The Problem With Heroes

In a recent article published on the Imaginative Conservative website, Craig Montesano laments on how Lee has been treated in modern times (click here for the article, a brief bio of Montesano comes with the article). For Montesano regards Lee as a hero of significant stature, but some of Lee's 21st century reviews seemed to have caused irreparable damage to his reputation and the current times demand that Lee's pedestal be destroyed and Lee be forgotten.

Lee is admired for his character and military abilities. But his belief in white supremacy and that he fought in a war to maintain that supremacy along with his fondness for hierarchy are part of what shows Lee to have feet of clay.

Montesano is honest and upfront with Lee's failures and defects. Nevertheless, he wants Lee to be placed on a significantly high pedestal. Certainly Montesano believes that Lee's pedestal should be not as tall as others might want, but he wants a society and culture in which we look up to people like Lee. And in that sense, Montesano, like Lee, prefers a hierarchical society. Thus, he prefers a society that retains a certain degree of authoritarianism.



But what Montesano wants in society just might be what causes his heroes, like Lee, to be endangered. Why is that?

Authoritarianism can include the authoritarian personality type. So as a society leans toward authoritarianism, its people tend to naturally exhibit the traits of  an authoritarian personality type. Part of that ,includes the employment of a simple black-white, all-or-nothing thinking. With such thinking, people tend to use a very limited set of criteria, while ignoring a much larger set of information, to form its opinions of others. If that set of criteria is met, then the person in question becomes a saint regardless of any of their faults and sins. If that criteria is not met, then the person in question is demonized regardless of their contributions and positive qualities.

And thus, both the times and Montesano show traits of embracing the type of thinking associated with the authoritarian personality type. Montesano embraces that thinking because of his fondness for hierarchy. Our current times often display this type of thinking despite rejecting both the metanarratives of the past and the worship of past heroes. Why? Because despite the rejection of heroes and supposed rejection of authoritarianism from the past,  modern times have emerged from an authoritarian culture and thus have been taught to analyze life by employing black-white thinking. The total rejection of people like Lee who have committed certain sins shows this all-or-nothing thinking. And thus just as Lee's contributions and positive qualities cause Montesano to perhaps minimize Lee's faults and failures, so many people today tend to minimize Lee's contributions and positive traits because of his faults and sins.

The more a society welcomes hierarchy and engages in hero worship, the more it employs the kind of the thinking that can pose a danger to the status of the heroes who are worshiped. That is because the more a society welcomes hierarchy and engages in hero worship, the more it teaches its future generations to employ the same kind of black-white thinking it does.

The more we engage in black-white thinking, the more we will either keep our heroes on high pedestals regardless of their faults or joyfully knock them off of their pedestals out of a self-righteous revenge. The less we engage in black-white thinking, the fewer heroes we will have and the safer they will be because the pedestals on which we place them will be sufficiently modest so that any fall will not prohibit us from seeing their good qualities and contributions.

Certainly Montesano displays a positive bias for Robert E. Lee. But that does not prevent him from writing a fair and upfront evaluation of Lee. His article is a worthwhile read. And he wants people to regard Lee as a flawed hero. But in the end, I believe that Montesano doesn't realize that the kind of hierarchical culture he desires to exist is what prevents people like Lee from receiving the credit that Montesano believes he deserves.