Two things before I begin:
Julian Patterson's blog from a week or so ago is priceless for anyone concerned about the NHS.
I (MG) came to an awful conclusion yesterday about the Penguin's less than complimentary comment under the sidebar picture. I believed that my inability to paint was a direct result of the stroke I suffered. I am now inclined to think that it is more likely to be the effect of an ever-worsening cataract in my right eye which is playing havoc with my ability to see and perceive correctly in three dimensions which is causing the problem. Perhaps if I can afford to get that fixed, it might solve the problem. Here's hoping!
Now to the main course; why do we engage in so much hero worship?
In between reading 'The Mating Mind' by Geoffrey Miller, a cognitive researcher, I have been re-watching the Harry Potter films (all of them in sequence) while eating my evening meal and imbibing the odd, post-prandial brandy or two.
Now, without wishing to extol, or demean, Ms Rowling's literary creation, Harry Potter is, in a conventional 'boarding school', children's novel, merely a highly successful franchise in the the manner of Sigurd, Robin Hood, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Agents J and K, Indiana Jones, John McLean et al; the characters are all heroes. Whether they are fundamentally flawed as characters or not, they all rise above their limitations and save whatever it is that they are 'fighting' for and this is very attractive to a wide range of people; why else would you sell 30 million books to adults and children alike and create films that gross over a billion dollars. What is interesting is that they, the characters, whether females contribute to their success or not, are all male.
This may be seen by some as merely the effects of a largely patriarchal society and, until Geoffrey Miller, I might have agreed with them but now I am not so sure. Female heroines have largely been portrayed in literature and its derivatives, plays and films, as people who have displayed that which is traditionally deemed to be male characteristics; assertiveness, belligerence, bloody-mindedness, a willingness to do battles; a metaphorical allusion to the competitiveness, often bloody, which characterises all, or nearly all, male combative strategies for winning mates. From Hedda Gabler to Lisbeth Salander, from Emma Bovary to the Hunger Games, it is difficult to find a 'popular' female heroine who does not embody the traditional male attributes.
What Miller's book does, if nothing else, is to question the reason why some proclivities may have arisen in the past as a result of sexual selection; not merely natural selection. After all, we are inheritors of instincts which were borne out of our primeval past and just cannot be laid at the door of the last ten thousand years of civilisation. How do we know that things are intrinsically immoral? Because our parent teach us? Because society deems them wrong? The young invariably react against the teachings of our elders and yet, still, few of us react against the taboo of incest, that generosity is preferable to downright selfishness, that being kind is preferable to being cruel; why should we care?
After all, altruism costs! Big time!
What Miller postulates is that the cost of being altruistic in pay off terms, 250,000 thousand years ago, paid off in reproductive success. Being able to demonstrate your reproductive fitness by being kind, caring, intellectually and emotionally stimulating, being able to demonstrate your reproductive potential by assigning vast amounts of resources to these endeavours in opposition to merely staying alive, meant that you would acquire a higher percentage of mates and thus enlarge your (your trait's) presence in the gene pool for future generations.
So, what has this to do with 'hero worship'? Think about it!
Females would want to mate with the best males possible. Heroes embody all that males have to offer: bravery; skill; aptitude; ambition; drive; commitment; a hearty feast of attributes for a female. And all attributes which deny the mere act of survival. For the male, what do we have? Expenditure of vast resources of energy; the learning process, the acquisition of skill; the risk of getting killed. But what of the rewards?
The promise of longevity through the genes; both male and female.
However he may be vilified in the US. Richard Dawkins and his collaborators taught us one fundamental truth; we should not confine ourselves to the group or the organism, we must consider the gene and its 'wish' for self-preservation
PS
Geoffrey Miller does not offer 'sexual selection theory' as a panacea to cure all of 'whys' of Darwinian evolution, merely that is has become neglected and should be investigated in more detail.
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