The greatest enemy of the hero is intentional mediocrity. The danger of mediocrity is two-fold. It dissolves and therefore relativizes the hierarchy of truth, thereby transmogrifying truth into opinion. The process of mediocrity is completed when opinion accepts as its content fiction.
If all human thought and activity is relative and boiled in the tin cup of mediocrity, and any admission of man’s fallen nature is blurred or altogether rejected, and contemporary human violence is merely a remnant of the primordial human food chain, there would exist no need for heroes or lives lived heroically. But this is flatly not the case.
Critics may impugn a hero using the vocabulary of their own torpor and emptiness of spirit, but they are powerless to deny the existence of good and evil, the hierarchy of truth, that humanity is enthralled and sometimes overcome by evil, and the incontestable fact that these basic observations are proven by the sheer weight of human crime, violence and murder in the most advanced societies.
A person may act heroically in the face of danger even when the threat is a catastrophic natural event such as a flood or an earthquake. But such a person is a hero of the hour, not of his age. In contrast, the hero of the age emerges--we may say, rises up--precisely to oppose a catastrophic evil initiated and executed not by natural forces but by human beings themselves.
Man’s inhumanity to man is not the result of bad sociology and inadequate therapy but actually a willful participation in evil, that is to say, to remove the conscious restraint that severely governs the tendency resident in every human heart to commit wrong against another--to laugh at someone else’s tears, to crush the health and well-being of others whom he despises, or to obliterate human lives, tribes and even nations.
A hero is not self-reliant in the sense of being a loner who defines himself by his estrangement from his community. To the contrary, a hero is dependent on the community in which he was raised and educated. It is precisely the intersection where the continuity of shared belief and values encounters the anarchic powers arrayed to destroy it that the hero emerges to secure for his community an opportunity to renew itself, reaffirm its purpose, and move forward.
The hero’s fight is never the impulse to strike back at boredom, still less to step beyond the good. His rising up is precisely to oppose forces or enemies which threatens his community or his nation with irreversible decline or outright extinction. A hero may quickly emerge and respond to the latter as when tyranny comes suddenly and with a great shock. Far more difficult to grasp for ordinary citizen and hero alike is creeping tyranny, the kind that entrenches itself slowly over a much longer period of time.
All these aforementioned things constitute a hero. If this description is incomplete, it is not because of an inherent or fatal flaw in the role of the hero but rather the inadequacy of the essayist. Or perhaps, irony. We may say that irony is the abrupt and astonishing reversal of human expectations.
We admire the hero, yes, but are we saying that the possession of the aforementioned attributes is so exceptional among men as to be rare, indeed found only within the hero? May we not expect to find the attributes of the hero to be common among ordinary decent men everywhere? Indeed, we cannot speak of the bond between the hero and his enthusiasts as shared unless we acknowledge their mutual participation in the heroic attributes.
The transformational dynamic is this. It’s not that the hero’s extraordinary accomplishment imposes values and beliefs on those who follow his exploits attentively. Rather, the hero’s example affirms the excellence already present in their hearts. The heroic exploit stirs the mind and awakens the heroic spirit in the human heart. Yes, the man, the young man, and fathers everywhere need to cultivate a heroic approach to ordinary life such that, if all or most were renown for the courage of their convictions and an unfailing will to do good, heroes would be superfluous. Imagine, if heroes in ordinary life were superabundant, extraordinary heroes would not be needed. Would that this were true!
The ordinary man is not likely destined to be a hero, for extraordinariness implies that true heroes are few and far between. Nevertheless, we need this sort of person everywhere. You want him to be your next door neighbor, the man in every home on your block, your boss, the leaders of your community, the soldier in your military. You want your teenaged son to have someone stir his heroic imagination.
You want men of integrity everywhere, sharing the vocabulary of hard work, the common good, life-affirming values, the traditional family. You want them working, building creating and sustaining. You want them ready for any need, contingency or emergency.
You want to know that from among decent men everywhere, ordinary heroes, that one will step up and galvanize his community, his city, and his nation in an extraordinary way--to defend the good, that is to say, the ideas that form the truth of human goodness known by men and women of good will everywhere, in every time, and in every place.
We would like to think that every generation is worthy of providing a singular individual who possesses, by the persuasive power of ideas and courageous personal example, the leadership ability to galvanize a defeated people, weary of battle and disillusioned in spirit, to go where they would otherwise not go, and to accomplish what otherwise they felt they could do. The heroic man stands on the cusp of the supernatural. In the name of his cause, his people, and decent human beings, he opposes the overlord futility with all his might and its vassal dread of the future.
You want to know that effecting moral and ethical leadership of a nation, an army, an alliance, has its origins in the good of the most basic unit of human society--the family. Many heroes are unknown, but those who are known have changed the course of human history. These are men who have stood against a tide of evil in their generation, a collective of vile interests which threatened the just welfare of human beings everywhere--not merely those within the reach of powerful weaponry but many others within the reach of their corrupt ideas and values.
Admittedly, all heroes are flawed as are the people they inspire. We do not say may be flawed because it is impossible for human beings by nature to be capable of perpetual nobility, grace and perfect intentions. Were a man’s life known by others to be virtually perfect, this would refer to the historical record. Unknown would be the scope of his intentions and most private thoughts.
Also unknown would be his response to the most trying circumstances, the extent to which he is willing to make personal sacrifice, the limit of his endurance, the extent to which he is willing and able to absorb the most withering criticism from the very persons whose interests he is defending. A hero may know personally only a relative few of the many he has pledge to defend.
That a man’s words and deeds are heroic while his flaws are merely human is proved by his willingness to publicly name his friends, and if necessary, to lay down his life for them. Certainly, he knows them as friends because of their mutual and shared understanding of the common good. Whether this shared understanding is consciously expressed and reiterated or intuitive and presumed is not fully known or even necessarily relevant. This may seem unacceptably haphazard, even dangerous, but it must be remembered that there is no school for heroes.
This is not to say that schools are irrelevant in the end. Actually the contrary is true. Schools should exist, not for the purpose of students discovering who they are--as if this is either the concern or the mission of seven year olds--but for communicating--and we mean instilling--core truths affirming the humaneness of human beings of good will everywhere, virtues affirming the nobility and excellence of human character, and values specific to the identity and well-being of the nation.
If your essayist could ask a hero to speak for himself, what might he say about his great strength, courage or ability? What would he say about his achievements, great deeds and noble qualities? Or about being a role model or ideal for others? Perhaps this thought is not too far out of line. After some sort of respectful silence, the hero of his own generation would say, I am a useless servant who has only done his duty. (Part 3 of 3.)
