Human beings are deeply divided, eternally torn between apathy and activity, between nihilism and belief. In this short life, we wage a daily battle between a higher and a lower self. The hero stands for our higher self. To get through life and permit the higher self to prevail we depend on public models of excellence, bravery, and goodness. During the last forty years in America, such models have been in short supply.

Except among politicians and Madison Avenue advertising firms, the word hero has been out of fashion since the late 1960s as a term to describe past or present public figures. We have been reluctant to use it this way, doubtful as to any one person can hold up under the burden of such as word. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, hero was used to describe the firefighters and police offers who picked their way through the rubble, passengers who thwarted terrorists on a hijacked airplane, and soldiers who left on planes and ships. In difficult times, we turn to the word hero to express our deepest sorrow, our highest aspiration, and our most profound admiration.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America was forced to question some of the attitudes of an antiheroic age: irony, cynicism, preoccupation with celebrities and sex, disdain for political leaders, and indifference to soldiers. "Times of terror are times of heroism, " said Ralph Waldo Emerson. America's new war has reminded us of one kind of heroism, the brave deed, and of one kind of hero, the rescuer. My hope is that it will also encourage us to become more interested in past and present public heroes and that it will revive the qualities of admiration, gratitude, and awe too long absent from our culture.

In America today, we have come to define the person by the flaw: Thomas Jefferson is the president with the slave mistress, Einstein the scientist who mistreated his wife, Mozart the careless genius who liked to talk dirty. These definitions lodge in our minds-especially if they relate to sex-and become the first and sometimes the only thing we remember. As a society, we need to explore a more subtle, complex definition of the word hero, suitable for an information age, one that acknowledges weaknesses as well as strengths, failures as well as successes-but, at the same time, one that does not set the bar too low.

The definition of hero remains subjective. What is extraordinary can be debated. Courage is in the eye of the beholder. Greatness of soul is elusive. Inevitably there will be debates over how many and what kinds of flaws a person can have and still be considered heroic.We are fearful that heroes might be illusory, falsely elevated by early death or good spin doctors or the vagaries of history. The twentieth century taught us well that leaders once thought heroes can turn out to be tyrants. And the tacit assumption that a hero is supposed to be perfect has made many Americans turn away from the word-and the concept-altogether. The contemporary preference for words like role model and mentor and the shift from the recognition of national to local heroes are part of the transformation of the word hero that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century.

There is something appealing about a society that admires a range of accomplishments, that celebrates as many people as possible, that looks beyond statues of generals on horseback for its heroes. Making hero more democratic, however, can be carried to an extreme. It can strip the word of all sense of the extraordinary. It can lead to an ignorance of history, a repudiation of genius, and an extreme egalitarianism disdainful of high culture and unappreciative of excellence.

We need role models and mentors and local heroes, but by limiting our heroes to people we know, we restrict our aspirations. Public heroes-or imperfect people of extraordinary achievement, courage and greatness of soul whose reach is wider than our own-teach us to push beyond ourselves and our neighborhoods in search of models of excellence. They enlarge our imagination, teach us to think big, and expand our sense of the possible.

-Peter H. Gibbon