A GREAT MAN DIES, some wealthy, powerful pillar of the community, or of the entire nation, and the funeral is huge and elaborate, known to all. Across town the pauper is laid to rest in a pauper's grave, and the beat goes on.
At some point someone might briefly, vaguely consider whether the great and powerful person had a positive or negative impact on the condition of human existence, might wonder whether widely accepted definitions of greatness, traditional societal values, themselves, are applicable.
Some very rich and powerful people have what almost all would agree is a negative impact on the world, tending to damage it, rather than contribute. Maybe the unknown trash collector who dies young was a greater man than hitler.
At this point in human history we seem to think of the people who have a direct, immediate, and profound impact on the world as being somehow "greater". We use terms like "great men". Physical strength, intelligence, material wealth, political power, we consider valuable resources.
our whole system of values evolves over time, and even now, we are starting, for example, to place less value on a head full of knowledge, since computers are everywhere, all knowledge stored inside.
It could possibly be time to take a long hard look at many of our modern beliefs and values, which we tend to pace in high esteem, as people always have placed their own beliefs in high esteem.
It might be wise to start by admitting that all that we believe, our philosophies, religions, attitudes about everything, are primitve, crude, and temporary, will be scoffed at and radically changed by our descendants.
While we slowly change our values and beliefs over time, our descendants experience the consequences.
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