Analyzing the Heroic

January 22nd, 2008 Posted in Heroic

For me the hero is the utmost exemplar. Whatever is to be done is accomplished with dash, dispatch, excellent style and results well beyond expectation. In each sector, whether sports, factory production, family life, police work, sailing, horseback riding, journalism or whatever, the behaviors required are evaluated superior against a normal competence. On rare occasions an especially gifted player will soar well above this average and approach an aesthetic perfection that has a beauty that inspires and energizes all.

The basic hero is the soldier acting beyond expectation in battle. The heightened probability of death is what combat is. The soldier enters this arena voluntarily and then if he is drawn into an heroic act he increases the odds against his survival in the service of accomplishing a military purpose. Heroes in other fields may approach this stark moment but when they do we measure their acts against the heroic soldier’s metric.

The heroic has at least two modes: the act and the way. The act is in the moment, a response to a here and now situation, the challenge immediate. The way is the career of duty persisted in over time, usually a life-time. The daily grind continuing at a high level of performance over the long haul. The career achievement: expanding expertise beyond the ordinary, a depth of knowledge and skill achieved, all used to reach maximum public service. The heroic is usually considered a contribution. It suggests action and work that are selfless, disinterested, modest. Each line of action, each occupation, profession has its own pantheon of heroes. The incidents of high challenge, the rewarding events usually spontaneous and unexpected are very similar to the test implied in the athlete’s demonstration—an exemplary response to a difficult challenge. (The distinction of act and way comes from Avner. “Memoirs of an Assassin.”)

The act and the way are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The act can be a high point of a career. The act itself could lead to a career. But still the temporal measure marks a very distinct difference. The military career with calls to active combat is full of possible high points. This is paralleled by the careers of stunt men whose routine risky actions also have this stand out quality. Other occupations share in this career way with moments of high action—life guards, firemen and police, test pilots.

CHART
Comparing the Act and the Way

ACT (NOW) WAY (CAREER)
Immediate versus Extended
Peak achievement versus Consistent
Maximum risk versus Control risk
Crap-Shooter versus Cards: Bridge
High emotion versus Even tempered
Dramatic versus Repetitious
Award: Medal versus Award: Watch
Power, Force versus Influence
Episodic versus Integrated
Individual versus Institutional

The heroic involves a comparison. It is measured against what we think of as average or normal behavior. In the army it is normal to do one’s duty—maintaining the line, remaining true to comrades—so facing death and danger is not heroic but simply correct. The hero is beyond this. His action is extraordinary. We are into a culturally governed event. The actions and the evaluations suggest that a consensus on a rule and a value resides within the social group or society surrounding. In other words, heroic is a highway into the formal outlining of culture. You don’t have to be told a rule, you see it in the explicit attitudes and responses in the actual behavior.

Below normal or failing to meet the standard is sometimes labeled cowardly or excessively incompetent. The required behavior, willful or not, is not forthcoming. The hero is rewarded, the normal is ignored, and the coward is punished or treated as a comic figure. It is exaggerated under-achievement. Sometimes a moment of vast disappointment. The goat, the dope, the idiot. The trip and fall. The pig on ice

The hero of the way implies a consensual norm as well. He goes beyond, tops whatever is required. The normal defines the honorable but unremarkable career, and the failed career where the behaviors fall below the line is the bum, the bottom. Lionel Trilling, scholar, academic, critic, and novelist, seems to me to be a hero of the way. Famous, influential with many students and admirers, consistent and honorable and outstanding in his work. A beautiful ideal of a life of a particular kind of service. The failure of the way, the person who achieves well below his potential. Drops out. Becomes an alcoholic or drug addict and muddles through. Allows his output to fall in quality and amount. The bad example.

The total sequence is sometimes not precisely defined. The hero jumps in the river to rescue the drowning man but it is not clear what the average or the lesser responses would be. We all might respond within our trained capacity. But some with other concerns might turn away indifferently. It is not so much cowardice as a rejection of the ideal. One doesn’t measure up because he does not accept the rule.

This is the anti-hero. The rejector of the cultural imperative that motivates the rest of us. This is not the failed person who might opt to hide here–the one who is in the game but doesn’t measure up. The anti-hero represents a contrary order. For example the conscientious objector in wartime who refuses the value of aggression and violence and advocates a pacificism against the aggression of the other. His view is usually based on religious conviction. He maintains his stance even against imprisonment, ostracism, communal disfavor, financial loss. In his own way the anti-hero can reach heroic status.

More generally the anti-hero rejects the dominant cultural order of his group or society and advocates another way. Traditionally the break is between the bourgeoisie and the bohemian. It is not class conflict because there is no formal economic critique. It is primarily a aesthetic rejection or a difference in style, another way of life.

These acts and ways can and do occur without witnesses or with witnesses who remain silent. They remain private and except for their immediate concrete effects have no consequences. The aesthetic, high or low, and the swirl around it is a vector of popular and public attention but this circle can be constricted. Sometimes only a partner witnesses, sometimes only the actor alone. The lost chords, the missing in action. It is only through the public acclaim or derision, the spreading of the word, that these behaviors transform to news and then history and myth and fable. In this form they contribute to the reinforcement of the cultural norm or to its modification and rejection.

The reward is in the honor and admiration one receives and in the medals and the stipends. The punishments range from execution to prison to derision to isolation. And for the individuals involved there is reinforced confidence on one side against shame and guilt on the other. Traditionally the heroic act is considered glorious—that is permeated with the approval of the ineffable. It is mysterious, again beyond normal, in that it is astonishing and incredible. It can involve patriotism, essentially advancement of one’s ethnic group or people, expressed by the mystical notion of fatherland. And it also has a strong element of willingness to sacrifice self.

The heroic system can be harsh on the losers (those who fall below the measure.) Historically there has been a movement to mitigate this punitive weight. There are recognized rationals for not being normal– illness either physical or psychological. One is neurotic or is fatigued or stressed. Carried too far and the excuse becomes institutionalized and people are excused who actually are capable of meeting the norm.

This heroic cultural syndrome has a masculine quality that is now under revision from the feminist liberation movement. Beside the coward and the anti-hero and the neurotic is the sissy—the boy who behaves as a girl, the sexually passive boy-man. This is part of the pressure among men and boys to be available for the heroic act if possible but at least to reach the normal honorable way. The career way usually avoids the gender distinction in this exaggerated form.

Women and girls can be heroic but until the feminist movement they had their own categories. Her special biological capacity for reproduction and nurturing and her traditional limited commitment to military work sets up different types of heroism. The political agitation for equality of sexes give fronts for action: marches for the vote, for reproductive freedom, for child care and education, for nursing care and medical issues. Now with women involved in military operations the conventional heroic act and more and more the conventional normal military like service requirements become their lot.

Under the old way—remnants of it are still around—the woman was the prize for the hero. The heroine’s struggle was to remain pure and faithful, and her heroic acts were against challenges to chastity, hearth and home. She had to remain stoic, not intimidated, vigilant. The comic-romantic narrative takes the form of the man and woman passing several heroic tests before they can be together.

Animals can be heroic. The mother cat who removes her litter from the threatening fire. The loyal dog. The horse who serves beyond the call. But sometimes the heroic act for animal or man is only an artifact of setting. One might make a dashing attack upon the enemy thinking he is in full retreat to the rear.

I have been emphasizing the modest hero, shy and undemanding in ordinary life whose unusual act in the emergency is even more unexpected and is allowed by him to quickly recede and not be recalled. But this is not universal. It is apposed by a boasting culture. The hero, and the potential hero, crows like a cock. He appears the ego-centric braggart. His claim for honor is loud and persistent. He demeans his competitors (the modest hero sees them as comrades and associates). He treats them with disrespect while demanding adulation. He wears jewelry, attention gathering clothes. But sometime his sign is merely a boastful smirk. In his behavior he seems to confront the ineffable. Any weakness or failure to maintain exemplary standards subjects him to the contempt of the mob. While he maintains the illusion of the hero they are his abject and loyal followers, but after a falter he can become the target. The higher the flight the steeper the fall.

Psychologically this cultural form disarms the lesser blow-hards and the quiet ones. Allows the all-out blabber in a way to avoid the test. Goliath dominates the field with his loud mouth until David hits him with a well aimed rock.

The braggart culture is associated with the chief and his military mob. It is a non-bureaucratic form of order. The leader is the loudest bully who maintains himself in power by constant bragging and random acts of terror against his subjects. Cooperation and sharing are negated. And in general it is a primitive, self-limiting kind of order.

The ultimate test comes when the braggart is forced to stand up and fight—a test he seeks to avoid or only accepts when the odds are highly in his favor. But to the extent he can actually win in the test the loud mouth is matched by the heroic act and he becomes temporarily secure in his social dominance.

Control over this heroic identification process develops through the established system of awards. The level of valor, the near magical feat is graded along a hierarchy of awards. The prize is sliced and the numbers acclaimed are multiplied. And over time the aesthetic test, the cultural consensus itself might be subtly shifted. So the nation-state advances the ideal that it is a worthy recipient of loyal sentiments and self-sacrifice. The institution also by its awards preempts to itself the exemplary acts and ways that the people in their several forms and capacities continue to generate.

But there is a problem of fraud. The beatific act can be mimicked and manipulated. Exaggerated advertising claims. Exaggerated claims of the miraculous. Watch out for spin. One example from the old Soviet Union. They had the Stakhanovite worker, a category of heroic worker named for a famous rate-breaker who vastly exceeded the ordinary production norms. Was it an aesthetic moment or a propaganda ploy to goad the other workers to increase production? Or both? In industrial and gang work, the man on the job tends to pace himself, not to press full-out all the time. It extends the time required and the worker’s wage return as well and it helps preserve the worker’s strength and energy. The employer wants to maximize immediate productivity, to maximize output and profit. It is a contentious front. Historically the worker group has tended to establish an informal (even secret) productivity norm well below the group’s possible, if working all out, out-put. With the communist party as employer the managers encouraged Stakhanov and other line workers to bust the restraining norm and vastly expand productivity. Old S. in trade union terms was a rate buster whose work mates under ordinary circumstances would use all means possible to restrain him. Productivity gains while often attributed to an increase in the worker’s effort usually come from the introduction of more efficient machinery or to rationalizing of tasks. Piece work where wage is tied to effort motivates norm breaking. Trade unionists claim that as workers show their true capacity the pay per piece goes down and that ultimately the relative pay remains the same.

Grace, the attention and support of the ineffable; falls on the hero. He is identified and marked and appreciated as full of Grace in report and myth. All witnesses retain the act or way in memory and use it as a fount for conventional aspiration. Ideologues and manipulators of opinion are constantly advancing and reinforcing tales of these exemplars. In every case the heroic act or way is a commentary about the social setting upon which it is based. A key to value and a measure for ordinary action.