|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Event-making Man
| Article
# : |
13988 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
4,545 Words |
| Author
: |
Sidney Hook
Sidney Hook is resident scholar at the Hoover Institution. He
is author of Common Sense and the Fifth Amendment: Paradoxes
of Freedom, and, most recently, Out of Step. |
In ordinary discourse, the connotation of the terms hero and heroic is positive, emotively favorable. No one would regard the question "Who are your heroes and villains?" as awkward. In most contexts the heroic implies the admirable, the praiseworthy, the ideal, a model. To suggest that a genuine villain could be a hero would normally sound like an oxymoron. Historical uses of the word center on some act of distinction or a person, often noble, sometimes even divine, who performs a service for mankind or endures extraordinary torment for the sake of the community. In its most prosaic sense, hero may refer to someone who plays the central role in a novel, play, or operation, a role that can be filled by an individual of any moral character.
There is no difficulty in understanding the meaning of hero and heroic in their variegated emotive senses. Once we know a person's moral values, we can read his characterizations of the heroic status of individuals he is appraising in the specific contexts that occasion his judgments. The difficulty with the popular conception of the hero and heroic begins when the terms are applied to the historical role of individuals, and we begin to evaluate the significance of their activity, their actual effect upon events, regardless of our moral evaluation of their deeds. Almost invariably when the terms hero and heroic are invoked in characterization of historical figures, they figure as part of an explanation--heroes are the great men and women who have left a substantial mark on events. "Great men and women" here refers to individuals who had a momentous causal influence on events, regardless of whether we morally approve of what they did and how they did it. When Lord Acton said, "Great men are almost always bad men," he was not calling their existence or their influence on historical events into question. He was expressing his judgment that the actions that made them great or the specific means they employed were almost always morally repellent.
Once we pose the question about the place of great men and women in history, we can abandon the literature of heroic fable and poetry that adorns the tales of the origin of nations and peoples with the nebulous myths of the past. We are raising questions that are difficult but not always impossible to answer, if we delimit our inquiries to specific persons and their effect on specific events. The rash and untenable view of Thomas Carlyle that all history is the history of great men, good or bad, can be dismissed as obviously inadequate to explain the myriad patterns of social life, the great shifts in the movement of peoples, the conditions of economic production, the emergence of cities, and the vast impersonal infrastructures that limit
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
