We don’t have heroes because they are too real

In his book Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, author Thomas de Zengotita* argues that we no longer have heroes because of what the mass media have done to our consciousness. That is, in order to be a real hero, you must essentially be unreal. For if you think about various heroes of old--anyone from Buddha to George Washington to Mahatma Gandhi--it’s because we know so little about them that their deeds may be imagined and therefore mythologized. As de Zengotita puts it, “real heroes of the past were represented with a frugality that is almost impossible to credit today.”

A heroic myth is particularly “unsaturated,” leaving considerable space for imaginative engagement with its narrative elements. If Koufax were playing today, the reality of his myth would be utterly obliterated by saturated media coverage of his every move, including those extra tight close-ups that intrusively force you to see every hair on his face, every vein in his eyeballs. de Zengotita cites the example of the New York fire fighters who attained heroic status through our imagining their very real selfless deeds. However this bubble burst for de Zengotita when he saw the official NYFD “Calendar of Heroes,” featuring photos of the firefighters stripped to the waist, seductively posing and “vogueing” for the camera. The mythic imagination was foreclosed and replaced by the mediated image.

The central irony, according to de Zengotita, is that “we don’t have heroes because they are too real, representations of them are too rich and detailed. There is no space for our imaginations to occupy, no room for us to supply them with mythic life.” The mass media give us only a flattened realism devoid of reverence, depth, or dignity. Instead of heroes we have stars or celebrities, generally disreputable people such as Britney Spears, Madonna, or Paris Hilton, whose exploits we look at in the same way the ancient Greeks might have thought about their gods, who were actually not at all godlike. Rather, they were just like humans only worse--more jealous, more envious, more lustful, more vengeful.

Likewise, in our day there has been a collapse of the vertical plane, so that the “higher” has been replaced by the lower writ large. In an age that absolutizes the relative and exalts the lower, it is much more difficult to have real heroes, for a real hero, whatever else he is, is never a relativist. Like George Bush, or Ronald Reagan, or Winston Churchill, they are in the service of an unwavering ideal. But today, unwavering commitment to a higher ideal is not called heroism but fanaticism or fascism.

In fact, we can’t even recognize a hero unless they somehow become a star--think of Jessica Lynch--but as soon as they do so, “they cannot compete with the real stars--who are performers.” So President Bush can’t compete with Martin Sheen, any more than our troops in Iraq can compete with Hollywood images of warfare.

This brings up a crucial point about the role of imagination in understanding reality. In recently discussing the “intelligent design” debate with a reader, he essentially dismissed any non-empirical reality as being analogous to belief in "pink fairies." Richard Weaver, in his classic Ideas Have Consequences, argued that it is a characteristic of the barbarian, in all times and places, to believe that it is possible to grasp reality, the raw stuff of life, “barehanded,” without any mediation by the imagination. We are then faced with the “ravages of immediacy,” for without imagination, reality is simply a brute fact with nothing to spiritualize it. The world shrinks down to our simplest way--animal way, really--of knowing it, and with it, our souls constrict correspondingly.

In this regard, postmodern skepticism is provincialism of the worst sort, as it imagines that it is getting closer to the reality of things, when it is actually getting more and more distant--like pulverizing a work of art into smaller and smaller parts to try to get at its meaning. posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:00 AM 13 comments