Introduction

Since the earliest recorded times, the human story has been passed down by cave paintings, drawings, carvings, sculpture, oral stories, music, and eventually written texts to enable cultures to exist in continuity while still evolving towards a better state.  Common yet incorrect beliefs notwithstanding, our most remote ancestors did not convey gods as the cause of everything.  No, this came later with a more sophisticated understanding of the world and its complexities.

While many myths and legends have their basis in fact, and some of the Greek gods may have been loosely based on real people, we encounter human deification directly in Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, ca. 2900-2700 BCE.  His superhuman exploits are detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, slightly before Egyptian Old-Kingdom pyramid texts (ca. 2686 BCE) reveal the deification of pharaohs.  It seems that worship and praise was, in some measure, directed towards living persons who could literally grant wishes.

It should therefore not surprise us that the Romans deified people and that an imperial cult worshiping emperors who were “divi filius”, son of god, in reference to descendance from Julius Caesar, who was deified by the Senate in 42 BCE (two years after his assassination),  or some other deified person, or that such claims ruled in Greece as various families claimed descent through Heracles (Latin: Hercules) or other Greek or Romanized Greek gods.

No, that’s not surprising.  What is surprising, to me, and the topic of this post is that we’re still at it. 

Icons and Populism

Words like Icon and Populism have meanings that require overt contextual remarks lest they be widely interpreted tantamount to hapax legomena and thereby treated as almost filler words.  In this post, I intend the word Icon to refer to a human being, a popular human being, for whom popular or populist sentiment calls for overlooking misdeeds and even crimes that would certainly not be overlooked for the rest of us, especially not for the minority or the poor or the less able.

While religious warnings about such things are a source of historical thought in this post, it is not blasphemy that I’m writing about.  No, not at all.  I’m writing about the essential deification of human beings, technologies, and anything else that takes on, for some, a “can do no wrong” mantle.  Thus, while religion provides a background for what an Idol or Icon may be, it is not central to this post and I certainly am not talking about statues and other items others wish to destroy. 

What I am writing about is us, you and me, and our insistence on granting superhuman attributes to people and things resulting in grave risks as those superhuman “god-like” things prove themselves to be just as faulty as are we but with much large impact due to the power that we’ve given them.

You see, until recently, I didn’t understand why so many decry advancing populism.  I mean democracy is all about electing whom the people choose, isn’t it?  Yes, it certainly is.  But if the people adore, elevate, even worship people whom they support, everything can go horribly wrong.  It certainly did in Germany, because, and generally speaking, popular “strong men” leaders usually have a target that they exploit and attack – often a target that is vilified and demonized without any cause other than “they” are different.  Different perhaps, but there is no of rational, just cause.  Remember, Hitler did not seize power through violence.

So, in this post, I’m using Icon or Idol to refer to a popular figure with populist, fawning adoring, support and for whom people overlook words and deed for which others would be held to account. 

I realize that our American justice system is quite flawed, that people are persecuted for political reasons, that driving while black is still treated as a criminal offense, and that the circumstances (and race) of one’s birth have a great deal to do with what we can accomplish in our lives.   This post, however, is not about those unjust and inequitable flaws in our country.  No, this is about allowing, even demanding, that popular figures rise to levels of power and influence beyond what a reasonable and prudent person would allow.

Uru Achim

Uru Achim – Awake, Brethren – Belev Sameach – with a happy heart!  Thus goes a stanza of Hava Nagila.  In this case, my Uru call was while reading Elie Wiesel’s lecture on King Josiah in the collection Filled with Fire and Light.  In this work, page 43 of my copy, Wiesel asks us questions.

“A society that centers its creative energies on limitless importance of success and instant gratification in all areas – isn’t it practicing a kind of idolatry?  Isn’t the passion for wealth, fame, and power a form of idolatry?  Aren’t celebrities treated as icons or idols?  If art is an object of worship, isn’t the relentless quest for beauty idolatry?  And isn’t the cult of personality in politics a form of idol worship?  If idols can inspire fear, isn’t the nuclear bomb an Idol?

“Isn’t a narcissist or egomaniac someone who worships himself more than his Creator? … Self-admiration is also a form of idolatry, perhaps even more seductive and dangerous than the other kinds.”

I read those questions, and my mind said Yes! He’s right.  And the wheels quickly turned explaining why populism can be bad – when we seek a mortal superhuman savior and check our brains in at the door to believe everything they tell us.  And we double down, protecting the image of our idol, attributing everything bad to persecution. 

Clearly some folks are persecuted, even persecuted by the justice system and officials thereof, and God knows the media can persecute and demonize anyone. Still, in doubling down we admit no flaw, minimize all signs of, well, evil.  Nothing and no one is above question or flaws.  Even God regrets his decision to make man and to anoint Saul King.  Why then do we tolerate those who place themselves in that position?  Because we put them there in the first place, perhaps?

Wisdom

Socrates likely died because he was convinced that a democracy in Athens would result in unqualified and corrupt individuals being elected and he favored a technocracy or meritocracy.  The danger, we believe he thought, was that someone could use the Art of Rhetoric (as Aristotle teaches in his book by that name) to get people to vote for them regardless of their qualifications or, indeed, their intent.

Indeed, while we read history telling us how mad and cruel Caligula was, he was popular with the people.  Anyone who gave the aristocrats a hard time was popular with the people – and Julius Caesar was also quite popular – it was not the people who thought him to be a threat to the republic but, rather, the aristocratic senators.  What a strange twist of fate that the assassination of Caesar, who had been made dictator for life, would ultimately result in the assassination of the Republic as Octavian, later styled Augustus, came to power after defeating Antony and Cleopatra VII. 

I suggest that the course of wisdom is to give no one durable fealty without question.  We must question lest we lose our humanity and wisdom.  To do that, we must work at it.  I mean, we must not trust a snippet on the news or a claim that a comment was taken out of context.  No, we must seek the video or audio or transcript that provides a more holistic view so that we can ourselves determine how we judge the latest claim, and yes, we will each judge differently depending on the context of our own lives.  That’s right and good, if you ask me.  What’s neither right nor good is being lazy and trusting people whom we have good reason to believe have spun the message for their own purposes.

I remember a scene in I, Claudius where Herod Agrippa tells the now Emperor Claudius “Trust no one, not even the wife of your bosom.  Trust no one.”  His childhood classmate, Claudius, responds to the King of Bashan “Not even you, Herod?”  “Trust no one.”  Of course, Herod was plotting a revolt from Rome you see.  Likewise, we must take great care when we trust and we must never trust unconditionally over long periods of time, not people who seek power and influence, not even pastors and priests. 

Yes, I trust my wife with my life.  I do trust other people in similar measure, but there is a bi-directional love and personal knowledge here.  When the relationship is not bidirectional, when we watch from afar, we must not be so foolish as to completely trust and ignore the tarnish on the idol or get caught up on populist fawning that we support the unsupportable.

You know, Seneca the younger (d. 65 CE) is credited with giving us “To err is human”, errare humanum est in Latin.  Some complete that sentiment with “to forgive is divine”, but Seneca, a Stoic, saw it differently.  Tradition holds that his saying was Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum: To err is human, to persist (in error) is diabolical.  Our Stoic friends believed that most things are neutral, some are demonstrably bad, and some are demonstrably good.  This saying promotes the idea that our job in life is to help each find and correct our errors.  Not even Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (b. 121 CE, d. 180 CE, Emperor of Rome 161-180 CE) whose Meditations provide documentation of his struggles to be a good Stoic, was perfect.  Indeed, in order to maintain the empire, he had to be cruel and a bit ruthless.

While stoicism is more complicated than most think, and includes the universe collapsing several times only to repeat the exact same pattern of history which only a few ascend to sufficient wisdom to rise above, it does provide some good pointers on how we should think about each other.  At least I think so, and that change from a vast legal code to a simple far less comprehensive set of things to avoid or punish is where I think we should be – we’re not getting closer to that, by the way, but that’s an issue for discussion on another day.

Still, when we err by ignoring or supporting drastic errors, we may cause the diabolical to manifest.  This we must avoid.  That requires iconoclasm – not the destruction of statuary and buildings, but the truthful assessment of people and review of whom we support based on work, on study, and not based on fervor or what is claimed.

Like Marcus Aurelius, we have to work at being good people and making sound decisions.  It’s too easy to follow the crowd – go ahead, be an iconoclast, speak up, and make sure that if you must vote for the lesser of two evils, you know to the best of your ability which errant human that is.