Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [116]
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History’s Heretics
Who and What Mattered in the Past?
IN 1975 MADAME TUSSAUD’S Waxwork Museum in London took a poll of 3,500 international visitors who came through its doors, asking them to rank the five most hated and the five most beloved people in history. The results were as follows:
Most Hated
1. Adolf Hitler
2. Idi Amin
3. Count Dracula
4. Richard Nixon
5. Jack the Ripper
Most Loved
1. Winston Churchill
2. John F. Kennedy
3. Joan of Arc
4. Robin Hood
5. Napoleon
It is an interesting list because it speaks as much for current popularity as it does historical impact (no doubt today Osama bin Laden would make the most hated list). Such a lineup, however meaningless it may be historically, brings to mind a fascination we have with comparisons and lists. Just who were the most important people and events in history?
Comparisons can be objectionable and such best-and-worst lists that demand comparisons onerous. In a culture that esteems greatness and exalts eminence, however, while at the same time sharing pluralistic judgment values, comparisons frequently turn into arguments, and lists morph into endlessly debated rankings. Such lists are ubiquitous. The Book of Lists and the Guinness Book of Records are both popular top-selling publications. In the final six months of 1999 millennial fever spiraled upward in a headlong rush into naming the most important people and events of the century and millennium. Most were embarrassingly ahistorical and celebrity-centric, with famous folks from the 1980s and 1990s dominating a listing of what was supposed to be the most significant names of the last thousand years.
On the more serious side, Time magazine ran a five-part series on “the most influential people of the century” that included extensive essays on each of their chosen hundred. In the “Heroes and Icons” edition, Howard Chua-Eoan opined, “We need our heroes to give meaning to time. Human existence, in the words of T. S. Eliot, is made up of ‘undisciplined squads of emotion,’ and to articulate our ‘general mess of imprecision of feeling’ we turn to heroes and icons—the nearly sacred modules of humanity with which we parse and model our lives.” Yet he noted the dilemma of discerning true heroes from mere icons: “Iconoclasm is inherent in every icon, and heroes can wear different faces in the afterlives granted them by history and remembrance.” Therein lies the problem with any list that includes persons for whom history has yet to grant proper perspective, such as anyone named from the past couple of decades.
Time senior editor Richard Stengel identified another problem inherent in such lists at the close of their “100” series: “We all know about Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history, but what about the Creepy Guy Behind the Curtain theory of history or the Meddlesome Housemaid Who Spikes the Punch theory or the Wife Who Whispers in the Great Man’s Ear theory? History is written by the victors, but what of those who called in sick that day? Or those who opted not to play? What of the individual who performed one small act that set in motion a great, grand tumult of actions that changed history?” Stengel’s pick for the creepiest guy of the twentieth century is Gavrilo Princip, who triggered the outbreak of the Great War when he assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914. Lee Harvey Oswald comes to mind as well, yet neither made anyone’s list. In the end (literally their final issue of the century), Time named Albert Einstein as their “Person of the Century,” and I can only say hallelujah to that.
Life magazine, in a special double issue in the fall of 1997, wisely focused on events rather than people as the factor that most changed the world over the past millennium. (The editors got it right in