NO MORE HEROES ANYMORE?
Watching the film The Odyssey recently made me wonder about the definition and role of heroes. "No More Heroes" is a 1977 song by the English rock band the Stranglers. The song's lyrics refer to several historical figures, starting with the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky who "got an ice pick / that made his ears burn". Others mentioned include "dear old Lenny", that is, the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, the playwright William Shakespeare and the Roman emperor Nero.
I just wondered: were they on to something concrete when they wrote this, or are all our historical heroes part of a myth? The song itself is somewhat open to interpretation: are they bemoaning the lack of modern day heroes, and are they suggesting that they are no longer great?
The first difficulty of the topic is definitional. A hero might be someone who performs an extraordinarily courageous act. But courage alone may not be enough. A soldier who performs an act of extraordinary bravery might be called a hero, but what about someone who risks their life to rescue a stranger? What about someone who spends forty years quietly caring for a disabled child? What about someone who refuses to participate in an injustice despite considerable personal cost? We might therefore distinguish between: physical courage, moral courage, self-sacrifice or achievement.
The interesting question is whether these things can exist independently.
Q1: What actually makes someone a hero? Is it the act itself, the motive behind the act, the consequences, the character of the person, or the judgement of others?
Heroism and Sacrifice
There is a strong intuition that a genuine hero must have something to lose. Someone who risks nothing in doing something admirable may be good, but are they heroic? Consider three people:
1. Someone gives £10 million to charity after becoming a billionaire.
2. Someone gives away almost all their modest savings, knowing it will materially affect their own life.
3. Someone risks their life to save another person.
All three may be admirable. But we instinctively rank the third differently. This suggests that cost matters. Yet this creates another problem. If heroism depends upon sacrifice, does a person become more heroic merely by having more to lose? And what if the sacrifice is made because the person enjoys being admired for making it? Does the motive matter?
Q2: Does heroism require sacrifice?
The problem of the hero's motives
This takes us into a very old philosophical problem: suppose somebody performs a magnificent act but does so because they want fame. Are they still a hero? Kant gives us one reason to be suspicious of heroic reputations based merely on outcomes. His moral philosophy places enormous importance upon acting from duty rather than inclination or self-interest: “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.” (Note: On a strongly Kantian interpretation, heroic behaviour cannot simply be a matter of producing an impressive result. The character and maxim behind the action matter.) But this raises a paradox: If somebody risks their life because they desperately want to be remembered as a hero, the act might still save a life.
Q3: Does the impure motive diminish the heroism? And if so, how could we ever know who the real heroes are? We can observe actions. We cannot directly observe motives.
Q4: The central question of the Stranglers song is: were previous generations actually more heroic? We frequently hear that the past produced greater characters. People fought in wars. They endured hardship. They built institutions. They explored the world. They undertook dangerous work. They displayed stoicism and self-sacrifice. Perhaps modern society has become softer. But there is an obvious alternative explanation. Perhaps people in the past were not more heroic. Perhaps their societies simply produced more opportunities for heroic narratives.
Carlyle and the "Great Man"
The philosopher Hegel gave a central role to the "hero", personified by Napoleon, as the incarnation of a particular culture's Volksgeist and thus of the general Zeitgeist. Thomas Carlyle's 1841 work, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, also accorded an essential function to heroes and great men in history. Carlyle famously argued that: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” This is the classic “Great Man theory of history". The idea is attractive: history becomes intelligible through extraordinary individuals: Caesar, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Luther, Cromwell and others.
Tolstoy's War and Peace offers almost the opposite interpretation: Tolstoy is deeply sceptical of the idea that great historical events are primarily caused by great individuals. Napoleon may appear to be directing history, but Tolstoy portrays him as being swept along by enormous social forces that no individual can control. Karl Marx argued that history was determined by the massive social forces at play in "class struggles", not by the individuals by whom these forces are played out.
Q5: This produces an interesting distinction: are heroes people who change history, or people who become symbols of historical changes that were already taking place? Perhaps Napoleon did not make history. Perhaps history made Napoleon.
Perhaps the question should therefore be reversed: “What does our choice of heroes tell us about ourselves and our current society?”
Nietzsche was deeply suspicious of conventional morality and of the tendency to admire people simply because society has labelled them virtuous. He asks us to consider whether our admiration for heroes reflects our own values rather than the intrinsic qualities of the person.
Every society creates heroes reflecting their times. The ancient Greeks had Achilles and Odysseus. The Romans had Caesar. Medieval Europe had saints and knights. Popular modern culture has musicians, actors and sportspeople. The heroes change because the values of the society change.
However, there is yet another possible answer.
Marketing and the manufacture of heroes
Is heroism now mere marketing? Modern society is exceptionally good at manufacturing public identities. A sportsman or soldier is turned into a "hero". An entrepreneur becomes a "visionary". A celebrity becomes an "icon". A philanthropist becomes a "humanitarian". Sometimes these descriptions are entirely justified, but sometimes they are essentially branding. Perhaps we are aware of this and don’t regard contemporary figures as true heroes. Or perhaps we only see historical figures as heroes because they are veiled in some mist of time.
Q6: Are our heroes simply branded products, and do these products simply reflect the needs and virtues of the times they live in? Reflect on those we currently regard as heroes.
Lytton Strachey’s book "Eminent Victorians” was a critical take down of 4 figures who had until then been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon. He is fairly easy on Nightingale, and the other three are now largely forgotten, but obviously at the time it was written (1918) they were well known and must have been generally well regarded. This shows another twist: heroes to one generation are quickly forgotten. Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton in 2002, but I wonder if he would be now: opinions change quickly.
Q7: So in conclusion, who would match our criteria of hero? We could discuss some specific examples: Churchill, Rosa Parks, Captain Scott, Sophie Scholl, Edmond Hilary & Sherpa Tenzing. Specifically, how do these figures fit into the various categories of hero we have discussed?
