June – Lives to Learn From

​“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” wrote the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle in 1840.   Perhaps if he were writing today, Carlyle would say “great men and women,” but he voiced an important theory of human history’s unfolding.  Our story, he claimed, owes its contours to the ideas and actions of heroic individuals in key times and places.  Distinguished by their personal qualities and the inner spark that guides them, “heroes” exert a dramatically disproportionate effect on their times.  For better or for worse, he said, they are the creators, “natural luminaries,” and “modelers” who bring new things into existence and inspire the admiration of others. 
​
​Historians and writers who shared Carlyle’s perspective in the nineteenth century pointed out that “great men” were not always good men.  Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Atilla the Hun, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed a place in the pantheon, as did Pericles, Jesus, Muhammad, Shakespeare, and Luther.  Had he lived to the twentieth century, Carlyle would surely have had to spotlight  Stalin and Hitler, in addition to Churchill and FDR.  The “Great” were sometimes, but not always the virtuous. 
 
Herbert Spencer, Carlyle’s contemporary, insisted that the Romantic Scot got it all wrong.  “Great Men,” he claimed were simply products of their social environment and indeed all of human history could be explained by impersonal social forces that were largely beyond the control of individuals, and which, in fact, molded the imagined great men.  (Not surprisingly, Spencer wrote the Study of Sociology in 1896.)
 
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries scholars have straddled these two extremes.  Yes, we need to give historical circumstance and social environment their due, but are human beings really just “history’s slaves,” as Tolstoy hinted in War and Peace?  If so, how does one explain Dante Alighieri or Joan of Arc?  Alexander Hamilton or the Grimke sisters?  Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton? Oscar Schindler or Irena Sendler*? Mohandes Ghandi or Mother Teresa?  ​

Human history does not always prove the efficacy of human striving.  We sail in strong currents, and sometimes our vessels (large and small) are swamped by rogue waves.  One thinks of the Plague, the Holocaust, or 9-11.  But we are not without ballast and rudders. We struggle to right ourselves, and we move forward.  This month the Core Virtues program celebrates men and women  who were bold enough to brave monster waves and high winds, take the hits, and pilot us to better ports.  These are lives to learn from.

​To read more from Telling Our Stories, visit our Blog Archives page.

​