There’s nothing good about a national tragedy—other than the good that we see in the midst of one.
When two shrapnel-laden bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday, the nation grieved. Three people died. About 170 others were wounded, some seriously. We again were forced to ponder the safety of our streets and our ever-dangerous world.
And yet even as we grew sad and angry, we heard—we couldn’t help but hear—about the disaster’s heroes: bystanders who hopped fences and ran toward the chaos instead of away. No matter the potential danger—more bombs or shooters or who-knows-what. They ran toward trouble. They ran toward the people who needed help.
We see these people in the aftermath of almost every crisis—be it Aurora or Newtown or smaller events that never make the national news. In the aftermath, we call these folks “heroes,” even though science might call ’em just plain crazy. Writes Time senior editor Jeffrey Kluger:
Ethicists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have tried for a long time to figure out why we do these things—why we put ourselves in mortal danger to save other people and, in so doing, defy our one great evolutionary imperative, which is to stay alive ourselves.
Kluger ticks off how scientists try to explain why we ordinary people sometimes become heroes in moments of crisis: We’re more likely to help people who we know, say biologists (never mind that many heroes risk everything for complete strangers). Neurological arguments are made involving our status as social creatures or the physical patterns of our brains. “And yet,” Kluger continues:
All these answers just smell wrong. You can deconstruct a painting by explaining the salts and sulfides and esters that make up its pigments; you can parse a symphony by measuring the frequency and wavelength of the final crashing chord, but you’re missing the bigger picture.
Frank Farley, a professor of psychology at Temple University, admitted ignorance to ABC News. “We really don’t know for sure why people put their lives on the line for other people,” he said. “It is the most mysterious act, in my view. How does someone get close to giving up their life for someone else they may not even know? It’s so profound.”
Those of us who believe in divine design don’t struggle with an explanation, of course: It’s all about God. We may be fallen creatures, but we still are His creation—mirroring in some small way His nature, His image. So, just as Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross for us, there seems to be a part of us that’s willing to sacrifice ourselves for others. It might not make sense, scientifically speaking, but to paraphrase the Apostle Paul, God’s foolishness runs circles around our own ideas of what makes sense.
But there’s another angle to explore here. I can’t help but wonder whether that intrinsic spark in us is augmented and preserved by the stories we tell. There’s no shortage of heroes at the local theater or around the television dial. We Americans love our entertainment—and our entertainment is saturated with heroes.
It’s so obvious that we take it for granted. In the reviews I write for Plugged In, there’s very often a line or two about how someone shows “sacrificial courage” or “heroic derring-do,” etc., etc. It’s almost a given. When I think about the movies I’ve seen so far this year, all of them had heroes. In Oblivion it was Tom Cruise’s Jack Harper, battling for nothing less than the human race. In The Croods it was an out-of-touch father named Grug who risked his own well-being to toss his whole family into a brighter tomorrow. Even Evil Dead—not a movie that’d ever get made into a Plugged In Movie Night—had a hero: a guy named David who sacrificed himself to save his rather disturbed sister.
Look at last year’s biggest-grossing movies: The Avengers. The Dark Knight Rises. The Hunger Games. Skyfall. All of them movies predicated on heroes. Check out the year’s Best Picture nominees: Lincoln. Argo. Les Misérables.
We at Plugged In talk all the time about how our entertainment impacts us in myriad ways—and often we’re forced to focus on the bad stuff: how violence desensitizes us, how sexual content titillates us, how even seeing someone smoking a cigarette in a movie makes it more likely we’ll light up ourselves.
But the reverse, we believe, can also be true. The stuff we watch and listen to and play can sometimes teach us good things.
I’ve written before—probably too much—about my fascination with superheroes growing up. Ask me back then what a hero looked like, and I’d probably point to Superman or Batman or Spider-Man. But even then, I knew they weren’t heroes because they had superpowers or nifty gadgets. It was a part of who they were inside. Their character. Their willingness to sacrifice for others.
By extension, if you walked into any elementary school and asked the kids today what a hero looks like, most would pull someone from the world of entertainment: Captain America, perhaps. Merida from Brave. Harry Potter. The heroes they name might have flaws. Some of them we might not even want to call heroes. And yet, movies and television are the places where they—where we—are most likely to see our most resonant images of heroism.
I learned how to be a hero—or, at least, how to be a particular sort of dramatic hero—from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and the superhero cartoons I watched on Saturday mornings. I learned that heroes do not shy away from danger: They run toward it. My entertainment reinforced this message at every turn, it seems. And for all the weaknesses we may point to in modern entertainment, this core lesson is still hammered home with surprising frequency.
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