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WILLIAM J. BENNETT
To begin with, I wish to set the stage with a piece on heroism. Men are called to be heroes in ways both big and small in every area of their lives, all the areas we cover in this book—war, work, and play; civic life, family life, and prayer life. What follows is a piece I wrote more than forty years ago and one whose message serves as a foundation for the pieces to follow. Whether we take up the sword, the plow, the ball, the gavel, our children, or our Bibles, we must always do it like the men we are called to be.
As a child growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I had many heroes. The one I remember best was Gary Cooper, as Marshal Will Kane, in High Noon. I saw the movie when I was nine years old and Coop, as Will, is still special to me. He wasn’t the roughest, toughest guy in the world in that movie, his courage wasn’t the macho callousness of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” or the “Man with No Name”; that was the stuff of his antagonists: the Miller brothers. Will was worth admiring for other things, in language I was to learn later—for his courage and compassion and sense of what deserved to be loved and protected. In addition to Will, because my family and teachers thought it worth their time, I was exposed to a variety of other heroes and heroines: Lou Gehrig, Roy Campanella, Edmund Hillary, Tamsen Donner, Abraham Lincoln, Esther, and Odysseus; and later on, in college, to Mother Courage and Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr. and Justice Holmes.
In all of them it is fair to say that there was a certain nobility, a largeness of soul, a hitching up of one’s own purposes to larger purposes, to purposes beyond the self, to something that demanded endurance or sacrifice or courage or resolution or compassion; it was to nurture something because one had a sense of what deserved to be loved and preserved.
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QUALITIES WORTH STRIVING FOR
From childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood, people I knew went to the trouble of pointing out to me individuals who possessed qualities of human excellence that were worth imitating and striving for. Eventually, I learned that heroes and their qualities were to be found closer to home and that there were neighbors, friends, and even members of my family who possessed these qualities.
In a recent survey of twelve hundred junior-high-school children, the most popular response to the question “Who is your hero?” was “None.” Nobody. Other answers far down the line in this and other polls have revealed the devaluation of the hero, at least. Students today cite rock musicians, Evel Knievel, and the bionic man and woman. This suggests—and my own informal poll and the reports of friends of mine who are teachers have confirmed my suspicion—that heroes are out of fashion. For some reason, perhaps for no reason, many of us think it is not proper to have heroes; or worse, that there aren’t any—or only shabby ones.
Such a fad is dangerous because it puts children’s ideals, aspirations, and their notions of self-worth in jeopardy. Children need to know what deserves to be emulated and loved and nurtured, but knowing these things is not transmitted by their genes; these things must pass, through education, from generation to generation. C. S. Lewis didn’t have the benefit of a poll, but he anticipated the results of this one when he remarked that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
THE WORST AHA! OF ALL
We have been too much suckered by what is called “the reality of technique,” or what I call the Aha! theory of human behavior. The Aha! theory of behavior assumes that the most real aspects of anything are those that are base and are concealed from the eye. Aha!—you may appear to be an honest lawyer, but that is only a devious approach to get my business; Aha!—teacher, you may appear to have an interest in my child but you are merely putting me on in order to get me to tell the principal how fine you are so you can get a raise; or the worst Aha! of all: Aha!—Dad, you may try to make me believe that you’re doing it for my good, but you are really just doing it to manipulate me, to show you have power over me.
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Think about it: How is it that the worst somehow gains more reality than the best? How is it that baseness, insensitivity, callous indifference, hardness, sadism are more real than pride and honor and compassion and courage and sacrifice? Even if they are more prevalent—and I am not sure they are—that just won’t do; reality doesn’t depend on a majority vote.
We have become so interested in raking muck that we scarcely lift our eyes from it. Watergate, “demythologizing,” phony sophistication, believing that every good action has an ulterior and crass motive, the rise of the anti-hero, and a variety of other forces have made the hero invisible to us.
In 1950, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner mentioned with disdain authors who write “not of the heart but of the glands.” He reminded his audience that the basest of all things is to be afraid and that the writer must leave “no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart . . . lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” He echoed Yeats’s well-known prophecy about a time, perhaps our time, when “the ceremony of innocence is drowned” and “the best lack all conviction.” It is hard to have convictions without ideals. Heroes instantiate ideals.
Real heroes, not the bionic types who do it with wires, may be fictional or factual as long as they embody character, as long as they possess qualities that we instantly recognize as true to human life and worth human attention.
DESIRABLE REAL EXAMPLES
In education, rather than squabble for innovation on the one hand and a return to basics on the other, we ought to encourage something that is both: an innovation and a return to the basics of aspiration. Along with emphasis on sound arithmetic and spelling, even on sociology for the first-grader, we should tell some stories, true stories, about heroes. We should offer our students and ourselves some real examples, not only of human corruption, degradation, and duplicity, but also of the qualities we think men and women can and should possess.
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Along with true accounts of Carlos the Jackal, we should recall the truth of Yonatan Netanyahu, the young philosophy student who died at Entebbe. Every community, even Sodom and Gomorrah, has one individual in it who might be identified to students as worth admiring. This could be done even as students are taught to engage in the now honored practice of suspecting the motives of everyone else. I think the time taken for this exercise will be worth it. And it’s possible that if we don’t take the time, our children, taught as they have been to doubt, will live the consequences of not knowing what they may safely believe.