Heroism

Heroism or courage is usually thought of as a personality attribute. People are either brave or they are not when they are called on to be so, which means a hero is the opposite of the normal person who could not or would not rise to the circumstances. Achilles was brave; Audie Murphy and Sergeant York were brave; Freud was brave, in an extended sense of the term, because he was willing to challenge the conventional thoughts of his time in a major way that earned him derision at best and a suspicion that this man was preoccupied with things better left alone. Part of his success was to legitimize the connection between sex and ordinary feeling as a fit subject for communication. Most of us just keep our secrets.

There is another way to look at heroism or courage. It is to emphasize the situation rather than the person. Certain situations require a person to take an action that will be thought brave or courageous; to act otherwise is cowardly rather than ordinary. The soldier who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to spare his comrades is brave, though, depending on the details of the circumstances, if he had acted otherwise so as to save himself when that would only have meant that all the people in his foxhole would have died, would have made him a coward, and we do not know whether there was a way he might have hunkered down and saved only himself and still have been considered honorable. 

This thought is presented not to in any way diminish an act of heroism. It is to try to make sense of the fact that heroism takes place when, as so many brave men report, they saw themselves as merely doing their jobs. The same could be said of those who are seen in retrospect as being politically brave, as when they refused to testify before Congressional Committees so as not to implicate friends, or people who might be said to be socially brave because they go against received opinion, such as the person who, like Huck, befriends someone not thought fit to be a friend.

What else could have been done, given the circumstances? One either informed on a friend or did not. A witness who did so at a private session of The House Un American Activities Committee would not have altered the essence of the deed, and so one was either brave or an informer. Refusing to accept a black man as a roommate in the Fifties (whites were asked their permission though, I have been informed, the reverse was not the case) would make you either a racist or not, however much ten years before a white man might have finessed the issue by thinking that he was just following customs and so taking neither side of the emotional issue. It is all up to circumstances. Freud would have been cowardly to have kept what he discovered to himself because his identity was wrapped up in being a truth seeker. In that sense, he “had no choice”, though Darwin, according to one interpretation, waited on becoming a hero because he did not want to be subject to derision.

The decision to be brave is therefore neither idealistic nor emotional (though it can be those as well). It is primarily rational, a swift recognition of the position into which one has been put and what are the available alternatives. That is very different from Emile Durkheim’s view, which is that bravery is both idealistic and emotional: a refusal to abandon the group which sustains a person’s ideals.

It is not a cowardly obeisance to decorum, I think, that explains how often are brave the people who face the prospect of death. The enormity of it might drive one to flail against the night. But think, for a moment. What is a dying person to do? Or a person who is close to someone who is dying? A person can be unpleasant and whine, which means that others will say the person is handling it badly even though there is nothing much that can be done to put it off.  One might as well make life easier for those who will survive. You take your pain into another room; you speak gently to those who call, embarrassedly, to inquire about your condition. You divide your favorite belongings among your children because you really do want to assign some to one child and some to another. You are not just putting on a brave face; you are being brave, for to act otherwise would become a burden and you don’t want to inflict that on yourself. So the dying person is brave because there is no alternative, at least for those of us who consider dignity better than panic. I have seen dying people who are brave, and those who are not so brave, and no one I know excuses those who are not brave as just ordinary. They are always pathetic, however much one is sympathetic to those who find the prospect of death too much to bear.

In similar fashion, one is brave when one accepts the end of a romantic relationship rather than carrying on about it, or responds to a job termination by thinking about where to work next. Some people are brave, like my father, for having carried so much of the burden of his father’s family at too early an age because to do otherwise would be to bear a life long guilt for not having done what one could do when what one could do might have mattered to people you love. He was very brave in that respect, though he was also scared of illnesses and injections and death. People are brave a good deal of the time and not just on special occasions such as war or politics and they are brave in some circumstances while not in others.

So my thesis is this: bravery is not something that raises people above the ordinary cut of folks. Rather it happens under circumstances where one is inevitably either a hero or a goat and people make a rational calculation about which title to assume. That thesis goes a long way to explaining what has happened to a number of workers during the current coronavirus pandemic. People who at one time were regarded as menial workers, such as grocery store clerks and delivery men and people who work at Amazon fulfillment centers are regarded by the media and perhaps by themselves no longer as menial workers but as heroes in that they are the ones who keep the economy functioning. If they go to these jobs they are heroes and if they quit their jobs they are malingerers and victims and cowards, take your choice of terms of derision. The choice to be a hero is an easy and rational one: if they are heroes, they continue to get their paychecks; if they opt out or stay home, they will be unemployed. But the media and public opinion would prefer to cast them as heroes, and so they are just doing their jobs, just like the soldier who is just doing his job of looking after his buddies because a failure to do so would brand him as a slacker. 

Now apply this same analysis to politicians, contrary as it is to the conventional view of heroism offered by John Fitzgeral Kennedy in his book “Profiles in Courage”, where he said that the deciding vote to acquit Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial was cast by Edmund G. Ross of Kansas. It was an act of courage because he did what he thought was the right thing in spite of the fact that he was criticized for it. Similarly, Kennedy regarded Senator Robert Taft of Ohio as having been courageous because he opposed the Nuremberg trials. Kennedy was being a bit coy in that he picked people whose resistance to popular pressure was for principles that were defensible even if unpopular. Would he have stood up for Trump as courageous for having sided with the people who picketed Charleston in the name of white supremacy? That is what the conventional idea of heroism leads to: defending the indefensible as an act of courage. 

The conventional sense of heroism endorsed by Kennedy motivates present day Liberals who angrily ask why there are so few Republican Senators who will show courage and stand up to President Trump even though he is so clearly unfit for office and even though they roundly castigated him during the primary campaign leading up to the 2016 election. Have they no shame? Are they so craven that they will risk nothing to preserve the honor and effectiveness of the nation against this very bad man? What that anger does not take into account is that those Republicans do not think that they have been put by their constituents into a position where they are either heroes or cowards. They think Trump supporters would be furious with them if they did not support Trump and think that refusing to support Trump will get them few new supporters. And circumstances until recently would seem to prove that correct. Why risk everything when they want to remain around to pick up the remains of the Republican Party? Certainly Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz feel that way, whatever their misgivings about the President. They are biding their time, just as they were during the primary season before the 2016 election, when they thought Trumpites would turn to them after Trump had played himself out as an obviously ridiculous choice for a candidate for President. They are making a rational calculation. They will announce, after Joe Biden wins, that there is a new Republican Party devoted to the public interest and who was this guy Trump anyway? Never heard of him.  

Now you might think these Senators are cowardly for not picking up the cudgel against Trump themselves, they afraid to do the brave and honorable thing. But bravery is not the quality we most want in politicians. These are people who have calculated how to maximize their political fortunes for forty years and they are not going to sacrifice that hard work for the feelings of the moment. Nor would a follower of Max Weber, who prized the politics of responsibility, which means politicians who are aware of the constituencies they serve and the difficulty of pursuing new paths, over against the politics of ultimate ends, where principle displaces practicality and results in highly ideological and divisive politics. So let politicians be politicians. It wasn’t the Republican leaders who chose their candidate in 2016; it was the membership of the party. So let those Senators rediscover themselves to be responsible, by which they mean statesmanlike, even if some of their number, like Susan Collins, will be dropped from the scene because they played it just too fine, just too cute. She is no coward, just a practitioner of the political arts of bending principle so as to serve one’s constituency, and perhaps mistaken about the directions in which public opinion moves. The Republicans will be surprised that their rational calculation, based on their own sense of the balance of forces at work, which are very different from the Democratic assessment of those forces, does not work out, but you don’t expect people in the two parties to make the same assessment of what the nation will stand for, do you? Elections determine who guessed right.