Jay Burden joins me to discuss his new book, Heroes and Hero Worship, and why he thinks Thomas Carlyle is one of the greatest authors of all time. We discuss Carlyle's impact on the way we think about heroes, hero worship, and hero worship in general.
00:03:13.120He was considered one of the all-time greats.
00:03:16.160He was very, very popular in the Victorian era.
00:03:21.640Dickens was sort of an acolyte of Thomas Carlyle.
00:03:24.920He infamously carried around his books wherever he went.
00:03:28.380But due to a number of reasons, which we'll probably get into, he's very much fallen out of fashion.
00:03:34.640And because of that, he's sort of been erased from the canon.
00:03:37.840And he's very influential on the way that we speak in somewhat similar way that Shakespeare is.
00:03:43.960So even that term, the great man theory of history, it derives from Carlyle.
00:03:48.440He also came up with that phrase you may have heard to describe economics, the dismal science.
00:03:53.900So even if you don't know Carlyle, you know Carlyle is a good way to describe it.
00:03:58.360Right. Yeah, I want to dive into that because, like you said, he's somebody who has a large impact, though a lot of people probably can't directly reference him.
00:04:07.440I certainly didn't run into him in any kind of public school setting.
00:04:10.640You weren't reading excerpts of Carlyle or any of his work the way that you would someone like Shakespeare or Dante or somebody.
00:04:18.020And so it's somebody who's had a large impact but has been largely erased from kind of the average American or even Westerners understanding of literature and culture.
00:04:29.740So, guys, we're going to dive into On Heroes and Hero Worship.
00:04:34.100But before we do, let's hear from New Founding.
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00:05:44.960So this book is really interesting because Carlisle is primarily an essayist.
00:05:52.200In fact, many of his books are simply an assembling of different essays that he wrote.
00:05:58.700And so there's a feel to this for sure.
00:06:02.860It's a collection of six different lectures that he gave and the notes of those lectures get turned into one book.
00:06:10.720He gives each of these six lectures on different archetypes of what the hero is and then gives specific examples of the people.
00:06:20.340Before we get into the content of this book, where do you put it in Carlisle's kind of kind of canon?
00:06:26.940Because I would say this probably is the best place for people to start due to the structure of it.
00:06:32.940I would say a smaller chunk of reading something like Chartism might be the best because that's also maybe a more politically applicable work as where this one rambles quite a bit in many different directions as Carlisle always does.
00:06:46.080But probably something slightly more focused, I think, would be easier, even though this is an important work, to be sure.
00:07:39.840And if you're interested in used books, because he was so popular in a previous era and has now fallen from that,
00:07:46.480it's quite easy to get very nice leather-bound copies of Carlisle for a penny on the dollar.
00:07:52.640So I'd recommend that if you're a physical book collector.
00:07:55.180Yeah, sadly, happily for me, but sadly for public education, one year my wife surprised me with a large collection of leather-bound Thomas Carlisle books that had just been pulled from a library somewhere.
00:08:10.100They still had the library cards in the pockets, you know, on the inside of the books, probably banned by some, you know, angry librarian who couldn't believe that this reactionary bigot was still sitting on their university library shelves somewhere.
00:08:27.160But got it very cheaply due to exactly what you're saying there.
00:08:33.780And to frame this work, I think it's important to reference what we mean when we're talking about the right and the left.
00:08:42.260You know, the sort of raison d'etre, the end goal of the left is equality.
00:08:46.460And the reason that Thomas Carlisle is so popular among right-wingers and reactionaries is that it's 180 degrees the opposite of what Carlisle sees as being the true, the just, and the beautiful.
00:08:57.940And his whole concept of the great man of history is very much related to political elite theory, right, which is something Aron that you and I talk about all the time.
00:09:06.780And that's the idea that history is shaped by these great men who sort of uproot the pre-existing order through their will.
00:09:16.400And so what he does is this is first sort of lay out his thesis statement, right, that these great men really are what make the course of history.
00:09:25.400And then through that examines a specific archetype of the hero.
00:09:30.280So he starts with Odin, right, the hero as a god, that he moves to Muhammad, right, the hero as a prophet.
00:09:38.460And although Thomas Carlisle is at least nominally Christian, he goes through characters and heroes from other cultures specifically to show, one, this is a universal human institution, right, that of hero worship.
00:09:52.800And also, and he says this multiple times, it's much easier to talk about the prophet Muhammad than it is to talk about a specific biblical prophet.
00:09:59.620That, you know, people will get their hackles up.
00:10:01.680And so that's something I would say, you know, if you're interested in reading this book, don't be put off by that.
00:10:14.840He is not a Norse pagan, but he's using that as a prism to examine hero worship.
00:10:20.080And so if you've heard anything about this book, you've probably heard that phrase, hero worship is the basis of civilization.
00:10:26.500And what he means in that is that not only do great men determine the course of societies and of cultures, but also that the civic religion, right, the moral framework of any society is in many ways determined by the men they put forth as laudable and notable, right, put forth as something to be imitated.
00:10:48.220And so, for instance, you see that in the American context, we're sort of on our fourth American republic, right?
00:10:54.600But within each one of those different sort of dispensations of America, you see a great man who sort of sets that forth.
00:11:00.560So obviously you have Washington, then you have Andrew Jackson, you know, then you have Abraham Lincoln, and then FDR.
00:11:08.300And each one of those men is sort of turning over the preexisting institution, creating something new, and albeit it's contiguous.
00:11:16.220And then after that, people look to them as the model to imitate.
00:11:19.900And I think it's very important as, you know, someone who is, shall we say, less than thrilled with the current state our society is in, to look back at heroes from our tradition and say, I want to be like them.
00:11:33.060So you look at a man like Robert E. Lee, for instance, and he viewed himself in relation to Washington.
00:11:38.240He felt like he needed to live up to that.
00:11:40.360And so that's really what Carlisle is getting at and why this book is so important for us as students of history and lovers of tradition.
00:11:49.900Yeah, you're right to point out that he's really taking many, many figures that people wouldn't assume he would use because he's trying to establish the universality of this phenomenon.
00:12:03.440That even though the type of people that each civilization will venerate will change due to the character of the people, the fact that they will be defined by who they venerate is always the case.
00:12:16.040And so he often pulls, again, like you said, examples like Odin or Muhammad, which he would not personally believe in.
00:12:22.260But he also pulls people like maybe Luther.
00:12:25.960I mean, he is kind of a, you know, he's a Protestant to the extent that he's a Christian.
00:12:29.500So maybe Luther would be somebody that he would actually venerate.
00:12:33.560But he also pulls people like Rousseau.
00:12:37.380When he talks about the hero as king, he pulls not ancient kings, but he goes ahead and highlights people like Cromwell and Napoleon.
00:12:47.620And so these are often people that you would think an arch reactionary would probably not invest in.
00:12:53.540These are not like the Plutarch's lives that he would want people to emulate.
00:12:58.160But at the same time, he's still willing to look at these people because he's trying to show this phenomenon.
00:13:04.900And really his core thing that he tries to tell people is that it's about being men of action.
00:13:12.200Each one of these are men who are great.
00:13:14.260Each one of these are ones that excel and lead.
00:13:17.120And he often seems to say, we almost cannot judge men who are like this because they are kind of beyond what the average person is capable of, what they understand.
00:13:28.960And who are we to kind of, you know, foist our lower moral understanding on some of these kind of genre defining men, these archetypal men.
00:13:57.560And one of the things that we need to address with this concept of great men is that great men and good men are not necessarily synonymous.
00:14:52.860That is very interested in destroying the symbols of the old order and replacing them with either completely fake people or these kind of like, you know, horrible criminals.
00:15:09.120Because this is what makes up a civilization.
00:15:12.700And when you see those heroes change, it's a leading indicator that the rest of the civilization is following in their way, so to speak.
00:15:22.040Yeah, you really notice, like you said, it does not escape the left, even though they don't believe to some extent in this, does not escape the left that that which we venerate, the heroes that we worship will define society.
00:15:34.360And so because they're looking to flatten things out because they're looking for equality, it seems so often that the key is removing those who have taken great actions, those who have actually built things, discovered things, founded things.
00:15:48.600And instead, it's increasingly about replacing them with those that flatten things out, those that created some kind of equity, though it was the first person of these nine traits to achieve something that had already been achieved several times over.
00:16:05.360Nothing can be new, nothing can be truly built and inspiring, instead, it's simply the remix and rehashing until all of our heroic figures kind of melt down into that gray goo of no one who stands out and elevates the human character or sparks the imagination.
00:16:24.140Only those that can kind of retread the same ground we've been over several times, but with a new, different hue or set of genitalia.
00:16:33.300Well, and that's exactly why I opened this discussion by talking about the difference between the right and the left, right?
00:16:39.780Because the left, their primary end goal is that, flattening, right?
00:16:46.280And in Carlyle, we see something very different, that there is a difference between men.
00:16:51.880And, you know, he mentions there are multiple ways to be great, right?
00:16:55.760These heroes share certain traits, but there are also different archetypes.
00:16:59.460But in the beginning, you know, in the start of his section on Odin, when he's sort of introducing this series, he talks about the fact that, you know, virtue is very much striving to be like these men.
00:17:11.820Yeah. And we've kind of talked about the fact that while Carlyle had, shall we say, a complicated relationship with Christianity, he does nonetheless point to Christ as the supreme example, right?
00:17:57.020And because of that, right, there's this idea that, you know, there is a quality difference between these two groups.
00:18:04.800And I don't mean that in a moral sense, right?
00:18:07.120Obviously, you know, we can have a theological discussion there.
00:18:09.760But in the sense that if you cannot recognize that some men are greater than others, you've sort of already swallowed that poison pill of equality.
00:18:17.320And it's just you are sort of negotiating where on the slippery slope you'll set up your shop, so to speak.
00:18:23.280So this is an interesting, I think, crossroads for Christians who are studying this because I think a lot, especially modern Christians, would worry about the phrase hero worship, right?
00:18:40.220We're talking about elevating a man to the place of a god.
00:18:42.660Of course, we know if you look at most classical heroes from antiquity, at some point, these people are elevated to somehow have had a relationship with the gods, right?
00:18:55.200Either they're actually secretly the son of a god.
00:18:57.860At some point, Zeus, like, snuck down and, you know, slept with their mother, and they're actually descended from a god at some point.
00:19:03.500If you are going to become a truly powerful ruler in Alexander or a Julius Caesar at some point, someone would need to introduce the idea that you were physically descended or, you know, you're genealogically descended from a god at some point.
00:19:20.080Obviously, that's not something that modern people would be comfortable with in general.
00:19:25.240But specifically for Christians, there's a religious injunction to kind of avoid that.
00:19:29.680And so is there a way that Christians can view this without perhaps falling back on the more ancient understandings of direct lineage to gods or the elevation and idolatry of a man?
00:19:44.880And I take your point to heart, right?
00:19:47.020And so when we use this phrase hero worship, obviously some of these figures, you know, in Carlisle's work were literally worshipped as gods.
00:19:57.680We believe that there is, you know, one God.
00:20:00.620And at the same time, we can look at men who were greater than us, right?
00:20:05.340And I, in addition to kind of the great men of history, have people that I strive to emulate.
00:20:11.420And obviously the term worship has a certain connotation that we can disagree with.
00:20:17.200But the point is, right, it is looking at someone as an example to follow.
00:20:22.320Obviously, the church understands this well.
00:20:25.620You know, I am not Catholic, but there's this idea of Christian saints, right?
00:20:29.440Someone who has lived the Christian life well.
00:20:32.140And so you are, in many cases, being named after someone and the idea that you will follow forth in their footsteps.
00:20:39.580And, you know, when we use that term worship, it is sort of a directing of attention towards, right?
00:20:46.740So in the Christian world, there's this idea that, you know, if you misorder your affections, you misorder your attention, it is a form of idolatry.
00:20:55.800And so certainly you can take hero worship, right, the striving to imitate a human, too far.
00:21:01.160Now, I will say, when I look around at society, I don't see that error being committed very often, right?
00:21:09.920I don't see many people who live in, you know, the cult of Oliver Cromwell.
00:21:14.600I'm sure there's someone out there who does that.
00:21:17.120But to me, the problem of modernity is very much a problem of deconstruction.
00:21:20.820It's that we can't view these men sincerely.
00:21:23.580We have to view them as, you know, somehow compromised, as somehow worse than the narrative, right?
00:21:29.860The idea that if it is a story, we must pull it apart and deconstruct it.
00:21:33.860And so while there certainly is an error there, it is not the error we are oftentimes faced.
00:21:39.060And so, again, there's an idea of the Aristotelian golden mean here.
00:21:42.880You know, there is certainly excesses on both sides.
00:21:45.160But given the situation we're in, I don't see that as being a particularly pressing concern.