The fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11
attacks this past Friday was a somber reminder to Americans of the
first responders and their heroic sacrifice on that terrible morning. Three
hundred and forty-three firefighters perished that day, as well as sixty police
officers and eight paramedics, all rushing to the aid of others with a
disregard for their own safety. That selfless service, says author Tod Lindberg,
that willingness to put their own lives on the line for the lives of complete
strangers, is precisely the quality that defines the modern hero – and
distinguishes him or her from heroes past.
In his short but deeply considered new book The
Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern, Lindberg examines greatness from its most
distant origins in human prehistory to the present. Through character studies
of heroes both real and literary, he explains the conception of heroism in the
ancient world, how it differs in our time, and the ways in which these heroic
types have shaped the political realm and vice versa.
Whether ancient or modern, the distinctive
characteristic of the heroic figure, Lindberg begins, “is the willingness to
risk death.” A hero overcomes what Thomas Hobbes called our “continual fear of
violent death” and is willing to embrace his fate “in accordance with an inner
sense of greatness or exceptional virtue.”
The model hero in ancient times was of the
conquering, killing sort, a warrior earning renown by slaying piles of enemies
on the battlefield. Think of Homer’s Achilles, whom Lindberg examines at
length: a self-centered, petulant demigod, perhaps, but a warrior of superhuman
caliber. Or Julius Caesar, a man so determined to be the greatest man in Rome
that he would destroy the Republic in a civil war rather than rein in his ambition.
But over the centuries, the slaying hero
gradually fell out of fashion, thanks in large measure to the horrors of World
War I and Vietnam, not to mention the rise of the literary antihero such as The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden
Caulfield. Our ideal of the hero morphed instead into a courageous soul who is no
less afraid of death but more focused on saving
lives than taking them. Achilles’ modern
counterpart acts not to kill and conquer, but to serve and save others. “From
slaying to saving,” writes Lindberg, “from the highest, riskiest expression of
self-regard to the highest, riskiest expression of generosity and the caring
will.”
Lindberg uses the history of the
Congressional Medal of Honor – the U.S. military’s highest decoration – to demonstrate
this evolution of heroism. He reviewed the award from its creation during the
Civil War to the present, and concluded that “the percentage of citations that
include a saving narrative [as opposed to a killing narrative] has increased
markedly” over time. The significance of this shift?
If the military itself… now designates its
highest heroes not on the basis of their infliction of violent death on an
enemy but on the saving of lives, then we have perhaps reached the point in the
development of the modern world at which the modern, saving form of heroism has
eclipsed the vestigial forms of classical heroism and their slaying ways for
good.
[…]
The hero as slayer versus the hero as
lifesaver: That is the crux of the difference between the classical and the
modern form of heroism. Greatness versus equality. Ego versus generosity. “I am
someone” versus “I can do something for someone.”
The modern hero sacrifices, as Lindberg puts
it, “in service to a greater purpose. Their purpose has not been the classical
hero’s purpose, namely, the actualization of their sense of inner greatness.”
Instead, “the modern meaning of greatness
is service to others.” [his emphasis]
Curiously, though, Lindberg points out that the
spirit of modern heroism, the antithesis of the conquering hero, is most
grandly embodied in the ancient figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the “Savior” God
who died on the cross to redeem the human race. Today that spirit is
personified in such heroes as the World Trade Center responders on 9/11, the
medical personnel from Médecins sans
Frontières, the three unarmed Americans who recently took down a
heavily-armed jihadist aboard a French train. They and others like them constitute
“the modern face of heroism.”
For Tod Lindberg, this evolution is a
positive development – but we cannot be complacent. There is no guarantee that
the more destructive form of hero – the conquering, slaying sort – won’t
return, unless we prevent him. His chilling example of a modern slaying hero
Osama bin Laden.
From Acculturated, 9/17/15
