Long life to imperfect heroes

Small service communication: Vince and Kash, my favourite couple on Earth, let me know they have this weird (let me tell you) habit of listening to my articles at Sunday lunchtime. Since I am digitally handicapped, I didn’t know it was possible to listen to what I write as a podcast by downloading the Substack app. Now you know too! Sure, the automated voice is a bit mechanical, but if you’re an insufferably lazy reader, it does the job for you.

Yesterday, I told a friend that I actively try not to have idols. And that this is why I am a Catholic. He turned to me and asked, “Aren’t Saints your kind of idols though?” A poignant question, but I was not prepared. I had had three glasses of wine at that point. But I adore it when they hit me with a witty question to which I only sound dumb. It means I am having dinner with the right people.

The truth is that I don’t even have to try hard not to have idols. It is not in my nature. I split hairs on everything - the minute someone is portrayed as entirely evil or entirely good, I get suspicious. I don’t want to turn this article into a theological exercise, but since Navalny’s death, I have been reflecting a lot about the nature of heroes in our modern world and what we demand of them.

In 2018, I was doing a thesis on the unbundling of the gas sector in Serbia and Albania. I researched the Russian influence on that reform in both countries. The Russian ambassador complained then that he had never felt so useless as in his post in Albania, where many wouldn’t even reply to his calls. As Albanians, we are not particularly fond of Russians. I am not personally drawn to their culture, and most of my friends come from countries that have been hurt by Russia’s imperialistic attitude. This is to say that I am not coming from a point of bias. And yet, Navalny’s death hit a chord in me. Perhaps because I have been waiting for a Navalny in my own country for a long time now. And I have not dared to turn into one myself yet.

Who was Navalny?

A 45-year-old is a lawyer turned blogger, YouTuber, protest organiser, anti-corruption activist and face of Russia’s opposition. Being the opposition leader didn’t make him the Western liberal politician we champion in Europe though. He used to participate in marches of a very far-right nationalist group generally behind the slogan of ‘Russia for ethnic Russians’. A 17-year prior video of him dressed as a dentist comparing immigrants to dental cavities sparked much controversy. He did not condemn the invasion of Georgia either. But from prison, where he was detained from 2021 on, he denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine via social media and encouraged anti-war protests across the country.

Our issue with complexity

Navalny’s heroic life made me even more convinced of the fact that we’ve got a problem with complexity. Someone way smarter than me whom I cannot recall right now claimed that intelligence is the capacity to hold two different and contrasting views and process them without breaking inside. Something along those lines. Well, we are frankly an idiotic society then. Because I’ve seen two groups of people surface at the news of Navalny’s death and I don’t like either.

One is made of those who point out the fact that he was not a Saint, that he was just as imperialistic as Putin was, and that he was not a liberal. I laugh and despair at the naivety of these comments. We live in an area of the world where everyone demands a lot of rights and claims no responsibilities and at the same time, we act as the sommeliers of freedom. It baffles me that we don’t understand the magnitude of what Navalny dared to do. It truly signals that we live in extremely unforgiving times in the Western world, where you can be judged at any given moment for who you were decades before, and that no matter the efforts done for improvement or the changes you underwent, they won’t matter if someone decides to apply their impossible metrics of morality. Most Western people today act as the court of the Spanish Inquisition without even realizing it.

I have a friend who comes from a very good family, who after studying abroad decided, against all advice, to go back to Albania and advocate for democracy. She’s dedicating her life to our country’s freedom. Much like Navalny at his start, she researches blatant cases of corruption and posts them online. As a result, her mother was already let go from her public job. My friend isn’t a Saint, with much of her views I don’t even agree. But I bow to her courage because it is one that I have not dared to show yet. I am not the one staying out in the night to protest while police try to drag me away. People out of action should be careful in their judgments. They should earn the right to do so, to be honest.

But I dislike also the other group which is elevating him to the standard of perfection he did not fit into. A group that avoids carefully mentioning all of his shadows. They forget that it is our shadow that magnifies our lights. These are also usually people who’d cancel anyone who holds views deemed too extreme, who wouldn’t even listen to those opinions because they don’t hold the courage to listen to something they dislike. If the first group is made of harsh judges of heroism, this one is made of the cowards of disagreement.

For me, it is heroic to undergo a transformation that is so violent that makes us nothing like what we were before. Cheesy to say, but would you keep reminding a butterfly of when it was a worm? Navalny wasn’t perfect, that’s not the point of a hero. Navalny was a man who fought for truth, and integrity. Both things made him a free man despite dying in prison. Saints too were never idols, they were humans who dared in their imperfections to go beyond their shadow. This is what I’d reply to my friend, who funnily enough is called Cristiano, today that I am sober.

Vilma Djala

For more, TheContraryMary