I suppose most of us have heroes. Family members who served in wars (curiously always for the winning side), great sportsmen or women or even hollywood film stars. I have many – but most are long forgotten. There is Rachel Crowdy who pioneered the use of first aid in the “great war” and thereby saved thousands of lives. Richard Cobden who, with the industrialist John Bright, saw the British Corn Law as the greatest cause of poverty and bankrupted himself to repeal it. Many great social reformers never gain even mentions in Wikipedia – such as the British MP who ran a lone campaign to stop the flogging of apprentices in the navy with a “cat o nine tails”. Eventually he came into the British parliament with the instrument of torture under his coat and struck it down on the Speaker’s chair. The shock was enough to make parliament outlaw the practice.
I have letters from many social reformers of the nineteenth century in a personal collection and as I trace the energy of their writing across the fading parchment I reflect how few such people exist in our own age. Of course there is the common heroism of so many otherwise ordinary people. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs (George Eliot).
But then I wonder too how most of us will never leave any lasting mark on the world. How all the effort we give to our jobs will be as nothing even next week or next year. Yet that does not stop us from fixating on issues and on tasks to be done. What is there, we may ask, in the new world order of corporate concerns that requires reform – and even if there was how could we effect change large enough to ripple through time? Of course such major wrongs do exist, but we have lived with them so long we cannot even see them. Or they creep up on us like the increasing isolation that we feel in the digital economy. Our landscape changes like the weather and even storms must be tolerated.