Lingua Franca #2: Heroes

"HERE IS THE PEOPLE'S HEROINE"

Most of the traces of the young Iosif Djugashvili were now gone – the fashionable and chic dress, the wind-swept hair, the smoldering good looks.

The old photos make clear why he could be such a charmer, so well-loved among his friends and revelers. The man he’d later become, you’d see no traces in those early photographs – he was charming, dashing, brash, full of confidence.
 
You can understand why he made such an excellent bank-robber, extortionist, and agitator – but all that is gone, long buried and censored, scant few traces remaining for historians many decades later to attempt to dig up and piece together.
 
No, by January 1942 that Iosif Djugashvili is no more; the hair is now slicked-back tightly upon his skull. He wears a simple and drab military uniform with no decorations on it. There’s moments of levity at banquets – he would still turn on the charm at something like the Moscow Conference with Churchill and American representative Harriman present, laughing a little, striking one of his grandest bargains – no separate piece for the Axis criminals. Unconditional surrender only.
 
But most of the time, Joseph Stalin looks much harder than he did as a younger and more care-free man.
 
The Nazi Invasion, Operation Barbarossa, had failed two months earlier at the very doorstep of Moscow.
 
Now, in late January of 1942, Iosif is musing on war strategy. The Nazis dug into the defensive after the Russian counterattack in the Battle of Moscow in early December, but they would surely resume their aggressive campaign when the winter thawed.
 
How to navigate the war strategy…?
 
Stalin was likely smoking a cigarette and working at his desk when he came across the article in the newspaper Pravda. Oh, this  is something…
 
Stalin read the final account of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya – an 18 year old Russian woman who volunteered for partisan guerilla warfare against the German invaders. She’d snuck into the village of Petrischevo where German cavalry where based, and set fire to a number of buildings before being caught.
 
She was defiant from the gallows;  she makes a speech of resistance  –
 
"Hey, comrades! Why are you looking so sad? Be brave, fight, beat the Germans, burn, trample them! I'm not afraid to die, comrades. It is happiness to die for one's people! You hang me now, but I'm not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You can't hang us all. They will avenge me."
 
And her last words –
 
"Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!"
 
Some weeks later, Stalin reads this account in Pravda and finds himself nodding. Yes, this is  something…
 
Stalin stands up from his desk, smiles, says, "Here is the people's heroine.”
 
***
 
LINGUA FRANCA #2: HEROES
 
Our exploration of the Lingua Franca  continues with a concept that’s been important across the ages – heroism.
 
It used to mean something very different than it does now. It likely will take it’s olden meaning once again, some day not too far into the future. Until then, we’d be wise to get our thinking in order on this important topic.
 
So now we explore – what’s a hero?
 
***
 
HEROES OF THE SOVIET UNION
 
For her partisan warfare and brave stance in the face of death, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became the first woman decorated with the Hero of the Soviet Union  award during World War II.
 
This was one of two major “Hero” decorations in the Soviet Union – Hero of Socialist Labor  and Hero of the Soviet Union .
 
The Hero of Socialist Labor  award was the newer of the two, being created in 1938. Its first recipient?
 
Joseph Stalin.
 
From looking at Zoya and Stalin, we can see two types of publicly-honored heroes that, seemingly, all societies tend to honor across history – the martyr  and the confessor .
 
***
 
THE TWO TYPES OF SAINTS
 
“Sainthood” exists as a concept in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and most of hierarchical branches of Christianity. (It’s missing from some Protestant denominations, and present in others.)
 
The original criteria for sainthood was martyrdom – dying for the faith specifically.
 
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, had she been a Christian instead of a Soviet partisan, would have perfectly met the criteria for Christian sainthood.
 
"Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!"
 
This looks eerily similar  to how many of the early Christians died under Nero’s persecutions – the torture, the humiliations, the final invocation that Christ is coming and thus, stay strong brethren!  – except in her case, it was Stalin and comrades, not Christ and fellow Christians.
 
Death is always and ever lurking somewhere in the back of one's mind for most humans. Even when we don’t think of death itself, certain things terrify us – tapping in to some primordial self defense mechanisms, a self-preservation instinct we inherited from our times as apes… or perhaps even earlier. Fear is part of our existence, and fear of death is one of the strongest of the fears.
 
In all societies, across all times, people who died bravely were put forth as examples and stories of them were shared among the survivors of their people. This was true when Pericles gave his famous funeral oration in Athens; this was true when Lincoln spoke of the consecrated ground at Gettysburg; this was true when Soviet partisans were hung by Nazis on that frigid winter battlefield.
 
It was and is always true.
 
In the early centuries of Christianity, martyrdom was the criteria for sainthood, but eventually, Christianity became the Roman state religion and the persecution of Christians largely ceased.
 
As martyrdom became less common, a new type of saints came to the fore in being canonized – confessors of the faith.
 
This designation was for people who lived entirely a manifestation of Christian life – or as the official Roman rites called it, a life “Heroic in Virtue.”
 
There are some official and relatively discrete criteria for Christians to be called “heroic in virtue” – their life needed to seem to follow the tenets of Christianity nearly completely, and interestingly, with a certain effortlessness  to it. It was not enough to be pious – you had to be joyfully pious . From my (admittedly limited) understanding of this doctrine, it was a belief that Confessors of the Faith were granted some sort of grace by God Himself; they lived as an example to those living; God sent them to show light to the world, or some such.
 
And thus, gradually, there became more officially recognized saints who were confessors , who lived in heroic virtue , than those who were martyrs .
 
***
 
PATTERNS OF CELEBRATION OF PEOPLE’S LIVES
 
As humans, one of the chief ways we figure out how to live is by observing those around us. Strongest of those examples are those our culture celebrates as heroes . And indeed, across all ages and cultures, people who die bravely in defense of their civilization or ideology seem to be celebrated to some extent as martyrs, and those who seem to live effortlessly along the lines of a very inspirational life are celebrated too – there is less of a universal word for those, but confessor-type heroes are celebrated across the ages.

This makes sense, and seemingly happens across all human civilizations. Similar rites and celebrations and words come to describe them – the word “hero” seems to emerge across all languages, sooner or later, and it typically encompasses these two types of heroes.
 
***
 
THE GREATEST OF GREAT HEROES
 
A third and final type of Universal Hero ought to mentioned before proceeding – the truly Great Hero .
 
We’ll turn to one of the foremost works on heroism, one of my favorite books, for reference. Tomas Carlyle’s 1840 “ On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History ”  is one of the finest works ever written; if you can handle and work your way through the Victorian English, it pays off with all sorts of gems and insights.
 
Carlyle advanced two critical ideas in On Heroes , both of which I believe to be correct.
 
1. Everyone has a “religion” in the most general sense of the word – not necessarily their formal religion or what they claim to believe, but how they relate to what matters and their place in the universe . This is one of the chief facts of people and determines much of the course of their lives.
 
2. “Religion” is mapped out, discerned, and founded by Heroes , who illuminate and bring forth how a people should live.
 
***
 
RELIGIO AS THE CHIEF FACT
 
I tend to use the Latin word “religio” to denote a person’s orientation towards the universe , and to distinguish it from organized religion. Everyone has a religio – at two extremes, a belief that nothing matters and nothing is true is religio  just as much as a Buddhist who believes in working towards nirvana to break the reincarnation cycle.
 
Carlyle, emphasis added –
 
“ It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him.  A man’s, or a nation of men’s.  By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them.  This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that.  But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion ; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Un- seen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? 
 
“Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation.  The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. ”
 
***
 
AND WHERE DOES RELIGIO COME FROM? … HEROES
 
Carlyle goes on to walk through some of Norse mythology – noting they still believed in the Norse Gods, Odin and Thor and what not, as little as 800 years prior to his writing On Heroes  during the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
 
He reflects on how the Norse mythology gave rise to notions of what to do  and why life matters … and then reflects on where such views came from. His answer –
 
“Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not like to be compelled to say very minutely!  One thing we may say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;—from the thought, above all, of the first Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse “man of genius,” as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;—till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought.  It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so ! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!—Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows , in man after man, generation after generation,—till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to another.
 
“For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration.  Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter.  Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all.  Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world! ”
 
***
 
ON HEROES
 
Heavy stuff!
 
Oh my, this is heavy stuff.
 
But I think it is – true .
 
Often denigrated under the name “Great Man Theory,” Carlyle articulates how societies come to form their views of the world and what matters.
 
He answers that all men wonder and suffer, in a vague unspeakable way, until some Thinker – a Hero – comes forth and codifies what matters, and what does not.
 
Carlyle names a number of such Heroes – Odin, mentioned above; the Prophet Muhammad of Islam; Napoleon Bonaparte and Oliver Cromwell… a number of literary greats and poets; religious reformers…
 
Indeed, this explanation rings true – Confucius still lives on, deeply embedded in East Asian society. His life is seen as an example of how to live, especially in Chinese society, and he’s adored and revered to this today. Carlyle uses the word “worshipped,” but the word worship, alas, has also changed meanings in the 170-some years since he wrote On Heroes .
 
Being a Hero , of course, does not make you good . Under Carlyle’s definition, Marx and Lenin were certainly Heroes ; Attila the Hun, Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, and yes, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin qualify as Heroes, alongside Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and innumerable others.
 
To say Hero  in the Carlylean sense is not to say good  – it is just a fact. It is someone who organized the thinking and religio  of their people for a time. The Young Turks that led the Ottoman Empire down into destruction were Heroes , just as much as Mustafa Kemal who fought to preserve the independence and modernize the new Turkish Republic. To be a Hero  has nothing at all to do with being good ; it has to do with organizing an uncertain and confused pattern of life into a systematic way of thinking for a large number of people. You can be a hero and terribly wicked – like, say, Pol Pot – or you can be a Hero  and be terrifically good, like, say, Aristotle. Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan were both Heroes  to large numbers of Americans, under this definition, however you might personally feel about either of them. So too were Sun-Yat Sen, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping – again, however you might feel about any of those three. To be a Hero is to organize confusion into a system of thought about what matters, for a large number of people.
 
***
 
HEROES AND POWER
 
Humans are ever and always attracted to power, for a variety of obvious and non-obvious reasons.
 
I need not explain that, do I? Humans are attracted to power. The majority of humans, the majority of the time. This is a straightforward and true statement, can we not agree on that?
 
(Good.)
 
There has been a trend over the last 50 years or so to equate “hero” and “good.”
 
“Teachers are the real heroes” – statements like those.
 
Prior to this past half-century, heroes would typically show at least some aspect of the three we’ve explored –
 
1. The Great Hero  – Confucius, Augustus Caesar, Mohammad, Charlemagne, Benjamin Franklin, Marx, Lenin, Mao – someone who organized a large-scale system of thought for their people and led them to new patterns of meaning – religio –  across their lives.
 
2. The Martyr  – someone who dies bravely in defense of their society and culture.
 
3. The Confessor  – someone who embodies all the precepts of their society, seemingly effortlessly, manifesting virtue and seeming to light the way for others. The very devout and pious son in the view of a Confucian, the samurai lord who arranged his affairs perfectly and lived in harmony in his domain, the Christian who founds a monastic order, the revolutionary socialist who strives constantly to add more dignity to labor and build the state.
 
We can see these emanating from the same place – first, in the foundation of a system of thinking and meaning; second and third, in dying bravely or living faithfully in advancing that way of thinking.
 
The word “heroic” might be appended to lesser versions of these actions – so that a policeman or soldier who goes far beyond the call of duty into mortal danger, but who does not die or suffer for it, is called heroic. It is like a “smaller version” of living one’s life constantly like that – a smaller version of the Confessor-type hero, heroic as applied to a single moment ; that makes sense, of course.
 
People who clarify a system of thought – Mencius following from Confucius – might also be called Heroes; as would people who go through prolonged suffering to bring their cause to the forefront (like the original Bolsheviks, to a socialist, who often lived in immense poverty and dedication for a long time before the USSR was founded). (Incidentally, many of them would later be executed by Stalin before being rehabilitated and considered martyrs by Khrushchev and Gorbachev – but that’s besides the point.)
 
To be a Hero, of course, was powerful  – because you were shaping, to greater or lesser extent, what people believed mattered and how they lived.  You were forming a society and culture, or advancing and defending a society and culture that already existed.
 
***
 
THE DEBASEMENT OF THE HEROIC CURRENCY
 
But this brings us to the current day.
 
“ “The miners are not ‘heroes,’ as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months,”  Néstor Jorquera, president of the Chilean mineworkers union, CONFEMIN, told the Inter Press Service.  “They are victims.”  Many in the international labor movement have complained that news accounts have ignored the poor treatment of workers by the mining company, which initially refused to pay their wages after the miners were trapped underground on Aug. 5.”
 
“The miners are heroes.”
 
“Teachers are the real heroes.”
 
Where does this come from?
 
Under some sort of tortured logic, of course, you could say that anyone doing anything worthwhile is a hero  – but what then, are actual heroes to be called?
 
Carlyle said it like this –
 
“Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:— the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any! “Gold,” Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases. ”
 
I find the above excerpt fascinating – almost hilarious.
 
Carlyle is advancing one of the most grand and lofty theories of all time – as to the origin of why humans think certain things matter  – and he answers that it comes from Heroes who organize thought and meaning , and that society follows from reverence and emulation of those heroes.
 
And then – hilariously – he compares it to bank notes.
 
And he remarks that that some notes are forged.
 
Carlyle was an odd writer – he mixed the lyrical and poetic hyper-romanticism of the earlier age, with the fierce mercantile, scientific, and logical thinking of the Industrial Revolution. (Incidentally, Nietzsche did too, as did Marx at times. Nowadays the hyper-romantic streams of thinking have largely died out in their purest forms, so we have very little writing that’s both logically grounded while simultaneously truly sweeping and awe-inspiring.)
 
Carlyle takes both refuge in an idea, and shudders in horror at the same time – when the ideas that are advanced as Heroic  stand on shaky ground but are persuasive, the can only circulate like forged bank-notes for a time… before the entire currency collapses.
 
We can say thus, that Hitler was a Hero for a time to the Germans – but Nazism collapsed and was extinguished due to the falseness of the ideology he advanced. Aristotle and Confucius have lived for thousands of years and will likely live thousands more, but Hitler was a brief run of a couple ugly decades before he committed suicide in the subterranean Fuhrerbunker as Berlin burned above him.
 
When Carlyle was writing in 1840, of course, the French Revolution was seen as an unmitigated disaster – the Terror, Napoleon’s usurpation of the Republic, and then his self-proclaied monarchy; then his usurpation of the Spanish Crown followed by the brutal guerilla uprising there, the doomed invasion of Moscow and all the suffering there, before eventual and final defeat at Waterloo.
 
Carlyle’s prediction was that debasing the heroic currency – intending to praise and celebrate and live patterns of living that are not in harmony with nature  would eventually lead to downfall and destruction.
 
I believe that he is correct – and World War I and World War II were the forces that swept so many bankrupt philosophies off the world stage and into the ash heap of history.
 
But – what of our current era?
 
***
 
HEROES AND VICTIMS
 
We are exploring the language of the day – last chapter, we explored the word “condescension” – which flipped meanings from good thing  to very bad thing , and the original concept was effectively deleted from common thinking.

Rank still exists. Duties still exist. Duties that are beneath your station that you are not responsible for… those still exist. You can still do those duties out of a sense of goodwill and camaraderie. But condescension… condescension has had damnatio  proclaimed on it; the concept  does not exist any more.

There is no way to talk about this thing; it might as well not exist.
 
Heroism has gone similarly – if everything is “heroic,” then what’s actual heroism?
 
The reasons it happened, I believe, are far different.
 
“Heroism” got equated with “powerful” – which is both true and false. Yes, the Heroic  is always a source of power and moves people along through life. But being named heroic  does not grant that sort of power; it’s only when a worldview and system of thought is in harmony with both nature and its era  that it becomes powerful.
 
It might not be an exaggeration to say that True Heroism is everything … and yet, the word “hero” without actual heroism  doesn’t mean particularly anything.
 
We probably live in an era that glorifies naked power as much as any other era ever has. Which might even be acceptable, but we also live in an era that pays too much attention to labels  – words – and not enough to substance .
 
When the Chilean miners were trapped underground for over two months, they were steadfast, they endured, they survived  – they were a lot of things. But were they heroes?
 
Their own union rep, Señor Jorquera, does not think so –
 
“ The miners are not ‘heroes,’ as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months. They are victims.”
 
***
 
THE SECOND LESSON FROM LINGUA FRANCA
 
Words are incredibly useful as a tool of thought, but they mean nothing when they map to nothing.
 
The word “hero” – for reasons we’ve explored – has come to be mapped to “person I like” or “person I want to praise or reassure for some reason.”
 
The word hero , thus, has came to mean – very little.
 
It’s just a worthless compliment you can give someone.
 
Yes – worthless . It doesn’t mean what it meant when Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was executed by the Nazis; it doesn’t mean what it meant when Benjamin Franklin was lovingly called “The First American” for advancing principles that the new nation would be based upon.
 
In this case, the word has been debased  – it’s mostly just another synonym for “good,” highly diluted in its meaning.
 
Worst of all abuses of this word, I contend, is calling someone a “hero” who has just suffered through something. Suffering steadfastly can be admirable, to be sure, but in olden days, it was only those who suffered to advance their civilization  that were called heroes – and even then, sparingly.
 
Once again, the word does not matter  – actually, in this case, the word might matter some… you ought to think on what’s really a hero . I’ve laid out my logic and sources, but you ought to give it some thought of your own.
 
But, in another sense, no, the word does not matter – rather, what matters is the concept of a word losing its meaning by merely becoming a synonym for “nice thing” and thus losing its significance.
 
The trend towards calling anyone a hero who suffers a little bit, not even necessarily bravely, not for their civilization  but just in their own private lives … is this not a debasement of the word “hero” – a word that was once the most grand of words, denoting the most grand things of a civilization, and which now means… nothing?
 
It’s too bad we don’t have an actual word for people who suffer – so that they can be worthy of our compassion, and celebrated for enduring, and comforted after their struggle. Attributing “hero” to them, as if the word is a magical talisman that will make them powerful, that’s just silly… but it’s too bad we don’t have an appropriate word for this other thing that’s worthy of our sympathy.
 
Oh wait, we do have a word for it?
 
What is it?
 
“The miners are not ‘heroes,’ as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months. They are  victims .”
 
Oh.
 
Well, ain’t that something.
 
Monarchs who think they’re clever mix brass in with their gold coins and think no one will notice. It’s a good trick… for a short time. A very short time.
 
Think through your words a little, eh? We need to brandish up our mental treasuries to continue to think soundly, clearly and lucidly.