We got a letter the other day inviting our family to a banquet honoring my daughter’s high school’s “Students of the Month.” My daughter was honored as such in the fall for unhesitatingly stepping forward to hold, comfort and prevent further injury to a classmate as the girl suffered a seizure and fell to the floor while the teacher summoned help. My daughter was pleased a few weeks later when they honored her as a Student of the Month in recognition of her compassionate, forthright response. Her classmates, in typical enough youthful human fashion, had recoiled in a kind of frozen discomfort.
And my daughter’s response to the banquet? “Do we have to go?”
Then she went on to say something very interesting, and perhaps more mature even than her action to help her classmate. “I only did what any human being should do; it’s not really that big a deal.”
She’s right, of course. It shouldn’t be that big a deal. But the fact that it is tells us much, I think, about two things: 1) some people’s general reluctance and hesitation to pitch in with inherently discomforting situations, and 2) the age-old archetype of the hero—our need for it, our desire to create, with our adulation, heroes among our midst. (And later, our tremendous, world-shattering dismay when they often—no, make that “almost always”—turn out to be just as fallen and human as we are.)
A similar scenario was recounted in a newspaper account a few days ago of a man who had suffered cardiac arrest at a freeway off-ramp when waiting for a light. When his car rolled back into the car behind him, the driver got out to investigate, saw the man slumped over his wheel, a few others came to assist, and they got the man out of his car and administered CPR until emergency help arrived. The fire chief’s sign-off line in the article: “That people took action, that is amazing.”
I found myself almost shouting into my morning coffee cup: “Amazing? What, you expected them to stand there talking about the Giants’ lack of hitting until your EMTs arrived?”
We humans are consistently better than that, I like to think: better than to “amaze” ourselves by responding in such basic, almost in-born fashion to help our fellow humans in need. This despite our equally human penchant to slice, dice and bomb each other into oblivion in altercations between warring tribes. Both those tendencies make up the human pageant, but it is the helping, ostensibly “heroic” part that will concern us here.
The hero archetype is rooted in antiquity, in the very earliest manifestations of our consciousness that formed us into the storytellers that we are. The ancient Greeks were all over the hero myth. Heracles rescued Hesione, the beautiful daughter of the king, by confronting the sea monster who was about to devour her after the king, that lowly coward, had tied her to the rocks and offered her up as a sacrifice. (“Thanks, Dad!”)
As the monster rose to the surface and opened his jaws for his snack, Heracles dove in with his sword flashing, managing to cut his way through the beast’s belly and leave it dead, the comely princess thus freed to go forth and create little princes to sustain her father’s lineage. (Hopefully, his recessive cowardly gene did not survive the new DNA configuration with her husband.)
And so it goes across virtually every culture in the world, only details and contexts changing, but the central archetype nearly identical: the hero’s going where few or no other persons dare to go, then coming back to us with hard-earned wisdom borne of the courage to risk it all.
In western culture, Jesus is not anything if not the ultimate hero, the very embodiment of courage, self-sacrifice, and the perennial wisdom borne of his encounter with the monster Satan. (His own, unhumorous version of “Thanks, Dad!” can be seen in his crying out on the cross: “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”)
In today’s world, of course, we have somewhat lower standards, as my daughter rightly complained. It’s not like she had to endure crucifixion or a descent into the belly of a beast to earn a kind of hero status for what was, to be sure, her commendable action in helping her stricken classmate. Nor did the people involved in coming to the aid of the motorist, which so “amazed” the fire chief.
Nevertheless, our need to confer hero status on fellow humans is folded indelibly into our continuing efforts to become better than we are—more courageous, helpful, compassionate, whole. For that, we need models, inspirations, someone to point to for both ourselves and our children in saying, “See that person? That’s the way to be, the way to act, the values to embody! You can do it, too!”
And of course, we can, though far too many of us don’t, and virtually all of us don’t at least some of the time. Periodically, even the most courageous and faithful of us fail and fall short of our heroic ideal. And then the recrimination and scorn from the previously admiring public and even from one’s own highest aspiring self can be swift and brutal.
“He’s no better than us!” we cry about the fallen hero.
And so he isn’t. Which is a bitter—and maturing, and liberating—experience for us humans. We all both need heroes and then just as strenuously need to dethrone them as we claim our own responsibility for acquiring the special knowledge and wisdom they possess. Those come only from risking all, flailing into the belly of the beast, and—we hope—emerging out the other side, chastened, bloodied, renewed, but still bowed humbly with the weight of the new tasks that present themselves forever ahead.
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This song by Skillet is a little heavy-rocky for my usual musical tastes, but there’s no denying the power and relevance of the lyrics…
For periodic and brief posts of inspiring words from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied by the usual lovely photography as exemplified here, see my public Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/TraversingBlog
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Deep appreciation to the photographers:
Rotating banner photos at top of page courtesy of Elizabeth Haslam, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing, see more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Small photo of Heracles the Archer, sculpture by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City by Mary Harrsch, Springfield, Oregon, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing, see more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/
Sculpture entitled “Death of a Hero,” reenacting the death of Meleager. Early 3rd cent. AD, photographed at Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig, Basel, Switzerland, by Nick Thompson, Auckland, New Zealand, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing, see more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pelegrino/
Angel sculpture from Martyrs’ Square in Brussels, Belgium, remembering those who died in the Belgian Revolution of 1830-31, photographed by Fiona Cullinan, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing, see more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/katchooo/
Certainly, most people need a hero. A whole entertainment industry has been built around this in Western Culture. But in modern society we don’t want the true heroes. We only find those folk in myths, great spiritual leaders, or everyday individuals like your daughter. We no longer pay much attention to true heroes, we need superheroes, who have substituted the strengths of courage, soul, and love of neighbor for material strength and super egos. This is one of our culture’s great moral and spiritual defeats. We want to be supermen or superwomen. We don’t want to risk ourselves for the sake of others, especially if they’re the wrong color, religion, or sexual orientation. As history moves forward I wonder if we aren’t turning into a culture of soulless moral cowards.
Interesting you should mention the superheros, Robert. Doing some background for this piece, I came across a professor and researcher who noted that when he asks his social psychology class of college students to draw their idea of a hero, “Almost everyone draws a superhero…someone wearing a cape and a mask with all the superhero accessories. It’s usually a white male.”
Perhaps staying with the cartoon imagery absolves us of any real striving to be heroic ourselves, since heroism is from another dimension, unreachable, suitable only for entertaining fantasies in the theater or video game.
Living in a heavily military city (San Diego), I often hear of our service people referred to as “heroes”. Having been in the service myself, I can safely say that the act of enlisting in the service does not and should not confer the “Hero” title upon a person. I think there is obviously “hero inflation” taking place in our daily language. I agree that simply living life, and doing the things that humans should do for other humans, is simply admirable. To me, a hero is a person who places his/her life in danger in order to save another. Usually it is an instinctive act, which, if allowed to be thought-out, may not occur.
Moon, I think your last point is particularly intriguing and strikes me as true, but it also gives me great pause. It means that in some ways, true heroism is an irrational act, since almost by definition putting our lives in danger has to be considered “irrational.” And if we take a moment to “think” about the action we are considering, rationality might well prevail and we would be more likely to hold back. But there’s a sticking point here: How can putting our lives in danger be “instinctive” when all our evolutionary programming compels us, like every living thing, to employ every means possible to survive and propagate ourselves? That would suggest some other kind of “programming”—of values, morals and highest ideals—has been at play in the person’s life, causing them to “instinctively” react in a spirit of self-sacrifice that overcomes their perfectly rational instinct to guard their own life at all costs. Obviously, the closer another person is to our kinship circle, the more automatic our heroism would be—what parent wouldn’t go through fire to save his or her own child, whereas, how much would we risk to save a stranger’s—or even more challenging, Charles Manson’s—life?