Nicholas Higgins 29/05/20 

T. E. Lawrence: Hero for our Times

‘I loved you so, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky and stars’, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

A couple years ago the administrators of the Barron Prize for Young Heroes polled American teenagers and found only half could name a personal hero. Superman and Spiderman were named twice as often as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Lincoln. Of the students who gave an answer, more than half named an athlete, a movie star, or a musician. One in ten named winners on American Idol as heroes.

If heroes are symbols of all the qualities we would like to satisfy, this speaks of volumes of modern ideals. Rarely are sportspeople, actors and musicians lauded for their achievements alone (as they should be). Rather, they are revered for their achievement of wealth, status and fame - the great prizes of the secular materialist. In this celebrity obsessed culture, historical figures have not fared well. They’re old and dusty, and too often have betrayed our modern ideals. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Nelson Mandela is accused of terrorism, Winston Churchill once called Gandhi a ‘half naked fakir’. Spiderman and David Beckham have no such skeletons in the closet. 

Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ by the film of that name, had his share of blemishes. Famed for his involvement as British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt (1916-18), he was lionised in his own lifetime as the ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’. He assimilated into Arab culture, united the disparate tribes and lead them to ‘victory’ against the Ottoman Turks. In contrast to the immobile, grinding war on the Western front, Lawrence’s adventures were exotic, mysterious, thrilling. When he died in 1935 The Montreal Daily Herald remarked, ‘Lawrence belonged to the era of chain mail and broadswords, when men broke their lances in impossible quests’. It wasn’t long before detractors shone the spotlight on all parts of his life.

In keeping with the corrosive cynicism of our day, he’s variously been labelled a self anointed ‘Kingmaker’, grandiose neurotic and rabid masochist. Most damning is the accusation that Lawrence was yet another British imperialist, and leading the Arabs to ‘freedom’ was just a dupe for British designs on the region. Indeed, the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret pact cooked up by the Britain and France in 1916, carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, a betrayal that put paid to any Arab hopes of freedom. Sectarianism, violence, intractable and untold human suffering have remained in the region ever since. 

It would take too long to weigh up these claims, but one thing is for certain. When you pin down someone’s flaws so aggressively as this, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to be real about the limits of human nature; heroes aren’t super-heroes, they get it wrong just like we do. Instead of scrapping them to history like so many like to do, better to separate the things that make a hero noteworthy from the bad. In so troubled a world, rife with warfare, famine and unrest, we need heroes more than ever. Even a tarnished hero is a beacon of light amidst this vast darkness. 

Critics, for example, ignore that the gueriila tactics Lawrence innovated not only won the war in Arabia, they inspired the creation of the SAS and are still replicated by the British and American armies. His military theory (27 Articles) is credited with being an entirely workable blueprint for nation building today. If only Tony Blair or George Bush took his advice, ‘do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly’.

His taking up of a foreign Arab culture, learning the language, adopting the dress, is a lesson for all leaders to respect those you lead, no matter their colour or creed. He’s also an inspiration to have vision, he was clear on his mission and never settled for mediocre goals, even if he was 5’ 5” and had a head too big for his body. As he put it himself, ‘those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible’. Lawrence’s life is more than an entertaining story, it’s a mine of wisdom for us to study and replicate, in the here and now.

What makes Lawrence all the more admirable is that for all his fame, it never went to his head. Writing to his friend Jock in 1929, Lawrence noted, ‘I’m very weary of being stared at and discussed and praised. What can one do to be forgotten? After I’m dead they’ll rattle my bones about in their curiosity. Au revoir’. So vexed was he by the journalistic paparazzi of the day, he retreated into the solitary ranks of the RAF, not as Colonel T. E. Lawrence, but as a private under a different name, T. E. Shaw. 

Lawrence was militantly humble. In the preface to his autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he acknowledged that his story is ‘still less fair, of course, like all war stories, to the unamed rank and file, who miss their share of the credit, as they must do until they can write the dispatches’. He denied any wartime decorations and even shunned the great riches that could’ve come from his book royalties. Universally admired as a man of genius, he could have wined and dined his way into the lap of luxury. Yet he chose to spend the rest of his days in solitude in his humble cottage in Dorset, Clouds Hill.

Lawrence couldn’t be more at odds with today’s cult of celebrity worship; in our narcissistic world we obsess over those who are obsessed over themselves. ‘I’m really f***cking good at my job and people who are interesting and good know that’, so said Gwyeneth Palyrow in 2004. Of course we also envy their hyper-materialistic, superficial, status driven lifestyles. How sad that this is who we idolize today, and not those who have displayed true virtue or some noble quality? Lawrence is special because he displayed just these merits for heroism, yet still refused to let the world make a narcissist of him.

His shunning of worldly reward was born from his own troubled soul. Lawrence was a man with a load on his mind. This was caused not least by the sense of betrayal (and responsibility) he felt for the Arabs; which in turn exacerbated the sense of contradiction he felt in his own self. Lawrence the lover of the Arabs, versus Lawrence the agent of British imperialism and betrayer of Arab friends. Lawrence the Oxford graduate, aesthete, possibly homosexual, versus the dashing, magnetic ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’. The recluse who hated fame, versus the half-godlike ‘white saviour’ who romped around the desert on a camel. Lawrence was a man at odds with himself, a disenchanted, struggling, confused man.

He summed it up perfectly when he said of himself, ‘lots of people go about saying they alone understand me. They don’t see how little they see, my name is legion’. He even confessed to Robert Graves, that ‘I have two selves’, both of which he added, were ‘mutually destructive’. Lawrence’s letters are shot through with a resulting deep alienation, a neurotic self scrutiny and almost suicidal self-hate. The picture he fashions of himself in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is that of a soldier spoilt by introspection and self analysis.

Lawrence shows us that even heroes that achieve otherworldly success are still human. He made blunders and mistakes, and he was struggling with deep inner turmoil. Yet these circumstances didn’t stop him from limiting his aspirations, from ‘dreaming by day’. For me, this makes Lawrence not only deeply relatable, but wonderfully inspirational. To all those who’ve experienced his same mental strife, be stirred by Lawrence’s example.

Immanuel Kant said that, ‘from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’. This may be true. But some have used that warped, knotted timber to build more beautifully than others, and we may all benefit from their examples.