Some Thoughts on Ordinary Heroism

I took several days off from blogging in order to attend the Bioneers Conference in Minneapolis. The conference, ending Sunday, October 22 in San Rafael California and 18 satellite communities, brings together a diverse crowd of speakers and attendees from every walk of life. The common thread is an interest in “the restoration of the Earth’s imperiled ecosystems and the healing of our human communities.”

The Bioneers conference offers a one-stop shopping experience for people who are interested in learning about everything from electric cars, to solar energy, to community activism, leadership, local foods, organics, global warming, alternative currencies, to mushrooms and biomimicry. We left the conference yesterday, midway through the second day, overwhelmed with information and the weight of the alternately stirring and depressing assessments of the state of earth.

When I last wrote about communicating about global warming, I was filled with enthusiasm for an assessment done by the Institute for Public Policy Research, in the UK, which concluded that a discourse about “ordinary heroism” could capture the imagination of a subset of citizens who have yet to engage with the issue of global warming. The argument was that the groups framing messages about global warming should engage the public with the meme of being ordinary heroes who would help save the environment.

In the wake of the Bioneers Conference, I am less enamored with the ordinary hero strategy. On one hand, a speaker who heroically challenges us to question our lives of complacency and ease, can trouble our thoughts and inspire us to change. All too often, however, I find the outrage drains my energy. I fear the tendency of all too many people to heroically elevate their points of view contributes too much to the gridlock and divisiveness that seems so prominent a feature of our everyday discourse. I respect what the advocates have done, but it doesn't seem to energize my own desire for action.

James Hillman, scholar, Jungian analyst, and one of the national keynote speakers, said that a great many of us suffer from thinking disorders. We think we know what is wrong, and we can be paralyzed by this critical knowing. Every positive proposition meets immediate criticism; the wrongness of others grows in dimension as we focus on it. As a result, Hillman said, everything and everyone divides into opposing positions. The cure, the basic therapeutic move, is to search out the meaning of the symptom.

If our society suffers from too much superficiality, too much certainty, too much independence, the answer, Hillman argues is in “doubt, disorder, deviance and dependency.” It’s already too easy for us to think we are special, ordinary heroes, because of what we buy or wear, the solar collector we put on our house, or the raw food diet we so virtuously adopt. It’s a lot harder to hold our positions lightly, to be open to learn from others, or to question our basic assumptions. But these practices may be precisely the form of ordinary heroism most called for these days.