Strix
Hero-Bashing
HEROES—like gods, and for broadly similar reasons— were once a necessity to the human race. They were, and with primitive people still are, an inspiration, an example, a source of pride, and their sagas were a sort of tribal heirloom, handed down in each generation by the old to the young as a valuable part of their heritage. They were not regarded as expendable.
Today, when many people find it easy to dispense with a god, the hero's position is less secure. The man who slew a tyrant pr held a pass against odds fulfilled a basic need, for, even at his dimmest and most benighted, homo sapiens has always wanted something in his own image to look up to, and heroes, reminding men of the great things that men can do, were reassuring institutions whose memories were invoked in times of crisis.
The same need hardly exists, at any rate in peace-time, now. Or perhaps it does exist, but is taken care of in different ways. In place of the shadowy, redoubtable, monolithic giants who loomed up out of his tribal past. modern man is surrounded by a teeming galaxy of assorted supermen and superwomen, all ceaselessly competing for his admiration. Cricketers, film stars, athletes, crooners, racing motorists, ballet dancers, tele- vision personalities : the worlds of sport and entertainment provide innumerable fans with a wide variety of idols, and celebrity worship—a cult with an almost infinite variety of sects—is rife throughout the land.
This may partly explain the vogue for iconoclasm which is an unbecoming feature of our age. Living as we do in a sort of Madame Tussaud's, we have ceased to regard all figures on pedestals as sacrosanct. Our hagiological impulses have atrophied, and we have developed a morbid interest in feet of clay. I say 'we,' but perhaps that is rather unfair. Big men are content to leave heroes on their pedestals, and so are little men; but there always seem to be enough of the men in between to set in motion the processes of doubt and denigration which will leave a question mark, if, not a blot, upon the hero's scutcheon.
I remember, from years ago, that one of the few and ill- assorted volumes on the bookshelf of a Hebridean shooting- lodge bore the title Twelve Great and Good Men. I never read it, and I have forgotten the author's name. Who would dream of calling a book anything like that today? Twelve Complex and Equivocal Men would be as near as its modern counter- part might get. All men have their faults, and most human enterprises have, somewhere, a seamy side; the tendency today—well exemplified by recent biographies of T. E. Lawrence and Orde Wingate—is, in the name of objectivity, to concentrate on these. 'It is understood (we sometimes read in reports of exhumations] that certain organs were removed for examination.' A similar preoccupation with what it may be possible to prove unsound or infected characterises the approach of many self-appointed anatomists of heroes.
* * * The odd thing—or one odd thing—is that, while we en- courage, or at least tolerate, the use of our own heroes as Aunt Sallies by private individuals, we find it both ludicrous and unnatural when, in more highly organised countries, heroes are demoted by the State. Almost every other day we read that in Ruritania, Comrade Snoek, the popular and energetic Minister of the Interior, has been unmasked as an enemy of democracy, an Imperialist tool, a deviationist, a running dog of capitalism, a hyena. He has been dismissed from his office and awaits the summary sentence of a People's Court.
Experts are always ready to explain the fall of Comrade Snoek. They tell us that he fell out with his brother-in-law, that he drank, that he alienated the Agrarian-Microcrat ele- ments in the Rudburo, that he made a nonsense of the Goverska Ulitsa project, that he never existed at all.
But the fact remains that Snoek was, while he lasted, a hero. The well-loved dictator of Ruritania paid tributes to him in his lengthy and turgid speeches. Cinemagoers in that country were accustomed to seeing Comrade Snoek, on the news- reels, cutting the first sod on the site of a new salt-mine, being cheered by the walking wounded at a State corrective centre. or being presented with a posy on behalf of the workers at a handcuffs factory. He was, a 'must' for adulation.
To us it seems completely ridiculous that Snoek should have been converted, almost overnight, from a public figure of the utmost eminence to an object of opprobrium. But he is only. after all, getting a brisker, more drastic dose of the sort of treatment which, in the fullness of time, he would almost cer. tainly have been accorded in this country. He has fallen more suddenly, and further, than he would have fallen with us; and the consequences of his fall will be more disagreeable than any amount of posthumous denigration. But we show, I think, a certain lack of perspective in regarding his fate as a kind of fantastic aberration. In Ruritania a firing-squad dis- posed of his legend; in England he would have been lucky if a penetrating reappraisal of his achievements in some sour fellow's book did not, after his death, achieve much the same effect.
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One of the worst occupational hazards of being a modern hero, whether self-made or State-manufactured, must be that your doings become—and remain—news. In the old days. after slaying your dragon, you married the king's youngest daughter and rested on your laurels. You were not immediately involved in a number of activities—such as being interviewed, writing your autobiography, making after-dinner speeches, and advertising ball-point pens—for which you had neither apti- tude nor relish. You were not, in other words, either exploited or encouraged to exploit yourself.
Today fame is a commodity from which money can be made; and perhaps the decline of the hero is really due more to those who try to build him up than to those who seek to knock him down. The limelight does not kill integrity, but it is apt to compromise it. How often, when we are about to meet for the first time someone newly famous, have we not been reassuringly told, 'He's rather a good chap, actually,' the implication being that the modern hero, contaminated by the processes of his acclamation as such, is unlikely to be a good chap? Perhaps the basic trouble is analogous to that on which old - fashioned nannies, contemplating overstocked toy-cupboards. are apt to harp. We have too many heroes of one kind and another, and we should appreciate them more .if, as in the old days. they were fewer.
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