Has heroism become a trivial pursuit?
Nowadays heroes come and go with alarming frequency. Oliver North is a goat one day, a hero the next. And so it is with Gary Hart, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and hordes of other politicians, Christian figures, athletes, and entertainers. Have we reached Andy Warhol’s society of the future when everyone will be famous—but only for 15 minutes?
Americans have always taken heroes seriously, and rightly so. Heroes, whether we are aware of it or not, focus the human imagination and thereby shape the lives and personalities of their admirers. Public heroes also provide coherence at a deep level to the society of which they are a part. This is what makes our present confusion about heroes particularly troubling. How can they exert this influence if they rise and fall, inflate and deflate like soap bubbles on the wind? It is no small thing when the heroes of a society are in disarray, because heroism touches the human spirit deeply at so many levels—the psychological, the sociological, and the theological.
You can see the psychological importance of heroism early in a child’s life. Think of the hats a child puts on—those of the nurse, the fire chief, the soldier. Long before a child is aware of abstract moral rules, he or she has a fertile imagination and wants to be like certain kinds of people and unlike others.
Even as we grow older, we are motivated not just by rules and laws, but by stories, by images of flesh-and-blood people who have lived in a way we find admirable and attractive.
On a social level, we do not need to look far to see the significance that people like Elizabeth I, Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Gandhi had for their respective countries. (Of course, on the dark side of heroism, there was Hitler, who was probably the most skilled architect of a hero system in our century.)
In reading theology, I often find Christians speaking as if having heroes is pardonable up through early adolescence, but after that heroism is a negative force, tied inevitably to pride. Not only is this the fruit of a low view of the power of the imagination, but it also shows a theological thinness. The God of the Bible is the God of glory, and we are called to reflect something of this glory in our relationship to him through Christ. Glory and honor are not the featherweight conceptions that our society has made them, but are heavy and solid, rooted in the unchanging character of God for all eternity.
The desire for heroism, properly understood, comes from the need to interact with and reflect the glory of God himself. In this is found true human greatness and excellence, which is focused ultimately in the imitation of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18). At its worst, the heroic harnesses the full force of human vanity, self-deception, and cruelty to become a scourge on the planet. But at its redeemed best, the longing to reach toward heroism is the burning desire to honor God, forgetful of self.
Heroism is not dead in our society, but it has been besieged by two powerful forces: cynicism and trivialization. Together they bring about a crisis of the imagination that has deeply affected our society.
Heroes And Cynics
We are living at a time when the very word hero has come to carry cynical connotations. Many loud and learned voices are claiming there is no such thing as human greatness at all, and there never was. There has been a widespread loss of confidence that meaning for human life can ever be expressed in words. This is obviously devastating, because heroes must be heroic in terms of meanings, values, or standards—without which their heroism would be indistinguishable from villainy or random behavior. If the foundation for meaning is cut away, the human need for heroism will shrivel up in boredom and alienation. Or it will hang in midair, waiting to attach itself to the fragmented, arbitrary, and sometimes fanatical meanings that either individuals will create for themselves, or charismatic leaders will prefabricate for them.
The existentialist Ernest Becker has given an incisive thumbnail sketch of the history of meaning. He points out that for all of known civilization, people have believed in two worlds: one that you could see, and one that was invisible. They lived in the visible world, but they believed in the unseen world, in which lived spirits, hobgoblins, gods, goddesses, and God. The invisible world provided the basis for meaning and value, and hence, for what was heroic. It was the source of cohesion for their society. However, about the middle of the last century, people began to be told that there was no invisible world. It did not exist and never had. They were living a lie.
Becker then looks at what happened to heroism as a result. Once the door to the invisible world was closed and barred, we had to derive a sense of the heroic from the visible, tangible, material world.
He writes in The Birth and Death of Meaning: “People no longer drew their power from the invisible dimension, but from intensive manipulation of very visible Ferraris and other material gadgets. They try to find their whole fulfillment in a sex partner or an endless succession of partners, or in their children.”
Suddenly the theater of heroism has shrunk. There is nothing beyond ourselves to which we correspond except the vast impersonal. Lost is God and the moral and heroic absolutes that made sense under his reign, and with it the idea of distinctive human dignity. The British philosopher C. E. M. Joad put it well: “Although there was scientific basis for saying that man was the highest primate, there was none for placing him outside the animal kingdom in the matter of unique rights; he was only the star performer in the zoo. Suppose, then, someone put him in a cage or made a slave of him; was there any biological or sociological law which said this could not be done?”
Admittedly, we do different tricks than the other animals in the zoo. But unless there is a God in whose image we are made, all our higher ideals for justice, goodness, and beauty are just pretensions, mirages in the consciousness of the human animal. At the philosophical level, there is therefore little confidence in human distinctiveness, let alone heroism.
Freud Confronts Da Vinci
The human sciences have also made a major contribution to cynicism about human greatness, especially as they treat the subjects of motivation and freedom. We are told that human choice is not what it appears to be. If we accept the sophistications of some views of psychology, we know that what appears to be heroic—for example, a man or woman’s act of courage in saving another’s life—is, in fact, a desperate attempt to win the approval of a long-dead parent who had withheld love in the childhood years. What, then, has become of the hero? He or she is transformed in our minds into a neurotic, and with a slight turn of the mind, admiration is changed to pity and condescension.
Psychoanalysis has always been a great equalizer of people. This, of course, puts it at loggerheads with heroism, which by definition gives attention to what is extraordinary. The influence of Freud, although great in psychology and psychiatry, may have been even more pervasive in literature, history, and the arts in general. He set a pattern in his early study of Leonardo da Vinci when he explained that da Vinci’s extraordinary creativity could be accounted for by his repressed homosexual desires. As an “in-closet” homosexual, such psychic energy was built up inside him that it was sublimated into his artistic and engineering accomplishments.
By this psychoanalytic method, any heroic act can be seen to have self-serving, even sordid roots. We are left with our attention fixed on the internal crippling of a person, and we are thoroughly uninspired by that person’s genius.
Space does not allow a survey of the debunking strands in psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, sociobiology, and economics. Despite the many helpful contributions these fields have made, there has been a tendency to see individuals as only products of intrapsychic, socioeconomic, or biological forces beyond their control. These factors eclipse the drama of life—stories with unfolding narratives of agonizing choice and action. In the name of science and under the aura of its authority and sophistication, some of the work in these disciplines simply obscures those things most important and most admirable in human existence.
The Trivialization Of Charles Lindbergh
The second great force besieging heroism today is trivialization. While the acid of cynicism dissolves the very idea of the heroic, the force of trivialization at first seems to be blowing the horn for the heroic. On closer observation, however, we discover trivialization dilutes heroism. It contributes just as much as cynicism to the loss of the heroic. The media are prime culprits. In his landmark work, The Image, Daniel Boorstin complains that we have exchanged heroes for celebrities. While a hero is someone who has done something great or honorable and therefore commands respect, a celebrity is “known for his well-knownness” and is envied for it. He is the “human pseudo-event.”
Trivialization takes two forms. First, true heroes are trivialized. Second, trivial people are inflated to heroic status.
Charles Lindbergh was one of the first heroes to be trivialized by the news media’s power. His flight was extraordinary, but relatively uncomplicated—insufficient to satisfy the public’s hunger for information about him. Therefore, his rise to fame itself became the focus of the news, with all the complications and tragedy that it brought to his life. What the press had made of him was more newsworthy than what he actually did, and hero became celebrity.
More recently, Lenny Skutnik, the man who rescued a woman from the icy Potomac River after the Air Florida plane crash, observed the same thing. After he had appeared on television beside Nancy Reagan at the State of the Union address, he reported that when people would come to him they no longer asked, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who jumped in the river and saved the lady?” but instead, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who was on the State of the Union?”
The second form of trivialization—inflating superficial people to heroic status—is more destructive. It provides us with a new cast of fascinating people each week, and with fame as the central virtue. The National Enquirer is always ready to feed our inquiring minds, and People Weekly magazine to keep us abreast of the most recent divorces and indictments among celebrities. In a recent study of the top ten American heroes, seven were in show business, and most were considered not so much for who they were but for their stage or celluloid images. Much of what is admired actually does not exist except in the form of image. Like the dehydrated desert wanderer, we are navigating by mirages.
This is very serious. Today’s heroism is one of style, not of character, where the important points are driving a Mercedes or BMW, and wearing Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren fashions. Even in the “serious” world of politics, what seems to matter is physical appearance, an attractive family, and a quotable quip on every current issue. (Of course, for someone who wants to be a celebrity badly enough, that is always possible. All one needs to do is to shoot a famous person.)
Not only are certain individuals trivialized, but heroism itself has become superficial. As long ago as 1959, Earl Blackwell and Cleveland Amory compiled the voluminous Celebrity Register. In it the television comedienne Dagmar was listed beside the Dalai Lama, Anita Ekberg beside Dwight Eisenhower, and Jane Russell beside Bertrand Russell.
As long as fame is the highest value, we cannot make important distinctions between celebrities and true heroes. Could it be that some of our televangelists have pulled God himself into the triviality of America’s consumer culture, where faith is a commodity and theology is lite—all for your entertainment pleasure?
Eating Indiana Jones’S Cake
Although the forces of cynicism and trivialization seem to start off in opposite directions, they in fact feed each other. The more cynical one is, the more life seems to be trivial. The more life seems trivial, the more cynicism is justified. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two, the result of which makes it very difficult to develop a healthy sense of heroism.
The heroism that survives the acid of cynicism and the inflation-deflation cycles of trivialization is apt to be a heroism out of reach of the vast majority of people. This is because there is no modern transcendent source of meaning. As long as heroism is linked to moral character, it can provide a focus of aspiration for common people, for the possibility of moral choice is available to any of us. But much of what passes for high-visibility heroism today is morally neutral. Society can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. Instead, we exalt heroes of beauty, sports, music, and film—those with money and possessions.
If we follow the heroics of Clint Eastwood or James Bond, we will end up dead or in jail. What if (like the vast majority of us) our physical endowments are such that the heroism of beauty or professional sports is simply not an option? Or how many of us can be rock music stars? Wealth and its accouterments may be a little more accessible, but they are still unavailable to most people.
What we have is a heroism that has a different function than it used to have. The hero was once a focal point for aspiration, but this is no longer realistically the case. After initial short-lived aspiration, the modern hero is apt to produce two responses—daydreaming and self-hatred. We daydream about what life would be like if we walked in the shoes of the hero, but we detest ourselves for falling so far short.
Watching a 90-yard touchdown run is inspiring, but for most observers, it inspires only a trip to the kitchen for another can of beer. Likewise, the adoring fans of the rock guitarist are inspired to invest fortunes in records, tapes, posters, and correct clothing, but few get beyond “air guitar” in their own musical accomplishments. As Christopher Lasch has noted, there is a loss of will to emulate another—it takes too much effort. The highest aspiration is to live a hassle-free life, to minimize frustration and maximize stimulation and comfort.
Admiration without aspiration ends ultimately in frustration. My life seems so dull compared to Clint Eastwood’s roles. This turns easily to compensatory heroism: using a hero not to aspire to, but, by a vicarious voyage of identity, to silence the need for aspiration. The compensatory hero does not fire our ideals; he compensates for our lack of ideals. He or she reduces us to obedient little people, because we are without any imaginative moral vision that could call us to break with conformity. This, not true religion, is the opiate of the masses, leaving us easy victims to the seductions of the consumer culture.
As columnist Russell Baker said of Raiders of the Lost Ark, “you want to make sure nobody in the audience thinks you’re an outdated sap who really believes in swashbuckling. So you keep winking at the audience by making the whole thing so preposterous that they’ll know you’re only kidding.” Heroes like Indiana Jones are often held up as proof that true heroism remains. In fact, they are only attempts to have one’s cake and eat it too—to get an imaginative charge out of a story, but still preserve a basic cynicism.
True heroes challenge the excuseladen mediocrity of our lives and open us to new possibilities of what we might be. As such, they are uncomfortable to live with and are often unwanted. If we can debunk or trivialize them, we give ourselves a reprieve from their challenge and from the shame of our shortfall. This reprieve is one of the payoffs of the cynic or, in biblical language, the scoffer. However, there are great losses involved that we are only now beginning to see. C. S. Lewis wrote that “in trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pulled the horse into Troy.”
In a world without heroes, there is no shame, but neither is there glory and honor or a positive moral imagination. Time will tell whether the Trojan horse is already in the city or not. Last year’s Fourth of July edition of Newsweek celebrated everyday heroes from each of the 50 states. It was moving in that they were selected because they were unknown, and they cared in imaginative and costly ways—usually about other people less fortunate than themselves. It is gratifying that these are Newsweek’s heroes, but it is less encouraging when we realize that there are other “heroic virtues” that have left larger footprints on the American imagination. The advertisements within that same magazine predictably show that it is in fact beauty, talent, money, and power that are considered to be the real motivating levers to human action.
Christians have a possibility of pointing to a new way, to a redemption of the imagination. But before we become triumphant, we must concede that our track record in recent times has not been good. Ernest Becker, in Escape from Evil, pointed out that the world, looking for the Christian ideal of heroic sainthood, too often sees a church that “openly subscribes to a commercial-industrial hero system” rather than the excellence of God. The challenge is to show something better in the integrity of our lives, before one another and before God, as we imitate his Son.
Dick Keyes is director of L’Abri Fellowship in South-borough, Massachusetts. Now at work on a book about heroism, he is the author of Beyond Identity (Servant, 1984).
