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?
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.
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