The Hero and other Cultural Characters

We all need a valued role to play, but men really need it.

One of my most enduring memories from my ten years traveling the US was being in a dive bar somewhere in Ohio when a woman got all upset that her man had went into the bathroom, locked it, and that was half hour ago and he wasn't answering and he had history of falling asleep on the toilet and passing out and she needed help and for the next twenty minutes every man in the bar gave it their best shot -- some running and throwing their shoulder against the door, some with pool cues and other improvised pry-bars, some trying to pick the lock, some with absurd Rube Goldberg like schemes -- finally, one of the guys got it open by taking the door off the frame using tools from his truck and after the guy inside was woken from his concoction-of-substances induced sleep, for the next two hours the man who opened the door strutted around like the cat’s meow. He was the hero of the night and everyone bought him free drinks and that dude was one proud dude, beaming, and recounting the story of how he opened the door to everyone, including me who heard it about four times, and each time he told it, it got more impressive.

The image sticks with me because it was both so comical and telling. This was one of the divey-est dive bars in the US, with a collection of intoxicated, high, and strung out customers that didn’t discriminate by race, gender, age, or faith. Every demographic of the US was represented, with the exception of the successful and the whole scene played out with a chaotic bluster — with each actor, when it was their time in the spotlight, entering with a swaggering bravado that soon collapsed in cartoon-ish ways — a humiliating slip and fall, a crushed finger, a yelp of pain, and so on and so on until the hero finally dismantled the door only to reveal a rail thin spiky haired man sprawled on the toilet who, when woken, walked directly to the bar with an oblivious grin, ordered another drink, confused over all the buzz around his release, but loving the attention, which he used to try and hit on a woman right in front of his woman, the one that had bothered to rescue his useless ass in the first place, who quickly jerked him out of the bar like a momma cat carrying their mischievous kitten.

Behind that humor though, is an example of behavior that I’ve seen across the US, from Wall Street to trap houses, and across the world from Amman to Uganda, which is that all men need to feel like the hero, if not over the course of their lifetime, then at least every now and then. They get an immense sense of worth if they are being valued, and appreciated, for rescuing, protecting, building, and solving.

While the need to feel important isn’t exclusive to men, the roles that give them the most satisfaction (generally sacrificing their body for the greater good), and how they respond if they don’t have those roles (anger, despair, vengeance), is very different from females.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent article on the dangers of epic poetry, which boiled down to the writer believing that the long established hero archetype is corrosive, bad, and unnecessary -- an outdated concept of masculinity.

Besides being unnecessarily anti-intellectual (everyone should read as widely as possible, especially the classics) it is simply wrong. The scene in the dive bar in Ohio is an absurd example of the universal appeal of the hero archetype, especially to younger men, and that is something a society shouldn't entirely dismiss, and rather than try to make it profane, understand the need for it, and the good that can come from it.

A society where young men want to save a man trapped in a bathroom, or rush into a burning building, even if only for the momentary adulation of women, is actually a good thing, and when men don’t have that role to fill, the absence will be replaced by far less dignified behavior that is anti-social, or they will sink into a despair, each of which comes with ancillary reckless behavior such as drugs, crime, and violence.

The article isn’t an one off, and while it might be a little over the top, it does represent a common view, especially in academics, that doesn’t understand humans, not at a deep “what do people want from life?” level. People don’t simply want what the modern Liberal project believes they want, which is ever increasing material wealth and a Libertarian individuality whose end point is emancipation from any and all communal norms.

People do want material wealth, but that alone isn’t enough, because they also need to feel a sense of purpose aligned to the Good, and for men that means some version of being a hero, which is especially incoherent to the modern academic worldview that emphasizes individuality, because it requires being a part of a community, since it is an act of selflessness, where the hero trades their physical suffering for communal praise and status. You can’t be a hero if you are alone, because there is nobody to save or protect, and nobody to then sing your song.

That gap between how academic elites understand the human is most pronounced when it comes to back-row (low educational attainment) men, of all races, because that is where the difference between what the educated understand as fulfillment (book smart learning) is almost orthogonal to what they understand it to be, which is building physical things with real world consequences. “Mundane” things such as stringing power lines, delivering packages, drilling for oil, harvesting food, which provide a society the necessities to run.

I also believe most of our current elites don’t understand how culture works, at almost any level. People don’t only need purposeful roles, the notion that someone can make up their own bespoke identity, like a tailor-made suit, might be true of a small minority of the highly educated and motivated, but the bulk of citizens in a society choose to, and would rather, play a stock character.

This has been one of my pet theories¹ that I’ve grown more and more confident of as I’ve walked the world, and read more, which is that cultures, like a video game, provide their citizens with a limited array of characters to play, each with different strengths and weaknesses. The selection and popularity of these characters changes with time, mostly driven by the same viral/random mathematical process as any large scale interconnected system, like the spread of memes, rumors, and diseases², but the array on offer is mostly, but not exclusively, determined by elites, who have a disproportionate impact on what is considered moral and immoral, what is “allowed”, through their ownership and influence in the media, educational institutions, and the legal system.

These characters change from place to place (national stereotypes can be a simplified version of the most popular) and a successful society understands this, and does its best to encourage and promote healthy roles that are easy to access. In Japan it might be the dedicated craft-person, in England the eccentric tinker, in France the “five hour smoking alone pontificating on stuff he doesn’t really understand at the cafe” guy, in Amman the devote Muslim, and so on.

Having an array of celebrated heroic characters for men to fill, that are bound to the greater Good, is an absolute must for a functional society— rescue workers, military, carpenters, engineers, husbands, fathers, backhoe operators, truckers, etc — and if you diminish the status of those, unhealthy ones will bubble up from the bottom, because there are some universals that transcend cultural boundaries, and the need for men to feel useful is one of them.

A result of this broken societies can have endemic problems, what I’ve called cultural tics, that while clearly profane, are a way for the distraught to access certain status levels (to continue game analogy). In the US an example is the school shooter³, which has now become a character that angry, confused, distraught young men can play, the anti-hero, that can be as appealing to some as the hero, if a society is sufficiently broken.

In England, it is the bad drunk, in Japan, the sexually perverted, in Muslim countries, the fundamentalist. One of the intractable problems when you have a negative cultural tic is that it becomes almost impossible to address because you get a society wide Streisand effect — where everyone coming out and condemning something only increases its impact and solidifies the tic as a known character.

These national tics aren’t limited to men, or necessarily to aggressive anti-social behavior. In Korea childless misfit is a now character that’s been taking off in popularity, resulting in a huge drop in fertility⁴, and working its way into politics. These national tics can show up on TV shows, in movies, and in politics, as a literal character, solidifying their popularity.

The larger point is there are some cultural tics that can’t just be explained by policy, because they are deeper than that, and they will persist longer than expected, no matter the many attempts to stop them.

Some people don’t like this type of analysis because they like to think we “don’t play cultural roles”, but as Erving Goffman documented, that’s exactly what people seem to do. According to his decades long ethnographic research, watching people, we are all actors in a cultural play. As a Catholic I disagree with him on the extent⁵, but the overall idea at a descriptive level is correct.

As I’ve written before, humans are a remarkable animal because of the diversity of how we choose to live, which is determined by our culture, and within that culture, by the character we select,

We are not slaves to our animal instincts. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul.

Rats, and other animals, live rather similar lives, in their daily patterns, regardless of where they are born, driven by their inborn instincts. While so much of modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it really is our differences that define us as a big-brained species that uses constructed tools (literally and figuratively), rather than genetically programmed instincts, to survive and thrive.

And those differences are what comprise a place’s culture. We humans are cultural animals, imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but who generally end up “in having lived only one.”

That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into.

I would amend that to say, “actually sometimes we are if not slaves, then at least employees, to our animal instincts”, and where that shows up the most is the differences in what men and women find fulfilling. While culture can diminish the differences between them, it cannot ever entirely erase it. Which cultural characters the genders select, as a way to access a meaningful life, is one of those stubborn DNA influenced differences that I believe passes the bar of being a human universal, and for men, that means a need for characters with heroic qualities.

I am sure a lot of readers are thinking, well the male hero has a lot of well documented negative qualities, such as being violent, so that is why we’ve tried to move on from it. Yes, Achilles is not exactly the character I want young men in a society to be modeled on, but a well run society provides men less violent, positive, hero archetypes, whose main meaning comes from protecting the integrity of the community from threats. A culture needs these both for pragmatic reasons (to keep the lights on) and to diminish the appeal of negatives models, because like a rug too large for a room, you can’t entirely stamp out the bump in the room, and without culturally approved male hero roles, a black market in un-approved anti-social ones will pop up.

To end this, that is how I generally think about the nature (DNA) versus nurture (culture) debate. Our biological reality is the landscape on which culture is built. It provides the bedrock, but culture can transform the topography rather dramatically, just like we can level mountains, build tunnels, and bridge rivers. Yet no matter how much engineering we do, especially if you drill far enough down, you can still see the contours of the original landscape, in what needed to be built, versus what comes “naturally”, and that continues to shape life in the city of humans.

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PS: I leave this Monday for Dubai, then Mumbai, then Hong Kong, then Beijing, then Seoul, then Washington DC.

I’ll be giving a talk in DC area on February 27th, in an Arlington Virginia McDonald’s from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m ( 6020 Rose Hill Dr, Alexandria), followed by a 5:30 p.m. happy hour at local Mexican restaurant (Helena's 5735 Telegraph Rd, Alexandria, VA).

If you want to attend the talk, please send me an email with your name and email. We are limited to ten readers, so please only send one if you can make it! The happy hour is for everyone, and I’ll happily buy any reader a drink, or two.

1. I am by no means suggesting I’ve created anything new or novel here. There is a long history of the idea of cultural archetypes. From Dawkins chapter in the Selfish Gene on memetics, to René Girard in "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World" (1978), to Erich Neumann belief in archetypes as fundamental psychological patterns that appear throughout cultural history, to Ralph Linton’s, "The Study of Man" (1936) and "The Cultural Background of Personality" (1945).

My only contribution is the gaming analogy!

2. Basically three coupled differential equations.

3. Easy access to guns is not only an issue with the US, but school shootings are. I believe, if guns were harder to access, ‘mass suicide” attempts will still be a thing, although they would be less deadly.

4. I believe the global phenomenon of collapsing birth rates is another issue, and as I wrote about in my piece on Phnom Penh, you can think of it as the rise in popularity of a new global character, the childless,

That idea of having children — as the thing you do, like this couple, without thinking about because it is clearly towards the good — has been the default mode in most cultures for almost all of our history.

The modern world, at least large parts of it, no longer considers it a default good5 and so it’s been eroded as a capital t Truth, and many people now think about having children as a decision to be adjudicated, maybe not as cartoonish-ly as making a spreadsheet that tallies up the costs and benefits, but as a thing that needs to be rationalized, and when doing that they see the hard work, sacrifice, and a personal commitment more than they see the meaning making good

5. I believe there is a core self that is removed from “acting” because while I believe we are all defined within the social, the drive towards the Good isn’t entirely utilitarian (to get applause.)