A Call to Heroism

May 20, 2002
"Is Michael Jordan a hero?... Lenny Bruce?... Why can't Charles Manson be a hero?" These are among the questions teenagers pose to Gibbon when he addresses them on the subject of heroism. Gibbon, a research associate at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, answers in a series of brief reflections. Examining the writings of Emerson and Carlyle, the 19th century's premier thinkers on the subject, Gibbon extracts several characteristics of the hero: sincerity, persistence, intuition, austerity, bravery and virtue. He then defines a hero as a "person of extraordinary achievement, courage, and greatness of soul." Reading through these lenses, Gibbon establishes his own hall of heroes, many not surprising: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass; others more unexpected: Lucretia Mott, artist Käthe Kollwitz, educators Martha Berry and Horace Mann. He examines the models of the warrior-hero and the athlete-hero and their impact on American notions of the hero. Disgusted by the contemporary cult of celebrity, Gibbon asserts that celebrities lack the greatness of soul and moral vision that being a hero requires. Yet he explores with great candor the shortcomings of his own representative men and women. While Gibbon's enthusiasm for restoring the notion of heroism is admirable, his definitions are subjective and depend on the unlikely chance of our returning to a society like Emerson's in which values are commonly shared.