A hero is a person who takes risks of life or property or social respect so as to accomplish an end. Going beyond their duties makes someone a hero and that applies to all the firefighters who ran up the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the very few of those civilians who run into the surf so as to rescue someone from an undertow. By extension, Willy Loman can be considered a hero because he risked exasperation and planning and anxiety so that he could pay off his mortgage and so everyman is in some way or another a hero, but we usually treat heroism as people or categories of people who are extraordinary in putting duty above self interest. Other people are just conducting their lives and accorded dignity but not heroism.
Heroism, while an extraordinary event, is a phenomenon that reflects on the nature of culture and social structure. Durkheim thought that heroism in battle is to be understood as the selflessness that comes from over-identifying a person with their society and so are regarded as altruistic, which means that the person has suppressed personal interests for the greater good and so negates their own value when people who are heroic may not find their own lives as less precious only that circumstances may leave them with a choice that is heedless of self without having abandoned self. Durkheim’s explanation is true enough in that soldiers do not want to be ashamed of themselves with their comrades. In general, we can say that heroism is a particular way of dealing with a role, whether that is defined as an expectation or a purpose, whereby there are different risks that take place in different kinds of roles, and so reveal the nature of the roles themselves. So a used car dealer is heroic when he doesn’t exaggerate his wares though it is possible that being low keyed is an advantage to making a sale and so he is no longer heroic but simply effective.
A good example of the relation between heroism and roles is the classic essay by Leo Lowenthal, a Frankfort School theorist, on the contrast between heroes of production and heroes of consumption. He argued that during the productive time of capitalism heroes were people like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. They made things, were ingenious, and made life better, and so their biographies were about their scientific and manufacturing triumphs rather than their personal qualities other than those like thrift and energy that marked their heroism. At a later time, however, people became preoccupied with celebrities like movie stars and their biographies were about how they spend their ample livings rather than anything they had done. Good fortune had brought them to the condition of life where they might luxuriate in what they could now possess. Lowenthal admired those who did things and demeaned those who just spent their treasure. Aside from being a Marxist commentary on the state of the nation, Lowenthat was making an acute Marxist observation that the populace will admire the heroes created in different stages of capitalism, as if that were its single clear element of the nature of the economic system.
I want to complicate matters by suggesting that differences in heroism do not arise only from the stage of economic development but in fact are different in any number of occupations and in civilian and family life as well. In particular, the roles of celebrity and of politician, both roles of long standing, are explained better by considering what in the nature if the rikes brings iyt their occasional heroisms.The heroes in the Iliad are such because they risk their lives in battle so as to accomplish a kind of immortality but each of them pursues a particular distinction, so that Ulysses is sly while Ajax is dim but straightforward, their distinctive characters engaging them in being warriors in different ways whatever the general purpose of being a warrior, which is to risk life and limb in the pursuit of grandeur while for Erasmus people should become recognized as heroic for having mastered the intricacies of government rather than of warfare. Different and changing roles have differing excellences.
Lowenthal thought of celebrities as people with money to spend. More correctly. celebrities are engaged in their craft, which is to make their personas interesting or alluring. That applies to actors, models and even reality show stars like the Kardashians, who painstakingly add up footage so as to boil them down to something of a narrative. They have to be assiduous in their craft, as enduring take after take until the director gets what he or she wants from a scene. The patience required by the role makes those who act and pose akin. Audry Hepburn was a photographer’s model before becoming an actress. The excellence rather than the fact of having the role comes from something else. It means finding a role or a picture that makes it recognizable and telling as a way to express and impress themselves deeply, some actors fortunate enough to have long careers where, like Humphrey Bogart, was the young gangster in “The Petrified Forest” to “Casablanca” and when older in “The African Queen”. Other stars fade out after a few roles, such as Vivian Blaine, first in “State Fair” and then just a few years later in “Guys and Dolls”. We admire Jack Nicholson for three Oscars and Meryl Streep for umpteen nominations.
The drama of a celebrity career is in inveigling oneself into getting started as recognized or, later on, when established, at choosing which scripts are promising ones that are worth signing on. People lament they didn’t get the role of Scarlet O’Hara or passed up the opportunity not to appear in a classic. So a celebrity or an actor is heroic when that person is lucky, either to finding a good prop-erty or living in an age, like Bette Davis, where there were a great many good properties and scripts designed to suit their ,talents, as in “Now Voyager”, which could have been a laughing stock except that its script and cast made it work as a way for a person to make themselves rather than just be a victim of their psychology. Bravo. Harrison Ford says, regrettably, that the movie business is an industry, whereby he means that an actor can appreciate having a few moments when they can earn their chops, most of the movie thrown away for thrills and action. Ford had an extended tour in “Blade Runner” and a brief moment or sequence in “The Life of Adelaide” where he meets a woman he knew when young but never aged. He looks shocked and hides it but is still clearly shocked by the others who see her after many years as still young. Ford had mastered his craft well enough so that he could express complicated emotions with expressions, art as old as the silent films. He can chalk that up to his personal Hall of Fame even sdif most viewers will not notice it. All of that makes heroism chancy and so the equivalent of what Lowenthal recognized as celebrity culture, which is that it is unearned rather than the heroes who may be in Dante’s Hell but are nonetheless full of integrity despite their particular shortcomings but properly so because they did a distinct evil deed. Actors are just lucky however their bey of talents that are available if lightning should strike. Justice takes place when the person meets the moment and there are so many good actors that very few of them make careers despite having little talent, Robert Taylor an exception to that rule: a stiff whomever he played.
The occupational role of the politicians also seems as chancy as being a film star if what is considered is the chance to gain elective office. There are many offers for few takers and it is not clear what talent gets you the brass ring. All sorts of people run to gain office and manage to succeed in getting elected. Bill De Blasio got to be Mayor of New York City because his son sported a winning Afro, while Christine Quinn, chirpy and notedly lesbian, would seem to have an edge in that same election, but fell flat. And nowadays, people other than lawyers and long time pols run for elective office, including patent medicine doctors, memoirists, and election deniers. Put together some money, and everyone has a chance.
But legislative office is very routine once the candidate is elected. Most of the time, and especially in the increased party discipline in the last quarter century, a Republican or a Democrat votes the way the party leadership requires lest the leadership withhold funds in the next election or gets primaried by a sect within the party. American legislators are like members of the House of Commons: they know who to shout “shame” to the opposition bench when their own bench calls for it.Most Congressmen and Senators are time servers. They show up to be belligerent at hearings and then vote as expected except for those who re known to be particularly belligerent, such as Ted Curz from Texas or trotting out his own reliable wares, such as Bernie Sanders of Vermont who, after all, is distinguished from other Liberals by vociferously calling himself a Social Democrat. Meanwhile, Sanders backed Biden’s Build Back America Act till it folded and is not opposed to the Inflation Reduction Act because it is so limited.The various constituencies can rely on their representatives to do the right thing by them.
In fact, the quantidion of legislative politics is interrupted when some legislator goes against the tide by opposing his own constituents on a matter of principle and is for that reason considered heroic. John F. Kennedy chronicled such figures in “Profiles in Courage'' though the problematic nature of that designation was picking Senator as having opposed the conviction of {resident Andrew Johnson because in Kennedy’s time it seemed obvious that getting rid of the sitting President was outrageous given the ties between North and South that were soon to be assundered by the Civil Rights Movement when Johnson was undermining the Union victory in the Civil War whatever the pretext. Far more noble was the upstate New York legislator who pondered about whether to legalize abortion before Roe v. Wade and decided to support that change though conflicted about it, a true sign of what legislators are supposed to do, which is ponder the rights and wrongs of things and then make up their minds on that basis alone. That is courage, while it is also true that it is admirable if not courageous to have a legislator who is not flashy but is reliable in voicing the sentiments of his constituents, such as Pat Leahy of Vermont and any number of reliable people while Susan Collins is just unreliable when claiming to be independent but, finally, going along with the Republican leadership when Mitch McConnell asks her to.
Even most Presidents are prudent rather than heroic in that they move their team further towards the goal post in the recognition of the long standing objectives of the party he (so far) represents. Biden has become successful by managing a proxy war without having it escalate, something Truman did with Korea and Johnson-Nixon did with Vietnam, and pursuing extended entitlements and higher taxes on the rich while Republican Presidents will lower taxes on the rich and limit entitlements. Only exceptional Presidents do something different such as when FDR provided a bevy of legislation to help the government manage the economy and when Trump tried to fiddle with the governmental system, which was heroic to some and disastrous to others. Presidents can all be considered heroic because they are standbys who have to deal with the unexpected but not very much is required for a President to become very briefly a hero. All George W. Bush had to do was to yell into a bullhorn while atop rubble at the World Trade Center so as to be proclaimed as a unifier. FDR actually planned the way World War II would work during the month after Pearl Harbor. He was a hero of production, government issue, rather than merely glib and flashy.