War on Heroes: The Hidden Battle That’s Unmaking Our Sons
The Heroes Our Sons Admire Forge Their Souls , and Our Future. They Still Matter.
Walk into a cinema today and you will be surrounded by heroes, or at least, by figures dressed in the costume of heroism. Capes flutter, swords clash, superpowers are flung about in a riot of special effects. Never before has the screen been so crowded with champions, and yet never before has the idea of heroism felt so hollow. These luminous figures entertain, but they do not instruct. They dazzle, but they do not inspire. For all their spectacle, they do not serve the ancient function of the hero: to teach men and women how to live.
The paradox is striking. A society that produces more “heroes” than any before it is, at the very same time, a society incapable of believing in greatness. Our screens are flooded with saviours, yet our culture has lost the ability to admire, to revere, and to aspire. The old heroic figures — Aragorn, Arthur, Luke Skywalker in his first telling (don’t get me started on the degenerate caricature he’s become in the latest instalments) — are either forgotten or dismantled. What remains is a world rich in distraction but poor in direction.
This is not a mere literary or story-telling problem. It is a civilisational crisis. For heroes are not cultural ornaments, to be enjoyed if one likes and ignored if one prefers. They are the scaffolding of a society’s moral imagination. They are the maps by which young men find the way into manhood, and the figures by which a community transmits its highest ideals across generations. Without heroes, we are a people without memory, without aspiration, and without direction.
Every boy is born into a storm. His body surges with energies he cannot yet master; his world presents him with trials he scarcely comprehends. Between the impulses of the flesh and the longings of the spirit, between the demands of the age and the whisper of eternity, he must learn to stand as a man. Here, in the tempest of youth, heroes serve their first and most crucial function.
A true hero is not a decorative figure of entertainment but a guide to the soul. He is the one who teaches the young how to live in a broken world that still demands greatness. In the hero’s story a boy discovers that his strength is not given for indulgence but for sacrifice, that his trials are not arbitrary but formative. By following the one who dares, suffers, and endures, he learns to translate raw instinct into disciplined courage and wayward desire into covenantal fidelity.
Joseph Campbell was right to note that the hero’s journey (the call to adventure, the descent into trial, the return in triumph) recurs in every culture because it mirrors the very structure of human growth. But what Campbell described as archetype, Scripture records as history. Israel’s heroes are not mythical symbols only, but real men summoned beyond themselves: Moses before Pharaoh, David before Goliath, Joseph enduring betrayal, Paul suffering in chains. These tales are not escapist diversions; they are maps of maturation, scripts of initiation by which the young may find their place amidst chaos.
For without heroes, youth remains uninitiated. He drifts from pleasure to pleasure, seeking purpose in novelty, but never hearing the summons to responsibility. He has no wind in his sails, no compass in his hand, and no harbour in sight. He longs, often without knowing it, for the figure who might show him how to bear the weight of manhood. Heroes are that figure: they are the mythic fathers of every boy, beckoning him from immaturity to responsibility, from chaos to order, from self to service.
The trial of youth is, in essence, a passage. A boy begins in the world of his mother, the world of nurture and immediacy, where his needs are met before he names them and his place is secured by a love he did not earn. Such love is indispensable; without it life itself cannot begin. But it is not sufficient for the making of a man. If he lingers there too long, he remains a child: clinging, dependent, unformed.
To become a man, he must be led, or sometimes driven, into another world altogether: the world of the father. This is not merely the literal presence of his own father, though that is vital, but the larger world of duty, trial, discipline, and demand which the father represents. In this world, love takes another form. It ceases to be indulgence and becomes command: You must rise, you must endure, you must become.
Heroes serve precisely this function. They are the ones who call the boy out of the maternal circle into the paternal arena, where he must test his strength, bridle his appetites, and discover his vocation. Odysseus does not remain in Calypso’s arms; he sails through storm and temptation. David does not linger in Jesse’s house; he steps onto the battlefield. Christ does not remain in Nazareth; He goes into the wilderness, into temptation, and into His Father’s mission.
When fathers vanish, whether in the home or in the imagination, this passage falters. Boys remain suspended in adolescence, restless, unstable, forever seeking the meaning they cannot find. They grow into men who cannot centre themselves as husbands or fathers, for they have never crossed into the world of the father themselves. The absence of fathers leaves a generation of men uninitiated — and no civilisation can endure on such terms.
For this reason the figure of the father is indispensable. He is both model and boundary: the one a boy longs to emulate, and the one before whom he stands in awe. Admiration of the father is never a soft thing. It is tinged with fear, sharpened by respect. To grow before such a man is to learn that life is not indulgence but summons, not perpetual shelter but calling to responsibility.
When the father is absent, the boy’s hunger for such a figure is not diminished but heightened. He wanders the world, restless in his search for an image of manhood. He drifts into substitutes — celebrities, influencers, ideologues — but they lack the authority to demand respect or the moral gravity to inspire imitation. The boy, fatherless, remains a boy, even when his years make him a man.
Heroes, then, serve as mythic fathers in the imagination. They bear the weight of admiration, that peculiar mixture of longing and reverence, even fear. To admire David is to feel one’s own cowardice; to admire Moses is to feel one’s own inadequacy; to admire Christ is to feel one’s own unworthiness. Yet it is precisely in this encounter with greatness that a boy finds the direction of his becoming. A society that withholds fathers, whether in the home or in its stories, cripples its sons. It deprives them of the figures they require to become men.
If heroes are so necessary, what does it mean that our age delights in degrading them? It means we have turned against greatness itself. For a society reveals its attitude toward virtue in the way it treats its heroes. To honour them is to honour what they embody; to debase them is to confess resentment against it.
We see this in the way our most cherished stories have been recast. Luke Skywalker — once the very picture of youthful calling, who overcame fear, resisted temptation, and redeemed his father — is now portrayed as a bitter hermit, ashamed of his own legacy, resigned to despair. What was once a tale of hope has been rewritten into a parable of futility. Aragorn, once the ranger who became king by courage, humility, and loyalty, is in our time reduced whenever possible to hesitation, guilt, or irony. Even King Arthur is now recast as a figure of failure and doubt rather than nobility and sacrifice.
Such betrayals are not accidents of poor imagination. They are deliberate. They reveal a cultural mood that cannot bear the sight of masculine virtue. For in the spirit of postmodern feminism, courage is recast as aggression, authority as oppression, strength as toxicity. The noble man must be ironised, undermined, or dismantled, lest he stand unashamed. The result is not merely bad storytelling; it is the training of a generation to despise what it most requires.
The suspicion of masculine virtue is the fruit of a broader cultural project. In the name of liberation, postmodern feminism has taught us to see in every strength a danger, in every authority a form of domination, in every aspiration to greatness an act of oppression. Under such a gaze, the very qualities that sustain civilisation are treated as threats to it.
This suspicion bleeds into the imagination. The noble man cannot be permitted to remain noble; he must be recast as broken, guilt-ridden, or irrelevant. Hence Luke the cynic, Aragorn the hesitant, Arthur the failed. A culture that once needed heroes now labours to dismantle them, for the sight of unashamed virtue has become unbearable.
And yet this recasting does not liberate men or women. It deprives them. Boys are left without maps of manhood; girls are left without models of noble manhood to admire and to hope for. Families are weakened, civic life erodes, and art itself becomes cynical. For when we lose the capacity to admire, we lose the capacity to aspire.
But heroism has not vanished; it has only been obscured. The true measure of greatness has never been in domination or self-assertion, but in sacrifice. A hero is not the man who conquers for his own glory, but the man who gives his strength for the sake of others. Courage is not cruelty; it is the willingness to suffer for what is true. Authority is not oppression; it is the weight of responsibility borne in service.
The Greeks knew heroism well, and their tales turn on the arduous work of ordering a man’s strength amid pride, longing, and the demands of community. Achilles’ courage is shadowed by wrath; Aeneas’ duty shaped by the weight of empire; Odysseus’ brilliance tempered by yearning and temptation. Scripture tells its own stories of heroic struggle, but in the register of covenant and obedience. David’s bravery is offered to God, Joseph’s endurance serves a people, Moses’ leadership is borne in communion with the One who calls. And Christ gathers all these threads into a heroism defined by self-giving love: strength poured out rather than asserted.
Here is the essence of greatness: to turn strength into service, courage into covenant, authority into self-giving love. Such heroism is not a relic of medieval romance or ancient epic. It is the perennial form of manhood, the path by which boys become men, men become fathers, and fathers become the foundation of generations.
The way forward is not nostalgia, as if we could simply re-enchant the old tales by willing it so. Nor is it escapism, multiplying superheroes until their very abundance makes them weightless. The way forward is recovery: a deliberate return to the true meaning of heroism as covenantal responsibility and sacrificial love.
This means telling better stories, the kind that do not mock or dismantle greatness, but honour it without irony. It means fathers reclaiming their place in the lives of their sons, embodying the weight of admiration and the authority that summons respect. It means teaching boys that admiration is not envy but the first step toward aspiration, and that to become a man is to become worthy of fear, respect, and love in the same breath.
For if we cannot give our sons and daughters heroes, we will give them nothing to become. And a people without heroes cannot remain a people for long. To recover the lost art of greatness is to remember not only who we once were, but who we might yet become.
Yes to all the modern ills and correctives you cite, and yes, the Greeks knew heroism well. We still do, too; but unlike us, they shared the same “register” and were able to glorify heroic exploits without apology.
You note that in the modern register “A hero is not a man who conquers for his own glory,” but he certainly was for the Greeks; Heraclitus highlighted “One thing above all others, immortal glory among mortals.” We confuse heroism and celebrity; they saw the two as inseparable. The purpose of mortal existence for them was, in fact, great deeds performed in pursuit of “Kleos” (renown, recognition, respect and remembrance) earned publicly and competitively.
Nietzsche may have been criticized for flattening the Greeks into a single amoral ethos in “Homer’s Contest,” but he keyed on the difference: “Why did the whole Greek world exult over the combat scenes of the Iliad? I fear that we do not understand them in sufficiently ‘Greek’ manner; indeed, that we should shudder if we were ever to understand them in ‘Greek.’”
As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." We do need to avoid nostalgia and historical stylization; we should also be wary about judging the ancients in a Christian or post-Christian rearview mirror. We project moral categories (pity, humility, universal dignity, the sanctity of life) onto worlds that did not operate with those values.
In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri applied those categories and concluded that glory detached from virtue earns no true laurel. That said, I think it’s ironic that while he condemned Akhilleus to Hell, the Greek enjoyed “immortal glory among mortals,” whereas Dante’s Christian heroes (e.g., Bonconte I da Montefeltro, my personal favorite) often had to appeal to the poet to remember them to mortals (“Do you, among the living, retell”).
This Japanese proverb is the deepest irony of our age: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Excellence of deed and epically heroic exploits provoke discomfort, envy, and swift deflation. H.L. Mencken said: "Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum."
Yet thankfully, somehow, the great nail gun keeps outperforming the hammer.