The death of heroes, the recovery of the heroic

Christian Century, Dec 22, 1993 by David Hein

The death of the hero is further advanced bacause we recognize that Thomas Carlyle was seriously off the mark in believing that the history of the world is the history of great individuals like Moses, Muhammad, Cromwell and Catherifne the Great. History, we know, is shaped by forces far more complex, and we have learned to pay attention to the diverse contributions of workers, minorities and immigrants. They, their families and their communities used to be deemed inarticulate and irrelevant; they are now recognized as important actors in the historical drama. Moreover, an important trend in historical writing of recent decades has been the "personalization" of nonhuman entities. Historians look at the influence of large structures and processes--demography, ecology, economics, geography. While all sorts of history are still being written, there is a clear movement away from focusing on the great man and the big event. And these changes have affected education down to the earliest grades. No longer is the history of the nation represented to the young in terms of the exploits of its great individuals, as it was 50 years ago.

Finally, the demise of the hero can be seen as the inevitable result of a democratic society. Democratic heroes from the very beginning were different. Americans liked military victors if they acted like Cincinnatus and relinquished their military careers to return to civilian life. We suspected the strong man and loved the good loser, like Lee; we required our rulers to be subject to the will of the people. Sidney Hook aptly pointed out that if the hero is someone who changes the course of history, then it follows that a democratic community must be ever on guarf against such a person.

The contemporary observer could well be ambivalent about this whole phenomenon of the death of heroes. On the one hand, it smacks of the leveling process with which we are all familiar. The hero's decline is part of the larger process of the disenchantment of the world and the flattening-out of our experience. The landscape of the ancient hero was the rich terrain of myth and legend: east of the sun and west of the moon. Our own realm seems more barren and impoverished without the adventurers and their marvelous deeds.

On the other hand, there are somwe discomfiting things about heroes that lead us to accept their departure with forbearance. We are all a little like the child Bruno Bettelheim wrote about in The Uses of Enchantment. The heroes of history make the tyke feel insignificant; trying to duplicate the hero's deeds gives the child a sense of hopelessness and inferiority. The hero by definition is mightier than others; he or she does things that no one else is capable of doing. We will not be heroes, most of us. We will probably not even have the chanve. "It is fortune chiefly that makes heroes," someone once said. But for the devious twists and turns of a historical process over which he had no control, G. B. Redwood would probably have continued being the real-estate editor of the Baltimore News.