No Reverence, No Heroes

The heroic vision of life and the religious vision are related in ways not immediately apparent to the modern secular imagination.

The heroic Czech dissident and statesman Václav Havel argues that our ancestors, despite their inferior scientific knowledge of the universe, “knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.” What they knew, for all the disagreement over details from one culture to another, was “the same basic message: People should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them.” And as a corollary, they believed “they should revere one another.” In that space for reverence the hero resides.

The heroes of old books—Homer’s, Sophocle’s, Shakespeare’s—written before our post-religious age, were certainly not models of perfection. They were not idols, just heroes. They were often tragic figures, with flaws that brought them down. What they had, though, was a height to fall from. Such characters—Odysseus, Oedipus, Macbeth—fascinated our ancestors, who saw in them the potential to go up or down that all people share. They may have been larger than life, but they were not unrelated to life as ordinary people knew it.

A whole vision of communal responsibility and personal significance was embedded within those stories. Old literature taught by example that actions have consequences. Individuals matter. And what they do affects not only themselves but others around them, because individuals have their full identity only in a social context.

This vision had norms to distinguish good from evil. It had a place for God, for others, and for the self, a place for this life and the next. It set each human life against a panoramic background that stretched upward to infinity and outward to eternity.

In particular, this vision honored the pursuit of excellence. Human glory could be easily enough forfeited, and the desire for fame, as Milton warned, was “that last infirmity of noble mind.” Still, the main thing was that this glory was attainable. The roads to the goal were various. Some wayfarers were impelled by pride toward self-aggrandizement for its own sake. Some humbly assumed the burden of self-denial for the sake of attaining some self-transcending communal end. Some found their measure of glory by coordinating human effort with divine grace in order to glorify God. From the rich stock of fictional and historical characters—Abraham or Achilles, Beowulf or Dr. Faustus, Lincoln or Napoleon—each person could ponder the degrees to which some were worthy of emulation and others provided cautionary tales of a road not to take.

This venerable tradition also provided a means to come to terms with that last great enemy that lay in wait at the end of every road—death. For people who through long centuries lived with heaven above them and eternity beyond, death functioned as the great prompter of the human drama, and every action in one’s little story had consequences in the Great Story. In that high-stakes setting, heroism was possible. And a good death was to be prized as a fitting crown to a good life.

This whole grand vision has gone a-glimmering in our age—and only in our age. The literature of our century features antiheroes, one after another in a dull march. We have traded in high King Oedipus for low man Willy Loman. Antiheroic literature is good at provoking melancholy and inducing despair; it does not stir souls to aim at greatness. In a resolutely egalitarian age, the passion to excel smacks of elitism, and elitism is a swear word. We are all small people now. A good death is unthinkable; we surround death with professional white coats to keep it out of view.

Our schools reinforce this low vision. History texts skimp on the great actors upon time’s stage: George Washington gets chopped down to half-page size. The old literature is scanted, deemed too difficult or too remote or simply irrelevant. We socialize our children to fit in, not to stand out. We deprive them of models of courage under fire that could inspire daydreams about some dire circumstance in which they could test their own bravery. Is it any wonder that suddenly we’re all abuzz about what’s wrong with our boys? Even such a seemingly paltry matter as grade inflation undermines the recognition of excellence, for girls as well as boys. The glory has departed.

A touchstone for comprehending our malaise is to be found in a new book by conservative journalist David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks’ term “Bobo” is a shortening of bourgeois bohemians. The bohemians who roiled the ’60s and the bourgeois who calmed the ’80s have, according to this Boomer author, fused to produce a distinctly new hybrid. The Bobos imagine the “culture war that pitted traditional values against liberationist values” to be over, its oppositions now “merged, blurred, and reconciled.” Actually, traditional “values” were simply submerged. Out with “soaring ideals and high ambitions”; in with “small-scale morality.” Brooks finds “a lot that is wonderful” in this “soft and comfortable synthesis.”

Bobo paradise is not, however, without its serpent. Sooner or later, affluent strivers discover a hole in the heart that the material accoutrements of the good life cannot fill. Their first commandment, “Love Thyself,” does not serve. So they look—as Havel could have predicted—to religion. But because, in Brooks’ words, they desire “to build a house of obligation on a foundation of choice,” they require a religiosity “conducted in a spirit of moderation rather than zeal.” Thus, “orthodoxy without obedience”—a rabbi in Montana calls it “Flexidoxy”—is the closest they get to the real thing. And because Bobos do not consider that the hole in their hearts might be a God-shaped void, “Montana is the closest we get to heaven.”

The insufficiencies of the Bobos’ irony-laced approach to life come into focus when Brooks broaches the subject of heroism. It comes, fittingly, in the chapter on “Spiritual Life.” For Brooks, too, senses that we get to the heart of the matter about heroes only when a religious vision of life comes into play.

Brooks reflects upon the martyrs, prophets, and saints of yore; then he observes, “Maybe that sort of surrender and heroism is beyond the reach of Bobo spirituality.” He explains acutely, “Maybe if we walked around with a coherent moral order built into our head, we would feel at home in the supernatural realm.” Since, however, Bobos are “lacking that faith in that next world,” even the conservatives among them settle for aiming at “prosaic goodness, not heroic grandeur.”

Religious faith was vigorously attacked by secular intellectuals in the so-called Enlightenment. One of their slogans ran, “No God, no master.” To that we may add, “No souls.” And, “No heroes.”

A culture can live off the accrued moral capital of its religious forebears. It can continue to revere heroes after rejecting the religious view of the potential grandeur of beings made in the divine image. But only for a while. We have just about run out of that capital. And that is why we have heroes no more.

Edward E. Ericson Jr., a contributing writer to TAE, produced an abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago in collaboration with author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.