Heroism For a More Civilized Age
In which I discuss a possible future writing project. I’d encourage you to read this one even if you usually ignore my Real Blog Posts.
Hm. My first reaction was to disagree somewhat with your explicit claim that most people want to be heroes, and strongly with your implicit claim that this is a good thing.
Then I read the essay and I agreed with basically everything except the way you use the word “hero.” Which I guess reminds me of our recent discussion of how to use the word “identity.”
I want to be great and glorious and transcendent. I want to excel. (My friends tend to joke about how I do everything at max, and do everything with a bit more effort and a bit more excellence than normal people would bother). There’s a reason I connect to high epic fantasy, and to the narrative of the ubermensch.
I specifically don’t connect that to “heroism.” For most of the reasons you cite in your post; the hero is someone who steps up to save a dying world, and our world is pretty fuckign great, thank you very much. And anyway my desire to be great is about me, not about anyone else. (Cue discussion of virtue ethics).
So I guess you say “we should encourage people to be heroes in a way that doesn’t involve narratives of major threats,” and I say “We should encourage people to be great without worrying about heroism,” and those are pretty much the same fucking thing.
I should mention separately that I really connected to your comments about the people who are always hoping something goes wrong, so they can step up and be heroes. I like taking care of my friends, so whenever a friend has a problem a little piece of me goes on high alert and gets kinda excited. Like, “Oh, I hope there’s a problem I can solve!”
And this is probably largely responsible for my tendency to kind of adopt people who need a certain amount of caretaking. If they have medium-sized fires on a regular basis, I have something to help with and that makes me happy. Which I guess is what you were talking about.
Hrm. Some random scattered thoughts:
* I don’t think I made the claim that “most people want to be heroes.” I certainly didn’t mean to make that claim. It’s almost certainly not “most people.” It’s some people. You find the urge-to-heroism in lots of places – especially amongst the young, and especially-especially amongst those who are talented enough that dreams of greatness don’t seem totally implausible from the get-go – but it’s definitely not everywhere. (In fact, there was a bit that got cut from both the post and the follow-up bits-that-got-cut post, in which I said as much directly.) But even a small slice of the population adds up to something big and important, when you’re looking at the whole world.
* There’s at least one important difference between [my models of] heroism and just-plain-personal-excellence, which is conflict. Heroes aren’t just Super Awesome People; they’re people who undergo heroic character arcs, which involves contending with some kind of antagonistic force. You can have an artificial antagonism rather than a Genuine Existential Threat, and it still works, which is sort of what I’m going for here. (We already allow for that in a few sectors, like high-level competition, and we can expand the model.) But just being great doesn’t capture the same empowering sense of narrative.
[Yeah, you can try to model “the difficulty of becoming greater” as an impersonal antagonist, in a sort of Man-versus-Nature way, allowing you to wring a heroic story out of a private self-improvement process. I don’t think this is necessarily doomed to failure, but I think it’s going to be hard for most non-hermits to get very far with that strategy, because the “drama” is too completely internal and too hard to put on display for validation. And once again, the conversation circles around to “just how difficult is it to be a self-contained monk who doesn’t need any validation from anyone?”]
* I don’t really know what your stance on virtue ethics is, but as far as I’m concerned, the world is a better place for your being awesome. Even if no one else has any good way to access it or appreciate it.