How far can selfless altruism go? A number of studies show that, when the cost of aid is too high, altruistic behavior becomes less frequent. But it is far from being nonexistent. Though examples of courage and determination in coming to the aid of others despite considerable risks are certainly heroic, they are not necessarily called that because of their rarity—we hear about heroic actions almost daily—but because we measure the degree of boldness and dedication that such actions require, while no doubt wondering what our own reaction would have been in the same situation.
On January 2, 2007, Wesley Autrey and his two daughters were waiting for the subway at the 137th St.-Broadway station in New York. All of a sudden, their attention was drawn to a young man having an epileptic fit. Wesley quickly intervened, using a pen to keep the man’s jaw open. Once the fit was over, the young man got up but, still half-dazed, he stumbled and fell off the platform.1
While the sick man was lying on the tracks, Wesley saw the lights of an approaching train. He entrusted his daughters to a nearby woman to keep them away from the edge of the platform; then he jumped onto the tracks. He planned to carry the young man back to the platform but realized he wouldn’t have time. So he threw himself over the man’s body and pinned him on the ground in the drainage ditch between the two rails. Despite the conductor braking as hard as he could, the train passed almost completely over both of them. The underside of the train left grease on Wesley’s cap. Later on, Wesley told journalists: “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right. I just said to myself, ‘Somebody’s got to help this guy or he’s toast.’ ”
He explained that, because of his previous experiences, he was able to make his decision in a fraction of a second: “Since I do construction, we work in confined spaces a lot. So I looked, and my judgment was pretty right. The train did have enough room for me.”
According to Samuel and Pearl Oliner, emeritus professors at Humboldt University in California, who have devoted their careers to the sociology of altruism and more particularly to the study of the Just, the “Righteous Among the Nations,” who saved many Jews during Nazi persecutions, altruism can be thought of as heroic when:
• it has the aim of helping someone else;
• it involves a major risk or sacrifice;
• it is not linked to a reward;
• it is voluntary.2
Like the previous account, the following situation, reported by Kristen Monroe, amply fulfills all four criteria:
This hero was a man in his forties who liked to hike in the southern California hill country. On one of his hikes, he heard a mother screaming that a mountain lion had carried off her small child. The man ran to where the mother told him the lion had disappeared with the child; [he] tracked the animal until he found it. The child, still alive, was held tightly in the lion’s jaws. The man picked up a stick and attacked the animal, distracting the lion so that it dropped the little girl and attacked him instead. He managed to beat off the attack and returned the child, badly mauled but still alive, to the mother. As soon as he got the mother and child safely en route to the hospital, he disappeared.3
The event was reported by the grateful mother, which earned the man a notoriety he scarcely wanted, including the Hero medal awarded to him by the Carnegie Commission, which every year recognizes particularly heroic deeds in the United States. The rescuer did everything he could to escape the public’s attention, refusing all interviews, including the one that Kristen Monroe had solicited when she was writing her book, The Heart of Altruism. In his polite but firm refusal letter, he explained that “the local honors were unwanted, the national press and television attention unpleasant, and the public acclaim abhorrent.”4
Most of us have no way of knowing how we would act if confronted with the same situation. In general, a mother always reacts by saving her child and, when she risks her life for her child, she doesn’t need to think twice about it. But some people also act in a similar way for complete strangers. Despite the powerful preconception that we are all basically selfish, examples of heroic rescues call that preconception into question.
For Philip Zimbardo and his psychologist colleagues at Stanford University, heroism implies voluntary acceptance of a level of danger or sacrifice that goes well beyond what is usually expected of people.5 The performer of a heroic act has no moral obligation to accept this risk. In instances involving potential physical danger, he must also transcend personal fear so as to act quickly and decisively.6
Zimbardo identifies three major forms of heroism: martial, civil, and social. Martial (military) heroism involves deeds of courage and abnegation that go beyond what is required by military discipline and sense of duty; giving one’s own life to save one’s companions is an example. Civil heroism, the heroism of someone diving into freezing water to save a drowning person, implies a peril for which the performer is generally not prepared; he or she is not guided by a code of obedience or honor. Social heroism—the heroism of activists against racism during apartheid in South Africa, or of whistle-blowers exposing a scandal in their company or government—is less spectacular and usually transpires over a longer period of time than actions linked to the first two forms of heroism. If social heroism doesn’t generally include immediate physical danger, the price to pay can be very high, leading, for instance, to the loss of a job or to ostracism by one’s colleagues or society.7
In 1984, Cate Jenkins, a chemist at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, received a file from Greenpeace showing that scientific studies carried out by the Monsanto company that were supposed to prove the harmlessness of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) had been falsified, and that Monsanto knew that these chemical products were highly toxic. Jenkins alerted her superiors and submitted a damning report to them. But the vice president of Monsanto intervened with her superiors at the EPA, and the report was buried until, outraged, Jenkins decided to deliver it to the press herself. Misfortune dogged her: she was transferred, than harassed for years until her life became hellish. But it was thanks to her that the collusion between the government and Monsanto was brought out in the open and that many victims of PCBs and “Agent Orange” (used in Vietnam as a spray) could be paid damages.8
Zimbardo proposes a situational vision of heroism. He argues that most people are capable of heroism when conditions require a swift, courageous intervention. Although situations serve as catalysts indispensable to heroism, the decision of the people who intervene is made in the privacy of their own consciences. For many heroes, like those who saved Jews hunted by Nazis, heroic engagement is linked to an examination of conscience guided by moral norms that are deeply anchored within the person.9
Altruism can be the main motivation behind a heroic act, but that is not always the case. In some heroic acts, concern for fellow human beings is certainly present, but other motivations such as the sense of duty for one’s nation (as in the case of martial heroism), or indignation in the face of injustice and abuse (in the case of whistle-blowers, for instance) can play a prominent role.
In the story that follows, there is clearly a mixture of altruistic concern for someone in great distress, and of fiery indignation against perpetrators of injustice, discrimination, and abuse.
Lucille had an eventful life. From the time she was very young, she performed courageous acts, coming to the aid of others. When she was little, when the America of the 1950s was still living in an age of intense racial discrimination, she resolutely took the side of a black girl whom the bus driver refused to allow on the bus with the chicken she was carrying. Lucille had the little girl get in and sit next to her grandma in the part reserved for white people, which was regarded as scandalous at the time, and took the chicken in her lap. This behavior brought the wrath of the local population down on Lucille and her mother. Later on, when she had enlisted as an officer in the US army, Lucille was sent to Africa. Despite her frailty, one day she rescued a Sudanese man whom a US soldier had thrown in the river and ordered the soldier back to the camp. On another occasion, a colonel who hated women soldiers let a frozen beef half fall on her back when they were unloading food supplies. Lucille had four ruptured vertebrae and remained handicapped for the rest of her life. That did not prevent her from continuing to help others, as her account shows, recorded by Kristen Monroe.10
On July 29—I’ll have to double-check that, but I think it’s the twenty-ninth—I was working at my desk… when I heard some terrible screaming.… I looked out and saw this man grabbing this young girl. It was my neighbor, washing her car. He threw her onto the pavement of the driveway.
At this time, I knew that something had to be done and done now, and no time could be wasted. There was nobody in our neighborhood. They all work. I’m very crippled. I wear a back brace and a leg brace.…
But Lucille went outside. Despite the fact that she needs a cane to walk, she rushed down the steps of her house as best she could and began running toward the rapist and the young woman. When she arrived, she found herself in the presence of a 6'2" giant who had already torn off the young woman’s shirt and was about to rape her. She shouted at the man to let her go, but he paid no attention to the old woman.
He didn’t pay any attention to me. Well, he kind of turned his head and looked at me, and then he went back to her. I hauled off and hit him across the neck and the head with my cane. This caused him to get up. He started toward me. I said, “Come on, I’m gonna kill you. Just come on. I’m not foolin’ with you.” And I yelled at the girl, “You get in the house and lock the door, and don’t even let me in. I don’t care who comes; just don’t let ’em in.”
People said, “Were you afraid?” Yes, I was. I kind of felt this was it for me, because he was so vicious-looking. I thought this was a death-to-death fight: I’m gonna kill him or he will kill me. Because he was hurting another human being, an innocent human being. I just can’t take that. I wasn’t trained that way.…
When she did get in the house, I realized that if I didn’t catch him, he’d be another case where they’d say, “Well, you don’t have any evidence.”
So Lucille went after the man, “whaling out with her cane.
“He told me he was gonna kill me. ‘You bitch,’ he said. ‘I’ll kill you right here.’ ‘Alright, come on,’ I told him. ‘Let’s do it.’ And finally he turned and ran to his car.”
Finally, another man turned up, sent Lucille back to safety, and the police arrived. The attacker was overpowered and arrested. Lucille got out of it with bruises. According to her: “It’s that you care enough about someone, about the human person, that you feel that you have to help no matter what.”
Kristen Monroe asked Lucille why it was she, and not someone else, who had stopped the rape, when so many people might not have had the courage or even thought of helping. “I’ve thought about that,” replied Lucille. “My mother and grandmother taught me to fight injustice in any form. If I’m there, I’m responsible. They taught me to love all of humanity.”
Let’s remember as well the boldness of the “unknown rebel” who, on June 5, 1989, on an avenue in Beijing, stood in front of a tank, immobilizing for thirty minutes a column of seventeen other tanks that had just broken up the freedom demonstration by the Chinese movement for democracy in Tiananmen Square. He managed to climb up onto the front of the tank and supposedly said to the driver: “Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you. Turn around and stop killing my people.” Here again we see a blend of resolute indignation against tyranny and concern for others. No one knows what happened to him, but the image of his confrontations with the blind power of totalitarianism was broadcast all over the world, and he became a universal hero.
Purely out of compassion, Maximilien Kolbe, a Franciscan priest imprisoned in Auschwitz, volunteered to be executed to take the place of another prisoner, a man with a wife and children. This man, along with nine others, had been condemned to die of hunger and thirst as revenge for the escape of another prisoner. Such examples seem to surpass our ordinary abilities, even though many parents, mothers especially, feel ready to sacrifice their lives to save their children. In the end, stories of heroic deeds emphasize the depth of kindness inherent in human nature and remind us that human beings are capable of the best as well as of the worst. About the “banality of heroism,” Philip Zimbardo writes, “Most people who become perpetrators of evil deeds are directly comparable to those who become perpetrators of heroic deeds, alike in being just ordinary, average people.”11 In given situations at particular moments, the interaction between circumstances and each person’s temperament tips the scale toward altruism or selfishness, toward pure compassion or the worst cruelty.