Great Spirits of History

There’s this quote that floats around sometimes. It goes something like:

If you don’t do the thinking, the thinking will be done for you

This is usually presented like a bad thing. Everyone likes to do this. You have the commentators who swing liberal expressing this kind of sentiment when it conflicts with that kind of ‘personal agency’ ideology they’re into, like Jordan Peterson any time he talks about tyranny or Joe Rogan’s views on Covid.¹ But you also have progressive commentators worrying about it for its potential to erase the contributions of the marginalised. I’m thinking of Noam Chomsky’s manufacturing consent complaint or Angela Davis’ more general postcolonial discontent. Everybody does it. I do it. Heaps.

I think this kind of maligning is pretty fairly earned, for the most part. Following leads inevitably to sclerosis if the thing you’re following is a cultural trend. This is one of the contributing factors I write about in my post about how social media is much less influential than the way life is going for social media users, or one of the societal failings that I think contribute to rising suicide rates. Essentially it’s the kind of hydraulic force that forces us to use social media badly, and more generally consume information badly. We end up believing in ideological stacks that don’t always serve us very well.

However, as I also say, ideologies are graceful solutions to a complex world. We can’t possibly work everything out from first principles. We have to rely on others in many cases.

So enough of my complaining. Let’s talk about a good one. One of the ideology stacks that I think might be overly maligned is the Great Man Theory, or the idea that:

history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes: highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, extraordinary leadership abilities or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect.

Now, obviously this particular framing is no good. This particular framing leads us to make silly assumptions, like that ‘talent’ exists inherently, rather than more often being incidental. As I’ve pointed out before:

The better theory of history is the one that recognises that we stand on the shoulders of giants … The ‘great men’ of history are nothing more than an emblem of an enormous swath of contributions across people and time … at some point along the way we slap a face to the process

If you’ve never read Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, you should. Better than any PHIL101 course. He puts it quite beautifully:

Each of these philosophers has some lesson for us, if we approach them properly … We too have had the experiences they had, but we did not suck those experiences dry of their secret and subtle meanings: we were not sensitive to the overtones of the reality that hummed about us … So let us listen to these men, ready to forgive them their passing errors, and eager to learn the lessons which they are so eager to teach.

Alright, in putting together that quote, I can see that it comes off a little kitsch. But whoever reads his audiobook makes it sound fabulous. Durant’s more general point is that philosophy contextualises science:

Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions … Philosophy leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters, the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored.

And in the works of the ‘Great Men’, we see this juncture—the putting together of threads into a whole. But we need to add something to Durant’s zealousness. Something Durant hints at when he quoted:

“Do you then be reasonable,” said old Socrates to Crito, “and do not mind whether the teachers of philosophy are good or bad, but think only of Philosophy herself.

The implication is that these Great Men are avatars for the ideas. They represent the collection of ideas and perspectives at a time and place much more than they represent the ideas of the person themselves. We might instead, as I suggest elsewhere, look at these people as the spirit of an idea rather than a real person. I think this frees us somewhat from the talent myth and the fact that ‘Great Men’ narratives obscure the contributions of the marginalised. Because, as you might before you start playing with any kind of spirit, no matter how superstitious you are, you should have a little think about it’s motivations first.

Let me give you an example.

In Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, they talk about the pervasive idea, originating ostensibly with Rousseau, that:

Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.

Along the way, they point out that this ‘idea’ of Rousseau’s was never an idea of his at all. It was a parable, designed to explore:

a fundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality’?

As they point out, Rousseau was reflecting the debate provoked by critiques of European civilisation in the early 1700’s, sparked by indigenous commentators like Kandiaronk. Specifically:

Whereas in [Indigenous] societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others (with the consequence that differences of wealth had little effect on individual freedom), in France the situation could not have been more different. Power over possessions could be directly translated into power over other human beings.

Graeber and Wengrow go on to show, throughout their book, that the idea of the ‘Noble Savage’ is overblown. The capacity for despotism or egalitarianism doesn’t seem to be reliant on civilisational time, but circumstance.

By inspecting the spirit of Rousseau’s idea, we get much closer to the thing than if we viewed Rousseau as a Great Man with a great idea: hydraulic forces that trend toward despotism may look like civilisation, but in fact take us further from some idyll.

We can do a similar thing with Plato—something I did in more detail here. Plato was born in a time where the actions of the famous Athenian Democracy had led to profound unrest as well as being a major contribution to Athens’ loss in the Pelopennesian War. So, Plato was in favour of aristocracy, not democracy, and wrote of the promise of ‘philosopher kings’ in his Republic:

The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers

Plato, in this and many other of his works, represents the spirit of one great idea—the value of natural laws against social ones: that democratic values could be dominated by populist rhetoric, indecision, and poor leadership, and that cabals of the ‘naturally powerful’ can be a bulwark against it.

Again, by viewing the spirit of the idea, and its motivations, we come to understand it much better. We can see the value of aristocratic ideals against democratic ones, but we’re also exposed to the dangers. It’s not for nothing Plato has his philosopher kings jumping through so many hoops before they make it to the top. He has his ‘kings’ graduate, bruised and scarred, from a fifty-year program of trials and education—at least those who didn’t break under the pressure.

To take it back to where we started:

If you don’t do the thinking, the thinking will be done for you

You’re not likely to find a better solution to navigating most of the world than this. But you can give yourself better tools to work out whose thinking you want to adopt. This is one. A little argument in favour of the great man theory, except I reckon we should call them Great Spirits, not men. It’s not like anyone’s going to listen to you if you try to overthrow the icons of the so-called ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ anyway. This way, you aren’t just more likely to be better informed, but you get the benefit of imagining them to be whatever you like. Make Plato a girl. Who’s going to stop you? It’s just a spirit after all.²