Why aren't you a hero?
Why aren’t we all?
I know a full professor at a major research university in the US who is also a foreign national with a green card. (I’m being deliberately vague here, because I really don’t want to dox her and get her pursued by trolls). “Prof. X” recently returned from an overseas conference only to be hassled by border agents at the airport. “Why do you travel so much? Where are you going? If you expect to become a US citizen you need to stay in the United States.”1 That sort of thing, delivered in an aggressive manner. Prof. X patiently explained that she is an academic and travels a lot to give talks and do research. The border agents grilled her like she was in MS-13, not exactly the warm welcome back we ought to give to a high-achieving permanent resident we should be delighted to have in our country.
Not long after that Prof. X announced that she and her family were, in her words, “fleeing” the US and she was taking up a position at Oxford. I was saddened, but not surprised, to hear this.
Prof. X isn’t the only one. I know of others who have decided that staying in the US is no longer the best choice for them or their families. Apparently this can really anger people:
I don’t remember the allies shooting refugees, but in fairness I’m not an historian.
What I’m wondering about is both why people would want to be a hero and why they expect others to be heroes.
Heroism is dangerous work
Being a hero mostly sucks. I think a popular fantasy is to have lived the life of a hero. Fantasizers don’t want to live the life of one, like people who want to be a writer without doing the hard work of, you know, writing. Actually living the life of a hero means getting shot by bigots, imprisoned, assassinated, lynched, burned at the stake, and handed a kylix of hemlock. At a bare minimum there are people trying to do these things to you.
I doubt that most sensible people truly want to hide Anne Frank in their attic. Who wants to live a life of deceit, in fear for years that every knock on the door portends jack-booted Nazis? Hopefully we all want to be the kind of people who would hide her if it came down to it, but that’s quite a different thing.
Would you really want to live the life of Jesus? No spouse, no kids, betrayed by your friends, and tortured to death by the government at the age of 33. Would you choose to be Martin Luther King, Jr., hounded and abused by racists and eventually shot dead by one at the age of 39?
Do you envy Medal of Honor winner Pvt. Ross McGinnis? Like many MoH recipients, he received the award posthumously. In 2006 he was in Iraq, manning a .50-cal machine gun in a Humvee, when an enemy insurgent threw a grenade into the gunner’s hatch. It landed at his feet. While the Army reported that McGinnis could have leapt out to his own safety, instead he yelled, “Grenade!” and threw himself on top of it, saving the lives of four other soldiers in the truck. He was 19 years old.
Would you actually want to be that hero, or just wish you were the kind of person who would throw themselves on a grenade to save your buddies while simultaneously never finding out? Walter Mitty-ing heroism is waaaay more appealing and much more likely.
Martyrdom is no proof of truth
Apart from the personal risk of heroics, there’s the danger of thinking you’re the hero when in fact you’re the villain.
After he assassinated Abraham Lincoln while theatrically shouting sic semper tyrannis, John Wilkes Booth expected to be hailed as righteous hero avenging the South. Instead he was shocked to find himself a despised and hunted fugitive with a massive bounty on his head.
Domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in 1995, killing 167 people (including 19 children) and injuring 684 others. When arrested by the cops, McVeigh was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Lincoln over the motto sic semper tyrannis. Like Booth, McVeigh mistakenly thought he would be seen as a hero enacting retribution against an abusive and hostile government.
The January 6 insurrectionists—carrying the Confederate battle flag and many wearing neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate apparel—also thought they were heroes on the right side of history as they attempted Trump’s autocoup. All they needed to complete their ensemble of delusion was Booth’s ill-fated battle cry.
Nietzsche once commented,
That martyrs prove anything about the truth of a cause is so little true I would be disposed to deny that a martyr has ever had anything whatever to do with the truth… Martyrdoms, by the way, have been a great misfortune in history: they have seduced. The inference of all idiots, women and nations included, that a cause for which someone is willing to die… must have something in it —this inference has become an unspeakable drag on verification, on the spirit of verification and caution. Martyrs have harmed truth. (The Antichrist, 53)
McGinnis was a hero for saving his brothers-in-arms, but even so his sacrifice did not show the Iraq War was a just cause. The willingness to be a martyr might, as Nietzsche suggests and plenty of examples attest, simply prove you’re an idiot. Or worse, like Booth, McVeigh, and the insurrectionists, it turns out that you’re not the hero of this tale after all, but the villain.
Why aren’t YOU a hero?
Almost no one is 100% cowardly or 100% heroic. We should expect the distribution of people along the line from coward to hero to be a bell curve, with most of us in the fat middle of “occasionally stepping up, but not constantly putting ourselves on the line.” That’s human nature. Asking why someone isn’t a world-historical hero is like asking why they aren’t batting cleanup for the Yankees, or winning the National Book Award, or scoring a Nobel in physics. Almost no one is, and it is ridiculous to expect that to be the norm. This is part of the reason why the latest effective altruist demand that you spend your time saving the lives of all the shrimp, mosquitoes, and archaea that you possibly can because that will maximize something valuable is comically unreasonable.
Then there’s the faux heroism of anonymous keyboard warriors who think arrogant challenges to others is a sign of bravery.
That comment was in response to an earlier piece of mine on problems faced by colleges, and demonstrates a sadly common failure to grasp what a collective action problem is.
Suppose you really want to combat climate change. You feel guilty about your middle-class lifestyle, and so you decide to sell all your possessions and live like a hunter-gatherer. While you are happy to contribute to fixing climate change, you don’t want to waste your contribution either. You’ll be wasting it if (1) we solve climate change and your sacrifice wasn’t needed after all, or (2) we fail to solve it and your sacrifice was squandered.
Then you reason as follows: if humanity actually fixes climate change, that will take billions of dollars, billions of people, and many years of effort. It would have succeeded without your paltry contribution. So you might as well have kept your house-dwelling, truck-driving, plane-flying lifestyle after all. It made no measurable impact; the environment turned out just fine anyway. Therefore you won’t give up your way of living.
After a little reflection, you realize that everyone else will reason the same way, which means that no one will sacrifice to combat climate change. Since no one (or only the chump who didn’t think this though) is going to contribute, fighting climate change is for sure doomed to failure. Well, you’re certainly not going to abandon your middle-class lifestyle for a project that will inevitably fail.
In the end it doesn’t matter we fix climate change or not; the rational thing for you to do is to keep on the way you are, and do nothing. Then everyone reasons this way and climate change is never solved.
That’s a collective action problem. So’s addressing the woes of higher ed. I can fail all of my students2 and it solves nothing—not rampant AI cheating, not Trump, not student apathy, not underfunding by the state, not under-enrollment by white men, not the cost, nothing. That’s true of each and every faculty member. Which means we’ll all rationally arrive at the conclusion that there’s no point in flunking all our students and taking a boatload of grief for it.
Yes, my acquaintance fleeing the country for Oxford, or the emigrants profiled in the NYTimes aren’t heroically staying in the US and fighting for democracy, truth, justice, and (what theoretically used to be) the American Way. If any of them were world-historical leaders whose personal actions would have a massive impact on global events, then sure, it would be nice if they stayed and helped out. However, none of them (no offense meant) is Gandhi, Mandela, Mohammad, or Joan of Arc, and they would simply risk their careers and families to achieve nothing.
It is unreasonable to expect others to pointlessly sacrifice themselves. However, for each of us there may be hills that we are willing to die on, even when that has no effect beyond our ego. Nevertheless, one’s own pride, one’s individual sense of self-worth and integrity does matter, and we must each choose for ourselves our own small battles and opportunities for modest heroism. But that is not for others to decide or demand.
She has no interest in becoming a naturalized US citizen, especially now.
N.B.: this past semester my students earned the worst grades of my career. In my best class (of four) the median was a C and the mean a D+. In another class the sole statistical mode (the most frequent grade) was a zero. Yes, a zero. This is depressing.
In my younger days, I will admit I thought everyone had the tenacity to stand up for what they believe in. Growing up in a conservative, Christian household taught me to speak up when you see bad people doing bad things i.e. reading Harry Potter, believing in evolution, or swearing. Now that I am a tad bit older, I relate much more to your side of the matter. "Quick to listen, slow to speak" I think is the general principle I would argue for, but definitely not die on a hill for. I think it is the privilege of young people to have the tenacity to care about a subject deeply. Age brings a level of disillusionment with the world. Perhaps we have just seen too many people we viewed as heroes collapse under their own hubris.
I appreciate the core argument you're presenting here, but I want to add some nuance to a throwaway aside that you made.
> This is part of the reason why the latest effective altruist demand that you spend your time saving the lives of all the shrimp, mosquitoes, and archaea that you possibly can because that will maximize something valuable is comically unreasonable.
We all live in different social bubbles, and so we will have different experiences with our interactions with different groups. I'm incorporating the (implied) anecdote you've provided into my beliefs, and I'm offering an anecdote from my experience for you to incorporate into yours.
In my experience, effective altruist don't "demand" that you spend your time saving the lives of shrimps etc. For one thing, these people tend to value consequentialist reasoning and they surely realize that using the language/tone associated with "demand" would ultimately hurt their cause.
Instead, what I tend to observe is that they think through various premises seriously, including the possibility that reducing harm to shrimps is something that has a very low cost to high benefit ratio, i.e. that it's potentially an "effective" form of "altruism". They will then write up and present their arguments for why they think this might be the case, and they invite dissenting views, because they value having "true beliefs".
Furthermore, in my observations, they don't try to drag disinterested lay people into debating these points with them, because again, this would needlessly alienate and annoy most people without providing a corresponding benefit and thus be counterproductive to their goal of doing altruism effectively.
What I *do* sometimes observes is that the EA will publish these articles and arguments (on substack and elsewhere) to debate among themselves, perhaps making a claim like "I've done some calculations regarding where we humans seem to be causing the most needless harm, and I think shrimp welfare might be an area worth looking into" and then someone-who-doesn't-identify-as-an-EA might interpret that as "EA people are saying that we are bad people unless we sacrifice everything in our lives and spend every waking moment protecting shrimp" and then via the game of broken telephone, this eventually gets interpreted as "EA demand that we give up our careers and all forms of leisure and sacrifice our loved ones in order to promote shrimp happiness" or something along those lines.
I guess I'm claiming that that last thing is a caricature and "non-central" example of what EAs believe. Perhaps there exists people who read that caricature, and actually become persuaded by it, and thus truly believe it (and perhaps also self-identify as EA), but again, I claim that such people are non-central examples of EA.
I'll also mention that I don't personally put any effort towards improving shrimp welfare, but I support people's freedom (whether they identify as EA or not) to think about and debate the issue of shrimp welfare, and if they do come up with proposals that sound effective to me (e.g. "We have a detailed and adversarially-vetted proposal that will make shrimp slaughtering more humane at only an increase cost of 2 cents per pound of shrimp"), then I'd be willing to sign the petition or whatever. That doesn't sound comically unreasonable to me.