Napoleon Crossing the Alps by David
Back in college, I had a history professor named Bob Brinson. I remember him because he was a very good teacher, able not only to make the subject exciting (a talent surprisingly rare in history professors) but also conversant in the scholarship of history itself. That is, he taught us about the different ways that scholars view history, the various cultural and ideological lenses through which history is filtered in any given generation.
In particular, he told us about Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory of History. This is the theory in which history as a successive series of exceptional people who changed the world. You know their names already: Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Elizabeth I, Isaac Newton, Napoleon, Churchill. The title “Great Man Theory” is obviously a bit of a misnomer in that 1.) it inevitably includes women and 2.) many of these individuals are “Great” not in the moral or spiritual sense but rather in the size of the shadow they left upon their historical landscape. Even so, the core of the Great Man idea is that such people represent not only an extreme idealization of their historical culture, but that they change that culture irrevocably. In short, they make world a better (or, at least, different) place than whence they found it.
Even today, when most people think of “history” as a topic, they are really thinking of the Great Man Theory (call it GMT for short). GMT was how history was traditionally taught for many centuries, in part because it is an inherently patriarchal—if not elitist—view of human events. Great men are all that matter; ordinary people are just extras on the set. Not surprisingly, the theory was especially attractive to the Fascists and proto-Fascists of the early Twentieth Century. They took GMT to a grotesque extreme, believing not just that history is driven by exceptional individuals—the Übermenschen of Nietzsche’s writings—but that such men should be given total authority over everyone else. Hence, Hitler.
Elizabeth I
In recent years, GMT has been almost completely discredited by modern scholars. It’s too simplistic, they say. It puts too much emphasis on intangible, non-quantifiable entities like vision and courage. In our modern cybernetic world, where statistical analysis has become an enshrine components of political and economic planning, the notion that a single human being can make any real difference in the great sweep of history seems naive, even boorish. In the era of “Analytics” and “Big Data“, GMT seems as old-fashioned as a rotary phone.
In its place has come the rise of the so-called Zeitgeist Theory, which lies on the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. If GMT proclaims the individual, Zeitgeist Theory focuses on the collective, on society as a whole—literally, the “spirit of the times.” Zeitgeist Theory acknowledges the presence of exceptional people, like Napoleon, but sees him as merely the product of his era—the crest of a wave. In this view, the rise of the French Empire was not the brainchild of one military genius (Napoleon). Rather, it was an inevitable consequence of the huge military and structural advantages that France enjoyed after ridding itself of the Bourbon monarchy and establishing itself as the first full democracy of Europe. Even if Napoleon had stayed in Corsica and lived a life of quiet obscurity, someone would have made France into a great military power in the early nineteenth century. In short, the big picture of Europe would have been the same, with or without Bonaparte.
As the great Carl Sagan once said, it’s difficult to “change the weave of history.”
I’ve been thinking about these differing approaches to history a lot lately. Yesterday was June 6, 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Also, I just re-read Jonathan Alter’s fine book The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. I tend to read a lot of books about World War II and that era in general. Like so many, I’m drawn to the drama of the story—the epic, Manichean struggle between light and dark. And after finishing this last book, especially, I came to a startling conclusion…
I am an ardent proponent of the Great Man Theory.
I, too, believe that people are products of the era in which they find themselves, and that great revolutions don’t come until the world is ready for them, in some sense. And yet, despite all this, cling to the Great Man Theory. I am, in fact, a GMT booster, and always have been.
I’m not sure why, exactly. Maybe it’s because Zeitgeist Theory is just so damned boring—so lurkingly deterministic and cold. Or maybe the fact of my being raised Catholic has made me more receptive to GMT. (Christ is, after all, the ultimate Great Man of Western Civilization.)
But I think my inclination towards GMT runs even deeper than that. If you love history as a “story,” then you have to love the characters of that story. You have to believe that their actions matters, that they drive the story and are not just carried along by it. And, strangely enough, my belief in the consequences of human action leads me to a series of deeper admissions. I believe that life has a purpose. I believe that the universe is evolving as a consequence of human choices. I believe that individuals, with their individual acts and choices, can and do affect the arc of history in profound and even sublime ways.
In short, I am a closet Teleologist, which is to say that I believe the Universe is evolving toward a hidden but specific destiny. I believe that every human being in the main character in his own novel, and that all of these novels converge in the great saga of eternity.
This is a stubbornly archaic and unfashionable belief, I realize. Some very smart people would even call it “delusional”. Fair enough. But this crazy belief system of mine is affirmed each and every time I read a well-written biography, such as Alter’s book about F.D.R. Perhaps no other figure is more often put forth as a defense of GMT than Franklin Roosevelt. How could it be otherwise? If World War II was the hinge on which the Twentieth Century turned, then FDR was the hinge on which World War II turned.
The enormity of F.D.R.’s impact on the history of the world is even more amazing given the almost absurd improbability of his life. As Alter so poignantly demonstrates, the fact of FDR should never have occurred in a purely mathematical and random universe. A vigorous young man blessed with wealth and privilege, he never should have been stricken by polio. Once stricken, he never should have survived. Having survived, he never should have re-entered politics. Having re-entered politics, he never should have achieved the Presidency. Have achieved the Presidency, he never should have weathered the social and political upheavals of the Great Depression. Have weathered these, he never should have led America to victory over Fascism. And on and on.
Even the aforementioned Carl Sagan—one of my other heroes and the smartest dude to ever to have his own TV show—couldn’t help but marvel over the fantastic improbability of FDR’s life story:
A polio virus is a tiny microorganism. We encounter many of them every day. But only rarely, fortunately, does one of them infect one of us and cause this dread disease. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, had polio. Because the disease was crippling, it may have provided Roosevelt with a greater compassion for the underdog; or perhaps it improved his striving for success. If Roosevelt’s personality had been different, or if he had never had the ambition to be President of the United States, the great depression of the 1930’s, World War II and the development of nuclear weapons might just possibly have turned out differently. The future of the world might have been altered. But a virus is an insignificant thing, only a millionth of a centimeter across. It is hardly anything at all.
I would talk Sagan’s speculation a step further. I would make the case that if F.D.R. had not come about, at that exact moment, then history itself might have ended. The fascists might have won World War II, and the human species might have perished in the inevitable nuclear wars that would have eventually followed between Nazi Germany and Russia (or America, or Japan). Or, failing that, the entire planet might have fallen into some eternal nightmare of totalitarian rule, of the sort envisioned by George Orwell. But F.D.R. was there. And it is hard to exaggerate the impact that this once-pampered mama’s boy—and that insignificant microorganism which infected him on that summer day in 1921—had on the fate of us all.
I once had the pleasure of attending a lecture by the great science writer and biologist Stephen J. Gould. One of the main themes of his lecture was the concept of contingency—the fact that huge changes in history can hang on the smallest of chances. He was speaking, of course, about evolutionary history—the way that species can foliate in unexpected and random ways. But he also talked about how this idea of contingency is deeply woven into our human experience, both in our art and in our perception of our own lives. As wrote in one of his essays, “The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the ‘experimental’ production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.” He even cited two films as evidence of this theme: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future.
Back to the Future
Both of those great movies involve a kind of time travel. In It’s a Wonderful Life, the main character gets to see what the world would have been like if he had never been born. And in Back to the Future, a modern boy travels back to the 1950s to help his future parents make better choices, and thus improve the story of their lives (and his own). You can, in fact, trace this kind of story back to at least the nineteenth century in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge gets to see how his past, present, and future have been wrecked by his misanthropy and greed. In all of these tales, the theme is the same: that the overall shape and character of every human life—and of all those around us—is contingent on his actions, his choices.
As with so many things, the Buddhists have the perfect great metaphor for this idea. It’s called Indra’s Net, and it’s basically a huge, infinite fisherman’s net spread over the entire universe. At each intersection of the net rests a jewel, and each jewel reflects all the other jewels. As described in the Avatamsaka Sutra:
There hang the jewels, glittering “like” stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.
How better to describe the way in which we are all interconnected, in all moments?
And so, getting back to my original question about whether The Great Man Theory is dead, the answer is an emphatic “no.” Books about Great Men (and Women) will always be so popular, both in an out of scholarly circles. It is because the story of great people is just a particular example of our greatness. To believe in the magnificence of Napoleon is to believe in our own (potential) magnificence. And, more to the point, he simply makes for a very good read.
NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden (REUTERS)
But the Great Man Theory is evolving, I think. It now has to include seemingly insignificant men who somehow rise to greatness. One example I would put forth is that of Edward Snowden, the guy who blew the whistle on the N.S.A. He basically risked his freedom—perhaps even his life—to reveal what he thought were gross abuses of governmental power.
If that’s not the quality of a Great Man, what is?
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