"Heroes in Every Age"

READING

Philip Zimbardo’s study of evil, "The Lucifer Effect," was the subject of a Sunday service a month or so ago. I’m returning to his work once more because he asks, at the end of his long exploration, what it takes for people to be the opposite of evil – to be heroic. In this passage, he reflects on who heroes really are.

“We would like to celebrate heroism and heroes as special acts by special people. However, most people who are held up to this higher plane insist that what they did was not special, was really what everyone should have done in the situation. They refuse to consider themselves ‘heroes.’ Maybe such a reaction comes from the ingrained notion we all have – that heroes are supermen and –women, a cut or more above the common breed. Perhaps more than their modesty is at work. Perhaps, rather, it is our general misconception of what it takes to be heroic. . . .

“Another aspect of heroism is raised by their example. Heroism and heroic status are always social attributions. Someone other than the actor confers that honor on the person and the deed. There must be social consensus about the significance and the meaningful consequence of an act for it to be deemed heroic, and for its agent to be called a hero. Wait! Not so fast! A Palestinian suicide bomber who is killed in the act of murdering innocent Jewish civilians is given heroic status in Palestine and demonic status in Israel. Similarly, aggressors may be construed as heroic freedom fighters or as cowardly agents of terrorism, depending on who is conferring the attribution.

“This means that definitions of heroism are always culture-bound and time-bound. To this day, puppeteers enact the legend of Alexander the Great before children in remote villages of Turkey. In the towns where his command posts were set up and his soldiers intermarried with villagers, Alexander is a great hero, but in towns that were simply conquered on his relentless quest to rule the known world, Alexander is portrayed as a great villain, more than a thousand years after his death.

“What is more, to become part of any culture’s history a hero’s acts must be recorded and preserved by those who are literate and who have the power to write history or to pass it on in an oral tradition. Poor, indigenous, colonized, illiterate people have few widely acknowledged heroes because there is no record of their acts.”

From "The Lucifer Effect," by Philip Zimbardo, pp. 459-460.

SERMON

Alexander the Great may have been one of the most powerful military commanders of all time, turning every place he visited into an outpost of the Greek empire. Those who assimilated into Hellenistic culture carried forward the legend of his conquests and the sophisticated civilization that came with them. That is how one side of the story goes.

Another side, however, tells how a small band of oppressed Jews, unwilling to profane their religion with Greek ways, succeeded in taking back a small part of their world and restoring its traditions and faith. That is the Hanukkah story. Perhaps some of you read Rabbi Michael Lerner’s message from Tikkun this year. He argues that the significance of Hanukkah “is that so many people were able to resist the overwhelming ‘reality’ imposed by the imperialists and to stay loyal to a vision of a world based on generosity, love of stranger, and loyalty to an invisible God who promised that life could be based on justice and peace. It was these ‘little guys,’ the powerless, who managed to sustain a vision of hope that inspired them to fight against overwhelming odds, against the power of technology and science organized in the service of domination, and despite the fact that they were dismissed as terrorists and fundamentalist crazies.”[1] The Hanukkah meaning for us, Rabbi Lerner concludes, “is this same radical hope, whether rooted in religion or secularist belief systems, that remains the foundation for all who continue to struggle for a world of peace and social justice at a time when the champions of war and injustice dominate the political and economic institutions of our own society . . . .”[2]

Here is our seasonal reminder that one group’s heroes are another group’s terrorists, that one nation’s golden age inflicted oppression on another, and that a lot depends on who is writing up the story. Our idea of who is the hero is profoundly contextual, revealing a host of allegiances and perspectives. The more we know about the world and learn how culture-bound we are, the easier it is to see heroes as the locally determined phenomena they are.

None of the heroes of my childhood have quite the same reputation today. My heroes – T.E. Lawrence, John F. Kennedy, Albert Schweitzer, were all flawed and misunderstood. Though they embodied qualities that instructed and inspired me, they were also the same bundle of ambiguous humanity we find in ourselves.

Sometimes, knowing the human side of a person actually makes them seem more heroic. I was never much interested in Mother Teresa until I read in the news recently that she struggled with her faith, ultimately deciding to continue her work whether she believed or not. Now there’s someone who may truly have been a saint.

And then there are celebrities, people we don’t really know at all. Yet we learn to see them as larger than life figures, whose every move and escapade are somehow more real than our own. Whoever they are, and many of them are surely good people, their lives have little to do with the information we consume about them. Yet they take up much of the space that heroes once did, while the public imagination entertains itself with their marriages, divorces, DUIs, and hair.

Perhaps heroes no longer belong in our information-rich world where anyone can be the subject of a tell-all memoir or a You Tube video. When you can know every embarrassing thing there is to know about another person, there’s not enough romance or mystery left to be a hero. You might conclude that all we can do is shuffle along together, learning to live without the example of just how heroic people can be.

And yet the hunger is still there – and so are the heroes. Go to Amsterdam and you will find that the line of visitors waiting to see Anne Frank’s house is patient and long. What you see there are not just the artifacts of a family who lived in an attic. You see the goodness of the people who risked their own lives to hide them. Zimbardo pauses to reflect on these people. He writes, “A common theme in the accounts of European Christians who helped the Jews during the Holocaust could be summed up as the ‘banality of goodness.’ What is striking over and over again is the number of rescuers who did the right thing without considering themselves heroic, who acted merely out of a sense of common decency. The ordinariness of their goodness is especially striking in the context of the incredible evil of the systematic genocide by Nazis on a scale the world had never before experienced.”[3]

Zimbardo offers some other examples of contemporary heroism. “At the vanguard of efforts to promote freedom and human dignity,” Zimbardo writes, “are special kinds of heroes who are willing to engage in lifelong battles against systematic oppression. In recent times, Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela took heroic paths that led to their engaging and dismantling two systems of apartheid.”[4]

Zimbardo’s inventory of recent history continues with the anti-McCarthy heroes, who stood up to hysterical and repressive forces within our society and our government. Church member Sylvia Berke is one of them. On the other side “from the imaginary menace that faced the United States” was “the palpable daily menace and cruelty of national domination by the Communist regime.”[5] There we find hero Vaclav Havel, who led the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia.

Next on Zimbardo’s list are the heroes of the Vietnam War, those who stood up to their captors, surviving imprisonment and torture, and those who stood up to their commanders, refusing to collude when they ran amok. There are the whistle-blowers, the rescuers, and the survivors of catastrophes of all kinds. There are the passengers on United Airlines flight 93, who managed to prevent the plane from reaching “its intended target, either the White House or the Capitol.”[6] Most, if not all, of these heroes came out of ordinary circumstances. If the situation had never presented itself, they would have led lives that were remembered for something other than their courage and sacrifice. But life happened to give them an extraordinary opportunity, and they were able to rise to the occasion.

What qualities did they possess to draw upon under tremendous pressure? Are they qualities we can nurture in ourselves? We need to ask ourselves these questions.

“Heroism focuses on what is right with human nature,”[7] Zimbardo responds. He lists six categories of “virtuous behavior that enjoy almost universal recognition across cultures: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.”[8] He defines “transcendence” as “beliefs and actions that go beyond the limits of self.”[9] Some acts of heroism take place in a moment; others over a lifetime. They belong in the public imagination because they teach us that anyone – even one of us – can be a hero; can summon up the courage and the selflessness to do what needs to be done. “For reasons we do not yet fully understand,” writes Philip Zimbardo, “thousands of ordinary people in every country around the world, when they are placed in special circumstances, make the decision to act heroically.”[10] We are all “heroes in waiting.”[11]

Who can say what choices we make will determine what others think of us? People do not choose to become heroes. Zimbardo notes that the European Christians who risked their own lives to rescue victims of the Holocaust simply “did the right thing without considering themselves heroic, who acted merely out of a sense of common decency.”[12] Heroes do not exist for themselves. They live in the collective imagination, showing us, through life-changing moments and lives of service, that we are all capable of great goodness. They draw on capacities we all have and virtues we all know. Their courage is of the kind that Anne Sexton chronicled in the poem we heard during our meditation earlier. “It is in the small things,” the ways in which we survive indignity, heal our wounds, and face the unknown. It is in the power each of us has to transcend our own limitations – whatever those limitations might be – to choose the greater good. Using all we have, we become what we dream we can be: heroes to one another, whenever the time is right.
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1 Rabbi Michael Lerner, “Chanukah & Christmas: When Hope Triumphs Over Cynical Realism,” "Tikkun" December 2, 2007.

2 Ibid.

3 Philip Zimbardo, "The Lucifer Effect" (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 486.

4 Ibid., p. 472.

5 Ibid., p. 473.

6 Ibid., p. 482.

7 Ibid., pp. 460-461.

8 Ibid., p. 460.

9 Ibid., p. 461.

10 Ibid., p. 488.

11 Ibid., p. 488

12 Ibid., p. 486.