Great Men and Great Ideas
At this moment, everyone is absorbed in trying to fathom what happened in the election of 2024. How can it be that our cultural elites, of media, governance, education, professions and 65 million voters were shocked into disbelief at the outcome? This is quite different from normal disappointment that one side lost. That happens all the time. How can such total unawareness exist on the Left? Many ideas will be suggested in the coming years about this “surprise;” all-too many will be based on ugly assumptions about foes. What may the Liberal Arts, often scorned as not concerned with the practical world by those who do not know them well enough, tell us, however, about such a watershed?
The secular Liberal Arts tradition of the nineteenth century was fascinated by the question of what moves History. The truest answer, of course, is the Creator. But the philosopher Hegel, in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, theorized that history was driven by a Spirit of the Age—or Zeitgeist—which, roughly speaking, is the sum of varied minds working along similar lines or being educated into these similar concepts. Each age’s Spirit or set of dominant ideas, he believed, will tend to be somewhat the opposite of the previous one. As the old and the new clash, a yet newer concept of the age will slowly emerge, combining certain elements of both while improving on both. Thus for Hegel, the “advance” of history is a product of millions of minds and spirits slowly agreeing on what becomes a revolutionary change. This kind of thought easily, though not inevitably, led to a Marxist view of the masses as the real source of historical change that no individual leader is capable of resisting.
Napoleon’s emergence in history, however, irresistibly brought forth another explanation: that great men emerge out of nowhere and single-handedly transform the world. Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History sets out six types of extraordinary beings who transform history. These include, among others, Odin, Mohammed, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Rousseau, Cromwell and Napoleon. Of the mere men, only Shakespeare and Dante might plausibly, if inaccurately, be said not to be involved with a political revolution. In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson took up this idea in his book Representative Men. The title is typical Emerson, he wants it both ways. These men are great, but they are really just us grown larger. Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Goethe are his picks. Only one of his men clearly is a great political force—Napoleon. He wants to emphasize, not inaccurately, that great minds move the world as well.
Leo Tolstoy was obsessed with both of these two ideas. His War and Peace, among much else, weaves back and forth between them, trying to determine whether it was the simple masses of Russian men and women, bearing forward the great ideas of Russian identity and Christian faith, that were more important. Or whether the decisive actors were Napoleon and General Kutuzov, who lured Napoleon into the death trap of the Russian winter, even at the cost of the burning of Moscow.
Our own time remains in the middle of these questions. Globalism is an extension of what we thought was a defeated communist ideology. But now Marxism is furthered with the willing support of massive businesses for global profits, much as I.G.Farben and Krupp willingly supported the National Socialists, who preached state control of everything. On the opposing side seems to be cultural nationalism, which resists the homogenization of all persons and folk-ways under a global autocracy. Since globalism is communist in impulse, a childish binary mental framework has declared nationalism to be right-wing. Surely our Founders would have been puzzled by such a designation of their work. We know best our own Constitutional Republic, with its earnest and revolutionary thesis that the people are capable of governing themselves. Its concern for the rights of men stemmed from the Christian conception of God’s desire for the salvation of all men, not just of an elite. This impulse, however many times liberals have tried to denature it into a mere rational preference, remains massively powerful, even in the face of collapsing religious leadership everywhere but the Moslem world.
Donald Trump’s ascendancy to a second presidency, in the face of massive resistance on the part of the media, the academy, the federal bureaucracy, and the judiciary, might bear examination in light of the Great Man theory. The unlikely, but huge, coalition of what were formerly perceived as opposing American “interest groups” who supported him may represent, not merely the response to a charismatic individual, but to an idea that is far more important than any man. Yet the man is crucial, it seems, to the success of the idea. It is no coincidence that since his first appearance on the international stage in 2016, numerous leaders throughout Europe and now even South America have supported cultural nationalism as the truest expression of their people’s will, often with surprising success, and always opposed by massive opposition, from the European Union in particular. If this is correct, the Cold-war battle between Communism (supported by hard Left Quislings) versus Republican ideals that support the freedom of conscience and private property may have permanently morphed. The war may now poise Globalism and autocracy versus a cultural nationalism that wields the power of the nation state in defense of freedom. We are looking at a trans-national business-state apparatus engaging in war against a loose coalition of nation states. To ensure survival of the nation state, and still to defend the rights of individuals in such a contest, will require great men and women indeed. After all, states are better known for diminishing the rights of their citizens in the name of centralized power. Let us hope we may have begun with a man great enough to achieve this delicate balance. And let us hope that the great idea of freedom will indeed win the world. As always, in what the Liberal Arts can view, only time will tell.
