One of the dichotomies that emerged within COVID culture was the contrast between the heroic front-line workers and the non-essential workers who must obediently and patiently stay at home.
This tension between glory and domesticity has ancient origins. In the epic worldview, war is the stage upon which honor is won. Therefore, achieving heroic status involves giving up the comforts of home to travel away into the battlefield and risk one’s life in war. Achilles, the Greek hero, had to choose between two lifepaths: (1) a long and peaceful life at home, with his memory fading soon after his death or (2) going to Troy, where he would die young—but win eternal glory that would echo through the centuries (we are still talking about him on this blog today). Achilles’s mother, who wants him to live, dresses her golden boy as a girl and sends him to live as a girl in King Lycomedes’s house, hoping that Achilles could avoid conscription to the Trojan war. But Odysseus tricks Achilles: he puts before him a pile of gifts consisting mostly of female clothes and jewelry—but also a sword buried at the bottom of the pile. Achilles is “magnetically” attracted to the sword and grabs it in readiness for battle, thus revealing his innate attraction to heroic action.
Odysseus, before he joins the war, also tries to embrace “working from home” at Ithaca instead of sailing to Troy with the Greek army. The man who about ten years later would devise the deceit of the Trojan horse pretends to be insane and plows his field erratically to “demonstrate” his madness and hopefully dodge military duty. But the messenger sees through Odysseus’s scheme. He places Odysseus’s infant son Telemachus in front of the plow, forcing Odysseus to steer away—and hence reveal his sanity and fitness for active war duty. Odysseus then sails off to war, and it is his wife Penelope who waits dutifully at home for twenty years.
The heroic status, once conferred by a society upon an individual who engaged in active service, can become addictive to that individual, making domesticity and ordinary life an awkward fit. This is perhaps what Alfred Tennyson observed in his poem “Ulysses” when he imagines Odysseus as an “idle king” with an “aged wife” who is restless to once again experience heroic action: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
In the Odyssey, even while the ten-year-long yearning to return home remains the deepest abiding emotion on the hero’s journey, Odysseus never ceases to be a military hero. In the introduction to her translation of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson observes that the poem
“seems to question how fully this epic hero can adapt to a new, nonmilitary world. When Odysseus is about to go through the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, Circe warns him not to put on his armor and try to fight against Scylla, which will be futile and will only make the situation worse. But Odysseus insists on doing so—increasing the danger to his men. Similarly, in leaving the island of Polyphemus the Cyclops, Odysseus is unable to resist shouting back, “Cyclops! If any mortal asks you how your eye was mutilated and made blind, say that Odysseus, the city-sacker, Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithaca, destroyed your sight” (9. 502-6). Odysseus cannot resist the urge to gain kleos—the honor that comes from being the named subject of heroic legend. He is able to become nameless (“No man”) only for a little while” (pp. 66-67, Norton, Kindle edition).
But the epic genre also raises deep moral and emotional doubts about the sustainability and desirability of kleos. Achilles, as a result of his conflict with Agamemnon but also due to a deeper disillusionment with war, is adamant that he wants to leave the beach of Troy and return home:
I must say what I have to say straight out,
must tell you how I feel and how all this will end—
so you won’t crowd around me, one after another,
coaxing like a murmuring clutch of doves.
I hate that man like the very Gates of Death
who says one thing but hides another in his heart.
I will say it outright. That seems best to me.
Will Agamemnon win me over? Not for all the world,
nor will all the rest of Achaea’s armies.
No, what lasting thanks in the long run
for warring with our enemies, on and on, no end?
One and the same lot for the man who hangs back
and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits
for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death,
the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion.
And what’s laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing—
and after suffering hardships, year in, year out,
staking my life on the mortal risks of war. . . .
Many a sleepless night I’ve bivouacked in harness,
day after bloody day I’ve hacked my passage through,
fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes. . . .
Why must we battle Trojans,
men of Argos? Why did he muster an army, lead us here,
that son of Atreus? Why, why in the world if not
for Helen with her loose and lustrous hair?
Are they the only men alive who love their wives,
those sons of Atreus? Never! Any decent man,
a man with sense, loves his own, cares for his own
as deeply as I, I loved that woman with all my heart,
though I won her like a trophy with my spear . . .
His gifts, I loathe his gifts . . .
I wouldn’t give you a splinter for that man!
Not if he gave me ten times as much, twenty times over, all
I say no wealth is worth my life! . . . .
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man’s life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth. Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies . . .
true, but the life that’s left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. One thing more. To the rest I’d pass on this advice:
sail home now! You will never set your eyes
on the day of doom that topples looming Troy.
(The Iliad, Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition)
But Achilles never follows through on his resolution to abandon the heroic code. His beloved friend Patroclus takes Achilles’s place in battle, wearing Achilles’s armour and is killed by Hector. Grief-stricken and enraged, Achilles is manipulated back into the heroic stage—and eventually dies at Troy.
When Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets the ghost of the dead Achilles, Odysseus naturally acknowledges his former comrade’s heroic status, but Achilles responds by reasserting the sentiment that animated him as he was about to leave Troy—that an ordinary life is better than heroic death in battle:
“But you, Achilles,
there’s not a man in the world more blest than you—
there never has been, never will be one.
Time was, when you were alive, we Argives
honored you as a god, and now down here, I see,
you lord it over the dead in all your power.
So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.”
I reassured the ghost, but he broke out, protesting,
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”
With the rise of early modernity and modernity, these ancient doubts about the meaning of heroism intensified and expanded, as writers asked themselves deep questions about the revered epic genre: what is the meaning of epic glory within the writer’s own present-day society?
In Paradise Lost, John Milton adapts the ancient epic genre to describe the war between God and Satan and the temptation of Eve and Adam. At the same time, Milton was also likely indirectly and self-critically writing about himself and about his own involvement in the civil war of the seventeenth century. Milton supported the execution of king Charles I and had a prominent position in the administration of Cromwell’s republic. With the subsequent restoration of the monarchy, Milton fell from grace (and also went blind). Some scholars believe that Milton put a great deal of himself into the character of Satan in Paradise Lost. Satan tries to overthrow God, is expelled to hell and then tries to colonize humanity by transforming himself into a serpent and tempting Eve and Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. Milton’s Satan comes across as epic and persuasive—but he is actually manipulative and destructive. Some have suggested that Milton created Satan partly as a way of dealing with his own guilt about the English civil war and the execution of the King. When Satan speaks about his expulsion from heaven, the readers are expected to recognize Satan’s heroic bravado (that he would rather rule in hell than be a slave of God in heaven) as a distortion of what Achilles says to Odysseus in the underworld (that he would rather be a slave than be a dead hero). While Achilles asserts life, Satan leads his followers toward death and destruction:
Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
<https://poets.org/poem/paradise-lost-book-i-lines-221-270>
Milton, like Achilles, rejects simplistic notions of heroic glory and ultimately embraces a passive view of heroism: true heroic action takes place in the mind and in the heart, not on the battlefield. Human life is about working hard to understand the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil and about lovingly embracing the challenges of being mortal—a reality that Adam and Eve have to contend with when they are expelled from the garden of Eden at the end of the poem:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
http://www.online-literature.com/milton/paradiselost/12/
How does the discourse of heroism within COVID culture fit into the epic tradition? In the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope was asking himself a similar question about his culture as he set out to write “The Rape of the Lock.” His conclusion was that, within his well-to-do social circle, the epic has given way to the mock epic:
“What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things”
< https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44906/the-rape-of-the-lock-canto-1>
Pope poetically depicts a real incident that occurred within his social circle—a young man cutting the lock of hair of a young society beauty whom he admired (utterly unacceptable by today’s standards, but relatively trivial in Pope’s eyes) and the emotions resulting from it—as an epic war of great significance. Pope’s intention was to highlight the lamentable gap between the great ancient warriors engaged in great epic action on the one hand and the self-centered and overprivileged members of his own society on the other hand. At the same time, Pope was also deconstructing the heroic code itself, revealing some aspects of it to be possibly inherently ridiculous and harmful.
Is COVID culture more epic or more mock-epic? On the one hand, COVID is real; many people have suffered and died as a result of it, and vulnerable people should be protected. And science is indeed an epic endeavor to understand the principles of nature and how to use that understanding for the benefit of humanity. Medicine, likewise, has had truly epic achievements in making our lives better. However, like the true epic genre, science and medicine are complex and fluid journeys in which our understanding of reality should always be subject to modification based on empirical observations. As Isaac Newton observed: “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light” <https://quotefancy.com/quote/833146/Isaac-Newton-I-keep-the-subject-of-my-inquiry-constantly-before-me-and-wait-till-the>. And as Francis Bacon before him commented about the method of true as opposed to false science:
“There are and can exist but two ways of investigating and discovering truth. The one hurries on rapidly from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms; and from them as principles and their supposed indisputable truth derives and discovers the intermediate axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its axioms from the senses and particulars, by ascending continually and gradually, till it finally arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way.”
< http://people.bu.edu/dklepper/RN242/aphorisms.html>
When a particular politicized policy, shouted out with absolute slogans, (everyone must get vaccinated! This is the only way!) replaces actual open-ended scientific inquiry (what are the actual benefits and harms of the vaccine? What about natural immunity? Are COVID measures doing more harm than good?)—the cultural result might be mock-epic (and in some cases tragic) rather than epic. How would past generations of doctors, scientists and people living with respiratory viruses regard our response to COVID and our cost-benefit analysis? And how will future generations judge our epic battle with COVID?
I have written in a previous post about how COVID culture might in some cases become a paradise of fools for people who can currently make a living from a laptop wearing comfortable clothes and within easy reach of a well-stocked fridge. A poet observing our reality might find rich material for the mock-epic genre in our rhetoric about “doing the right thing” versus “doing the wrong thing” while in fact some of us are enjoying the convenience of making a living from home and pursuing our pre-existing tendency for social distancing (why put effort into organizing a dinner party or a playdate?).
The Greek epics focus on the heroes. But if we could know more about the inner world of the non-essentials who stayed at home instead of sailing off to war, perhaps we might hear a sentiment somewhat similar to that of some of us who today can earn a living from home: I rather like working from home. Let other people be the front-line heroes.
Social-media personalities who seem to regard themselves as COVID heroes, and who have adopted the false humility of people who only want to save lives, should keep in mind the mock-epic potential of COVID culture. The history of science might regard those who double down on COVID narratives while disregarding context, cost-benefit analysis or empirical evidence as mock-epic characters (or worse). These “heroes” may come to be regarded as characters whose attachment to the notion of glory, as well as lack of self-awareness and proportionality, sets them apart from the much more complex ancient character of Achilles who, while being the most skilled warrior among the Greeks, was also in his own heart and mind deconstructing the heroic code—not to mention Milton or other writers who seriously contemplated the postlapsarian human condition and asserted acceptance and love over fear. We should also remember poets who, like scientists, celebrated our right to learn patiently and gradually from empirical observations and from our own experience. Consider, for example, Walt Whitman in Song of Myself:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun … there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand … nor look through the eyes of the dead … nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
We will soon likely have to acknowledge that there is no epic victory to be had over respiratory viruses—there are medical advancement, and there is scientific knowledge, but above all there is life that has to be lived. Insisting on medical heroism, on being the “named subject of heroic legend” instead of accepting life and working within that framework to care for each other cheapens the human experience and cheapens the scientific search for knowledge. Mock- heroism encourages the proliferation of power-oriented pseudo-science instead of patient and useful empirical inquiry.
As I wrote in a previous post, the discussion about the future of work and study in the world of work-from-home technologies is a very important discussion to have: to what extent and for which activities and tasks should we continue to work and study from home?
The discussion about the future of work and study is made interesting and complex by the very real advantages of domesticity for many adults, as well as children and families. Perhaps the appeal of working from home ties us in some ways to Achilles’s and Odysseus’s reluctance to go to Troy and to their longing to retreat from battle and return home. But ultimately the discussion about the future of study and work is not a heroic discussion. It is not a about slaying a virus as if it were a dragon or as if our future depended on the outcome of an epic battle to conquer COVID. Rather, our discussion should be about how, while acknowledging our needs and vulnerabilities as human beings who have complex lives and conflicting demands, we should nevertheless continue to live, work and study in meaningful and honest ways—assisted by true science and true medicine as servants of the common good, not as arenas for self-glorification.