Human idols

The cult of the genius and the need for role models

I’m not the first to note that many idols aren’t the wonderful people the initial image suggests. Mohandas Gandhi is the most famous example: a pacifist famed for his principled stand against colonial rule who regarded Asians (British usage) as equals of white people… but didn’t stretch this belief in human equality as far as black people. We’ve just gone through another round of honouring the nation’s role models – a new list of knights and lords has been announced. They don’t seem the most inspirational people. They’re mostly politically-connected, or else rewarded for doing their job.

              Statues of great people litter the country. Benefactors, officials and generals loom over us. The recent ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign has reminded us that none of these people was perfect, and many seem to have more to condemn than recommend them. I think much of the time we immortalise these men (yes, mostly men, another criticism of our national statuary) for a specific deed or act; it is the good thing that they want to be remembered for. In that sense, something like a Said Business School, named after Wafic Said, a billionaire arms dealer, is implicitly promoting values that we should support. Mr Said didn’t regard his legacy as an arms dealer as a worthy legacy, and would prefer that we respect and remember funding of education (even if it is a business school, a university department that raised and raises difficult questions about the nature of academia and the value of education).

              It’s true that many people who had statues erected to themselves, as well as those viewing them, thought of the honour as adding to their social status and erasing other misdeeds, but the only sensible justification a modern mind can accept is that we must respect the individual acts that the statues commemorate more than the individuals who did them.

              And that’s the crux of the matter. We are a social species. We see character in the ways of fate. We deduce intention where none exists. That’s how gods evolved. Most of us despise the abstraction of information away from people and human narrative. That’s why television is overflowing with the sewage of soap operas and un-‘reality television’, and drama is pumped into otherwise perfectly decent shows about natural history, cooking etc. It’s why Prime Minister’s Questions is so popular, even though it’s about as close to real debate as a candle is to the sun, and about as relatively enlightening.

                We care about people, despite all the evidence that they don’t deserve it. Of course, in modern times we don’t erect statues so easily. The people who matter don’t care about the physical medium of lasting architecture and old-fashioned monuments. Instead we have autobiographies and cult followings. The greatest of modern times is probably Steve Jobs, although in the UK the noted racist Winston Churchill has even made it to the £5 note.

              Steve Jobs was, it seems, a difficult and unpleasant man to work with. Hailed as a genius, he wasn’t genius enough when he went to India seeking enlightenment; a true genius would already have a budding philosophical approach. He was a computer hobbyist whose hobby brought him wealth, and hence licence to be nasty. Once in the position of CEO of a company you know perfectly, it’s perfectly possible to achieve what he did without being such a deeply unpleasant and difficult person. I haven’t pored over his biography, but I get the impression of someone who never really found that enlightenment. His main superpowers seem to have been luck, supreme confidence and a good amount of inside knowledge of his own company. We could spend many pages (and people have) analysing exactly what making an idol of him says about modern society; I’ll leave that for you to ponder.

              Alongside our obsession with entrepreneurs whose main achievement seems to have been to be lucky, we also talk of role models when we discuss athletes and performers. Despite not caring about footballers’ lives, I still can’t escape the occasional article reporting yet another instance of bad behaviour and noting that the footballer is a bad role model. Of course, without such reporting no-one would know of the bad behaviour or even think that footballers are role models. It’s strange that we care about the morality of athletes and musicians, but not so much the morality of our economic idols.

              We also sometimes talk of scientists the same way. Yet science is a collective effort, and making a massive leap in understanding is usually luck; after all, if the discovery was known, it wouldn’t be a discovery. So a researcher is necessarily leaping into the dark.

              Do we need role models? When I was young, I certainly dreamed of fame and riches (and yes, I still do, although it gets harder and harder as I realize how far I am from such things) but I didn’t dream of doing exactly what I read other people doing. The fun was in imagining myself in that position: how I would help friends and family. I’m fairly sure that wealth and power can corrupt and tempt people even without role models to show people how to drink heavily, take drugs and seduce each other’s partners. Humans have imagination, and what a wealthy individual lacks in imagination a multitude of salesmen and hangers-on will provide instead. The idea of having a role model is no longer to show people how to live a good life. It seems that it is another aspirational propaganda tool: see what it is possible to do in this marvellous society. It has become corrupted from its origins in sainthood.

              We’ve had role models for a long time. Saints are another example of humans who have become remembered for an act, or a death, or occasionally a reasonably good life. As the protestant branches of Christianity pointed out, the cults of sainthood, including the cult of the virgin Mary (i.e. Roman Catholicism) come very close to idolatry. In some places, they definitely merged into idolatry. For example, Santeria in Cuba is a fusion of the Christianity the Spaniards imposed on their slaves and the African gods the slaves brought with them; the identities of saints have merged with those of gods.

              This brings us back to our predilection for seeing character and intent where none exists. Footballers, entrepreneurs and CEOs are our modern saints; our version of the primitive animist spirits of the wind and the sea. We have simply updated our concerns from the natural world to the economic and sporting worlds. We ascribe to these god-like beings mastery of their element because we refuse to believe in chaos and chance.

              By ignoring these powerful forces in our society we aren’t indulging in harmless dreaming. Hero-worship isn’t only a sin for the Christians who believe that we should have only the one God. It’s a sin against truth. If we don’t understand how our world works we won’t act in the right ways to make it better, or do the best with our lives.

              We like to blame Trump for the awful state of modern America, or Dacre for the same in Britain. Both men are bilious parasites in the world, proof positive that there is no such thing as natural justice. But the truth is that individuals only push the vast impersonal structures of society little by little. It takes thousands of individuals working together, either consciously or subconsciously, to make a difference. In the world of PR and marketing, people look for influencers: the cadre of people who will spread the world from its central origin. Christianity needed Jesus’ disciples.

              The truth is that people are just people. There are bad people and good people, but good people make mistakes, at best, and bad people sometimes do nice things. We shouldn’t worship or demonize any of them; they are just little people. It is the systems and ideas they leave behind that matter. The idea of the role model is one idea we need to discard.