Heroes or Actors

"But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!" Nietzsche, Friedrich.

Pondering a recent Week in Review in the Economist magazine, I thought where were the heroes among the celebrities and world leaders highlighted in that magazine? The articles seemed more focused on actors than heroes. But what did I mean when I thought about heroes? I found myself with more questions than answers. So, I did what I frequently do. I wrote an essay to myself about, “Heroes or Actors?”

“Hero” and “heroism” are tough words to define. One study suggested that heroes have twelve central traits: bravery, conviction, courage, determination, helpfulness, honesty, being inspirational, moral integrity and being protective, self-sacrificing, selfless, and strong. That list of traits only lacks a weakness to Kryptonite to be a proper description of Superman. Are heroes to be found anywhere outside of Marvel Comic characters?

Novelist Raymond Chandler famously defined a hero as “a man … who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid… He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.” Their character defines heroes.

On the other hand, an actor is someone who portrays a character. They use their body language, voice, and emotions to bring a character to life. One definition of acting is a process of communication between actors and audiences in a world of the imagination. Actors intend to make their audiences imagine the actors are themselves identical to their characters in this world of the imagination.

Heroes walk the actual streets of life. While they may be tarnished themselves, they are neither mean nor afraid. They are complete in their humanity - a common human and yet an unusual human. They are the best of their world and good enough humans for any world. I care little about their private lives; they have neither the lack of sexual appetites of eunuchs nor the impulsive, excessive sexual appetites of satyrs. As Chandler said, a hero might seduce a duchess, but he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. Heroes are proud, and have all the virtues and vices that come with pride. The story of their lives is their adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a human fit for adventure. Heroes have a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to them by right, because it belongs to the world in which they live.

In everything that can be called heroic, there is a quality of redemption. It may be tragedy, it may be pity and irony, and it may be laughter in the face of fate. In his essay “Redemption “, James K.A. Smith paints a picture of the myriad ways redemption is clear in our world. He starts by recognizing that sometimes redemption seems like an abstract concept:

But what does redemption look like? Mostly, you’ll know it when you see it, because it looks like life flourishing. It looks like a life well lived. It looks like the way things are supposed to be. We find it in the heroes of our childhood. We find it in the great cultural giants of our day like Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King.

My childhood heroes were the heroes of The Iliad, The Odyssey, Ivanhoe, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, the stars of the Saturday Westerns and war films. Characters in stories and movies shaped my idea of heroes. World War Two had just ended; the movies, magazines, and newsreels were full of heroes. Pictures of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima were ubiquitous. We were not living in the rubble of bombed-out cities of Europe; the American economy was booming.; we were going to share the American Dream with the world. Then came the Vietnam War. Suddenly, my generation needed heroes of our own.

We learn from literature and art that genuine heroes differ from the rest of us. The passions and frailties of heroes and gods are the stuff of Greek myths. They were not heroes because of their powerful and dominating personality, but were impersonal instruments of the Gods for the accomplishment of noble ends. They were guilty of the human absurdities, foolishness, and incompetence. Despite their passions and frailties, they expanded humanity’s sense of human possibility. Though not necessarily good, they did things beyond the normal human experience.

The outrages of both our celebrities and of our heroes somehow please us. However, celebrities are actors, not heroes. Entertainers, entrepreneurs, sports figures, politicians, and other celebrities act in certain ways while heroes live in other ways. Heroes have something to lose other than popularity. Actors are in love with success, and heroes are in love with excellence. I learned in college that, too often, higher education teaches success, not excellence. I fear my childhood goal of popularity also led me to a search for success rather than excellence.

Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Jean Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau said man in the state of nature, like the animals, did not want things for which he has no need, or need things for which he has no desire. Nature tailored primitive man’s consciousness of the world around meeting his needs for survival and reproduction. The story in Genesis of the Garden of Eden tells us man was in this state of nature before eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Once driven from Eden, man became depraved, seeking his own interests above those of his community, and perceiving desires for things he only needs to increase his power over others.

Rousseau’s sentence and the story of Adam and Eve tell of a dichotomy fundamental to the idea of humanity (as distinct from the animals). Man’s enslavement is one side of a coin, on the other side of which is stamped his basic freedom to choose good or evil. Man is free to choose precisely because he is vulnerable to enslavement. Men can be heroes because they are man, not Superman. For Rousseau, the one thing that supports the relationship between the two sides of the coin, and prevents enslavement from taking over completely, is human compassion. The distinguishing characteristic of the heroes of the Iliad was this same sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. The story of Adam and Eve is a story of God’s compassion for his creation.

Jung talked about the transformation of our heroic attitude of winning, achieving, accomplishing, and being in control of our lives, into a new heroism that accepts the reality of where and who we are and then moves us to become courageous explorers of the interaction between our inner and outer worlds.

Heroism supports our struggle to achieve a place in the world and stability in love and work. But when midlife, unhappiness, trauma, or illness the thrust us into the search for meaning, as well as the need for the support of our own depths and the divine within us, it calls for a new heroism. This heroism is the ability to say yes to our fate, what is already happening to us, to dive into it and into our own depths.

“I can only approve those who seek while wailing.”- Blaise Pascal

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to seek, persevere, and endure even while wailing. Excellence results from the seeking to give something beyond the normal human effort. Excellence is an outward expression of inner integrity, passion, and a compassionate desire to make a true difference.

We need heroes to help define our aspirations. The “heroes” of today are not perfect, as the heroes of literature and human history were not perfect. But they are people we admire and wish to emulate. They keep that original link to human potential. The heroes we choose define our ideals; our ideals define us. Heroes are our symbols of the traits we would like to have and the ambitions we would like to satisfy. While our choice of heroes is a perennial moral issue, there are warning signs of the need to focus more attention on the heroes we choose.

The administrators of the Barron Prize for Young Heroes polled American teenagers and found only half could name a personal hero. People taking part in the poll mention Superman and Spiderman more than twice as often as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Lincoln. Digital media has helped to create a society that confuses personalities or specialized skills with excellence. Of the students who gave an answer, more than half named an athlete, a movie star, or a musician; one in ten named winners of American Idol as heroes.

I recently listened to a playlist of the “best” songs of 2020. Close to half seemed to me to suggest that excellence in music implies explicit language and misogynistic behavior. African Americans of my generation, as well as a few whites, grew up idolizing the great civil rights leaders. Listening to “best” rappers can lead an old person to think that today’s young people aspire to become pimps and strippers. The number of hits on popular websites shows that too many of us are idolizing the rich and valuing hedonism above public service.

Our devotion to heroes is still strong, but we give that devotion to the wrong models. A person choosing Martin Luther King as a hero is going to have a more unique sense of human excellence than someone who chooses a Gangsta rapper. In the Muslim world, Osama bin Laden, and his like, still have a widespread heroic appeal. We can tell how we are doing in the struggle for Muslim hearts and minds by the degree to which this continues to be true.

It never hurts us to ask ourselves who our own heroes are and whether we are doing all we can to live up to these heroes. When I was in college, the Campus Crusade for Christ was popular with my university campus. Their tag line was, “What would Jesus do?” Having personal heroes, and asking ourselves what they would do, is a start to addressing society’s lack of role models for human excellence.

Young adults and grandparents have a special obligation to introduce heroes to our heirs. Our responsibility is to tell them the stories of Lincoln, King, Mother Teresa, and Gandhi; to introduce them to the heroes of the influential books of literature; to tell them the difference people of courage, nobility and genius have made to the world. Just tell the stories! We should recommit to that purpose. Start by going home tonight and listing your five most important heroes.

The corrosive cynicism and skepticism prevalent in our society is another obstacle to the appreciation of heroes in our society. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, although delivered in 1910, is relevant today.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who actually strives to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the tramps of notable achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt

Cynicism comes from the feeling that our leaders have betrayed us. The media tell us Washington and Jefferson held slaves, Martin Luther King was a philanderer and plagiarist, and that about everybody had sex with someone they should not.

The antidote to cynicism is realism about the limits of human nature. We need to separate out the things that make our heroes noteworthy and accept the shortcomings that blemish their heroic perfection. Carping and debunking misses the point. True, the false steps, and frailties of heroic people make them more like us, and since most of us are not heroic, that may seem to reduce heroes’ stature. This dynamic pulls in the other direction as well: these magnificent spirits, these noble souls, amazingly, they are like us; they are human too. What was possible for them is possible for us. They stumbled, they wavered, and they made fools of themselves—but they rose and accomplished deeds of triumphant beauty. Cynicism is too often merely an excuse for sparing ourselves the effort.

The critical moral contribution of heroes is the expansion of our sense of possibility. If most of us, as Thoreau said, “live lives of quiet desperation,” it is because we allow our horizons of possibility to cramp our dreams. Heroes can help us lift our eyes a little higher. Immanuel Kant said, “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Some have used that warped, knotted timber to build more boldly and beautifully than others, and we may all benefit from their examples. Heaven knows we need those examples now. We need heroes because our heroes help define the limits of our aspirations. We define our ideals by the heroes we choose, and our ideals—things like courage, honor, justice, and, most of all, compassion—define us.

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Mother Teresa

Modern, humdrum life has little room for heroes, but Mother Teresa’s quote offers a form of heroism for modern times. Challenging times do come, but modern life assesses our endurance of the ordinary. Trivial things, done with great love, rarely catch the eye, and rarely receive appreciation. Redemption is a small thing done with great love. It looks like our everyday work done well, out of love, in resonance with the flourishing of life. It looks like doing our homework, making the kids’ lunches for school, building with quality and a craftsman’s devotion, and crafting a municipal budget that discerns what really matters and contributes to the common good…. It’s nothing short of trying to change the world, but it starts in our homes, our churches, our neighborhoods, and our schools.

Our English word “hero” comes from the Greek hero, which meant a warrior. To the ancient Greeks an authentic hero was the man (always a man) who was successful in battle. Society honored these figures. The word “hero” came to mean someone looked up to as a god in their home area.

Modern dictionaries define “hero” as a person “admired for their bravery, great deeds, or noble qualities.” Externality is central to this definition: brave acts, extraordinary deeds, “noble” qualities. When we hear someone described as a “hero,” we think of

• the soldier who, under heavy enemy fire, saved the lives of his entire platoon, or

• the firefighters who saved the lives of those trapped inside a burning building, or

• the man who jumped into the surf to save a drowning child

These are brave people performing heroic deeds in public. In war, natural disasters, and times of crisis, we applaud the heroes who find the strength to do remarkable acts of bravery and courage. We honor their courage. We reward their actions with citations for bravery, and television appearances.

Mother Teresa represented another type of hero, one who does insignificant things with great love. A type for our time, developing in response to crises not so obvious as earthquakes, tsunamis, or other disasters. These crises are cultural and reflect what Joseph Campbell has called “the collapse of the timeless universe of symbols.”

In response, a new form of hero is emerging. Investigating and rediscovering the lost brilliance of a united, shared humanity is a brave feat. Something our outer consciousness alone cannot achieve. Our individual, inner, intuitive world is the crucial mystery tying us to the rest of humanity. The modern hero is the person who has the courage to explore that world; to not defer to pride, fear, economical greed, and accepted dogma. Modern culture and society do not guide and save the hero, but the reverse. Every one of us must share the ordeal, not in the bright moments of our tribe’s victories, but in the silence of our personal despair.

We live in a society no longer centered on religion and tribe, but centered on economic and political organization. Our focus now is on competition for “material supremacy and resources. This materialistic focus has led to the decay of the arts, morality, and rituals.

Broken lines of communication between our outer, or rational, mind, and the inner, or intuitive mind, split the modern person in two. Living in a spiritual darkness, modern Homo sapiens has few goals beyond getting ahead. Struggling to find a sense of purpose, people today cannot seem to go beyond ideology, nationality, sectarianism, and greed. Mired in materialism, the driving force of our time, the average person has little awareness of their inner, or intuitive self.

But the hero for our time has this interest. They respond to crises, but do so in a new, more interior way. The table below lays out the differences between our current sense of hero and Mother Teresa’s hero.

The new form of heroism occurs amid the banalities of life, and makes severe demands on the hero to be patient, devoted, persevering and self-sacrificing. The new heroism does not shine, nor does it whine. It requires humility and spurns public acknowledgement. When visible, few people recognize it as heroism: they may think of it as “weird,” or incomprehensible. Yet, these invisible acts of heroism can change the world.

They tie this new form of heroism to the crises of our time, and its development in response to them. Specifically, the new hero is transmuting the whole social order, by working first on healing themselves. The hero moves away from the norm and takes up the mantle of hero by understanding their inner world. In ways that our disempowering society finds hard to believe, these invisible acts of heroism can change the world.

Discovery of one’s inner world sparks a deeper appreciation of diversity in the outer world. Gaining insight into our inner selves drives us to remodel the prejudicial structures of our shared history.

The new hero represents all that a human being can be, and so is inspiring, a worthy goal for anyone. The new hero promotes ecological and economic health and rises above sectarian divisions to promote peace and harmony. In doing so, the hero reclaims vitality and enthusiasm and infuses others.

Finally, the new hero is brave, but not in the sense of the firefighters or soldiers under fire. Far more subtle, but no less arduous, is the bravery of the soul’s journey into the “mystery” that is a human. The modern hero is not fearful of mystery, does not fear their inner depths, does not shrink back from entering the unconscious. They have grown past the ego’s need to shine, to take center stage, to be validated by external figures achieving great deeds, “to court applause.” This is what Mother Teresa meant when she spoke of doing small things with great love. Derring-Do is unnecessary. Great ambitions to achieve power and prestige are not heroic. The key to Mother Teresa’s heroism is not the “what” so much as the “how.” Minor acts, often not even noticed by most people, deeds set amid the banalities of life, but done with great selfless love, are the stuff of modern heroism.

If there were enough heroes, the world would be a better place, and yet not too dull a place.