No More Heroes Pt. II

A sequel to a nearly-decade-old essay rant – this time, looking for a way to let go of the idea of the saintly, perfect hero, so that we can focus on the ideas and art worthy of heritage.

It feels like nearly every week brings a new revelation about great thinkers, artists, musicians, or currently popular figures, exposing unseemly aspects of their lives that tarnish the public image of that person. This is inevitably followed by a mass cathartic condemnation of this person and calls for their erasure, deletion from libraries, and the collective consciousness, with the endpoint being an exorcism of this person’s spirit from our agreed canon. The assumption here might be that this description applies only to left-leaning cancel culture. Still, both very recent events as well as countless historical examples show this to be a universal phenomenon, no matter the culture, politics, or religious tradition. We have always been very eager to shed personalities for transgressions, real and imagined. But what makes today’s purges seem so necessary to their participants? On the right, with their soft fascist and religious fundamentalist tilt, we can see that they are not quite as serious, ideologically speaking. It is not so much about the purity of vision as it is about bringing about a pragmatic, albeit nefarious, power-based goal. As such, the ends justify the means. The left, ironically, is home to the more puritanical streak, traditionally and behaviorally more akin to the protestant sects of old. Societies are under immense pressure, and this pressure will only increase. Even if we can tame our technological innovations, the climate will soon turn the dials to such a degree that our political, cultural, and economic standards will all come under strain. Ideas for how to live, what is valuable, and what is worth saving are what is needed. Hero worship has no real place. There are no more heroes because there never were any.

If we were able to encounter the bigger personalities of culture and history like we do people in our everyday life, we might be able to let go of the idea of heroes and the baggage they bring with them. More importantly, we could relegate these “heroes” without having to endure the rituals of self-flagellation and cries for forgiveness that moments of truth surrounding these people usually bring with them. That seems a far way off, because we cling to wanting heroes – literally all of them, from the beginning of time – to somehow be saintly figures, perfect in their humanity, or at the very least, in what we worship them for. If we could find a way to mature, we might develop the faculty for understanding why these people are who they are, that they have put forward ideas or achieved certain things that we find impressive, or headed movements we see as having been important and successful, without feeling the need to drop them and disavow their names as soon as we learn of shortcomings or genuinely horrible behavior. Being able to delineate what is “good” without hero worship and cults of personality could offer much cleaner approaches to projects of all kinds. Separating the art from the artist, a leader from the private person, a great thinker from a parent or friend, should really be the norm. Inspiration should come from anywhere; it all really depends on what ends they are put towards and what they are used to justify, then as now.

We inherited a system, or systems, of worship. They have been there since humans have had stories, fulfilling various roles. Historical, mythical, or religious figures, war heroes, cultural legends, authors, artists – they were always kept pristine in their story. Ironically, as society became more secular through the Enlightenment, our national and everyday heroes were also elevated to the status of holy figures whose carefully curated stories allowed for some faults, but only in relation to their overall perfection. Americans still learned that George Washington never told a lie well into the second half of the 20^th century. Ghandi, as the father of the nation of India, or Mother Theresa, saintly figures worshiped as almost otherworldly in their time and beyond. With some of these figures, we are mature enough to let go of older ideas of untarnished legacy, but with many, bitter disputes will still erupt if anyone tries to bring a charge or even just an insinuation against their person. In this time of overthrow, any defects, shortcomings, and all-out heinous acts are brought against whoever we see as undeserving of our or anybody else’s love and admiration. People across the ideological spectrum will go back to canceling or tarring and feathering old thinkers or artist geniuses as “woke”, proto-fascist, imperialist, all with the same taste as the book burnings of old (as in, Savonarola or Qin Shi Huang). At the moment, the knee-jerk reaction to this defamatory hysteria is to defend this person’s character or even abhorrent behaviors and double down, saying it’s actually okay or, at the very least, trying to relativize. This movement to make everyone either a saint or villain, a bastion of civilization, champion of minority rights, or Hitler before Hitler, leaves us with no nuance and impotent, with no ability to discuss actual ideas, let alone harness them, whether in art or politics.

What is it exactly that we need from these heroes? What are we looking for? What part of us do we demand they speak to or for? Knowing that Gandhi stood up for the rights of South Asians in South Africa in his first civil rights battle, but did not seem to feel the need to do the same for black South Africans, or objected to his dying wife being administered penicillin, but was more than okay with taking it himself, or slept naked with his grand-niece to test his sexual urges, all go a long way to knocking him off his saintly thrown, but do they tell us anything about his role or the effectivity of his methods in bringing about political change in India? Do the recent revelations surrounding Michel Foucault’s predatory behavior and sexual abuse of young boys while living in Tunisia detract from his ideas and concepts and their usefulness in describing certain phenomena or for use in debates? Artistically speaking, people seem to give more leeway to the subjects of controversy. Painters’ works tend to live a somewhat separate life from their creators, though Paul Gauguin has been the focus of some debate (which itself has recently been counter-debated). In music, people in mainstream culture seem to have made their peace with the many genuinely disturbing stories and bizarreness surrounding Michael Jackson. Does the fact that artists such as David Bowie slept with underage groupies throughout the late ‘60s and ‘70s make their musical innovations and influence null and void? This is the age-old separating the art from the artist debate, and it is now something that has spread to every facet of output (or “content” as we now call any human effort). These are not easy questions to answer or conversations to have. They are multifaceted and require nuance and mutual understanding to even discuss.

Historical figures easily fall into this category, with the likes of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Genghis Khan, either being icons in the pantheon of “great men”, nation and empire builders, or bloodthirsty, power-hungry, genocidal sociopaths. Even a Buddha, whose first step on his path to Enlightenment was to bail on his wife and their infant child, or any number of prophets, can be seen to be quite human in their actions. A certain maturity is needed to engage with these personalities, their ideas and actions, and the manifold effects they had, and to discuss them to glean worthwhile insights. On an individual level, this is a personal decision, and one has to make peace with why one takes a certain view, rates a certain idea, or is a fan of a certain artist or public figure, and know how to defend this beyond simple moral-virtue hero worship or excusing figures as “products of their time.” If individual traits come into play in such a discussion, it should be possible to defend your position on why you find it discrediting within a discussion concerning an overarching issue. Then it is up to the other to take this on board or not, and that is then your lot for that discussion. Depending on who is participating in such an exchange and how much is riding on the debate or conversation, it could end up being anything from a simple matter of ego and ruffled feathers to the loss of a potential solution that would be detrimental to a larger group’s well-being.

Right now, we urgently need to move on and kill our heroes to be able to reclaim agency in a tumultuous time and become our own people. If we cannot do this, the childish paradigm of hero worship and vilification will only play into the hands of authoritarians and extremists who are making a major push to define how public discourse takes place. In countries such as Russia and the United States, the effects of these disingenuous stances will take decades to undo. Those two countries, in particular, are emblematic of a universal tradition of worshiping war heroes. Amorphous mass armies of heroes who, in the past, went out and protected their country, who automatically bestow their dignity and virtue onto whoever is serving in those militaries currently. These can either be great struggles, as in the above countries, or smaller ones, be they independence movements or regional conflicts. Personally, I do feel a sense of pride that, for example, my great-uncle fought against Nazi Germany in World War II, or an ancestor of mine fought on the side of the Union in the American Civil War, and as such played a part in ending slavery in the United States. That doesn’t mean that I think that every person in those armies was moved by some great weight of history to stand up against the wrongs of their time. There is a very good chance, if not complete certainty, that my ancestor who fought in the U.S. Civil War held fairly racist views. The first-person accounts of occupations, massacres, or treatments of POWs by either Nazi forces in Europe or Japanese forces in Asia make me, personally, certain that it was right that the Allies fought them, whatever the context. In terms of complexity, I can know that the Allies themselves also committed many war crimes that culminated in the carpet bombing of cities and the dropping of atomic bombs, and still reason that fighting fascist forces was right. I can be repulsed by the homicidal racist violence of Emmett Till’s murder while at the same time knowing that one of his murderers was a veteran of the Battle of Iwo Jima. These are stark examples, but they are meant to show that no hero worship is needed to feel both pride and rage at historical circumstances.

Similarly, as an American, it is entirely within the realm of possibility to be inspired by Malcom X while also feeling deeply unsettled by his antisemitism, or to view Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the US’s great leaders while knowing he had numerous affairs, or to be genuinely in awe of Frederick Douglass while also knowing he was a truly horrible husband to his wife. In culture, huge figures such as Caravaggio can easily be looked at with awe while also knowing he was probably a really horrible person and most definitely a murderer. As a one-time punk kid, I can love 19-year-old Johnny Rotten holding up a mirror to the hypocrisies of 1970s society and simultaneously want to have nothing to do with his lonely, strange, and weirdly culturally xenophobic tendencies over the last decades. The same goes for many once-underground heroes. This can be done because we do it every day with our families, at work, and in our interactions with people. We live with ambiguity; we navigate uncertainty and still have a feeling of remaining true to ourselves and not fighting some eternal battle. The same is very easily possible on a larger scale, and dethroning our heroes is the first step. They are helpful when we are adolescents searching for an identity, but as we grow, we can also learn to let go of our demands of self-spun fictions and face reality.

One of the greatest benefits of letting go of heroes and the expectations placed on them is that you rob all totalitarians and would-be authoritarians of their most useful tool. Being able to discuss, strategize, and execute based on historical and cultural examples allows for flexibility of thought and action that works like epistemological jiu-jitsu on the black-and-white thinking populists often employ to distract and detract from their opponents. Moving to another level offers an advantage as one can shift discourse to a more direct and advantageous level that works towards finding solutions as well as presenting itself, and indeed being, more honest and straightforward, which plays well in a political landscape where almost everyone is used to politicians and all associated with them having ulterior motives. Populists around the world need their heroes and villains; Putin needs people to decry Stalin so that he can label them unpatriotic, Xi needs people to doubt Mao’s legacy or even quietly mention Tiananmen Square so that they can be singled out as being against the people. Likewise, European cultural chauvinists need people to doubt the foundations of Western Enlightenment culture to prove the rabid irrationality of decolonial or leftist discourse, just as much as dyed-in-the-wool socialists need people to uphold “Western Civilization” so that they can point them out as the hypocritical descendants of the racists and misogynists of old. History and ideas disprove all of the actors who try to make us choose a side, and soon enough, our reality will force us to make decisions that will not be looked kindly upon by future generations. It is best to be able to argue, in depth, with knowledge and conviction, as to why we hold the beliefs we do, why they benefit those we say they do, and why they do not come at the cost of others’ well-being.

There are no more heroes because there never were any. There are just humans, and the ideas and art they create that can maybe become worthy of some kind of heritage. Puritanical, quasi-religious devotion to ideologies and their figureheads, or historical icons, is of no use in a world so thoroughly cynical as the one we inhabit today. Clear-minded and honest argumentation, not in the debate-me-bro sense but in the manner of a clarifying conversation within a meaningful relationship, will be a cornerstone for building strategies in our increasingly uncertain future-present. Ideological grandstanding, historical revisionism, hero worship, or cults of personality simply have no place. We carry the views and appreciate the traditions we do because of historical and regional happenstance; they can be interesting to discuss and even valuable to compare in the face of shared challenges, but they don’t necessarily carry weight in the grander scheme of things, especially in today’s globalized and information-flooded world. We might even go so far as to say that those who now invoke or attack heroes and their standing, make claims about civilizations, western or otherwise, are doing so from a disingenuous place and are already pursuing a personal agenda of some sort. Stripping concepts of their holiness, using figures as reference and not justification, can mean a real attempt at discourse and problem-solving. We have moved beyond worship and cynical criticism because the world around us has shifted and, in doing so, it has moved us into another environment. This new world requires us to get real and get real quick.