Ernest Becker (1924-1974), in The Denial of Death, holds that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot live with the knowledge. Every culture hands him a hero system, a scheme that lets him earn the feeling that he counts beyond his body and outlasts it. Heroism answers the terror of death. Otto Rank (1884-1939), whom Becker follows, names a second terror beneath the first, the terror of life, the dread of standing alone, separate, free, with no large thing to merge into. A man builds against one terror and falls toward the other. The hero system holds him in the middle.
Two terrors govern the field Amanda Alexander works in, and they sit on opposite sides of one wall.
The first belongs to the humanitarian lawyer who tells the story of progress. He looks at the bombed cities and the camps and the mobilized millions of the twentieth century, and he needs the killing to mean something other than the last word on man. So he builds a hero. The civilian becomes a sacred category that humanity discovered. The Geneva Conventions become conscience written down. Law bends toward mercy across the centuries, antiquity to Nuremberg to the Additional Protocols, a rising line. The lawyer who serves that line serves a thing that will outlast him. He fears that man kills without limit and that civilization runs thin over the killing. His hero answers the fear by calling the thin layer the ground.
Alexander carries the opposite dread. She fears the dupe’s fate, the fear of living inside a comforting story and mistaking it for the world, of taking a settlement that power assembled and calling it a moral order the species earned. Her hero is the historian who sees through the story. She earns her standing by refusing the consolation the first man cannot live without.
This is why the two cannot hear each other. The first man’s floor is the second’s abyss. Tell Alexander the progress story and she hears a fairy tale. Tell the progress lawyer that the civilian hardened into a category during the industrial wars and took its modern shape from a political compromise in 1977, that the term surfaced in the 1970s through fights among the Red Cross, the academy, and rival blocs, and he hears the floor give way. Each man’s comfort is the other’s terror. They argue about history. They fight about which terror they can bear.
Her hero runs on a subtraction story. Strip the teleology, strip the talk of universal morality, strip the myth of a tradition running unbroken from the ancients to Geneva, and what remains is the thing underneath: contingency, conflict, bureaucratic adaptation, the imaginative work culture does before treaties catch up. She offers the cleared ground as reality with the superstition removed. The progress story was the bias. Take it away and the history stands plain.
Becker stops her here. The cleared ground is not a clearing. It is another hero system. Disenchantment consoles too. The man who sees through every myth has found his own way to count, and his way is lucidity. He is never the fool. He stands outside the story watching the believers, and that standing-outside is his immortality, his proof that he met the world without flinching. Alexander’s subtraction does not deliver her to bare reality. It delivers her to the place of the one who is not deceived, and that place is a hero’s place like any other. The mutation reads to her as a clearing.
Her sacred values come into focus against the rival. She holds contingency holy. The progress lawyer holds permanence holy. She prizes the courage to historicize the sacred, to show that men made the civilian. He prizes the courage to defend the sacred, to treat the civilian as found, a thing the species uncovered, because a thing men made they can unmake. She reads science fiction and military memoirs and strategic theory beside the treaties, and she shows that culture imagined civilian death long before the law allowed it. He reads the treaties and the case law and the diplomatic record, and he builds the doctrine that keeps the imagining in check. She wants the truth about how law becomes thinkable. He wants the law to keep working as a brake. Both men believe they serve the civilian. She serves him by telling the truth about his origins. He serves him by guarding the story that protects him.
How much of this does she see? Her work shows one kind of awareness and lacks another. She knows the abyss her method opens, and she steps back from it. She declines to call humanitarian law a fraud or a mask for power. She holds a place between doctrine and pure relativism, which means she feels the danger of the cleared ground and refuses to live at the bottom of it. That is honest. What she does not turn on herself is the method she turns on everyone else. She historicizes the believer’s hero and leaves her own alone. The critical historian dissolves every hero system but the one she stands in, the one that scores her a point each time she shows a sacred thing was assembled. Her ledger runs on truth against comfort. It never asks what her own truth comforts.
Three coordinates fall out of this. The shape of her hero is the disenchanter, the one who is not fooled, who earns the right to count by showing the construction behind the doctrine. The rival she fights without naming is the progress lawyer, the keeper of the rising line, and she fights him on every page that shows the line got drawn late and got drawn by interests. The cost her ledger cannot price is the one Becker puts first. The story she dissolves might be doing work. The belief that the civilian is sacred and found, false as it reads to her, might stay a soldier’s hand or a minister’s order in the hour when the contingent version hands him a permission slip. She scores truth. She does not enter the body on the other side of the truth, because her hero system keeps no column for it. A man who needs the story to hold the killing back pays for her clarity, and the bill never reaches her desk.
Becker does not ask her to lie. He asks her to see that the choice of truth over comfort builds a hero like any other, and that the hero, any hero, throws a shadow he prefers not to count. Her work holds because she comes within a step of seeing it. She walks up to her own myth, the myth of the man with no myth, and turns back one step short.
