Refusing Resignation: Moral Heroes in an Age of Victims

Why should we think about heroes? Aren’t they something the twentieth century discredited? Two world wars and several massively botched attempts at revolution have led many people to think we would be better off if we gave up on heroes entirely.

But such people might be surprised to find that even Immanuel Kant believed that we learn to make moral judgments by examining the characters of men and women who act morally. The test of moral activity, as opposed to self-serving action that happens to coincide with it, is heroism. Learning to make moral judgments by examining heroic exemplars is so natural, and effective, that Kant recommends it even for “businessmen, women, and ten year old children.”

The belief that heroes are romantic, and Enlightenment is not, is very widespread. Whether they view it as a reason for regret or relief, most people agree that the Enlightenment opened a post-heroic age. I believe this is wrong – but in one way or another, people have been mourning the decline of simple heroic virtue, and its replacement by modern calculation and self-interest, since Odysseus outlived Achilles in the Trojan War.

Two very different concepts of the hero stand at the beginning of western literature, and we can use them for orientation today.

Odysseus

Odysseus is everything Achilles is not. Even his most important military achievement, the invention of the Trojan horse, breaks every code of martial honour. It did end the war. But it’s a piece of the behaviour that led Voltaire to write, “I do not know how it comes to pass, but every reader bears secretly an ill-will to the wise Ulysses.”

Odysseus-bashing has a very long history, going back, at the least, to the fifth century poet Pindar. Pindar was furious that Homer left the ambiguous Odysseus alive after Troy, while consigning straightforward noble figures like Achilles and Ajax to the shades. Pindar was defending the old order, and he viewed the triumph of Odysseus as moral decay. But you needn’t belong to the aristocracy to object to Odysseus: Euripedes portrayed him as vile and deceptive; the Stoics thought he was whiney; and contemporary critics are still inclined to attack him.

The most thorough attack on Odysseus was made by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944. Their Dialectic of Enlightenment was the twentieth century’s most influential attack on the Enlightenment – that is, modernity. The book argued that The Odyssey was the beginning of the end: the first modern novel showed the first modern man, uprooted, cool and dispassionate. Adorno and Horkheimer’s most memorable example left Odysseus as the brutal, denatured industrial baron whose workers have been deafened in order to toil ever-harder. The captain who stops his sailors’ ears and binds himself to the mast to sail past the Sirens foreshadows the modern capitalist, relentlessly driving himself and his workers through a sterilized world. As compensation, he treats himself to an occasional trip to the opera; the workers must forego even that.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, Odysseus’s triumphs are the empty triumphs of modernity itself. The story of the Sirens shows the triumph of reason – and shows it to be hollow. Odysseus suppresses his passion in order to reach a long-term goal. Here the modern subject uses reason to dominate nature – his own nature first of all – while leaving a small space for the empty version of nature and passion we’ve come to call culture. Thus safely framed and bounded, art can no longer move us – it simply lets off steam.

There is something brilliant about this reading. But the spell lasts only till one asks the question: so you want him to drown? It’s interesting to wonder what Achilles would have done in such a situation, but stooping to put wax in his men’s ears and letting them tie him up would not have been an option. I imagine him curling his lip and jumping into the sea, sword in hand – perhaps even taking a Siren down with him. That’s how romantic heroes behave. Odysseus, in contrast, refuses any easy way out. Here as elsewhere he dares to be divided, to acknowledge that being human means being torn, that being grownup entails real choices, and facing regret.

All these truths are so banal that it might seem pointless to assert them – were there not several schools of thought that have flourished by denying them. Adorno and Horkheimer’s use of The Odyssey is the model for a form of deconstruction that’s become so pervasive and automatic it has become fashionable. They do not, to be sure, go so far as Foucault, for whom the abolition of public execution by torture was just a more sinister form of domination. But they do imply that every form of action is futile, as everything dynamic becomes deadened. Turning music into high culture to be suffered in the straitjacket of a tux and a concert hall is turning its power into mush.

I don’t have an alternative to the undermining power of the culture industry, but I know the alternatives are more than two: either you have songs so powerful they drive men mad, or you have, well, muzak. And those are the alternatives left to Adorno and Horkheimer and their many heirs. They never actually say Odysseus shouldn’t have survived, but they do imply that his life – like ours – isn’t really worth living, at least when compared to the richer lives of yesteryear.

Achilles

From our distance, Achilles can look like a hot-headed fool, bellowing and slashing his way to the glorious death that – even he acknowledges, too late, in Hades – is so hollow that a bondsman’s life would be preferable. But Achilles has had thoughtful modern defenders, such as Jonathan Shay, who thinks we can admire the sheer willingness to risk one’s life that always produces a moment of awe. I want to understand that moment.

Like Tolstoy or any other great war poet, Homer leaves you thinking it was all for nothing, but that’s the sort of hindsight that takes years of slaughter to achieve. If the Trojans were fighting for their homeland, the Greeks were fighting for a principle. Throughout Homer, as well as the Bible, the difference between civilization and barbarism is defined by the way strangers are treated. Civilized folk welcome the stranger with food and drink and shelter, loading him with gifts before asking his name. Barbarians eat them alive – think of the Cyclops – or gang-rape them to death – like the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. The stranger, of course, has reciprocal obligations.

When Paris answered the wining and dining at Menelaus’s court by absconding with the wife of the host, along with a sizable amount of his treasure, he violated the mainstay of international law. If the Greeks were to preserve any measure of order between peoples, they were bound to respond in force.

I do not believe it is the only way to be a hero, but I do want to examine the impulse to give one’s life for a cause. Seen under daylight, away from adrenalin, it seems the clearest form of irrationality. What makes men give up the one solid and particular basis of everything else they could desire or hope for – in the name of an untouchable abstraction?

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the Bush administration’s reactions to them, make the question contemporary. Some claimed the terrorists were radical losers, capable of producing nothing but a final fifteen minutes of attention by exploding with nihilist rage. Others have tried to argue that jihadism could be answered with good materialist explanations: given jobs, better living conditions and the prospects of an acceptable future, young men would find a better use for their minds and bodies than blowing them up.

Such explanations lasted only until empirical studies called the premises into question. In the last few years, social scientists have conducted thousands of interviews with terrorists and the people who knew them to uncover a far more puzzling picture. In a summary by the anthropologist Scott Atran, suicide terrorists turn out to be:

“more educated and economically well off than surrounding populations. They also tend to be well-adjusted in their families, liked by their peers, and – according to interrogators – sincerely compassionate to those they see themselves as helping … All leaders of jihadi groups that I have interviewed tell me that if anyone ever came to them seeking martyrdom to gain virgins in paradise, the door would be slammed in his face.”

Here is a quote from a soldier in the American civil war who did not believe in the afterlife:

“The very purposelessness of sacrifice created its purpose. In a world in which ‘commerce is the great power’ and the ‘man of wealth’ the great hero, the disinterestedness and selflessness of the soldier represented the highest ideal of a faith that depended on the actions not of G-d but of man.”

Before we dismiss such tones as fatally high-flown, manipulative rhetoric, we need to examine a crucial text of that resolutely reasonable philosopher – Immanuel Kant.

Kant

Like his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason has a transcendental deduction, and most readers begin it with the hope that they’re about to get a proof of the moral law, something akin to the demonstration that coherent experience would be impossible without the order provided by the categories.

A little reflection should show such a hope to be futile: we may not be able to conceive a world without causality, but experience has been steadily revealing the absence of moral order since the Book of Job. But a proof of the moral law is the real philosopher’s stone, the sort of thing you’d love to whip out to silence an apologist for torture, or at the very least the tireless speaker who haunts every ethics lecture demanding that you show him why relativism is false. Instead of a proof, Kant offers an example.

Take a fellow who insists he can’t resist temptation any time he passes a brothel. Were you to threaten him with execution as soon as he left it – installing a gallows on the doorstep to keep his imagination focused – he’d be sure to discover his temptation to be quite resistible. The fear of death trumps every ordinary human desire, since staying alive is a necessary condition on fulfilling any of them. Yet the same man will waver when faced with a choice between instant execution, and committing injustice that would doom another innocent. Like most of us, he would likely find ways to quiet his conscience. But the wavering counts.

In the first case, we know exactly what we would do: give up brothels or chocolates or any other form of pleasure in order to stay alive, and we know this as we know any other truth of nature. In the second case, we do not. And in the moment of uncertainty about what we would do, we know what we should do, and thus what we could do. That moment is the one in which we grasp our own freedom. Justice can move us to deeds that overcome the strongest of natural desires, the love of life itself. That reveals a measure of human dignity that nothing else can – and lifts us out of a world in which our lives are determined into one that is, genuinely, transcendent.

The dangers of leaving solid ground here are easy to see. Many of my German colleagues grew up in hallways adorned with photos of fallen relatives in Nazi uniform they were taught to honour as heroes to a lost cause. If the yearning for transcendence produced such spectres, small wonder we try to keep it at bay.

Though they don’t acknowledge it, the Frankfurters’ portrait of Odysseus joins neatly with the romantic tradition that excoriated the Enlightenment as calculated and plodding. Even as late as 1918, no less a writer than Thomas Mann would contrast the heroism of Germany with the civilization of “security and flabbiness” he saw in the Allies: a “world of ants with insurance policies,” a “pacified Esperanto earth” where “air omnibuses bustle over a white-coated, rational, statelessly unified, techno-sovereign, electrically far-sighted ‘humanity’.”

We’ve good reason to beware of this kind of language. Most of my American friends had trouble naming a single hero, when asked, and European reactions to the question were even worse – I am even regularly attacked for using the word. I understand their anxiety, and it goes back much further than the First World War.

As far back as the seventeenth century, philosophers and politicians thought that teaching people to act for non-heroic motives – primarily, their economic self interest – would produce a saner, more peaceful society than encouraging them to act for the sake of honour and glory. If the market were really effective, I might be inclined to agree. But sooner or later most people tire of calculating and collecting, and strive for the sense that they stand above all that.

I’ve brought in Kant to argue that this sense can’t be dismissed as romantic or mystical, still less as a nihilistic wish for destructive abandon. Those who disdain simple survival to risk their own lives are not seeking death as such, but the force that makes life worthwhile. We cannot offer them alternatives unless we acknowledge what’s at stake. Kant says it’s the manifest experience of freedom, and with it the moral law.

The American philosopher William James was an avowed pacifist and socialist who nevertheless wrote a powerful essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War.”

“Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents … [Militarism] is the great preserver of our ideas of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed … [Peace] ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a pleasure-economy.”

Though this text was written before the First World War, James had experienced the American Civil War – one of his brothers died of wounds suffered there – which devastated his generation. When James speaks of martial virtues, he is well aware of their price. And still he insists they are preferable to the alternative: a “sheep’s paradise,” a “cattleyard of a planet,” a “mass of human blubber,” “insipid, mawkish, dishwatery.”

Though James’s tone can be reminiscent of Carlyle or Nietzsche, his books, unlike theirs, could not be found in Hitler’s bunker. James’s condemnation of The Iliad is clear and explicit. Yet James’s essay, backed by Kant’s metaphysics, can still be read as the best modern attempt to capture Achilles’s appeal.

It’s the appeal of the moment of absolute freedom that Kant marked in the willingness to risk your life that does test your convictions as nothing else can. Rousseau thought Socrates would be remembered as any old Sophist, had he only died of natural causes. He did not believe that dying for a principle is the only way to show your willingness to live for it. But I hope to have sketched why it can seem neither crazy nor thoughtless, and why the urge to valorise Achilles continues to appeal.

The Frankfurt School’s portrait of Odysseus is continuous with the romantic mourning for heroic virtue, but there are important differences. One is a consequence of technology – the mechanics of modern warfare leave little room for the deeds of individual warriors to matter enough to be remembered in song. (It’s chilling to consider that an effective suicide bombing does require the kind of individual skill and daring that’s absent in many modern army manoeuvres.)

In deconstructing Odysseus, Adorno and Horkheimer had no intention of resurrecting his opposite number. The attack on Odysseus is not an attack on a particular sort of hero, but on the possibility of heroism at all. It’s a good theoretical underpinning for a contemporary culture that has become not just unwilling but embarrassed to talk about heroes. I will return to that embarrassment later on, but I mention it here to highlight another.

Disputes about whether we need heroes, and what kinds, have been with us for millennia. But however they stood on these questions, there is one stance everyone would have been embarrassed to take a few decades ago: the stance of the helpless victim.

From heroes to victims

In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu paid his first state visit to Berlin, and to mark the occasion Germany’s largest newspaper publisher arranged a special gift. In a carefully orchestrated ceremony whose guests included sixty diplomats, several ministers and a handful of Berlin’s Holocaust survivors, the chief editor offered Netanyahu the original architect’s ground plans for the concentration camp Auschwitz. Netanyahu gave a speech expressing his gratitude, and brought the plans with him to his next stop at the office of Chancellor Merkel, who declared herself to be “very moved.” The drawings were designated by the publisher as a gift “to the Jewish people as a sign of respect.” Netanyahu had the decency to experience a moment he described as “almost speechless” before taking the plans to the United Nations to wave at Iran.

What leaves me nearly speechless is not the political use of the ground plans – almost anything, from mass murder to puppies, can be put to political use – but the fact that such a use is even conceivable. What does it mean to give the ground plans of Auschwitz to the Jewish people as a sign of respect? Fifty years ago it would have been a slap in the face. But although the Holocaust has become the paradigm of the contemporary tendency to turn our view from the heroes of history to its victims, it didn’t begin in Israel. On the contrary, as Tom Segev’s superbly disturbing book The Seventh Million shows, until the early 1960s every reference to the Holocaust was an occasion for shame.

Israel had been founded to provide an alternative to the image of the Jew as defenceless victim. The goal of the state was normalization: to have the opportunities for political self-determination other nations take for granted, to be a land and a people like any other. But what drove pioneers to fight bandits and malaria, drain swamps and plant trees was not a vision of normalcy – as the joke went, Jewish policemen and prostitutes – but a vision of Jewish heroism. The Jew should no longer be the passive object but the active subject of history. Netanyahu’s ceremonial acceptance of the ground plans is thus a direct reversal of the heart of that Zionism he claims to defend – like so much of his government’s other behaviour, which is another subject entirely. It is, however, entirely in tune with the dominant melody of most post-war culture on an international scale.

Jewish focus on the Holocaust, both in Israel and elsewhere, began relatively late – it’s hard to find before the 1970s. But it became the non plus ultra of identity in the age of identity politics, with increasing competition among peoples to prove they were just as miserable victims as anyone else. So, a book on the Nanking massacre was subtitled “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” and its Chinese-American author gave interviews expressing the wish that her Holocaust would “find its Spielberg.” Often the contest comes close to hysteria in Eastern and Central Europe, where nations who suffered under Stalinism are demanding equal treatment for their wounds.

The content of these debates may be various, but their form always depends on the claim that my pain is worse than yours. The struggle for recognition that Hegel saw as captured by the attempt to overcome your enemy – first through battle, later through production – has been replaced. Recognition is no longer provided by doing more than another, but by enduring more than another. It’s a reversal that’s fatal for any concept of political morality, for it assumes that what counts is not what you do in the world, but what the world does to you.

Initially, the impulse to turn from heroes to victims was a progressive one. History had been the story of the victors, which condemned the victims to double death: once in the flesh, once again in memory. To insist that the victims’ stories enter the narrative was just a part of righting old wrongs. When slaves began to write their memoirs, they took steps towards subjectivity and won recognition – and slowly but certainly, recognition’s rewards.

So the movement to recognize the victims of slavery and slaughter and colonialism was made with the best of intentions. It was part of a process of acknowledging that might and right often fail to coincide, that very bad things happen to all kinds of people, and that even when we cannot change that we are bound to record it. Yet in re-evaluating the place of the victim in history, something profoundly unhealthy took place. Once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether.

Nietzsche was the first to notice the development, which he located in Christianity: in an act of insidious revenge, he argued, Christians turned aristocratic values of strength into vices, and elevated the meek who could not have beaten their masters in a fair-handed fight. (Note, however, that it took some time before the image of the man of sorrows replaced the image of Christ triumphant.) But the Christian reference has its limits. Jesus was not a victim but a martyr who chose his own fate. Nobody volunteered for a place on the Middle Passage or the train to Treblinka.

This makes the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss writer who found fame and fortune with an autobiographical account of his childhood in a concentration camp, particularly astonishing. The childhood turned out to be invented. Earlier rogues tried to hide origins that were painful or troubled, and invented genealogies that turned them into sons of wandering knights or bishops. Where painful origins were acknowledged, as in Frederick Douglass’s narrative of his life as a slave, the pain was a prelude to the overcoming of it. The overcoming of victimhood was a source of pride; victimhood itself was a matter of shame.

Heroism or terrorism? The case of John Brown

If competitive victimhood provides neither models nor inspiration for active virtue, does it provide something else? Narratives of suffering can produce compassion, a first step on the road to seeking justice. The victim’s story reveals her to have the same sort of soul as the victor, and in doing so often creates the visceral sorts of reactions that are needed to turn the bare knowledge of injustice into the will to oppose it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin made the evil of slavery alive for readers around the world, and increased the ranks of the abolitionists faster than any previous arguments. But:

“Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. Witness the case of Cinque, of everlasting memory, on board the Amistad. The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three million of our submissive colored population. We need not mention the Greeks struggling against the oppressive Turks, the Poles against Russia, to prove this.”

These words were spoken in 1851 by John Brown to the League of Gileadites, founded to organize armed resistance in response to the Fugitive Slave Law. I turn to Brown in an attempt to answer the question that’s shadowed every discussion of terrorism – and thus more obliquely heroism – in the last decade: Isn’t one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter? The question is usually raised to stop discussion, with the implication that everyone’s views on the matter are authentic, and therefore equally valid. The question seems to me the place to begin discussion, not to end it, so my thoughts will not be conclusive. John Brown is one of the most controversial figures in American history.

“Was Brown a terrorist who killed innocent victims or a hero-martyr who struck a mighty blow against the accursed institution of slavery? His body has lain a-moldering in its grave for almost 150 years, and yet there is today no more consensus on the answers to these questions than in 1859.”

The refusal to pronounce judgment may be part of normal academic fence-sitting, but it’s not an avenue open to philosophy, for I believe that Brown’s story itself raises a moral demand.

Steven Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body has been called the American Iliad, and if anything deserves such a stature it’s this epic poem. For the Civil War was set in motion by John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, if any man ever sets anything in motion. Historians then as now share the poet’s conclusion. Brown was the spark that radicalized North and South, convincing both sides of the truth of the last words he wrote on the way to the gallows: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood.”

When Brown wrote that the focus on a hero like Cinque would be more useful in ending slavery than three million stories of suffering, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was still in press. A year later it became America’s first best-seller, and was widely read abroad. Stowe performed a masterpiece of consciousness-raising, but her book was not the first description of the horror of life as a slave.

Abolitionists held meetings, raised money, and established the Underground Railroad. But like most of us, most of what they did was talk. The talk was anything but cheap: even in the North, preachers lost their pulpits for open abolitionist preaching, and one white man was lynched in Illinois for printing an abolitionist paper. Before the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionists had been few; but several political decisions of the mid-1850s increased the tension between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces. Born in 1800 to a small farmer in Connecticut, John Brown drew the strongest consequences. Like his father, Brown seemed to have been an abolitionist from the start, though his passion for the cause kindled at the age of twelve when he experienced the mistreatment of a slave boy in the house where he was lodged.

Most unusually for the era, Brown’s father raised him to believe in the equality of all people under God, and the lesson was passed on to Brown’s own children. As Frederick Douglass and others later noted, Brown’s family was the only white one where blacks were invited to share supper as a matter of course. The suppers were not luxurious; Brown struggled to support what would eventually be twenty children. He tried his hand as a tanner, shepherd, small farmer and surveyor, going bankrupt twice in the effort to put the family on a solid enough footing to pursue his real calling – the abolition of slavery, which he viewed as a consummate evil.

The family was active in harbouring and transporting fugitive slaves to Canada, as well as supporting a small farming settlement of free blacks on the home they carved out of the wilderness of western New York. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed by Congress to encourage slavery in the hitherto open West, offered an opportunity for action with wider consequences. Brown urged his sons to answer the call for free-state volunteers to homestead in Kansas, and five of them set out in 1854.

During the journey, the families were under constant harassment by pro-slavery forces. When Jason Brown’s four-year-old son died of cholera, the family disembarked to bury him in a thunderstorm – only to find that the pro-slavery ship’s captain had pulled off before they could reboard. What they found when they finally reached Kansas was civil war. While the settlers who opposed slavery were in the majority, they were struggling to survive on the rough Kansas plain, under constant harassment from pro-slavery farmers who would ride out from their homes in Missouri, ransack and burn the settlers’ towns, steal their livestock, and occasionally shoot them dead. The object was to terrify the free-staters into returning home before the popular referendum on slavery; John Brown soon came to Kansas to support his sons.

Context is crucial for understanding the Pottawatomie massacre Brown commanded in 1856, the main source of his reputation as a terrorist. Terrorism involves the use of violence outside the law, including what laws exist to govern war. Now Brown held slavery to be an undeclared war by one part of the population against the other, and believed that violent resistance to it was a matter of calling the slaveholders to reckoning. But whether or not they agree with that, historians agree that the vast majority of violence in Kansas – 75%, by recent accounting – was committed by pro-slavery forces. They were often in collusion with the fraudulent government installed by President Franklin Pierce.

Nor was the Kansas-Nebraska Territory the only part of the Union notable for absence of law. After making a speech called “The Crime Against Kansas”, the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner was nearly beaten to death with a gold-headed cane by South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks on the floor of Congress. Following the bloody beating many senators took to carrying weapons in Congress; Brooks’s constituents sent boxes of canes to demonstrate their support. One was inscribed: Use knock-down arguments.

The news of Sumner’s beating was Brown’s last straw. “I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution,” he exclaimed. “It is nothing but the word of cowardice.” The next night he commanded a vigilante party of seven men, including four of his sons, who used broadswords to kill five neighbours who had been active in pro-slavery circles. Historian David Reynolds argues:

“There was appropriateness in Brown’s using terror to avenge the sack of Lawrence and the caning of Sumner, typically Southern acts of violence met by characteristic Northern timidity. Sumner’s helpless passivity before Brooks’s sadistic attack was not unlike the inability of the Lawrence citizens to resist the invading border ruffians.”

Brown’s role in the Pottawatomie massacre came to light, and discussion, much later. Partly aided by local Native Americans with whom the Browns were friendly, the vigilantes avoided capture, so that Brown’s initial fame in Kansas was made in the much less bloody battle at Osawatomie.

There Brown let off most of the pro-slavery soldiers he captured with a lecture explaining that their cause was at odds with the Declaration of Independence. His small force did not prevent the Missouri regiments from sacking the town, but he was considered to have won such a moral victory that Senator John J. Ingalls later recalled, “It was our Thermopylae and John Brown was our Leonidas with his Spartan band.”

More popularly, he was thereafter known as “Old Osawatomie Brown,” and it was under that name that he was captured at Harper’s Ferry. Though debate remains about just what Brown intended, it was certainly not what happened. He had studied the slave insurrection in Haiti as well as the life of the Maroons in Jamaica, and seemed to have hoped that by capturing the federal armoury at Harper’s Ferry he could ignite a slave rebellion which would create a provisional state in the Alleghenies, gaining strength by raiding plantations and freeing slaves until the system finally fell. The raid was probably doomed from the start. What Brown lacked most were men; Frederick Douglass refused outright Brown’s plea to join them, as did others. In the end, the band contained six black and thirteen white volunteers, including three of Brown’s sons.

They were initially successful in capturing the armoury and a number of hostages, including Colonel Lewis Washington, a small but wealthy planter who was the great-grandnephew of the first American president. Brown wanted his name as well as his weapons, a sumptuous sword given to George Washington by Frederick the Great “for the moral effect it would give our cause.” Brown relished the symbolic justice: George Washington founded a nation that fought for liberties it denied to black men; now black men were guarding his descendant with iron pikes.

The hope was to hold the hostages long enough for Brown’s party to take the munitions and return to the mountains, strengthened by the scores of slaves they expected would rally to the cause. But the slaves didn’t rally, the retreat was delayed – at one point, by Brown’s decision to organize a large breakfast from the local hotel for the hostages, a breakfast that Colonel Washington, among others, didn’t eat. The hostages later testified that they were treated with extensive courtesy.

By the second day, the news of the raid had raised not just local militia, but federal troops under the command of Robert E. Lee. The battle was brutal but its outcome never in doubt. With Washington’s sword in his hand, one son dead and another dying by his side, John Brown was captured when federal troops bashed in the armoury door. A belt buckle seems to have prevented Brown’s own wounds from being fatal.

John Brown would have called it Providence. For though he’d planned for the raid’s success, he was astute enough to know that its failure might be more effective. The military battle over Harper’s Ferry lasted barely two days; the moral battle took up the two months between Brown’s capture and his execution, and the latter was as spectacular a success as the former was a defeat. Initially, the outcome of the moral battle was far from certain. Prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison originally called the raid “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane, though disinterested and well-intended effort.” All but one of Brown’s “Secret Six” supporters rushed to distance themselves from him, literally. With good reason to fear being tried as accomplices, four fled the country while one took refuge in an insane asylum.

Then came the moment when those of us who are trained in philosophy can be proud of our profession. When even abolitionists who knew Brown well were prepared to spurn him, Thoreau and Emerson took up his cause with an intensity that surprised those who knew them. Emerson’s wife, and Thoreau’s mother, had been far more engaged in the abolitionist cause than either of the writers – one of whom was known as the revered but scholastic “Plato of America” and the other as the brilliant but peculiar “hermit of Concord.” They shared a patrician suspicion of anything that looked like a political movement. Yet as abolitionist Wendell Phillips later wrote, “The crowning honor of Emerson is that after talking about heroism for so many years, when the hero, John Brown, came he knew him.”

Thoreau was the first to take an unambivalent stand. Two weeks after the raid, he gave an impassioned speech which called Brown a man of “rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles.” For Thoreau, Brown had practiced the highest form of civil disobedience. In a comparison crafted to engage his audience at Concord, he called Brown more important than the heroes of Lexington and Concord: “They could bravely face their country’s foes, but he had the courage to face his country itself, when she was in the wrong.”

The speech was repeated several times, and the best lines were widely reported in the news. Brown’s own behaviour at his highly public trial reinforced Thoreau’s picture. Carried into court on a stretcher, the wounded Brown spoke with calm and force that impressed even his southern opponents, and declared himself prepared to die for the principles that were as enshrined in the Bible as in the Declaration of Independence. Thoreau’s defence and Brown’s demeanour were decisive for Emerson, who was the most influential intellectual, and highly paid speaker, in America. Even more importantly, his Concord poem recalling “the shot heard round the world” left his patriotic credentials unimpeachable, associating him forever with the best ideals of the American Revolution.

Five days after Brown’s speech to the court in Virginia, Emerson made a speech in Boston. It began by arguing that John Brown had disproved one deep Southern myth: “The Southerners reckon the New Englanders to be less brave than they.” The prospect of his execution, Emerson continued, was “the reductio ad absurdum of slavery, when the Governor of Virginia is forced to hang a man whom he declares to be a man of the most integrity, truthfulness and courage he has ever met.” In the phrase that was picked up across the nation, Emerson said that hanging Brown “would make the gallows glorious as the cross.” That speech was called “Courage.” His second speech on Brown, delivered ten days later, was called “Morals.”

Emerson turned the tide, and by the time Brown was executed a few weeks later, the bulk of Northern public opinion regarded him as “The Hero of 1859,” in the words of a banner gracing a memorial service in Ohio. Of the thousands of offers of support sent to his family, the most moving was probably one written “by your colored sisters” to his wife just before the execution, and published in The Weekly Anglo-African:

“Tell your dear husband, then, that henceforth you shall be our own! We are a poor and despised people – almost forbidden, by the oppressive restrictions of the Free States, to rise to the higher walks of lucrative employments, toiling early and late for our daily bread; but we hope – and we intend, by God’s help – to organize in every Free State and in every colored church, a band of sisters, to collect our weekly pence, and pour it lovingly into your lap. God will help us, for he is the Judge of the widow and the Father of the fatherless.”

I began to read about Brown because I thought he was a case of moral complexity, worthy studying in the effort to know whether it was possible to give a reasoned answer to the question: terrorist or hero? But the more I learned about Brown, the less difficult I found the case. Thoreau and Emerson and those who followed had answered most questions. It was a near-perfect marriage of theory and practice. Even in Massachusetts, words like Thoreau’s and Emerson’s were not spoken lightly; both men received death threats, and would doubtless have received more were it known that they not only held speeches and raised money for Brown’s family, but broke the law by helping one of his co-conspirators escape.

So without the work of a couple of neo-Kantians in Concord, John Brown’s soul would have been stopped in its tracks. But likewise, the defence of John Brown was Transcendentalism’s finest hour; without it, their praise of self-reliance and civil disobedience can take on the air of the fine disdain for the masses that Harvard education, and residence in the most beautiful town in New England, permit. Joseph Campbell argues that heroes would be nowhere without poets, Carlyle thought that poets are lost without heroes.

John Brown’s defenders were not only poets, though they were not the sort of philosophers who think you can give necessary and sufficient conditions for much of anything important. Their writings, however, offer reasons, and I want to turn to three arguments that can be mined from those writings to answer the question: was Brown a hero? In sum, they are three: he waseffective, he was committed, and he was of good character.

Being effective, of course, was not entirely in his hands. In his 1909 biography John Brown, W.E.B. Dubois wrote that Brown “did more to shake the foundations of slavery than any single thing that ever happened in America.” On the eve of his execution, theSpringfield Republican wrote:

“no event could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution. This is not because the acts of Brown are generally approved, for they are not. It is because the nature and spirit of this man are seen to be great and noble.”

Here the paper unknowingly echoed Brown’s own remarks a decade earlier that one Cinque was more effective than three million unhappy victims.

The courage that impressed the North terrified the South, which began to form the militias that would be the base of the Confederate army. Southern newspapers printed cartoons of Brown dressed as Satan, and asserted: “Now that the black radical Republicans have power I suppose they will Brown us all.” Lincoln’s care to denounce him during the 1860 election was a matter of conviction as well as tactics. But it was Lincoln who would come to put Brown’s last words into action. Had Brown’s actions, or the war itself, had a different outcome, they would have been differently judged. Benet’s answer to his own question – how to weigh John Brown? – was: “Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself” which is part of what Bernard Williams called moral luck.

If the first reason for judging Brown a hero is the fact that his raid indeed turned out to be the beginning of the end of slavery, the other two factors were entirely in his hands. One was the manner of his death. Brown’s clarity and composure made him the paradigmatic Kantian hero – one calmly prepared to die in the cause of justice.

Where it didn’t produce awe, Brown’s willingness to die was the main source of the allegations of lunacy. The shaky charges of “hereditary insanity” offered in the courtroom to explain his action, and possibly commute his sentence, were refuted by all the available evidence. What seemed to have fuelled the charges was the conviction that such action makes no sense. Thoreau attacked the assumption behind it in his first speech on Brown:

“‘But he won’t gain anything by it!’ Well, no, I don’t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, taken the year round, but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul – and such a soul! – which you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.”

Significantly, Nat Turner, who led a far wilder and bloodier revolt in 1837, was never accused of insanity, since it was taken for granted that “every slave hated his bondage.” As one historian commented, the assumption that Brown was a lunatic began to recede during the Civil Rights Movement after freedom riders showed that other white people were willing to die for a liberation that had no particular relation to their own self-interest. Emerson’s speech “Courage” rued a world “turned upside down. I wish we might have health enough to know virtue when we see it, and not cry with the fools ‘Madman!’ when a hero passes.” Brown’s readiness to lay down his life was exemplary, but so was the way that he lived it, and those who judged him a hero were careful in describing it.

This is only part of one of hundreds of texts devoted to analysing Brown’s character, which revealed something like consensus: despite later caricatures of Brown as Satan, every Southerner who actually had direct contact with him was impressed by his integrity. Governor Wise of Virginia who ordered his trial, the jailor who oversaw him, Stonewall Jackson – who happened to be present at the execution – all saw him as exemplifying the honour, daring and humaneness which were a Southern gentlemen’s pride. All stressed that he lived in private what he preached in public; he was Puritan all the way through. Here is Douglass’s report after their first meeting:

“He observed that I might have noticed the simple manner in which he lived, adding that he had adopted this method in order to save money to carry out his purposes. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long, and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial. Had some men made such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it as affected, false, and hypocritical, but in John Brown I felt it to be as real as iron or granite.”

Yet what also emerges in several portraits is a wide streak of gentleness. Though not a man of humour, Brown was also not the sort whose dedication to humanity precluded attention to the human beings around him. His extraordinary energy was not only put to building log cabins, but to staying up all night with feverish babies.

Heroes come in wholes

In a century that was obsessed with epistemology, the turn to the victim had another appeal. Despite fake narratives and invented memories, judging someone to be a victim is relatively straightforward. Judging someone to be a hero is infinitely harder – we’re not even certain of the criteria, much less how to balance them. Add to that the knowledge of how many claims to heroism have been abused, and it’s easy to understand the impulse to leave the whole territory behind. Yet the territory will be claimed by others, if those of us who have the chance to be reflective don’t use it. The fact that concepts are abused cannot absolve us of the responsibility to try to use them properly: reinvesting them with meaning, by carefully showing how they might make sense.

Limits of space prevent me from doing more than sketch the sense that can be made here, but if John Brown’s case teaches us one lesson, it’s that heroes come in wholes. Success makes some of the difference; moral luck plays a role. But we can control quite a lot of the character that takes a lifetime to build. Had John Brown’s life been less than exemplary, we’d be queasier about admiring his willingness to leave it. Heroes needn’t be flawless; even the hero-besotted Carlyle distinguished heroes from demigods. If we study their lives in detail, we will often find detours, but usually also running threads. The moment when someone decides to leap out of the ordinary and prove her own freedom is prepared by smaller steps.

That moment need not end in death. In Moral Clarity I thought it crucial to portray some contemporary heroes who are very much alive. It’s important, however, that all of them took major risks, and that all of them described doing so as bringing them joy. Risk need not be mortal, but it must be more than something you take on the stock market. Thoreau was spot-on in identifying the impulse to call John Brown crazy: every model of homo economicus was helpless to explain him. Here’s what unites heroes like Achilles and heroes like Odysseus, for all the differences between them. Achilles (better call him John) takes risks for the sake of others, and if it takes work to decide when this kind of hero is justified, the kind of hero Odysseus stands for is even harder to determine.

Earlier I’ve argued that Odysseus’s combination of vitality and acceptance of fracture make him particularly suited for modern eyes. His way with the Sirens can be seen as a showcase for complex thought and courage. Odysseus’s whole life is an attempt to live with varieties of monsters, to get his hands dirty and still come out wholly alive, if never quite whole. However, often Odysseus insists that his miseries are the worst ones, he never resigns himself to being a victim. Beset by force after force that would bring most of us down, what moves us is not his sheer survival but his capacity to be alive – in the very fullest sense, against the silent awareness that few of us are.

It isn’t enough to make someone heroic, but without it any hero will be forgotten. Rousseau called it force of soul; Arendt called it love of the world. You can call it charisma, as long as you admit it’s just a word to mark all we don’t understand.

Being wholly alive means refusing to take your life for granted, to struggle to make meaning from this little bit of time and space that’s fallen to you. This means viewing your life as a project – perhaps better, an endeavour. The project needn’t be something as grand as eradicating injustice, or even all the injustice in your neighbourhood. But it has to have a different structure than: the sun came up and I consumed this, the sun went down and I consumed that. Had Odysseus been able to see his life that way he would never have left Calypso.

These kinds of heroes make us feel more alive ourselves, convinced for a moment that more things are possible than we’d hitherto dreamed. Heroes take more and they give more, and they thereby serve as standards for how to live in the world instead of merely existing in it. Heroes remind us that life itself is larger than the dimensions we are urged to accept. If heroes do nothing but throw all their weight against the purveyors of resignation – deadly and seductive as any Siren – they do a great deal. At once challenge, threat and offering, they’re balance against all the voices that whisper life sucks and then you die – however high- or lowfallutin’ the tone. Anyone whose life contains the message that we need not succumb is by that fact alone heroic.

Odysseus is such a person, but can we give him credit for it? We all recognize this property when we see it; earlier ages used words like vital force. It seems both something granted like grace, and grasped like the prize it is. Calling it an achievement outright is unfair, since we don’t start this race at the same point. Its ground is something we don’t control, be it genetic levels of energy or whatever our mothers did or did not.

Differences between people on this score are clear, alas, in quite young children. But the sense of awe and delight that leads you to taste and explore every bit of the world that comes your way seems to be equally present in most babies. Heroes remind us not only of what we could be, but perhaps of what most of us have been, before whatever forces of disappointment led us to settle for less.

William James’s 1906 essay claimed that “strenuous honour and disinterestedness abound everywhere.” A hundred years later, it’s hard to agree – or even remember the last time words like “honour” and “noble” were used with straight face. There are honourable and noble arguments for being wary of appeals to heroism: we all know how often they’ve been manipulated and abused. Still we need to separate the fear of manipulation from a less honourable one, namely fear of embarrassment – of looking like a sucker for taking anything so earnest so seriously. Claims to victimhood evoke little embarrassment; claims to heroism make us cringe.

But don’t take my word for it – economist Robert Frank writes that: “The flint-eyed researcher fears no greater humiliation than to have called some action altruistic, only to have a more sophisticated colleague later demonstrate that it was self-serving.”

Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. is Director of the Einstein Forum. She is the author of Evil in Modern Thought and Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists. She has also edited (with Hilary Putnam and Jeffrey Schloss) Understanding Moral Sentiments: Darwinian Perspectives?