Heroism

By AC Grayling for The Guardian

Saturday March 9, 2002

My hero is he who wins praise without bloodshed - Martial

March comes in like a lion, so the saying has it, and in respect of the peculiarly vicious escalation of violence in the Middle East, Afghanistan and India since the month began, the saying has a ghastly aptness - recalling the image in Shakespeare of a maddened lion with bloody mouth, tearing everything before it, an emblem of what issues from despair and hatred. The active participants in these conflicts are doubtless thought heroes by the constituencies of anger that they represent. They include the suicide bomber, the jihadi with his Kalashnikov in a mountain cave, the sectarian with his club and the firebrand intent on murder. In all cases they oppose professional, well-equipped soldiers, who in turn are thought heroic by those who see them as protectors of order.

Heroism is typically thought a warrior virtue, and it is true that, in the absence of enough fanaticism or rage to make it unnecessary, "it indeed takes courage to fight implacable enemies with guns and bombs, given that they answer in kind". In self-defence against malign aggression, or in the interests of principle, such courage would deserve the name of heroism. But all other fighting and killing, squabbling and destroying, never does. On the contrary, heroism is first and foremost the property of peace-makers. It takes infinitely greater courage to salvage a people or an epoch from conflict than to start or continue it. The outstanding figures of our time, among whom Nelson Mandela is the exemplar, are those who seek reconciliation, agreement, forgiveness - very milksop notions, no doubt, in the view of people who think it cleverer to let their guns do their thinking and talking.

Such folk would scarcely merit even our contempt if it were not that their way of solving problems does such fantastic harm, and if it were not that there is an organised means of supplying them the wherewithal. Those who oppose them not with returned gunfire but with offers of peace are as high above them morally as Everest is above a worm cast. Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked that "a hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world". This is profoundly untrue. It is when the world has become sullied and degraded by violent quarrels, when reason has yielded to frenzy, when all human feeling has been boiled into hatred, that true heroism might flourish, if it can be found. Part of the reason is that peacemakers usually have first to face the animosity of their own side, which regards them as traitors and weaklings. They will be in the uncomfortable position, at least for a time, of being better regarded by enemies than by friends. The people who could best thank them, if they were able to understand what was done for them, would be those not yet born - next year's children, or in the longer term, the beneficiaries of a generation which had the blessing of growing up in peace.

The medieval Muslim sage Sa'di wrote, "Even if you could tear the head off an elephant, if you are without humanity you are no hero." That is the key. There is a quiet but not so small heroism of the moral life which is crucial here. It is very much easier to be intolerant, angry, jealous and resentful than it is to be generous, patient, kind and considerate. Without question it takes far more thought, and far more work, to treat others from the standpoint of these virtues than from that of those vices, which is why the latter are so prevalent. Each of the world's current conflicts needs just two individuals, leaders on opposing sides, to stand up, meet, talk, keep clearly in view some image - a child blinded or limbless because of bombing, say; and to agree a fixed determination not to use large-scale murder as a way of managing differences. On that basis, real hope can enter the picture. This is of course an extremely hard thing to achieve; but it is why such individuals, if they were to appear, would be very great heroes indeed.

[Wise words indeed.]