“Should we bestow sainthood on reckless adventurers?” is a great question asked by the Independent. The “hero” / “reckless adventurer” in question is Aron Ralston, who chopped off his arm with a penknife after becoming trapped by a rock in the wilderness. He had not told anyone where he was going.

There are fairly obvious ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ to this argument. What interested me was the Independent’s analysis of whether “adventure” can be heroic or whether it is all tilting at windmills and conquering the useless.

A few snippets from the piece that really got me thinking:

• For some, Ralston is the ultimate all-action hero who hadn’t let fear of death put him off following his instinct for adventure.
• To his admirers, Ralston’s heroic courage lies… in his refusal to let the risks curtail his courting of adventure, the very antithesis of the modern-day affliction of the health and safety culture. He is a five-star example of getting to the very heart of what it means to be human by flamboyantly discarding the layers of protection the rest of us build – or allow to be built – around us.
• Are our heroes vicariously living out what we really want to be doing but are too scared/cowed/busy with our dreary 9 to 5 routines?
• Or they might be the volunteer lifeboatmen who go out 365 days a year, unheralded and largely unthanked, risking their own lives in the seas round Britain to save “idiots” like Ralston who get themselves into tight corners by their derring-do.
• Then there are those whose job can involve the call to heroism – the soldiers, sailors and airmen.
• Perhaps being a selfish bastard helps shapes the circumstances that makes heroes. If you are the sort to feel a duty to go on living for your children, you don’t contemplate climbing K2. Alison Hargreaves died there in 1995, days after being acclaimed a hero as the first woman to reach the summit alone, unsupported and without artificial oxygen. She left two small children without a mother.
• …[We have a] collective habit as a society of focusing narrowly on one well-publicised heroic aspect of  an individual, and then applying it to everything else about that individual. Aron Ralston is now top of the pile on the motivational speakers’ circuit. Such presentations usually involve telling the story one more time, and then pretending there is a link between the decision he made to cut his arm off when trapped in an isolated canyon and the decisions that his corporate audiences will be making about where to open the next branch of McDonald’s. Speaker and audience collude in the make-believe that heroism is infectious, and can therefore be caught by contact with a heroic individual, and that it spreads seamlessly between different aspects of that individual’s life.

What do you think?