Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                            I WOULD HAVE BEEN A HERO

Most mornings, often before sunrise, I take an hour-long walk as my “constitutional” – a way of keeping fit when I know most of my day will consist of me sitting on my backside either reading or writing. As I walk I’m usually listening to a podcast through my ear plugs. The other day I was listening to an episode of the excellent BBC “A Short History of…” series. The episode was about the life and death of Vincent van Gogh. Of course it had to deal with the artist’s sad mental decline in his last years and his suicidal tendencies (first the ear-cutting self-mutilation, then shooting himself in the chest.) But one of the saddest details was the bullying behaviour directed at him by local adolescents. At the very time van Gogh, already weak with sickness, was painting his iconic crows-in-a-cornfield painting, a group of young yokel thugs surrounded him, stole his straw hat and filled it with a dead rat, knocked over his easel, splattered him with his own paint, filled his drinking bottle with salt and ran away laughing.

Now none of us would do that, would we? Wouldn’t we recognise this was a great genius at work – a man whose paintings would be cherished by the whole world? Wouldn’t we have rushed in to chase the bullies away? Wouldn’t we have righted his easel, gathered his paints together and filled his bottle with something drinkable?

And the answer is – probably not.

We’re very good at inserting ourselves into the past and patting ourselves on the back for the great and righteous things we would have done. But in this case, the fact is that van Gogh was known as an artist only by a very few people at the time. Most of his paintings couldn’t find buyers, or were sold for a pittance. And if you had lived in the village where he spent his last days, you would probably have seen him as a raggedy, eccentric nuisance of no particular account. Like the Pharisees and lawyers, you would probably have passed him by on the other side of the road. And so, in all probability, would I.

You might have seen James Cameron’s historically inaccurate, largely fictitious and very soppy 1997 film Titanic. There’s a scene where Kate Winslet’s character is showing off to her stuffy fiancé some of the art works she’s bought in Europe – paintings by little-known people like Picasso – and saying how great they are. Her stuffy fiancé scoffs and says such artists will be forgotten in a few years. .. and in no time the Kate Winslet character is stomping off to shag with a proletarian steerage passenger. Well of course we would have set the stuffy fiancé right, wouldn’t we, given that the artists in question are now canonical…

Alright, you know what I’m going to say.

In 1912, most people, including the super-wealthy who travelled in the best berths in the Titanic (even the ones who wanted to shag a bit of rough) would not have even heard of Picasso and if they had heard of him and his ilk they would have thought he was a passing fad for drunkards in bistros. And so would you. To include this (of course fictitious ) scene in his film, James Cameron was patting his audience of the back and encouraging them to think how much more sophisticated they were than the philistines of 1912.

I could give many more examples but I’ll aim my shot at the most obvious one. In Occupied Europe in the Second World War, you would have bravely fought in the Resistance, wouldn’t you? I mean, when you think of those days, you are appalled by the fact that so few did just that. You feel superior to them, don’t you? How cowardly they must have been! I’ve heard these sentiments voiced by university students in seminars.

What self-delusion! Only a very few would or could risk life and limb (and their families) up against a totalitarian regime. Most simply kept their heads down – as you would have done – and hoped those terrible times would just pass. There’s a reason why we regard the Resistants as heroes. It’s because, in the circumstances, they stood out from the mass of people so there were very few of them.

Of course you can think of the barbarism of defunct medical practices, and wonder why people once permitted them – the use of blood-letting in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as a universal remedy; the craze in the 1920’s for using “monkey glands” to revive vitality, and in the same era the consumption of radium-inflected water for the same reason; the lobotomies that were still practised in psychiatric hospitals up to the 1950s and 1960s. How disgusting and inhumane they were! And yet, at the time, the mass of people saw these as perfectly respectable and scientific practices. Do you really think that you, at the time, would have seen them in any other way?

There is a very obvious message here. It’s easy to feel superior to the mass of people in the past and to imagine that you would have behaved more humanely, more compassionately, more heroically and with more perception than they. But you can only feel that way if you imagine that all is well in our own age, that nothing we do now is barbaric, and that people always lived in the same comfort as we do. It is, of course, the virus of presentism, where everything is judged against the standards and beliefs of the present age. And to add to reality, let us be quite certain that in 20, 50 or a hundred years, some of the assumptions and practices of our own time will be regarded as barbarous, presumptuous or just plain ignorant. Including those who presume that in a different age they would have been heroes.