Hero?

Many people consider heroes to be those who they look up to or seek to emulate. Often these heroes have persevered under intense pressure or misfortune. Some heroes are simply (but not merely) parents--the people who took care of you. Aristotle’s heroes were good, appropriate, believable, and consistent--all qualities that few individuals possess. As Elie Wiesel stated in his essay in My Hero, the people others consider to be heroes are never heroic all of the time. This term ‘hero’, as applied to individual people, is one that I cannot identify with. I cannot look at anyone and say, “This person is my hero.” I find the term to be rather trite and the definition limited and unsatisfying.

The definition of a hero is limiting because it usually involves only two people – the hero and the admirer. This case is even more severe when the hero is an acquaintance of the admirer because no 3rd party has ever been privy to the heroic characteristics or actions that have made such an impression on the admirer. I propose that the definition of hero should refer to a cycle as opposed to a single entity.

The heroic cycle necessarily begins with the hero. However, the heroic actions of this person would fail to inspire others if they had never been exposed to them. We absorb this exposure through various media, and one of the most enduring forms is writing. Without the authors, the cataloguers of heroic deeds, all admiration would stem from first-person interaction. No one would be able to learn from, assimilate, or deem heroic any deed that they had not been a physical witness to. Consequently, these recorders are the heroes of the heroes.

Some writers, like Homer, immortalize the valorous actions of warriors. Others, like Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, capture the personal emotions of these warriors with poems like “In Flanders Fields.” Poets have a habit of condensing the spectrum of human passions into a brief stanza that by its nature as writing is accessible to everyone. Who would have known of the perils of the Trojan War or the death-pact of WWI soldiers without Homer’s Iliad or McCrae’s lines urging men to

“Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.”

In a similar way, journalists often capture the heroic acts of every-day people like policemen, activists, or teachers. Even artists capture these experiences with book illustrations or classic paintings. One of the most striking examples of a recorder of others’ actions being revered as a hero is Rachel Carson. In her revolutionary book, Silent Spring, Carson compiled the work of many different scientists and organizers of the fledgling environmental movement into a single scientific work that was still readable to citizens without technical backgrounds.

And so, if the recorders of these heroic actions are in themselves heroic for their efforts to document, are not the publishers and patrons of these works also commendable? They are another vital link in the cycle of the promulgation of heroic tales. These accounts are then read or witnessed by every day people who may be inspired by others’ struggles and consequently moved to their own heroic actions--thus completing the cycle.

In this cyclic human experience, is any one ‘heroic’ status more important than the other, since they all feed the next iteration? I cannot believe so. I think that to revere one facet of the cycle above all others is to cheapen the whole. This is the essential reason why I do not believe that the idea of a hero can--or should--be embodied by an individual; the individual only has a place in the wheel.