Post Modern Heroism!

Heroism a real or mythical phenomenon.

Michael von Brasch

13th August 2006. 15.00 Hours Sunday.

Paper read at the Continental Philosophy Group, Surry Hills; Sydney.

Table of Contents

Post Modern Heroism!	1
Table of Contents	2
Preface.	3
Preamble.	5
Introduction.	5
Asymmetric Warfare and dead Civilians.	7
Comic Book Heroes?	11
From Fantasy to Reality?	15
The Vietnam War (a digression)	19
A perplexed Humanist’s discussion on Heroism.	22
Conclusion	25
Analysis.	26
Introduction.	26
Existential perspectives.	26
Skeptical Musings.	28
Present World Malaise	31
Conclusion.	32
Brave Semantics!	32
Introduction	32
Courage	33
Brave	33
Valour	34
Hero	35
Conclusion.	36
Heroism and Values.	36
Introduction.	36
Victorian Heroism.	37
Second World Heroism.	38
Conclusion	38

Preface.

Writing about human heroism, is there any other kind, has proved very interesting? I have found it rather more challenging than I initially thought. The topic as so much in life is rather too vast to encapsulate my musings in a few pages or a week of thinking and writing. I am aware great mountains are missing from the small plot.

In the Preamble section I have focused on a few general issues such as the change in current warfare from symmetric: roughly equivalent armies fighting each other to asymmetric: as much smaller and weaker organization combating a militarily powerful adversary, where one side has the advantage of overwhelming firepower and technology while the other resorts to fighting among civilian centres or bases, using them like fish existing (swimming) in the ocean. I have also discussed comic book heroes as they exemplify much we learnt about heroes and make for a simple analogies. In the ‘Perplexed Humanist’ subsection I take a look at a few recent heroes and the concept of martyrdom to broaden the investigation. There have been films from Germany depicting moral heroes in the Second World War, remaining one of the few instances where the issues of good and bad are clearer-cut in received opinion.  Tackling a murkier era in history I have ventured into the Vietnam War minefield where these factors are very much less apparent. The point of this diversion is a cursory examination on why and how we construct our history and how icons or signs eventually filter through the complexities of dispute through continuing thesis and antithesis till we collectively arrive at a sustainable synthesis.

The Analysis section looks at indicators of the present World’s malaise, if indeed this is an appropriate description, as a world malaise seems to be a constant running throughout recorded history. I have also briefly looked at a Sartrean and Marxist view and at the possible need to modify our perceptions of heroism as we could be moving from a human to inhuman age. 

Brave Semantics covers the salient words of ‘Brave’, ‘Courage’, ‘Valiant’ and ‘Hero’. These four words are used so often that we frequently lose sight of their import. The reference sources are exclusively from the Oxford dictionary, though I do use other references where I think necessary.

Heroism and Values is the shortest section and addresses but one example of how valiant deeds were perceived in a gap of some eighty years. 

If as Mao Zedong in his lecture of 1938 says: ‘Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed’. Though not directly addressed, the theme is covered obliquely in the text. Another excellent question is: ‘Are heroes necessary for the dominant powerful and privileged of every land to keep control over the general population?’ Look at Ed or Fred and what they have done and if you try to emulate their achievements you will earn our enduring respect, for a while anyway!

A complaint that can be leveled at me is that of illustrating failings in our world that make heroism difficult if not possible but do not come up with any tangible constructive solutions. Subject to confirmation bias and skeptical of crowds and human leadership in displaying inherently greater capacities for wisdom and effective decision-making, my goal is not to suggest options but to examine the place of heroism today. I suspect unless a hero or heroes emerge(s), of whatever flavour, the task of climbing out of our current existential mess is un-resolvable and we will have to muddle through. I simply do not know, given the conflicting arguments, what the best answer to our pending woes might be. I am not a hero!         

Any inevitable errors or shortcomings in the text are entirely my responsibility. This is only an initial draft and the views expressed will and are subject to continual change as fresh insights and thoughts make revisions inevitable. It has been fun to compose some thoughts into text, which hopefully will not be tedious for the audience.

I would like to thank my wife, Shirley for putting up with me while I composed and wrote the text. It is not always easy to life with someone crouched over the keyboard. She proved invaluable by reading the text and making valuable corrections.      

Preamble.

Introduction.

I will readily admit the title ‘Post Modern Heroism’ smacks of being an oxymoron! If the modernist age came to an end in the rubble of Berlin and the charred embers of Tokyo city or alternatively with the collapse of the Wall and its symbolism then for some of us amid these ruins or liberation (with the possible exception of the USA) ,  there was the demise of heroism. Did this actually happen or is it still occurring? We may argue positively or negatively (or with a balance) about the necessity of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the dropping of the bomb, it was probably done with the best of intentions by the USA, but it is, for most of us, a bizarre proposition for anyone to describe it as a heroic event. As one US historian observed during a program about the War in the Pacific, discussing the fire bombing of Tokyo and the deaths of 100,000 people; a moral divide despite the ‘ifs’ and the ‘buts’ had been crossed. Regrettably and despite noble efforts to implement checks and balances against any repeat of these dark chapters in World War Two most of us would readily agree new limits of barbarity were achieved in this struggle with the Holocaust being the most extreme. The efforts for changing the conduct of war and politics have proved failures as the grim experiences keep being repeated. We simply are incapable of learning from history and continue to make the same mistakes, possibly hoping a hero will emerge to affect a beneficial change. The modern technological horrors of war, whether asymmetric or not, have led some of us to believe, the human capacity for effective heroism is being extinguished. It is very difficult to be a recognizable hero as you disintegrate in an exploding bomb, whether it is smart or not being immaterial or when a computer console operator exterminates a household.   

The US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq or the Israeli intervention in Lebanon may be the result of sincerely held beliefs about the locus of good and evil but even such hawks as Donald Rumsfeld or Ehud Olmert are unlikely to employ the word ‘heroism’ or describe themselves as heroes in their sorry debacle of finding the correct measure of right through might. As soon as children, the aged and the innocent die the rhetoric of the world’s leadership begins to sound decidedly un-heroic even hollow. The reality of today’s world and our anxieties are articulated in T. S. Eliot’s; ‘The Hollow Men’:  ‘This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper’. Our concern may be that he has it wrong and while whimpering (un-heroic?) we will dissolve within the bangs set off by goodly if wrong-minded authorities. Eliot’s words do resonate when it comes to current heroism, which seems more frequently done with inaudible whimpers than glorious bangs.   

We loathe the unconsidered resolution of the US-Anglo and Israeli brinkmanship because it smacks more of fear than a heroic determination to build a better, nobler world. As Tony Blair admitted: ‘My concern is that we cannot win this struggle by military means or security measures alone, or even principally by them. … We have to put our ideas up against theirs’. A laudable recognition that at least he is beginning to understand the limits of violent technological force and the importance of making our and his ideas palatable to the ever growing angry populace of the Middle East. Other foreign lives such as Lebanese or Iraqi have become mere currency to maintain the façade of lofty ideals, disguising our incapacity to find resolutions. Our leaders appear to be arguing for the merit of it being better for some of these Third World civilians to die now rather than more of them to die later! If this is their pragmatic outlook, we are living in an un-heroic and sorry world. Among the West today there appear to be no heroes to give us hope for a ‘peaceful’ solution. No matter how lovable, Washington’s Donald Duck does not have the answer.   

Is there or can heroism exist as a phenomenon for any Post Modernist or even for the course of human existence in the twenty-first century? Has the labelling, seen from our present point of view, for ages once described as heroic, distorted both the meaning of the word as well as the interpretive framework for our recorded history, transforming them into mythical fabled eras? Do we need heroes, those inspirational forebears who were certain of, even blessed with, right as well as wrong and acted accordingly even if we recognize there may be inexcusable blemishes in the narrative? Without them do we risk collapsing into moral ambivalence or relativism? (If so is this a bad outcome?) Is the labelling of events and the deeds of people involved as heroic, a distorting filter over messier and grayer past realities? Those of us profoundly suspicious of any and all ‘grand narratives’, whether they are coated in terms such as ‘democracy’, ‘globalization’, ‘liberty’, ‘the market driven economy’, ‘justice’, ‘rule of law’, ‘freedom’ and ‘humanity’ must wonder about heroism’s value in our hectic and all too muddled human environment. Good intentions, stupidly if valiantly executed do not or should not qualify as a form of heroism many of us will argue. Whether we support or oppose current USA and Israeli activities in the Middle East, whether fighting the good war on terror or in self-defense, most of us would be hard pressed to describe their decisions and their execution as heroic. Only the most ardent would not concur with Colonel Tim Collins (to me an intelligent possibly heroic observation), who commanded the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment and observed at the Royal Institute of International Affairs: ‘We have clearly no plan… We are relying entirely… on military muscle to impose freedom and democracy.’  Indeed the label ‘hero’ as it has always been from David and Goliath onwards usually resonates with the ‘underdog’, who in this case becomes day by day those having the US president’s ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ thrust upon them. It is probably the people in Iraq and Lebanon who are praying and hoping for heroes or a hero to appear and drive out, what to them are their oppressors. 

The word ‘hero’ has become diluted and some of us may wonder about its application for sporting and entertainment legends. These individuals have performed remarkably and touched many people’s lives but are their deeds immortal or heroic? Where is the valour, other than in their years of constant lonely training and toil or is it at the moment of triumph? Those who struggle but fail are usually not visible and do not get the opportunity to be forgotten. We can describe, the efforts of unrecognized health care individuals, especially those ministering to the incurably afflicted, teachers prevailing in an under resourced education system and at least succeeding in molding their students into literate and numerate adults and other sections of every country’s population as performing heroically in near impossible situations but often we do not know who they are. Mother Teresa and her sisterhood, working in the slums of Calcutta springs readily to mind. Many may applaud other fields of human endeavour, such as boudoir deeds, both past and present on the very reasonable assumption that it is more heroic to make love than war and continuing discussions of heroism on the battlefield only keeps the embers glowing. The difficulty of universalizing the expression through normalizing it, we forget about the extremities and limits, whether they be the axis of cowardice or valour or some other measure such as say hedonism, assuming of course cowardice or hedonism are the opposite of bravery. The concepts are muddled allowing for what should be a disallowed term: heroic coward! Cowardly hero? (implying presumably a frightened rebel who cannot follow our father’s or cultural precepts).           

The formula for a hero is in most people’s minds someone, whether an individual or group, having the clarity of vision to implement their perceived sense of justice and taking the necessary action to defeat the wrong done upon a more muddled multitude. Movie-makers, whether US, Hong Kong or Japanese, are quite competent at distilling out the essence of heroic ripping yarns, such as ‘the Seven Samurai’, the Magnificent Seven’, many of the Clint Eastwood westerns. The messages are easier and clearer to distil when events happen in another historical period. The opposition can be painted bad without recourse to their constantly changing humanity. It would be unthinkable to make a film today about a group of Somalian or Nicaraguan, Yemeni or Arab heroes exacting vengeance upon a team of US or British professionally and martially trained mercenaries armed to the teeth, and single-mindedly focused on liberating the local population from the vice of Western global exploitation. There are of course quite a number of films portraying the brave efforts of the US security services foiling the endeavours of misguided but always very evil terrorists. The formula for heroic depictions usually requires a clear sighted, skilled individual(s), recognizing the injustice visited by a tyrant, whether an individual or an exploitative group, and taking action, often violent action on behalf of the ineffectual but oppressed population, thereby accomplishing their liberation and social stability. Rarely is social stability examined as a code word for establishing subordination to a new power structure, usually an elite keen to preserve their ideals. The story tends to fall apart when neither hero nor anti-hero are signally good or bad, the affected population does not wish to be liberated on the hero’s terms and the outcome produces only destruction and death to those wishing to remain uninvolved.

Today we have plenty of oppressed and exploited multitudes across the world and oppressors abound in all flavours, but the heroes appear to be failing or are simply absent, unable to deliver George Bush’s noble goal of democracy and freedom for everyone still alive.   

Asymmetric Warfare and dead Civilians.  

Killing a carload of possible but un-convicted terrorists may have utilitarian merit, assuming there is no possibility for error, but is hardly heroic, and executing the Al Qaida chief in Iraq by wiping out a dwelling with innocent residents inside through smart bombs does not smack of justice and the nobility of US military values. Expediency in arriving at a desired result is generally not understood as being heroic. We have fortunately not reached the stage, nor hopefully ever will, of ascribing the slaughter of civilians, whether innocent or partially complicit, as heroic. 

A dramatic change has taken place in warfare during the Twentieth Century, namely the evolution of ever growing civilian deaths during combat. They are the ones who die and suffer not the opposing combatants who find it advantageous to fight and hide amongst them. The US arsenal makes it impossible for their adversary to engage them in any terrain other than one inhabited by civilians. This trend has become progressively more severe with civilians increasingly shouldering the burden of death and destruction, while the military, especially those from US-Anglo, Israeli and their Hamas, Hizbullah (Hezbollah?) opponents as well as the growing numbers of Iraqi insurgents, becoming these people’s  effective executioners. The Reuters published estimate as of the 28th July 2006 for the Lebanon crisis gives the following numbers:

Lebanese Army = 20; Lebanese Civilians = 360; Hizbullah = 11
Israeli Military = 24; Israeli Civilians = 17

If these numbers are even reasonably accurate, and they have grown as well as continuing to keep growing since then, it graphically demonstrates the dilemma in modern warfare. Israel’s stated justification is the removal and if possible, the destruction of Hizbullah. The Hizbullah, we are told only amount to some 5 – 6,000 strong combatants. The much larger Lebanese army, which is not allegedly involved and could neither hope to fight the Israeli army in battle nor defend their citizens and the whole population rather than Hizbullah become collateral damage and a great recruiting ground for future recruits. The Israeli strategy of destroying Hizbullah is admirable but probably unachievable as Hizbullah can merge back into the population till Israel’s military tires of the exercise and then return to strike again. Israel’s government and military in pursuing their goal have inflicted deaths many hundreds of times greater upon the Lebanese civilian population but left Hizbullah and Hamas operational, possibly even stronger for tomorrow or in the next five years (consider the film of the Battle for Algiers).  In the process Israel is suffering greater fatalities in both their army and civilian population as well as ensuring increased recruitment for their foes.  Their targeted enemy is the only really effective military force, as witnessed throughout the Arab world, of being capable of fighting back. From the Lebanese population’s viewpoint it is understandable many of them see the Hizbullah as heroes. Can or will the Israeli population see their own political and military leadership in terms of heroism, especially when or if they withdraw and recognize failure? How many of us will find culprits for the slaughter, preferring to simply forget. 

An interesting idea was presented by a hawkish journalist (no offense to hawks, they are beautiful birds) in the ABC’s Late Line program, Israel rather than fighting Hizbullah should destroy the Syrian regime thereby destabilizing the region further and expanding the scale of slaughter. Unquestionably neither Hizbullah nor Hamas can function without Syrian and Iranian arms and money but stopping them in doing this through invasions is certainly not the solution other than expanding numbers of freedom fighters or terrorists. Locating the arms dealers and manufacturers is certainly a more productive ambition. Sophisticated weapons such as guided missiles or artillery require the resources of a functioning state and if the UN or USA has any real power, this supply channel could be very much reduced. It would require effective international policing rather than brute military display. In so far as Syria and Iran perceive advantages in helping the ‘terrorist’ organizations not a great deal has changed in the machinations of power politics. Have any realistic efforts been undertaken to enlist Iran and Syria into solving the Middle East problems rather than ostracizing them and leaving them to fan the ever growing flames?    

In case I am accused of singling out Israel and the US as examples of countries using excessive military force to fight a disproportionately smaller foe, their experience is common to the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the British in Cyprus and Kenya and the Russians in Afghanistan. It is the problem of how to fight an asymmetric war heroically. This makes their stubbornness to repeat the same mistakes remarkable. The US and Israeli defense forces (as indeed the French, English and Russian) are structured to fight other armies in battle and there they perform exceptionally well as ‘Desert Storm’ or the defeat of the Arab alliance attest. They are not designed to fight the asymmetric war they are encountering in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq and to date no one has come up with an acceptable or useful formula to build the necessary force to combat these guerilla units. Special forces appear to be part of the answer but are normally too small and do not have the local knowledge to have much impact in the urban warfare encountered in the region. The outraged objections from supporters of current doctrine will stress that all too often the civilians, by taking up arms or supporting the insurgents, are no longer protected and deserve the consequences from their involvement; an old lament. By not wearing uniforms, the irregular fighters (part civilian part warrior, they do are not members of an established army) merging into the population background, a properly recognizable army is severely handicapped in their capacity to fight legally or humanely. A ten or a seventy year old equipped with an AK-47 is just as capable as a fit trained young man to kill a soldier from ambush. Some commentators have suggested under these circumstances, whether involved in combat or not, civilians lose their rights as non-combatants in these circumstances.   

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, warfare was almost exclusively the domain of national armies, symmetric warfare, with regiments and battalions triumphing over their enemy colleagues and involvement by civilians seen as, unnecessary, undesirable, illegal and when it occurred these civilians were labelled as terrorists, bandits or partisans. Civilians taking arms against foreign yet legally established troops were viewed as a barbaric horror to be bloodily suppressed. This view remains relevant today. It is interesting how the portrayal of a terrorist or freedom fighter has evolved during the last hundred years by the image-makers and received opinion. From being heroes they are now the enemy we must fight. A word that has fallen from popular usage is ‘Guerilla’, they were the nightmare of every Napoleonic soldier in Spain from 1809 onwards. The French Franc Tireurs during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 caused the German Army more heartache than Napoleon the III’s forces. Neither the French in the Napoleonic period nor the Prussians in 1870 understood these civilian combatants to be heroes prepared to fight and die for the country; it was not the way war was meant to be fought. (In World War I the experiences of 1870 affected the way German commanders viewed the Belgian and French civilian resistance fighters. They reacted harshly, earning the world’s ire). Heroes, generals and civil authorities believed, belonged in the army and the civilians’ tasks were to support them with food, logistics, services and keep the home fires burning. In World War I, if we exclude the numbers who perished from the continuing Allied blockade and the Spanish Influenza, 95% of the deaths were military, but this changes by the Second World War. Table A.a illustrates the shifting balance between military and civilian deaths.

Table. A.a  ‘Percentages in the Two World Wars and the Korean intervention of Military and civilian deaths’. 

Wars	Percentage of Military Deaths	Percentage of Civilian Deaths	
			
First World War	95%	5%	
Second World War	42%	58%	
Korean War	16%	84%	
  
We do not have to think very deeply to understand the significance of the data presented above. Whether there are arguments supporting the US led coalitions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq as well as Afghanistan and we acknowledge that there was perfidy from their enemies, it is the civilian population who pay and pay with their lives. This is an outcome that diminishes the stature and respect of our well trained soldiers. The Vietnam conflict, though not having generally agreed numbers, partly because of continuing non-collaboration between the affected countries’ scholars, still allows us a general benchmark. The Vietnamese government gave out the following statistics on April the 3rd 1995: Combatants = 1 million; Civilians = 4 Million, the accepted figures for the US coalition are: US = 58,226, Australia = 400 and New Zealand = 38, they simply are not comparable as percentages. If we accept the Vietnamese numbers as reasonable we can derive the following percentages: Civilian = 80% and military = 20%. Even if more accurate calculations reveals a 70 – 30 ratio of civilian to military deaths, the phenomena of civilians as the victims in post-modern war continues to be sustained. (More likely I suspect, the ratio will swing to a rise in civilian deaths). This is exacerbated by such modern terrors as land mines and planned land poisonings such Agent Orange. To reiterate: Killing civilians by the latest hardware and with professionally trained soldiers is not viewed by the overall majority of us as belonging within our concept of heroism. We can feel some sympathy for the flyers, having their orders to drop bombs on non-combatants, and they are courageous when flying into heavily defended enemy sectors, but they offend our sense of who a hero is or do they? As human beings and presumably with the capacity to choose, they accepted their function to unleash tons of high explosives upon often non-military targets. After the Nuremberg trials, the defense by any country’s military that they were just following orders was deemed unsustainable, making it necessary for each and everyone to follow their conscience about the justice of what they are doing. My Lai as a more recent case in point or the even more recent transgressions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the consequences for the perpetrators do caste doubts upon US capacity to exercise justice. We may have sympathy for the US combat personnel who marched into Iraq with high moral hopes and find themselves mired by atrocities and crimes, wondering how this came about, as they are ‘Americans’ afterall. Sadly their claim of being heroes becomes untenable.

Lebanon is still too fresh but previous incursions into its territory and the crimes that occurred at Sabra and Shatila do not promise any reason for optimism. If the Guardian’s accounts are accurate, most Israeli troops believe their actions in Lebanon are wholly justified. ‘Few of the soldiers were sympathetic to the plight of Lebanese civilians ravaged by the Israeli assault that followed Hizbullah’s July 12 raid, “They should complain to Hizbullah,” said Private Alex Gronov.’ This outlook is frequently fertile ground for later commissions of crimes, though I am not suggesting there are none currently occurring nor things are not grim enough.

From their (Israeli) perspective after fighting a morally murky war in the occupied Palestinian territories they believe they are operating against a recognizable enemy and defending their country. Patriotism has since the dawn of recorded history been one of the most frequent justifications for engaging in war. The Israeli soldier’s certainties may change as the conflict mires and the casualties mount. Much as many people in the world, the sight of dead civilians and burnt out homes becomes eventually intolerable, leading sometimes to a sinking of morale in the soldiers and a repugnance by the people who cannot see an end to the slaughter. It is difficult to see how Hizbullah will not rise in stature throughout the Arab world and make gains as the fighting draws out. The contest will be between the various insurgent groups as to who will wear the mantle of ‘Heroes of Islam’. The US Army will eventually withdraw, wondering how with their arsenal they managed to leave un-heroically and un-victorious.     

If we are unable to find heroes amidst our modern technologically trained military there is occasional solace with the accomplishments of our police, medical, fire and rescue services, though whether the word heroism readily springs to mind is open for discussion. Some mothers of very young children may argue that they should be enlisted in asymmetric operations, having with patience and great forbearance reared terrors into functioning people!   

Where are easily identifiable heroes to be found?

Comic Book Heroes? 

The simple Comic Book stories we remember from our childhood days were spaces abounding with heroes. Davey Crocket, Kit Carson, Dan Dare and the many others in a wide selection of boy’s own heroes. (I was across the equivalent girl’s literature and the models of heroines portrayed therein). Did they and do they, whether in computer games or on the screen, represent what many of us believe to be our model for heroism? Alternatively have they diminished the lustre of true human heroism? Compared to stories from generations of our bards. Humans can never hope to match fictional heroes as there is too much intervening ‘reality’.       

Are our easily recognizable heroes now the ‘comic’ (both in the sense of ridiculous and comic-books) larger than life beings who pop up at box office releases in the guise of ‘Superman’, ‘Spiderman’, ‘Jedi Knights’, ‘the Justice League’, with Batman and the Charlie’s Angels just too silly to merit our attention? Superman being an indestructible individual and therefore, meeting our understanding of being immortal, can fit within the simple definition of a hero, despite being the most powerful of a weird, confused bunch of supposedly philanthropically minded monsters. (formula driven idealists?) His endless fight, dressed in totally implausible raiment, against a league of super-villains for ‘Truth’, ‘Justice’ and ‘the American way’ smacks of the very apotheosis of the Post-Modern Hero! Simplicity!! (simple grand narratives are possible) We generally enjoy watching the impossible attainments from these incredible figures! 

The ‘American Way’ that has destabilized the Middle East, the Western economies and commenced a war based at least in part upon falsehoods (Weapons of Mass destruction?), could Superman support the at times inarticulate, mumblings and the praying from the White House? Given his quest for ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ is there a un-resolvable contradiction? Would he, superman, be obliged to aid the unfortunates in their ravaged lands and punish the misdeeds of the Pentagon and the White House supremos? Realities do highlight fantasy’s confusions!  Given his undoubted and almost indestructible powers how would he go about achieving a result that meets these other two criteria; ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’?  

In fairness to the man of Krypton he is not noted for his intelligence, as has often been observed by wits, the Gods tend to compensate those with an abundance of brute strength by withholding from them too much cleverness and wit. (Maybe Jeb and George Bush are the illegitimate sons of the man of steel?) Absence of cleverness is a common problem for many legendary heroes, when we consider Achilles, Siegfried and King Richard the Lion Heart. The key to ending the Trojan War came through the guile and cunning of Ulysses and not through an outcome by combat with physically adept warriors. It must also be observed that there was little evidence of the wisdom, goodness or mental acuity from the Gods, who have, we are told, now fled our smart if selfish peopled globe, during this grim period of supposedly heroic struggle. Even if most of us do not subscribe to the proposition that our earth is a horrible place it is undoubtedly sometimes gray and we do recognize there are inherent complexities towards achieving social harmony. We may attribute this sorry situation to any number of causes such as the Manichean dualist idea of a constant battle between light and dark or more foundational premises such as the presence and existence of good and at times more interestingly Evil! Superman more than any other hero is an ideal, doing his crime-fighting not overly burdened by too much cerebral calculation or concerns and knowing his incredible strength will see things come right. With his might he brings the sorry slobs of his world to right! To make him appear more attractive, he is a modest hero, adopting the disguise of the mild mannered, mediocre reporter of a city popular news paper (not an environment for rational thinking we may well consider!), only resorting to his authentic self when flying faster than a speeding bullet to combat self evident human perfidy. That his story captures the imagination of many people is an interesting reflection on our current culture. (Interestingly the planet Krypton appears to match planet Earth in supporting two photogenic genders for their species procreation. In a later episode there must be a Superwoman or girl surely?) Occasionally extreme examples are revealed during the news blackout season over Christmas, where the somewhat simple-minded endeavours of quirky but not normally interesting individuals are recorded in the tabloids for our post lunch titillation. One tragic if absurd tale was about a New York dweller dressed in the easily identifiable costume of the great traveller from the super people’s planet, being discovered dead in a freezer the morning after his ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘the American way’ patrol through the alleys of urban vice and crime, where sadly his quest to bring the crooks to justice was foiled by a self-sealing door to a jumbo sized fridge! The police commented upon this misfortune, by observing that Hal was a nut but a generally harmless nut! How many troubled people are brought to institutions suffering from delusions of being Superman remains, as far as I am aware, statistically unrecorded but undoubtedly there would be a steady trickle. If most of us were honest with ourselves, being Superman does have some appeal even if we might have to pay the price of forgoing too much thinking and anxiety! Unnecessary when we are superman and an indestructible hero! Do we need to worry about the consequences of this material on the minds of our can-do high-tech military?

A few pointers from comic book and Western heroes do reveal the following: 1. The hero’s place of origin is a mystery. 2. When everything is impossibly grim for a helpless multitude they mysteriously appear. 3. Their appearance is always theatrical. 4. Not knowing their background they have very little personality other than accomplishing the task on hand. 5. They hardly ever engage in negotiations, their issues are so cleared cut, only swift action is appropriate. 6. They vanish or ride off into the sunset, leaving behind, we assume, a better place. They never help with rebuilding the dysfunctional chaos they must leave behind. (too hard and un-heroic?) 7. They come from nowhere with a single mission, do it and vanish. 8. Their livery, if not their personality, show them to be a hero. The costume identifies them, meaning they need to reveal very little of their personality, if indeed they have any? The lives of human heroes are of course better known but this tends to muddy the clarity of their moment of heroism. For instance when we learn the hero was a murderer before signing up and then afterwards engaged in reprehensible behaviour we tend to assess his performance within the whole live and in this instance we would hardly describe him or her as heroic. Psychotic or serial killers generally do not qualify in this category.

Another aspect of the comic book hero and to a lesser extent the western equivalent is the tapestry on which their deeds are portrayed. They all are in control of their material world. No Tsunamis or earthquakes disrupt their efforts. Superman and the rest never get tired or sick or have a limb mangled from the aftermath of an explosion, or get hungry, starve, suffer excruciating as well as incapacitating pain or are humiliated by better fed, stronger brutes, they are always examples of how they have made their  bodies (their thingness) work in harmony with their clear intentionalities. Their bodies never let them down. In the case of superman he is blessed with incredible strength, kryptonite muscles of an order that can bring a fully laden goods train to a halt, speed of movement supposedly faster than a bullet (from which firearm is never explained), he can fly through the air, how is left to our imagination, and having X-Ray eyes he can see through most opaque obstructions. Unlike us he is the master (or if a superwoman arrives mistress) of the material world. In the Olympic Games he would win every event effortlessly and because of this certainty he does not need to calculate too much ahead, as success, given his body’s prowess, is assured. He does not think but acts! We as human beings simply cannot compete.

I don’t ever recall seeing a comic book or even a supposedly human hero on film, who rather than bending the material world and crushing evil by their strength, solved seemingly insoluble problems like our present terrorist or Middle East crisis through their superior capacity for thinking. Heroes generally don’t think a lot, it smacks somehow of being un-heroic. Rarely are clever people characterized as heroic, rather they are devious, cunning and duplicitous, necessary but ignoble. King Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans are incredibly brave even if they were slain to a man, the calculating Athenian command however do not earn this accolade even though their navy was victorious at Salamis. Why because they planned for a winning strategy, rather than go out and fight courageously but unthinkingly. Scientists like Steven Hawkings are seen as admirable but usually, despite enormous handicaps and great work in the realm of thinking, not as heroes.

A silly even insulting Hollywood film, are there not many (?), about the Warsaw Uprising in 1943 has the well fed, incredibly skilful Jewish well armed resistance slaying vast numbers of SS troops armed with armour. It is insulting to the memory of the starving, ill-equipped, unsupported (by the Polish population) fighting a desperate battle against contingents of relatively lightly armed SS and police because they understood, having no other options, as the nearing date for the forcible deportations loomed. They believed it was better to fight and die in the Ghetto than just perish at Auschwitz. By fictionalizing the event and portraying it as a fight between heroic, well nourished Jewish youths and the robot-like forces of oppression the story simply becomes absurd. They become cartoon characters and Paper maché heroes, larger than life, impervious to any physical actualities, supplanting real human heroism from tired, hopeless people fighting against a non-winnable and implacable destiny. Almost every Holocaust film is implausible, for how do you get actors to starve and sink into degrees of hopelessness of those who actually suffered, died or endured this hell?             

The Western heroes have blown away as tumble weed, while the melting pot of Hollywood dream manufacture changes course, producing expensive non-heroic, conspiracy theory trivia and nonsense gender comedies. Even in films such as ‘Black Hawk Down’, ‘Platoon’ or ‘Saving Private Ryan’ it is difficult to discern any heroes in their woolly plot. The US GI Joe and Jane are unquestionably well intentioned, muscle-honed, imbued with the full armoury of their nation’s certitudes, succeeding if not in bringing the foe to justice, at least, usually exterminating masses of them through their awesome available fire power. They rarely function outside the comic book paradigms, making it rather difficult for those of us in the audience to see them as heroes.  In a film where the first US Amazon (superwoman?) earns the ‘Medal of Honor’, the actual Iraqis are so inept that the interest shifts upon the cowardly behaviour of her male crew, who gun her down to survive the helicopter crash. Whether she was a hero (heroine) or just stupid remains an unresolved question in the audience’s mind. Films such as the ‘Green Beret’ are so inane that even considering it through former distorted youthful semantic lens of heroism would prove futile. The leading actor, John Wayne, appears as though doped to the neck with any number of noxious substances, restricting his capacity to perform cogently as he is unable to say any coherent words during a plot where the Viet Cong are mowed down in the thousands and US ‘justice’ (and way) prevails. The portrayal of the Viet Cong commander as a minor loopy nonentity more interested in assaulting the village maiden’s chastity than combating the enemy is an inspired stroke of nonsense in a best forgotten production. These various films illustrate the danger of reducing the Hero’s stature by diminishing the quality of the adversary. To be a hero his adversary must also be heroic or otherwise the story becomes farce and boring. 

From Fantasy to Reality?

If we accept the merit of Simone Weil’s pithy words: ‘Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life’. And that Heroism may in fact belong to the three quarters of that part of our lives it may be useful to ponder reality’s tickles. Assuming, of course, there is reality outside our fictional constructs. 

Most of us expect on hearing the expression ‘Post Modern Hero’, someone not belonging within the cartoon domain with its fantastic bloodless representations but composed of attractive flesh and blessed with human comprehensible purposes as well as insights, even if they only exist in the media hyper-space. True they inhabit the entertainment ether and are realized through film stars, sporting identities or popular musicians. Not so very much different from cartoon characters and we see a Batman film some of may prefer the older comic book portrayals. The plot is invariably anthropomorphic-ally centred, we have yet to see the terminator prevailing heroically against other cyborgs without any humans present or a human good arising from the mayhem. (The terminators won and exterminated mankind). In Terminator II, the robot was the hero, but we all knew it was really Arnie. Till Michael Jackson’s recent brush with the law and the excitement engendered by the possibility of his peccadilloes becoming public knowledge, he belonged within that peculiar realm of yesterday’s (Post Modern) Heroes. He probably sung the song ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’ at one of his previous appearances? His motor cavalcade from Munich airport in 1992, I recall, was greater than that given to most heads of state and much of the city’s shopping centre was sealed off to us mere mortals so he could make his selective purchases in comfort! It was very clear, given the youthful jubilation and the press superlatives that he inhabited another realm well beyond that of most other human beings. In part his endless face reconstructions achieved the objective of transforming the real Michael Jackson into a bizarre heroic Putto. 

Film and its stars, even if we accept the stars are in reality only human, undergo a metamorphosis, becoming virtual heroes, who often in this guise become more real than their rather less enchanting actual lives. Nappies and screaming children can destroy the fragrance of every hero very quickly! The mundane, the ordinary, the trivial are filtered out of their lives and we are often left with an unrealizable epic as well as individual. Most people today will know the names of film stars but very few will even know their recent military and civilian heroes. I may be wrong, but I suspect a survey among Australians and New Zealanders will yield very low numbers when it comes to identifying their Victoria Cross heroes, with the possible exception of Captain Alfred John Shout, mainly because his medals sold recently for more than a million dollars.   

The USA as the world’s super-power and with the notable exception of some of its own harshest critics such as Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, presents a culture when seen on Television, anchored in its own certainties, especially those of their own inherent greatness. (For historical reasons this does not appear to be the case with Australia where the rubric ‘the “great” Lucky Country’ seems preferable). Many countries, if the popular medium can be believed, base their moral ascendancy, if we hear their leaders correctly, on such worthy values as democracy, their constitution or culture, but most importantly on God and His justice. The Divinity’s land of determined freedoms under His law, as though a hierarchy from His or Her throne actually exists and somehow we must be in bondage to it. We are well served to consider Cicero’s words from the First Century B. C.: ‘We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free’. This can lighten our burden in striving for individual freedom. Dostoevsky’s in his tale of the Grand Inquisitor contrasts the contract we make with those who have power. They give us bread and certainty so we do not have to endure the burden of our own free will! By obeying our country’s law we believe we are content, but are we free? Some may argue there is a distinction between lawless and regulated freedom and the second is preferable, namely limited freedom. A topic for further discussion is the question of limited freedom being freedom? Here in this complex of law, freedom or liberty, justice and the struggle between the individual and their community, can heroism be found? When is it right to follow the laws and commands of our government and leaders and when should we resist them? The community and its leaders, whether democratic or not, are frequently wrong and is it heroic for any one of us to oppose them? Anthony Trollope’s observation: ‘There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people’; being worth reflection. It can lead to the paradoxical situation of freely uniting a ‘democratic’ population through organizing a good war with plenty of ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and of the ‘American Way’ for all. It is conceivable the USA, during their inevitable darker moments of anxiety, on what has gone wrong, see merit in reinventing their decision making based upon the Papal hierarchy. With God working through the leadership, (at times George Bush junior’s words sound as though they are ex cathedra pronouncements), spilling, gushing or even cataracting over the population, salvation without heroes can be possible. The Holy Spirit illuminating military, civil as well as religious community organs by the word, gives the confused, clarity and a mission. It makes it, if we accept the verity of the word, essentially unnecessary to construct any alternative individual models of truth, justice and the world. This can produce at times absurdities such as ‘It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world’.  If some, somehow, as for instance say Colonel Harkworth, after his resignation during the illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970, come to antithetical conclusions about the inherent value of God’s blessed agents and especially the leader (Richard Nixon), they are generally viewed as odd or having tumbled into unacceptable patterns of behaviour, even of being possessed by an ill spirit. 

Well may we imagine the presidential sage nodding his head, affirming Blaise Pascal’s oxymoron ‘It is not good to have too much liberty, it is not good to have all one wants’. Why does he not heroically admit this to us? We have been commissioned to bring as a boon an excess of liberty and democracy (not necessarily the same thing) to recalcitrant foreigners with our smart bombs but in doing this are we liberated ourselves? We know, and we hope our global leadership also understands, the devil is a fallen angel and the transformation can be quite sudden or evolve over time. If the Devil can be viewed as a hero then this may not matter very much! Oscar Wilde is astutely prescient about the leadership of any country, and by definition us, namely: ‘Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob’. Is it unrealistic for us to find heroes amongst the mob? Possibly not if they must emerge from somewhere or as has already been inferred from nowhere? The concept of a mob even if we get accused of being arrogant is not usually the field of future heroes.

In contrast to heroism by agencies of strength, a more recent genre of films from Germany make an interesting contrast on the usual formula of the simple-minded yet clear sighted, skilled, physically adroit athlete (the film with Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump springs readily to mind) present in the right place and time to correct some grave injustice or rescue wounded comrades, The noble yet troubled, even psychically tortured individual, who realizes the wrongs committed by their government (something apparently difficult to believe in the USA or Australia) and follow their own ‘moral conscience’. Choosing an individual path of resistance against the incumbent ruler and authority is rather a more European theme. The strength of these moral heroes lies in their existential difficulties with the institutions, which create the ethical and social frameworks that mislead the population into supporting bad or dangerous aspirations. Invariably these institutions are the Church, parents, teachers and schools, police and the law as well as the depiction of the overall national culture that moral heroes find themselves railing against. The message is clear: social and cultural authorities are or can be very negative agents in developing a sound semantic foundation within a community, blurring the sensibilities of the living with promises of a good life if each person does their duty as part of the social contract. They (political and cultural authorities) all too often direct the construction of our conscience and moral framework. The difficulty most of us have and the moral hero does not, is recognizing the malignancies in human organized authorities and taking appropriate as well as measured action to correct the ill. Moral heroism does, unlike comic book heroism, require a measure of proportion and intelligence. Assassinating the prime minister, for example, because he is planning to do away with unionism in Australia or keeping refugees off shore, is certainly a disproportionate response, most of might believe and better resolved by voting him out of office. But were he to engage us in a catastrophic war where most of us would perish, the action may be appropriate? If we are honest with ourselves, we would realize that changing Australian government policy by killing one man would be utterly ineffective and only foster draconian reprisals from his successor. This is part of the strength and weakness of parliamentary democracy, namely no one is entirely responsible for the implementation and execution of policy. This is safe but probably not heroic. (The imagery of the individual, hero or not, resisting the state remains very powerful and can definitely colour the skepticism some of us have for any and all human institutions). In Sophie Scholl, Claus von Stauffenberg and other portrayals of ‘good ethical people’ living under an evil dictatorship, we find the characters taking strong individual action against the state as well as their community and thereby paying the ultimate penalty with their lives. In the film Napoli, the young fit lad protests against the establishment by not fighting in the second round of a boxing match and thereby being caste out from the comfortable community of the young Nazi elite. Even in the movie titled ‘Downfall’, the exhausted and enfeebled Adolf Hitler leaves some of us rather ambivalent and even sympathetic with his plight, and by no stretch of the imagination is he portrayed as a hero, even an evil hero. His screen character left me wondering why so many Germans followed him to a Götterdämmerung, when as a shambling, shuffling shell of a man, he looked more suited to occupying a room in a rest home. 

The great Tyrant is in this and other depictions transformed into a victim, rather than an agent of great human disaster, even if during his time in office he was a hero to some and after his death the Satan to most. It is difficult to paint him as both man and hero or antihero at the same time. Heroes have something supra-human even godly, or, if this is too strong an abstraction of a character set, as hero or arch villain their humanity should vanish deep into the shadows. Adolf Hitler sitting in a gazebo sipping a cup of tea and worrying about why the gardener is moody, does not reflect either great valour or perfidy and spoils the constructed image of him as the son of Beelzebub. To represent Nazism or for that matter Stalinism, is very difficult when only looking at the leader as a man, then they are human all too human, not heroic but neither monsters (either). Then and now the question of patriotism, duty, following national goals, readiness to sacrifice oneself tend to muddy any reflections on who was valiant and what is courageous and how those chose to act during the turmoil of a complex situation are to be understood. (They are not heroes if they have been coerced). The problem is well addressed in J. P. Sartre’s trilogy, where the principal characters individually reach answers on what they need to do during the turbulence of war. There are no single clear answers, but many possibilities leading to living and doing in the world and this makes embracing the choice for a moral hero rather more difficult. These solitary regime opponents are troubling to those of us less committed or clear about moral certainties, because we simply do not often know whether our government and authorities are transgressing or have transgressed community and social limits. 

Most of us are too pragmatic not to accept that governance is a difficult responsibility and those charged with executing it, probably mean well, even when making mistakes especially when not possessing the requisite skills. ‘Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair’.  Those troubled by the limitations of our leaders are not comforted by the thought of: ‘There is a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true’. Most of us continue to wrestle with what is true and what are falsehoods; incapable of fully understanding the perfidies committed by our establishment till it has become history. As Paul Valéry observed and for those imbued with a jaundiced perception of power will endorse: ‘Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them’. Whether leaders of dictatorships or democracies, once in power, they are inclined to keep us away from the actual affairs of state. Much of the theatre and machinations of democratic government involves the privileged powerful and their efforts on keeping us under control, as the many ministerial television interviews reveal.    

Unfortunately the various German moral resisters, heroic as they may have been, failed in their endeavours to effect regime change or more importantly alter the population’s existential perceptions of their crumbling and dangerous world. Most of the officers at Zossen; von Stauffenberg discovered, despite the very bleak prospects looming for Germany were against the assassination attempt and continued to understand their duty in terms of supporting the defense forces and the state even if they had private reservations about the future. Un-heroic maybe but is castigating Major Remer when hearing Hitler’s voice and receiving orders from his commander in chief over the telephone, then taking action against the conspiracy, an instance of moral cowardice or turpitude?

It may well be that moral heroism is the finest expression of human courage and needs more examination. ‘It is not easy to depict the lonesomeness, the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously- obtained (or just oppositional) information will be passed on (will even be recognized as such) – or passed on in time – or recognized as vital in the maze of couriers (or received opinion). Though written to describe to perils of the resistance in World War Two, it does also rather well illustrate the dilemma of the Moral Hero. To be a hero (moral or otherwise) implies the severe burden of being alone, Of not being directed by someone else but performing from one’s own convictions. In the film depictions of heroes this possibly explains why the hero has no past, but acts out of only inner conviction and then disappears.   

The Vietnam War (a digression)
 
The Second World War, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Imperial regimes are relatively easy models for people to arrive rapidly at what are good, bad and straight forward moral choices. All of us believe and hope we would have resisted the commands for implementing Nazi racial elimantionist policy. There is a problem in taking one particular historical instance and using it as a model for other situations. Idi Amin is not Hitler and Ho Chi Minh was not Stalin.

When we look at other historical events is the process for arriving at quick conclusions quite as simple? For instance the Vietnam War continues to haunt the US, New Zealand and Australian psyche. Not because we lost, we did not, (at least not on the field of combat) but the word is irrelevant, it was a bad war. The stated objective of eliminating or stopping Communism was unachievable and was not what the war was about seen from many Vietnamese perspectives. Very few speak of this conflict as being heroic or having heroes among the principle players. Communism as practised by the Soviet Union came to an end in 1990, making it difficult to understand how it could ever have been perceived as the threat many thought it was in the post World War II period. It was in the 1960’s difficult for many well-meaning people to conceive of the Vietnamese people wanting their own independence even if it was under a communist rulership.     

Interesting for some of us would be a film about the opposition to the Vietnam War, whether set in the USA or Australia. Would the director and producer portray, if not a malevolent and morally corrupt, then at least an incompetent Australian Liberal or US presidential administration, which enacts dubious legislation to send non-voting twenty year old lads to fight an inappropriate war, balanced against a nobler and more courageous opposition arising from groups of intelligent and ethically aware young people ready to endure imprisonment to draw attention to their governments’ wrongdoing? The outcry from many veterans and Returned Servicemen’s organizations, as well as former highly honoured Liberal, Democrat and Republican politicians, would make the above scenario very unlikely and a quite divisive portrayal. It would endanger revenues and possible profits by polarizing public opinion. (The results of the Quiet American are an example). The targets of this mismanaged adventure might argue with some merit that they were only doing what the majority of the electorate then wanted. We as an Australian or US collective are, the establishment figures of the period would claim, responsible for the war, its conduct and eventual failure. We elected them and made them responsible for carrying out the operation and though the subject was not a major issue for the voters at the booths, they were given our license to execute foreign and domestic policy and conscript our young men. It could be claimed they merely implemented our wishes to the best of their abilities, not that many of us, if we had understood, would necessarily have agreed. Yet even the most ardent Australian Liberal supporter, would we hope, not couch the government’s involvement and decision in language using terms such as ‘courageous’, ‘brave’ or ‘valiant’. We can accept they made their decisions for utilitarian reasons such as cementing the US-Australian alliance and possibly because they were really frightened of the Red Peril, but it is certainly not a heroic chapter in their period in office. Some of us may well argue that we do not wish our political masters to be heroic, but to leave us alone so we can get on with the exhilarating task of greedily working and consuming at the trough of the global marketplace.   

Alternatively a film showing the Australian (Liberal) or the US president’s cabinet comprising of highly intelligent, very shrewd but troubled decision makers, thoughtfully and caringly engaging in a valiant effort to stem the vile canker of the Communist expansionist octopus would stretch too many people’s credulity today. We are possibly able to accept the proposition of their honourable sincerity and that they erred when arriving at their resolutions, but they were wrong and by being wrong they were partially responsible for the deaths of millions and they would, we may hope, gain much more in historical stature if they recognized this and apologized for their mistakes rather than remaining defiant, evasive or silent about their former judgement. We can accept claims that the military are blameless for the scale of destruction, hampered by political interference and that the soldiers performed their duty with zeal and expected valour. If Australians earned four Victoria Crosses, two of them posthumously and members of the US armed forces won 245 Medal of Honor of which 63% died performing their deeds, there obviously was an abundance of immediate bravery and courage, but it did not alter greatly the scale of misery caused during the conflict nor did it lead to a better world. If World War Two brought about the defeat of fascism and Japanese imperialism, what did the Vietnam war achieve other than improved weapons’ technology, refugees (boat people) and South East Asian impoverishment?

Some commentators have proposed that the problem with Vietnam and other later conflicts is not that the struggle is, or was wrong, but that, being conducted within tight moral and legal constraints, it was ineffectively executed. North Vietnam was ruled by a Communist clique and should have been invaded, ousting them out of power and bringing the population ‘Truth’, ‘Justice’ and the ‘American Way’.  The US presidency and administration, the hard liners claim, have become feeble through compliance with international laws and accepted norms of humanity and a more ruthless operation would have produced much better results. Similarly later critics of supposedly weak US presidents (Bill Clinton) bang upon their war drums and claim if he had acted more aggressively and forcefully we would not be in the mess we find ourselves. The US public could not forgive Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis, it made the country look weak. Whether he was to blame for the failed rescue mission is open for debate, but the smear on Uncle Sam’s prestige was just too much. It appears from their view that our salvation is only possible if the US public elect a strong, ‘heroic’ president capable of prompt decisive and where necessary military action. Maybe Clark Kent or Superman should run for office as George Bush junior’s term is coming to an end?        
 
A more likely outcome for such a presentation about this messy yet unresolved part of US and Australian history (from the perspective of our national identity – we meant well did we not?) is to completely muddy the narrative. Portray the government as victims of noble yet invalid assumptions, led astray by inaccurate or deceptive foreign policy assessments. The luckless young conscripts are victims of necessary, if undesirable government policies, forced to serve and make a cheery best of an unpalatable and dangerous situation. As the lead actor, Martin Sheen, in ‘Apocalypse Now’ complains when suffering from the ineptitude of four star clowns, who have abused the enthusiasm and sense of duty of their men. In films such as ‘Charley Company’ and ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ (and in ‘Platoon’), the military system and mind are identified as being responsible for the apparent misery, while the luckless men stumble through their ordeal, trying to maintain their decency. (In Charley Company the captain is a self-serving fool and in Good Morning Vietnam the Sergeant Major is a manipulative and very nasty character molded by previous military exigencies). A film portraying the military ‘mind’ and how it can be changed into something better (whether morally or socially) has not to the best of my knowledge been made. 

Returning to our script for the Vietnam conflict, the militant, scruffy longhaired student opponents in their youthful yet naïve bellicosity develop an uncaring attitude for the wounded psyche of the returned even betrayed and disillusioned veterans, where no particular person is entirely at fault. All in this script, however, do not perform heroically or actually take much responsibility for the consequences of their actions during this period and their role in the continuing saga of human misery. Undoubtedly there are exceptions like Colonel Harkworth but generally most went along with their leaders’ decisions. At least some Japanese veterans after the war set out to atone for their own and their country’s misdeeds through rituals at sacred sites. We see images of the dead and injured Vietnamese and wonder, was anyone actually accountable for this horror? We witness Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and occasionally Harold Holt or John Gorton on television but were they culpable in any way for this tragedy or was it really Ho Chi Minh and some of the recalcitrant Communist Vietnamese? How did they become ‘infected’ with communism and who among them needed saving from this malignancy and who deserved expunging for having become a social canker? Other than maybe the Viet Cong and the NVA, though given the numbers of boat people even this is questionable, the struggle produced no heroes just the dead (more than five million?), wounded, refugees, the ruined land and plenty of shades and colours of victim-hood, but Heroes? No heroes even afterwards: Jimmy Carter failed as new events swept away his moral high ground making him look weak not heroic!  Is it, today, possible to accurately or comprehensively portray the Vietnam war and extract moments of heroism from the duplicity, folly, napalm and explosions?

The conflict remains unclear in our collective minds and we prefer creative forgetting, than tackling the monsters inhabiting the marshes. Probably this arises, as so much in history, by the impact of irrational aspirations that take time to be minced into an intelligible history. It is unlikely another Saint George will appear to slay these murky beasts quickly! The possibility for constructing a meaningful account of the Vietnam war may occur when we have seen Vietnamese portrayals of the events and processes, depicting from their view the human frailties, base deeds and excesses of their enemies and setting these along our own depictions of national memory; hopefully then a reasonable or reasoned narrative may begin to grow. Through mustering the various truths from former enemies and using the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, we will undoubtedly be able to construct an intelligible history and I suspect till that is complete it will be impossible to discern the heroic amid the jumble of disputed facts, circumlocutions and claims. 

This brief digression is not intended to open up old wounds but to illustrate how difficult it is for us to get clear insights of events and processes nearer our own era than it is to view them over a span of a hundred years or two centuries earlier. There is simply too many open festering wounds from more recent events to re-caste them as heroic. No historian writing about the Napoleonic wars attributes good or bad motivations or deeds to the various affected combatants. Much more likely are efforts to capture the heroism and glory of the Grande Armée or the Grand Alliance. Yet the hurt and anger the Napoleonic occupations stirred among the Germans as an example (the same applies for the Spanish) in their lands, reading Heinrich Heine and other contemporaries, leaves little doubt they contributed to deep grievances still evident in the Franco-Prussian and then the First World War. Heinrich Heine writes of the deep resentment the average German felt towards France, remembering injustices going back to the Charlemagne period and earlier, as an outcome of their costly Liberation war. Feelings of anger and hate cannot be switched on and off just because a conflict concludes. Spain and Russia were horrible experiences for the French, and they committed sufficient atrocities in those lands they conquered to warrant continuing historical censure, laying very much open the question of their heroism when set against their dark deeds. This has tended to become diminished in our memories as some of us enjoy revelling in this supposedly heroic age. What is indisputable however, is the more civilized manner in which the peace treaties were conducted then compared to today. It may be a sad testament about our capacity as citizens in lands committed to truth and justice (the American way being optional) that we occasionally vote less than effective people into power. Perhaps?      

A perplexed Humanist’s discussion on Heroism.

Possibly we need to look for heroism at the lower more immediate psychological layers of human activity. Where people were or are prepared to put themselves in danger or endure self-sacrifice to save another’s life. Rescuing people from perishing by the excessive application of modern weaponry strikes all of us as worthy. If heroism reveals itself in people recognizing the essential humanity of the other, even if hated, whether one’s own or enemy civilians as well as combatants, and that their life or any life is worth saving, despite the ideological rhetoric of various community and government authorities, Heroism in our Post Modernist period may continue to have relevance. Undoing the damage (even to a small degree) caused from the large almost mechanically constructed military and political organizations, especially if they claim a democratic license, does sound, to some of us,  a heroic choice. 

If the prophets of pending ecological disasters are correct, do we need to look beyond humanity to other living species and their survival or should we pragmatically embrace the global plastic coated electronic web as our viable future world and damn animals? Will it be possible to mobilize the global net to motivate and drive our politicians to take action in preserving the ‘other’ world of animals and plants? The idea that the great Twenty-First Century’s Hero may no longer be individual man and woman, but the collective repository of the wisdom from hundreds of thousands, even millions of contributions, kept in lines of text, meta-text or images certainly has appeal and promises hope. Rather than using technology to destroy civilians by ever more gruesome means it would be preferable to harness it to begin producing positive results such as keeping most of us from complicity in global crimes. Can this medium reduce the irrational in so much of human activity? The heroic web, becoming our government rather than frail ambitious people.

We are at the dawn of some exciting science, such as gene and DNA manipulation along with ever increasing computing power, and rather than creating boutique babies will there be sound commercial and social reasons to employ these for keeping our world a habitable space given the ever exploding population? Are we doomed to living in a rats’ nest where some of the two-legged rats, being more equal than the others, will need walls and guards to maintain their reasonable standard of existence? Is it so implausible that 90% of starving and deprived mankind amounting to around ten billion will be at war with the privileged one or two billion? If there is little to die for, is the heroic option to sacrifice oneself by defeating and slaying the rich (seen from the perspective of exploitation), whether it leads to more equitable distribution of the shrinking resources, being of course the grand challenge (the unspoken grand narrative)? Climate change, whether the future is as catastrophic as many predict, the inevitable oil shortage and an equitable re-distribution of available resources and wealth are obviously extremely heroic challenges for all of us.

Technology has however been too often employed for malign aggression, even if the rationalizations at times appear worthy. Heroism is usually considered a warrior’s virtue and even when armed with the latest and best weapons, it requires courage to confront an implacable adversary as the US military’s in Iraq and Israeli forays into Lebanon attest. The efforts of the US-Anglo-Israeli coalition has proved invaluable in increasing the constituencies of anger throughout the growing trouble spots of the world and ensuring a steady stream of recruits to carry on the fight against their more professional and technology equipped soldiery. Each of these warriors may kill a hundred or more, and their weapon’s systems thousands or hundred thousands but given the growing numerical disproportions, the declining birth rates in the West, and the coagulating rage, can they (we?) possibly win? It is very difficult to sell a young person with an affluent future, the merit of being trained as one of the poorly paid, empire’s legionnaires, standing lonely sentinel upon a wind swept corner of earth, struggling to hold back the tide of the desperate. This task appears to be relegated to peripheral economically disadvantaged communities, there is a danger they become angry. Wealth and opportunity have made such a prospect unpalatable, certainly not heroic, even with government trinkets!   

Those of us who have received a Catholic education can confirm the special honourable status accorded the Church’s martyrs. For believers, martyrdom is a particular form of heroic expression, the individual being assured eternal salvation. Whether this desire by yesterday’s and today’s martyrs stems from the difficulty of realizing their lives in a desperate untenable world, at least as they perceive it, or a burning hunger to attain immortality remains a perplexing conundrum. ‘The average man, who does not know what to do with this life, wants another one which shall last forever’.   They are, or become, the Religions of the Book’s believers immortal heroes. Martyrdom has little relevance to anyone unless it promises eternal salvation and assured claim to heroism. When we recall the problems the Romans encountered with fanatical Christianity, and how it has become they, rather than the trouble-makers, who are pilloried in the popular received opinion, it is difficult to be completely condemnatory of today’s suicide bomber. As far as I recall, there was never an instance during Diocletian’s rule where Christian peacemakers (not an intended Oxymoron!) sought a resolution to the conflict. The idea of the Bishop of Antioch or Rome sitting down with the Roman magistrates to conclude acceptable coexistence remains a shrouded scenario, at least till the rise of Constantine, where he chose Christianity as Rome’s future religion. Much of Christian proselytizing was always based on the concept of Christians and the others, the Pagans and it was the Christian’s duty to convert the others to the faith.  

Those, who seem presently to be absent are the peacemakers, despite Christ nominating them as belonging to the select blessed. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God" (Matthew 5:9). Compared to the strident bellicosity of today’s sabre rattlers, the few with pretensions or a wish to bring an end to the growing carnage appear to be wimpish and ineffectual (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton?). As a species we appear unable to get it right, either committed to using force to impose human happiness or talk and do nothing. ‘The cannon thunders… limbs fly in all directions …one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice…its Humanity in search of happiness’.  We embark, probably with the best of intentions, and, an absence of doubt upon the benefits of regime change for other people, certain they will be ecstatic to have us remove their nasty bosses from power and find we have created an enormous human disaster and desolation but console ourselves by claiming we have achieved peace with justice. (Somali, Iraq, Afghanistan). These ungrateful and ignorant people, rather than embracing the gifts we brought with the sword, grow angered and distrustful of our efforts. In contrast, when an ethnic horror occurs in a less interesting region, we take too long to intervene ensuring mega-deaths (Kosovo, Rwanda, Somali). Regrettably, people of Nelson Mandela or Gandhi calibre are very rare in a constant violent world and are considered by many as heroes, in as far as they did succeed within their environments to implement some degree of community reconciliation, agreements and forgiveness. They are John the Baptists, showing another way for resolving conflicts. Maybe a few of us quietly hope the Saviour will soon return to allow us another bite from the apple of personal salvation!

Mother Teresa was, and is, also an inspiration for the possibility of leading a ‘loving’ life, caring for the very much less fortunate. They may in fact, or at least should be, markers of heroism, but how many of us consider them as such and can or would we accept peace even without honour? Many of us may doubt that the First World War was necessary but how many would hold this view about the Second? Do we subscribe to the argument made by Lord John Russell: ‘If peace cannot be maintained with honour, it is no longer peace’. One quality distilled from our discussion is that a hero requires honour. Honour being the maintenance of our reputation and good name through our allegiance for what we hold as being right or more usually conducting ourselves by conventional standards of behaviour. For a hero this is of course easier, not having a past he or she does not have a reputation or good name and by definition they are outside the conventions of social behavoiur, their honour is anchored in their selves. Here there are contradictions between being a committed peace-maker and maintaining one’s honour.  Some historians claim the First World War began because both sides felt honour bound, to respect their promises and agreements. 

Must honourable peacemakers be forced sometimes to resort to violence to achieve their goal? In Rwanda for instance if there had been more UN peacekeepers and violence was sanctioned for them where necessary, would many more people have survived? If our leaders pursued peacemaking goals, could this activity be conducted without proper democratic processes? In this instance, is it better to allow the clear vision of one to rule, rather than the muddled rhetoric of the many? (UN) Will the collective wisdom of the Net, be a possible replacement for the Bible, being our own means towards a harmonious earth?      

The medieval Moslem sage Sa’di contributed to this debate with these words: ‘Even if you could tear the head off an elephant, if you are without humanity you are no hero’. From our earlier discussion humanity is not a requirement for being a hero. Many movie heroes slaughter their enemies with no effort to either taking them prisoner or getting them medical attention. Presumably the sins of their adversaries are of such an order that the heroes as God’s agents only have recourse to their utter extermination!  

It is difficult to find much positive humanity in the current crop of the world’s leadership. With his undoubted Christian faith and belief in God we should expect George Bush junior to reveal considerably more sense of humanity than his official pronouncements and actions reveal. A pause may be required, while we consider the tower of Babel and God having given us many languages, making communication very difficult, if not impossible. Would a heroic challenge be to impose a world Esperanto or is this just too horrible to contemplate? A web’s Esperanto!

Conclusion

The word associations we have uncovered for hero and heroism have expanded to include a wide range of concepts: honour, humanity, martyrdom, belief, conscience, justice, single minded determination, emotions, God and many more. A number of heroes have been identified but they are very few and sadly have had little influence upon the growing tensions and cooking world crisis. 

We may be too close to events today to discern the sparkles of revealed heroism among the pyrites of technological splendours, globalization and be too mired in the noble words from the empire committing grievous failures.                   

Analysis. 
Introduction.

Delightful as rambling in the Post Modern heroism’s recycling bin can be, the purpose of this exegesis is not to exhaustively examine our recent popular culture or future story creations, but take a cursory look at our present globe and globalization, and, attempt to discern outlines for possible spaces where valiant deeds or heroic events are possible through the murk of the murmurings from the doomsayers of a pending Armageddon. Whether the Apocalypse is a natural product produced by our anxieties at being temporal beings, or a pessimistic aspect of humanness, is beyond the scope of this discussion. It may well be wrong when speaking about a future disaster as it may already be occurring or happened some time ago. We may not have recognized it amid the world’s noise. ‘Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already occurred’. The challenge if the observation has merit and assuming heroism is essential during a catastrophe, how do we recognize it in others and find it in ourselves? 

Are we all potential heroes and if yes why do many of us fail to realize it, unless of course we do not believe it is a worthwhile target and there are better options during the short duration we have at living our lives?    

Existential perspectives.

Interesting is, how little the phenomenon or quality of heroism is part of general philosophical discourse. For most of us being a hero, in whatever discipline or life’s pursuit, is an important drive, especially when we are or were young. A hero is a winner and if winning was not possible then we strived and achieved more than we believed we were capable of; or so at least our betters and mentors told us. Does it not impinge upon the endless discussion of free will and determinism with their continuing disputational mazurka? The concept of a hero remains somewhat obscure in the debate, impinging upon concepts of individual human will in so far as it confronts the possibilities of our being both wretched and happy, successful and failure, positively embracing all these through a process of personal intentionality, by choices and actions. Can our admiration of heroes and heroism be a dimly understood awareness of the continuous tension between our realization of being conscious and our being as a thing, preferably a memorable and admirable yet distinct, though temporal ‘thing’? If we reflect on Roquentin in Sartre’s work titled ‘Nausea’ and the words: ‘an unrealizable totality which haunts the For-itself and constitutes its very being as a nothingness of being’. As possible heroes to others and to ourselves, is the dread of our nothingness of being, our irrelevance in the world we live in, negated by our affirmation that this nothingness is not nothing when we have achieved something? Something recognized outside ourselves by our community, making us a worthy individual person. We receive praise, prizes, adulation, and are noticed, for a moment when we have done something heroic! Without the recognition it is difficult for many of us to value our deed. If a hero once, even a little hero, why not be a hero again, why not strive to be an ever greater and greater hero? Are many of us upon a quest of being heroes with the goal of becoming God? (A God? With all the loaded implications)

‘It is this ideal which can be called God. Thus the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God … To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God’

If Sartre has identified an important aspect of our human condition, namely to become a God or God, namely God is not another other but a possibility of our ‘I’, this is by definition a heroic endeavour and behoves us all to strive towards this goal. Here heroism would be part of our own process or processes for reconciling our consciousness and us as thing(s) that will lead us to becoming or being God. (Depending upon whether being God is a completed work?) Indeed if valid, is it a duty for each of us, to a). Decide who or what God is? Rather than viewing the deity as a benign person, it can be understood as possibilities driven through our willpower.   b). Determine if there is a God (the essence of God or God as our spirit or willpower) within us? c). Discover whether God is in our consciousness or our ‘thingness’ or in both, requiring reconciliation? d). Lead our life in such a way that we become God? e). Is one path to becoming God through being a hero? (We will discuss the quest for immortality through heroism later). It is an extremely difficult quest as most of us are uncertain about what constitutes or is God. If God is everything or a separate identity it may be impossible, but if He or She or It or a ‘Not It’ is an essence (will to power, drive, spirit) we possess to achieve our authentic selves and possibly fulfill our purpose to manifest this potential, as many believers in religion claim as true, this could be the grand purpose or design for our existence? It may be, some of us might think, a too grand narrative for the Post Modern hero. If worth pursuing, it would be essential for us to find and unlock the requisite metaphorical gate within the jumble of our ‘usness’ and ‘thingness’. Dualism in this proposition seems unavoidable. Can this be done through thought, faith, knowledge or just through or will to power, even if the results are dangerous? From the above quote’s perspective, earning and receiving popular acclaim may be irrelevant in this mission, unless of course we need our cultural ghosts as signposts and the stimulation of others to help us in our individual yet temporal life’s journey. A ship wrecked Robinson Crusoe until man Friday arrives may have enormous difficulty being or becoming a hero, other than ensuring his own survival of course. Heroism is inevitably seen as one human being aiding another or others, rather a journey of the self. It tends to touch upon concepts such as concern for our fellow human, altruism or philanthropy. In this amble, we may ask why strive as there is no one to be a hero for unless we believe in the welfare or good of other people or beauty and our ability to achieve our destiny if not as God then more than we currently are.. 

Those of us concerned by the urgency to become God may wonder whether it is a worthwhile goal. Though Jesus preached the virtues of ‘showing the other cheek’, abstaining from violence and the value of striving to be a peace-maker, His Father was, if we understand the Old Testament correctly, given to exercising extreme force in the name of His justice but without a previous trial or a right of defense. (As far as I know). Lucifer, the brightest among His angels was condemned to hell (for loving himself more than God?) and driven there (or down) forcibly by the Archangel Michael. Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for eating a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. (Which some of us may think should have earned them a reward for initiative rather damning their species to original sin. Why do the rest of us need to be punished for the sins of our predecessors?). Sodom and Gomorrah were reduced to ashes and the incorrigible human sinners in Noah’s lifetime purged during the great flood. Of course He was incapable of being wrong, the punishments were merited, but they were exercised violently and with no recourse for any appeal. Well can Bush junior and his team of hawks argue that God (the Father) having blessed the United States, has also given them the permission to bring justice upon mankind with the sword or smart bomb. Certainly the Almighty reserved Justice as His prerogative, but He has presumably handed some of it down to the righteous humans on earth’s hierarchy to exercise in his name. If violent force is one of God’s attributes, then as his creations, it must sometimes, if used for the sake of Justice, be a human virtue. Our personal difficulty then becomes discerning between God’s inspired just conflicts where loss of life is inevitable and part of His grand design and unfathomable will (how through revelation?) and those caused through human sinfulness, rebellion and error (wrong decisions made exercising our free wills or over evaluating ourselves). In this light, a hero can be someone who may have to exercise violence much as the Lord and with honour, ensuring God’s justice, an admirable goal. We all understand violence and force but the concepts of honour, the divine and justice are rather more diffusely difficult.

‘Peace is in the grave
The grave hides all things beautiful and good
I am a God and cannot find it there’.

Skeptical Musings.              

There may be those among us skeptical about God and theistic realities. Though we may not find the concept very appealing our consciousness and ‘thingness’ may be determined more by our socialization, and in this process of getting taught ideas about who we should be and what constitutes a hero, are constructions of our developing person. A Marxian retort contrasts the above discussion, which could be pursued into the  ‘Anthropic Principle’ discussion, changing of course into socially constructed determinism:

‘The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness’.

The above quote questions the privileging of the individual human against the significance of the social material world. Our world today is one where we inhabit it more and more with our own technology and machines, possibly for some with a hope that the machine becomes us or we become machines. Victor Klemperer after the Second World War, and returning to teaching, criticizes the view by many young Germans (amid the rubble), of considering aircraft pilots and tank crews as heroes. He took exception to the symbiosis of man and machine, yielding vastly more impressive, if dubious, destructive results, than a man on his own with a gun or preferably without as a heroic endeavour. Give a pilot one B-29 bomber and one atomic bomb and she or he can destroy Hiroshima! Culpability becomes, however, more complex as the B-29 and its pilot are only part (replaceable part) of a complex system where responsibility is distributed across many agents from the President, the Air Force commander to the maintenance crews and the cultural climate of the time. The argument of man-machine war making also dissipates heroism, as the individual is less important, even replaceable to achieving the result. Where is the heroism? With Harry Truman who had to give the order? He, if the ‘buck’ truly stopped with him, would suggest today’s heroism can only be found in the moral realm and with the few who have the power, rather than with the once dominantly physically courageous individual (loner). This individual has been replaced by the men-machine systems. A more extreme but not necessarily morbid thought, is that humankind may become supplanted by their own created inhuman-kind evolution. Without computers or oil today, our civil and military societies would cease to function as we understand them and few have conceived of this new world. Back to six week dangerous traveling upon a sailing boat to see other lands or waling hundreds of kilometers to reach our desired destinations. We have become computing and oil dependant, very much like drug addicts, and our material life is becoming more and more linked with their smooth operation. It is not too fanciful to suggest that in our urge to continue living to well over a hundred or forever (God?), heroically or not, we may in fact become more machine than human as our body parts are replaced with pacemakers and artificial kidneys, our cellular deterioration repaired through recent biological advances. At what point when we have lost our own body parts will we cease to be human? Were this to happen and it seems likely, would we think as humans or increasingly as in-humans?

‘The suspicion they betray (in both senses of the word) is simple, although double: what if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?’ 

A teleological evolution into the mechanical, digital and technological for mankind (and I am not saying this is a bad thing), would it make us more inhuman than human? Will heroism in these conditions be possible? Can a cyborg be a hero? When and if we become more Machine than Human, will our capacity to think and the associated values as humans change? 

‘…Whatever the immediate stakes might appear to be: health, war, production, communication. For the benefit of humankind (or its ruin?) as the saying goes’.   

Two closing points, firstly, is heroism diminished if not altogether irrelevant if the deed in question is done primarily by a machine or the machine-part in us, because those with the biggest and most powerful technology will always triumph over the mere human? (Despite the message in the Stars War films). Indeed when and where the human prevails against the aggression of machine-equipped or machine warriors, we generally view them as heroes. The second point the transition from living human to (living?) machine human may involve enormous changes in perceptions and values with little room for heroism. Some of us may believe or hope that heroism requires a human with humanity to be seen as this:

‘What is a place, a moment, not anchored in the immediate ‘passion’ of what happens? Is a computer in any way here and now’   

In contrast a positively expressed outlook on our changing future.

‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machines and organism; in short we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics’.

As evolving post modern cyborgs from our once simian heritage, how will courage and valour fit into this projected future world? We will concentrate on improving the technology of our machine components and go forth to test it against other similar equipped individuals. The Olympic games would mutate into Formula One events and the rules of what are allowable machines and banned will exercise our legal minds. Why concentrate upon machine activity at all and work on improved computer-brain interfacing? Remove most of the extraneous body and float in a digitized Garden of Eden. 

We may reflect that heroes are inevitably yesterday’s heroes. It would be odd if we suddenly claimed of someone ‘you will be tomorrow’s hero!’ or even ‘what you are doing now is heroic’. A hero to be a hero must be recognized as such after the deed and by at least one other, otherwise the expression has little value. The hero cannot claim himself or herself as one, this would, we the others might believe, be extraordinary hubris. Shades of Narcissus and what would be the point of ascribing values to deeds done alone?    
Present World Malaise
   
The symptoms of our world’s present malaise are many, as indeed they always have been, but among them are the more recently revealed climate change (potentially catastrophic to us as a species unless we solve it by becoming cyborgs), resource competition with the ever present greed (oil in particular – for without it we may be facing very severe belt tightening and reduction of our exuberant consumption), continuing national territorial claims in what we loosely call the third world (on our doorstep for instance Indonesian New Guinea), growing religious fanaticism; Christian (Bible belt fundamentalism), Jewish (Satmar Sect?) and Moslem as well as the enduring ethnic animosities. It is becoming evident, heroism has frequently been equated with martial prowess and endeavours; it seems today heroism cannot help resolve these problems, they are simply too big, there is too much technology and possibly people. Solutions to them cannot be found through military adventures with the courage and bravery of one man alone as the USA has discovered and undoubtedly so will Israel. The challenge to invent or discover a new ‘heroism’ in our age is therefore not entirely irrelevant. It is well enunciated by General Sir Rupert Smith in his book: ‘The Utility of Force’ and to quote. 

‘We are engaging in conflict for objectives that do not lead to a resolution of the matter directly by force of arms, since, at all but the most basic tactical level, our objectives tend to concern the intentions of the people and their leaders rather than territory or forces’.
  
All nations and their communities have in their semantic memories, deeds of their extraordinary forebears, whether warrior or saint, assisting in the construction and maintainenance of national exclusiveness and grandeur. The sentiment is best exemplified in Thomas Macauly’s ‘The Oath of the Horatii’; 

‘And how can man die better
	Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
	And the temples of his Gods …’

In the above words are encapsulated a number of key themes on heroism; namely the preparedness to face and, if necessary, die against fearful odds and for reasons of family, community, the nation and its gods. This urge to lyrically extol the virtues of the supremely best of the best, whether as free willed, self-sacrificing individuals recognised later by their society, or, as fine effective examples of cultural construction, their deeds are narrated more with emotive than rational language. National anthems usually make little sense but stir the heart. Indeed it continues to be imprudent to express any thoughts other than those couched in eulogizing hyperbole (and then in reverential whispers) when referring to any country’s heroes, as the mood of the crowd may turn easily into anger. The events commemorated are sacred and to question the claims presented would lay the person open to a range of vitriolic abuse. Standing before their tombs, memorials or with the early sombre morning group, it would be blasphemy to question the now deceased but unforgotten heroes. Words such as ‘age shall not weary them’ and ‘lest we forget’, metaphorically remove them from our more pedestrian field of experience, placing them among the pantheon of our immortal forefathers and culture. As heroes their quality of being ‘brave’, whatever this may actually mean, is generally understood as a virtue, a positive extraordinary attribute in a few individuals, which we are taught and counselled to admire and where possible to emulate if we have the requisite character (been trained and taught properly) and when the situation demands. The heroes, especially military, are, we are told, touched with super-human grandeur as exemplified by their remarkable capacity for personal duty and sacrifice. To sacrifice one’s life as Jesus Christ did, but not necessarily for all of mankind, but, for the ashes of our fathers, continues to hold a strong appeal for many.

Conclusion.

There is no conclusion, how can there be as the discussion has only been opened and to close it with a few facile sentences would be cavalier. 

How far are we socially determined or constructed beings or temporal creatures wrestling with our free will and the constraints of our being a thing (with the rules that science keeps revealing about us, such as we are subject to gravity, friction and natural forces). It is also valid for us to see ourselves as a mix of the rational and the irrational, making it unclear where the drive for heroism stems.  

Brave Semantics!

Introduction

How do we understand the numerous words, covering this phenomenon, such as ‘courage’, ‘heroism’, ‘bravery’, ‘valour’, meritorious behaviour, martyrdom and other expressions that circle around this concept? Spoken with awe and hushed tones, they may elicit a tear or a lump in the throat. 

Most of us would take exception if our countrymen, or we, were described as cowards and acted in a perceptibly unheroic manner under any set of circumstances as this is not how we generally see ourselves behind our mask of individuality. We may today accept that there are limits on our courageous behaviour, whether psychological, physiological, physical or cultural, but are unlikely to accept our non-performance as being attributable to any character flaws within ourselves. If there is evidence of rather less worthy motives such as material self interest and selfishness we can argue these failings occurred in our earlier cultural construction and education. The idea that we are biologically determined towards heroism or a lack of it, is an unsustainable argument, suggesting more plausibly that we are taught to be heroes.. 

The words ‘Courage’, ‘Bravery’, ‘Valour’ and ‘Heroism’ are frequently used and abused and it is undoubtedly useful for us to revisit them to ensure they regain their relevance.  

Courage

Around the penumbra of the words ‘courage’, ‘bravery’, ‘valour’ and ‘heroism’ hang a ganglia of unclear ideas, beliefs and semantic memories that linger in the recesses of our minds. An examination of the words and there origins reveal interesting heritages. ‘Courage’:  as the Oxford dictionary informs us, stems from a Middle English and even earlier French word applied to a person’s state of mind and spirit, especially their revealed disposition, vigour, confidence, pride, honour, nature and how these are revealed by their expressed thoughts, intentions and deeds. These rather broad if somewhat vague ideas developed into our present and are understood by a person’s character and their behaviour, especially when not succumbing to fear while facing extreme danger. Most of us are usually clear about what represents danger. It can be spiders, terrorists, the state, snakes or insane threats, however we interpret this. As the marine colonel in the film ‘A few Good Men’ responding to the defence attorney’s question; ‘Extreme danger?’ ‘Is there any other kind?’. It cements our awareness that the world is a dangerous place. In the age of Chivalry a knight was expected to have and display his courage by his gallantry and skills in arms. (If we believe our soldiers are well trained and highly skilled after a year in the army, we need to reflect upon the seven to ten years for a knight to master his discipline!) His stature in the eyes of his peers would be diminished if he did not take immediate action if he believed the honour of his Monarch, his family and his own were impugned. His response usually took the form of settling the slight through combat, as for instance in a duel. Individuals with other stations in life such as serfs and monks were not expected to behave in such socially constructed displays of courage. Not having or requiring courage, they did not disgrace themselves by taking flight from danger or begging for mercy. When they, other social sections, did succeed to defeat the armoured knight, as for instance, the English archers or Swiss pikemen, they were considered ungallant, uncivilized and even barbarous opponents, unworthy to fight against him. It was in theory at least, the knight’s or feudal lord’s duty to defend these weaker people with their castle’s strong ramparts or by their own martial courage, and ward off any threat to them. Even till the mid twentieth century it was socially acceptable for aristocrats to challenge each other, when they felt their honour slighted, by requesting a duel. We need only remember Field Marshal von Kluge’s challenge to Colonel General Guderian in 1943 at a conference in Hitler’s presence during early 1943. Hitler not being from an aristocratic background promptly forbade its execution. Would similar ranking commanders from a middle class milieu come to the idea of challenging their insulting interlocutors to a duel? Some of the message underpinning Cervantes classic ‘Don Quixote’, include the absurdity of feudal gallantry in a changing world where gunfire (technology) and altered social hierarchies become dominant.

Brave

The word ‘Brave’, though etymologically unknown, appears to stem from the Latin ‘Bravo’, and through the French, was adopted into the English around 1485. It was used to mean such human qualities as gallant, stout hearted, intrepid and what has rather fallen from conventional usage, showy, finely-dressed, splendid and handsome. In former times, and even today, the stature of warriors can be discerned by the splendour of their raiment. A general makes a more striking picture than a private soldier. The word evolved to be understood among its various meanings to be:  a warrior, as for instance a North American Indian, or, even someone described as a savage, who challenges, confronts or defies, even with ‘bravado’ their enemy or adversary face to face. Today the term ‘bravado’ has lost its gravity and can be sometimes used in mockery, when we for example describe someone performing with great gusto and bravado. Beneath our semantic cotyloid of ‘brave’ we dimly remember numerous poets and their lines: ‘High hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots’ by Milton. ‘None but the brave deserves the fair’ are worthy sentiments from Dryden. Those lines portray bravery as an attribute we as men (human males) hope to possess and in possessing it we become worthy of the fair (presumably damsels, though today this would be an unacceptable sentiment. It may very well be brave women who deserve the handsome, though the idea is still a little foreign in even our liberated global landscape) and are good patriots. Much discussion and activity is underway: whether to train and deploy women in combat, and were this to happen, what impact would it have on the usage of the terms brave, courageous and valiant? Some authors suggest that the field of combat is one of the remaining territories where men can prove and demonstrate their manhood, whatever this may mean. Milton in his line does link the brave with patriotism, a conjunction that many of us might agree with. It is in war, we are taught and while defending our country, that the brave are found amongst us and revealed as pinnacles of patriotic virtue. Saying of someone they are brave politicians, merchant bankers or sanitation inspectors in the same context as brave, patriotic soldiers, policepersons or firepersons may sound foreign to our modern (post-modern?) ear. The thought of the Australian prime minister and his cabinet acting like former Roman consuls by leading their citizens onto the field of battle does have appeal but is implausible. It would be interesting to witness their bravery in an environment of danger. Many high-ranking commanders today see their politicians as greater threats and danger than they do their proposed enemy. It can be said with some justice that General Colin Powell handled President Bush and General Norman Schwarzkopf bravely and the Iraqis in contrast were but a minor nuisance during Desert Storm. Defeating the Iraqi Army was a fore gone conclusion but restraining presidential exuberance and the battlefield commander’s petulance and at times hysteria was a much greater challenge. Some wits have suggested we are about to witness the post-brave political era!
Valour

Valour, another expression used to describe worthy or high value persons, dates back to the Middle English, from thence to Old French and then to the Latin – Valor, to be strong. Initially it was used to describe the worth and importance due to those with exceptional personal qualities (the ability to succeed in a physical fight or endeavour) or rank, and in this way, was often used as a title or prefix when addressing a leader. Prince Valiant could not be other than valiant. The expression has developed into its more commonly understood meaning of describing someone with the quality to face, overcome, and win, with strength (physical, moral and mental) against a perceived danger, displaying boldness, firmness and prowess, especially in combat or conflict. ‘Our fortunate and oft proved valour in wars abroad’; conveys the import of valour when it is eulogized by our cultural spokespersons. What exactly the unknown poet meant when proclaiming ‘a damsel of great valour’ in 1330, is best left to our imagination but certainly he wasn’t speaking of an English Amazon triumphing against the Scots or Welsh. Possibly she was  forced into a marriage with an objectionable prince or noble?
Hero

Finally we need to explore the oldest word in the quartet: ‘Hero’. Its origins are from the ancient Greek ‘Heros’ or ‘Heroës’. It was a name or label given men of superhuman strength, nobility, ability and favoured by the gods; later they themselves becoming demigods or immortals. The expression has evolved to describe a person, who through deeds, actions, noble qualities, such as firmness of spirit and greatness of soul, achieves an epic outcome, worthy of the community’s veneration and admiration. One becomes a hero by performing deeds and actions; one is not born a hero even if one’s ancestors were admired for this quality. Heroism also requires the fickle sponsorship of the gods, or today, what we understand as good fortune. (The Fates?) Stepping out of a trench with the intention of capturing an enemy position bristling with deadly weapons and getting immediately killed is not usually judged heroic, even if it may have been a grand deed otherwise. An agent, having the intention to do the nearly impossible, must actually at least partially succeed, and in this they must have luck, otherwise there is a chance they merely appear ridiculous. The problem of who or what the gods are, and who the present eye was, are well captured in Alexander Pope’s few lines: 

‘Who sees with equal eye, as God of all
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world’

A multiplicity of perspectives surround the claim of hero; in the man against man model, there is the primary person who performs the deed and the other or others, who suffer, die or are forever obliged to acknowledge they were defeated or lost. Then there must be a society, group and culture who venerate, broadcast and sanctify the glorious event. By becoming immortal, the hero rises above the fame of his actions, as Goethe says: ‘The deed is all, the glory nothing’. Leaving us as the chorus to sing their praises afterwards we are ourselves elevated in the process of proclaiming the hero’s fame. In the task of achieving heroism a paradox occurs: ‘You must be master and win, or serve and lose, grieve or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer’. To be the master, the hammer and triumph, you need to transcend your serving servile you with its obligations to obedience as taught by society and to strike out alone, thereby joining with the gods. The anxiety you may have, of course, is that by doing this you may make your self a fool or a knave. Intelligence and deep thoughts are not prerequisites for a hero, better to act than be delayed by worrying about the consequences! Hamlet by not dispatching his stepfather swiftly, once appraised of his father’s murder, is a classic figure of the thinking troubled antihero. A hero should not ponder upon the course of action but ‘do’! If the luckless other, assuming they are human and by definition bad, are slain, crushed or surrender servilely, they cease to merit our grief or sympathy. In the process the hero, however cannot slaughter innocent civilians or uninvolved third parties, or he or she loses their claim to this status. The hammer of the master acts, and in striking necessarily causes change often occasioning loss to another, The servant as anvil is the platform for the grandeur of the master’s ‘is’ and being struck may lose some or all of their own former ‘isness’ and even ‘wasness’. Though being a servant, today, carries negative connotations, the truth is that most of us are servants to large corporations or institutions and must comply with our bosses’ hammer (hammering). Can anyone employed by large organization and obeying their rules, usually a mandatory requirement of service, consider themselves a hero?  

You can be a hero and fail, but the failure must be extraordinary and unique otherwise the danger is you are merely ridiculous. Scott’s fatal efforts may be viewed as heroic in attempting to get to the South Pole. Others following him, making the same mistakes and finding themselves in a similar disaster, would not be viewed in the same manner but probably at best as being irresponsible. We may admire the nobility of spirit in venturing upon dangerous deeds with a sentiment of ‘it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. Yet most heroes on executing their deeds have a measure of success, even, if afterwards they failed to attain the impossible (for them at least) and we may experience grieve and loss if for no other reason than remembering what could have been. Much like Prometheus if they survive their deed they may be metaphorically exposed to the cruel mountain’s cold winds and freeze at night or be tormented by the vulture sent from Zeus during the day. Being a living hero is, as the few tell us, a harrowing experience. 

In becoming a hero they must have a worthy adversary to conquer or overcome, whether nature, creatures or other men. The deed’s value is contingent upon the enormous challenges to be mastered. What merit is there in crushing, destroying or slaying a weak or harmless thing? If Saint George slew a lizard rather than a dragon he would hardly be remembered, nor his deed praised. 

Conclusion.

The above discussion is reasonably contained and a conclusion therefore unnecessary. A theme for future discussion would be Evil’s heroes and can they exist? Can we be the heroes of Satan? If we accept the reality of evil as a dynamic opposite rather than the absence of good (active or not), why can’t we perform extraordinary deeds on its behalf, assuming evil is an ‘it’ or being and not merely an abstract construct or the absence of good?  

Heroism and Values.
Introduction.
We have pursued the macro-view on heroism and its application in current World Affairs, where the trend has become ever more the civilians who are the victims rather than the combating adversaries. Implicit in the discussion has been the shifting perceptions on heroism and whether the concept has value in our Post Modern age. 

To close the paper it could be interesting to look at an example of the United Kingdom’s approach to bestowing their highest valour award, the Victoria Cross. The Victoria Cross was established in 1856 to recognise the bravery and courage of any soldier or individual. Prior to this event only higher ranking officers were recognized by orders and knighthoods, the Battle of Waterloo being the first instance where ordinary soldiers received a campaign medal. The outlooks and values upon awarding this medal were very different to those some eighty years later in the Second World War.

Victorian Heroism.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, her consort, held very firm views on what was morally acceptable and worthy of royal and public acclaim. The following example gives an instance where a Private P. M’Gwire of the 33rd (Duke of Wellington’s) Regiment was refused the award because he had, while being taken a prisoner by the Russians at Sebastopol, managed to kill his two captors and escape, returning to his own lines. His officer reported the action in the following report for a citation:

‘The Englishman kept wary watch and, when he fancied his captors off their guard, sprang on the one who carried his musket, seized it and shot dead the other of his foes.... Meanwhile the Russian from whom our fellow had taken his own musket and who had then fallen to the ground, when rising from his recumbent position fired, missed, and finally had his brains knocked out by the butt-end of the Englishman’s musket; after which the man coolly proceeded to take off the Russian accoutrements, etc, with which he returned laden to the post where he had been surprised, fired at by the Russian sentries and received with loud cheers by our own pickets’.

The language of the officer smacks of Victorian English with expressions such as ‘our fellow’, rather than giving the private’s name. In a Hollywood film the above scene would probably not even be viewed as especially heroic as too many US GI’s have been portrayed doing exactly the above deeds far too often. A Rambo or Chuck Norris would not kill two of the foe but a whole battalion along with a team of specialist Speznicks. The reason Lord Panmure gave why the queen wanted M’Gwire’s name  omitted from the list is interesting:

‘His deed, although publicly praised and rewarded by Lord Raglan, was one of doubtful morality, and if pointed out by the Sovereign as praiseworthy, may lead to the cruel and inhumane practice of never taking prisoners, but always putting to death those who may be overpowered, for fear of their rising on their captor’.

Today this sounds quaint when we have slaughtered millions of civilians. Her heirs held rather different views and by the First World War, killing prisoners though not officially condoned, occurred and went unpunished by both sides as the fighting became more brutal, uncontrollable and savage. In the Second World War the above citation would not merit a Victoria Cross but possibly the much lower ‘Mentioned in Dispatches’ unless there were further reasons for recognition.

There is a remarkable contrast with the posthumous award of the Victoria Cross during the Second World War to a Commando officer.

Second World Heroism.

Temporary Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Charles Tasker Keyes of the Royal Scots Greys, Royal Armoured Corps (11th Scottish commando) on the 17/18 of November 1941 led a detachment at Beda Littoria, Libya, with the express purpose of killing general Erwin Rommel. Leaving aside the British intelligence was wrong and Rommel was to be found at the front, the morality of sending an assassination squad may give us pause. It is unlikely that Queen Victoria would have approved.

We can argue that General Erwin Rommel and the men at his headquarters were combatants and is was perfectly legitimate to target them with a commando raid and kill them. Given the raid happened hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines, taking Rommel prsoner, if he had been there, was not an option even if there was an insufficient guard. 

Though doubtlessly Lieutenant Colonel Keyes was very brave in taking his unit across very difficult terrain, and finding, let alone reaching, the headquarters; the overall mission parameters of assassinating an enemy general do sound to some of us as being morally questionable. Fortunately, in this case, no civilians were injured, but if there had been Libyan people present, there was a very real chance they may have been caught in the cross fire. It is unlikely the mission planners considered this possibility or would have ordered Keyes to discontinue were this the case..

Conclusion

Post Second World War Australian military and civilian bravery or heroism awards have been almost all given for selflessly rescuing of saving comrades or people’s lives. There have been a number of instances where the Star of Courage, the Medal for Gallantry and the Bravery Medal have been awarded to Australian service personnel. Australians, no longer being eligible for British valour or bravery medals, have established a new set of their own with the Cross of Valour being the highest grade. 

In our Post Modern world these women and men, who have earned our highest valour awards are not publicly well known. It is also valid to say that the First World War and Second World War heroes’ names are not common knowledge within our population. Our heroes, whether military, civil, sporting, scientific, entertainment or artistic, much like ourselves, are usually temporary apparitions and vanish from popular awareness. Ironically we tend to remember our politicians, successful or failed, more easily than this band of our most valiant. Is this a Post Modern or a merely human phenomenon?  

‘What these men (and women) did nothing can alter now. The good and the bad, the greatness and the smallness of their story will stand. Whatever of glory it contains nothing can now lessen. It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and for their nation, a possession forever’.

A worthy conclusion but do we agree? If we do agree can we name the 63 World War I and the 20 World War II Australian and New Zealand Victoria Cross winners?