What is a hero?

Story deals in heroes. In fact, an accepted definition of "hero" is "the main character in any story."

My own definition is broader than that, and is summed up by the graphic you see below. For me, a hero is anyone outstanding.

I mean "outstanding" literally. Anyone who has separated him or herself from the greater mass of humanity, for whatever reason, is a hero. Heroes "stand out" from the crowd.

Which means that a hero does not have to be a sports star, or a bystander who saves people from a burning building. For me, a hero is a person who has lost the status of ordinary human.

This is particularly true for ancient Greece.

Heracles, for example, makes the world safe for civilization by killing monsters. On the other hand, he also kills his wife and children. As a role model, he's pretty poor. But he's larger than life, which is what counts.

The hero in Greek mythology pushes towards the divine, in having superhuman powers and abilities. But the hero also deals with death, by facing it or other dangerous situations, or by causing death on a small or large scale, or by becoming subhuman.

At the same time, as the graphic indicates, heroes insulate civilized humanity from divinity and death. Some of us think we'd like to be like Superman, but mostly we're grateful for our quiet lives. We let the outstanding folk do what is necessary-- either to protect us from the dangerous and the uncanny, or to be the ones who show us why a quiet life is preferable.

This is true for real life and in fiction.

The fine Pixar film The Incredibles illustrates the ordinary/extraordinary tension perfectly. The fictional family of superheroes lives in a society where government-sponsored do-gooding get tangled in the everyday world of lawsuits and liability. Seems that every now and then a hero has to break a few eggs to catch a villain, and citizens object.

As a result, the government shuts down the superhero program and tries to reintegrate these outstanding folk into normal society. But by their nature, even by their genes (as we find out about Incredible child #3), they must push outside the box of civilization or lose their sense of self, not to mention their sanity.

And since, in the reality constructed by the movie, there is always a villain ready to destroy civilization as we know it, these heroes really do need to step outside their corporate cubicles and suburban houses to save the day.

My model differs markedly in emphasis from Joseph Campbell's so-called "Hero's Journey." For Campbell, the hero's reference point is him- or herself, more specifically the process and outcome of that hero's own life. This emphasis finds its origin in the late twentieth-century preoccupation with self, encapsulated in Campbell's admonition to "Follow Your Bliss." Everyone can be a hero, in Campbell's model.

As one who lives life with a sound track, I identify with the idea of personal mythology. In the past, I've been semi-obsessed with the idea of matching my life with that of King David of Israel-- though lately it's been more useful for me to explore how I resemble Goliath.

But for the ancient Greeks, the hero's self was never the focal point of a story. Ordinary Greeks never thought, "I'd like to be Achilles. I'd like to be Heracles." They identified themselves first as a member of their own family, then of their clan, then of their city and/or region, then of their nation, and finally as an individual. Greeks like Socrates are famous for being individualists, but there's a reason Socrates was condemned to death.

So much for stories. In real life, Today's teenagers very often find themselves in heroic situations, in the ancient Greek sense. Having left the relative safety of childhood, but not yet integrated as adults with jobs and families, teens live in an outer world of uncertainty and flux. "Teenagers will do anything, as long as it's dangerous," adults say. "They think they're immortal."

It's not that teens think they're immortal. But they are semi-divine (as the graphic suggests)-- because they haven't found the boundaries yet which will propel them back to the circle of civilization. They test and probe, and sometimes come to bad ends through that testing.

We spend a lot of time fretting over teenagers, when in reality people in their twenties commit crimes, kill, and die much more often. We are preoccupied with adolescence because we are fascinated by heroes, by human beings in outstanding situations.

Most teens are not heroes by choice. They'd like nothing more than to stop being noticed-- or at least not to attract so many worried looks.

That's why those of us who work and live with teens could do a good deed by helping to de-heroize their lives as much as possible. Parents sometimes think that imposing fair rules on their adolescent children's behavior will result in the kids hating them. Just the opposite is true. Once they have lost their hero status, former teenagers will thank the parent who has set proper boundaries, even if during the period of testing the parent feels like he or she is living with Heracles or Medea.

As high-schoolers graduate this year, romantic commencement speakers will feel obligated to urge them to "change" the world for the better, a superhuman feat of which none of us is capable. It would be more compassionate to say, "Remember to take out the trash," "Keep your eyes on your own test," "Listen more  than you speak." This is plenty heroic for the vast majority of us, much less open to abuse than "Follow Your Bliss," and it might be a more efficient way of changing the world-- one responsible adult at a time.

Comments

[DF]

Had a thoughtful email from a reader, part of which I reproduce here:

Of your recent posts I particularly liked the one on
> heroes and teens.
> Many societies explicitly use that brief window of
> "suspended
> mortality." I understand the Israeli aircorp
> recruits fighter pilots
> almost exclusively from teen males because they will
> dare things that a
> more conservative (older and wiser?) human would
> never. They
> continually push the envelope - like that diagram in
> your post - towards
> divinity or towards death (often in open defiance of
> both).
> Interestingly, to openly defy either is to
> acknowledge them more
> concretely than can the older and wiser who
> supposedly has come to terms
> with them.

The Athenians had a teen "fighter pilot" program called the Ephebeia. Youths aged 16-18 spent two years on the borders of the nation, acting as an early warning system for invaders.

I welcome everyone's comments on teenagers as outstanding human beings.

[Theriomorph]

Here is a teen hero I knew - a hero not for dying in the pursuit of rescuing, but for living in the outstanding embodiment of compassion:

http://theriomorph.blogspot.com/2005/10/sweet-ghosts-anniversary.html