Is there no Greatness?
There’s a lot going on these days and, frankly, much of it alarms me. I’m a guy of traditional views and a fiscal conservative. I don’t think anyone should spend money they don’t have, especially governments. I believe everyone has the right to make choices for themselves, and people should mind their own business. Makes sense I guess – after all, I’m officially a senior citizen. I rely on considered, rational, reasoned thought. I view public displays of emotion-driven, progressive tirades as counter-productive and even destructive. Not coincidentally, they often turn destructive both from a human and economic standpoint.
One of the most troubling trends appears to be the urge to denigrate and destroy many significant figures of history, erasing names from edifices and monuments, and every hero of our past. Why? Because they purportedly did not espouse the values we currently hold as self-evident. This trend is foolhardy and destructive. It wants to erase a past we should look upon with measured pride and with the knowledge of how far we have come from those times. But, I wonder – based upon our current behavior in America, how far have we really come? The lack of tolerance for the views of others is alarming. The thought of open, considerate, rational discussion seems impossible. Manners continue to disintegrate; civil public behavior seems non-existent in large, public gatherings. One wonders what the mob proponents of anarchy are after, and to that thought, the answer seems obvious – destruction of the status quo, of traditions, of the rule of law, of the republic form of government. I think immediately of Jesus – “Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do.”
Today I’m focusing on the destruction of the American Hero. Great people do not grow on trees. But, I also think there is a distinction between people who are great and people who do great things. People who do great things are both ambitious and sacrificial. They give up much to pursue a dream, their life’s goal. They are rarely swayed from total dedication to achieving it. To that end, they often sacrifice their health, wealth, life, family and friends. They are usually flawed and unbalanced; total dedication to a cause makes you that way. It’s unavoidable. We lionize them as people who have furthered the cause of nations or humanity in some substantial way. But almost without exception their private lives are deeply flawed. They have either given up on, or never cared about, family or personal attachments. Family and friends usually suffer as a result, and the legacy to their families is usually one of personal dysfunction and tragedy. These people who have accomplished something that furthers humanity usually do so while abusing those closest to them. They are not likable, even sometimes despised.
We sometimes compare people who are great with other people (saintly, even) whom we tremendously admire for their ability to connect with others. People who have a seemingly unbounded ability to empathize, engage, and connect with others have an amazing gift, particularly if that engagement is genuine and heartfelt. They are usually not famous, though they certainly may be. They also may be as corruptible as the rest of us, but those who can remain humble are truly made of rare, great and powerful stuff.
People who do great things are always products of their time, of their society and its beliefs and mores. But, in one way or another they are also always outliers; they part from the accepted way of thinking. In most other ways, however, they will follow the norms of society. So, when George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison helped create this completely new concept of citizenship and nations, they owned slaves. Today, we cannot comprehend that. Unable as we are to come to grips with this conflict, we condemn both them and their actions, effectively throwing the baby out with the bathwater. With that logic, the concept of a republican form of representative government is as bad and racist as slavery. Taking this thought pattern to its end, by extension everything espoused or built by this country is racist.
That is a leap of logic no rational person should ever make. It is dangerous and ignorant. It ignores all the good, all the hope, all the realization of aspirations and accomplishment a free, limited and republic form of government has realized. Those who seek equal everything for everyone fail to realize nothing, NOTHING, can or ever will be perfect. Though perfection is a concept and aspiration of humans, it is not a capability possessed by humans. It does not exist. Absolutes do not exist in nature. They exist in mathematics and physics only in the theoretical sense, as a concept of an absolute, or of a defined set or group. But any formula of a curve (a distribution by which all human attributes are represented) extended to infinity, will never reach absolute zero. Therefore, perfect distribution of a human trait or capability can never occur. Accidents will never reach zero; there will always be accidents. Death will never be completely eliminated nor disease completely wiped out. Nature can never be completely harnessed. There are certain truths that are inexorable; they will endure beyond mankind.
As truth is an absolute it, too, is a concept. Truth is not relative, moldable, or mutable. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Hmm, there’s that conflict of truth, of concept, to social reality and mores. That men and women are imperfect, fallible, prone to the economic and technological realities of their times should be a given. But, for the sake of our self-righteousness, we cannot see that. It threatens our ‘modern’ vision of ourselves as more pure, more enlightened, more righteous. History will look back one day and wonder, “What were those morons thinking?”
We were thinking with the same arrogance of every millennium before us – that we were the best thing since sliced bread. So much more educated, more knowledgeable. There was only one problem – we still had the same reptilian brain as our ancestors, the same emotional synapses and the same cerebral cortex as those who came before us. We sit in judgement, yet we are no better.
