Legacy: Important and Irrelevant

The public response to the death of several prominent leaders in the past year raises two interesting questions about legacies: how much control does any leader have over the lasting impressions of their actions? And, why do we care so much about them?

In the ancient city of Rome, statues and busts were used to carefully craft the image that leaders of the era needed portray - to look like the solemn and responsible public servants of the Republic or the unchanging messianic rulers of the Empire (Sooke, 2012). The tools at the disposal of modern leaders are more advanced, but they serve the same basic purpose.

In Britain, the death of Mrs Margaret Thatcher set off a storm of reactions, a battle over whether her policies and time in office had rescued or devastated the country. The conflict, and the extreme polarisation of viewpoints, shows the true difficulty of managing an image even with all of the available tools. For her part, Mrs Thatcher believed she represented a kind of liberating force, that sought efficiency and freedom in the capitalist market place (White, 2013).

But then her death exposed one of the complexities facing attempts to craft a lasting image: that however hard you try, others will come after you and fight just as hard to define that heritage for themselves. In this case it has led to claims of attempts at perverting biography and analysis by hagiographifying Mrs Thatcher, quelling all alternate opinions under claims of sanctity (Greenwald, 2013).

The death of the late Venezuelan President Signor Hugo Chavez presents a different sort of case. Having died in office, there has been little time for the ritual construction of the myth, impartial assessment, or criticism unshackled by official power. Instead Signor Chavez's contribution has to be measured in contrast to his predecessors and on the active appearance and popularity of his policies.

It has been pointed out that his socialist revolution has been particularly costly to the Venezuelan economy, which will make the inheritance left to his successor a potentially double edged sword (Carroll, 2013). Such issues, that might force substantial changes, makes control of how the past is interpreted incredibly important to those in the present: Signor Chavez's own party cannot afford to diminish any of the his popularity nor to distance themselves from it - for the boost it gives - but at the same time may need to change direction and undo many of his policies.

While some leaders have passed and left their legacy in other hands, others find themselves in the situation of having plenty of time after leaving office to perfect their message. One of those also happens to be Mr Tony Blair, one of the most (in)famous users of public image in politics. It has been six years since he stood down as Prime Minister, but he is still active in managing his legacy.

Mr Blair's premiership was largely defined by the role it played in advancing the age of spin in British politics. Yet even with all the skills and tools of publicists and PR people, all the expertise and technology of the modern era, his legacy is a divisive issue. There is an extreme amount of distortion between his own autobiography and the satirical treatments of his life, like More4's The Trial of Tony Blair or The Comic Strip Presents... The Hunt for Tony Blair.

It seems that the legacy we try to craft for ourselves is not always the one that lasts. That would require a level of control - achieved in the past through domination of battlefields and civil tyranny - that just isn't realistic or desirable in the twenty-first century. Yet that has not stopped people struggling for control.

Even in the name of vanity, this obsession is excessive. This isn't how you establish truth. The struggle to define what people stood for, or represent, has to be about something bigger than just determining the accurate narrative of any given individual's life story. There must be a bigger prize. The prize that history of any kind has always offered is an inheritance: a legacy, a heritage, a tradition; an anchor to which parties can tie their causes, to ground their ideologies in something tangible.

In this scramble to claim legacies as part of an ideological inheritance, history is turned into a tool. That tool can be used to exploit our own cultural obsession with personalities and narratives to distract us from more rigorous analysis, evidence or debate. To remain vigilant against deception, we must reject personal qualities, successes, and morals as irrelevant, and demand instead logical arguments backed with evidence.

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References:
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+ Alastair Sooke's 'Treasures of Ancient Rome'; on the BBC; 2012.

+ Michael White's 'What is Thatcherism?'; in The Guardian; 8 April 2013.

+ Glenn Greenwald's 'Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette'; in The Guardian; 8 April 2013.

+ Rory Carroll's 'After Chávez's funeral, who gets Venezuela's poisoned chalice?'; in The Guardian; 5 March 2013.