Over at Impossible Me Abbeycadabra had an interesting post in which she wrote about author Neil Gaiman with whom she shares a lot of literary interests, so much so that she considers him a ‘hero’. She is well aware of the danger of having heroes, given that so many public figures whom one once liked or admired have later revealed themselves to have quite obnoxious views on some major issues (the number of such people is too large and the names too well-known to be worth listing), so she is naturally relieved that so far he has not had any unflattering things revealed about him. But she shares the same feeling of unease that all of us have that some figure we look up to might have some dark secret revealed.
While I myself avoid the use of the word ‘hero’ (it sounds vaguely medieval and over-adulatory to me) there are public figures whom I admire. But nobody is perfect or have imperfections that so perfectly match one’s own that one does not notice them. So one is bound to encounter some piece of information about a person whom one admires that is not congruent with one’s expectations of them. This is inevitable. The question is what to do when that happens. Do you ignore the bad news and become an apologist? Do you decide that the good outweighs the bad? Or do you wash your hands of the person?
I think that the problem is seeing it as a dichotomous choice and a question of loyalties, that when it comes to some public figure X, one is forced to choose between being on ‘Team X’ or ‘anti-Team X’. While one may start out as being on Team X, it is not necessary that any bad news should automatically shift one to anti-team X. It all depends on the nature of the news and how X responds to being confronted with it.
I tend to be forgiving about people who say or do something out of ignorance or because the world has moved on and they have been left behind. I think that is not uncommon. This attitude is likely because I can look in the mirror and see in my own past that I have held views that simply horrify me now and would hope that people would be forgiving if some of the views I held back then became public.
The real issue is what someone does when confronted with their unsavory past. If they acknowledge it and say that this was something they deeply regret and have tried to move past and hope to do better in the future, then I think one should let it go.
But there is a descending scale of responses. If they try to try to minimize it, deflect it. or issue a non-apology (which seems to be a common response), then that is unfortunate but not necessarily a major offense. This is because I think such a response is a reflexively defensive move since people do not like to recognize their own faults, especially when it emerges suddenly, and it takes some time for it to sink in. This kind of response is often a way station on the way to a realization that they were wrong and hopefully over time they will get there. I think they should be encouraged to complete that journey. However, if they repeat this over and over again, then they are clearly in a state of deep denial and one is justified in being less forgiving.
The more serious issue is if they get angry and either deny what they said or did or double down and take even more extreme positions and attack their critics. This is often the case with very prominent people with big egos who think that any acknowledgment that they are not perfect or have been wrong will cause their world to come crumbling down. Often they are outraged that a member of the unwashed masses has the temerity to criticize them. Such people tend to be hopeless cases and we are justified in washing our hands of them.
I think that even if we do not go so far as to call people heroes or otherwise idolize them, having high expectations of people can be a good thing even if it guarantees that we will get disappointed from time to time. The reason is that it encourages people to try to live up to the expectations that others have of them. For those who care what others think of them, especially those close to them and whom they care about, being held in high esteem can be a motivating factor for good behavior. Being too cynical about people and too quick to believe the worst about them and criticize them harshly may not be the most productive way to respond.
So basically, I think that we should not shift too quickly from Team X to anti-Team X because X committed some transgression. There is something to be said for being critical while allowing some time and space for their better selves to emerge.
I don’t tend to have heroes. For example I think our Prime Minister (and Cabinet) has been doing a good job dealing with the Covit-19 crisis but he is a total idiot in international affairs.
Of course, in Canada we don’t really have [political] heroes. Hockey is a different matter.
Béliveau for ever
My policy is to generally not have heroes, and when I do, to very firmly not give a shit what anyone else thinks about that position. Which is to say: I shall not defend having someone as a hero. E.g. I state that person A has always represented an ideal of something or other through their work. Angry person B turns up to tell me my hero is a milkshake duck. At this point I have some options:
1. Care what person B says, and loudly defend person A and their work. Nah.
2. Care what person B says and cancel person A. I don’t fucking think so.
3. Consider my interactions with person B at an end.
Option 3 is, I think, always best. Nobody is made any happier by options 1 or 2.
But I think having heroes is an adolescent thing. I was embarrasingly old before I came to view Douglas Adams more critically than simply considering him a hero. Realising he was in fact massively privileged and only able to do what he did because of that puts a rather bitter spin on his famous comment about deadlines -- “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by”… well yes, that’s jolly funny and fine if you don’t have a mortgage and have enough inherited and earned wealth to basically never have to work. When I first heard it it came across like a “what am I like?” joke from someone seeking empathy for their laziness. Later it came to sound more like a rich white guy gloating about the fact that the little people (e.g. his publishing agent) can fucking whistle for the stuff he promised and was contractually obliged to deliver if he feels like having another bath.
“Hero” is not really a Medieval word. It comes from Ancient Greek (originally meaning a prominent ancestor worshipped as a demi-god), and Medieval Europeans tended not to use it much, even though it was known in many Medeval European languages (even Medieval Greeks tended not to). “Saint” or “paragon” was the much more common term for a similar thing.
Christ on a crutch, he’s not my goddamn hero!
Did either you or PZ actually read that article? I said Gaiman was a good guy in one paragraph, the post was about the nature of stories and adaptations!
Jesus, what’s the point of trying to write anything if it just spawns multiple threads of people having Very Serious discussions about how they think their misunderstanding of what I wrote is wrong?
I do not see what the difficulty is. A person may strike me as being knowledgeable, wise, insightful, brilliant, etc. on one topic while not living up to that on another. I have no problem agreeing with them on the former and disagreeing with them on the latter, as agreeing with them does not entail any sense of loyalty or duty to agree with them elsewhere.
Or they are doing the bare minimum in an effort to have it both ways -- say whatever they want, and then say enough to get the media or whatever off their back.
Forgot to add before the quoted passage:
…Nor do they owe me any loyalty, duty etc. to continue to say things I approve of.
Well, that still doesn’t really feel like it’s coming to terms with what it’s even supposed to mean to be on one of these “teams.”
Let’s say, for example, that you don’t like Michael Jackson. Okay…. So what? It just doesn’t seem to mean anything in particular about how you’ll act in response. Maybe it means nothing at all: you’re simply angry/upset and it doesn’t matter whether he changed, apologized, redeemed himself somehow, or anything, because you just have some emotional reaction or another and that’s about it. Maybe you’ve got some fairly measured response, but it’s still lowering the stakes so much that there’s little reason to even have conversation about it. Maybe you think of it all in terms of consumerism and how you can leverage your power as a person with money to burn, and you expect everyone else to think and act accordingly. Maybe you even go so far as to start demonizing anyone else who still appreciates anything he ever did. And so forth.
It seems like this could go in all sorts of different directions, because there’s an awfully wide array of valid options for people on that “team.” So there probably aren’t a lot of coherent things to say about it. It’s also not clear what the approach is supposed to be like for anyone else who ever lived…. Why even turn it into a question about this one specific individual? Why care about that? (Not saying you couldn’t, at least in some cases, but it’s often a question that is just skipped rather than getting a genuine answer.)
Besides, even if you believe it’s totally obvious how people should think about him and whatever that’s supposed to entail, there are tons of other cases which might seem much tougher or more ambiguous to you. And there are ones with nasty folks on all sides, so maybe there should another option of treating it all like a stalemate or whatever. Is that a different “team” that a person can be on? And if so, what then?
“She is well aware of the danger of having heroes”
This danger only exists when one assumes that heroes should be perfect. I never did, so I was not shocked at all when I learned about the dark sides of my heroes Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jun. In fact since many years I have been ready for bad news about my third hero, Nelson Mandela.
Perhaps it’s my bias, but I’m under the impression that this is (another) typical American problem, non- or less-existent in (the more cynical) Europe. Most American western and action movies have morally perfect main characters. Check some comments at IMDb: Americans pretty often react to European movies with “I can’t relate to any character, because they all are morally flawed!”- which is exactly the point, of course.
So I wonder: is this because Americans tend to look for a reincarnation of the Messias? Has it to do with the popularity of comics characters like Superman? I always liked Donald Duck (definitely very, very flawed) much more.
Anyhow, my admiration for all the good things Ghandi and Martin King Jun. never decreased, because my expectations never were that high.
“the same feeling of unease that all of us have”
Let me correct this: “the same feeling of unease that all of us Americans have”. Let me remind you once again that the world is a bit bigger than just the USA. I never had this feeling at all.
“So one is bound to encounter some piece of information about a person whom one admires that is not congruent with one’s expectations of them. This is inevitable.”
It is. You wrote it yourself: always remain aware that nobody’s perfect. Hence lower your expectations. Bakunin, the great anarchist and critic of marxism, was also an anti-semite.
“Do you ignore the bad news and become an apologist? Do you decide that the good outweighs the bad? Or do you wash your hands of the person?”
None of them. Let me repeat: I keep on admiring their good sides and at the other hand admit that eg Ghandi’s prewar views on Hitler badly sucked.
“one is forced to choose”
It’s at this point that I lose control of my middle finger. Nobody forces me in this respect. Of course this is relatively easy for me, because I always refuse (especially on internet) to join any (anti-)team but my own, that consists of exactly one person: me. I preserve the right to switch from team X to anti-team X at any point I see fit. Sometimes people are disappointed, but that’s their problem, not mine. They had too high expectations of me. Don’t, is my advise.
“I can look in the mirror and see in my own past …..”
Who guarantees that you (or I) don’t hold horrific views right now?
“But there is a descending scale of responses.”
I don’t care about (verbal) responses and even less about apologies. The only response I accept is changing behaviour. It’s exactly in this respect that you are way more christian than me. Apologies as described by you are the secular version of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confession_(religion)
“having high expectations of people can be a good thing even if it guarantees that we will get disappointed from time to time. The reason is that it encourages people to …..”
Nope. According to scientific (psychological) research this merely encourages people to become hypocrites. What works is praising desirable behaviour.
This quote confirms that you deep in your heart are still a christian. I am not.
Abbeycadabra @#4,
I apologize for misunderstanding what you were saying. I was taking my cue from this passage in your post:
Yeah, you had the same reaction I did, Mano. What we admired in the people we looked up to was real. They did those things. Sometimes, they believed in the things they did. The later information we get about their horrifying flaws changes nothing… unless we let it.
No heroes, no movement.
@9 Mano
I know, and I understand, it’s just… that was part of the intro, and was pretty tongue-in-cheek – though it remains true that to date, by all accounts, Gaiman’s a decent guy.
But now both of the most prolific bloggers on this site – including the only well-known one! – wrote blogs that picked up and ran with… seemingly not having read or engaged with what I was actually writing about. So now both of them have a conversation effectively about how I’m wrong, except I didn’t actually say the thing that is being discussed, and was in fact primarily writing about something totally different. It is deeply frustrating, especially since I am one of the newer bloggers here and just now trying to pick up the pace a bit.
I wonder if those sentiments work in the converse, that is, regarding one’s villains.
(doubtful)
Also, reminds me of this joke (McGregor’s Legacy):
“both of the most prolific bloggers on this site {…}wrote blogs {…} seemingly not having read or engaged with what I was actually writing about”
Indeed. They’re flawed.
Or they might have thought they had a different point to make about something else and just used your post as a springboard. That’s how I read it. Your post is about stories, this one is about apologies. I don’t see how it invalidates what you wrote in any way.
I see no difficulty with the converse. The discussion being about highly respected people doing something to erode that respect, or being discovered to have done so in the past; the converse then is a reviled person doing, or being discovered to have done in the past, something worthy of respect. In which case, I welcome the possibility that the person is not a awful as they seemed, though I’m not going to rush in and declare the person redeemed off a single act.
“He was a thief, and a terrorist. On the other hand he had a tremendous singing voice.”
Apparently, the joke didn’t get the point across.
“Tell a lie once and all your truths become questionable.”
There’s an essential asymmetry.
Ah, yes losing trust is a great deal easier than gaining it. Same with respect, admiration etc.