Aug 9th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Against The “Alpha Male”
Cliché about “alpha males” and so forth are so deeply ingrained in our culture that I had no idea what they specifically referred to. Apparently, though, it refers to research on hierarchical behavior in wolf packs, research that was done in the 1960s and popularized in part through David Mech’s book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.
And in this fascinating video (via Jim Henley) Mech explains why that research is outdated and people should drop the idea:
As Jim says, “this is how science is supposed to work but doesn’t, necessarily. Open-mindedness, readiness to renounce superceded views.”
60 Responses to “Against The “Alpha Male””
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August 9th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Re: readiness to renounce superceded views
The word is ’supersede’, Yglesias. From the Latin ’sedere’, to sit.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Dominant primate?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
There’s a whole field of study here : “hierarchy porn in TV shows about wildlife between ‘80 and ‘00 and its politics/social subtext”.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
You know, Hector, those Romans were the cosmopolitan hipsters of the ancient world. I wouldn’t be learning their language if I were you. It might rub off.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Adam,
If it’s good enough for St. Peter and his heirs, it’s good enough for me.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
I’m guessing you’re not a fan of sociobiology.
Fundamental Basis of “Cool”
August 9th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
If it’s good enough for St. Peter and his heirs, it’s good enough for me.
Paul might have spoken, or at least wrote Latin, seeing as he was a citizen, but Peter and everyone else in the eastern half of the Empire would have spoken, written and thought in Koine.
Hell, at least half of the great works of the Romans during Republic and Empire were in Koine.
So why aren’t you doing Greek?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Except that the guy in the video explicitly says thay scientists don’t really talk about alpha wolves anymore.
So scientists have in fact renounced that view. It’s just that popular culture hasn’t caught up. How is that scientists’ fault?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Of course a beta male would have no idea what they they specifically referred to
August 9th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
This shouldn’t be filed under “gender”, the correction applies specifically to wolves and not necessarily to other groupings of social animals where there’s a dominant, and Yglesias’s gross over-interpretation of the correction to this misunderstanding to make some implicit point about whatever he’s implicitly making a point about (hinted at by his categorizing this post as one dealing with “gender”) is pretty much exactly as obnoxious a politicized misuse of science as those he’s implicitly criticizing.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
To be fair, this is an argument against using “alpha male” literally in the context of wolf packs, which is almost never the context in every day use. Using this as an argument against use of the term in popular culture today doesn’t really work. As with many phrases, it has evolved beyond its original use.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Uh, Matt? That video does add some nuance and constraint to the use of the term amongst wolves (because, apparently, most wolf packs are actually family units). But it does nothing to overrule the use, as a cliche, to describe the characteristics of a hierarchical leader in a structure that isn’t family unit. In fact, I’d argue the video reinforces that usage.
But maybe your idea is that we should call CEOs, generals, etc. dads?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
No. Concept of “Alpha” male originated with the study of wolves and has been mis-applied to other species, including humans. If it was wrong in the first place, chances are it is wrong in the other cases, derived from it.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Also, Henley’s full quote is:
…which is incoherent. Has he read Kuhn?
There’s several ways of interpreting Henley’s comment, as well as Yglesias’s approval of it, but what seems most likely to me is that both subscribe to the very naive (and wrong) view of how science actually functions (or should function) as an institution—a view that, not coincidentally, most scientists themselves share (at least unconsciously).
More to the point, not only doesn’t science actually work that way, it shouldn’t work that way. So Henley is correct when he says that science doesn’t work in the idealized way he thinks it ought. He’s wrong to believe that it would be better if it did.
The truth is that science as an institution and scientists as scientists are inherently conservative. And that’s a good thing. Science is a competitive enterprise and while scientists are trained to be conservative, they have personal incentives to be novel. There are huge amounts of implicit trust involved in the practice of science—we see this whenever peer-review famously fails or when there’s fraud. If science weren’t inherently conservative, then a great deal more dubious science would be embraced than already is because it’s the hot, new thing and/or external pressures such as attention from the media or politicians…and I’m certainly among the group who believe that this is a bigger problem than outdated ideas held onto because of science’s conservativism. Yglesias would probably agree, once someone mentioned the mania about evolutionary psychology, for example.
Indeed, given the EP example and no doubt numerous others, I think we could find many instances when Yglesias (and presumably Henley) would bemoan some trend of science they believe dubious. Yet, when they find some older science they believe dubious which has yet to be superceded by new research, they predictably bemoan science’s conservatism.
This is the kind of predictable, facile, and misleading science commentary we get from people who have limited knowledge of science (and/or the sociology of science)…this would be bad enough if it were just bloggers like Yglesias and Kerr, but we see it from to many so-called science journalists, as well.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
No. Concept of “Alpha” male originated with the study of wolves and has been mis-applied to other species, including humans. If it was wrong in the first place, chances are it is wrong in the other cases, derived from it.
Really? You think that video debunks the very idea of social hierarchy? For all species rather than just wolf packs that happen to be family units?
Do you have a citation for a similar debunking of the existence of social hierarchies amongst, say, baboons or gorillas. Should we retire the term silverback male?
August 9th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Thne notion of hierarchy or pecking order is well established scientifically in many animal groups. I suspect there really are some alpha type males, the natural (sometmes charismatic) leaders who shine in a particular set of circumstances. Think Bill Clinton in a legislative context versus him probably not being the guy you’d look to for leadership when landing at Omaha Beach on D-day.
But the most common references I come across about the whole alpha male thing as applied to human groups is about imagined or fantasy pecker order — delusional anonymous posters in a blog commnents section deriding those who disagree with them as betas yada yada yada.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Matt, I’m not convinced this says what you think it says. If you notice, he says the term is perfectly legitimate applied to the top of a hierarchy in a “mixed” pack that contains unrelated animals.
Now, this is uncommon in wolves (who tend to form packs based around nuclear families), but common in primates. So if you consider that broader human communities are sort of like the case of “packs” with unrelated animals, the term “alpha” could still legitimately used for humans.
On the OTHER hand, there’s been a lot of research into primates that shows that the characteristics we ascribe to “alpha” and “beta” members of ape packs are incorrect. One old assumption was that the “alpha” male was the breeder, and the lesser “beta” males didn’t breed (much); this has been part of the whole derogatory sexist trope of using these words in humans. But with the advent of DNA testing, primatologists have been able to figure out that these lower status males actually have MORE offspring than the leaders, presumably because the leaders spend a lot of time defending the pack, time that the lower status males can spend with the females.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Which is to say, the term is probably not ridiculous to apply to humans (since we have males that are the top of the social hierarchy), but that using the term by analogy with the primate role of “alpha male” as “high status male that gets all the females” is incorrect.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
This is utter and complete bullshit. As an etymological matter, perhaps it’s the case that the specific usage of “alpha” to refer to a dominant in a social grouping of animals originated with wolf research, but that’s of no real consequence and certainly has no bearing on whether a) theories of dominance in social groupings originated from wolf studies; and/or b) all such theories are likely to be invalid because it doesn’t apply to wolf studies.
Simply as a matter of elementary logic, your argument—accepting for the moment your incorrect assumption that social dominance theory in animal behaviorism originated from wolf research—that because the theory originated with wolf research that the theory is likely wrong as applied everywhere else…is faulty. Is it false that the Moon revolves around the Earth because it was proven false that the Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth? Does the fact that Greek atomic theory is false mean that modern atomic theory is false?
More to the point, unlike in the case of wolves, there is no similar revisionism with regard to social dominance theories in primates—much more closely related to humans than wolves and therefore far more relevant to your overeager desire to use this specific case as an argument against any possible similar social dominance theory as applied to humans.
Also, even among canines, social dominance theory is uncontested with regard to hyenas.
What relevance this does have to most people is with regard to theories of dog training and dog/human relationships. The “alpha” theory is probably wrong with regard to dogs. It would be a good thing if more dog owners knew this.
But if you don’t have a fucking clue about any of the science involved, then don’t attempt to use scientific results as discussed in the popular media (or on YouTube!) as fodder for your political program, whether it be sociobiological, anti-sociobiological, or otherwise.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
You didn’t know that?
Where did you go to school again?
August 9th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
“No. Concept of “Alpha” male originated with the study of wolves and has been mis-applied to other species, including humans. If it was wrong in the first place, chances are it is wrong in the other cases, derived from it.”
Hold on. It would be a mistake to overgeneralize these findings. The video is explicitly about wolves, and Mech’s intention is simply to correct some of the mistaken beliefs people once held regarding wolf social hierarchies.
But this does not contradict the existence of alpha males in other species. In the video, Mech clearly does not reject the overall use of the term; he only rejects it’s application to wolves. A lot of biologists have observed this phenomenon in other species (for instance, Chimpanzees), and the fact that wolf packs are actually lead by a dominant breeding pair doesn’t really have anything to do with primate social order.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Hyenas are not canids, Keith. And with hyenas, it is a function of birth order/lineage and gender, not alpha personality type. Females always outrank males, and the youngest child of the matriarch outranks any older child, etc.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
If the model for human behavior is somehow validated by the legitimacy of the wolf model, that’s one thing. But it’s just as likely that the model for wolf behavior was a projection from existing assumptions about human behavior.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Roissy bait.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Re: No. Concept of “Alpha” male originated with the study of wolves and has been mis-applied to other species, including humans. If it was wrong in the first place, chances are it is wrong in the other cases, derived from it.
What the F*ck? This is utterly absurd. Are Mr. Harold and Mr. Yglesias contesting the existence of dominance hierarchies in general? In elephant seals, for example? Or in gorillas?
The video is specifically about wolves, and has nothing to say about the existence of dominance hierarchies (often quite savage and brutal ones) in many other social mammals.
Keith Ellis is right- I suspect Mr. Yglesias is trying to make an ill-concealed point about ‘gender’, and in so doing is bastardizing a bit of animal behavior research that he doesn’t really understand.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Ah, well. This is what I get for letting myself get pissed off about someone else’s egregious overreach…I overreach.
Sort of like the whole “correcting someone else’s spelling/grammar on the web” thing. Mea culpa.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
This does, however, again give evidence that Cesar Milan is 20yrs out of date and should not be taken as an “expert”.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Paul might have spoken, or at least wrote Latin, seeing as he was a citizen, but Peter and everyone else in the eastern half of the Empire would have spoken, written and thought in Koine.
Yeah. In addition, there’s really not a lot of proof that Simon Peter ever even made it to Rome or did anything significant there. The Catholic Church retroactively put him there to stamp out all the competing Christian sects and establish its authority over Christianity. (As I often have said, the early history of Christianity is a real mess and there is very little we know about it, and what we do know is enough to establish that the “official” story is quite false.)
So it is quite doubtful that Simon Peter, who was a poor fisherman from the Middle East, ever spoke Latin fluently.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Mech is the guy on wolf behavior. His work was absolutely essential in USFWS’s reintroduction efforts in Yellowstone and North Carolina so I don’t doubt that he’s correct.
That said, the alpha male concept was almost always misapplied as used to describe other mammals, so whether or not it is falling out of favor as to canid behavior really has nothing to do with whether or not it can be applied to human behavior, so there’s no real point to be made about “gender” (by which I assume MY means human gender) here.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Re: In addition, there’s really not a lot of proof that Simon Peter ever even made it to Rome or did anything significant there.
Since very ancient times it was claimed the Peter was martyred at Rome under Nero. As there is no evidence against this claim, and it most certainly does not qualify as an “extraordinary claim” requiring extraordinary proof, I see no reason to doubt it.
I do agree though that Peter probably had no more than smattering of Latin, at best. This would not have made his visit in Rome diffcult: the Greek writer Plutarch lived there for many years without ever finding it necessary to learn Latin.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
A lot of arrogant hostility to Matt, especially by Keith Ellis. The original post seems good to me. I don’t find the point overstated. And the commentary about “how science works” is fine.
August 9th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The original post seems good to me. I don’t find the point overstated.
That’s because there was no explicitly stated point. For example, when Matt says “people should drop the idea” the reader is left to wonder drop *which* idea? The idea that leaders of wolf packs achieve their dominant position through aggressive behavior, or the cliche that social groups often have dominant males?
August 9th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
The “alpha male” concept gets badly translated as a political metaphor, usually applied for conservative or militaristic purposes. The original post is an effort to push back on the metaphor by showing that even at its origin, the “alpha male” concept does not mean what the people using it are implying.
Shorter Yglesias: Outdated research from animal studies does not accurately describe human social organizations, which are very complex.
August 9th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Also, Pluto is not a goddamn planet.
August 9th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Shorter Greg Abbott: I don’t know what I’m talking about.
August 9th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Re: The idea that leaders of wolf packs achieve their dominant position through aggressive behavior, or the cliche that social groups often have dominant males?
The correct answer would be to drop A), but I suspect that Mr. Yglesias and other second-wave feminists, like Mr. Esper above, want us to drop B).
August 9th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Part of Matt’s genius, it seems, is to say very little and conjure up all sorts of nastiness. I like it.
On a related wolf note, in the early 90’s I used to visit to this place called Wolf Hollow, in Ipswich, Mass. Still there, apparently.
http://www.wolfhollowipswich.org/
At the time, it was a fairly large wolf enclosure containing perhaps 15-18 wolves and hybrids -a pack. It was run by a man and women.
When the woman entered the enclosure, she was treated as a mid-level sibling by the wolves. She was shown lots of love but little respect. The low-ranking wolves jostled her around, pushing her with their muzzles and pulling her by her jacket and jeans. Playful activity, but fairly rough. When encountering the breeding couple it was required that she show great deference with her body language. But mostly the breeding couple ignored her.
When the man entered the enclosure, play activity stopped. All the wolves moved quietly aside, heads slightly bowed and bodies low, except the breeding pair. In what reminded me of a revue of some kind, the breeding male sauntered over, rose and put his forelegs on the man’s shoulders, stared him the eye, then opened his jaws and gently touched the man’s face with his teeth. Satisfied, he dropped down, moved aside, and breeding female moved in and repeated the exact same teeth to face gesture.
The man explained that in the beginning, he too had been treated by the pack as a mid-level sibling. But on a daily basis, for many months, he peed above the height of the breeding male’s markings. He became the pack’s top marker, whether they liked it or not, and a new status was required. The man believed the breeding pair had no choice but to consider him a coequal, and in a comprise, bequeathed to him the honored title of grandfather, or elder statesman, of the pack.
August 9th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
One of the best political thrillers ever: Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household. From 1939.
August 9th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
On the topic of the conservatism of science, here is a good article by Krugman explaining how a lack of conservatism in economists is a big reason for our current economic woes. Of course, its probably an open question whether macroeconomics is even a science (I would say probably not, at least not yet.)
On the subject of “alpha male”, how about we throw it into the bin of overused cliches that rely on debunked science, along with the “boiled frog”, and never speak of it again?
August 9th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Changing the subject to monkeys—one study was done many years ago, in which it was discovered that the monkey that became the alpha-male had more testosterone than the losers in the big alpha-male contest. It was assumed that that meant that the male with the most testosterone won.
Later, another team repeated the experiment, but measured the testosterone levels of the monkeys before and after the big contest. Turns out that the monkey with the initial lower levels won. After that, his testosterone level went up, and the losers’ went down. Seems that the alpha-male is chosen by the group. They back down when he charges them and makes threatening gestures.
Lesson: Don’t back down.
August 9th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Jon:
The catholic church certainly claims that, but given there is actually not a shred of actual evidence that simon peter actually went to rome, let alone that he served as the first bishop of rome (a claim also made by “tradition”).
Remember, “tradition” is just another word for “things that someone made up along time ago”. The church had a huge incentive to make this up because they were seeking power and needed to tie their organization back to jesus. That is a far more likely explanation than that simon peter made it to rome, served in a very important position there, and left no evidence that he was ever there.
August 9th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Boy, it looks like I should have not whipped out that one-liner in response to Adam’s one-liner, as it appears to have derailed the conversation. Be that as it may. Dilan, I suspect that JonF is going to controvert you before long, but I will just point out that you have the wrong end of the stick here. The tradition that Peter was the bishop of Rome was eminently _not_ invented to give more pre-eminence to Rome, because it predates the claims of papal primacy by many centuries. Rome was, for the first half-millenium, just one among many Christian centers- Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch- but from very early on, before the concept of papal primacy had ever been thought of, it was more or less agreed by clerics across the empire that St. Peter and St. Paul had been martyred at Rome.
Irenaeus (who was a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna, who was in turn a disciple of St. John) attests to this, as does Clement of Rome, Papias (another disciple of St. John), Ignatius of Antioch (around 110 AD) and many others. You could dismiss this all as a conspiracy, I suppose, but I’m not sure why you would. Incidentally, neither JonF nor I are Catholics. The idea that St. Peter served at Rome is very solidly based in tradition, and can’t really be argued with- what Anglicans and Orthodox do take issue with is whether St. Peter was pre-eminent among the apostles, whether his heirs were also pre-eminent, and what pre-eminence actually means.
Moreover St. Peter’s own Epistle suggests that he was at Rome:
“By Silvanus, a faithful brother unto you, as I suppose, I have written briefly, exhorting, and testifying that this is the true grace of God wherein ye stand. The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son.” (Babylon meaning, of course, Rome).
He didn’t spend very _long_ there, of course, as he is said to have been martyred there in the persecution under Nero in the mid-60s.
August 9th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Keith is making a lot of assumptions here. All I said was:
I never said one word about social dominance or social hierarchy. What I simply said was that the originator of the term himself, who coined it from his study of wolves, says that it does not apply to wolves (in most circumstances) and that therefore it probably does not apply to other species.
Social hierarchies in people are not explained by the behavior of wolves or baboons. And I still think “Alpha male” is a stupid, reductive, and unfortunate term that conjures up visions of muscle-bound gladiators from comic books and is not what we ought to be thinking of in someone we admire or would wish for a leader.
As for Matt he was admiring the ability of a scientist to admit that he was wrong, which is indeed admirable and is one of the things we would admire in a leader.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Seriously? You’ve never watched a nature show
August 10th, 2009 at 1:01 am
Hector:
1. You will not find too many non-christian historians who accept that there is any evidence that simon peter made it to rome. there is not a single person who ever CONTEMPORANEOUSLY attested to his presence there.
2. Saying that christian authorities invented crap (which they did) to win power struggles is not a “conspiracy theory”. It is what just about every non-christian historian, and plenty of christians, believe happened.
3. The reality is that nobody has the first idea of who these biblical characters really were. We have some idea they existed (though they might have been composites) and saul of tarsus is pretty well developed but beyond that its all “faith and tradition” which isn’t history.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:51 am
Also, as for the Epistles of Peter, that is another example of “tradition” meaning “BS that somebody made up”. There is no evidence that Peter wrote his epistles; most Biblical historians believe that the First Epistle was written after he died, and just about everyone agrees the Second Epistle was written by someone else.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Beta males are the pool-boys of the primate world.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Dilan,
No, there isn’t any contemporaneous Roman testimonies of St. Peter having gone to Rome, but one can’t expect that there would be. Christianity was a small religion during the first century and did not attract the attention of the Roman authorities until the second century. As for the epistles of Peter, as a Christian I accept sacred tradition as a (generally) reliable guide, so I believe that the letters are what they purport to be: divinely inspired testimony either from Peter or from associates of his writing in his name.
Sacred tradition (by which I mean the writings and practices of the apostles and church fathers, as they have been handed down to us) isn’t infallible any more than Scripture is, but it is as authoritative a guide as Scripture, and if you accept one there’s no reason not to accept the other. You can choose (and I think you do) to believe it’s all ‘made up’, but that view has, I think, its own contradictions. If you accept any of the Christian moral teachings (which I think you do- at least you’ve expressed some admiration for the teachings of Jesus before) then you’re already conceding that you think sacred tradition has _some_ authority, and if you trust them on matters of moral teaching then it raises the question, why should they not be trusted on matters of history in which they were in a position to know the truth? Put differently, why believe that Jesus even existed, or that his teachings have any merit, if you don’t credit sacred tradition _at all_?
In any case, this somewhat besides the point. As I pointed out, the question is whether the tradition about Peter’s martyrdom at Rome was ‘invented’ to justify the claim that Rome was the unique center of the Church. And there is no way you can credibly claim that, because _no one_ around 110 AD was making claims of Papal primacy or Roman primacy. The belief in Roman primacy arose long _after_ the belief that Peter went to Rome, so the tradition about Peter could not possibly have been invented to justify Roman primacy.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:38 am
[...] Mech on misunderstandings about “alpha males” that resulted from his research on wolves in the 1960s [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Hector:
There’s a lot of gobbledygook and misdirection in your comment, but the bottom line is you concede there is no actual historical evidence that simon peter made it to rome.
As for the rest, you make 3 really bad errors:
1. You can say you accept church tradition, which is fine (I wouldn’t expect you not to) but that doesn’t mean such traditions had an immaculate conception. The church was run by human beings motivated by self interest, just like every other enterprise (the sex abuse scandals recently demonstrated this). If you choose to believe church tradition, you should have no illusions that this is the same as verifiable history.
2. The argument that since I think jesus was admirable and got some things right means that I have to accept his “authority” is fallacious. Where jesus’ teachings are supported by reason and borne out by experience, I think they have some validity and resonance. But nobody has the type of “authority” you posit, that is, that we are bound to follow the teachings because of the identity of the teacher. I suspect you would get this with respect to non-christian teachers who you admire. Do you think aristotle has “authority” such that you have to believe him? General velasco?
3. Again, we know little about early christianity. But we do know there were competing centers of power (rome, jerusalem, antioch) pretty early on and that the roman empire was interested in getting control over it well before 110 ad; we also know there were struggles about the “jewishness” of christianity which played out regionally. So there’s reason to think that even in 110, it could benefit those who favored the position of the bishop of rome to argue that the rock upon which the church would be built was set down in rome.
In any event, the broader point is that there is no evidence that this happened and no reason to think that church traditions are accurate. It’s all faith in the end.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Re: There’s a lot of gobbledygook and misdirection in your comment, but the bottom line is you concede there is no actual historical evidence that simon peter made it to rome.
What? Yes there is historical evidence, if you accept Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch, and Tertullian as trustworthy sources. I said there was no contemporaneous testimony, but that’s the case for a great deal of historical events.
We actually know quite a bit about the early Christian history, including about the nature of various dissenting schools of thought (Marcionism, Manichaeanism, the Ebionites, the Arians, etc.). The orthodox church wrote a lot of polemics against these schools of thought, and we can infer a lot about them from the writings of their opponents. We’ve also discovered a fair number of books by these heterodox schools of thought, and by comparing them with the orthodox works we can infer a fair amount about what they thought.
If the tradition about Peter was invented to justify Roman primacy, then there is no reason why clerics and theologicans outside Rome would have bought into the tradition. They could just as well have argued that St. Peter _really_ went to Alexandria or Ephesus. Irenaeus didn’t live in Rome, nor did Ignatius. On the contrary, there was _never_ a tradition (among _anyone_) that St. Peter was martyred anywhere but Rome. The early Christians differed about a great deal, but I’m not aware that there was much disagreement about the _history_ of the apostles. On the contrary, most Christians (mainstream and orthodox) agreed that St. Bartholomew went to Armenia, St. Mark to Egypt, St. Thomas to India, St. Peter to Rome, etc. The fact that people who disagreed on a lot of theological matters agreed about the history of St. Peter indicates that that history is probably fairly reliable.
What _would_ count as historical evidence, in your eyes, that St. Peter went to Rome?
August 10th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Hector:
Considering that the guy was claimed to be Bishop of Rome, a church record would do it. Or a couple of contemporaneous accounts of other people meeting him in Rome, or him spreading the gospel there, or being arrested there, or whatever.
Look, one of the things lurking behind this is that even the proof of Jesus’ existence is fairly thin. I don’t buy the “Jesus Myth Hypothesis”, but that’s because this person obviously influenced enough other people who wrote about him that the probability that some person existed who they are all referring to is quite high. But that doesn’t mean we really have a lot of historical details about his life– we don’t; what we have is third-hand accounts.
And so it is with Peter. You’d have us believe that an inauthentic letter, third-hand statements of people who lived 40 years later and never met the man, and the statements of a Church that has deliberately lied and abused its powers regarding numerous matters over the course of 2000 years to advance its own power constitute evidence that Simon Peter went to Rome. (Indeed, the Church now claims that Peter’s bones are under St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, but they won’t let any independent academic inspect the alleged “bones”! Talk about dishonesty!) No, Hector, that’s faith.
You would be shocked how little we ACTUALLY know about these characters (other than, perhaps, Saul of Tarsus, who left a pretty extensive paper trail), how they lived, what they stood for, who they associated with, and where they were. What we “know” is pure faith. Jesus could have been just about anything given the scarcity of actual history about his life, and the same is true of Simon Peter.
If you want a nice comparison, think about how much we know about, say, Geoffrey Chaucer vs. how little we know about the authors of “Beowolf”. In each case, we have texts that we can look at which provide us some information, but in Chaucer’s case we also have a bevy of historical records that tell us a lot about where he was and when and what he was doing and what his life was like. Whereas, with the Beowolf people, we have no idea– we just have the text they left behind.
We assume there was a person named Simon Peter who was a disciple of Jesus. (There may not have even been that, but it’s a legitimate assumption to make.) We know that untrustworthy sources (i.e., Church officials with a 2000 record of lies) make mighty convenient claims about Simon Peter. And we know that those claims started being made long after Peter must have died. Beyond that, we KNOW little more. It’s all a matter of whether you want to convince yourself that you have an encyclopedic knowledge of things that happened 2,000 years ago or not. And believing that you have that sort of knowledge, of course, is ridiculous.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Sorry Matt, most of the modern “alpha male” concept is based on monkeys and the infamous “alpha baboons” of zoology and political snark. That research is quite robust, including neural and biochemical correspondences involving serotonin, etc.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Which Geoffrey Chaucer? the writer or the diplomat?
August 10th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Dilan,
Why do you think the letter is inauthentic? It may have been from the hand of Peter, or from the hand of someone writing in his name- it doesn’t really matter to me, since I accept it as being an inspired work, whoever wrote it. The higher critics typically argue on the basis of literary criticism, which is far from being a science. Let’s hear your own arguments- I’ve heard some of the higher-critical arguments against, say, the idea that St. John wrote the Book of Revelation, and I find them utterly unconvicning. Perhaps you could explain to me why you find them convincing.
The kind of records you’re asking for exist for few people at that date, and certainly not for the members of a small and persecuted religion. We don’t have any contemporary accounts for the life of Alexander the Great or Socrates either, but I suspect you would agree that those people existed and did more or less what they are alleged to have done. If you don’t, then I would consider that pretty silly but at least consistent.
And I’ll say again, many people who had no possible stake in Roman primacy, and who lived in other parts of the empire and traced their spiritual heritage through others of the apostles, were claiming at a very early date that St. Peter lived at Rome.
August 10th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Let’s hear your own arguments- I’ve heard some of the higher-critical arguments against, say, the idea that St. John wrote the Book of Revelation, and I find them utterly unconvicning. Perhaps you could explain to me why you find them convincing.
It isn’t that. I have no idea if the same person (who may not even have been named John) wrote the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation. Neither do you. You just have an unreliable tradition that says it, and a bunch of biblical scholars who go both ways but who don’t have a lot of evidence to go on.
The kind of records you’re asking for exist for few people at that date, and certainly not for the members of a small and persecuted religion. We don’t have any contemporary accounts for the life of Alexander the Great or Socrates either, but I suspect you would agree that those people existed and did more or less what they are alleged to have done.
Well, Hector, there’s a big jump between “these people existed” and “we know quite a lot of details of their lives”. And those are the blanks that unreliable and influenced-by-liars “tradition” fills in. Alexander the Great didn’t have a cult dedicated to his veneration who spent 2,000 years propagandizing on his behalf and filling in all sorts of “details” in his life that may or may not have happened. (Socrates had Plato, and therein lies the same problem– we really have no idea how much of what we attribute to Socrates came from Socrates and how much from Plato.)
Part of your problem, Hector, is you really don’t seem to understand that historians have a hard time piecing together details of the lives of people who lived 200 years ago, let alone 2,000. Or you know it, but you exempt your own religion’s truth claims from it. Now, again, I wouldn’t expect otherwise– but my real beef with you is that you won’t admit it’s just faith, i.e., belief without evidence.
I don’t find Christians (or other religious folks) absurd– but I do find Christians who constantly pretend that their faith is a matter of evidence and “proof” to be absurd. If you don’t understand what faith is and why it isn’t a matter of evidence, you really are beyond help, Hector.
And I’ll say again, many people who had no possible stake in Roman primacy, and who lived in other parts of the empire and traced their spiritual heritage through others of the apostles, were claiming at a very early date that St. Peter lived at Rome.
All of those people lived decades after Simon Peter died and had no firsthand knowledge of the subject, and you really have no idea whether they had a motive to place him in Rome.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Dilan,
I think that church tradition is a pretty reliable source in general. As reliable as Scripture, and as reliable as natural reason. It’s one leg of the proverbial three-legged stool.
More generally, I think that if several testimonies from people 50-150 years removed from the events in question, who were widely geographically separated, and who had no particular reason to all ‘invent’ the same idea, all happen to agree with each other on some point of history, and if no serious contemporary challenges to that testimony arise, then it’s likely that there is something to those testimonies.
I mean, look, the early Christians disagreed on just about _everything_. They disagreed on the value of the material world, on sexual morals, on economic morality, on whether eating meat and drinking wine were OK, on who had created the world, on the origin of evil, on the nature of the devil, on the nature of Christ. It isn’t hard to learn about some of these heterodoxies, either by reading some of the surviving heterodox scriptures or by reading the writings of their opponents and filtering them with a critical eye. One thing they _didn’t_ disagree on is where St. Peter lived. I’m not aware that _anyone_, either orthodox or heretic, ever disputed that St. Peter went to Rome, or proposed that he lived somewhere else. Let’s do what Chesterton proposed, and try to figure out the truth by looking at ‘the witness of the heretics’. Marcion was probably the greatest dissenting Christian of them all, certainly the first major threat to orthodoxy. He went to Rome to spread his faith, and tried to convert the church of Rome. Now, why would he do that? Why not stay in Turkey, where he was from? Doesn’t it suggest to you that Rome was already seen as some kind of ‘center’?
Look, I have no dog in the fight over Roman primacy- I’m not Catholic, I disbelieve in Petrine primacy or papal primacy, and I argue about these issues sometimes with Catholics. That said, in the absence of any evidence that St. Peter lived anywhere else, and in the presence of unbroken and pretty much unchallenged church tradition since 110 AD, it seems to me likely that he did go to Rome. And no, I certainly don’t think there is ‘proof’ of the matter, or that it doesn’t take a certain kind of faith. It does- if you don’t consider the church fathers trustworthy, then you’re unlikely to be convinced. What I do argue is that while you are free to claim that St. Peter never went to Rome, and that I can’t prove you wrong, it seems to me much less likely than the alternative.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Actually, Dilan, scratch the bit about Marcion. It doesn’t prove anything but that Rome was a center among other centers, and Marcion could have gone anywhere- many did. It also reminds me of the insufferable arguments some people make in favor of Roman primacy.
I’m not, really, trying to get you to agree that St. Peter went to Rome, and I’m not claiming that there is proof. What I claim is that there is some evidence for the proposition, however questionable or dubious you consider the source, and there isn’t much evidence against (i.e. there is no testimony from 50-100 years later that claims he was at Alexandria or Carthage). Make of that what you will: ultimately it comes down to whether you think the church is a reliable source, which I (generally) do.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:16 am
It’s a testament to the readers here that one boneheaded post by the always far to credulous blogger can generate such an informative discussion.
Subtract Matt and we’d have an interesting site.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:52 am
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