Unhappy the Land in Need of Heroes

The human tendency toward expecting someone else to save the day ensures necessary action lags behind the will to improve.

ANDREA: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.

GALILEO: Unhappy is the land in need of heroes.

from “The Life of Galileo,” by Bertolt Brecht

One of the hardest questions I get asked is “who are your heroes?” In one sense, I do not have any. I find hero worship unbecoming. In another sense, the people I think do heroic things tend to be people who simply go beyond what reason and morality compel in their behavior to do something truly exemplary. Mark is heroic, to me, because I have watched him at great sacrifice to himself and his own level of stress be the shield of citizens accused in the State of Texas. But I wouldn’t say Mark is one of my heroes; that implies I think that there is some pedestal upon which I would place him. I would not place Mark on a pedestal; he is more suited to being in the trenches with us.

So it is with trepidation that I watch the heroic mythmaking occurring now in Ukraine. To be sure, resistance to Russian imperialist aggression is both justified and laudable, and the people defending their homes and families and every last meter of their home turf should be commended. But when I see people in the United States fawning over people like President Zelenskyy, I cannot help but think: why are we praising them for doing what should be done?

Morally, I am a deontologist in the grand Kantian tradition; moral actions arise from duties owed by moral actors within a fundamentally rational system. We may, through the application of reason and universal principles, arrive at knowledge of whether our actions are moral, in my world. The guiding principle of this action, the maxim, if you will, is to act at all times as if our maxim could be willed as universal law. That is, if you would permit yourself to do this action, you must permit your worst enemy to take the same action at the time most inconvenient to you. When one finds himself making an excuse for why his action is justified for himself but not for others, one commits an error in moral judgment. As such, in many cases, the universe of “moral” options is small. When President Zelenskyy refused to be airlifted to safety and shared his people’s peril, that was not an act of nobility which should be lauded as special. That was what anyone should have done in that situation. That we consider it unique among politicians to show that courage isn’t a feat of Zelenskyy’s, it is a stunning indictment of the cowardice we expect from politicians.