There’s this thing arts lecturers do – they have their pet subjects, their favourite authors or artists from whatever period they study, and they get really weird and uppity about their subject’s relevance to our modern day. Some random poet from the sixteenth century actually has a lot to say about social media, we’re told – there’s always some twist, some special application of their peculiar interest with the potential to unlock the problems of the world – ah, if only more people knew about it. If you’ve done an arts degree, you’ll be familiar with this behaviour. It’s very funny. It’s obviously partly about job security, about scholars scrambling for an ever-shrinking pool of grants and funding. It’s partly negotiating social and historical change, deciding which texts we do or don’t concern ourselves with. But it’s also, in many instances, coming from a place of genuine conviction. These scholars and researchers will be like hey yeah I think this guy’s really on to something, and then you read the actual book, and it’s fucking coconuts.

I don’t think people get how crazy some of this stuff is. It’s wild. If you’ve never read much non-fiction that was written before, say, the 1900s, you’ll be shocked at what people publish. Take Thomas Carlyle, for instance. Carlyle was a 19th century essayist and writer, who in 1841 published On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In itself, that’s a strong title. Seems like it might have some interesting insights that could be translated into the context of video games and their hero-protagonists. That’s how I got into it, anyway – it was mentioned in Tim Barringer’s book on labour and art in Victorian Britain, which we talked about a few weeks back, and I picked it up second-hand. If you’re not familiar with Carlyle, he’s a major Victorian thinker – he’s described on this dust jacket in front of me as “the greatest and most enduring of the prophets of the Victorian era.” We can approach his work in a few different ways. Obviously we can take a historical approach, considering how he fit into and shaped his cultural context. With that lens, it’s easy to say that he’s an important figure in shaping the Victorian period. But that type of argument about influence and trends – in some ways it’s very boring. It’s a little robotic. It might tell us who was important, but it doesn’t tell us whether their ideas were any good. It doesn’t tell us whether Carlyle’s arguments are worth thinking about today – whether they actually have anything to contribute to our modern discourse. Can we build off these ideas, or have we forgotten him for good reason?

Let’s check the first chapter, ‘The Hero as Divinity’. Here, Carlyle tells us that the essence of Scandinavian myth and “pagan mythologies” more broadly is “recognition of the divineness of nature.” That’s already a lot to unpack. What’s a pagan mythology? Historically, ‘pagan’ is a term invented by Christians to define (and dismiss) other religions as primitive or superstitious – as essentially false. It’s a sectarian term, rather than a useful tool for classification. There aren’t really any historic religions that would have self-identified as pagan – it’s a label that Christianity applied to other religions, rather than something those religions applied to themselves. Some of them do draw on the label after the fact – we have today neo-pagan groups who identify themselves with that language – but they’ve adopted a term applied to them in the first instance by Christianity. In that sense, we can’t really talk about ‘pagan religions’ as if they’re a coherent group with consistent characteristics. The only thing they really share is that they were all bundled together by Christianity in order to demarcate them as non-Christian. When Carlyle talks about the essence of pagan myth, then, he’s imposing a generalisation on a group of religions that don’t have any inherent connection. He’s not making an observation, he’s creating a stereotype. At best we could use his observation with reference to Scandinavian myth by itself. Elsewhere in the first chapter, for instance, he argues that “the primary characteristic of this old Northland Mythology I find to be Impersonation of the visible workings of nature.” We might be able to do something with that, but we can’t build an argument around the so-called essence of pagan religion.

Carlyle also says a bunch of stuff without really giving evidence or reasoning. He asserts things. He’ll be talking about Odin and then just start telling you his personal philosophy about what constitutes a man: “The first duty for a man is that of subduing fear. We must get rid of fear; we cannot act at all till then … now and always, the completeness of [a man’s] victory over fear will determine how much of a man he is.” Is that true? Is that defensible? How much of Carlyle’s argument do we lose if we don’t buy in? And what do we do with all those other, similar statements?

• “Men in all times, especially early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks.”
• “Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him?”
• “A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is – alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth – can, of all things, the least measure himself.”

It’s not that we write today without philosophy, without assumptions about the nature of masculinity or self-knowledge. We’re not above our own cultural perspectives and norms. But so much of Carlyle’s argument rests on what are essentially just vibes – on appeals to shared sentiment. Are people actually good at detecting quacks, at spotting frauds? Is that consistent with our experience of the world? As our culture changes, as our norms change, some of those sentiments fall away. Where they serve as the foundation of Carlyle’s argument, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

We haven’t got into the meat of the chapter here – we’re really only tinkering around the edges – but some of the methodological problems are becoming apparent. Different times have different scholarly standards. Carlyle invokes terms that were maybe appropriate to his time, but that don’t stand up to present scrutiny. He appeals to sentiments that don’t always translate across cultures or across time. These are standard problems in dealing with any of these older texts. Plus – you know – there’s also the racism. I’m using a 1966 edition of Carlyle’s book, with an introduction from the scholar Carl Niemeyer, who acknowledges some of Carlyle’s overtly racist beliefs. In the 1867 pamphlet Shooting Niagara: And After?, Carlyle wrote about the American Civil War, and what he sees as the nature of the black American: “evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions,” he writes, “…the Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant.” Niemeyer modestly suggests that Carlyle’s reputation in the modern day has “declined” – although, he adds, Carlyle is “still one of the great figures of nineteenth-century England.” This whole introduction is a real exercise in trying to salvage your subject’s reputation. Carlyle’s theory isn’t perfect, Niemeyer says, but it’s still important. He “failed to discriminate his heroes,” but he “at least recognised the force of the great man in history.” His argument might be disreputable, but “not quite so disreputable as some of Carlyle’s critics have pretended.” It’s all set in the language of trying to pull us back from the brink, trying to de-escalate so we don’t drop Carlyle down the memory hole. It’s also, curiously, a tension that can be understood in the terms of Carlyle’s own argument.

Carlyle’s big idea in On Heroes is that we are all involved in hero-worship. To Carlyle, the history of the world is “the history of the great men who have worked here,” and all of our thoughts and feelings and efforts are just a manifestation of things they thought first: “the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of thoughts that dwelt in the great men.” In our adoration, in adopting their principles knowingly or otherwise, we align ourselves with these mighty figures. “That we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever.” Taking up Carlyle’s argument, some of us, noting his comments about black Americans (“the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the white man”), might assert that Carlyle is not, in fact, a great man, and might shunt him towards the memory hole. Others might try and wrestle him back, rehabilitate him – he is “still one of the great figures,” Niemeyer insists. But a third approach – my approach – would be to throw out Carlyle’s argument altogether.

Although the first two positions are in conflict, they both implicitly accept Carlyle’s concept of hero-worship, that we should manifest the thoughts of the great thinkers. One side says that Carlyle is not a hero, and so we should throw his stuff away, while the other insists that he is a hero, despite the racism, and so we should keep him. Both of these arguments accept the idea that we ought to be looking for heroes. They share the underlying premise that if we just read the right people, if we follow in the tradition of the correct thinkers, we can make things right. We can uplift the world and bring forth the visions of utopia and harmony. And I just don’t think that’s true. We can’t fix the problem that Carlyle represents by copying his ideas. We shouldn’t be looking to just enshrine a better hero. Carlyle is wrong. We’re not here to manifest the thoughts of great thinkers: hero-worship shouldn’t be – can’t be – the metric for deciding what we read.