Moral community, heroism and the left.

Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if, through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

-Sophie Scholl

N.B. As I wrote this, my determination was that it should be easy to follow for those with little background. If this means I “labor the point” I apologise.

I

According to one poll, 56% of young men and 40% of young women voted for Trump in 2024. Other polls are generally similar. The left, then, has a significant disadvantage with young men. My reading of what is wrong with the left’s outreach to young men is this: the left does not offer young men a clear opportunity to affiliate with a moral community.

By Moral Community I mean a group of people who: A) Share common goals held to be of ethical value B) Recognise each other as sharing those common goals C) Accord each other a special kind of affiliative respect or recognition as seekers after those goals and D) Support and communicate with each other.

Moral community is a kind of affiliative relationship or bonding. It is the relationship invoked whenever one sincerely calls another person a comrade and is inherent in many articulations of the concept of solidarity. It builds on trust, even as it further reinforces it. Heroism is in a certain sense the pinnacle of affiliation to a moral community, to be a moral hero is to achieve the highest level of affiliation.

What does this have to do with the left and young men?:

1. People, and especially people who want political change, wish to understand their own lives as expressing agency through a moral community.

2. Through failures of the left, the maneuverings of its enemies, and the actions of would-be-radical liberals, people have come to think the left sees men as the other in a way that blocks integration into a moral community.

3. The left must openly an decisively reject this. In particular, the left should focus on the idea that the proletariat has a shared interest in the liberation of all.

In what follows, I’ll outline A few preliminaries. The nature of my thesis is that while it is, I think, true and useful, there are several quite false and useless doctrines in the vicinity that must be rejected.

First, an observation. Notice how the right obsessively sells the idea of heroism to its would-be acolytes? I have been watching the right for years, and this idea is always there, always just below the surface. Heroism- recognized heroism- is affiliation to a moral community at its highest point. They are selling that, and with good reason.

It is always risky to claim that one’s failure to reach out to a demographic group has nothing to do with your specific proposals and everything to do with how you pitch them. It’s the easy way out. In this case, though, I think it’s warranted. The gender gap in enthusiasm for the left isn’t written into nature. Bernie Sanders, infamously, did quite well with young men- and he more or less supported the same policies as much more polarising figures- including an anti-sexist and anti-racist agenda. [Note: I don’t find it useful in this specific context to bicker about whether or not he was truly left- he was clearly tapping into leftwing energies].

I don’t think reaching out to young men requires or would benefit from, throwing oppressed and vulnerable people under the bus, in fact, I think that entertaining this idea fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem. It essentially buys into the right’s narrative about how the world works, but reverses the value judgements.

II

So, to state our position. The highest form of integration into a moral community is heroism on behalf of that community. Strange as it may be to say, I think that’s what a lot of people- especially the kind of people who get really into politics- crave. However confused, sad, or angry people may get, most people want to do good and make a difference.

Consequently, people seek a vision of politics in which they can be heroes.

Here’s something dumb that I might be saying but am not:

Men have a special need for heroism not shared by women. We can win them over by appealing to this need for heroism and turning the left into a boys on adventure.

I don’t think that in the sense I think of craving for heroism, there’s any clear difference between men and women, although there are different modes of cultural presentation. Nor do I think offering an opportunity at heroism looks like offering a boy’s own adventure. If you can’t see, for example, that Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at Trumps inauguration, calling for mercy for the poor, the oppressed and the foreigner was an act of heroism, you may have misunderstood the idea of heroism.

There would be a way of offering young men on the left membership in a moral community or heroism that would effectively be third positionism and I have no interest in that. Any suggestion that men should struggle to achieve heroism through their gender is bunk.

This isn’t to deny it’s a good idea to target young men with messaging. People are discussing the topic in a cringe way but: “leftists don’t have their own Rogan and that’s bad” is not wrong. Leftist channels catering to interests which statistically are most appealing to men- like weightlifting or team sports- would be a great contribution. But messaging like “HOW TO BE A MAN! BUT LEFTISHLY” would be just as weird, inappropriate, and reactionary as “HOW TO BE A WOMAN! BUT LEFTISHLY”.

Why don’t men see the left as offering them a chance at heroism? My theory is they are reacting to a view on the left, popular after the rise of the New Left, of how people’s real interests align and clash. That view makes it difficult for men, and others, to see themselves as potential members of a leftist moral community.

III

I am under no illusion that the left’s approach to young men is “why Kamala lost the election”. I do think the election is a good moment to rethink our commitments, but Kamala Harris lost the election because a global anti-incumbent wave, driven by dissatisfaction at cumulative inflation, threw out governing parties everywhere.

If anything, she did somewhat better than the average. This may be because Trump was not an especially strong opponent. The need to win over as many people as possible to the left, including young men is a much bigger point than the 2024 election- though the results frame the question nicely. Nor should there be any haste to mourn Kamala, except that her defeat gave Trump his victory. She was after all, supporting a war in which starvation and high explosives are being used against a densely populated urban area.

But since we’re all giving commentary on elections these days, let me give some in passing. I’d note that the centrist Dems of the world are trying to spin these results as evidence for their approach. This is despite issue polling consistently showing that the kind of technocratic centrism endorsed by centrist operatives is very far away from the populist centrism often endorsed by ‘centrist’ swing voters.

The data, such as it is, doesn’t best support the idea that the problem was swing voters not voting Dem. Instead, it tends to support the idea that Dem voters didn’t show up.

It’s also worth noting that far less has changed vis a vis young men in this particular election than is often made out. Even back in 2008, there was a substantial gender gap. Trump got far more young men than he ‘should’ have in 2020 as well. We can and should be worried that a majority of men under 45 supported Trump. Still, suggestions that young men are “overwhelmingly” rightwing- at least by US standards are ridiculous- Trump got less support than Kamala among men 18-29 according to some polls.

Finally, on the topic of the election, don’t let the people responsible for this monstrosity let you think for a moment that the left are the ones killing the Democrats with “wokeness”. Wokeness has always been mostly a centrist phenomenon. Here’s noted centrist Hilary Clinton:

IV

Let us also discard any suggestion that we should not reach out to men drifting towards conservatism because it’s their responsibility to stick to the correct path, and if they cannot do this, they fall below the moral threshold of being worthy of our time. Even spelling this idea out explicitly shows it for what it is- a load of moralistic rubbish. If you care about people, politics must be about results not who ‘deserves’ outreach. But let us moot the idea briefly nonetheless.

After the election, we’ve heard a lot discussions left of center about moral lines. Can Trump voters be forgiven? Can Jill Stein voters be forgiven? Can Harris voters be forgiven? Can men be forgiven given a majority voted for Trump? (see the American 4B movement). Can white women be forgiven given a majority voted for Trump (something the American 4B movement is much more circumspect about)? Not only are such group generalizations always imprecise, but the very idea of the the redeemable, and the unredeemable are not useful here in the world. Down here in the tumult of the world we should be too busy helping to judge.

Judgment is addictive and this is doubly true when it can build audiences. Judgement is a form of false action, and it feels like doing something and participating in the world even when nothing is really happening. It’s like the experience machine for politics. If you go down that route, you could lose yourself and some people lose themselves perhaps forever- I’ve seen people become sicker and sicker through judgement.

And, in fairness, if you were so inclined, there’d be a lot you could stew in.

Here were the results of a referendum in California, a very blue state. A majority of the voters supported slavery as punishment for a crime:

Further, there was essentially no campaign for No. The voters decided this all on their own.

Can you imagine what the margin would be if the vote were held across America? Or if there had been even a No campaign in addition to a yes campaign? Probably at least 65% no.

It would be easy, I think, to end up in the position where you think most Americans are evil- and it won’t stop with America. If the limitus for decency is consistently respecting the fundamental rights and interests of others then no American demographic is in the main decent. Ultimately, very few individuals are. Life is long, and there are many aspects in which one might fail, although, I concede, of course, there are degrees.

100 billion people have lived. The vast majority of them have supported dreadful things, indeed the vast majority of them have participated in terrible things. Those that didn’t often just lacked the opportunity (e.g. dying in infancy).

Do you want to call the vast majority of your species evil? If you get into the business of calling individual humans evil, it’s going to be hard to draw the line in such a way as to avoid calling a majority wicked. I refuse to do that and fortunately, it is a choice. You don’t have to play this game.

While there might be facts about whether or not this or that act is wrong, and even whether this or that person is better in this or that way, there is no objective threshold written into the universe between good people and evil people. There are just people- better and worse people, sure, but there’s no cosmic line between “good person” and “trash”. You can draw a line if you want, but I tend to find this results in more and more people being marked out as trash. Like thermonuclear war, you win by not playing.

This is what I’ve always detested about even ironic misandry. You think men are trash? Sure you can set the bar in such a way that most men are trash, but most ways of coherently drawing the line so that most men are trash will also result in most women being trash. On the whole then I think it’s probably best then not to say things that will cost you half of the population. At least if you are trying to help people by changing the world.

Moreover, and mark my words here, the lives of men and women are so entangled and interdependent that anyone who hates women will ultimately hate and disrespect men, and anyone who hates men will ultimately hate and disrespect women. Misogynists are always misanthropes in the general sense, and too many years on Twitter have convinced me that Misandrists who really mean it are almost always misanthropes in the general sense too. It’s not something I’d risk even joking around about.

You can avoid it all with one easy principle. Political activity is not meant to be merely expressive- it is meant to be focused on building coalitions. The goal is not moral expression but effective moral action to help people. The expressive approach to morality- that treats morality as a signal, first and foremost of who I am and thinks this state of affairs good, rather than seeing morality as a beneficial relation to the other, is responsible for all kinds of evil. This is just one of them. This is not meant to demean the centrality of morality to personal identity. Only by engaging with the ethical as something with real stakes, not mere signaling does the ethical gain the capacity to profoundly shape and alter life, identity, and community as something more than a fashion symbol.

If I am right, is it not a huge indictment of men? That many will only do the right thing if they get to feel like valued members of a moral community? Ah, but there’s the rub. It’s not just men, it’s the human condition. We all have a tendency to be like that. Foreswear, forever then politics as unrestrained moral judgment not grounded in helping people. The irony here, I guess, is that a focus on helping people, and not on oneself, requires recognizing that a lot of people are oriented toward their own self-image, at least at first, but that’s just the way things are.

Finally, what about the more pragmatic argument that a lot of these young guys are already fascists, and nothing is going to win them over? Perhaps, but these things are always about the percentage you can win.

V

So why don’t young men feel like they can integrate into a leftwing moral community?

What I’m about to go through will be old hat for many. I apologize for that, but it is, I think, the core of the issue. Many have argued that the contemporary left framework alienates many people from itself in that it doesn’t tell them that they will win out from the defeat of oppression. Instead, they are told they are privileged by oppression and so would presumably be better off if it continued (at least prima facie). I think this is broadly right. However, I want to frame the core problem differently- the contemporary framework doesn’t create a moral community for virtually everyone like the old left did.

We used to hold something like the following broadly Marxist theory:

Social problems arise because they are in the interest of a monied ruling class. This ruling class supports racism, sexism, war, queerphobia and so much more because it is to its advantage to do so. The ruling class divides and disorganizes through these mechanisms. To the extent ordinary people have bought into oppressive ideologies, the articulation of a positive alternative can win many of them away. A better world for everyone is possible, and we can exercise our agency collectively to achieve it.

Now we are taught what might be called the Kyriarchal theory:

Social problems exist because numerous overlapping constituencies benefit from them. Men benefit from patriarchy. White people benefit from racism. Straight people benefit from queerphobia. Able-bodied people benefit from ableism. People must be appealed to on a moral basis to divest themselves of their advantages because it’s the right thing to do.

About 60% of the American population is white, and about 50% are men. The probability of each is (roughly) independent, so 80% of Americans are either white, or a man, or both. Even on this simple 2x2 axis, the vast majority of the population are either predators or mixed predator-prey. As we add in more axes, the large majority of the population will be both oppressed and oppressor. Never mind that being in America is, arguably, a form of “privilege” in itself. Certainly, the value is mitigated for many groups, but overall it’s better than being in a poorer country for a huge majority.

A first pass: you might think that this approach is unlikely to be persuasive to men, whites etc. because it says that the left is not aligned with their selfish interests, and people tend to want their politics to advance their selfish interests. Thus the kyrarchical approach will impose a natural ceiling on the left with each non-subaltern identity giving another reason to oppose the left. I disagree. This may be a factor, but I don’t think this is the major problem.

The greatest problem with Kryiarchical theory from the point of view of trying to win is related but different. The problem is that the clash of interests makes e.g. some men feel like they won’t be accepted into the moral community offered by the left both because the left doesn’t seem to be about them and because they think that a perception they have objectively clashing interests means they will be subject to suspicion and distrust if they join, and they are already subject to suspicion and distrust even before becoming members. It is hard to make moral community with people who you think your interests lie in screwing them over.

In the Combahee River statement, which is perhaps the real origin of this moment in politics, more so than Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality, a collective member called Morgan writes at the very end of the text- effectively capstoning the piece:

“I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.”

(The idea of the proletariat- or even that there is a direct economic aspect to people’s position in society- seems absent!)

Earlier they write:

"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression."

Especially as the statement is applied to 2024, I find myself wondering- where is everything else- imperialism, ableism and the like? In an election in which a Black Woman was running was running to administer the imperial core how believable is it that Kamala’s is not linked through her positionality to the maintenance of any systems of oppression? Imperialist core versus periphery, anyone?

Seeking the innocent was never going to turn up much in a world like ours. The power of Marx’s identification of the proletariat with the revolutionary class was that it never depended on a perfect innocence from oppression or being the most oppressed. It depends on the paradoxical power granted by having one’s labor exploited, and thus having control over a thing of value to the masters of the world. As Olin-Wright argues, the distinction between oppressed and exploited matters greatly. Exploitation, in an odd way, is linked to complicity- thus it is not the absence of complicity that gives the proletariat power- quite the opposite.

This is well-trodden ground but I am trying to say something specific here in addition to the usual critique of identity politics, namely that politics depends on affiliation to moral communities, and Combahee River politics isn’t compatible with that for the large majority of people living in America- since on this view, everyone but Black lesbian women have objective interests in the world as it is. That leads, e.g., men and white people to find moral community with the left difficult because they held to have an objective opposition to the aims of the movement even if they claim to have subjective support for the aims of the movement. This erodes trust, a precondition of moral community.

I don’t think this is an abstract point. There is a pervasive sense among a lot of people that the left is not for them. The problem is not so much that they think supporting the left is not in their narrow interests, the problem is that they do not feel they will be trusted by the left. People crave both trust and recognition from a moral community, and we must be responsive to these demands. The Kyriarchial approach just isn’t.

However, the question of whether a theory is inconvenient is separate from whether it is true. Maybe the Kyriarchal theory is just right, as much as things would be simpler if the Marxist theory were correct.

Is it really plausible that the objective interests of each non subaltern group (men, white people, straights, the able-bodied, etc.) lie in the continued oppression of the oppressed? I am just not convinced that I am happier for living in a world fragmented and alienated by oppression and power. Consider the energies, the advances, the works of science and art, held back by those structures. Consider the jagged and jarring character of everyday life in a world of oppression. I believe my interests, along with the interests of every oppressed group and individual, lie in a joint program of the abolition of the power of the ruling class, a program that will also greatly weaken or destroy oppression.

Perhaps this is the realm of the hyperstitious. That is to say, at a gross simplification to a surprising degree, our choosing to believe the kyriarchal or the Marxist theory is true can make them so. It depends on how we conceive of our own interests, and it depends on how optimistic we are, and on what scale we think we can affect change. Can we just make the distribution of the cake a bit fairer (in which case things might indeed be close to zero-sum) or can we seize the bakery?

To the extent that people feel like they do benefit from oppression, I suspect a lot of it is due to shrinking social horizons starting sometime between 68’ and 78’. In a world in which the powerful never give anything up, all there is to do is to fight for the scraps. Among many other things, this is what is meant by seemingly frivolous slogans like “all power to the imagination”. If a group of people are all tangled up and stuck in the mud, it takes imagination to see that more is possible than just wrestling to see who will be on top of the heap. I often suspect much of the apparent debate between the kyriarchical (many winners from oppression) and Marxist (few winners from oppression) views are merely verbal- the difference relates to the timescale, and to what one holds to be fixed- changeable, impossible, and possible.

It is obvious- to me at least- that a much freer world would be better for everyone. It is obvious that some intermediate steps will challenge our own conception of our interests (although most intermediate steps will be good for everyone but the ruling class). Which defines our interests, ultimately- the short horizon or the long? If you focus on the short-term horizon, I guess it makes a kind of limited sense to say “you win out of the oppression of others, white male proletarian” if you look at things from that horizon, but I don’t think it makes the most moral or strategic sense, and I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why so many on the left decided that it was progressive- let alone good politic to tell white men that racism and sexism are too their advantages! It seems better to ground the moral community in a focus on the long horizon.

The only realm in which there might actually be for some people a genuine tradeoff between long-term and short-term interests, between their race and advancing the working class, is in the scramble for middle-class white-collar jobs and struggles over affirmative action. But even here, I think, even a wholly self-interested white man would be better off organizing multiracially and across sex lines for more such jobs rather than fighting over the division of the available jobs.

To sum then, I choose to focus on the long because it is more useful, and because, hyperstitiously, if we all do it- focusing on the long horizon, defining our interests that way- brings those interests closer. We must reject the post-1978 assault on the imagination, and to imagine the end of capitalism, not the end of the world.

Interests are a much more fluid concept than either capitalism or mechanical Marxism admits. There is an objective basis for the existence of a sense of shared goals among the proletariat, but other forces- not least the capitalists themselves- try to push the creation of perceived interests.

Political interests are always collective interests, and both the individual and the discourse have power in setting the collectivity. If the motive forces in politics were just individuals getting more stuff and working fewer hours, almost no one would participate in politics, because their individual contribution to their own welfare would be insignificant. This is to say, a prisoner’s dilemma-type argument would imply we should all do nothing.

In politics, people- especially people who are actively involved in the long term- usually act not primarily because they are concerned with themselves, or because they are concerned with the whole impartially, but because they are concerned with people like them. “People like me” come to be an extended social self, and asserting the rights of what they perceive as their extended social self becomes important for the individual’s own sense of dignity. Fighting politically of itself strengthens feelings of dignity, and further anchors the individual to the extended self.

But what “people like them” means to any given person is itself a place of social and even intrapersonal conflict. The right wants to restrict it, whereas, at least classically, the left wants to expand into to the whole proletariat, and ultimately, the whole species. As Gitlin pithily put it (thanks to FdB for bringing this quote to my attention): “If there is no people, only peoples, there is no left.”

VI

What of heroism? Perhaps I seem ridiculous for speaking about heroism and even moral community because it might seem that most people’s ambitions are so much lower than that. Most people just want to be part of a group- even the idea of moral affiliation might be too in-depth to describe that. Consider our subject drawn to the right. They turn on YouTube and find 1 million right-wing talking heads who offer affiliation and far fewer leftwingers offering. No need to have heroism in the story, maybe no need even for a moral community- just a little c community.

First of all, I think people often have bigger dreams than we realize.

Secondly, heroism is the keystone species of affiliation. To act heroically in the context of a moral community, especially if that heroism is recognized, is a state of perfect affiliation. “Can I imagine a hero like me in this community” is perhaps the ultimate test of affiliation - if that is missing, something fundamental is missing. Heroism is a somewhat archaic word, but the fundamental idea of being the paragon of a community holds enormous power over people.

VII

The proletariat itself is a heroic subject.

To simplify: Born and raised in low circumstances, the proletariat- those who have nothing to sell but their labor were formed when their commons were enclosed and their traditional lands were taken. They were cast into the cities as surplus labour- free to find employers, and free to starve if they couldn’t. They found themselves “outcast and starving midst the wonders they had made”, they had the least of all, but were ultimately the most necessary to the new structure- for nothing would work without their action. They held both the motive (their marginalization and suffering) and the means (their power over production) to lead the world to a better place. So shunned, the proletariat began to grow stronger in knowledge and organization and seize its possibilities, not just on its own behalf, but on behalf of humanity as a whole. It aspired to heroism.

But as much as the proletariat is a collective hero, its heroic agency cannot be reached all at once by the collective. Hence organising is necessary. Thus there is an opportunity for the individual to grasp at something larger- at the pattern of history, or even a vision of the good they conceive as beyond time. Heroes are necessary because at first, classes only exist taxonomically and as possibilities. That is, classes aren’t self-contained, self-aware and articulated entities, prior to the action of individuals and small groups who seize that opportunity. Their action is always to some degree or another heroic.

The left anchors its conception to a surprising degree through an ideal of heroic proletarian action that embodies in its courage and solidarity the action it seeks from the people at large. Radical liberals, Marxists, Anarchists, Democratic Socialists, and the general left- everywhere one looks there is a tradition of heroic martyrs much larger than any on the right - Sophie Scholl, Julius Fučík, Rosa Luxemburg, Fred Hampton, Thomas Sankara, Buenaventura Durruti, Berta Cáceres to name a few. This kind of heroic agency isn’t an accidental ribbon. To a surprising degree, the crossover, the bridge between the individual and the class-for-itself, is the conceptual link provided by the heroism of the proletariat and the heroism of the individual’s story.

And there is space for a lot of forms of heroism- from the difficult work of mapping and planning policy and strategy to putting one’s body on the line to oppose genocide, to the precarious work of union salting and organization. It would be a mistake to think that identification of the proletariat as bearing heroic agency is a call to a politics of pointless gesture or heartfelt but thoughtless deeds. It also means the difficult work of economic analysis and design- like for example that carried out by my former supervisor Mike Beggs- is necessary. A hero who isn’t trying to get it right but instead just showing off is no hero at all, merely vainglorious.

VIII

How should we live? The left, more than any other ideology, perhaps ever, has demurred from answering this. The claim is sometimes made that because the left is not giving lonely alienated people advice, people are not attracted to it in the same way they are to other ideologies.

It is true that Marxists don’t offer much by way of answers to these questions. The reason is obvious. Since Marxism identifies the problem at the level of a larger social structure, prescriptions of how to live would be beside the point. And yet we find ourselves within the world, making choices under factual and moral uncertainty- what are we to do? Kirkegaard said life can only be understood backward but lived forwards. We face a similar paradox, we hold that what ultimately changes the world is classes, yet we live as individuals. The world can only be transformed collectively but lived individually.

A review of what other ideologies have done might give us some clarity. For the right, grappling with how to live becomes very tied up in a particular kind of self-help approach, a toxic approach that sees success as only dependent on will. The progressive liberals meanwhile bifurcate into an ideal of self-care on one hand and self-correction and behavioral monitoring on the other. I don’t know what the right advice is, but I know what seems so awfully absent in self-help, self-care, and self-policing, and that is fellowship with other people. Yes, life must be lived individually, but the terrible analytic loneliness of these approaches is self-imposed.

There is no need for us to put forward a complete theory of how people should live. I’m not against leftwing influencers etc. giving advice about life, fitness, big choices, etc. so long as it’s good advice but micro-obsessions about life aesthetics are the right’s game, not ours. We certainly don’t need our own leftwing equivalent of the carnivore diet, but the idea of providing people with something to help them live is increasingly indispensable in a period of social dissolution. My sense is though that we can help make life palatable through the ideal of a moral community aimed at the creation of a world in which: "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". That moral community may or may not physically exist in any given region, but we can at least offer its possibility, and in a lot of places, begin assembling it.

IX

The idea of the hero contains two elements in creative tension:

The Gloried

The Guardian

These are completely detachable in principle. It is not even clear they are correlated, but we aspirationally join them in the idea of the hero- the good should be glorious and the glorious should be good. Consider Achilles and Maximilian Kolbe- who sacrificed himself during the Second World War to save Franciszek Gajowniczek, but imagine instead a version of Maximilian Kolbe that remained wholly unknown- call him nameless. Both Achilles and Nameless fall under the category of hero in our culture, but it’s unclear what they have in common. We want to fuse the gloried with the guardian, but the two halves also clash for control of the concept.

Perhaps the Nietzschean will think that the idea that Maximillian or Nameless are heroes is a late Christian interpolation. I certainly think Christianity improved our concept of the hero- but the idea of the protector has been present from the beginning. It is normally a mistake to argue from etymology, but I note that the proto-indo-European etymology of hero is Ser, meaning to protect or to watch over (guardian). It is the same root as the word servant. Although our earliest depictions of heroism are of figures primarily marked out by their glory and not their guardianship, the etymology suggests, perhaps, that the idea of the servant-of-all has been present from the beginning.

The two elements interact in various ways. The hero is seen as glorious in part because of their guardianship, and through their glory a guardian.

When people say they want to be heroes, I always think the interesting, if a little trite, question is: Would you still want to be a hero if no one was watching? Or worse, if you would be remembered with hatred in spite of or because of your heroism? Is your heroism for you or for the other, in the eyes of those around you?

Willem Arondéus is interesting in this regard. Famously, he was killed after destroying the civil registry in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, burning identity documents that allowed the Nazis to identify Jews and other targets. Even though homosexuality was near-universally despised at the time, he made a point of asking that his lawyer tell everyone he was gay. He chose then, first to be a hero, and then to be, I’m sure he could only imagine, remembered with hate. “Let no one say that homosexuals are cowards”.

Of course, only you can decide whether or not you want to be a hero as we understand it, or merely beloved, but if you do want to be a real hero, there is a sense in which you must always seek your own abolition- even if only quixotically. A real hero has to aim at a world in which there is no longer suffering which generates a need for heroes in the sense we currently understand the term. As Brecht said, “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero”, and heroes, presumably, don’t want the land to be unhappy. This is why, ultimately, the right can never really offer heroism, especially the kind of Nietzschean right that doesn’t even pretend to be in it for everyone. Heroes seek a world that doesn’t need heroes.

I guess, despite my earlier cautions about moral judgments, it depends on how much faith you have in people.

X

Perhaps it’s a good time to start thinking about heroes again, as the right increasingly goes into its villain arc. By the villainous right I mean something in the frame of Milton’s Satan:

Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good

Taking altruistic ethics and flipping them on their head. The open disavowal of an intention to increase the welfare of the species, or even the nation, generally. The closest anyone is ever likely to come to supporting the idea of evil itself.

I mentioned earlier that a section of the right- very visible on, say, Twitter, thirsts after heroism. The hollowness of much that thirst- the way real desire for heroism is perverted into the desire for mere heroic glory- is well shown by how easy declarations of intention to both heroic and villainous ends coexist in the one movement.

Of course, as a leftist, I believe that the right has long failed to uphold the general welfare, but the villainous right is unique in denying even the intention. Think of the poseur pseudo-Nietzschean who craves the war of all against all not as a means to a better world, but as an end in itself- violence and struggle conceived of as the better world. The Zero HP Lovecraft types who joke about turning homeless people into Biodeisel. These guys are gaining power, and are, oddly I think, a kind of cancer on the right they’re weirdos who certainly don’t help the right achieve its goals in the main, and yet because there is no effective opposition to them on the right, and because the right has little effective opposition, they might just get what they want. A scary thought.

Just before election day, a group of young men went and voted for Kamala and shared photos online and one of them expressed the view that this made them a real man. An ex-Navy seal involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden became the Twitter main character of the day when responded that “but for social media” (???) these men would be his sex slaves. This already deeply disturbing vibe was further reinforced by his statement that they were “boys, not men” and by a later statement that instead of using them for sex, some of them might be used for food. The fantasy here is pretty clearly that of social collapse, followed by men assuming the status of a warlord. Unsurprisingly given what we’ve seen in the past, there was little attempt to police him from the right.

Now I have no doubt that, if pressed, this Navy Seal fellow would say he was joking, and I presume on some level he was, but most jokes like this are a mixture of serious and comic. There is, I think, a real craving for a more violent world in some quarters, with very little veiling it. On the far right, visions of idyllic monarchic bliss (never mind the peasants) are giving way to Mad Max.

I do think this is true of a lot of people, and most of them are beyond reaching:

I just don’t think it’s an excuse not to try and find people who can be reached, and reach them. We’re trying to win after all.

XI

Things may look bleak right now for any leftwing attempt to articulate a concept of moral community or heroism. Post 78’ it’s not clear that much is improving, but in the long arc of history, we’re still ahead. To see this, consider the concepts of the empire and the resistance. Have you ever noticed that part of being a hero, in our culture, is carrying the mantle of “The resistance”? No one wants to be the empire. This is not a universal condition and that’s a sign that, deep in our bones we are a progressive culture.

But the right has been very successful, in this strange topsy-turvy game, at painting us as the ones who hold power. Part of reclaiming heroism is breaking decisively with empire.

Consider the metaphor of Dragon Slaying which Jordan Peterson is so fond of. Well, what is a dragon? A dragon comes to rule over a terrified land, hordes wealth and demands the sacrifice of many to slate its hunger, particularly the weak and innocent. A hero arises. What finer dragon slayer would there be than the proletariat as imagined by Marx?

If the left represents the low and downtrodden, and the right the high and mighty, how can dragon slaying be anything but a leftwing exercise? What dragon ever stood for benefits recipients, refugees, minorities the sick, or victims of ill circumstances of any sort?

The fundamental urge to heroism is good. It’s moral, and perhaps surprisingly, egalitarian in its emphasis that can come from anywhere. The urge to be the resistance is also noble. This is unsurprising, society depends on good things confiscated and twisted. This is a pretty universal phenomenon. Consider Gen Z, much derided for wanting to be a streamer- what is that but the desire for freedom from drudgery, the possibility of applying creativity, the bravery to face the headwinds of public judgment, wanting to be at the center of a community? Even the seemingly vacuous desires usually point or aim at virtue at some level of abstraction. The problem is we just get all tangled up down here.

XII

A note of caution though- any attempt by the left to win people over by explicitly and directly appealing to their desire to Play The Hero or Join a Moral community. would be incredibly naff and is not at all what I am suggesting. Give people the space and they’ll do it themselves.

The right tries this strategy of going for heroism head-on through the category of myth: styling themselves in pseudonyms after heroic figures, affiliating themselves with intellectual heroes- Tolkien, Nietzsche, who would have found them violently disturbing. In a word, cosplaying. This is by no means what I am suggesting- and when the left has engaged in this, it has been a real problem. Heroism is defined by a worthy goal and the will to achieve it even if it requires sacrifice imitating the superficial script of heroism. rather than honestly reflecting on how to achieve heroic ends, denies the very agency that is at the core of heroism. Heroism is not, and can never be, an aesthetic. Aestheticization ultimately fails on its own terms, the ugliest, kitschiest shit is built by guys who claim to think beauty is the highest good because they don’t understand that a beautiful thing is always made in a world.

A lot of people have made the point that the hardcore right these days is fucking weird. I think a lot of why we encounter the right as weird is because they are, so to speak, dreaming through life. Myths aren’t at all bad- we all need them, but they avoid confronting their obligations to self and others through a series of mythic slogans and images. They are weird then because they are encountering the world through mythic categories in a kind of Satrean bad faith rather than actually confronting their duties to self and others. Eventually, you lose even the mythology. Everything becomes “a heap of broken images”- reactionary kitsch- everything is only understood in terms of an interchangeable symbol of the good thing or the bad thing. Christianity, and Stoicism- all stripped of their specific intellectual and moral content. Just a myth blob. “Look at me, I can scope objects out of our common cultural lexicon and assemble them in vaguely evocative patterns.” Cool? Do you want me to stick the picture up on the fridge?

Perhaps this is why the right often seems to get so angry at the very idea of someone making a moral statement about them- not the content of the statement but the very idea of being assessed. Raising the topic of morality puts on hold the purely aesthetic enjoyment of the idea of morality- morality and moral ideologies not as doing what the hero does, but as wearing the hero’s fashionable armor- “Oh look at me, I have the Jacobite armor set, much trendier than you strolling around in last season’s Wotanist garb.” Actually asking about their behavior is like an SQL injection attack on this garbage.

For the left I suspect, the danger of cosplay comes out most directly in the realm of thought. The problem is we all too often forget to be brave when we think- to try to think about what is needed to help and to win. The red professor all too often repeats the form of thought as if they were afraid to think.