Self-proclaimed alpha male Andrew Tate has been burning up his 15 minutes with gusto, schooling all of us beta males in the nuances of superior masculinity. We are taking notes!
Not in any hopes, mind you, of picking up any meaningful pointers on How to Be a Man (anyone proclaiming himself to be an alpha male has self-disqualified, as any actual man would realize), but in service of the study of this supercilious-yet-amorphous state that passes for masculinity in this post-Redford, Joe Roganified culture.
Here’s the Tate tweet that prompts my pen:
Reading books is for losers who are
afraid to learn from life.
So they try and learn from the life
OTHERS have lived.
But you never REALLY learn unless
you lived it.
You must feel it to believe it.
Books are a total waste of time.
Education for cowards.
Well... them’s fightin’ words, of course, especially to me. But lest I seem tempted to mix it up with the schoolyard’s bully dullard, I will hasten to clarify that it is impossible to take personally a taunt from someone so ill-equipped to even understand his own words. No, I’m don’t take this personally; he’s not attacking me.
He’s doing something far worse; he’s attacking Literacy herself. And that, I cannot stand by and watch.
Before Literacy graced humankind with Her beneficent presence, we were already quite adept at learning from life. We are, in fact, the consummate life-learners in all the planet’s history. We are masters at learning from life; that’s why we endured beyond our many cousins, and why we are in dominance over the Earth today.
And this trait comes built-in; it’s in the genes of every child born. No one is afraid of it; it’s indulged in varying degrees, to be sure, but it’s an innate hunger.
As far as learning from others – wow, it’s hard to know where to start. Yes, we learn from others from the day we’re born. Children learn from their parents; siblings learn from observing each other and sharing experiences; adults have attained an understanding of the world and the society to which they belong from this same learning from others. It’s called social learning, and it’s a hedge against living stupidly; it’s more efficient to add to one’s own understanding by seeing what has worked and not worked in the actions, behaviors, and efforts of others. It’s one of the driving forces that make us the universe’s most successful cooperators.
When Literacy joined us, She increased the power of social learning a thousand-fold. She made it possible not just to learn from observing the successes and failures of those around us, but from the successes and failures of those who came before. She gave us history, a deep record of human progress that allowed us to make far more rapid progress in our personal lives as well as our societal development.
As for never really learning what one hasn’t lived, hmm, Alpha Boy is inadvertently onto something there: learning by doing beats all other forms of learning. But if I learn-by-doing something that I have previously studied and come to understand before the doing, then I master it far more quickly – and I have jumped over the wasted time of trying 10 other things before trying the one I mastered. Reading books doesn’t compete with learning-by-doing; if complements it.
We must feel it to believe it. Well, that sounds like something he took from a t-shirt, or possibly an Instagram meme. That’s too subjective a claim to meaningfully parse, but we can embrace it for the moment and immediately see that it serves our argument, not Tate’s: feel it to believe it? Yeah, I’ve been there; in Shakepeare’s Henry V; in Huck and Jim’s enlightenment on the river; in Holden Caulfield’s deepening alienation. Books don’t compete with our ability to feel and believe; they enhance it.
As for wasted time, we must grant that Tate is an expert. He’s a man who has spent so much time on social media, primarily in the service of offending others, that he has managed to extinguish most of his channels of self-expression. How interesting it would have been to see him cull his concept of masculinity from a long dalliance with Literacy; she’d have set him straight. She'd have introduced him to Atticus Finch. And George Milton. And Tom Joad. And Plato’s Hero.
If “education for cowards” is a thing, we’d have to say that its home is not the town library, but social media. It takes no courage whatsoever to boast, pontificate, preen and hurl snark in the unvetted, inconsequential arenas of the Internet. One need never place one’s carefully-cultivated vacuity at risk by exposing oneself to ideas that have resisted for decades the most determined assaults of after-school detention loiterers like Tate.
It takes tremendous courage, on the other hand, to make a regular diet of characters that might challenge you; narratives that might upset you; ideas that might change you. Literacy is a formidable lady, a seeker after strength, and the library is no place for cowards.
Let Andrew Tate have his little rant, oblivious to his own nudity. And by all means, let’s appreciate to the hilt that he will miss entirely the irony that will ensue if he ever does become a celebrity of any duration, and finds himself with a book deal...
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