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Notes -
IMO heroes are not quite the issue. The Left has heroes, they are just continually written into and out of the political story. Their heroes come and go like musical productions. Obama was a hero, now he is not, and AOC is a hero for those who “subscribe” to her but one day she won’t be. What the Left doesn’t have is any permanent hero, definitely not any old white ones from the white tradition. I mean… Marx? I don’t know. The parasocial relationship that young left Americans have with Hasanabi is pretty indicative of “hero worship” — watching for hours, imitating, buying merch, as an example.
My apolitical opinion on hero worship is that it’s an essential biological feature of humans that will never go away, because it’s shared social imitation. Ideally we should appreciate the specific virtues of specific heroes and not care about about the rest, and possess a large repertoire of heroes to pull from. For a culture, it’s optimal to have a number of heroes as points of reference in conversation and as stories for the young and as “self-checkups” for our own conduct — that’s kind of what the medieval virtues were all about.
Hmm, that's really interesting. So you think having a common set of hero cultural touchstones is nice, and that we should attempt to deliberately cultivate a set of heroes with some very well-exemplified virtues? Does that mean, for example, that you'd like to see MLK there, but only if he were accompanied by a good and (diverse?) set of other people in a larger pantheon, rather than getting special and rare privilege?
Absolutely + absolutely; the third question is bit complicated for me — if he did demonstrate a virtue closest to perfection (there’s no one better at universally important skill x) and if I subscribed to the idea of a “general American” pantheon then yes. IMO this is the best use of our instinct to like heroes. Flaws in heroes can then help us to remember the inevitable flaws of all humans (our own Achilles’ Heel). If I could extend the ideal further for no reason, the “special and rare” virtue of the pantheon is social humility, the great untold heroic quality behind every civilization. People love this quality, eg the internet loved when the owner of Arizona Iced Tea talked about purposefully keeping the price a dollar. Now maybe the owner lacks the virtue of prudence but that’s another digression.
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