My Next Life as a Hero

by Jill Neimark

Let’s say reincarnation is real and we can choose our next life. What would it look like? My off-the-cuff impulse would be to choose myself all over again — Jill redux — except with a generous helping of better luck. Apparently, my choice is not unusual — but maybe lacking in a bit of wisdom.

According to Socrates, in Plato’s The Republic, there is a place where the souls of the dead are asked to choose new lives. Placed on the ground before them are patterns for lives of every kind: “There were lives . . . which broke off in the middle and came to an end in poverty and exile and beggary, and there were lives of famous men, some who were famous for their form and beauty as well as for their strength and success. . . . There was every other quality, and they all mingled with one another.” Socrates says that many souls choose new lives purely in reaction to the specific pain of the life they’ve just lived. But the key, he says, is to possess a kind of moral wisdom about what really shapes a good and just existence.

Socrates pays particular attention to the wise choice of the soul of Odysseus, that hero among heroes who blinded the Cyclops with an olive branch, escaped thousands of Laestrygonian giants, seduced the seductress Circe after she turned his men into swine, tied himself to a mast to both listen to and resist the irresistible song of the Sirens, and journeyed to hell itself to speak to the dead. After the unforgettable heroics of his former existence, his soul chooses the simple life of a private citizen. This pattern, says Socrates, had been overlooked by the other souls, but Odysseus was “delighted to have it.”

The simple life of a private citizen is what philosopher Susan Neiman calls “the life of a grown-up idealist” — the kind of ordinary hero we can all choose to be. In her new book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, Susan Neiman describes the reborn Odysseus as a hero who makes “real choices . . . he knows a great deal about happiness; few people tried out as many forms of it. He’s a master of reasoning . . . his reverence has been tested and tempered.”

What exactly does a grown-up idealist look like? She’s someone who doesn’t worry about purity or obsess about good intentions. In fact, Neiman draws a startling distinction between moral purity and moral clarity. “The allure of purity is a threat to the possibility of genuinely good action,” she writes. Purity can paralyze you with its seemingly infinite doubts: “What good are small steps when my life is entangled in large evils? My taxes support unjust wars, my clothes support sweatshops, my life depends on machines that produce carbon. And if I really face the fact that thousands of children die every day for lack of $2, giving less than all I have seems churlish.”
So don’t worry about purity. Intention is not the core of moral action. Good intentions abound in even the most stunningly evil acts. In one chilling passage, Neiman describes the moral principles of certain Nazis: “One Wehrmacht soldier reported by German psychologist Harold Welzer was proud of the fact that he shot only children: ‘My comrade shot the mothers, and I saw that the children couldn’t survive without them.’” In that case, “the opposite of good is good intention.”

Says Neiman, moral clarity requires the courage to judge actions, not the presumptuousness (and perhaps foolishness) to judge character — especially since many of us have moral thresholds that can be breached more easily than we’d like to think. Neiman describes soldiers who are forced to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!” until they are hoarse, who then come to regard killing people as natural. Or, closer to home, the Stanford students in psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment: Ordinary college students — good kids — were randomly divided into prisoners and guards and isolated together. Within a short time, guards were forcing prisoners to strip naked, stand with bags over their heads, and engage in humiliating games. “We don’t know why people have different moral thresholds,” says Neiman.

We are responsible, finally, for what we do. And in that simplicity is a beautiful moral clarity. If the act itself is good, that’s good enough. So what if “ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure — because goodness makes you feel more alive.” Ordinary, flawed goodness is the domain of the grown-up. Even our hero Odysseus chose it.

Jill Neimark is a journalist, novelist, and poet.