The Phenomenon of the Banalization of Heroism in Contemporary Culture

Annotation

In the post-heroic culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, heroism is losing its status as an exceptional event and is increasingly constructed as a reproducible media image, meme, or brand, giving rise to the phenomenon of its banalization. The object of this study is the contemporary culture of heroism. The subject is the phenomenon of the banalization of heroism and its conceptualization in philosophy and science. This research draws on a historical, philosophical, and conceptual analysis of the works of Hannah Arendt, Martin Leibovici, Mary Morris, Zinaida Franco, Frederick Zimbardo, Stuart T. Ellison, and others, as well as on the methodology of critical theory for analyzing the culture industry and symbolic exchange. The results of empirical and interdisciplinary studies of heroism are additionally utilized. It is shown that “banality” in Arendt, Morris, and Zimbardo describes a mode of relationship to the sociocultural environment characterized by automatism, routine, and the loss of a critical dimension, while “banalization” captures the process of reducing complex phenomena to clichés and repeatable forms. Banalization reflects the migration of heroism from the realm of the transcendent / exceptional to the realm of everyday practices (“heroic imagination”) and institutionalization (“the science of heroism”). A comparative analysis of the perception of the hero in individualistic (USA) and collectivist (China) cultures demonstrates how heroism is imbued with different cultural content while preserving a universal core of rational-volitional traits. A critical analysis of empirical research has revealed two forms of contemporary heroism: the “banal,” situationally determined act of an ordinary person, and the “non-banal,” rooted in stable and diverse types of moral personality. A distinction is made between banalization-reduction, where heroism is reduced to a single impulse and loses its connection with a stable moral character, and banalization-democratization, which reveals the heroic as potentially accessible to everyone in everyday life.

Keywords

• banalization of heroism
• post-heroic culture
• ethos
• moral personality
• situationism
• comparative studies
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