Michael Jordan, Yes; Winston Churchill, No?

David Polansky on why democracies fear greatness -- and why they shouldn't.

This essay began as a conversation I had with WoC contributor

David Polansky

about what makes a historical figure “great.” Specifically, we were talking about Winston Churchill, lionized by the Right and by liberals but increasingly vilified by Left and by the … further Right. I myself struggle with Churchill: undoubtedly a powerful leader and orator, but also the man behind the firebombing of Dresden, among other things.

Can historical figures be “great”? What does it mean to be “great”? And do we have a harder time calling a leader great today than people have in the past?

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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Shocking as it is to report, Donald Trump has only been in office just over three months. In that short time, he has roiled the news cycles (and the markets) with radical changes to the status quo on immigration, trade, education, foreign aid, and more. This combination of ambition, willful independence in the face of criticism, and personal charisma raises the specter of greatness — certainly among his more ardent supporters.

But even his harshest critics pay him the backhanded compliment of treating him as a transformational figure — even comparing him to monstrous leaders of both ancient and modern history. And greatness may in fact be a morally neutral quality (cf. Time magazine’s “person of the year,” which has included Hitler, Stalin, Khomeini, Putin — and, twice now, Trump himself). But we have difficulty with the concept of greatness itself, and for reasons that go beyond questions of morality. That some individuals are superior to others in important ways — possessed of greater beauty, skill, courage, and so on — is one of those statements that is both incontrovertibly true and fundamentally uncongenial to the democratic spirit of our age.

Sports remains the most obvious exception to our present allergy to value of greatness and hierarchical rankings. Not of course that there is necessarily consensus about who is the greatest when it comes to particular cases and particular sports, like Federer versus Djokovic. And these are further complicated when trying to compare cases across different eras, as with, say, Jordan versus Lebron. But the idea of surpassing greatness itself is largely uncontested in the domain of athletics — indeed, these kinds of contests by definition invite such comparisons. (And it is probably not incidental that athletic contests as such are far older than our democracy — indeed, legend would date the original Olympic games before ancient democracy as well.)

For me, Michael Jordan remains the most singular exemplar of athletic greatness, in the sense of displaying not just surpassing excellence in his particular field but also the clearest expression of the underlying spirit of victory — an almost Achilles-like striving for primacy (I would have also accepted Muhammad Ali here). Again, these individual cases are arguable, and we continue to argue them, but far greater inherent controversy attaches to this question where political figures are concerned — for this goes more directly to the heart of our discomfort about the question in the first place.

The reason why our democratic spirit fears greatness comes from its roots in (among others) the words of Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … ” Jefferson was making a political claim, not an exhaustive one, but our democratic spirit is not limited to the domain of politics. Our democratic spirit wants everything else, including human achievement, to be equal as well, and so it contributes to a grudging view of human greatness. Moreover, just like the citizens of any type of government, we small-d democrats are not immune from envy and resentment.

That said, the nature of democracy, on the one hand, and envy and resentment, on the other, may be mutually reinforcing. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted:

Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment at which it thinks to hold it fast … Whatever transcends their own limits appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no kind of superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight.

All of this complicates how we assess the possibility of greatness in our time. Now, ambivalence or even incoherence where greatness is concerned is not specific to our time; what is distinctive is that we seem unwilling to propose an account of our own.

And it is true that how we define “greatness” is conditioned by a more comprehensive cultural and historical understanding of what is good and bad, laudable and shameful, and these understandings may prove incommensurable with others. Certainly, much of Christianity rejects classical ideals of human greatness. There is a remarkable line in Augustine’s City of God, in which he describes pagan Rome as having become master of the world even as it was itself mastered by its own lust for mastery. This is about as clear an inversion of our standards for assessing greatness — what Nietzsche would call a “transvaluation of values” — as I know.

But this is not to say that Christianity simply rejects greatness as such — as Nietzsche himself recognized, even if his latter-day, post-BAP readers do not. There is enormous will-to-power at work in early Christianity. No, they were not Hun-like conquerors, but they conquered all the same, overtaking the Romans — the greatest of all ancient empires.

If part of heroic greatness means the willingness to face death for the sake of something higher than material comfort and mere existence, many of the Christian saints went to deaths no less violent and grisly than the Homeric heroes on the plains of Troy.

Today, of course, our ambivalence over greatness is not really a function of Christian piety, which has been in retreat for some centuries now. But we are perhaps further along on the same path; we have only replaced saints and holy men with postmodern substitutes among the world’s NGOs and charitable organizations. We have retained the Christian skepticism of worldly greatness, while eschewing the austere demands of religious commitment. W. H. Auden’s lengthy poem, “For the Time Being” contains a famous section in which King Herod, depicted as a kind of modern rationalist avant le lettre, justifies his slaughter of the innocents for what he fears the new age of faith will ultimately lead to:

The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

This comic passage is our predicament in a nutshell, in which a sentimental egalitarianism keeps us from appreciating human excellence.

With athletes, disagreement about particular cases doesn’t necessarily amount to a rejection of the possibility of greatness itself. But politics is trickier for us. For, political greatness is more than just surpassing excellence in the field of politicking. It requires a vision of something grander than individual or parochial interests married to a certain personal force that persuades others of its inner truth. It is, in other words, a capacity for making those visions reality. And how we evaluate them is difficult to separate from our judgments on the substance of those visions. (This incidentally is one of the things that limits claims for Trump’s greatness being that he is a man who is always first and foremost for himself.)

Moreover, in the political domain, many seem to hold that there is just something unhealthy about the general assumption of greatness, which also leads us astray in our judgment of particular instances. Thus, a few months ago the journalist

Jeet Heer

had the temerity to disparage Winston Churchill. Later, the history podcaster

Darryl Cooper

did the same. Now this is an old debate, and the hagiography to which Churchill has been subjected on both sides of the Atlantic has triggered its own backlash over the years. But I have come to think that not a little of this has to do less with the specific question of Churchill’s greatness (or even with the milder point that his personal grandeur could accommodate significant flaws and mistakes), and more with a larger rejection of the possibility of individual greatness altogether.

Continuing this inversion, today we are more likely to see greatness ascribed to, say, anti-colonialists and rebels, than to colonialists or imperialists. Thus, Mohandas Gandhi is a recurring candidate for greatness even among those otherwise inclined to reject the idea completely (though this, too, generates its own pushback).

Outside of politics (though admittedly, not entirely outside of it), SpaceX’s impressive execution of a successful booster catch during one of its launches reignited debates over the greatness — or not — of Elon Musk, with activist Cory Doctorow, for example, insisting that “There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg.”

Let us allow that there is too much hero-worship of the tech titans, particularly on the media platforms associated with them (and further, many of those public displays of admiration have a particularly oily quality to them, given the pecuniary interest involved). Let’s even allow that these perhaps businessmen and entrepreneurs generally are poor candidates for true greatness.

In the final section of The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama mocks the pretensions of those whose success is merely commercial: “But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America.”

But Fukuyama is deliberately contrasting corporate lawyers and bond traders with a true aristocratic warrior class, whose greatness he does not dispute. One wants to ask a detractor like Doctorow: who would he put up instead? Something like this problem also faces all those who want to tear down modern giants like Churchill, de Gaulle and others.

Does any of this matter? I suspect it does, because the scope of our own actions is conditioned by our interpretation of historical examples. Napoleon looked to Caesar who looked to Alexander, just as Alexander looked to Cyrus and Achilles — greatness inspired greatness. Now as these same examples make plain, greatness is hardly an unambiguous category; it is, as the kids say, problematic.

And yet one wonders what expectations we might have for future human achievement when all examples, past and present, are disparaged according to some impossible moral standard. Hero-worship certainly has its own problems — not least because people are often poor judges of what constitutes true heroism — but, for myself, I do not disdain the impulse to look for greatness and admire it where it might be found. And I remain suspicious of those who disparage it, substituting for it that grey, leveling form of egalitarianism, whose own motivations continue to strike me as far grubbier than its adherents admit.

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