A little while ago Vivek Ramaswamy (now banished to Ohio) resurrected an ancient culture war. Once thought forgotten, this vicious war reared its head again and threatened to draw the old battle lines. For a brief moment he rekindled the jock vs nerd wars of the 80s to 00s.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.”
He chose his side and launched an attack. The nerd is superior. The nerd will bring greatness to America. The jock is not up to the task of leading America into the 21st century and its cultural hegemony must be ended. The long reign of Saved by the Bell’s Zach and Slater must end! The Urkels shall inherit the earth.
The truth is we are ready for a new era. Vivek is wrong. He’s an aging millennial stuck in the bygone era of his youth. He’s a Japanese soldier stuck on an island fighting a war that ended 20 years ago. Though the animosity is still there between the old rivals, the truth is we are ready to transcend it. This is the age of the guy who is, as C.S. Lewis might have put it, Jock to the nth and nerd to the nth: a jock-nerd.
The Integrated Jock-Nerd
The best are neither jock nor nerd, but those who become both. Ironically, this is a more ancient archetype than the jock vs nerd wars.
The Qualities of the Nerd and Jock
Star Trek has always offered excellent examples of this integrated character and Captain Kirk is one of the best. He’s athletic, trained in martial arts (poor 60s television stunts aside), commanding, not afraid to get rough and get roughed up (his torn uniforms can attest to this). He was also considered a walking encyclopedia of information on starships, how they work, and was clearly well-read on the classics and philosophy. Shatner even took inspiration from Alexander the Great as "the athlete and the intellectual of his time" when playing Kirk.
Indiana Jones is another excellent example. A highly educated archaeology professor and leather jacket wearing Nazi punching machine.
Outside of fiction we could look at someone like Henry Cavill who is both tremendously fit, has played superman and secret agents in movies, and loves Warhammer, World of Warcraft, and nerdy stuff. There’s also Niels Bohr, the nerd who created the model of the atom and played soccer. The techbros seem to understand this. It’s why once nerdy Jeff Bezos went chad and Mark Zuckerberg took up MMA fighting.
If you’re more artistically inclined as a nerd you could look at Jack Kirby, comic book artist who worked with Stan Lee and was the original artist for early editions of heroes like Thor, Hulk, X-Men, Ant-Man, and the Fantastic Four among many others. He was an army scout during World War II and after the war had a… reputation.
“He always told his war stories,” Sakai remembers in the new oral history We Told You So: Comics as Art (Fantagraphics, 2016) by Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean. “They were different stories, but it always ended with him killing four Nazis. He hated Nazis.”
“…Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America’. To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived.”
Kirby: King of Comics
“The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I'd beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it.”
Jack Kirby
Jock behavior is a lot more than just having physical capabilities. It’s the attitude and character that make someone a jock. They have courage and confidence to do things in physical and social spaces. You don’t have to be as blessed in body for this as you might think. For example, from what I could find, Jack Kirby was only 5’2”.
Another way of thinking of it would be Yukio Mishima’s conception of sun vs night. Mishima is… controversial to say the least, but he captures the jock vs nerd well and it’s clear that he, an author nominated five times for the Nobel prize in literature, and a body builder who led a (very short-lived) coup against the Japanese state is someone who integrated both.
Mishima’s conception of sun and night is far more complex than what I can write here, but it goes something like this:
The night is for intellectualism, dependence on words and symbols, lonely, hidden and possibly even cowardly. Those of the night become physical wrecks of pale skin and saggy bodies.
The sun is for physical strength and beauty, doing deeds in the world instead of relying on symbols, and having the courage to show yourself and do things in the open air and with other people. Those who are of the sun are fit, healthy, confident and courageous.
Although Mishima is making the night sound terrible here the fact is that Mishima was a novelist of the night throughout his life, and then later adopted acts of the sun. He did integrate them both.
Speaking of integration, this is all very Jungian. Integrating the shadow was something Carl Jung argued was necessary for the individual to become whole. The shadow is that side of you that is repressed and denied. The nerd represses their desire to be the athletic and audacious, and the jock represses their intellectual and studious side as a pathetic withdrawal from what’s important in life. Perhaps Vivek repressed his shadow, developed ressentiment, and determined that the qualities of the jock are not just “not for him” but are bad altogether and should be rejected by all. It’s sour grapes, “I didn’t want to be like one of those jocks anyway.”
Ressentiment
The source of that ressentiment and sour grapes between the jock and nerd is partly from what is probably the mistaken belief that we all have a sort of RPG character creation system where our attribute points are allocated. If I allocate my points into my body I now have no traits left for intelligence. But that’s not how we work at all. Having a good body does nothing to take away from your mind.
Having said that, there is a factor that does limit all of us: time. We do have to choose which activities we devote our time to, but if we don’t waste our time we’ll usually find enough to be good at both the jock and nerd domains. In fact, the most successful people are often good at both.
“Evidence suggests that increasing physical activity and physical fitness may improve academic performance and that time in the school day dedicated to recess, physical education class, and physical activity in the classroom may also facilitate academic performance.
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Executive function and brain health underlie academic performance. Basic cognitive functions related to attention and memory facilitate learning, and these functions are enhanced by physical activity and higher aerobic fitness.”
The classic American jock is a sports player. Sports are a low stakes method for people to experience competition, success, failure, teamwork, drive, humility, and hard work. They build character through fierce competition, and they gain confidence in themselves through their achievements. Developing this kind of character is good for everything in life including intellectual domains.
So no, being a basement dwelling nerd who thinks he is somehow more intelligent because he is not focused on his body is wrong. If anything, by not focusing on both body and mind he’s likely not reaching his full intellectual potential either.
Interests
So how does someone live a life where they’ve integrated the jock and nerd? It’s about priorities and interests. Finding the time to embody both is difficult. You only have so much time in a day so finding enough to devote to both your jock and nerd endeavors can be difficult. Every hour you spend playing lacrosse (“pretty tough on the glutes”–Archer), is an hour you aren’t coding an Uber that takes your laundry to the laundromat.
But the reality is most of us probably do actually have the time to embody both. We just struggle with our revealed preferences. Every week you might want to play lacrosse for 3 hours, and code your Uber app for another 3, but your revealed preferences end up being doom scrolling social media for 6 hours every night. So really it’s about interests and priorities. If someone is interested and truly prioritizes being physically fit and studying they will find the time to do those things.
Interests are a funny thing though. A nerd with no interest in lacrosse probably won’t succeed at it even if they have that audacious spirit in them. The integrated jock-nerd has to actually have genuine interests in both sides. Our interests aren’t only things we’re born with. They develop through our experiences, cultural context, stories we consume, and role models. So the arts play an important role here, and we become a reflection of them to some degree. If the arts are separating the jock and nerd archetypes then we ourselves are more likely to separate as well. People often use stories and their characters as models for their own lives and ways of thinking (perhaps this is connected with our evolution as a story-driven species).
So if we want more people to integrate the jock and nerd archetype we need the arts to integrate them as well.
There is another piece of the puzzle though that explains why so many of us have revealed preferences that are clearly unhealthy and don’t give us the time and energy to devote ourselves to both jock and nerd pursuits: opportunity for success. If someone feels the opportunity to succeed in a given endeavor is not there, then they are not likely to devote much time to it. This captures one of the core psychological necessities that lay the foundation for the jock-nerd: audacity.
The jock-nerd has an audacious side to them where they are willing to try activities that are radically different, and try to succeed even when they have little to no assurance they could. If you’re traditionally a nerd but are audacious enough to get into lacrosse, and try and fail and try and fail until you start to see improvements then you’re on your way to integrating with your jock side.
Without that audacity or some feeling they can succeed, people are likely to give up trying and will fall back to their already established patterns and interests. The integration of the jock and nerd will remain unfulfilled.
Opportunity
Despite so many denying their other side I think there is an underlying desire in many for this integration below the surface. Why else would so many basement dwelling nerds be into video games and superhero movies featuring physical jock heroes doing very jock things? Perhaps because they feel they don’t have the opportunity to practice and achieve their jock interests they live them out vicariously in simulation.
Certainly modern society does not offer as many opportunities to live a heroic jock life as it used to. The opportunities just aren’t there. Wars used to be far more common along with the need for feats of strength just in daily life. The opportunity to be a heroic jock was everywhere and even the nerds had their chances at it. The ancient Greeks for example were a blending of the jock and nerd par excellence. Even the nerdy, annoying gadfly of Athens, Socrates, had been a soldier in the Athenian army during the Peloponnesian war.
His student, Plato had much to say about this–that the virtuous person was a blending of the two:
“It’s the person who makes the best blend of physical exercise and culture, and applies them to the mind in the right proportions, whom we should really describe as virtuoso and as having the most harmony in his life”
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“Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.”
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“In order for man to succeed in life, the gods provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, a person can attain perfection.”
Plato
I don’t think anyone could say that the ancient Greeks suffered from mediocrity by focusing on both instead of devoting their attention to one or the other. They had tremendous achievements as both simultaneously.
Fast forward to today though and the opportunities for jock achievements are more limited. It’s mostly in the realm of sports, which is fine, but still limited. Or it’s posting thirst pics and presenting yourself as some kind of jock content creator on social media, which is limited and perhaps not so fine at times. The old days when the educated, “decent chap” of the British Empire–another blending of the two–could travel the world in search of adventure and use his education to guide him is long passed. Churchill was probably one of the last examples of this type–a soldier who fought in multiple wars, escaped a prison camp in South Africa, invented the tank, wrote thousands of pages of essays and history books, and led a nation through the darkness of war.
If the truly healthy, full, and virtuous person is someone who integrates the jock and nerd then isn’t it in the best interests of civilization to create the opportunities for people to practice both? I hope this doesn’t mean we need wars, but at the very least it likely means we need frontiers to explore–places for people to be jock adventurers who are educated, well-read, and intellectual simultaneously. Scrolling back up to see Captain Kirk in this article captures this. I think Gene Roddenberry knew at some level this was necessary.