humanity and hero-worship
I don’t remember if I’ve written on this one before or not …
Newton wrote “If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. In the process of what he did, he himself became a giant, on whose shoulders much of modern understanding still rests.
It’s easy to hero-worship guys like that… to say Newton was an incredible person, who did incredible things, and was all around incredible. But what’s harder is to think of guys like that as ordinary people who put in a lot of effort to get where they got. In other words, to think of them as human.
I would say it’s very hard to see the humanity of the people we respect. Guys like Newton, Einstein, Bohr, modern figures like Stephen Hawking, great and influential philosophers like Descartes and Locke and Aristotle, etc …
By making all of these great people in history into two-dimensional landmarks, characters without flaws, we can say “they’re different than us”. Descartes was different than me, because he was a better thinker than I as. Newton’s insights could only have been arrived at by Newton. Einstein wasn’t an ordinary guy, Lincoln wasn’t either.
I think that that sort of hero-worship is wrong though, because it excuses us, as ordinary people, from rising to the challenge these great people pose. By saying “Newton achieved great things that I never could”, I can dismiss myself from the responsibility to try to achieve the things that he did.
That’s a great responsibility lifted from my shoulders, that I don’t have to try to be one of the giants on whose shouders another giant will someday stand. That I can just be an ordinary person, and leave no lasting impression on the world, no progress, no legacy, and that ultimately my life is permitted to be an embodiment of the futility that is ordinary life.
I harbor two incompatible sentiments about this. First, a part of me (let’s call it “the humble side”) knows that I’m probably in truth not as clever and mathematically insightful as Newton or Galileo, that I’m not as complex a thinker as Kant, that I’m not as vivid a writer as the great authors of the past and present, and wants to just calmly accept that as inevitability, and sink into the trough of normalcy. And seeing all the people who’ve made it through the majority of their lives to end up in cushy jobs as basically impactless researchers, as aging professors soon-to-be-emeritus, who are less concerned with revolutionizing their fields and more concerned with saving for their retirements, it seems like even those in the position to be such greats maybe are beaten into the humble realization that they never will be. And one “me” — the humble me — wants to embrace that, to accept as gospel that I will never be one of those greats, and that’s it.
And then there’s the other me (Let’s call him “the conceited side”). That me hates that pattern, finds that realization revolting, and finds the complacent normal me to be a contemptible sloth, deserving of the deepest degree of scorn and disdain for such an unambitious and outwardly pointless existence. That me wants me to push the whole me on and on, ever onward, always becoming better, stronger, smarter, more insightful. Always driven to refine my skills and beliefs, and ultimately to make a mark on the world.
It’s interesting, watching those two sides fight it out, I tell ya. They both make such attractive arguments. It’s sort of like the id and superego, except they’re not so much driving base impulses as philosophies of life as a whole.