1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.3 An Enchanting Original
1.2.3.4 Sharpe Lecture: heroism (part two)
Dr. Sharpe brought up a slide, showing a cartoon dictator using a whip to keep starving peasants away from a mound of food, while a heroic activist spoke to them.
“If there’s a clear and present danger to survival, it is easy to motivate people to do something about it.”
The slide changed, showing the dictator tied up with his own whip, and the peasants eating the food.
“But what about when the danger is more distant? Where the initial threat isn’t to people’s immediate physical safety or survival, but is instead a threat to the wealth or status of the next generation in another two decades? Or, worse, where the danger is more abstract, such as a threat to privacy or other freedoms that ensure dictators can be opposed in the future?”
The slide changed to showing the dictator, now wearing a neat suit, handing out cheap shiny mobile phones while behind a curtain a big eared spy wrote down a list of who talked to whom. The activist holding a petition was left trampled under the feet of the crowd rushing to get their phone.
“In such cases, the activist can only get so far by framing it in ways that show its true importance and communicating clearly and graphically the consequences of not opposing the threat to things that matter personally to their audience.”
The slide changed to show the activist holding up a large poster depicting some of the peasants being dragged out of their houses in the dead of the night by secret police ticking their names off the spy’s list of a subversive’s friends. A few of the peasants looked worried, but each hung back hoping someone else would step forwards first.
“The activist needs altruists, needs heroes. People who care about more than just themselves. Care so much that they are willing to risk themselves to protect others.”
The slide changed to show an ordinary man, carrying a pair of shopping bags, standing in the way of a tank. Then changed again, to show a peasant looking similar to that man standing in front of the tyrant handing back the phone, followed by others doing the same, the curtain being pulled down, the lists being burnt and the tyrant being tied up with the curtains while a hacker used a pair of pliers to remove what looked like a cockroach from each phone.
“So what are these other factors influencing heroic behaviour, the ones which we can affect?”
“We can start with the external factors. We can reduce the risk being taken.”
The slide showed the peasants wearing masks.
“We can praise those who step forwards and have their peers shame those who do not.”
The slide showed female peasants waving pom-poms, cheering those at the front of the crowd and making rude gestures at one cringing peasant at the back trying to hide in a rubbish bin.
“We can strip the tyrant’s deceptions bare, to rouse the populace to righteous anger over how they’ve been deceived, manipulated, robbed and controlled by a small minority.”
The slide showed the activist tearing aside the curtain, smashing a phone and then holding up a cockroach and pointing at the tyrant, with the peasants holding torches and pitchforks.
“We can break the habit of obedience to authority, replacing it with rational evaluation of whether the tyrant has the legitimate informed consent of the populace for his actions.”
The slide showed the activist holding up a copy of Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man” and pointing at a picture of the tyrant secretly stuffing ballot boxes and bribing legislators. One peasant was tearing down a sign saying “No dancing” while others were dancing enthusiastically.
“But, given time, we can also affect the internal factors.”
The slide showed a changed scene. The peasants were no longer facing the tyrant. They were sitting on plastic chairs in a hall. The sign outside said “hero training day”
“Empathy can be improved, by training people to understand their own emotions then identify with the emotions of others. This is especially effective when done at a young age. Cultures vary a lot in how empathic children tend to be, and it correlates with whether women have equal status in contributing to the household and whether men are seen to exhibit warmth.”
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The slide showed a man giving an upset boy a hug, while the other peasants looked on in approval and took notes.
“Compassion can be improved by making it a habit. Neuroplasticity means the parts of the brain which keep getting exercised get stronger. If you regularly help others, the part of your brain that rewards you for doing so will become more effective.”
The slide showed the peasants setting up a rota for pairs of people to go visit the elderly, clean the pond and repair the community defensive wall.
“Altruism can be improved, by widening the community a person identifies with beyond their immediate kin. The Humanists believed in valuing the dignity and worth of all humans. Immanuel Kant taught that it is wrong to try to use people as tools to achieve some ends, without paying any respect to their own rational motives. Trungpa argued that humans are basically good, not basically sinful, and brain studies support that notion: by default we are altruistic to everyone, and there’s a separate part of the brain that selectively inhibits that natural impulse.”
The slide showed some peasants discussing Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, while others were in a video conference with people from other countries with similar features, just different clothes or skin colours, holding up babies to the camera and playing finger counting games with them in identical ways.
“Altruism can also be improved by shared community spaces and activities, and by holding up lots of examples of it, so helping others appears the normal thing to do, something likely to be reciprocated, if not by the person you helped, then by others in the community.”
The slide showed the hall being decorated with a banner announcing a weekly “Share-a-pizza Fridays” and a peasant who brought an amazingly creative pizza along having her photo taken and put on the wall surrounded by lots of sticky pink hearts saying thank you from different people who’d tried it.
Dr. Sharpe paused to take a sip of water, preparing for his finale.
“Heroism goes beyond altruism. Altruism expects no reward. Heroism expects or risks a penalty, often a significant one. But it too can be trained. And we’re going to have a go at doing that right now. It starts with three questions, and I want you to take a minute to answer them for yourself, in the privacy of your own head. Get out a pencil and hold it in your hand when you’ve answered them, so I can see when people are ready to move on.”
Have you ever helped someone in need?
Has someone ever helped you when you were in need?
Have you ever NOT helped someone when they were in need?
Nadine thought quickly. Yes, she’d helped her mother and brothers, obviously. She’d also helped other singers when on tour, sometimes teaching them or lending them stuff, sometimes filling in for them despite it not being convenient. Were they what she thought of as her kin? She couldn’t remember taking any big risks to help others, though. She’d always been rather risk-averse, except when angry. OK, when she’d entered secondary school there had been that one time when she’d told off a group of older boys who were bullying a young Jewish girl in her class, and she supposed that was risking being beaten up herself, but she hadn’t been thinking, just reacting from pure outrage. Anyone might have done that.
Had anyone ever helped her? There was the year her mother died, when she was still a teen. That had been a bad year, and she’d received a lot of support. And when she’d been looking for gigs to raise money to go to college, one of her mother’s old friends had really gone out of her way to help Nadine, warn her of contract problems to look out for and put her in touch with a good agent. It had made Nadine feel safe, feel valued, like her mother was in some way still looking out for her.
Had she ever not helped someone? Well, all the time; the world was full of people in need. You couldn’t help everyone. Narrow it down. Had she ever not helped someone who was standing directly in front of her, in obvious dire need, when Nadine was the only person around who could help? Um. She searched her memory. She was still searching when Dr. Sharpe cleared his throat and continued.
“In the wrong situation, almost anyone can fall into performing evil acts. Horrific and sadistic. Adolf Eichmann organised the deportation of Jews to extermination camps during World War II, yet his Jewish biographer Hannah Arendt said the frightening thing was how normal he seemed. She spoke about the ‘Banality of Evil’. Well, in the right situation, almost anyone can fall into performing heroic acts. It isn’t just for the superhuman or even the exceptional. Everyone sitting in this lecture here today is capable of being a hero.”
“I want you to spend five minutes now, visualising yourself as a hero. Draw a picture of yourself in a cape, if that helps. Imagine you are walking along a street when someone has a heart attack. You stop to help them. You verify the problem, phone for an ambulance and, though you know you’ll be late to an exam, you might even be endangering your future career, you stay with them until the ambulance arrives. Imagine how it feels to be in that situation, pre-commit to what you’ll do if you ever find yourself having to make that choice.”
[...]
“Now, turn to your neighbour. Share your choice, and discuss what your community would be like if everyone in the community simultaneously chose to rise up and help each other out. How would things differ from how they are now? Are there any small steps, small risks you could take in the next seven days that would improve things around you, that you could use to train yourself to reflexively be a hero when warranted? Is that something you want? Pick yourself a secret hero name, make it your true identity, as though your everyday life were like that of Clark Kent, just a cover.”
The slide changed, a final time, to show a photograph of Dr. Sharpe wearing a superman symbol scrawled on a T-Shirt, underneath his academic clothes, his black gown streaming behind him like a cape, as he grinned at the camera while removing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.
She didn’t know what name Heather, sitting next to her, had picked. Nadine had switched the shepherd boy into a shepherd girl, and picked as her name: “Endymia”
She’d never told it to anyone, but she’d remembered it.