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No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
In September we read The Peloponnesian War. We saw how great societies can fall. Many of us see our own society falling right now, though we are not at war with a powerful neighbor who has gotten the best of us. We seem to be destroying ourselves, willingly, with great enthusiasm.
What can we do to stop it? Is there some law we could pass to return to greatness? Should a change in party be voted for, or even a new party all together? Surely there must be something we can do.
Thomas Carlyle, writing in the 19th century, had his answer for Great Britain. He doubted that some new law, a change in parties, or anything of the like that could help Britain. He thought that the true problem affecting them stemmed from personal problems, and had only a personal solution.
He saw a society enamored with quacks, and full of problems. He saw a society which no longer valued the heroic in men. His solution is not a law or a change of party, of religion, but a change in the soul of men. To start valuing the heroic, to strive towards the heroic themselves. To cast off quackery and falsehoods and stand up for truth with bravery. Only then could a society become great, to be led by great men; when its citizens would accept nothing less. The cry for change in a land full of quacks replaces one quack with another, but in a land where men truly value the heroic, they cannot be lorded over by quacks and frauds.
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He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in every
different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social business among
men; that the doing of it well, or the doing of it ill, measures
accurately what degree of well-being or of ill-being there is in the
world's affairs. He thinks that we, on the whole, do our Hero-worship
worse than any Nation in this world ever did it before: that the Burns
an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things
considered, a baser and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the
Mahomet a Prophet of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion,
accordingly, that we must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to
do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from
its asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,...
'Hero-worship,' if you will,--yes, friends; but, first of all, by
being ourselves of heroic mind. A whole world of Heroes; a world not
of Flunkies, where no Hero-King _can_ reign: that is what we aim at!
We, for our share, will put away all Flunkyism, Baseness, Unveracity
from us; we shall then hope to have Noblenesses and Veracities set
over us; never till then. Let Bobus and Company sneer, "That is your
Reform!" Yes, Bobus, that is our Reform; and except in that, and what
will follow out of that, we have no hope at all. Reform, like Charity,
O Bobus, must begin at home. Once well at home, how will it radiate
outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak and
work; kindling ever new light, by incalculable contagion, spreading in
geometric ratio, far and wide,--doing good only, wheresoever it
spreads, and not evil.
By Reform Bills, Anti-Corn-Law Bills, and thousand other bills and
methods, we will demand of our Governors, with emphasis, and for the
first time not without effect, that they cease to be quacks, or else
depart; that they set no quackeries and blockheadisms anywhere to rule
over us, that they utter or act no cant to us,--it will be better if
they do not. For we shall now know quacks when we see them; cant, when
we hear it, shall be horrible to us! We will say, with the poor
Frenchman at the Bar of the Convention, though in wiser style than he,
and 'for the space' not 'of an hour' but of a lifetime: "_Je demande
l'arrestation des coquins et des laches_." 'Arrestment of the knaves
and dastards:' ah, we know what a work that is; how long it will be
before _they_ are all or mostly got 'arrested:'--but here is one;
arrest him, in God's name; it is one fewer! We will, in all
practicable ways, by word and silence, by act and refusal to act,
energetically demand that arrestment,--"_je demande cette
arrestation-la!_"--and by degrees infallibly attain it. Infallibly:
for light spreads; all human souls, never so bedarkened, love light;
light once kindled spreads, till all is luminous;--till the cry,
"_Arrest_ your knaves and dastards" rises imperative from millions of
hearts, and rings and reigns from sea to sea. Nay how many of them may
we not 'arrest' with our own hands, even now; we! Do not countenance
them, thou there: turn away from their lacquered sumptuosities, their
belauded sophistries, their serpent graciosities, their spoken and
acted cant, with a sacred horror, with an _Apage Satanas_.--Bobus and
Company, and all men will gradually join us. We demand arrestment of
the knaves and dastards, and begin by arresting our own poor selves
out of that fraternity. There is no other reform conceivable. Thou and
I, my friend, can, in the most flunky world, make, each of us, _one_
non-flunky, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin
with:--Courage! even that is a whole world of heroes to end with, or
what we poor Two can do in furtherance thereof!
This excerpt is in fact not from the book I propose we read this month, but from Carlyle's book Past and Present. I think this excerpt does a wonderful job of framing Hero Worship though.
Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History outlines the lives of many of the great heroes in history. It, to me, was the best intellectual explanation of religion I have ever read.
It outlines how Mohammed was able to take the Arab people, hitherto unremarkable on the world stage, and like a strike of lightning ignite them into a force capable of conquering from Spain to India. How Luther, a poor monk was able to rise up, lead an insurrection against The Church and ultimately win. What was it about these men who were able to accomplish so much with really nothing but their sheer force of will? Carlyle goes on to deeply delve into the essence of the heroic, linking it to the religious, seeing that tapping into the true nature of God's reality provides men with a power to do on this earth a task that seems far beyond the capability of mere mortals.
True heroes fought against great systems, great empires and won. Carlyle explains this and illustrates it beautifully. I hope you will all enjoy reading it. It was quite easy to get enthusiasm for Thucydides, since he is a well-known classic. Carlyle is a bit more obscure today, though surely he is among one of the great writers of the English language. I hope for those of you who have never read him, or perhaps not heard of him, you will give him a chance. The fact that he is not read widely today is more a sign of our hatred of the masculine virility he stands for than the quality of his writing, which is first-class.
Here it is in various ebook formats for free:
https://archive.org/details/thomascarlyleson00carl
Here on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/On-Heroes-Hero-Wor...1481142666
Your local library will hopefully have a copy as well.
I will leave you with some excerpts from the text:
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Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship.
But now if all things whatsoever that we look upon are emblems to us of the Highest God, I add that more so than any of them is man such an emblem...
The young generations of the world, who had in them the freshness of young children, and yet the depth of earnest men, who did not think that they had finished off all things in Heaven and Earth by merely giving them scientific names, but had to gaze direct at them there, with awe and wonder: they felt better what of divinity is in man and Nature; they, without being mad, could worship Nature, and man more than anything else in Nature...
What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown...
No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life...
But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.