Honestly, Abe

For a paper in a Shakespeare class in high school, when tasked with describing (using textual evidence, of course) a necessary quality of a hero, I focused not on acts of fortitude or on bravery or on sacrifice or on contribution to the greater good. I wrote about intent — that a hero had to set out to do something heroic, less in a narcissistic sense than in the sense of having some noble aim or mind-set.

As I recall, I (comically) contrasted Mother Teresa with Michael Milken, the famous financier of the '80s. My point was that one could conceivably argue that a character like Milken, with the jobs he created and the effect he had on the economy (I ignored his contributions to charities), did more good than Mother Teresa, who, though she surely inspired thousands, helped a relatively limited number of people. (One could also argue — and I should point out, because I'm in danger of crossing into insensitive territory, that I'm merely trying to make an intellectual argument here — that the good she was able to do was fairly limited in scope because many of the people she helped were already dying.) Yet the quantity, so to speak, of the good was irrelevant because Milken was acting out of greed whereas Mother Teresa was attempting to ease suffering. Thus, she's a hero, and he's certainly not.

By the same logic, those who possess a certain purity of heart can be heroes even if they don't succeed (in life, anyway) at the task they've taken up — martyrs, for instance.

For the most part, I stand by this assessment. But it occurred to me the other day that it's an analysis best suited to literature, where characters' thoughts can be monitored moment by moment.

It doesn't take much effort to discern whether a character in a book has heroic intent. James Bond and Raskolnikov, for instance, both kill bad people, but the similarities end there. Other art forms — film, television, comics — offer similar advantages and may sometimes, with their simplification of thematic material, even ease the analysis. A Raskolnikov on the screen must be far less complicated than a Raskolnikov on the page, and in that simplification, motivations may become writ large. But I single out literature because of the depth of its characters, the minutiae of the mind it bares so clearly.

The point I am leading up to is that life is not so clean. Rarely are thoughts, desires or feelings so readily apparent. Milken and Mother Teresa prove obvious exceptions — we have the advantage of court transcripts or proclamations of faith or what have you to help guide us. To take a recent example, is Barack Obama a hero for openly supporting gay marriage? I would wholeheartedly agree that the issue is of great importance and that Obama came down on the right side of it. I think good has and will come from that endorsement. But his intentions in making the announcement are less clear. He was prodded by the comments of his vice president and was making a calculated political move. Saving face probably does not fall under the heroic umbrella.

When we jump back in time, things only get murkier. History tends to get whitewashed — that is, complex events are given simplified explanations, e.g., slavery was the cause of the Civil War. This applies to our historical heroes as well, characters (in the broad sense) who were much deeper, richer and more complicated than our textbooks will allow. Because most of us have the most simple knowledge of the past, our mind confabulates, and we fill in the gaps with intentions to match outcomes.

In truth, there exists conflict in some of our greatest heroes and villains, whether conflict in how we must (when considering all the facts) perceive them or conflict in how they perceived themselves and their place in the world. Vladimir Lenin. Robert E. Lee. Malcolm X. Even Martin Luther King Jr. was a philanderer.

No better example comes to mind than Abraham Lincoln. As we remember him — president of presidents, hero of heroes, captain, my captain — he held together our nation, ended slavery, preached equality. But the reality is more complicated, even on the simplest of facts. With the Emancipation Proclamation, a political move and a strategic one, Lincoln merely ended slavery in the South. The act did not cover nearly a million enslaved people in the United States, and slavery continued to be legal until the adoption of the 13th Amendment, almost three years later.

His remarks on the Dred Scott decision reveal some of the friction between the Lincoln who existed and the Lincoln whom we've conjured. Lincoln did denounce the decision for apparently seeking to extend slavery. But he sought to end slavery not only in keeping with the founding fathers' "all men are created equal" principles, but also in desiring an end to racial mixing, as "slavery is the greatest source of amalgamation." To the judge's horror at the thought of "mixing blood," Lincoln says, "A thousand times agreed."

Quoted verbatim, the text would probably send many Americans (and Lincoln lovers) into shock. "There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and black men enough to marry all the black women; and so let them be married." His ultimate point is that it is "morally right" and "favorable to ... our interest" to set up a colony where African-Americans can, and must, live entirely separately from whites. He even uses his logic to curry political favor: "a strong test as to which party most favors amalgamation, the Republicans or the dear union-saving Democracy."

To Lincoln's credit, he does make some salient points that seem ahead of his time, acknowledging, for instance, that the slaves have often been forced into sexual relationships — "forced concubinage" — and if emancipated, could at least consent to "mixing their blood." He also affirms "that the Negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong." But this sort of thinking, extolled as one of Lincoln's virtues, is mixed with ignored ignorance.

None of this is to discount the good that Lincoln did, or even to rule out his being a hero — there are other criteria we could use besides the one I detailed at the top. It is merely to point out the inherent difference between literature and life, in which means may somewhere along the line be lost to ends as a way of easing the dissonance.