Heroes and Heroines - heroes

Sean B. Palmer
2005-02-14T21:13:30Z

William Loughborough recently published his pantheon, a list of his heroes and seminal influences, and this is a discussion of his choices and of the wider ideas and manner of choosing heroes and heroines.

Heroes and Heroines

William Loughborough has a list of influences that he calls his Background Pantheon. It consists of the following people:

Alfred Korzybski

R. Buckminster Fuller

B.F. Skinner

Harry Partch

Wolf Wolfensberger

This isn't an exhaustive enumeration of WL's heroes, of course; the schema is that these are ignored geniuses that have made a considerable contribution to William's life and way of thinking, and that William believes should have a profound impact on society. Having said that, all but one of the members of the list are rather well known: they're all white males, old or dead, and all of them were either born in or have eventually come to settle in America. The point is that the ideas espoused by these gentlemen are so much of a cognitive leap that they're either ignored, branded heretics, or generally misunderstood and footnoted. One can also make the argument that opinion holds rather great sway over the perceived venerability of these folks. Partch is likely the least contentious, and the best candidate for being a famous genius; B.F. Skinner certainly the most contentious and hence the most often labelled a fool, as in Chomsky's wonderful criticism. But that only shows part of the picture.

When William showed this to (pronoun coming up!) me, it wasn't long before I started thinking more about his choices and dicussing them; and eventually I came to ask various people who their heroes are, and why. Perhaps I shouldn't've phrased it so openly, though, but it seems to be the perfect question to ask should you want to immediately stump someone. Ask a random person a question about high energy particle physics and there's a one in a thousand chance they'll know what you're on about, but with heroes it seems that no one really thinks about this sort of thing. To be fair, it could be a kind of vague mental block. If you ask an astronomer what their favourite star is, you'd probably get a similar response, but there you can understand it. Some people, on the heroes question, even do go for the obvious "everybody is my hero" answer that exposes our interconnectivity, but misses the point of the question.

So what is the point of the question? William's "pantheon" reveals some of the answer: to ponder those qualities that we most aspire to; to laud those that have gone undeservedly unlauded; to find out what work we ought to continue; to inspire, to ponder, to converse upon. To that end, I think it's important to have a schema. And sometimes people generate ones of their own accord. For example, when I asked Christopher the question he gave the usual "..." for a while until he remembered a film he'd seen recently about Howard Hughes. Then it wasn't long before he was about to think about people in the same vein and come up with John Glenn; as I said at the time, both intriguing choices (and they get my thumbs up), even if they don't share much of William's rouge genius schema. On the other hand, they're both white, male, old or dead, and American. It seems to be an odd tendency.

So asking someone about their hero, as Christopher recently and rightly pointed out, requires the answerer to first define the term hero. It's fun that, therefore, the term "hero worship" levied out to people who are perceived to be too into following a particular person's endeavours (think, perhaps, of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer learns about Thomas Edison) is something that's contextualised relative to the accuser and not the accusee!

Through all of this, I have of course been trying to answer the question for myself. What kind of heroes do I have, and why? Diverting the attention to other people is a kind of interesting procrastination mechanism, but it's also worked well for research purposes. For example, it's brought to mind people that I might've neglected to think about for a lot longer; such as the questionee that mentioned Antarctic explorers, for whom I have a great admiration. But since I'm devising a list as a kind of countering call to William's pantheon, I thought it best to ask his advice on the subject, and I'm leaning rather towards adopting his schema almost in full. Here's some advice that he gave to me in a thread called "pangenion" wherein I asked for any random insight that he had on the matter:

Skip people that "everybody already knows" like Shakespeare.
Skip people you don't have to defend from crackpot charges.
They should be out to change things - a lot.

That's by far and away the best advice I've had so far, and it's also an excellent summary of William's own schema.

So, who're my choices? I'm still working on it!

Sean B. Palmer