Canada needs heroes, not a cult of the present

National Post, 09 July 2023

To refuse heroes is, in a certain sense, to refuse history

I have never read Bertolt Brecht’s play on Galileo, but I have often heard it quoted on the need for heroes.

“Unhappy the land that breeds no heroes,” says one of Galileo’s students.

“No, unhappy is the land that needs heroes,” Galileo responds.

In my Dominion Day column, I put the question: “Can a nation exist without heroes?” I took the position of the student, lamenting that Canada was trying to live without heroes.

A longtime friend and thoughtful reader wrote to highlight the problem with “lionizing” heroes, noting that the greatest lion of them all, Winston Churchill, is viewed rather differently by those who hold him partially responsible for the Great Bengal Famine during the Second World War. I too wrote some years back about Churchill’s complicated legacy in light of how he is regarded Down Under in light of the battle at Gallipoli during the First World War.

A Commonwealth summit in Calcutta or Canberra would not feature the Churchill statues that a summit in Quebec would. So lionizing heroes is not entirely straightforward; like most important things, it requires prudence and balance.

My correspondent is on to something. Elevating heroes, he writes, “can lead to the diminishment of bad behaviours in favour of other achievements, which for some communities leads to great offense and counteracts the very unity the praise is supposed to achieve. To lionize one will always lead to offending another and that divide holds great danger for the country.”

Fair enough. Putting up a statue or plaque can be an offensive act; sometimes the offense can be the motivation. But it needn’t be so, and it is right to ask whether it is reasonable to take offense. There are no utterly unblemished heroes, but does praise of the virtues include praise for the vice? Both reside in the same person, after all, and it should be possible to recognize both, and draw a balanced assessment.

The Kingston city council, in taking down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, judged that the vice of residential schools overwhelmed the virtue of founding a country.

The city council in Calgary, in erecting the statues of The Famous Five, made a different judgement. The women were eugenicists to be sure, advocating policies hostile to the dignity of the disabled and not untinged by racism. No one thinks that their monument is for that, instead of for women’s suffrage. Would Calgary’s downtown be better off if the heroines of that cause were not celebrated?

Heroes emerge from history, and remain embedded in it. To refuse heroes is, in a certain sense, to refuse history, which means recognizing both lights and shadows. The alternative to learning in a balanced way from history is to abolish history. That what happens when the views of those who hold power today are imposed on the past. The monuments of history stand against the prevailing winds of fashion today.

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