New York Diary

Power to the People?

I was asked today who my heroes were. (Actually, the question was originally, "Can you tell us one of your heroes from the 21st century?") I couldn't name anybody. It's appalling.

Certainly, there are many people I admire greatly--the names Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi were suggested to me, and they certainly fall into the category of great people who did great things. I don't much subscribe to a "Great Man" view of history, though, and this makes naming heroes difficult. I can list several great leaders whom I admire: John McCain, for his convictions and moral uprightness; Bismarck, who managed an amazing excercise in the balance of power and who managed to unify Germany in the 18th C; Washington, who defined what it was to be a democratic President (after the American model); Pericles, the great rhetorician who led Athens through a golden age; and certainly Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi, both of whom managed to radically change their respective political systems to give voice to the unrepresented in society.

The thing is, it's hard for me to think that somebody wouldn't eventually have each done these things. The English and Germans may forever squabble over whether it was Newton or Leibniz who discovered calculus--but the truth remains, in my mind at least, that the state of physics and math was such that the time was right for the development of a mathematics of continuous functions. If it wasn't Newton, it was Leibniz; if it wasn't Leibniz, it was Newton; if it wasn't either of them, I am sure that somebody (or several somebodies) would have come along in a few years' time and worked out the functions anew. And this is how I feel about most of these "heroes": there had to be a first President, and if it wasn't Washington, it would have been somebody else--somebody who would have shaped the Presidency differently, to be sure, but who knows whether or not our country would not be better off for it? The civil rights movement needed to happen, desperately, and the Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a brilliant man and an amazing orater, as well as an excellent organizer. But if he hadn't been there, would the movement still have taken form? I hope so--and I think so, also.

Of course, there must be SOMETHING in these people that makes them the leaders who actually did emerge. It may be that the time was ripe for calculus, or a unified Germany, or whatever, but it still happens that particular individuals were, whether by chance, or motivation, or an accident of birth, on the front lines of those events. I myself have a strong desire to improve the lot of the people in my country and the world at large--and what is this drawing on if not some belief that, at some level, I as an individual actually can make a difference (and perhaps even a large one)?

I'm stumped. I'm thinking. Maybe the point is that we shouldn't overly privilege a view of history that says, "Let us learn about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Louis XIV, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and then we're done with history"--but at the same time we can't forget those people, either. They did, after all, do VERY important things. And perhaps they did them because they were particularly impressive (if not necessarily good) individuals.

posted by Skay @ 12:28 PM