A ‘NORMAL’ PAIN RESPONSE: THE HERO
Few of us have escaped an upbringing that displays the hero for our emulation. These admirable characters, from the Spartans to James Bond and Rambo, bear pain without flinching. Our teachers tell us that only those who are weak and cowardly succumb to pain. Pain is presented as an option which is not taken up by those with 'the right stuff'. I know of no country without its 'hall of heroes' with tales of valour which hopefully typify the national character.
It is true that a few cultures have also invented anti-heroes for the benefit of a decadent bourgeoisie. The Good Soldier Schweik survives the Austro-Hungarian army by excessive zeal in over-obeying orders. Gunner Asch oozes his way through the German army with inspired skill. These rare examples of the anti-hero are exceptions to the popular image of mass heroism that typifies an ideal of behaviour. Unfortunately, for most of us, there remain severe doubts that we will achieve the national standard when the time comes. So we wonder what makes heroes. Here we should demand to know if anyone is a permanent hero type or whether they exhibit heroism only in certain circumstances.
Many tribal cultures have initiation rites in which awful woundings must be born without a whimper. These remind us of the state identified by Beecher as the rare occasion where wounding has a clear advantage. The child is rewarded for stoical behaviour by being admitted to adult society. North American Indians who survived such an initiation have been tested as adults for pain tolerance and have been found to show no signs of retaining the stoicism they showed during the initiation. The Masai in Kenya and Tanzania maintain these injury tests on adults to choose their leaders. There is no evidence for toughness among those who do not enter the competition for leadership.
We have no reason to doubt the existence of these ceremonies or to treat them as bizarre special instances that could occur only among so-called 'primitive' peoples. To our shame, they occur regularly in our 'advanced' societies. We learn about them in the newspapers only when they go wrong. It appears commonplace in elite military units, such as parachute troops and commando units, that, when new men or officers are to be admitted to the group, they must submit to extreme endurance tests. In the minds of such men, they may retain a life-long pride in their achievement: 'Once a Marine, always a Marine'. However, like the American Indians, when these men are seen in later life as patients in civilian hospitals, they are just like all the other patients. It seems that heroism and stoicism are children of the situation rather than lifelong characteristics.
The image of the stoic, spartan, macho hero is strictly male. One might have expected a reassessment of this ideal by the new feminists. Unfortunately, we learn only that women can be heroines too, a statement that was never in doubt. In The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanche, which is regarded as a pioneering book of feminism, we read the astonishing stories of nineteenth-century women who took control of their own lives. Women are presented in that book with role models who have an unbroken history of tough, successful achievement of complete control. I regret that women, like men, are saddled with an unreal unachievable ideal.
A particular version of the hero is Jesus Christ. He was condemned to suffer crucifixion, a method of execution designed to be intensely painful. For two thousand years, Christians have lived with repeated versions of Christ on the cross. The pictures generate feelings of reverence in which the concept of Christ the redeemer merges with Christ who suffers. Christ is presented in the gospels as very human, with doubts as he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane for 'the cup to be taken away' and regrets when he calls on the cross: 'Why hast thou forsaken me?'. His suffering and sacrifice are coupled with the promise of redemption. I have no doubts that religion can provide immense comfort. We should, however, generate no confusion between the suffering and the redemption.
I accept that the sacrifice of citizens, friends, relatives and comrades in the two World Wars gave me the benefits of freedom, but I do not confuse that fact with their sufferings. I do not accept the words of the lord mayor of Cork in 1920 as he starved to death in protest at the English domination of Ireland: 'They will win who can suffer the most'. In this statement, it appears that suffering itself is a virtue and I greatly regret that some Christians have proclaimed this confusion. The saints and martyrs went to cruel and painful deaths as followers of Christ's example. Later, self-inflicted pain came to be an accepted route to join His kingdom. Saint Marguerite Marie Alconque (1647-90), who founded the cult of the Sacred Heart, wrote: 'Nothing but pain makes my life supportable'. In our day, Pope John Paul II wrote:
What we express with the word suffering seems to be particularly essential to the nature of Man. Sharing in the sufferings of Christ is, at the same time, suffering for the Kingdom of God. In the just eyes of God, before this justice, those who share in Christ's sufferings become worthy of this Kingdom. Through their sufferings they, in a sense, pay back the boundless price of our redemption. Suffering contains, as it were, an appeal to Man's moral greatness and spiritual maturity.
Here we understand that the Pope accepts suffering and glorifies it. This powerful statement has had practical consequences in Catholic countries, particularly in treating pain in terminal cancer, where some doctors have hesitated in their treatment of pain and suffering because the treatment might intrude on the patients' act of redemption.
Everyone matches their response to that of an idealized alter ego role model. No one achieves that paragon of virtue in a steady state throughout life and some of us never make it.
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