Heroes and Villains
A "conservative" ethos is necessary for the presence, in both a real-world and literary sense, of heroes and villains in society. Man could not develop in his mind and imagination what is defined as a hero if he had a relativistic outlook on moral norms. Neither could he have an image of a villain. Without men in society developing (to use the language of Richard Weaver) a "tyrannizing image" that is non-relativistic in its ability to have standards, heroes and villains are unthinkable. Men must have the ability to compare and contrast based on a common standard. They must be able to form a tyrannizing image that is able to define what is truly good and, as its opposite counterpart, truly evil.
Robert Nisbet in Twilight of Authority explains that "In the Greek, heros refers to the perfect man, the expression of the highest ideals of the community from which he springs." It is when we have "moral norms and ties of trust so real," Nisbet writes, "so widely accepted and understood, as to make identification of the heroic and the villainous possible."
"To read about the great villains in the epics, melodramas, and tragedies of other ages," says Nisbet,
is to be put in touch with the same greatness that we get in the great heroes, but of treachery, lust, dishonor, instead of virtue. ... A villain is by nature villainous, as the hero is by nature heroic, and throughout history we find, in art, literature, and religion, that in his own way the villain is just as important a symbol in human life as the hero.
Nisbet continues,
As the one is, through unique possession of virtue and strength, an exemplar of good, a spur to achievement, and thereby a vital source of creative meanings, the other becomes for us a model of all that is ultimately destructive of the fabric of morality. By that fact, the villain in his way serves the social bond...
Squalid modernity has promoted all of the things that are hostile to the formation of heroes and villains. Literature written now lacks the qualities of the literature of the old in this regard. Moral relativism is widespread. Religion, having retreated into modernity as well to a large extent, has lost its authority and role in society. The sacred has been lost in much of religion. It fails to inspire man and thus does not give man a conception of religious heroes and villains. Secular humanism is the model at present. Neither do we find clear heroes in other areas of modern life. We do not find heroes in the movie business. It is likewise for great men of business. Finding individual heroes in sports is also difficult. They get lost to the group and commercialism.
It is the same for the sciences. Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, as Nisbet reasons, have been looked to as heroes because of their great work they created as lone individuals. As individuals, they were not micros lost in a collective. But in the present age science research is collective. For this reason, today "it is unlikely that individual heroes will emerge again from the mass."
Robert Nisbet believes that the villain, too, has been lost, as he explains in his book Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. The villain qua criminal, for instance, has lost his role in society. Punishment of crime use to be an important ritual function of community. The "drama" of crime in community, says Nisbet, "is one of the most powerful in respect of the development of morality and the preservation of social order."
These days, however,
The entire ritual of crime and punishment is being lost, the recurrent, stabilizing, and reinforcing drama of crime followed by hue and cry, by search and capture, by trial, judgment of guilt, and then punishment. ... The community of moral and legal elements which once characterized crime and punishment has been fragmented, and in the process the individuality, the distinctiveness of crime, especially murder, has been lost to human contemplation.
With the crime rates that we have today, crime gets lost to the crowd. The individuality of crime disappears. No longer, except in extreme cases, is there interest from men in the goings-on of a crime case from its beginning, in public announcement, to its end, in final punishment of the criminal. The "functional reciprocity between the deed and the punishment" in community has faded.
Besides centralization of governmental power and the creation of public police forces (which, by the way, have not always existed---even in areas with a state), I judge we could also definitely argue that the creation of an ever flexible and erratic statist list of "victimless crimes" and the continuous creation of governmental legislation has added to the decline Nisbet is talking about. Indeed, legislation is based on a relativistic view of "law." There is thus, with this kind of frame of mind, no such thing as truly unlawful or lawful.
"The community of crime and punishment," writes Nisbet,
will be missed. It has been a building block of society. Durkheim referred to crime as both necessary and, in proper degree, desirable. Only through an individual's flouting of a sacred value, such as the sanctity of life, can people remind themselves from time to time of the value itself and of its indispensability to the community at large.
Losing this function of community, Nisbet believes, is not incidentally related to the rise of crime. Not only has the idea of crime become relativistic, as I have argued, but nowadays Nisbet says it is looked at as a sickness, not an evil. Hence, iniquity is an illusion. The rise of the therapeutic brings the fall of just punishment.
It is hardly putting too strong a light on the matter to say that America has lost the villain, the evil one, who has now become one of the sick, the disturbed, demanding therapy or at worst incarceration in an asylum... America also lost the victim, who is more likely to be denigrated for having gotten in the way of the disturbed one than to receive commiseration. America has lost the moral value of guilt, lost it to the sickroom. And finally, America has lost the most vital element, punishment.
"It is no small thing," he continues, "in a social order to erode away the ethic of guilt and replace it by the ethic of nonresponsibility for one's acts in matters of crime. Responsibility lies on the other side of the coin of individual freedom."
The idea of social environmentalism has therefore gained ground. Volition is promoted as not real. Criminals are excused, especially by certain left-liberals, as simply being products of their social environment. They are seen as mentally disturbed----but not evil. (Although, it must not have come to their minds that acts of evil are by definition, so to speak, mentally disturbed acts!) Because of this, muddled rehabilitation theories of justice have been developed, and real justice gets lost to them.
To relate this overall decline and decivilization to the literature of crime fiction, Robert Nisbet remarks, "The almost epiphenomenal relation that so long was peculiar to the classical murder mystery and to actual life is gone completely now."
All-in-all, at least for the most part, this is just another illustration, I believe, of the consequences of destructive ideas that have taken over man's mind and heart. (Ideas, it should be mentioned, that have been interwoven in statist and egalitarian thinking. This is not an accident.) Relativism and historicism are top among those destructive ideas. The loss of ideals and transcendental values has corrupted man. In the place of a general belief in some enduring moral order, man searches in vain and finds vacuity. Heroes and villains, as discussed above, have no place. Even objectively classifying a criminal qua criminal & villain has no place. Good literature, which is meant to reveal truths and (as T.S. Eliot put it) the "permanent things" about human existence, nature, morality, etc., has no place. Moreover, social environmentalism portrays man as having no nature, thinks of him as but an animal, and sees man as able to be molded into whatever image is wanted by the use of Leviathan. Consequently, it is clear what ideas and values need recrudescence.
See Also: The Paleo Blog's "Man and Modernity."
