Climbing vs. Lifting: Yelling, Ego, and Prejudice

Lately, our philosopher-columnist has noticed a little contempt among climbers for “gym bros.” As more and more bodybuilders wander into climbing gyms to try the sport, it seemed like a good time to think through the welcome they get. A muscular little social drama, somewhere between screaming, Planet Fitness, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

(CC) Sehoon Ye / Unsplash

Bodies and Yells

Fair enough. Plenty of us make noises on the wall that sound closer to animal than human. At the same time, yelling in climbing is widely frowned upon. We yell a lot, but we condemn yelling because it breaks the rule of “fair play.” According to a line often, and perhaps falsely, attributed to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, fair play is “the way of playing the game used by those who know it is only a game and do not get caught up in the game.”

Yelling does exactly the opposite. It forgets that climbing is only a “game,” to use the word of Lito Tejada-Flores, the American climber, filmmaker, and writer. It shows a disproportionate investment in an “useless” activity, to borrow the famous phrase from French alpinist and writer Lionel Terray’s Conquistadors of the Useless. And because it is useless, the activity is supposed to be practiced with a certain detachment—or at least with a convincing performance of detachment.

“Because I know there are people who really yell on purpose to show it’s heavy. It’s about taking up space, marking their territory a little”

A young climber

The person who forgets that, the person who fails to remember that climbing must remain, at least outwardly, just a game, breaks a rule that pushes him outside the group. He is no longer one of us. He becomes the other. In this setting, yelling is always something the outsider does. “We” do not yell, because we know none of this is all that serious, and we do not let ourselves get carried away.

Rental Shoes, Columbus, and Cannibals

But if the yell does not come from us, if it always belongs to the other inside us, then where does it come from? A young climber recently explained it to me this way: “I think some people yell like people at a weight room. I think maybe they come from lifting. Because I know there are people who really yell on purpose to show it’s heavy. It’s about taking up space, marking their territory a little. That definitely exists. But I don’t personally know anyone who does it for that reason.”

There it is again: the yell belongs to the outsider. To the others. To “the lifting people.” Here, they no longer even “yell.” They just open an animal mouth. They “yell to say” something instead of articulating speech like real humans. And they do it “like people at a weight room”: like those others who are not us. The ones who put on a show. The ones who fake it. Unlike us, the real climbers

There is no proof of any of this. But it costs nothing to think it. That is exactly how prejudice works. As Claude Lévi-Strauss shows in Race and History, the tendency to suspect the next tribe over of the most shameful behaviors, to see them as closer to animals than to humans, to describe them as “savages” and “barbarians” or as “earth monkeys” and “louse eggs,” is what we call ethnocentrism. It is, he writes, “the most ancient” and most widely shared attitude in the world.

Every society believes it is superior to the others and sees surrounding peoples as degraded versions of humanity. But Lévi-Strauss also points out that, while this reflex certainly did not spare Westerners, it was above all characteristic of the societies they encountered. So when Western societies believed themselves superior to so-called “primitive” peoples, they were merely “borrowing one of their typical attitudes.” On this point, we are no different from the peoples we contacted—and conscientiously exterminated.

That is how Lévi-Strauss can set all human societies side by side: those that believe they are “civilized” and those supposedly “primitive,” all ironically united by a shared rejection of otherness.

“But if he has a blast and spends his whole life enjoying himself in his blue rental shoes, that’s totally possible. And that’s a lot better than him going to Planet Fitness”

A manager at a major rock climbing chain

The story goes, for instance, that when Christopher Columbus landed on one of the islands in the Antilles and met Taíno people, he asked whether they were alone there. The local people replied that another people lived nearby, but that they should be feared because they were fierce, cruel, and ate human flesh: the Kalinagos, whose name, through slow distortions, eventually gave us the word “cannibal.”

But nothing proves that the Kalinagos actually ate people. After all, they were described that way only through the testimony of their enemies, so we can reasonably doubt the truth of that reputation.

We see the same thing in our own world with lifting and yelling. “Planet Fitness,” like “Kalinago,” starts to function almost like an ethnic label. It gets used to name the whole opposing tribe, the one we want to separate ourselves from, the one we accuse of deviance—yelling, eating people, same basic mechanism—the one we define ourselves against.

“I picture Jean-Baptiste, not especially athletic, 27 years old, dragged by his friends into a climbing session after work,” one manager at a major climbing-gym chain told me. “Maybe he’ll never be a great climber. But if he has a blast and spends his whole life enjoying himself in his blue rental shoes, that’s totally possible. And that’s a lot better than him going to Planet Fitness.”

Basic Instinct

So why the rejection of “Planet Fitness”?

There are probably noble reasons. A critique of consumerism. A critique of modern individualism. All of it in the name of the supposedly communal and humanist values of climbing. But already, we can see a clash of values that is typical of ethnocentrism: on one side, the pure ones, us; on the other, the corrupted ones, them.

There is also the idea that newcomers treat our “art” like any other fitness activity. And that they lack the one thing every community sees as essential: culture. What we accuse them of is not having “climbing culture.” Not knowing anything. Then, by a small slide, we move from the absence of this specific climbing culture to the absence of culture altogether, exactly as Westerners accused other peoples of having no culture simply because they did not share ours.

The yell expresses this perfectly. It makes visible an ignorance of the rules and of fair play, an excessive investment in an activity that is supposed to involve self-control and some distance from one’s own performance, as Olivier Aubel shows in L’escalade libre en France.

But none of this is unusual. Identity is built this way. As anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued with the concept of “schismogenesis,” every human group builds itself in opposition to another. Through small distinctions, through the rejection of otherness, group bonds grow stronger, and each member identifies more deeply with the whole they are supposed to form together.

From that angle, saying “climbing” is a “tribe” is not merely a metaphor. It is almost literal. Quasi-ethnographic. Deep down, climbers treat bodybuilders the way the Taíno people Columbus encountered treated the Kalinagos: with suspicion, prejudice, and slander, all classic signs of primitive ethnocentrism.

We, too, are a small people bound together by our rejection of the other, the ones across the way, the ones who are not like us. We are simply “borrowing one of their typical attitudes.”

We can regret this tendency, and it is probably good to stay aware of it so we can resist it when it appears. But we can also observe it with the distance and irony of an anthropologist. That helps us get down off our boulder a little and realize that, despite appearances, we are not so far from the few survivors still wandering the great Amazon forest—or from “the lifting people.”

Though I do have to admit: I’m not far from thinking they keep some unspeakable culinary secret hidden in their tubs of protein powder.

That said, I would love to know what they say about us when they are among themselves.