The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [75]
MOYERS: How is a hero different from a leader?
CAMPBELL: That is a problem Tolstoy dealt with in War and Peace. Here you have Napoleon ravaging Europe and now about to invade Russia, and Tolstoy raises this question: Is the leader really a leader, or is he simply the one out in front on a wave? In psychological terms, the leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it.
MOYERS: It has been said that a leader is someone who discerned the inevitable and got in front of it. Napoleon was a leader, but he wasn’t a hero in the sense that what he accomplished was grand for humanity’s sake. It was for France, the glory of France.
CAMPBELL: Then he is a French hero, is he not? This is the problem for today. Is the hero of a given state or people what we need today, when the whole planet should be our field of concern? Napoleon is the nineteenth-century counterpart of Hitler in the twentieth. Napoleon’s ravaging of Europe was horrific.
MOYERS: So you could be a local god and fail the test on a larger cosmic level?
CAMPBELL: Yes. Or you could be a local god, but for the people whom that local god conquered, you could be the enemy. Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.
MOYERS: So we have to be careful not to call a deed heroic when, in a larger, mythological sense, it simply doesn’t work that way.
CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t know. The deed could be absolutely a heroic deed—a person giving his life for his own people, for example.
MOYERS: Ah, yes. The German soldier who dies—
CAMPBELL: —is as much a hero as the American who was sent over there to kill him.
MOYERS: So does heroism have a moral objective?
CAMPBELL: The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it. Now, from another position, of course, you might say that the idea for which he sacrificed himself was something that should not have been respected. That’s a judgment from the other side, but it doesn’t destroy the intrinsic heroism of the deed performed.
MOYERS: That’s a different angle on heroes from what I got as a young boy, when I read the story of Prometheus going after fire and bringing it back, benefiting humanity and suffering for it.
CAMPBELL: Yes, Prometheus brings fire to mankind and consequently civilization. The fire theft, by the way, is a universal mythic theme. Often, it’s a trickster animal or bird that steals the fire and then passes it along to a relay team of birds or animals who run with it. Sometimes the animals are burned by the flames as they pass the fire along, and this is said to account for their different colorings. The fire theft is a very popular, worldwide story.
MOYERS: The people in each culture are trying to explain where fire came from?
CAMPBELL: The story isn’t really trying to explain it, it has to do more with the value of fire. The fire theft sets man apart from the animals. When you’re in the woods at night, you light a fire, and that keeps the animals away. You can see their eyes shining, but they’re outside the fire range.
MOYERS: So they’re not telling the story just to inspire others or to make a moral point.
CAMPBELL: No, it’s to evaluate the fire, its importance to us, and to say something about what has set man apart from the beasts.
MOYERS: Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now?
CAMPBELL: There’s a certain type of myth which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I