WHERE HAVE ALL THE ALPHAS GONE?
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012.His latest
book is Notes
from a Derelict Culture. A CD of his original
songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
For some time now I have watched the immensely popular HGTV
as a window on the culture—a large picture window letting
in “lots of natural light,” as the rather silly
and predictable house hunters are fond of saying—providing
a cameo on the conventions of middle-class society. One notices,
with few exceptions, that the wives tend to be voluble and bossy;
they speak first, far more often, more insistently and more
authoritatively. Their needs and desires are clearly predominant.
The husbands, for their part, are mostly bland and subservient,
almost leguminous in comparison, generally deferring to their
wives with only the occasional mewl of protest.
One
notes, too, the lack of genuine taste, the utter preoccupation
with trivialities, and the cloying banality of conversation
among the often obese participants. They are obviously hewing
to script, but the ideas, habits, physical attributes, speech
patterns, attitudes and expectations on display are close enough
to the cultural norm to seem authentic. People recognize themselves
and their aspirations in these TV episodes. Although the self-indulgence
and broadly decorticate behaviour one observes is certainly
off-putting, the absence of gender parity, in favour of the
wives, is perhaps the most conspicuous quality that affirms
itself.
One
might dismiss these observations as making too much of a mere
reality TV show, but HGTV does let in a lot of natural light
on a culture grown flaccid and critically disoriented. The ascendancy
of the now-dominant, rule-giving female and the attendant decline
of the proud and assertive male is the order of the day. The
male essence is not a privilege but a fact of nature—that
is, when nature is allowed to take its course. Yet, everywhere
we look men are surrendering their right to be men—to
be strong, confident, honest, unashamed and productive. I do
not blame the vindictive and self-righteous feminists for the
debacle. I blame the men who have allowed a social disaster
to come to pass. We now see the gradual disappearance, or at
least the alarming paucity, of alpha males in the social mix
accompanied by the rising tide of beta males—apologists
for their “toxic” nature, Michael Kimmel types—
who are complicit with the feminist agenda.
In
an important talk delivered at the ICMI conference held in Chicago
in October 2019, the video of which is soon to be released,
former vice-chair of the Maryland Commission for Men’s
Health Tom Golden pointed out that testosterone levels are markedly
declining among Western males. As is well known, testosterone
is a male sex hormone that stimulates the production of sperm
and the growth of muscle mass. But it is less well known that
testosterone is also genetically engineered for status-seeking.
University of Zurich neuroscientist Christoph Eisenegger in
a major research paper, “The role of testosterone in social
interaction,” suggests that testosterone “might
be best conceptualized as bringing motives for social status
to the fore.” Eisenegger showed that those who maintain
that high level of testosterone lead only to corruption, aggression
and emotional sterility have not adequately considered the evidence;
such studies have been “clearly refuted.” Testosterone
is the chemical engine for risk-taking, reciprocity, generosity
and competitiveness.
Writing
in Forbes, Neil Howe alludes to several analytic reports
showing that “men’s testosterone levels have been
declining for decades.” Among the many complex factors
involved in the downward trend, a crucial element seems to hinge
on “dismantling age-old ideas about masculinity and triggering
real anxiety over changing gender roles.” There is no
doubt that the economy is shifting away “from jobs that
favour men [and] toward sectors dominated by women.” Howe
is plainly a man of leftist sympathies—Donald Trump is
“old-fashioned, overtly macho,” plenty of testosterone
there. Nonetheless, while admitting that he might prefer “a
less testosterone-laden world [which] might be less aggressive
and more emotionally expressive”—as Eisenegger indicates,
a thoroughly mistaken notion—Howe remains concerned that
America, a once “‘pro-testosterone’ nation:
restless, striving, and rowdy…is losing the dynamism,
mobility, and enterprise that made it special.”
In
other words, testosterone is an alpha hormone. When men strive
not to excel and triumph but to conform and acquiesce, to blend
in safely with majority sentiment, to not rock the boat (even
if it is leaking), to go along in order to get along, and to
accept the deformed image of masculinity with which they are
daily bombarded, it is a sign that the testosterone pool is
drying up, as Tom Golden fears and research has borne out. What
is cause and what is effect is an open question. “Has
testosterone declined in response to a changed world,”
asks Howe, “or has the world changed to accommodate less
virile men? Or is it both?” Whatever the answer, the result
is the emergence of the beta man.
Of
course, I am using the Greek alphabet somewhat loosely. Status
is to a large degree context-dependent and social prestige may
not arise exclusively from the alpha hierarchy. But the distinction
between alpha and beta, despite the many shades of gray between
them, is a useful one and one that is commonly understood. As
psychologist Scott Kaufman informs us, “The most attractive
male is really a blend of characteristics, including assertiveness,
kindness, cultivated skills and a genuine sense of value in
this world. The true alpha is fuller, deeper, and richer.”
It follows that the true beta is emptier, shallower, and poorer.
I’ve
had occasion to write in a previous article about the posturing
feminist firebrand, Mona Eltahawy, who urges the weekly killing—she
calls it “culling”—of men. Eltahawy cites
a local instance of her determination to resist the patriarchy
and her fierce courage in fighting it, referring to an episode
in a Montreal club in which she physically beat up a man who
groped her. I am willing to bet the story is apocryphal. Yet
her fable limns a social truth, if only metaphorically, for
the straw man in Eltahawy’s fevered imagination is the
fictive representative of the actual beta male who has permitted,
and even abetted and cultivated, the travesty of his unmanning.
Though exacerbated and more than ever extensive, this development
is by no means a novel phenomenon. It has its history.
As
far back as 1913, E. Belfort Bax in The Fraud of Feminism
framed the issue with his characteristic insight and precision.
He is worth quoting at length. “In any conflict of interest
between a man and a woman,” he writes, “male public
opinion…sides with the woman, and glories in doing so.”
Bax finds himself baffled by “the intense hatred which
the large section of men seem to entertain toward their fellow-males…and
their eagerness to champion the female in the sex war.”
It is undeniable, he continues, that the Woman’s Movement,
unassisted by “a solid phalanx of the manhood of any country,
could not possibly make any headway.” The members of the
phalanx—legislators, judges, parsons, magistrates—“all
vie with one another in denouncing the villainy and baseness
of the male person…To these are joined a host of literary
men and journalists…who contribute their quota to the
stream of antimanism…the design of which is to paint man
as a base, contemptible creature.” Thus “the anti-man
cultus has been made to flourish [with] the whole of the judiciary
and magistracy acting as its priests and ministrants.”
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Bax could have been writing at this very moment.
These
men may have acted from motives of chivalry or principles of
moral virtue. They were not necessarily weaklings or beta males,
but the consequences of their actions led to a dilution of the
male spirit and temper and to the formation of a class of sexual
herbivores who took the path of least resistance. They are our
contemporaries, men who may believe they act from high ethical
considerations but in reality are feminized creatures who have
sold their masculine birthright for a mess of saccharine pottage.
In short, they are beta-men. “Men seem to be so cowed
that they can't fight back,” said former feminist Doris
Lessing at the 2001 Edinburgh Book Festival. And she was right.
As
poet Robert Bly writes in his 1990 bestseller Iron John,
begging forgiveness for being a man, in violation of natural
male vigour and energy, is a form of psychological suicide.
It is a function, says Bly, of male naïveté, increasingly
prominent in the modern era. “We see more and more passivity
in men,” he writes, “but also more and more naïveté.
The naïve man feels a pride in being attacked. If his wife
or girlfriend, furious, shouts that he is a ‘chauvinist,”
a ‘sexist,’ a ‘man,’ he doesn’t
fight back, but just takes it.” In fact, he will offer
to carry a woman’s pain before he checks with his own
heart to see if this labour is proper in the situation . . .
he rarely fights for what is his; he gives away his eggs,
and other people raise the chicks.” (Italics mine).
In
Bly’s analysis of the Western tragedy pitting the sexes
against one another, “Powerful sociological and religious
forces have acted in the West to favour the trimmed, the sleek,
the cerebral, the noninstinctive, and the bald”—Bax’s
“judges and magistrates”—who are the progenitors
of the beta men we see all about us today. The beta man is the
source of the cultural decrepitude and social dysfunction brought
about by the feminist assault on the psychic and biological
boundaries that differentiate the sexes. Beta men are committed
to resisting what they regard as their raw and turbulent masculinity.
They believe that masculinity as historically conceived and
as feminists insist is demonic.
For
Bly, the antidote to this febrile declension is the Wild Man
of myth and folklore—pagan, classic, Celtic—who
has been injured in his sexuality and who must return in all
his strength, “in touch with God and sexuality, with spirit
and earth,” that is to say, with himself. A man must rediscover
his “Zeus energy.” And this not only for his own
sake but for the sake of woman as well, whose fecund and magnanimous
nature “has suffered tremendously,” as a consequence
not only of her own resentments and illusions but also of the
favonian influence of compliant men. “The goddess Aphrodite,”
as he puts it, “alive inside the female body, is insulted
day after day.” Regrettably, the Wild Man, or his contemporary
avatar the alpha male, whom the mateless woman and the disaffected
feminist secretly crave, is very much a minority species. (Interestingly,
Neil Howe recognizes that “Millennial women yearn for
guys who can ‘man up’ and take care of business,”
but there are not enough of them around).
Bly
has been mocked by critics who find his thesis one-sided, expressing
a return to the primitive, and risibly “phallocentric,”
a reproof that many would apply to cult hero and magister Jordan
Peterson. There is much misunderstanding in this position, for
Bly accentuates the virtues of male sobriety and duty and Peterson
those of competence and responsibility. In his recently published
12 Rules for Life, Peterson, with his considerable
authority as a renowned clinical psychologist and an erudite
thinker, elaborates the argument for the retrieval of healthy
masculinity in a feminist age.
Following
psychoanalytical pioneers C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann, Peterson
points out that consciousness, “always symbolically masculine,
even in women…is constantly tempted to sink back down
in dependency…and to shed its existential burden. It is
aided in that pathological desire by anything that opposes enlightenment,
articulation, rationality, self-determination, strength and
competence”—in effect, the beta capitulation to
the triumphant female, the renunciation “of order and
of the Logos” by men who have become feminized and submissive.
For
such convictions Peterson has been denounced as a muddled thinker,
a chauvinist, a huckster, a phallocrat, a misogynist, a fascist—you
name it. But Peterson’s strength and manliness is evident
in his ability to soldier on, to rise above such mean-spirited
attacks, to lift his voice against the meretricious orthodoxy
of the day, and to turn the tables on his detractors, furnishing
an example of the alpha sensibility at work.
In
economist Tyler Cowen’s terms, America is suffering from
a “low-hanging fruit” mentality. We need high-reachers,
innovators, motivators and stubborn achievers to renew a lost
momentum; in other words, alpha men. Cowen writes from a leftist
perspective, with a hefty dose of social justice theory, and
focuses mainly on economic parameters over the last two-to-three
centuries. But the concept of making do with low-hanging fruit
fits the beta man with a strange perfection. These low-hanging
fruit are the ideas, attitudes, compulsions, platitudes and
opportunities associated with the feminist movement, which serve
the appetite for conformity and approval—until, that is,
the tree is bare. For a great reckoning is approaching unless
we can learn once again to struggle upward where the best fruit
can be found.
“It
is surely time,” writes Duncan Smith in The Vast and
the Spurious, to redefine “the state of gender relations.”
It is time “for some major gaslighting, some alternate
ways of viewing social life,” to explode the “feminist
racket” and educate its male collaborators. This will
be a monumentally difficult task. The beta male (aka the “soyboy”)
is now the Western model of masculinity to be emulated by all
right-thinking men. Unfortunately, Nancy Sinatra’s boots
are walking all over him. After all, “you keep samin’
when you oughta be a’changin’”—though,
indeed, he is a’changin,’ and at breakneck speed,
under the stiletto heels of the Gorgonocracy. The feminist shrew
is not the shrew of Shakespeare’s play; she will not be
tamed, for there are precious few Petruchios around to right
the balance and equally few Katherines who are “meet and
amiable.” As Kate says in her concluding speech: “I
am ashamed that women are so simple/To offer war where they
should kneel for peace.”
Of
course, The Taming of the Shrew is only a play, just
as HGTV is a piece of fiction. But the former articulates a
longstanding domestic ideal whereas the latter inadvertently
discloses a bitter social truth. The house may feature an open
concept, three bathrooms, a kitchen island, marble countertops,
a tiled backsplash, stainless steel appliances, a butler’s
pantry and plenty of space to “entertain.” A profusion
of wows, amazings, awesomes, and omigods lard the premises.
The man whose great passion in life is outdoor grilling has
to settle for indoor sizzling. “Happy wife, happy life,”
goes the adage. But there is no rhyme for husband. In Reality
Culture, the wife will keep the house, the kids and the assets
if or when she tires of her husband. What to do as the house
of Western civilization collapses and the culture self-immolates?
“Men have to toughen up,” says Peterson. “And
if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what
weak men are capable of.” And that is something we are
seeing with every passing day.
The
Western world of discoveries, technologies, amenities and unprecedented
wealth, which feminism abuses and exploits to its advantage,
is the achievement of an alpha civilization. It is time for
the so-called “patriarchy” to man up and celebrate
its creation.
