Saving Zelda

At the heart of a tour de force about the manifold problems in Legend of Zelda video games since the 1987 original, and how to make new iterations stronger, Tevis Thompson has the following insight about the idea of heroism upon which all of the Zelda games are based:

The point of a hero’s adventure… is not to make you feel better about yourself. The point is to grow, to overcome, to in some way actually become better. If a legendary quest has no substantial challenge, if it asks nothing of you except that you jump through the hoops it so carefully lays out for you, then the very legend is unworthy of being told, and retold.

This is precisely why I — like Thompson and like so many others — were captivated by the original game: There was so much space to explore, so much to do, and something of an uncertainty at times about how to proceed. And it’s why the whole concept of a heroic journey or adventure continues to resonate with so many people, within the world of video games (where the risks are obviously mitigated) and in life (where the risks remain but where the adventures are one’s own).

(via maxistentialist)

The Hero Report Broadcasts

Since it’s Friday morning, I wanted to remind RC readers that The Hero Report podcast will be broadcast live on Google+ this afternoon at 4pm Eastern. Our guest this week will be Mike Dilbeck, whose Every | Day Hero Campaign got under way recently. 

We’ve only done one live broadcast — last week — and we’re hoping to use this feature in as many interesting ways as possible. Not only is this a chance to watch the podcast being produced and to hear (and see) it a few days before it’s available, it’s also a chance to impact the conversation as it happens by commenting while we’re on the air.

To be sure that you’ll be able to watch the broadcast and comment on what we’re discussing, I recommend adding me to one of your Google+ circles. Drop by and see what we’re up to … and, of course, tell your friends!

Want to make the podcast portable? Subscribe via iTunes (video / audio-only).

Censorship and Corporate Heroism

In response to yesterday’s post about Twitter and censorship, Jake Wobig offers the following critique:

In doing this, Twitter agrees to stifle the voices of its users and to be complicit in the “The Big Lie” described by Vaclav Havel in Power of the Powerless.  The Big Lie is that everyone supports the government’s view of what is right and proper and beneficial to harmonious relations, to the maintenance of order.

Havel describes how, in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule, shopkeepers would put signs with loyalist slogans in their stores because it was good for relations with the authorities.  And because people saw so many of these expressions of faith all around them, they could not help but think that their own honest sentiments – that the system was corrupt, exploitative, immoral – were not just wrong, but crazy.  How could their own impressions be right when apparently everyone else had differing views?  This insidious inculcation of self-doubt was one of the most powerful tools of oppression in the Communist repertoire.

By agreeing to participate in each local government’s censorship scheme, Twitter is agreeing to help those governments spread their versions of the Big Lie among the local Twitterati.  They are agreeing to help those governments make the point that certain topics are just not available for discussion, and anyone who thinks otherwise is dangerously deviant. They are agreeing to help those governments spread the view that
everyone agrees and is happy and anyone who disagrees is just off their rocker.  And why?  To get access to their markets.  This is a kind of moral cowardice.

In one sense, this critique is right on the mark: There is a real danger whenever we have acquiescense with human rights abuses of any kind and, like most people who care about human rights, I wanted — initially — to protest vehemently about Twitter’s policy.

But, of course, I didn’t. In fact, I agreed with it in what I hoped would be a nuanced way. My reasoning, again, is this:

Governments all over the world can demand that Twitter remove certain content or make it unavailable in some other way. Twitter then has a choice to make: It can decide to comply or not to comply. If it chooses what Wobig regards as the heroic route of non-compliance, the government can simply block Twitter entirely. If it chooses to comply, local users can continue to use the service with some degree of censorship. Twitter has decided on the latter and Wobig thinks this is moral cowardice.

And yet the story is more complicated because Twitter’s isn’t simply shutting down access to certain users or removing content at the insistence of a government. As the piece I quoted from TechDirt rightly notes, Twitter plans to be “quite transparent about this — posting all info to ChillingEffects, and trying to let users know if they were visiting the page of a censored tweet.” In this way, Twitter isn’t helping to propagate “The Big Lie;” it’s actually pointing out those instances where a government is censoring users, in a sense pulling back the curtain on censorship while also allowing users to continue to use the service (and perhaps to find ways to communicate locally and internationally that don’t attract the censor’s notice).

And Wobig seems to recognize this:

Twitter might be thinking that communication cannot help but be democratizing, and no matter what censorial directives an authoritarian government might issue, the people will find a way to communicate what they really mean and therefore subvert the Big Lie.  To borrow another metaphor from Homer, Twitter might think they are the Trojan Horse.  And if so, more power to them.

Twitter isn’t acting heroically here, to be sure. But the heroic position is one that would most likely remove the option of speaking freely about anything to users in some countries. I wouldn’t call this moral cowardice at all; as I put it yesterday, “Twitter is making decisions in the real world, where access is being restricted, and is attempting to carve out a way for more speech and more access to communication to be allowed.” I don’t know if Twitter sees itself as the Trojan Horse, but my sense is that their policy is the one that’s most likely to operate in that way.

The Hero Report

I’m excited to announce a new venture on which I’m about to embark: A weekly video podcast on heroism with my friend Matt Langdon, an educator and blogger from Michigan (via Australia) with whom I’ve been in conversation for a few years now. Our first episode — which features a discussion on the Costa Concordia shipwreck, the captain’s dereliction of duty, and whether or not it’s appropriate to call someone a hero for doing his or her duty — will be available here tomorrow.

Matt and I have both spent a great deal of time thinking, writing, and lecturing on various aspects of heroism; now we’re ready to discuss what we’ve learned and to learn from others. To do this, we’ll take a look at stories about heroism (or the lack thereof) from the week’s news and we’ll debate what happened, why it happened, and what should have happened. From me, you can expect references to philosophy and pop culture as we go. But, I should note, it won’t just be us droning on about our own opinions: We’ll also have guests each week and we’ll pepper them with questions.

What’s more, we’re hoping to really embrace the social networking environment in which we spend so much of our time by taking suggestions for topics and guests for each week’s show, interacting on Twitter, and even broadcasting the show live via Google+ a few days before it’s polished up and available to download.

For those who don’t have any particular desire to see us, there will be an audio-only version, and both audio and video versions should be available before long via iTunes. New episodes will always broadcast at 4pm Eastern on Google+ and will be available to download on Mondays or Tuesday, depending on how much editing we need to do to make ourselves presentable. We might also sneak in a new episode here and there if something particularly interesting happens; we’ll likely just announce these a bit in advance via Twitter for people who’d like to catch the live broadcast.

I’m excited about this project, and hope you’ll consider checking it out and telling your friends!

On Joe Paterno’s Passing

When I read about Joe Paterno’s passing this weekend — on two separate occasions, strangely — I found it impossible to separate the coaching legend of so many decades from the sexual abuse scandal of recent memory. For good or ill, one event or choice can fundamentally alter public perception of a person’s life and legacy.

Indeed, this is a central element of the book project on classical heroism that I just finished. The image of ourselves that we want to present to the world isn’t necessarily the one that will actually be presented or accepted, especially if there is some sort of anomalous behavior that doesn’t fit with that image. At bottom, there are only so many decisions we can make in a short lifetime, which is why each decision we make matters a great deal.

Now, it’s almost certainly the case that few people will be able to line up every single decision and say, “Everything you see here tells one complete, clear, and consistent story about me.” But it’s so important to think critically about what we do and say because of the basic fact of our existence. As Shakespeare (5.5.27-29) pointed out, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more.” Macbeth, into whose mouth Shakespeare puts these words, is nearing his own death and is correct that the most basic fact about human beings is that their lives are brief.

But he is wrong about the very next line that he utters, for life is not necessarily “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (5.5.29-31). Macbeth might be somewhat consoled by this conclusion; he has done terrible things to others in his pursuit of power so that his life has turned out to be one that has been lived badly. But each life, however brief, can have great significance if lived well. As Janusz Korczak wrote, “The lives of great men are like legends – difficult but beautiful.”

That the best lives are filled with hardships whose navigation or endurance contributes substantially to their virtue is an idea that runs throughout the stories handed down to us from the Greeks. This is why we continue to find these stories so compelling. And it’s also the reason why we still find the lives of contemporary moral heroes to be so compelling: These are people who assign more weight to living a good life than they do to living a long life and who, as a result, end up risking more than most other people.

In no small part, they do this because they understand the stakes.

If we cling to the false hope that we might somehow stretch out our lives, we fail to recognize the finitude of our choices and thus we fail to imbue each decision or action with the importance that it rightly ought to have. When human beings face the fact of their mortality, when they give up all hope for continued existence, then they are able to think most clearly about the sort of life they want to have lived. It is only in doing so that morally heroic action becomes a possibility.