The hero is dead, long live the hero… 11th September might have brought the old heroes back. CIA agents disguised as Afghans were in the Hindu Kush, young western women governed provinces in Islamic Iraq and SAS officers crossed the mountains of Nuristan. For westerners, there hadn't been such an opportunity for heroic adventure since the second world war. Perhaps obituaries would no longer begin as scenes from Where Eagles Dare and finish like an episode of Coronation Street. The October Daily Telegraph obituary of Major Peter Keeble, for example, used 1,200 words to describe the many dangerous commando raids in which he won a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross. There were only 55 words on the last 59 years of his life as an executive in a cement company, concluding: "He retired to Kenilworth and taught himself to cook to a high standard. He enjoyed entertaining his friends and going to the theatre."
But the last three years have not produced heroes in the old mould. No Lawrence of Arabia. No Churchill. Wars once threw up heroes as a matter of course. This one has not. We still yearn for people who are greater and nobler than us but we are not sure that they exist. We have Spiderman and Tom Cruise's last samurai. Living heroes are famous but less grand. Whether they are housewives struggling with tragedy, or football stars, we no longer ascribe to them "greatness of soul." They may be better than us at doing certain things, but they are not godlike. We are less superstitious and deferential. We emphasise people's ordinariness. If we put them on a pedestal, we often knock them off it. This is a positive development. But it also represents a loss.
The old magical idea of heroism, from Alexander the Great to Lawrence of Arabia, held that a living individual could be fully human and more than human. Classical heroes had extraordinary personalities and did godlike things. Contemporary heroes are ordinary people in unusual circumstances. We no longer look for supreme heroic character in others and that carries the cost that we no longer try to develop such character in ourselves.
In the latest Afghan war, people did things which might have made them heroes in another age. Johnny Michael Spann, a CIA officer, infiltrated Afghanistan in disguise shortly after 11th September to lead special operations against Taliban troops. He died in a shootout outnumbered by a Taliban crowd, becoming the first US combat casualty in Afghanistan. A hundred years earlier he would have been idolised for such a life and death.
In the 1870s, George Hayward, a British agent who died on the Afghan border, became a household name, enshrined in a poem by Henry Newbolt. Victorians celebrated the nobility of their contemporaries in statues, hagiographies and grand paintings of their death at the hands of native crowds: Alexander Burnes in Kabul, "Chinese" Gordon standing, sabre in hand, on the steps at Khartoum. But 20th-century high culture was reluctant to deify other humans. Lytton Strachey exposed Gordon as a messianic fantasist. Novelists, playwrights and painters stopped portraying heroes. Industrialisation, democracy and mass culture; the first world war; Hitler's promotion of supermen; a different attitude towards traditional masculine values; the lack of common values—all made it more difficult to see our leaders as supreme ethical actors. Talk of heroism began to sound like fascism. Lawrence of Arabia and Churchill were the final expressions of a Victorian vision. The fantasy of classical heroism retreated to fiction.
Thus, although Spann, the CIA agent, led a life like Jack Ryan's in a Tom Clancy novel, the US media did not emphasise this. Instead it focused on the grief of his family and on interviews with his high school teachers. The media wanted him to seem ordinary. It felt the audience would relate more comfortably to his suburban roots and his grieving parents than to his adventures. He became an archetype not of extraordinary actions but of the domestic tragedy of mourning.
For the US media, the finest hero of the Afghan war was Pat Tillman, killed in April. Tillman turned down a $3.6m American football contract to join the US rangers after 11th September. His Washington Post obituary quoted AE Housman and Wilfred Owen, speaking of his "spirit, surging light and clear." But Tillman was remembered for what he sacrificed, not what he achieved. There was little focus on his acts as a soldier. He was, in fact, killed by "friendly fire." For an ancient Greek this would be a death to be pitied not glorified. Unlike Achilles, Tillman was respected because he did not want to be a hero. Like the firemen on the twin towers staircase, Tillman represents the hero as victim, killed in the line of duty. We judge modern heroes not on what they have done, but on what happens to them.
This is true in Britain too. Last year, the Daily Mirror Pride of Britain awards for heroes picked out Terri Calvesbert for her "sparkling unquenchable spirit" because she had been badly burnt as a child, endured countless operations and has now started school. Of the 19 winners, only one was from the Iraq war: Trooper Finney, honoured not for fighting the enemy but for saving comrades from a vehicle hit by friendly fire. Others included a headmistress and a girl who had given her £16,000 winnings from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to charity. These people were not famous and their good deeds tended to be small in scale. In three cases they were heroes because they had partially recovered from appalling accidents.
The audience for the awards included another sort of modern hero: the Osbournes, the Duchess of York, Diana Ross, Michael Owen, Ant and Dec, EastEnders's Jessie Wallace and Coronation Street's Suranne Jones. Our culture's attitude towards these celebrities has many of the ingredients of hero worship. People long to see them or touch them, study their lives and weep at their deaths. But the modern celebrity hero is viewed quite differently from a great figure in antiquity. We know much more about their private lives. Some treat celebrities as magical beings but many treat them much more ironically.
We celebrate Michael Owen's goals and Jude Law's looks but we do not think that they are fundamentally better than us as people. Jonny Wilkinson is an admirable sportsman but we do not credit him with the dignity and ethical mastery which the Greeks saw in Alexander. And when Beckham misses a penalty or Paula Radcliffe drops out of the Olympic marathon, the media is merciless. We do not allow celebrities to think too much of themselves. Like Achilles, Roy Keane abandoned his comrades because he felt insulted. For the Greeks, there was something noble in Achilles's rage. Our media described Roy Keane's withdrawal as "selfish" and "conceited." Modern heroes are not supposed to consider themselves heroes.
But Alexander the Great wanted to be a hero, pretended to be a hero, saw himself as a hero and was a hero. His contemporaries accepted that his pride, ambition and love of glory were what made him attempt heroic acts. And some Greeks were prepared to see him and heroes like him not just as more talented but as superior human beings.
For 2,500 years, this intoxicating idea shaped rhetoric, painting and literature and created a model of how a human should live. Heroes pursued greatness at the cost of peace, love and happiness. Their actions shattered societies, challenged gods and mocked death. People often did not envy them but were in awe of them, and their falls seemed tragic.
For the Greeks, a living hero, unlike a fictional character, was still a mortal: vain, ignorant, uncertain and obtuse. By acting as though they were divine they were doing the impossible, pushing the limits that divided gods from men. Each grand action trembled on the edge between magnificence and shaming folly. It was often only luck which seemed to determine whether an action was viewed as heroism or hubris. The culture found a marvellous, productive energy in this tension between the godlike idea and the mortal reality. They could see Mark Antony simultaneously as a pitiful middle-aged lover botching his own suicide and a colossus.
We no longer think that arrogance, violence and vanity can be redeemed by godlike yearning. We prefer our heroes peaceful, rational and democratic. We are now more various, open, ironic and conscious of the megalomania and paranoia of great men. We understand that an Afghan villager has braved more in 25 years of war than any adventurer or spy, prancing across the High Pamirs.
But now that we no longer worship heroes in the old way, we may be less likely to act heroically. Alexander or Achilles did not only want to be rich and famous, but also "the best, the best among the best, now and in perpetuity."
They were driven to attempt the impossible because they wanted to surpass the other heroes celebrated by their contemporaries. Classical heroes studied previous heroes, copied them and collected their belongings. Alexander wanted to be Achilles; Julius Caesar wanted to be Alexander; Napoleon wanted to be Julius Caesar; Byron wanted to be Napoleon and almost everyone wanted to be Byron. When Alexander arrived at Troy, he bought a suit of Trojan armour, put it on and ran round the walls in imitation of Achilles.
Ancient society forgave their vanity because it was intoxicated with their glory. Italy understood that Leonardo and Michelangelo were driven to their bold creations by a desire to outdo their competition. The grandeur of their art fed off society's celebration of the hero. It was no coincidence that tiny republican Athens, which produced such a disproportionate number of great thinkers, politicians and playwrights, was the place where the heroic ideal was most clearly formulated and realised.
That time is passed. Nostalgia for dead tyrants and the longing for heroes are unhealthy and they can result in the deification of a Saddam as easily as a Havel or Mandela. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we have lost nothing. The drive to be godlike and do the impossible is gone and we will see this loss in music, in novels, in painting, in architecture and the way we shape our lives. September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism. We have woken from the dream of men who are more than human. But in so doing we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves.
