No More Heroes.

Pity the nation that needs someone else's.

As regards the US elections, I have nothing to say.

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Thanks once more to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.  I am very pleased to say that the next translation into French by Hubert Mulkens is ready and I’ll be posting it over the weekend.. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as  long as you credit the original and let me know. So:

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When I was young, there were heroes.

There was nothing unusual, let alone potentially nostalgia-inducing about that fact. Every society since whenever had picked out exceptional people to admire and emulate: it was a way of bonding society together and providing common points of reference. Our society today, though, with its presentism, its assumption of moral superiority over even the recent past, and its ideology of the ruthless pursuit of power and money, has no room for exceptional people except the exceptionally rich. I think this is a bad thing, and I’ll try to explain why.

Some societies before ours had fully worked-out theories of excellence. The Greeks had the concept of arete, (which apparently shares a common root with aristos) and meant excellence, and living up to the maximum of your potential in any field. In Homer, for example, the term is applied both to Achilles the warrior, and to Penelope the wife of Odysseus, among many others. In a less concrete form, the word is found in Aristotle’s writings on ethics, and in the biblical letters of Paul. I suppose “be the best you can be” is a very crude modern equivalent, although that injunction is concerned largely with material success.

Other societies have also institutionalised the concept. In Japanese, for example, sensei (先生) can mean just “teacher,” but is best translated as “one who has been before,” and is an honorific title given to anyone who has excelled in a particular field, and is able to pass their knowledge and experience on to others. As I’ve pointed out before, our ego-driven Liberal society has difficulty with the concept that there are people who know more than we do, and are better at things than we are, and from whom we can learn.

Traditionally, excellence could come in all sorts of ways. When I was young, the Second World War  was still a recent memory, so inevitably the popular culture of the time found many of its heroes there. In the Battle of Britain, for example, fought over the southern England where I grew up, in spectacular air raids, in the quiet heroism of the Convoy escorts recounted in Nicholas Monserrat’s  The Cruel Sea, in the men and women of the French Resistance and the operators behind enemy lines. Even as a young child I tried unsuccessfully to grapple with the mentality of bomber crews in their early twenties setting out on operations, knowing that they stood statistically no chance of surviving a tour of thirty missions.

But it wasn’t all gung-ho. There were the scientists and engineers who designed and built the Spitfires and Hurricanes and the radar system that won the Battle of Britain. There were ordinary people from all walks of life who made important contributions to the war effort. Everyone knew about Constance Babbington-Smith, the aviation journalist and photographer who became a key photographic interpreter for the RAF and first identified both the Me163 jet fighter and the V-1 flying bomb, or Frank Whittle, the former engineering apprentice who effectively invented the jet engine.

There were exceptional people in every area of life: sport, for example, which in those days was often only semi-professional and disgracefully under-exploited financially. One of the few football matches I ever watched with enthusiasm was the 1966 World Cup final between England and Germany, a match saturated with sensitive historical resonances. In those days, footballers were generally working-class lads who had been apprenticed to their local team. England’s captain, Bobby Moore, was also captain of West Ham, a London team based not that far from where I lived. Footballers were paid a decent salary with a bonus for winning, but they were ordinary blokes, and I knew people who had spotted Moore shopping in the local supermarket and asked for and obtained his autograph. Heroes in those days were exceptional people, certainly, but sufficiently close to ordinary life that it was possible for a working-class boy to feel that he could one day follow in their footsteps. The idea of footballers as independent multi-millionaire tradesmen with business managers would have seemed like something out of a piece of bad social satire. There wasn’t a lot of money in cricket, either, and you could dream of playing for the county you were born in. In those days, of course, all sport was free to watch on TV, and people could, and did, identify closely with its semi-amateur status: the great British racing driver Graham Hill, for example (father of Damon) was not only a Formula 1 champion, but a rowing and sports-car champion and a qualified pilot, who in more innocent days drove his own car to races.

Again, this is not an exercise in nostalgia: it was the traditional pattern in which exceptional people were drawn from, and remained close to, the communities they came from, and thus became plausible exemplars, role models and even heroes to another generation. And this wasn’t just a British, or even a western thing. There was a time when I followed athletics closely, and there were few more exciting performers than the Kenyan middle-distance runners. I remember watching Kipchoge Keino run at a championship in London in the sixties. In the last lap he just took off like a rocket, with a broad grin on his face, enjoying himself hugely and leaving everyone else in the dust. He never made much money out of athletics, and has spent the rest of his life doing charity work. I can’t even begin to think of anyone similar now.

Exploration was a big thing. Around the time I was born, Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tensing made the first ascent of Everest. Soon after there were the first primitive films of the ocean depths taken by the husband and wife team of Hans and Lotte Haas and shown on TV all over the world, and the underwater explorations of Jacques Cousteau. And then there was David Attenborough, disappearing into the jungles of Borneo to return with film of amazing dragon-like creatures. All over the world, children began to dream of a career in marine biology or natural history.

Of course some of these people, especially in the entertainment world, left their origins behind them very quickly, often changed their names, and became exceptional beings of another kind: Stars, which our modern cinema with its MBA management, its fear of experimentation, its world-wide marketing constraints and constant reinvention of the wheel, can never hope to reproduce. I was lucky enough to finally see a showing of Casablanca on the big screen a year or two ago, and what surprised me (apart from the forgotten political sophistication of the script) was the way in which all of the stars, and not just Bogart and Bergman, seemed to dominate the cinema, almost climbing out of the screen. Movie stars then were ordinary people who had, rather as in Greek mythology, been transformed into gods and goddesses. I was too young to register it, but men and women who saw Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren in their first films released in the UK told me of the equivalent of a neutron bomb detonating in the cinema. The same thing was apparently true of those who saw Elvis live: ordinary people touched with grace.

I didn’t have any money to attend concerts, but I remember Bob Dylan’s appearances late at night on the BBC during his first UK tour, and feeling that I was in the virtual presence of a divine being. Of course I saved my pennies until I could go out and buy a cheap and nasty guitar, like a million other young people: that’s what heroes are for, to provoke emulation. Maybe I’m old and cynical now, but I can’t think of anything today even remotely similar, where success means essentially fame and money, and worshipful adulation. Who’s the spokesman or woman for the current generation of young people as Dylan once was for mine?

It’s sobering to look at the ages of some of the most successful artists today, even if you measure that success just by receipts and Spotify plays, never mind cultural influence. Clint Eastwood has just put out a new film at the age of 94, Martin Scorsese at 81. Mick Jagger, I was amused to hear, is the same age as Joe Biden. Keith Richards is somehow still alive at almost 81. An entire generation—McCartney, Starr, Dylan, Simon— are about to check out, as did Leonard Cohen, composing and recording almost to his death at 82. The gap they will leave behind them in popular culture can be filled in the short term by “new” AI-produced material to the satisfaction of MBAs, but probably nobody else.

But enough complaining. If you accept that modern culture doesn’t produce heroes, role-models or figures for admiration and emulation as it once did, then why? The first thing to say is that Liberalism is quite uninterested in doing anything for its own sake at all, let alone well. Arete except in the limited sense of skill in making money, does not count. Quality, dedication, practice, even natural ability honed to perfection, do not count either. What matters is how quickly and how thoroughly something can be monetised. Exceptional and heroic accomplishments are only of interest insofar as books, CDs, films, product endorsements and advertising campaigns can be structured around them. (These days, Hilary and Tensing would be the centre of a multi-billion dollar industry.) Entirely imaginary or massively re-imagined events are actually better than real ones, because they can be carefully curated to make more money, and there is no-one to complain about misrepresentation.

Liberal professions (quintessentially law as an example here) presuppose essentially a licence to practice, and a skill in making winning arguments. (Anglo-Saxon society scarcely has the tradition of the distinguished jurist, writer of textbooks and academic legal theorist.) In the end, it’s about how much money you can make or, at the other end of the political spectrum how much influence you can achieve and how much publicity you can generate towards getting a more lucrative career as the head of an NGO, for example. Intellectually, the quality of some of the work can be very high, but that isn’t the point. And ironically, as I’ve pointed out before, the very survival of Liberal society, with its obsessive preoccupation with money, depends precisely upon the existence of people who don’t think that way, from the doctor who gives a disinterested diagnosis to the electrician who comes to fix your television. Come to that, even card-carrying Liberals would want a competent lawyer to handle the house purchase.

But the result of this is that the examples our society proposes for emulation are all based on becoming very wealthy, often very quickly, and independent of how it is done. Now of course there have always been people driven by greed. But over the last couple of generations changes in tax and related rules have enabled fortunes to be made in ways that were simply not possible before. When you can become a multimillionaire just by buying, renting and selling houses with money you don’t actually have, for example, you send a message about what society values, and what its younger members should emulate. Thus, for some years now universities have turned out streams of graduates headed for where the most money seems to be, from law to business studies to computer programming to whatever the latest thing is. Such people then often drift into traditional industries with no knowledge or ability other than spreadsheet manipulation, and proceed to do what they know best, and are most valued for, which is the transformation of assets, skills, people, infrastructure and experience into money. Society will necessarily be collectively much poorer as a result, since those who decide these things no longer actually value excellence except financial excellence.

People much more knowledgeable than me have written about what this has done to the entertainment industry, where traditionally you worked your way up gradually and painfully in the hope of making it big one day. I never shared my parents’ enthusiasm for Frank Sinatra, but I could recognise vocal talent when I heard it, and I knew that he had slogged away for years in dance-band orchestras, honing his talent. The Beatles did not arrive fully-formed: they invested heaven-knows how many thousand hours grinding away in Hamburg perfecting their act. These days, AI will produce all the songs the Beatles never wrote in 1963, complete with convincing animations. Public taste has now, I think, increasingly been conditioned not to want anything new and different, since that requires time, effort, money and judgement, all in short supply.

Since in a Liberal state the worth of anything is ultimately expressed in financial terms, and since the Liberal state recognises no motivation to get up in the morning except to make money, and increase personal autonomy,  Liberalism has an almost insuperable problem in explaining convincingly what happened in the past, and even what’s going on in the world today, when so many people were and are obviously actually behaving for reasons that have nothing to do with short-term (or even long-term) utility maximisation. Indeed, there is a well-known logical fallacy which consists of  desperately searching for any rational-sounding utility-maximising theory no matter how complex and improbable to explain a given sequence of events, instead of accepting messy reality, however simple and likely.

One result of this is a process of trivialisation, where historical and contemporary conflicts are subjected to a sort of economic reductionism, as though that is all there was and could be. An ironic result of that, is that many of the fiercest critics of the contemporary neoliberal system are so intellectually possessed by its tenets that their criticisms are based on the same set of assumptions its proponents use. So wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, for example, are trivialised into struggles over trade and raw materials, as though that is all there was. Major security and political issues such as Islamic militancy are discounted, because there is no way of fitting them int a paradigm of rational maximisation of personal utility, therefore they cannot exist.

The difficulty that Liberal society faces with the disappearance of the hero, to resume, is that it still needs figures to emulate. The very rich are in general not an attractive species, and they invite dislike and contempt from ordinary people more than they invite emulation and admiration. Moreover, since by definition not everybody can be rich, whilst everybody in principle can improve their tennis game, almost all attempts at wealth-emulation fail, and breed anger and disillusionment as a consequence. The answer, logically if perhaps curiously, is to replace the hero with the victim, the active with the passive, the person who does things with the person to whom things are done. This is logical in the sense that the concomitant of the Liberal pursuit of wealth is the pursuit of Rights, here understood in their fundamental sense of obligations we try to place on others to act, or not act in certain ways to benefit us. Just as wealth increases power, so also can victim status, because the victim claims Rights, and therefore power, over others. There is a brutal competition to establish Rights, and therefore power over others, since in a Liberal society Rights act as a surrogate currency conferring power, status and ultimately money. One way of looking at the politics of the current crisis in Gaza is the desperate attempt of an established near-monopolist of victim status and Rights to prevent the emergence of a competitor, for all the world like Micro$oft and Apple twenty years ago.

So in a Liberal society we are encouraged to emulate victims, both collectively and individually. Collectively because we can identify ourselves as an identity  group which is “marginalised” or “repressed” and demand that others give us some of their power, status and money to make up for that fact. Again, this doesn’t work very well in practice, partly because all of us belong to various “groups,” whose boundaries and whose position in the Index of Oppression change all the time, and partly because most such groups tend to be headed by Identity entrepreneurs who have a habit of making off with the money.

On an individual level, a Liberal society can tolerate exceptional achievement if it is firmly placed in a wider social context. Thus, someone from a “marginalised” background who succeeds in sport or politics or culture will be praised less for that achievement than for “overcoming prejudice” or whatever, to have obtained that status, with an implicit rebuke to the majority community for being prejudiced in the first place. But this is complicated because, in sport for example, there really is a hierarchy which rewards talent. Thus in France (to take the example I know best) sports teams, popular music, television and the cinema include a disproportionately large percentage of people from “marginalised” communities. And certainly in the case of sports, such people are respected and emulated for their achievements, rather than for their ethnic origin. All of which is awkward for Liberal identity theorists.

The solution, so far as there is one, is to have a large organisation or the State itself appoint someone to a position based not on their ability, but on their Identity. Thus, we read frequently of the “first X to be Y” as though this is a personal achievement based on merit. But of course it isn’t, and the only message it sends out for emulation is that everybody should make use of their perceived status as a victim or a marginalised person in order to persuade or intimidate some large organisation into giving them a position of wealth and power that they could not otherwise have aspired to. Ironically, the competition to achieve this status is every bit as ruthless and brutal as to become a successful bond trader, although the skills involved are somewhat different.But this is entirely typical of a Liberal society: what matters is not ability, experience or training, but rather the capacity to market yourself as a product which an organisation or a public feels obliged to buy. In the end, of course, such outcomes are not really about individuals at all, and so cannot be motivating or empowering. They are really statements of self-congratulation by an organisation or by Liberal society itself: look how tolerant and inclusive we are.

The Internet has provided opportunities for self-marketing that never existed before, and go well beyond narrow Identity politics, into the demand-led fragmentation of discourse itself. It is simply necessary to identify a market for a certain type of polemical discourse and then address it. About four hundred years ago, Ben Jonson wrote a satirical play called The Staple of News, where “staple” meant “monopoly.” At this establishment, you could buy any news that you liked, true, exaggerated or simply invented, depending only on what you wanted to hear. The Internet has now made this practically possible, and you can, according to taste, read a violently anti-Russian or a violently pro-Russian article about Ukraine, whose common factor is that the author concerned has identified a market which is not interested in nuance, or even terribly much in knowledge and accuracy. Indeed, we no longer ask that articles on current events be accurate, only that they tell us what we want to hear.

So, changing the subject slightly, one can flick though online articles about Gaza which really should be prefaced with a statement like I have never visited the Middle East, I don’t speak Arabic, I know very little of the history and culture of the region and I have only been able to look quickly through a few English-language sources. But I have very strong opinions so please send me money so I can keep expressing them. Well, that’s the identification of a market opportunity in classic neoliberal terms, but it’s a shame that we no longer require those who express strong opinions to know what they are talking about. An old-fashioned journalist like Robert Fisk, for example, made no secret of his sympathies, but spent most of his life in the Middle East and knew exactly what he was talking about. Today, his contributions would just be lost in the noise, and probably be regarded as too difficult and too nuanced.   

All of this inevitably produces bad faith and terminal embarrassment. It is an unchallengeable article of belief in Liberalism that the world is advancing steadily and ineluctably towards a morally better future. Never, it appears, have we known such tolerance, diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, though, nothing works, and the political, media, business and intellectual elites of our society are more incapable, and more morally dubious, than they have ever been. At some deep level, everybody knows this, no matter how firmly they are convinced that we live in a shining present and are moving to a shininger future.

After all, suppose you work at a University whose main building was designed by an architect two hundred years ago, and is basically as good as new. Meanwhile, the annex designed in the 1980s is too dangerous to use and needs to be torn down. Outside the Science faulty building are statues of great inventors and discoverers, whereas it’s decades since you won an important prize and all the best graduate students these days are from overseas. The impressive Arts Faculty building was donated by a successful industrialist and philanthropist in the nineteenth century, whereas the Business Studies building, now in disrepair, was paid for by a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands, in return for an honorary doctorate for its founder. The previously world-famous Institute of Geology and Geography was named for the first person to cross the Antarctic alone on foot with a dog. But now it can’t attract students and isn’t profitable enough. Etcetera. It’s the same everywhere: all the Liberal professions; the media, the law, politics, think-tanks, academia, punditry, finance, are all in decline and most have lost whatever public standing and moral authority they had. Somehow, we cannot design buildings or bridges that stay up, develop technologies that work or make organisations run effectively and honestly any more. The Chinese can construct new railways in the time it takes us to construct financing packages for the catering services on trains that we can’t make run to time, or even at all. .

0ur elites are thus conscious that they cannot match their predecessors, either practically or morally, and that makes them embarrassed, which in turn makes them angry.  So the result is logical enough: if the past offends us, let us destroy it. If we cannot measure up to great figures of the past, let us undermine them and bring them down to our level, so we never need to feel inferior again. Having no heroes today, we must destroy the heroes our predecessors had. Hatred of the past has been a fundamental feature of Liberalism since the beginning, of course: after all, the past is about superstition, prejudice, ignorance, intolerance and many other things that will be swept away by the clear light of the logic of enlightened rational self-interest. Evidence that might indicate otherwise must be destroyed.

But, surrounded by sleaze, incompetence and corruption, it’s increasing hard for us to look back on the past with an attitude of moral superiority. What frightening figures those nineteenth-century reformers seem to us now, with their intense moral seriousness? But of course they didn’t have our enlightened attitude towards transsexualism. Perhaps one of them, in a letter to a friend, remarked that he was glad that homosexuality was illegal. With enough effort, you can find enough dirt on someone, just for having been born a couple of centuries ago. And because England was a trading nation, if you try really, really hard, you can just about link anyone to some aspect of slavery, even indirectly. And then moral superiority kicks in, you can pull down their statue, rename their College and symbolically castrate that past to which most people these days feel inferior. (Ultimately, after all, this is all about Oedipal rage: we are a society with Daddy issues.)

Nowhere is this more the case than with the generations that fought the First and Second World War, suffered the tyranny, poverty and insecurity of the inter-war years, and rebuilt the West after 1945. We could not do that today. Simply put, our societies would come apart under those kinds of stresses, and we know it. It’s not because we are inferior beings, or society is decadent, or any other frivolous excuse, it’s that our neoliberal societies simply could not do what our forebears did, individually and collectively. How does someone who has been brought up to believe that words are violence react to an actual dead body next to them? How does someone who has been brought up to believe that poverty is violence react to surviving on 500 grams of food a day, if they are lucky? It’s not their fault: nothing in the operating system of today’s neoliberalism can tell us how to cope with such challenges, except, perhaps how to bribe our way out of fighting, and how to operate a black market.

This first became a problem in the late 1960s, for my generation which had grown up away from the shadow of imminent war, even if some countries preserved military service. What emerged was a mocking, sneering, form of anti-militarism, which was part of that generation’s rebellion against its parents. Often, it was hidden behind opposition to the Vietnam War, and was not pacifism (a curious, but nonetheless coherent philosophy) although they often pretended it was. Typically, it meant overt support for the Viet Cong, and posters on their walls of men with rifles, although not with white skins. I once went to a concert by Pete Seeger in London, where he first sung the powerful pacifist anthem Where Have All The Flowers Gone, complete with homily about the essential need for world peace, followed by the Spanish Civil War song Viva La Quince Brigada, complete with homily about the need to fight Fascism, with guns if necessary. Neither he nor most of the audience seemed to notice the logical contradiction.

In many ways, even several generations later, we are still in rebellion against the symbolically parental generation that directed and fought the Second World War. Never having to had suffer such things ourselves, and knowing that we could not cope with them if we had to, we spare no effort to pour scorn on those who did. This manifests itself at various levels, from wave after wave of tediously “revisionist” history and biography of very varying quality, to the reconfiguration of the Second World War as being exclusively about victims (“Auschwitz and Hiroshima are pretty much the same thing, aren’t they?) to the concentration on anti-war and pacifist literature and cinema in school and university curricula. And so we can imagine ourselves symbolically morally superior to those generations, and everyone is happy.

Except, of course, that we do actually need heroes. All societies do. And so the most fervent anti-militarists seek out, as they have always done, surrogates from abroad to admire and respect: what George Orwell famously called the “patriotism of the deracinated.” From the Viet Cong to the Afghan Mujahideen, to today’s examples of Hezbollah and the Houthis, we admire and find heroism in people outside our own societies, because we are too embarrassed to seek it within them.

The classic case at the moment of course is Ukraine. The reality is that western societies could not sustain a war of this kind, on either side, and we know it. This makes us angry and resentful. So we react in various ways. The children of the children who were brought up to despise the American “Empire” adopt Russia and its Army as totems instead. More widely, the knowledge that the Russian are doing things we no longer can, socially, industrially or organisationally, is humbling for some, but psychologically destabilising and unacceptable for others. Hence the fantasies of hundreds of thousands of dead, of ill-equipped and poorly-trained Russian troops fighting with shovels; anything to cling on to the illusion of western Liberal moral superiority.

For it can’t be emphasised enough that no western country could actually sustain a war of this kind for more than a few weeks. I don’t mean just that it would run out of ammunition and logistics in a matter of days, and no longer has the weapons, leadership and training to take part in such a conflict. Consider, for a moment, just the question of casualties. I’ve suggested before that, based on conservative estimates of Russian losses, they equate to perhaps 25-30,000 dead for an average western European country, perhaps 150,000 dead in the case of the United States. To which you have to add at least as many long-term disabled. And then, you have to assume that patriotism drives tens of thousands to volunteer to make up for the losses. And that’s just Russia. Nobody really has any idea of what Ukrainian casualties are, but let’s take a very conservative estimate of 200,000 dead for a country which in 2022 had a population lower than Britain, France, Germany Spain or Italy. Just think about that for a moment, and reflect also that in World War Two the Germans alone lost some 4,5 million men in six years of combat. Such figures do not compute these days: they would cause the Liberal utility-maximising algorithm to seize up altogether.

And still they fight on. Yes, there is press-ganging on the Ukrainian side, yes there are forces to prevent desertion. But it is fatuous to suppose that behind every isolated squad of Ukrainian troops is an Azov detachment ready to shoot them down if they retreat. They fight, as the Russians fight, because that is what men do in that region, and have always done. Their fathers trained for such wars, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought in them. Western societies can no longer do this: it’s not because we have become “decadent” or “soft” or any other similar glib explanation, but because Liberal societies provide nothing to fight for, and no rewards for being the kind of person who would fight anyway.

And so the last desperate expedient of a society that has outsourced everything else is to outsource heroism. We have created a fantasy Ukraine, full of people we would like to be, but can be no longer, fighting against overwhelming odds, defending western Liberal civilisation etc. This doesn’t have to be remotely credible to outsiders, it can happily ignore all sorts of inconvenient stuff about extreme nationalists and corruption. Ukraine as it is presented is a virtual western construction, full of heroic people doing things that we can’t do any more. And so far, at least, the elite consensus is that outsourcing heroism to Ukraine been just as effective as outsourcing manufacturing to China. After all, we will never need to display heroism any more: let’s sub-contract it.

“Pity the nation” wrote the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran “that acclaims the bully as hero.” Pity more the nation, I suspect, that has no heroes at all, and has to outsource heroism to others.