May 28th, 2007: Men’s Isolation: Heroism and Desperation—Looking for a Middle

I would like to begin, today, with an episode from a book by one of my heroes: Lance Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France, survivor of testicular cancer, founder of the Live-Strong Foundation (an organization that is devoted to funding cancer-research).

So, it looks as though I’m going to live—at least for another 50 years or more. But whenever I need to reassure myself of this, as I sometimes do, I go out to a place called Dead man’s Hole, and I stare down into it and then, with firm intent, I strip off my shirt and I leap straight out into what you might call the great sublime.
Let’s say it’s my own personal way of checking for vital signs. Dead Man’s Hole is a large green mineral pool gouged out of a circular limestone cliff, so deep into the hill country of Texas that it’s hardly got an address. According to conflicting legends, it’s either where Confederates tossed Union sympathizers to drown, or where Apaches lured unsuspecting cowboys who didn’t see the fall coming. In any event, I’m drawn to it, so much that I bought 200 acres of brush and pasture surrounding it, and I’ve worn a road into the dirt by driving out there. It seems only right that a place called Dead Man’s Hole should belong to a guy who nearly died—and who, by the way, has not intention of just barely living.
I stand there next to a 45-foot waterfall and examine the drop—and myself, while I’m at it. It’s a long drop, so long that it makes the roof my mouth go dry just looking at it. It’s long enough for a guy to actually think on the way down, and to think more than one thought, too. Long enough tto think first one thing, A little fear is good for you, and then another, It’s good for you if you can swim, and then one more thing as I hit the water: Oh fuck, it’s cold. As I jump, there are certain unmistakable signs that I’m alive: the press of my pulse, the insistent sound of my own breathing, and the banging in my chest that’s my heart, which by then sounds like an insubordinate prisoner beating on the bars of my ribcage.
I come up whooping through the foam and swim for the rocks. Then I climb back up and towel off, and I drive home to my three kids. I burst through the door, and I shout at my son, Luke, and my twin daughters, Grace and Isabelle, and I kiss them on the necks and I grab a Shiner Bock beer with one hand and an armful of babies with the other.
The time I ever did it, my wife, Kik, just looked at me and rolled her eyes. She knew where I’d been.
“Was it clarifying for you?” she said.

Lance Armstrong is also the man who, after his fourth, fifth or sixth Tour de France victory said: “I have an unfair advantage over the other riders. I had cancer.”

The Problem
I like this story so much because it helps us focus on the double-edge sword heroism presents us with in a man’s life. Armstrong’s jump into the mouth of Dead-Man’s Hole, his sheer pleasure at being alive as he comes up from the water, and the necessity of repeating this jump many times are as characteristic of heroism as are the solitariness of the jump itself followed by the celebration of victory that does include others who might be tickled by the hero’s exuberance at the moment, but, in a way, don’t quite follow it.

Depending on how we learn to negotiate this need for solitariness and affirmation as boys and men we turn out to be either desperate or confident heroes. The desperate hero is a man who either does not have the courage to start or gets carried away after he’s started or cannot return. Confident heroes are men who can undertake something on their own, struggle with it, accomplish it and then return with pride and humility to the community of others.

Confident and Desperate Heroes
The Desperate Hero
I believe that a fundamental problem of male existence is his inherent solitariness. It’s problematic because, for many men, it all too frequently ends up being loneliness. While I also believe that loneliness and solitude are important ingredients of a man’s existence and well-being, I also believe that a man’s drive to prove himself worthy of being a man propels him more deeply into loneliness than is good for him or those who live with him.

This is problematic for a man amongst men as well as for a man amongst women. Proving his manhood amongst men is, at its very basis, a competitive enterprise. It is a project that is designed to show that I, Man, am different/better/more talented/etc. than other men. When heroism turns to desperation, it is often accompanied by a man’s willingness to step on, hurt, even kill other men.

Desperate heroes, the ones who are likely to compete violently with other men, often turn to women for comfort and to relieve their loneliness. Yet, the desperate hero can never find that comfort there, because the search for comfort from a woman, for the desperate hero, never stops being part of the competitive enterprise of his heroism amongst men. Finding and—perhaps rescuing—a woman are part of the script of desperate heroism as are the fear that this woman might have been co-opted by another man and therefore be out to weaken him, or that another man might take her away, or, surprisingly, that she will get boring and will have to be replaced. The relational life of desperate heroes is often characterized by paranoia and jealousy towards other men and by a pathological need to repeat the conquest and, thereby displace and replace the prized object of affection.

The woman who becomes the object of the desperate hero’s search is often not equipped to deal with his pathology. She is either too enamored with his superficial heroic qualities and too weak herself to be aware of her imminent decline and replacement with another woman or she understands the dynamic and disdains and shames him, triggering anger and violence that might in the end even turn against her.

What the desperate hero can not find is love, nurturing, comfort a place of rest and peace, for the competitive aspects of his search distance him from men and women alike.

When this dynamic does not result in out-right anger, hostility, pathological repetitiveness and violence, it often ends up being a seemingly infinite distance a man perceives between him and his world. He might feel “admired” by his children, partner and friends, he might have attained power and status, he might be a reliable provider but he cannot get close to anyone. And no one can get close to him. The measure of this gap between him and others, often parallels the measure of his success. It is the distance of that which he achieved; for the achieved becomes an obstacle or perhaps a looking glass, through which the man is now seen. The paradox of proving one’s manhood to a community of both men and women is that it removes us from the possibility of being one with that community. Even if we return as celebrated heroes, even if a jubilating crowd is expecting us and is ready to pick us up and carry us a part of the way (all in deference and admiration of the hero’s achievements) we remain other and different.

I find, by the way, that this dynamic holds true in straight and gay relationships. The dynamic of the desperate hero doesn’t change.

Proving my manhood and striving to be a hero potentially distances me from other men rather than help me enter into the healing and supportive community of men and women. Proving my manhood and striving to be a hero distances me from women and men because it creates expectations of achievement on all sides that potentially get in the way of true intimacy.

The Confident Hero
We find four aspects in a desperate hero’s search for selfhood that are, I believe, part of the confident hero’s search as well: the quest itself, solitariness, repetition and external affirmation.

I have no doubt in my mind that boys and men need a journey, a quest, a sense of vision to understand themselves, to be proud of themselves and to succeed as sons, fathers, husbands, partners and friends. I furthermore do not doubt that men need to be alone in order to feel they accomplished that journey or quest. I have no doubt either that they will need this often in order to continue to live healthy lives. However, men’s need for affirmation as the true subjects of their world, i.e., as the ones who can will the world to be a certain way and not another, is immense.

A boy or man, then, might go back and forth often between his need to accomplish something alone and his need for affirmation for what he has or can accomplish.

An example might illustrate this:

Recently, my middle-son Jacob asked me to help him with something he was building. He actually almost nagged me about it. Finally, I turned to help him and asked him to hand me the piece of wood he was working on. But he wouldn’t. I said the following to him: “Jacob, you always ask me to help me and then, when I have a moment to do that, you will not let me help you.” “I know,” he responded.

As the words were leaving my mouth I realized what was going on. Jacob didn’t want me to help him. Of course, he wanted to achieve this by himself. He needed my affirmation that he could do what he had set out to do. My task as his father was not to take over or to show him how it’s done better, but to witness and observe and support in spirit how he was getting it done. And he did get it done.

Another example again from an interaction with Jacob:

Jacob had just gotten a light system for his bicycle and wanted to try it out, i.e., ride around our neighborhood once in the dark. My wife had said no. He was angry and came to me. Knowing she had said no I said, I’ll go with you. “Then I’m not going,” he said and threw himself on our bed.

My impulse was to let him go on his own. We had gone out in the dark before sharing my light system (he in the front with the head-light, me right behind him with the tail-light). He knows the rules and sufficiently understands the dangers. This I said to my wife and she did not object. Off he went and returned ten minutes later immensely satisfied with himself and the world and even more satisfied to be received by us with a sense of awe and admiration for his bravery.

Boys and men, I believe, need this middle. This middle is often so intangibly lost between being either a hero or macho or being a sissy or weakling. They need to be affirmed in their need for solitariness and achievement and yet welcomed back with love and nurturing care when they return.


Heroism and Manhood
All too often a man’s search for heroism and manhood is politically and ideologically exploited by governments, societies and nations. Often such exploitation will take on the characteristics of a kind of war-like situation in which “heroes” are needed to establish a “force”. This could be an army or a work-force. They have in common the promise that they will bring status and recognition to a man’s life. They also have in common the failure to keep that promise. Often men who are part of such “force” are reduced to ciphers whose absence matters solely quantitatively, not qualitatively. They are made to look the same, act the same, think the same. Any show of their individual differences is perceived as problematic and will be punished. Yet, it is not uncommon that boys and men, in search of experiences that will be formative and worthy of affirmation and praise are drawn to precisely these types of environments where they are reduced to non-individuals, to dividuals, if you will. It is also not uncommon that they will return, if they return, from those experiences damaged and lost.

What is a hero? While this is not the central question of my talk today, it is the question we need to answer, I believe, in order to understand
a) why men seem to be drawn to heroism in a peculiarly strong way
b) how men can be led to heroism going down a path of desperation (i.e., hopelessness and destruction
c) how to find the middle between desperation and heroism.

My own distance from heroism is a particular outcome of a particular time and place of birth. 16 years after WWII many Germans began to understand how Nazi-Germany had lived and breathed the air of an inflated sense of heroism. Heroic were those who sacrificed themselves for their country. The men who willingly and singing battle-songs would go to war, the women who gave birth for the “fatherland”, for the race, for the honor of having them die a hero’s death in battle—those are the people who were thought of as heroes.

About five years ago I read for the first time the letter sent to my paternal grandmother after her husband had been shot and killed on the Eastern front. According to the lieutenant who had (hand)-written the letter, my grandfather, Bruno Srajek, died a heroic death, saving others, never staying back, always in the front of row of those who were fighting.

But my grandfather didn’t die a heroic death. He was a medic, got shot by accident and bled to death from a wound to the leg that, likely, no one knew how to care for, if anyone was even around to tend to him that is.

Was he a hero for going to war in the first place? Did he sing songs while marching there? Did he die for the fatherland? No, he did not. My grandfather had been sent to federal prison for a petty theft he was involved in at the German Postal Service, his work. He had the choice of staying in prison for another five to ten years or to “volunteer” for the Eastern front. Nobody knew, not even my grandmother to whom I talked often about this time, what his thoughts were as he was making his choice. What I do know is that my grandmother asked him not to go.

Her wisdom about “heroism”, her intuitive suspicion of Nazi-propaganda and her no nonsense mind-set (i.e., stay away from any large flag-waving ceremonies; don’t join large groups and avoid church at all cost) led her to lead a life of much work, sorrow and grief. She was by many accounts, including her own, a nobody. Yet, this never turned her into a desperate person. She never strove to become somebody in the way Nazi propaganda promised that Germany and Germans would, once again, be a nation others would have to reckon with. Yet, I could tell that later, in her retirement, her life was characterized by a quiet pride of never having fallen prey to the lure of heroism Nazi-style.

But would she have accepted that her struggle against the odds during and after WWII, her succeeding to keep alive two little boys during this time of utter chaos (one with a club-foot, my father, and one with a congenital defect in his digestive tract that prevented him from passing stool in a normal way, his five year younger brother), would she have accepted that this alone could be called heroic?

My grandmother, it seems to me, was a begrudging hero. She didn’t want to be in the lime-light and only did what she felt she had to do. She never even made her ideological differences with the Nazi regime into anything but her own opinion. She wasn’t proving anything to anyone. She just responded to what was needed at the time.

Heroism, for men, is often more than a simple response to certain external circumstances. Rather than just responding to a given situation the way my grandmother did, heroism for a man is a way of proving his manhood. In his book “Manhood in the Making” sociologist David Gilmore describes the difference between men and women in this way:

Womanhood is something that is reached with the onset of a woman’s menses. While there are other things that contribute to being a woman, for example having children, getting married, etc. none of those are really putting in question the essential fact of a woman’s womanhood.

Manhood, on the other hand, while strongly based on “anatomical maleness” is really much more dependent on acts of manhood. Men have to be brave, enduring, courageous, strong in the face of even impossible seeming obstacles. Men, in short, have to prove their superior manly status as husbands, fathers, lovers, providers and warriors.

In addition, however, men cannot rest with having proved themselves once. They will have to continue to meet challenges and pass tests in order to maintain their status as manly men. Men are never done proving their worth and value, to their family, to their country.

Existence Precedes Essence

Existential philosophy is often described by using the dictum “existence precedes essence.” This means that we are what we do rather than do what we are. It means that we constantly have to “project” ourselves into the world, shape it form it, make something of it in order to live, survive and move on. We must not rest, must not stop being vigilant. If we do, the world will consume us. And eventually it will, for all of us are “running towards death.” While existential philosophy was meant to be a universal, if not humanistic approach to the meaning of human existence, I wonder, if it is not more accurately labeled an approach to the meaning of men’s existence.

The difficulty for men in our culture is their position between their own unwillingness to be done but also an inability to consider themselves done. On a cultural/societal level the former is connected to a societal inability to consider men as being done and having done what it takes, the latter is connected to a societal and cultural unwillingness to accept individual men for what they are individually.

Another way of saying this is that men have to learn how to live with the internal and external imperatives of proving themselves. More often than not they respond to the imperatives not by rejecting them, but by following them and living up to their demand.

Listen to Sam Keen (author of Fire in the Belly) as he describes men’s quest for manhood:

If an anthropologist from Mars were to study Earth culture he would notice something very strange. Everywhere he would find a social obsession with manliness. He would find that manhood is considered a chancy thing, a prize, a puzzle difficult to solve, a test to be passed. Men and women alike constantly exhort little boys to ‘act like a man’, to be muy macho, a big man, a real man, an alpha male. Men live under constant dread of being labeled a sissy, a weakling, a wimp, a queer. Most everywhere they live under pressure, stress, and the constant need to prove themselves by establishing mastery in the arenas of war work, and women, a near universal creed linking manhood with the socially necessary activities of protecting, providing and procreating.

Ronald Levant writes about manhood, in reference to Gilmore’s work:

Manhood. The “Big Impossible,” as the Fox Tribe of Iowa calls it—which is, of course, exactly what it is. In cultures around the world, men’s lives are characterized by this anxious uncertainty about their standing in a fraternity from which exile means shame and humiliation—this desperate struggle to retain a tenuous grasp on a status they can never fully claim.

And, Keen points out, it doesn’t end there. For in order to prove their manhood and worth as members of the fraternity of men, men are likely and willing to engage in the most foolish and incomprehensible deeds simply to demonstrate their courage and bravery.

Said Martian anthropologist would find seemingly irrational rites and informal customs that are designed to turn males into men. He would find men encouraged to fight, drink, brawl, defend their honor, strive without ceasing, and risk life and limb in order to prove their manliness. . . . Everywhere the path of manhood involves artificial ordeals and rites of passage that turn a boy’s passage into social maturity into a second birth trauma.

The question is, if these are the things we value in men, how can we prevent them from becoming what Eli Newberger calls “expressions of masculinity we all deplore—power-obsessed, controlling, self-indulgent, belligerent, insensitive, foolishly risk-taking.” (1) How do we maintain them as “qualities of masculinity we admire—courage, good humor, flexibility, dependability, sociability, protectiveness of others.



Manhood and the Male Script

The Culture of Heroism
Keen’s, Levant’s and Gilmore’s reflections on the issue seem to suggest that men do these kinds of things because of the social pressure to become and be part of the order of men. This raises the question whether, with all things being equal but with social pressure gone, if males would stop to perform in these pseudo-heroic ways. And it is precisely here that I think the argument from social pressure runs into problems. Boys and men will quite likely always be seeking to “prove” their manhood. But what if, rather than calling it proving, and thus making it seem like a thing that is more about external gratification and reinforcement, what if men’s search for manhood is more about a search for internal reassurance? As we saw in the passage from Lance Armstrong’s biography, struggling, tearing, fighting, overcoming, climbing, jumping, enduring might all be ways for men to reassure themselves that they exist.

But rather than simply letting men feel their existence in ways similar to what Lance Armstrong is describing we want men to prove their manhood in this way and we reject the men who can’t. The indecisive, whimpering man who confesses he doesn’t know what to do, how to act, what to think is abhorrent to us. He is abhorrent to himself, too, really and he will do whatever is in his power to erase this sense of weakness and vulnerability and replace it with a sense of manhood and heroism.

This disgust and abhorrence with one’s own vulnerability is a powerful motor to act “manly” and heroically. But often this motor functions in desperation. This is the point, I believe, where we have to begin when we deal with boys’ and men’s bullying, violence on the streets and in schools. We have to understand that somewhere in the make-up of a whole violent event is the desperation to do something heroic, something that will impress and will prove it beyond doubt: I am a man, a hero.

You can see that, while it seems that men should be able to just walk away from proving themselves, they really cannot. Deep inside them rumble the primal voices of the noble fight, of endurance and courage. The more we know about them, the more we can respect their existence and understand their function in a man’s life, the more important it becomes to understand also how they can be exploited and abused by a culture that sacrifices men daily to war, big business and a life of separation and loneliness.

However, the true answers to these questions are quite complicated as they involve understanding both cultural and biological facts about men. In a nutshell the conflict can be described like this: men can’t simply walk away from proving themselves as heroes because their biology forbids them to do that. However, their biology is not strong enough, on the other hand, to simply let them prove themselves independently of the outcome.



The Biology of Heroism
The sources of what I call male heroism and what looks like a continuous quest for a man to prove his manhood may very well lie in the deep past of men’s developmental history as males as much as in an individual male’s development in utero. Our knowledge of fetal brain-development is still very fragmented, but what we do know is that much of what we identify, later in life, as masculine or feminine behaviors are fundamentally determined in utero through short but intensive exposures of fetal brain receptors to certain sex-steroids. This exposure affects a “priming” of neurons and synapses in the brain readying them for later functioning in a certain way. Intensive cerebral exposure to testosterone in utero may, then, make those “individuals more prone to behaviors typical of adult men such as aggression and competitiveness.”

The somewhat confusing fact is that, such exposure in the first place leads to a higher mortality rate among males, especially among young adult males, because it precisely increases men’s propensity to act “foolishly” (as Keen calls it). This can be traced through many past and present human cultures. Repetitive aggression and competitiveness, perhaps the main ingredients also of heroism, are inherently related to risk-taking and potential loss of life on the male’s part.

Developmental historians and biologists alike have yet to come up with a coherent understanding of why it might be evolutionarily adaptive for men to act in a way that will quite likely kill them even before they are able to reproduce. On the other hand, it should be observed that the most risky period of a man’s life takes place exactly during the time of his procreative peak, i.e., between 14 and 24 years of age. In other words, it is possible that the principles of selection demand that men confront risky tasks. Those who don’t make it would not have been good contributors to the gene-pool.

Conclusion: Choosing Between Life and Death

My hope is that the last 40 minutes will have helped shape your understanding of heroism as both a necessary and dangerous part of a man’s life. My hope is that you will come to appreciate the great potential for good and accomplishment that lies in the male script for manhood as the great peril inherent in it to inflict damage on self and others. My hope, too, is that you will have come to see that a man’s willingness to struggle, endure and take risks might primarily not have anything to do with heroism at all, but rather is motivated by his simple need to reassure himself of his own existence.

Having said this, I would like to close with a few fragments gleaned from the book The Hero Within by Carol S. Pearson:


Heroes seek life, not death.

Heroes discover the treasure of their true selves.

Every time we confront “death in life”, we confront a dragon. Every time we choose life over non-life and move deeper into the ongoing discovery of who we are, we bring new life to ourselves and to our culture. We may have been misunderstanding heroism as we continue to call killers, i.e., people who seek death over life, heroes.

Is it possible that we have misused the hero-label in order to cope with the desperation of death? Perhaps in a desperate attempt to emphasize that “good will win out” we have called heroes those who have died senselessly who have sacrificed themselves.

In the context of war heroism is a socially acceptable and glorified way of committing suicide.

“Heroism today requires consciousness.” “. . . this is why men refuse to go to war [or] overwork themselves to an early death, or pretend they have no vulnerable feelings.” (8)

“It is important to remember that heroes of myth and legend hardly ever have perfect parents or perfect lives.” (9)

Modes of extraordinary heroism are rare. It is questionable if they should even be called “heroism” because most of them are either born out of extreme necessity or a result of “exceptional talent” and skill.