The Laughing Wolf

The Choosing Of Heroes

Reading Bill Whittle’s latest has caused a lot of thought. One of the more interesting trains of thought to follow on a Saturday has to do with heroes. Take a moment and think about who were your heroes growing up. I’m not talking movie or television heroes, but the real historical figures that you admired, studied, and emulated. For purposes of discussion, I am going to allow consideration of semi-mythical figures such as Arthur, Gilgamesh, etc. in on this.

When thinking about those who debate endlessly in locked rooms, versus those that went out and looked around, I realized that almost every one of the people I had admired as a child were those who went and looked.

Some of my earliest heroes were the Knights of the Round Table who rode forth and did to the highest ideals. It was Merlin, who sought for knowledge and wisdom in the Hollow Hills and across the length and breadth of the lands/Earth. I hung upon every word of the conflict between ideals and reality, and how the problems were resolved.

In more pragmatic terms, I thought very highly of Galileo. Here was a man who refused to accept the knowledge of the windowless cloisters and locked minds. He looked, and when he needed tools to look he made them, literally. He performed experiments to confirm or deny theories. He paid the price for so doing. It really bothered my Mom that I thought so much of him, given that she believed very strongly for many years in not rocking the boat.

Poor lady, she was sorely tried on that regard because I immediately turned my sight upon Leonardo, for whom I felt a strong kinship. We were both outsiders with a rough childhood, and he gave me courage and hope. For he dared great things, and was not content to simply dream of ideas, he had to try and make them real.

There were others, all of who paid a price in one form or another: Archimedes, who had to test his theories; Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the modern microscope and began to prove once and for all that it was microbes and not daemons that were behind many illnesses; Joseph Lister who revolutionized surgery with treatments for wound sepsis; Marie Curie, who gave her life for her research; Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman; and Nikola Tesla, who probably took more to his grave than we care to think about. Add to that military figures who pretty much formed the other half of my heroes, and it is a powerful mix.

Almost none of the ivory tower types stuck in my pantheon. Pure philosophy for its own sake was something that eluded me, and still does. It is great to dream of something grand, but such effort is useless if it has no bearing on reality.

The argument espoused by Mr. Whittle is an old one, and has been going on since well before Plato and his groovy cave. There have always been those who dreamed of ideals, and they were forever at war with those who looked out the mouth of the cave. I can well remember from my own career when computer modeling became the vogue. I remember well arguments raging over the validity of weather models that clearly said it was sunny and bright outside, when anyone leaving the lab and going to a window could see the rain pour down. Simple observation drove some of the modelers to even more intransigence, rather than to fix an obvious need in their model. The model was ideal, it was the world that was wrong to them.

So spend today and think a bit about your heroes. Were they people of action and great things, or merely thinkers with great ideas? Or, were they people who aspired to lofty goals and ambitions, but had the sense to look out the window and see the world as it was? With that in mind, who do you choose for your heroes, your authorities, now?

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