heroes and community

Heroes are not antithetical to community. If you look at the real folk heroes of various traditions, such as Irish, Vedic, etc, and get past the comic book versions, you find a complexity that Aristotle tried to codify in his definition of the "tragic". Before American comics (and they even have their own chiaroscuro aspects) only the melodramas had two dimensional heroes that were all good, going up against villains that were all bad. ( It is no accident that the word villain comes from the same root as the word village, and the derivation points to the melodramatic distrust of the urban which is harbored in the stereotyped "rural" heart.)

Melodramas in their turn were the spawn of the medieval morality plays, which created the exaggerated polarization of right and wrong, good and evil. Prior to the rise of the high middle ages theocracy of the Catholic Church, you would have a hard time finding such "cartoonish" versions of human existance.

Heroes for the greatest span of recorded time were tragic figures, called out of the comforts of community to deal with an extraordinary threat to the community. It was common knowledge, then, that once so touched by fate there was no happy ending. In the tradition of the Golden Bough, the "hero" was an aspirant to a divine state that played out with his being killed at the end of a year. Whether the year was figurative or literal, doesn't matter. What matters was, the role of the hero was the role of the doomed, who met greatness with a knowledge that it was fatal. What is antithetical to community, is the hubris that attempts to subordinate the community to the conscious will and ego of the hero...the hero who tries to escape the fatal implications of being "called out." That hubris links many modern leaders in a chain of fantastic mischance befalling otherwise great nations, tribes, cultures.

This is the shadow side of community that doesn't fit easily into platitudes about doing good, taking care, working "together."

In the normal cycles of any groups career through time, individuals are called out to be either leaders or scapegoats, and both classes are doomed in their own way. The "fatal flaw" of leadership is the stuff of real tragedy. The injustice that is meted out to scapegoats gets less scrutiny, and is even less well understood. But it is all of a piece, and the community creates the holon. The community isn't the victim of the extreme cases that defy its norms. The community is the cauldron that boils up and ejects the leaders and scapegoats alike in its mindless but wonderous stewing.

When Marx reified "society" as though it were an organism seeking equilibrium in the greatest good for the greatest number, but having to go through various distorted forms to find that equilibrium, he loosed a stubborn meme that still filters out sense in many discussions about society and culture. It has become simplified to a formula: evil=misfortune. If you are unfortunate, it is because of someone elses evil, or your own. This is the nadir of human philosophy. It sets every fortunate person against every unfortunate person in a suffocating arena.

The old stories, which included heroes who were not antithetical to community, allowed that misfortune could occur to virtuous people, and fortune could attend the petty and dishonest, for a season or so. The old stories had room for you and I to struggle, without being shamed by the mere fact that we face adversity. "Community" is not a palliative of the nature of pain or misfortune, and heroism per se is no measure of a man or woman's ultimate fitness, in virtue, or survival itself.