Fighting against a powerful force, fighting against gangsters, fighting against bullies, fighting against people who are altogether lacking in scruples and willing to do anything to protect and extend their dominance-- this is the work of heroes.
But in America, in our time --and particularly in those players in the political arena who are representative of the liberal half of the American spectrum-- heroes seem to be in unusually short supply.
What is the source of this dearth of heroism?
At one level, I think, the problem is that along the way we --in culturally liberal America-- lost sight of what we thought a human being is supposed to be. We withdrew the emotional and spiritual investment in an image of the human ideal as something we felt impelled to strive toward.
I can see it in the movies: the movies of the 30s, and 40s, and 50s, were MUCH MORE INTO LOOKING AT THE ADMIRABLE than movies in recent decades. In some liberal circles, "admiration" as a human practice has become as quaint as honoring the Geneva Conventions became in other, right-wing circles.
When people engage less in admiration it is a sign they investing less energy into the ideal image of the human being.
The protagonist as someone we can admire. Losing that is a symptom of a spiritual disease: a letting go of the energy that should invest itself into the cultivation of the good.
Our movies don’t have to go back to the naivete of the movies of an earlier era, but they can do more to get us to invest ourselves in an image of a kind of human ideal. A Jimmy Stewart, a John Wayne, a Bogart, a Gary Cooper, a Burt Lancaster– now there was a man one could admire, in some ways anyway. But one would not quickly say the same of Nicholas Cage or Johnny Depp. Something of an ideal –in terms of some ethic or other– is being offered for us to identify with.
The liberal half of America --with its disinvestment in the image of the human ideal, providing fewer images and ideas to support the achievement of that ideal-- helped lead the way downward for the moral structures of America.
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In particular, the draining of energy from the image of the ideal impoverished the motivational springs for acts of heroism.
Heroes, generally, are people who have cast themselves into that role because of their devotion to living up to a heroic ideal. In the heroic ideal of the American man --enacted in countless films of an earlier era-- when evil rises up, the ideal American man rises up to fight it. He does not shrink, in fear, from that fight. That would be a violation of the hero's ethic of honor.
In America today, we do not now have enough people who would rather die than dishonor themselves, even if that death were merely a political one. We do not even seem to have enough people for whom it is a tough choice if the path of the honorable hero leads through great danger.
That’s what the movies I was brought up on were always teaching us boys: you stand up to evil and you fight to defeat it. Captain Midnight. Batman. Superman. Jimmy Stewart in MR. SMITTH GOES TO WASHINGTON. John Wayne in countless films (though the question of good and evil was muddier with him). Or my hero Burt Lancaster –who was, in my adolescence, my idea of manly strength and courage– as an American individual in FROM HERE TO ETERINITY and as the French railroad man Lapiche during World War II in THE TRAIN. Gary Cooper in, for example, HIGH NOON.
None of these guys ever played people who would allow themselves to back down from the Bushite power out of fear.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
Perhaps it would mean being willing to run for office yourself.
Perhaps it would mean working hard to support someone for office who you believe is made of the right stuff.
Why don't people do that....
Well, they don't believe they could win.
They don't believe a worthy candidate could win.
They're afraid that if they put out the effort to support an independent candidate that it would end up supporting their worst nightmare.
All of these considerations are valid. Trying to change things is an uncertain risky business. One person with a gun can stand off a crowd of people because even though the group could take him out, each person realizes that he or she might get hurt.
No incumbent congressperson is willing to defend the Constitution because they fear it will lose them their job and they're not even sure they would succeed. Of course, that's the same dilemma a soldier faces when he or she enters a battle. Apparently moral courage is more rare than physical courage. A lot of people are more afraid of losing face, status or financial security, then they are their lives.
Another problem is... fighting city hall is an uphill battle that you have only a slim chance of winning a lot of ways to get hurt, particularly now. Looking back at the revolutionary war a lot of people did get hurt, including some of those who signed the Declaration of Independence.
Having courage is a lot easier when you have company; not so easy when you believe you are pretty much alone or don't know if anyone will support you.
I guess that brings you back to your original question.
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Mark A. Goldman (81 articles, 2 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 243 comments)
on Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 2:25:56 PM
As for isolation, for the citizenry, fortunately there are places like this that tell us that we are not alone.
But where the courage has been lacking, it seems that the Congress is where the ball got handed off in November of 2006, and then went nowhere. That's where the dearth of heroism has been most blatant.
Does Wellstone go far to explain this dearth?
Wellstone may be dead (and I've heard the rumors), but look at how many other people who have spoken up boldly (and a lot more aggressively against the BUshite evil than Wellstone, who after all died in October of 2002, before the criminality of the regime was nearly so evident), who are still alive: Olbrmann, Feingold, Krugman, Paul Craig Roberts, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Dodd (this week) and many, many others.
This is not like Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia in terms of how much courage it would take --or how surely one would be destroyed, or how long one would last-- to stand up to the Bushite regime.
I do not think the level of apparent fear on the part of our so-called leaders is so easily explained.
At the worst, a person in Congress, in standing up to honor his or her oath of office, might be inviting upon themselves the fate of a Max Cleland in the election of 2002. He was "bumped off" politically, but he lived to denounce the Bushites in the campaign of 2004.
I don't know just what Cleland would say about how terrible a fate it is to be defeated by the regime in an election, but my bet is that compared to the kind of danger and terrible fate that led Cleland to leave three of his four limbs in Vietnam, being sent back to private life is not the most frightening fate a human being can confront.
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Andrew Bard Schmookler (314 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 146 comments)
on Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 3:14:39 PM
This article raises a question that I have asked myself over and over--why is it that 40 years ago, so many Americans took to the streets to demonstrate against the Vietnam war while the anti-Iraq war activity is so limited this time?
isit only because there is no draft--the nearly 4000 killed come mostly from the lower income strata of society.Or because we are still far from the 60 000 mark?
I don't think so. Not only we might have lost our pride, our sense of the heroic, as Mr. Andrew Bard Schmookler argues convincingly but wehave lost hope.
After the historical defeat of socialism, under it's two main forms--communism and European social democracy--there is the feeling that ruthless globalized capitalism has the world in its grip, and that there is no other alternative.
And this new form of capitalism seems to bring about a regression of democracy everywhere it has taken over.
by
francine (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 370 comments)
on Friday, December 21, 2007 at 7:29:19 AM
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