We often treat the heroic impulse running through modern culture as some capital-T Truth woven into the very fabric of the human spirit. As if rejecting it would betray our humanity or reveal us to be somehow less than the Platonic form of a good human.
But as the Taoists and many others show us, heroism is not a human-wide value. While the notion of heroism and glory might be present in a wide range of cultures, it was paramount for a select few.
The ancient Greeks, and perhaps their temporal and geographic neighbors, espoused kleos — a kind of eternal renown or glory that can be won through great deeds — as one of their supreme values. For the Greek hero, a short life crowned with everlasting fame was better than a long, quiet, ordinary one. When Achilles is offered the choice between the two, he chooses glory and an early death. For a hero, to live unremembered was the worst fate of all.
Kleos was perhaps an outlier considering the long history of cultures across space and time. But the Greeks became disproportionately influential in the foundation of Western culture and the achievement society. Because of this, kleos spread widely for the next several millennia, eventually coming to be thought of by some as a core human value or motivation.
What we often forget, however, is that the greatest of the Greek heroes — the ones whose names endured — were rarely fully human. Achilles, Heracles, Perseus: they stood above and accomplished the impossible largely because of their divinity or direct aid from the gods.
Countless real Greek humans and their cultural descendants took these stories to heart and spent their lives pursuing kleos for themselves, seeing greatness and glory as the sign of a meaningful, noble life.
But there’s another way to read these stories: as tales about the limits of human capacity, reminders that the truly extraordinary was the province of gods and the godlike, that mere mortals like us are better served by pursuing something quieter, more humble, more human.
