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By Jason Cowley, New Statesman

Where are the great men and women who are changing the world for the better? Who are they? The New Statesman invites you, the reader, to nominate your modern hero. Over the next few weeks some familiar names will give their thoughts, while Jason Cowley explains what our search is all about. Ultimately, however, it’s up to you, so get voting . . .

Those of us in the affluent, liberal democracies of the west are perhaps the most fortunate people ever to have lived, in terms of material comfort, opportunity and ease of living. Yet we seldom seem grateful for our good luck. Many of us feel that something important is missing – ideology, idealism, belief – and that these are resolutely unheroic times. We are living in the aftermath of the failure of the great world-transforming, Enlightenment ideologies. We have seldom held our politicians in such low esteem; politics, for all the zeal of Tony Blair’s liberal internationalism and the slick presentations of David Cameron, is reduced to the mundane and the managerial. Only the most unreconstructed socialist still believes that equality is attainable. Only the most idealistic among us believes that poverty can ever be made history.

Millions are turning away from the secular democratic model, with its cult of celebrity and materialism. They are seeking meaning instead in premodern belief systems – most urgently in the cleansing, apocalyptic certainties of political Islam.

In the late 1970s, the Stranglers released one of the great punk anthems. “No More Heroes” was an expression of dis-enchantment and inertia. The Stranglers’ lost heroes were the already dead, such as Shakespeare and Leon Trotsky, or the merely mythic, such as Sancho Panza. There were no more contemporary heroes.

Here at the New Statesman we are not so pessimistic. We do not believe that resignation is the only response to the cynicism of our political leaders, to the disgrace of the Bush administration and to the catastrophe in Iraq. For everywhere you care to look there are good people doing good, often heroic work. We all know some of them: the single mother living on a difficult estate, who raises her family with dignity and respect; the man who gives up his well-paid job in the City to work for a relief agency; the environmental activist helping to alert the public to global warming. But these people, though admirable, are usually known only to their immediate family and friends, their influence vital yet limited.

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