Various Types of Heroism

 

The crudest, stupidest kind of heroism is the kind in which you idolize and idealize a person, celebrating and exaggerating their positive attributes, while refusing to believe anything negative about them.  ("Ac-cen-tuate the positive, el-im-in-ate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don't mess with Mr. Inbetween..." ...that song is so psychologically unhealthy, such maniacal, decadent evil that I kinda enjoy it and almost admire it...)

Next up, the critical stance towards a hero is almost as boring as crude idealism, and often merely the mirror image of it: it has essentially the same content as apologetics, but with the values flipped.  By all means, one should "tarry with the negative," as long as you don't tarry too long.  The moralistic posturing of judgment against "great" people can be just as tiresome as worshipful, dogmatic adulation.  When I speak to those who focus too narrowly on the foibles and shortcomings of a hero - you know, the type of people who never tire of detailing the slaveowning of George Washington, for instance - I can't help thinking, "Surely that can't be the most interesting thing about him - or about you."  There were, after all, plenty of slaveowners who were not George Washington.  The psychological fascination with endless litanies of all the delicious, tawdry, salacious, gossipy details usually reflects either a maudlin romantic sense of loss ("How dare he betray me by being a mere human?!"), a rage at reality for failing to live up to one's illusions, or, more likely, just plain old resentment towards one's teachers for having been inculcated in honor.

A somewhat cleverer stance is to admire a hero for their positive qualities, while frankly acknowledging their dark side, recognizing that we all have a dark side.  "Forgiving" our heroes, as it were.  This is a bit more nuanced than the first two, yet it is still lacking in many ways.  For one thing, this opposition is too binary: you've got the good parts of a person, which go in the good box, and the bad parts of the person, which go in the bad box.

Another similar attitude is one in which we regard a person's qualities not as divided up between good and bad, but as a series of characteristics which can be dialed up and down, where the extremes are both inadvisable, yet a wholesome balance lies somewhere in the middle.  Again, this is more nuanced than the first two intentional stances, but is it any better?  I'm not convinced.  In fact, in its over-complicating, "bargaining" attitude, it may actually be even more boring and lifeless than the first two options - too clean, too nice, too healthy, too pat, too bureaucratic, too academic, too patronizing, too intellectual, too clinical, too correct.  In some ways it may actually be worse than crude simplistic heroism.  The dream has been sucked dry.

A greater dimension of heroism is reached when we love and admire a person not in spite of their imperfections, but because of them.  As the old saying goes, it is the imperfections of diamonds that make them so valuable.  I call this the divine attitude, because I imagine this would be how God would feel - that is, God would love his creations precisely because, and to the extent that, they are not God: they are not perfect, they are not all-knowing, all-powerful, or all good - if they were, they would be God, and thus nothing would exist except God, and thus God would not have created the universe - and of course, it is part of the very essence of how people understand the very concept of God that God is the creator of the universe.  A similarly divine attitude seems to have been held by Christopher Marlowe when he created the central characters of his plays - his heroes,tragic though they may have been - not to mention the early Greek dramatists.  One form of this means appreciating a person not for their middling balance, but for their excesses.  As a rule, the Greek heroes were not paragons of perfect virtue, but rather extremely excessive characters.  The same is true, in a way, of some Biblical heroes.

I would add that anyone who has ever been in love understands what this means.  You love someone not in spite of the ways that they fall short of some preconceived concept or fantasy of a standard of perfection, but precisely for the ways they surprise you and subvert your expectations - the ways they are real, and human, and this specific individual rather than some abstract ideal - their ipsissimosities, to use some obscure philosophical jargon.  You might also say their quirks, their uniqueness, and also the unique qualities of your relationship with them: your shared memories, and their personhood.

Taking this one step further, we can conceive these qualities not as "imperfections" but as determinate characteristics, without assigning a positive or negative connotation to them.  Shakespeare was capable of crafting characters of greater and richer dimensionality even than Marlowe.

Similarly, a crude kind of heroism is one in which you fantasize about becoming your hero's friend, or perhaps becoming their acolyte, their pupil, their disciple,

It is a higher kind of heroism that doesn't want anything from heroes - that simply rejoices in the fact of their existence.

Similarly, a crude kind of heroism is a kind in which you want to, and try to, emulate the person you regard as a hero.  A greater heroism is one in which you recognize that you cannot, should not, and don't want to try to emulate their behavior, and yet you admire it nonetheless.  You cannot live anyone else's life.  Let them be them, and let yourself be yourself.  You cannot be anyone else.

I admire everyone for being who they are.  I even admire myself.