Hero worship

“However, Marty, I think Wells hits the right nail on the head when he explains Napoleon’s amazing popularity with his troops by the fact that they never saw him save on a few theatrical and emotional occasions, and that his soldiers idolised not Napoleon, but ‘a carefully fostered legend of a little pet of a man, who was devoted to France and to them all.’ Napoleon, it seems to me, was both ‘the child of the Revolution’ and the embodiment of the reaction against it. Society in the 18th and 19th century was crying aloud for ‘reform,’ but was not ready for a system of society based on common ownership. Napoleon represents the rejection of the theories of Anacharsis Cloots and the beginnings of the Capitalistic State; whilst the French bank, the University and the ‘Code Napoleon’ were the result not so much of his ‘original genius,’ as of the evident social and economic need for them.”

“There must have been, I suppose, in your planet’s history,” remarked the Martian, “many ‘great men’ who have attempted to change the course of social or economic development. Have any succeeded?” “Well,” I replied, “I do not know of any individual who has changed the course, but a few have stemmed it for a while. In Roman history, Sulla attempted to re-establish the lost power of the Senate and to crush the rising Equestrian order, which consisted of wealthy traders. To effect this he framed a constitution. In a few years, however, his constitution was practically disregarded, and all that remained of his labours were his administrative and judicial reforms, which, although secondary considerations with Sulla, yet satisfied the social need for better organisation, and thus endured. Strangely enough, Marty, a comic-operatic ‘Sulla,’ is operating in Rome to-day, and with the puffed-up pride of mediocrity fondly hopes to achieve the success denied to his more illustrious predecessor. How truly Marx interpreted history when he wrote, ‘Great historical facts and personages appear twice—once as tragedy and again as farce.'” ^*

Many more examples, however, could be given, Marty, of men whose desire and aims have been thwarted by economic conditions, but time prevents me from doing anything save naming a few, such as Cromwell, Charles XII of Sweden, and (possibly) Lenin of Russia. Spencer has ably summarised the conclusions just arrived at in his essay, “The Social Organism,” portions of which, with your permission, I will “inflict upon you :—

“It is not by the ‘hero as king’ any more than by collective wisdom that men have been segregated into producers, wholesale distributors, and retail distributors. The whole of our industrial organisation, from its main outlines down to its minutest details has become what it is not simply without legislative guidance but, to a considerable extent in spite of legislative hindrances. … By steps so small that year after year the industrial arrangements have seemed to men just what they were before—by changes as insensible as those through which a seed passes into a tree; society has become the complex body of mutually- dependent workers we now see. The failure of Cromwell permanently to establish a new social condition and the rapid revival of suppressed institutions and practices after his death show how powerless is a monarch to change the type of a society he governs. He may disturb, he may retard, or he may aid the natural process of organisation; but the general course of this process is beyond his control. . . . Thus, that which is obviously true of the industrial structure of society, is true of its whole structure. The fact that constitutions are not made but grow is simply a fragment of the much larger fact that under all its aspects and through all its ramifications, society is a growth, and not a manufacture.”

“Well,” said the Martian, I have learned a great deal from your discourse; in the first place my conviction that human societies are not jig-saw puzzles, the parts of which have been contributed by ‘great men,’ but are living and ever-changing organisms in which both ‘great’ and ‘little’ men play their respective parts, has been doubly strengthened, whilst it seems evident that ‘hero worship’ varies in its form and function according to the state of the community in which it exists. Thus, I gather that, early man was too self-occupied and practical to be carried away by sentimental personal idolatry, and individual control was sanctioned simply because it was the only positive control known. Later, with the evolution of abstract ideas and ideals, moral civilization came into being with the resultant glamour that attached itself to the governing members of society, In the past, my friend, ‘hero worship’ seemed to have fulfilled at least one useful purpose—it provided a control over what would be, I assume (compared with your present machines for mass production), crude and strangely miscellaneous instruments of production; that is to say, society, fearing anarchy, submitted to the subordination of efficient individuals. But what of the utility of ‘hero worship’ at the present time?”

^* 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

W. J.

(Socialist Standard, December 1927)