Varieties of Heroism

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Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties” (1984) brought the British journalist and historian Paul Johnson to my attention — as it no doubt did to many others — and I learned a great deal from it. His astringent realism was bracing, and his command of fact, relevant to the age of revolution he described, was astonishing and wide-ranging.

In the book, he suggested that the theory of relativity was comparable, in its effect on our perception of the world, to the first use of perspective in art, in ancient Greece; he pointed out that in 1914, old men did not send youth to war, but that youth wanted war, as Rupert Brooke’s poetry demonstrates; he showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, America did not pursue an isolationist foreign policy during the 1920s, but instead sought to keep the world prosperous by inflating money supply, and he argued that Hitler’s “final solution” originated not just in vicious anti-Semitism but also in the brutal precedent of Ukraine under Stalin, where millions died in forced collectivization.

His accomplishment in “Modern Times” was not anomalous: Mr. Johnson has been one of the most prolific writers of our era, reminiscent of the great Victorians in his ambition and productivity, despite the specialization that is such a prominent characteristic of the present age. His list of not exactly modest monographs includes “A History of Christianity” (1977), “A History of the Jews” (1987), “Intellectuals” (1988), “The Quest for God” (1996), and “Creators” (2006).

Born in 1928 in Manchester, England, Mr. Johnson, a Roman Catholic, was educated at Jesuit Stonyhurst and then at Magdalene College, Oxford, but clearly much of his education came from his own omnivorous reading. During the 1950s he was a supporter and close associate of the left-wing Labour Party leader Aneurin Bevan, and became editor of the New Statesman over the objections of Leonard Woolf, who considered a Catholic inappropriate for that post.

Mr. Johnson has moved a very long distance from left to right since his days at the New Statesman. In 1968, Mr. Johnson cheered the revolutionary Paris uprisings of students and workers that shook the administration of President de Gaulle, whom he now celebrates, as a man of great virtue, in his new book, “Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle” (Harper Collins, 320 pages, $25.95).

In his introduction, Mr. Johnson sets forth a general, and surprisingly relativistic, definition of the hero as “anyone who has been widely, persistently over long periods, and enthusiastically regarded as heroic by a reasonable person.” He casts a wide net, understanding that the definition of a hero changes from one period to the next: In the 18th century, which highly prized civilization and restraint, the very word “hero” carried some denigration, as some knucklehead who hit people with an axe.

One detail in his introduction is unforgettable. In the medieval and early modern period, the remains of French kings were preserved in the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, but their hearts were kept separately in reliquaries. These were ransacked by radicals during the French Revolution, and much of the bounty was put up for sale. Some was eaten as a kind of sacrilegious delicacy, and the shriveled heart of Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” ended up in the mouth of a Cambridge professor. Greatness can be forgotten — even devoured — as easily as it might be remembered. Yet, throughout the book, Mr. Johnson reminds us that heroes are made from the ground up, rather than from the pantheon down. The chapter on Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, “Two Kinds of Nobility,” is alone worth the price of “Heroes”: Lincoln here possesses the nobility of goodness, Lee the nobility of honor. The effectiveness of this chapter resides in Mr. Johnson’s ability to make us, in our assessment of them as leaders, return to Lincoln and Lee as individuals. Lincoln “was a good man on a giant scale,” he writes, “a man who raised goodness into a political principle, into a way of public life, into a code of government activity.”

Lincoln’s accomplishment, of raising personal goodness to the level of political imperative, is found also in Mr. Johnson’s discussion of ancient figures, passed down to us with reverence over many generations. And yet many of Mr. Johnson’s selections are unconventional: It is surprising, for instance, to find him identifying such biblical heroines as Deborah and Judith in resolutely patriarchal ancient Israel, and one reflects upon the similarities between ancient and modern Israel: religion, nationalism, a people, and a formidable military. With Deborah and Judith, we think of such a tough leader as Golda Meier; and there are resonances too for Ariel Sharon, a general who was a political leader, who could identify in modern Israel every plain and hill where the ancient battles were fought: Noli me tangere.

A chapter on two ancient “Earthshakers,” Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, does not contain new or surprising material. Both leaders combined courage and creativity with extraordinary brutality, and both call to mind Thomas Gray’s line about those “who wade through slaughter to a throne, / And shut the gates of mercy on mankind.” Alexander nevertheless spread Hellenistic culture through the Mediterranean world, and established the great library at Alexandria. As Mr. Johnson tells us, that library went up in flames when Caesar burned the Egyptian ships in his conquest of Egypt. Mr. Johnson might have observed that this was an unintended act of literary criticism and canon formation: The great works that became our classics survived in private libraries and came down to us.

Indeed, Mr. Johnson’s book shows us how crucial the acts of single individuals have been in the formation of our civilization. Caesar’s legions, as formidable as the phalanxes of Alexander, pounded out the territories of the Roman Empire, in effect creating the political and cultural entity we know as the West. As T.S. Eliot has said, to the extent that we are Europeans (and Americans) we are citizens of Rome.

But Mr. Johnson does not limit himself to the familiar battlefield heroism of men such as Caesar and Alexander. There is originality in his use of Jane Welch Carlyle and Emily Dickinson as examples of “Tortured Heroism in a man’s World.” He sees Dickinson as fighting with her creativity and with her fears, which reflected both Jonathan Edwards’s dark Calvinism and her father’s hypochondria. We could add that her decades of willing isolation reflected such fears and perhaps others. Mr. Johnson cites, but does not analyze, poems that express such fears. Analysis would have strengthened his case for Dickinson’s creative courage.

It is also surprising, and welcome, to find Ludwig Wittgenstein in Mr. Johnson’s anthology, in a chapter called “Cerebral Heroism.” Mr. Johnson gives briefly some of the pertinent biographical facts about Wittgenstein (1889–1951), but omits the salient fact that Wittgenstein was an advanced student — colleague really — of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. At the time Russell was the world’s foremost logician. With Whitehead he had written “Principia Mathematica” (1910). But Wittgenstein proved to be so much his superior as a logician that he put Russell out of the logic business. Thereafter Russell wrote only popular works — an enterprise for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Mr. Johnson does not do much with Wittgenstein’s major work, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” (1921) a brief but very difficult work in advanced logic. The “Tractatus” pushes linguistic-empirical analysis as far as it can go — and then concludes that, indeed, there is more. If this demonstration is successful, Wittgenstein has shown that empiricism is limited. Quite a heroic feat.

In 1921 when the “Tractatus” appeared in German, no one knew that empirical fact would someday demonstrate the limits of empiricism. Measurement of the radiation from the Big Bang indicates that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. What was there before the beginning, empiricism, by definition, cannot say.

To have written a book that demonstrates the limits of empiricism — a book some consider the most important book in philosophy to have been written in the 20th century — surely qualifies Wittgenstein as a hero. In it, he reopened what Heidegger calls the fundamental question of metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Wittgenstein’s efforts to peer beyond established boundaries are not unique among Mr. Johnson’s heroes, or among heroic visionaries not included in the collection. Wittgenstein examined the “more” beyond empiricism; how he peered past the boundary we cannot tell. Intuition? A sense that analysis itself is inadequate? The ancient rabbis peered beyond the edge and wrote, “In the beginning God said, ‘Let there be light.'”

This kind of seeking, searching drive does not, however, end as we approach the present. Mr. Johnson writes well on Prime Minister Churchill, whom he admires, and President de Gaulle, of whom he now thinks better than he did in 1968. And in his chapter on President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, he is completely convincing.

John Paul effectively undermined the Evil Empire (Reagan’s phrase) in its weakest link, Poland, where the process of disintegration began. Margaret Thatcher reinvigorated the capitalist sector by starting a worldwide movement to reduce the public sector. Reagan gave back to the United States the self-confidence it had lost and at the same time tested Soviet power to destruction.

Mr. Johnson writes luminously on this “Heroic Trinity Who Tamed the Bear.” All three were indeed central to the destruction of the Soviet Union, the heroic task that civilization required during the second half of the 20th century. They succeeded through intelligence, courage, and clarity about their goal. Mr. Johnson might have added that all three survived assassination attempts. Luck helps. On Reagan, Mr. Johnson understands some of his strengths as a leader: his clear goals, self-assurance, and wit — and wonders, intriguingly, whether “happiness” is a form of heroism — but he seriously underestimates Reagan’s considerable knowledge, judging him ignorant. Mr. Johnson apparently is unaware of the evidence in Reagan’s published correspondence and in the manuscripts he wrote for his radio broadcasts.

“Heroes” is a serious book and is well worth reading. There is much information and wisdom here. In my judgment, however, it lacks the rigor, focus, and sometimes the information, of Paul Johnson at his very best.

Mr. Hart, Professor of English (Emeritus) at Dartmouth College, is a senior editor at National Review, and a former speechwriter for both Reagan and Nixon. His nine books include “Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe” and “The Making of the American Conservative Mind.”


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