# Posted 3:03 AM by Patrick Porter  

POST-HEROIC? I’ve always been a little uneasy with the notion that we in the West wage post-heroic war because we live in post-heroic societies.

The argument goes like this: several converging influences have made traditional heroic world views redundant. Western societies that don’t live in almost a permanent state of emergency (like, say, Israel) are increasingly distant from the military.

They live in times of affluence and material plenty without precedent. They are very casualty averse.

Demographically, they don’t breed much anymore, certainly within Europe. A self-absorbed pursuit of longevity and wealth preoccupies them. This might even encourage them to view their family differently to most previous societies. Instead of an asset that can protect, feed and prolong the family, the state increasingly plays that role, and the child is an adored person. Crude as it is, fewer children may encourage people to value the lives of their single child more highly.

Post-heroic people are distant from the military profession and its values of self-sacrifice, the subordination of the individual to the group, and the necessity of violence. Civil society and its military protectors are increasingly distant species.

At the same time, the grim realities of warfare are visible in popular media. War can no longer be easily mythologised and romanticized. Iconic images of screaming naked Vietnamese girls, or torturers at Abu Ghraib, taint whatever high rhetoric our leaders direct at conflict. The collective memory of greater horrors of war, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, is strong. Conversely, as we take our most precious heritage of political freedom for granted, a sense that our ancestors fought wars to safeguard values and institutions is increasingly weak.

Indeed, it is this marriage of the television age, the scars of Vietnam and material wealth that erodes the heroic ethos. The intelligentsia and tertiary-educated elites who emerged out of this era now apply a high, almost perfectionist standard to how their own states wage war. Impossible levels of restraint are expected of an activity that should be notorious for being inherently volatile and twisted by human fallibility.

With the decline of religion and the debellicisation of society, we no longer worship God or revere war. It is now celebrity, non-violent, inoffensive and vapidly commercial, that attracts our devotion.

Hence the way we prefer to fight wars: low-casualty (or even bloodless for our own side, like Kosovo in 1999); a preoccupation with force protection over risk-taking heroism; a preference for air power-driven strategies over ground operations; an obsession with media-management and public relations; no conscription, compulsion and hardly any mobilization of broader society (the Marines are at war, America is at the mall); and a judicialisation of warfare, so that some victims of malpractice in our expeditionary wars are given a hearing and compensated.

But it’s important to make a distinction: we don’t exactly live in post-heroic societies. Yet some of our leaders think we do.

Its true that civilians are more distant from the military. Its true that we enjoy unprecedented levels of comfort and peace. Its true that our mass media does make great moral demands of our war-making. But the appetite for heroism is not dead.

Opinion polls provide little evidence for the stereotype of the self-absorbed, casualty averse West. The ‘Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)’ from the University of Maryland studied poll data following all combat deaths in the 1990s. After deaths in Somalia in 1993, all the polls taken in the succeeding week showed only a minority favouring withdrawal, with majorities favouring sending even more American troops in response to the killings. After the 1996 terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia, a Newsweek poll found 55% respondents believing America should retain its military presence there despite the deaths. The American public actually favours tougher responses following casualties.

Or picture this: on the morning of the 50th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign, in 1965, Australian visitors to the site amounted to a couple of lonely hippies. In 2005, at the 90th anniversary, it was so overcrowded with Oz visitors that the authorities had to build reinforced structures to accommodate them all. Australia’s national creation myth, of a baptism of former penal colonies into nationhood, had revived. When it came to war commemoration, it was the rebellious, anti-authoritarian 60’s that proved to be the aberration.

One final measure: there are lots of silly things about this article. But it makes one very telling point. Our world of popular entertainment, despite all of the social patterns above, reflects not a post-heroic culture but a lasting attachment to primordial ideas about heroism, evil and moral struggle:

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror — films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” — which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.’”

Having seen some of these leftist films, I’m not sure that they do advocate surrender or disrespect the military tout court. In fact, it’s a healthy sign of Western self-criticism that these films can be made in a time of war.

But they are antiwar films of disillusionment that treat soldiers mostly as victims rather than agents, focus wholly on American atrocities rather than heroism, and do not at any point even acknowledge the broader legitimacy of America’s conflict against radical Islam. And they aren’t cinematically bad films. But they have done badly. More heroically triumphant films have prospered.

So in three major areas: public reactions to military setbacks, public attitudes to commemoration, and the depiction of war in film, we don’t straightforwardly see a post-heroic zeitgeist.

What seems to be happening is something more complex: policymakers reckon on a post-heroic society, and then their policies are interpreted as evidence of the existence of post-heroic society. They look at the Iranian hostage crisis that brought down Jimmy Carter, the Vietnam war that tore apart the Democrats, and the failure of George Bush senior to win an election even after his victory in the Gulf, and conclude that their populations are allergic to sacrifice beyond any minimum.

But just because Bill Clinton went for high altitude bombing and no bodybags, or George Bush asks Americans to keep shopping while a small fraction of society does the fighting, doesn’t mean that they have accurately read the psychology of their people. We may not all be heroic (Good Lord, the author certainly is not) but even rich, secluded and childless peoples can still revere heroism in their own, strange, 21st century way. (12) opinions -- Add your opinion