Convocation Remarks, 1999
August 27, 1999
We live in an age without heroes. So I have heard it said and so I have seen it written. So must most of you. But is it true? And if true, does it matter? And if it is not true, why do so many seem to believe it?
What is a hero? A hard question that. At least I have found it to be hard. In preparing these remarks, I could never quite pin down a definition that seemed right. The dictionary didn't help:
hero - a mythological or legendary figure endowed with great strength, courage and ability favored by the gods.
hero - a person admired for his achievement and noble qualities and considered a model or ideal.
hero - in New York, a large sandwich; in New Orleans, a poor boy.
Passing quickly by the third definition, even the first two fall short, they are flat, perfunctory, lifeless really. For me, the image of a hero conjures extraordinary life force, outsized achievement married to even greater ambition, a power to inspire, a capacity of awe, in a phrase, human greatness distilled to a very high proof. In those terms, I think of Lincoln or of Lee or of Einstein or of George Marshall or of Martin Luther King, Jr.
So, if ours is an age barren of heroes, it must mean that we have no contemporary examples equal to the historical figures I have named or any which you might choose. But before we declare heroes historical artifacts, should we not ask whether ours is an age capable of comprehending heroism? It may be that it is not heroes we lack but the critical values necessary to recognize and to affirm the virtues of heroism.
The problem begins with the cult of celebrity, a wasting disease which has corrupted the distinction between self-indulgence and self-denial, which has devalued the idea of honor and debased the notion of selflessness. The public avidity for celebrity is ugly, ignorant and dangerous. Ugly because so often those celebrated are crude and rude, ignorant because the worship of mere fame is the true mark of the simple-minded, and dangerous because a society in love with celebrity instead of virtue will soon forget the value of virtue and discover to its sorrow the utter emptiness of celebrity.
So, for a society to have heroes, it must share values which make heroes possible, possible both to recognize and to admire. I am not convinced that our America on the cusp of the new millennium is that kind of society.
The mania for celebrity is not the only problem. We have also become a people notable for our passivity and our love of things material. History will remember us most vividly as consumers, consumers of canned entertainment, consumers of ideas rendered easily digestible for the unthinking, consumers of goods produced in stunning abundance largely for pointless possession.
To these miseries I would add one more: the crushing burden of a popular media with a fatal capacity to turn gold into dross and to make dross multiply. To the degree that heroes, by virtue of their heroic qualities, lead public lives, to just that degree, does the media pursue relentlessly even the most trivial details of their private lives. Indeed for a potential public hero there is no place to hide. And if, almost inevitably, small sins are discovered, they will be transmuted into monstrous moral derelictions. In such a world, a world without context or proportion, heroes cannot live.
Take the contemporary case of Governor Bush of Texas. Not a life that can yet be called remotely heroic. But assume just for a moment and just for the sake of argument, that his is a life that is potentially heroic. What chance is there for that if the consuming media need is to discover whether he used drugs in his distant youth? Decency asks that men be measured by means more honest and more relevant than that. But the application of these yardsticks requires a measure of discipline, of balance, of seriousness far beyond that tolerated in all but a handful of media organizations. And those organizations shape powerfully public understanding.
Take an historic example and imagine that example moved forward to our time. By today’s standards Lincoln would be stamped a racist. There is no doubt of it. He believed blacks to be inherently inferior to whites, a view certainly abhorrent to us. But do those views, however much we may think them profoundly wrong, mean that Lincoln cannot be a hero? Does that moral failure wash out the greatness of a leader whose courage and whose armies destroyed slavery and whose steady, powerful vision saved our nation? I think not, but I doubt that Lincoln's moral derelictions would survive a modern media onslaught, the certain impact of which would be to blot out the possibility of a mature and rounded understanding of a complicated but undeniably great man.
I say all of this, none of it very uplifting, because I believe in heroes and I know that in this place, our William and Mary, we have and will continue to nurture heroes who can inspire and enrich. I speak with such confidence because this College has been my life just as it will become yours. I speak with such confidence because I describe what for nearly 30 years I have observed. I speak with such confidence because I know how deeply ingrained here are soaring standards of intellectual excellence, moral rectitude and love of others.
To put not too fine a point upon it, William and Mary is a superior place not driven by the morals of the market, little interested in celebrity for its own sake and fiercely determined to make judgments not by the world's standards but by our own. The best among us are pragmatic innocents whose pragmatism is steeled by the sobering lessons of a hard history and whose innocence rooted in right values is proof against cynicism. So we are, we are, a community capable both of producing heroes and of comprehending heroism.
I said earlier that I had trouble coming to terms with a satisfactory definition of the hero. The fault was mine. One definition cannot capture such multiplicity. Heroes come in many forms and in all fields of human endeavor. Heroes are as likely to live anonymously as to light up the wider world. A fine grade school teacher may well be a greater hero than a Nobel prize winner; a successful single parent may be more authentically a hero than the world's most brilliant investment banker. Who are your heroes? Think about it and you will see my point.
Many kinds of heroes, yes, but the critical ingredients of heroic lives these are few, persistent and consistent. Indispensable is a passion about the purposes of life. Second, is a restless indeed relentless energy which reflects a questing intelligence and a thirsty spirit. Emerson said it well: God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please. You can never have both. The hero never elects repose. Third, courage, courage of many kinds moral, intellectual, spiritual, physical but always courage. Finally, a conviction deeply felt that one life, if rightly lived, must be about more than one life, must touch more than one life, that lived profoundly, will change the world.
The sad truth is that not all of us have it in us to be heroes. Not even at William and Mary. I know that and so do you. But equally true and perhaps more important is that everyone of us is capable of acts of heroism that partake of those heroic qualities I have just described. And it is the example of the hero, a true hero, that makes it possible for the rest of us, sometimes to our great surprise, to do heroic things.
F. Scott Fitzgerald caught something important when he wrote of Charles Lindbergh: He was a young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation then he did a heroic thing and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams.
You are young. None of your best dreams can yet be old. Live so that when you are old, your best dreams will have defined a life of high and shining achievement, not an old age of bitter and impotent regret. To live that life, you must believe in heroes and see in yourselves the possibility of some eternal things that might just might make you a hero, too.
