Hero

By Michael McMurray (GUST faculty)

The concept of a hero has, as with most things, shifted over the various ages.  In classical times, there was the figure of superhuman strength–Hercules should come to mind.  Or, if you focus on literature, there were those noble characters–noble by birth, noble in character–who were marred by that one flaw that brought them down–Hector, Oedipus, Agamemnon.  In late Renaissance England, Shakespeare extended this classical model with Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello.  In the mid-20th century Arthur Miller revised the concept be removing (or rather reversing) the class requirement; now it was the common man who achieved hero status–but he (and notice it was still and always He, never She) remained flawed and ultimately met his doom as a result of that flaw.

In everyday life, the hero has long been one who sacrifices all for the sake of others.  The soldier who leaps onto the the grenade to save his platoon, the miner who stays behind in the cave-in so that his fellow-laborers may escape, the diver who ventures once more into the wreck to free a trapped passenger–these have always been real-life heroes, and none could argue the nobility and bravery of their sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice.

Such sacrifice fell out of fashion in the middle of the last century, and for reasons that are understandable.  Such martyrdom is necessarily not achievable by all or by the many.  Replacing this grand model was the everyday hero, the sort extolled by elementary schoolchildren in essays about the dad who climbed onto the roof to rescue the cat, the brother who worked two jobs to put himself through college, the mom (a woman at last!) who cooked and cleaned and canned and taxied the kids everywhere without complaint, the sister who took on the responsibility for bringing up the younger children.

But these everyday heroes likewise went out of fashion.  Beginning in the late 1970s, for various social reasons too numerous to discuss here, the anti-hero had become commonplace.  With his–and-her–deeply ingrained Me-Generation outlook, the hero became a pillar of selfishness, ruthless, duplicitous, living and breathing “every man for himself.”  And so, as art imitates and then directs life, the idols and role-models became cruel and venal titans of industry–JR Ewing, Blake Carrington, Alexis Colby, Angela Channing.  (Ah, equality at long last.)  Certainly these fictional characters could be said to have made their mark, as did and have so many of their real-life counterparts.  But history, recent though it is, has not been kind to these “heroes.”  The damage done by their like to individuals, to society, to humanity, and to the planet was and is too apparent to be overlooked for long.

This still new century shows remarkable signs of yet another shift in the concept of the hero.  Yes, sacrifice and self-abnegation still appear to be out; no longer do we aspire to give all at the expense of ourselves.  Yet there is still a measure of selfishness–or, rather, an enlightened or rational selfishness, something that balances the utter selflessness of the past with an acceptable level of self-interest.  The blend is admirable in that it recalls that concept of the Golden Mean of Aristotle–balance, balance in all things.