Because no matter how many virile, healthy heroes you raised, it would take just one selfish bastard with a hearty sex drive to wipe out your entire bloodline. Selfish Bastard’s kids would thrive and multiply, while Hero Dad’s kids would eventually follow their father’s example and sacrifice themselves into extinction. “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades,” Darwin concluded, “would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.”
So if natural selection eliminates natural heroism, why does it still exist?
Andrew Carnegie was just as stumped as Darwin. The nineteenth-century steel baron built his fortune on his ability to read human nature, but heroism was one personality quirk he couldn’t crack. When he arrived in the United States from Scotland at age thirteen, Carnegie was a penniless, barely educated immigrant who was lucky to land work in a railroad yard, but his skill at outmaneuvering the most ruthless sharks of his time—including that notorious man-eater J. P. Morgan—helped speed his rise to the top of the steel industry. He wanted money, so he worked hard and gambled well. No voodoo there. But how do you explain someone who strives harder and risks more for free?
Carnegie was so intrigued by heroes, he began hunting them. In 1904, he set up the Carnegie Hero Fund, as much a research tool as a reward. Only pure altruists are eligible, not firemen or police officers or parents rescuing their own children. Every year, the fund collects tales of heroics from across the country, cataloguing them by gender, region, age, and incident and awarding a cash prize to the heroes or their surviving families. Carnegie was soon hearing about Thelma McNee, the teenage girl who leaped from her apartment roof onto the burning building next door to rescue two children trapped inside by the flames. A submission came in for Wava Campredon, a seventy-year-old New Mexico woman who was mauled but kept battling two savage dogs with her garden hoe to save her neighbor. Mary Black, a twenty-five-year-old Oregon housewife, was “encumbered by four skirts” but still swam twice into a flood-engorged river to save a pair of drowning sisters.
Was there some kind of pattern at work? Carnegie couldn’t figure out if he was looking at a performance model that could be reproduced or just a happy string of accidents in which the right person turned up at the right time, sometimes with a hoe. Because if he could boil heroism down to a formula—to an art—then good God! He’d go down as one of the world’s great peacemakers, a name spoken in the same breath as Christ. Once everyone became protectors, who’d be left undefended? Every classroom would have a hero like Norina Bentzel, every home a Thelma McNee, every riverbank a Mary Black. Carnegie had a reputation as a brass-knuckled fighter, but he was actually a pacifist who believed that violence was a disease that someone—maybe even Carnegie himself—could cure.
But in the end, he gave up. Carnegie would continue rewarding heroes, although he’d never understand them. “I do not expect to stimulate or create heroism by this fund,” he conceded, “knowing well that heroic action is impulsive.”
Impulsive. That was Carnegie’s mistake.
Carnegie and Darwin were men of science, but they were approaching the problem like poets. Sacrifice … betray … noble … impulsive … Those are judgments of intent, not descriptions of behavior. Carnegie and Darwin were wondering about thoughts and feelings—the why?—when they should have been focusing on action, on the cold, hard facts of how? Detectives don’t begin a case by worrying about motive, an infinite onion you can peel forever and still end up with nothing. First pin down what someone did, and maybe then you’ll discover why they did it.
That’s how the Ancient Greeks went about it. They put heroes at the center of their theology, which for all its tales of godly feuds and magical transformations still stands alone as the most pragmatic of world religions. Instead of bowing down to saints and miracles, the Greeks worshipped problem solvers and hard how-to. They understood the difference between heroism and impulse, and they devised an easy, two-step test for telling them apart:
Would you do it again?
And could you?
Hercules didn’t have one Labor; he had twelve, plus plenty of mini-labors on the side. Odysseus’s to-do list was relentless: he not only came up with a way to win the Trojan War, but he battled his way home afterwards by outsmarting, outfighting, and outrunning typhoons, warriors, enchantresses, a Cyclops, the powers of the underworld, and the charms of a sex goddess. Atalanta, one of the Greeks’ rare female heroes, showed the boys she could beat up a pair of degenerate Centaurs, defeat a legendary wrestler, help Jason recover the Golden Fleece, and hunt down the monstrous Calydonian Boar. Perseus, who was “skilled in all manner of things, from the craft of the fisherman to the use of the sword,” had to brainstorm a plan for cutting off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, then rescue a chained and naked princess from a sea monster.
Luckily, one man appeared who could turn all that crazy drama into a hard, clear code of conduct: Plutarch, the great Greek umpire of all things heroic. Plutarch was fascinated by heroism the way nuclear scientists are fascinated by uranium: he saw it as a fantastic natural superfuel, powerful and abundant and just waiting to be harnessed. Plutarch spent his life analyzing heroes and threw his net wide: he believed even fantasy has its roots in real-life experiences, so he studied true stories and tall tales, Roman history and Greek myths. By the time he was ready to write his epic work, Parallel Lives, he’d heard it all, so you couldn’t dazzle him; even the most beloved heroes got a blasting from Plutarch if they stepped out of line.
He reconstructed the lives of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; he exposed the shortcomings of Pericles—a brilliant tactician who nonetheless blundered Athens into the Peloponnesian War—and the fatal flaw of Pyrrhus, “the fool of hope” who took awful losses whenever his imagination outstripped his might. Plutarch admired Romulus, the wolf-suckled founder of Rome, for remaining true to his humble birth and kind to his eight hundred mistresses. But he blistered Theseus, who defeated the Minotaur in the Labyrinth; just because you kill monsters and thwart tyrants, you don’t get a free pass for sex crimes. “The faults committed in the rapes of women admit of no plausible excuse in Theseus,” Plutarch scolded. “It is to be suspected these things were done out of wantonness and lust.”
Plutarch did such a remarkable job, Parallel Lives became the handbook for modern history’s heroes. “It has been like my conscience,” Henry IV of France commented, “and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs.” Abraham Lincoln was a devoted reader, as were Teddy Roosevelt, George Patton, and John Quincy Adams. When England was rebuilding after the Great War, the hero’s bible was its guide. “Plutarch’s Lives built the heroic ideal of the Elizabethan age,” C. S. Lewis acknowledged.
And what Plutarch taught them is this: Heroes care. True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.
When the Greeks created the heroic ideal, they didn’t choose a word that meant “Dies Trying” or “Massacres Bad Guys.” They went with ἥρως (or hērōs)—“protector.” Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.