In the Orbit of Greatness: Hero Worship

Professor Graham was an atheist who worshiped gods.

I witnessed this contradiction because I signed up for his seminar on Evolutionary Biology. The topic held little interest for me, but it fulfilled my science credits and promoted itself as a class dedicated to the history and philosophy of science. As a student who read Popper while walking down Market St., the philosophy of science was appealing. Plus, I recoiled at the thought of memorizing the parts of a cell (again). A hidden bonus awaited for me, though. I was about to become unlikely friends with a scientist and a worshiper of excellence.

His story, recounted below, is instructive of the basic law of theurgy: we become what we worship.

Professor Graham was born in a rough part of north England and, despite his humble upbringing, carried in him the spirit of British excellence and autism. As a child, he wiled away collecting and categorizing beetles. Botany books accompanied him during romps through the countryside, and he set to memory the names of trees, their key identifying features, and the countless mushrooms, avians, and other organisms that huddled around them.

From an early age, he rejected Christianity as backwards and unscientific. A stag beetle could be measured, its behaviors observed, its ancestry traced, and its role squared within the surrounding ecosystem. The God of The Bible was an unverifiable abstraction whose greatest critique was the very world the priests purported He created.

Graham knew how the harsh English winters ravaged his beloved bugs. The Romans and Nazis have nothing on a Blackwater winter. Vast swathes are wiped from the earth before their subterranean children emerge to repopulate the hills come spring—or they shake off the sleep from their cryogenic slumber.

How could benevolence and intelligence describe such brutality?

The most galling feature of Christianity was its incuriosity towards nature. The vicars invoked God and demons to explain the world away and divest themselves of any responsibility save for “pray, do good deeds, and trust in God.” Graham didn’t buy it.

Science, with its data tables, precise sketches, and meticulous observations of nesting patterns and songs, offered a more concrete vision vitiated by the powers it granted. Like his fellow beetle-collecting hero, Charles Darwin, he was determined to let the method and its consequences guide him.

When his teenage years hit, so too did disenchantment. The adventure and possibility of the sciences that infatuated him were shattered by his contact with its reality as an institution. Strivers who nerded over theory and jockeyed for promotion filled the ranks of the academies. Graham disdained them. They were antithetical to his icon who braved a journey across the globe to measure finch beaks and decipher nature’s mechanisms. In a bout of teenage angst, Graham abandoned his aspirations to be a naturalist and threw himself into the excesses of the ‘60s.

It was not to last. Years of a bohemian life could not shake his call to greatness and a lofty intellectual life. A lecture series would rescucitate it. Birmingham, near to Darwin’s birthplace, was hosting the event on the anniversary of On the Origin of Species.

With hardly a penny to his name, Graham hitchhiked, begged, and stole his way from Brighton to The Magic City. The lecture series brought in, under far less austere conditions, some of the greatest minds in biology to pay homage to the plodding, meticulous genius of Darwin.

The Professor’s Come-to-Jesus moment arrived one evening as he sat beneath a bridge, watching the rain patter on the river. Graham had met and listened to men of courage and gravitas at this conference, men who continued to work tirelessly in the pursuit of truth, and who continued to put reason over-and-above political allegiances or getting invited to the cool cocktail parties. He met men who had dedicated the entirety of their lives to recording exotic birds in Papau New Guinea or venture across Africa to record vanishing species. They were proof that the spirit of Darwin had not died at Down House in Kent.

Perhaps, all this science business was not so pointless after all.

The experiences of the evening, like so many acid trips and rain drops running down the oak leaves, washed over him. They baptized him into the world of adventure and a renewed pursuit of truth. After years of profligacy and distraction, he determined to follow in the footsteps of his hero.

Before beginning his quest back into the sciences, including finishing up his undergraduate degree and, later, his doctorate, the grizzled young man would pay one stop at his icon’s quarters: The Mount. There, before Darwin’s childhood home, he vowed to devote himself to science and its revealed truths—no matter how uncomfortable its implications.

He did as he promised. Upon completing his courses, Graham became a prominent researcher in molecular biology. Much of his time, admittedly, was spent in a lab squeezing compounds into petri dishes, but he never abandoned the fanaticism and adventure that led him to where he was. And he never forgot Darwin.

This story was the capstone of the semester for me. After four months of sitting in on him wax about James Watson and George Gamow, treating his subject with the earnestness of a devotee, he finally revealed his life story over several epic office-hour sessions—Darwin’s bust sitting behind the bearded, tweed-jacketed professor.

Professor Graham, despite his frostiness, devotion to reason, and hostility to religion, was a believer. He worshiped a pantheon of heroes who shaped him into the character he is today—skeptical, fierce, adventurous, and meticulous in running the line between idea and fact.

What else could you call his devotion?

Militant atheists, like Dawkins, Dennett, and Graham, have labored to expunge all trace of religious impulse from their hearts and habits, yet hero worship persists. Its stubbornness proves how entrenched it is in the human psyche and how necessary it is in the pursuit of excellence. The New Atheists might take a more frigid and abstract stance towards devotion, as suits their temperemant and culture, but it is there nevertheless.

Hero worship is a powerful center of gravity drawing them into its orbit—energizing and orienting their efforts. At base, it is a celebration and honoring of excellence, recognizing that not only are such men or deeds worthy of admiration but that, given their constant presence in our minds, in our plazas, on our bookshelves, and on our tongues, they shall inspire us to similar heights.

Despite the stripped down version, Professor Graham’s practice did its job. Just as Achilles inspired Alexander to eagerly mount the ramparts first and sweep across Asia in one brilliant engagement after another, just as Caesar drove himself to exhaustion to match the accomplishments of Alexander, just as Nietzsche pursued his hermetic, peripatetic lifestyle in emulation of the ancient philosophers, Graham lived his life invigorated by the example of his heroes.

We mimic what we worship, and Celtic pagan hero worship is little more than the systematization and ritualization of this instinct. The preservation of artifacts of men of greatness, the establishment of museums, the journeying of thousands of miles to visit graves and seek the blessings of our ancestors, the singing of songs, the writing of books, the erecting of sculptures in plazas, the effusive recounting of their details, the offering of vows, bread, and glorious deeds in their name—to no longer pursue this in a haphazard, subterranean fashion while lipping the platitudes of secularism. Celtic paganism embraces, enacts, and ritualizes it.

This is hero worship, and it sits at the center of any culture and life of greatness and glory.