Heroism in a politically correct age.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

The following two essays are adapted from speeches given at a conference last month in honor of Margaret Thatcher.

THERE is a saying in the Talmud: "Who is a hero? He who conquers his evil inclination." Nothing could be further from the ethos of our present culture. For much of this century heroism has been defined by the upper reaches of Western culture in antinomian terms. The word "antinomian" means against the law, and in the sphere of personal morality that translates into a complete submission to one's evil inclination. But in the antinomian view, what is regarded by the law as evil is redefined as good. Or as Milton's Satan, the most eloquent of all antinomians, puts it in Paradise Lost: "Evil be thou my Good." Satan of course is rebelling against God and God's law, and his followers throughout the centuries have worshipped him in ceremonies and rituals of inversion. Thus in the black mass, an obscene parody of the Catholic Mass, everything was turned on its head -- the Lord's Prayer was read backward, the crucifix was hung upside down, and so on. There were different forms of the black mass in which various abominations were practiced, including child sacrifice. But in this context one of the most striking examples was the orgies that frequently accompanied these ceremonies. Not only did the Satanists defy the law in prescribing and practicing the ultimate in unchastity by indiscriminate coupling, but often they also featured anal intercourse, especially between men and women. Why? Because if the commandment of God is, "Be fruitful and multiply," the commandment of the Devil must be the opposite -- "Be sterile and diminish." The way to fulfill this commandment to be sterile is through inverting the sexual act itself by directing it into the channel of excretion and waste, signifying death, instead of the channel of propagation and birth, signifying life.

Antinomianism has had its ups and downs throughout history, and as with so much else that has been destructive in our own day, the decade of the 1960s was a high point in its resurgence after a spell of relative quiescence. The rock group the Rolling Stones, who in their now doddering condition are still packing them in, sang of their "sympathy for the Devil." On a higher rung of the cultural ladder, poets like Allen Ginsburg, novelists like Norman Mailer, and philosophers like Norman O. Brown preached the pursuit of instant gratification as the road to individual and social salvation. Mailer in particular celebrated the type he called the hipster, who, so far from trying to become a hero by conquering his evil inclinations, actually became a hero by indulging them to the full. Mailer even substituted the hipster, whom he frankly acknowledged to be a psychopathic personality, for the proletariat in the new revolution he saw in the making. This new revolution, unlike the Marxist one that had failed by being too rationalistic, would move, in his words, "backward toward being and the secrets of human energy."

Ginsburg for his part celebrated the mad as the truly sane and homosexuality as the best path to sexual fulfillment. But he also recognized -- at least at certain moments -- that homosexuality had a two-sided etiology. Men became homosexual not only because they were attracted to other men, but also as an expression of the desperate desire to avoid being mired in the messy stream of life into which they are inevitably yanked when they get involved with women. (I myself would argue that antinomianism reaches its apogee in the kind of feminism which professes to believe that all differences between men and women are socially conditioned rather than biologically inbred, but more of that later.) As for Brown, his antinomian utopia was a life of what he called polymorphous perversity, which meant treating the entire body, not just the genitals, as sexual organs and giving them full-time full play.

So much for the realm of personal morality. In politics, this same antinomian impulse has manifested itself in revolutionary movements which declare that the laws of a given society are not legitimate and that the true or higher law requires overturning them by violence. So powerful has this ethos been in the realm of politics that the words "rebel" and "radical" have become -- and still remain -- terms of approbation. The discrediting of Communism, and the mountains of corpses piled up and the oceans of blood shed by the revolutions made in its name -- even all that has not dimmed the luster of the image of the rebel, the radical, the revolutionist, and even the terrorist.

Yet a curious dialectic has been at work here. At the very same time that the hero has been conceived as a rebel against the law, the idea has been put forth -- and often by the same people -- that there is no such thing as a hero at all. Out of this idea comes the image of the antihero, who has dominated so much of the literature of the twentieth century. The antihero is not a servant of Satan or of evil redefined as good; he is not a rebel but rather a nihilist who (as the Marxists used to say, and still do in the universities, where the only remaining members of this endangered species are to be found) "demystifies" or (as the currently fashionable schools of critical theory would put it) "deconstructs" the very idea of the hero.

Now, this idea used to be the very essence of comedy. Tragedy presented us with figures who may not have been virtuous in the moral sense but who were certainly virtuous in the literal sense of possessing in an unusual degree what used to be thought of as the great manly qualities of strength, courage, and honor. The first two of these qualities they would use to defend the third, usually unto death, and they were offered up to us for admiration on that account. But the comic impulse was always there, ready to act as a subversive force. As Milton's Satan is perhaps the greatest of the antinomian heroes, Shakespeare's Falstaff is the greatest of the comic antiheroes. "What is honor?" he asks, and answers, "A word. What is that word, honor? Air. . . . Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday." This is why his great playmate, Prince Hal, must renounce and repudiate Falstaff when he becomes Henry V and finally recognizes that, as he confesses, "if it be a sin to covet honor/I am the most offending soul alive." And so, just after his coronation, he cruelly casts Falstaff out: "I know thee not, old man," he tells him. For if he had not turned his back on Falstaff and everything Falstaff represents, he could never have become, as Henry V, the king who leads his men into a bloody battle at Agincourt by telling them that "gentlemen in England now abed/Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here/And hold their manhoods cheap."

Today the antihero lives on in comedy, well exemplified by the character usually played by Woody Allen. But what is most noteworthy is that there is no longer a Henry V against whom he stands. Instead of being banished, Falstaff is now the one who does the banishing and holds the entire stage to himself. Thanks in large part to World War I, the generation of the Twenties and Thirties throughout the West became completely disenchanted with the old manly ideals and left us all with a legacy of deep skepticism toward them. No one seemed capable any longer of talking with a straight face about honor and courage, words that had, it was thought, led to so much senseless slaughter. In the Victorian era Tennyson could write a hymn to the six hundred who rode into the valley of death, but a poet of the post - World War I period trying to do something similar would have been laughed out of existence, if not indeed stoned to death.

To some extent, World War II, the good war, the war that everyone (or almost everyone) thought was being fought in a noble cause, temporarily rehabilitated the reputation of the manly virtues. But only temporarily. In due course even World War II fell victim to the onslaught of the antiheroic ethos that was resurrected in the Sixties and given even greater currency by Vietnam. Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is the key document here. Though published in the early days of American involvement in Vietnam, Catch-22 was a product of the new climate, and so powerful was this climate already becoming that Heller not only got away with but was even applauded for what a few years earlier would have been thought virtually blasphemous -- showing up World War II as in effect no different from or better than World War I. As Heller portrayed it, there were no heroes in that war; there were only victims of a racket run by idiots, hustlers, and thieves. Not even Falstaff, mutatis mutandis, outdid Heller in his ridicule of the idea of honor.

In the meantime we were flooded with stories and novels by the likes of Ann Beattie about young people who saw no point in doing much of anything even in their personal lives. To these shell-shocked -- or rather drug-addled -- survivors of the Sixties, concepts like courage and honor had simply fallen off the radar screen. There was no need to mock them, since they had already become invisible. And if perchance they made a surprise appearance somewhere, they were looked upon with blank incomprehension.

SO, to the antinomian assault on the traditional concept of heroism was added the kindred but still distinct cynical or nihilistic assault on it. And this had an interesting effect. As Michiko Kakutani has pointed out in The New York Times Magazine, it has even robbed the Devil himself of heroic stature. She writes:

In the new Al Pacino movie, Devil's Advocate, . . . Milton's majestic archangel, whose "stature reached the sky," has devolved into a slick Manhattan fixer [whose name, incidentally, is John Milton], the head of a law firm that does things like get rich murderers off the hook. Whereas Lucifer once waged an all-out war in heaven against God Himself, he now has his hands full seducing ambitious yuppies, who are happy to sell out -- not for knowledge or creative powers, like earlier Fausts, but for cushy apartments on Fifth Avenue and some corporate perks.

Miss Kakutani goes on to point out that most other recent Devils in American fiction have been similarly reduced. In T. Coraghessan Boyle, Satan seduces Wall Street types who want fancy cars. In John Updike he becomes "a tennis-playing art collector who uses his demonic powers to lure local divorcees into his hot tub." In Jeremy Leven, he becomes "a masochist suffering from paranoia and an inferiority complex."

In other words, even the antinomian hero, the only hero left to us by our present culture, has been turned into an antihero playing games of trivial pursuit.

But here we come to a complication, for when we descend -- or should I in this context say ascend? -- into the realm of popular culture, heroes in the traditional sense abound. John Wayne, the prototype, is still, almost twenty years after his death, one of the most popular of all movie stars, superseded among the living only by his own cinematic heirs Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson.

What this tells us is that the hunger for heroism remains, and when the upper reaches of the culture decide to starve it of genuine nutrition, the lower reaches will step in and offer it a banquet of junk food. I would be the last to deny that some of this junk food -- like McDonald's hamburgers -- tastes good. But O for "a little touch of Harry in the night"!

The question is whether we -- or rather our children and grandchildren -- will ever get it again. Not, I fear, if the feminization of our culture that the women's movement has been laboring to achieve should proceed apace. But my guess is that this campaign has already begun to encounter more resistance than it was running into up until very recently. This resistance is coming perhaps even more from women than from men.

To be sure, the leaders of the feminist movement, having already feminized so many other institutions in our society, have set their sights on purging even the armed forces of what a high female official of the Defense Department derisively called "macho culture." For this, far from being fired, she was praised, and it was only when she later denounced the Marines as "extremist" that she had to apologize and resign.

Yet other women, desperate to marry before their biological clocks run down, can more and more be heard complaining that all the men out there are either "wimps" or gays. It has been said that men are born aggressive and predatory and that only women can tame and civilize them, which is true. But it is also true that if women fail to demand that men be strong, and courageous, and honorable -- if, that is, they fail to live by the dictum that "only the brave deserve the fair" -- then they will find no one worth bestowing their favors upon. No doubt they will -- human nature being what it is -- perforce bestow their favors on, or at least resignedly decide to marry, the wimps they secretly despise. But there will be no more touches of Harry in their nights, or indeed in anyone else's.