhibits. So, Greek slavery was bad because we all know that ante-bellum American slavery was bad. We have been told this and it is a mandatory viewpoint, non-negotiable if you wish to keep your employment status, in some cases. Regardless of the absence of academic investigation into the social structure of slavery (which throws up a lot of quite content black slaves in ante-bellum Dixie, if some of their correspondence is anything to go by), slavery is just A Bad Thing.

Zuckerberg does mention slavery in Greece, but only from the perspective of masters raping their slaves, which the author claims was not illegal. There was no specific Greek word for rape, either, but rather three words which all did service and whose meanings had more to do with the abduction of property than sexual impropriety. “Women were commodities”, Dr. Zuckerberg writes. Well, they certainly can be. So can men, and children. It much depends on where and when you find yourself. Morality is the result of a set of geographical and temporal vectors, not a type of aerosol you spray on across the centuries to get rid of a smell you don’t like. But the concept of “woman as chattel” gets as close to the heart of Dr. Zuckerberg’s unease as anything in the book, and indeed is a hornet in the head of many feminists. But the classical analysis is not the problem, if that is the analysis one wishes to give.

No, the problem is simply one borrowed from the law, a lack of evidence. The tenuousness of the link between the thematics of many classical texts and the dribbling attempt at language of many of today’s keyboard-jockeys, the ones that so exercise the author, means slim pickings when it comes to piling up a weight of evidence. Granting influence by classical authors to the roustabouts Dr. Zuckerberg attacks here severely over-estimates the latter while denigrating the former. It is as though Dr. Zuckerberg’s opinion of men is so low she only notices the ones she dislikes most, and that by their habits, like some specialist in tropical insects. There are some accomplished men on the right-of-center of politics who are well versed in the classics, the white classics, but I suspect Dr. Zuckerberg may blush and stammer in their company, like a Jane Austen heroine unsure of her status.

It’s not entirely accurate to write that Zuckerberg has unwittingly picked a poor crop to represent the dissident right, but her analysis is interesting. She is dismissive of the Reddit crowd and the “little knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome they reveal”. So why shoot fish in a barrel? If they don’t understand what they are reading, they can’t do much harm, right? Not so, says the author:

[W]hile Red Pill references to the classics are often inaccurate, confounding, or lacking in nuance, they can be dangerous nonetheless. Even the most elementary errors still leverage the ancient world to promote reactionary ideas about gender and race.

This is the central pillar of feminism’s intellectual incoherence. You can create new versions of the classical world – or any other in history – all you like, the only real statement you are making is that you don’t like it, the way it was set up isn’t what women are told is acceptable in our enlightened times. But that’s the thing about nature. I won’t quote Horace on nature and pitchforks and so on, but the world and its hierarchies were not primarily put there to satisfy your moral aesthetics, but to serve the race.

But for Dr. Zuckerberg in Suffragette mode, the “men of the Red Pill” are not taking the classics for their own, dammit, and wimmin (and cool, tamed men) will reclaim the ancient world, like they reclaim the night, and their femininity, and the planet, and a bunch of other stuff. Boy, do they reclaim things. Here, we learn that there has been a fierce tradition of classical allusion in the service of feminism, “from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler”, a rather short list, but a list nonetheless. There’s a lot more stuff by men, which Dr. Zuckerberg of course redacts from history, but that’s patriarchy for you.

But there is more recognition of the classics on the left than a couple of old broads. There are hip, young, black rappers too, all alluding to the classical world and keeping it safe from the Alt Right who, like the Midians, do prowl and prowl around:

[T]here is also a fascinating tradition of the subversive use of the symbols of antiquity to challenge established ideas of cultural value, as when Jay-Z quotes Plato’s Euthyphro.

Now, I’m not so steeped in dotage that I don’t know who Jay-Z is, and I had to get to the bottom of this one. First, I went to Dr. Zuckerberg’s notes, for which she deserves academic credit because they are voluminous and thorough. But the reference to Jay-Z simply said. “Padilla Peralta 2015”. Writer? Jay-Z song? Rap festival in Rio? Black academic, as it turned out, and male despite the name. So, I turned to Google and fed it: “Jay Z Plato Euthyphro”.

Bingo. It seems the song in question is called No Church in the Wild, and features alternative verses by Jay-Z and Kanye, of whom I have also heard. The first two lines of Jay-Z’s verse seem to be the classical reference alluded to:

There we go. Tears on the mausoleum floor.
Blood stains the colosseum doors.

I don’t see the reference to Plato, but perhaps there are others I’ve missed. Professor Peralta writes whole essays on classical allusions in Jay-Z – I mean, he really does – so there must be. The lyrics, meantime, soon shift their subject matter to more familiar territory:

Rollin’ in the Rolls-Royce Corniche
Only the doctors got this, I’m hidin’ from the police
Drug dealer chic, I’m wondering if a thug’s prayers reach.

That last line may have a touch of neo-Platonism about it, but I can’t see this as the Renaissance 2.0. So, if that is the left reclaiming the classics, two dead women and a fat black rapper, then the Reconquista is in its early stages. In the meantime, I suggest we make better use of it. If the sister of one of information’s masters of the universe (plus Dr. Zuckerberg is married to a Silicon Valley mandarin) thinks that we might cause mischief with the classics, I suggest we take a look.

Finally, it is what is not present in Dr. Zuckerberg’s book which is as important as what is. The author makes it clear, early in the book and succinctly, that she will not really be looking at race. You can read her mind. To look at misogyny and frame it in terms of attitudes to women in Muslim, Latin American and Afro-Caribbean cultures would be essential if you were going to do the same archeological forensics you do with the Greeks. And you could hardly do that in polite society, or at least what passes for it in today’s groves of academe. No, the title is a deliberate tease: Not Only Dead White Men. It purports to tell us that there are men who are very much alive who think in the same way as the worst of the best in classical times. It is actually ironic, in the original sense of the word. It is all dead white men. Feminist writers take an almost medieval, High Catholic attitude to the dead, in which their influence on the living is every bit as important as that of the living themselves. Dr. Zuckerberg is no exception.