The Free Press
I traveled round the U.S. for 10 years, and one of my most enduring memories is of being in a dive bar somewhere in Ohio when a roomful of guys were trying to break down a door.
It started because a woman got upset that her man had gone into the bathroom, locked the door, and that was half an hour ago, and he’s not answering, and sometimes he passes out on the toilet when he’s had too much.
She needed help, and for the next 20 minutes, every man in the bar gave it their best shot—some running and throwing their shoulder against the door, some using pool cues as a crowbar, some trying to pick the lock. Each actor, when it was his time in the spotlight, entered with a swaggering bravado that soon collapsed in cartoonish ways: a humiliating slip and fall, a crushed finger, a yelp of pain.
Finally, one of the guys managed to take the door off the frame using tools from his truck, revealing a rail-thin, spiky-haired man sprawled on the toilet who, when woken from his concoction-of-substances-induced sleep by his distraught woman, walked directly to the bar with an oblivious grin and ordered another drink. He wasn’t the main character of this story.
The guy who succeeded in opening the door was the hero of the night—and he knew it. For the next two hours, he strutted around like the cat’s meow. Beaming, he recounted the story of how he opened the door to everyone, including me. I probably heard it four times. Each time he told it, it got more impressive, and each time, someone would buy him a drink.
The image sticks with me because it was both so comical and so telling. This was one of the divey-est dive bars in the country, with a diverse array of intoxicated, high, and strung-out customers; every demographic was represented, with the exception of the successful, and what I saw there was universal.
What I saw was this: All men need to feel like the hero—if not over the course of their lifetime, then at least every now and then. Most get their sense of worth from rescuing, protecting, building, solving—and for being appreciated for doing so. I’ve seen this truth on Wall Street—where I used to work, and where men would feel like heroes after closing a deal. I’ve seen it in crack houses, when I’ve been reporting, where people speak of the guys who went cold turkey like they just got Purple Hearts. I saw it, too, in the essay by Mana Afsari published by The Free Press earlier this month, about young male Americans who feel like it’s harder and harder to find a way to do something big and important—and that’s why they feel an affinity with the man who says he wants to make America great again. As one of them admitted, “I always wanted to do something great.”
Most of the kids the author spoke to were pretty well-educated, and a lot of them found meaning in talking about Homer and Virgil, ancient poets who understood the importance of heroes. It reminded me of an article in The Nation I read earlier this year, which is all about the dangers of epic poetry. The writer, Orlando Reade, argues that the ancient hero archetype is corrosive, bad, and unnecessary—an outdated concept of masculinity, which promotes imperialism. I thought at the time, This writer is simply wrong. I thought of that dive bar.
A society should never entirely dismiss the appeal of the hero archetype, especially in the way it resonates with younger men; rather than try to make it profane, we should understand the need for it, and the good that can come from it. Being a hero doesn’t mean conquering and ruling. It means, first and foremost, serving a community, acting selflessly; the hero trades their physical suffering for communal praise, and a certain status—even if that means throwing themselves at a bathroom door to “unlock” the intoxicated.
The trouble is, this archetype is kind of at odds with the modern liberal project, which favors the individual over the community—and preaches that each of us can create a bespoke identity, like a tailor-made suit. Young people are supposed to break out of the mold instead of trying to follow in others’ footsteps. But from what I’ve observed, in my years of walking cities from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, the bulk of members of a society choose to, and would rather, play a stock character. People want a role in life: the hero, the joker, the damsel in distress.
I’m hardly the first person to notice this. The very human desire to model ourselves on something has been studied for decades—not only by cultural critics like René Girard, but also by biologists, like Richard Dawkins. In other words, it’s not just nurture, it’s in our nature. What’s hardwired into our bodies is the landscape on which culture is built.
Probably the expert on all this was the sociologist Erving Goffman, who spent decades observing how people occupy cultural roles, and basically concluded that when we are in public, we are basically all actors with a part to play. Like Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage.”
To put it another way, cultures are a bit like video games. They provide citizens with a limited array of characters to play, each with different strengths and weaknesses. A successful society will accept a person’s desire to play a role, and do its best to encourage and promote healthy archetypes that ordinary people can aspire to fulfill. In Japan, it might be the dedicated craftsperson. In England, the eccentric tinker. In France, the “five-hour smoking alone, pontificating on stuff he doesn’t really understand at the café” guy.
But every society needs to give men the opportunity to play the hero. It must praise the men who risk their physical safety for the greater good—not only the ones who are rescue workers or soldiers, but also the ones stringing power lines or drilling for oil or harvesting food, providing society with the necessities to run. We must also value the men who protect and build and solve. The carpenters, the engineers, the husbands, fathers, and truckers.
Without culturally approved ways to be a hero, a black market in unapproved, antisocial ones will pop up; these usually involve proving your worth through crime or violence. Ah, but isn’t the male hero violent, too? Isn’t that why we’ve tried to move on from that archetype? Fine, Achilles is not exactly the character I want young men in modern America to be modeled on. That doesn’t mean we can’t provide positive hero archetypes, ones that protect the community from threats, keep the lights on—and, if needed, bust open a bathroom door in a dive bar.
People are obsessed with the “angry young men for Trump,” but what good will come of dismissing these kids as sexist and insisting that “hero” is an old-fashioned idea? Far better to celebrate men for wanting to save a man trapped in a bathroom, or rush into a burning building. Who cares if all they’re trying to do is get praise from a woman or a free drink? America would be a better place.
