Not everyone under the Red Pill banner bears the same feathers. In that movie, a red pill swallowed wakes the main character from the illusory world he inhabits and allows him to see an exploitative reality for the first time the men whose readings Zuckerberg catalogs all share an analogous perspective, namely, that society is not as it should be, and men, who are actively kept from seeing the truth, need to be roused. The first chapter is a sort of field guide to these men, who are loosely gathered under the moniker of “the Red Pill,” a reference to Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s 1999 movie The Matrix. Though there are missed opportunities in the book, Not All Dead White Men is an important project-required reading for classicists who want to understand how the works we study resonate in contemporary politics. Active mostly online and thus perhaps easily dismissed, these men are taken seriously as Zuckerberg traces the hermeneutics and rhetoric they employ to support racist and misogynist ideas as natural and right-as “classic,” in fact. That claim may have wobbled a bit in the last few decades, but its strength remains visible in the confident titles of the courses that classics departments offer, like “The History of Democracy,” “Western Civilization,” and at my university, “Great Books.” Donna Zuckerberg’s new volume explores the use of the classics’ implicit claim to authority, not in the academy but outside it, by men who seek a retreat to a society shaped by the ideals they find in classical literature.
The “classics” bear a claim to authority right in their name, namely, that Greek and Latin literature from the ancient world is central to the humanities and by extension to culture.
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