The Nature of Heroism
Are Olympic athletes really heroes? That's how they were described in news reports, but some of you who emailed PM and iPM disagreed.
Professor Philip Zimbardo is of a similar mind. You can hear his views in the player below.
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Dr Zimbardo made his name with the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of a number of psychological studies which have indicated the potential for ordinary people to do bad things. Now Zimbardo's investigating the potential of ordinary people to become heroes. As part of that he's conducting some online research. You can find out more about that here.
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Our Olympic sportsmen & women are admirable, but they are NOT 'Heroes'. Much less so are those who have been sent to kill foreigners in Afghanistan & Iraq. All war is bad, but at least in World War 2 we were fighting AGAINST an evil regime. Our troops now are fighting FOR an evil regime.
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I like Zimbardo's work generally, but was he a bit of a non-hero, when he cut short the SPE on 'moral' grounds?
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Don't we have to distinguish between those who feel heroism is a quality obtainable by hard work and those who feel heroism is a quality that occurs, often spontaneously out of an immediate need to succeed? In some ways the Zimbardo experiments are akin to sport in so far as they were set up to establish an end result. He took people off the street to examine how far they would be compliant to orders...any orders. Top sport takes people who show a level of fitness or skill and attempts to enhance the end results. I believe Zimbardo concluded that people are neither bad nor heroes in such studies. Not that bad and heroism is either end of the polemic.
We should not get swayed by our need to identify heroes in times when there are few uplifting stories in the news. Sports people and professional soldiers are not heroes per se, i.e. in the popular sense, but often individual exploits in the face of extreme difficulty can be heroic. Can we expect a person to be a hero? Who puts "Hero" on their CV? A Gold medal winner? A pesron who gets paid to kill children (by fault of war) from his F1 11 or gunship?
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I think the father who rescued his drowning child from the storm drain/river is a hero. And perhaps his Services training helped him to remain cool, calm and ciollected while he did it.
Sporting "heros" are few and far between. I think most sports people are obsessive rather than heroic. But I do find the disabled athletes very inspiring, because they are overcoming much greater hurdles just to compete.
Having come through cancer myself I now recognise that an old lady with terrible arthritis struggling down to Tescos can be pretty heroic.
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