Heroism is needed when society has failed

I found this particular phrase in a random Metafilter comment crediting Ursula Vernon, but I could not find a source. The comment was prompted by an article critical of the empty rhetoric valorizing “essential workers” in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic:

• We praise heroes for choosing to make a sacrifice for the sake of others. But since the U.S. government failed to provide timely, meaningful economic relief to citizens, most essential workers had no choice other than to keep working or starve. And the government’s failure to address or even acknowledge the pandemic early on made these jobs far more dangerous than they’d otherwise need to be. It’s disingenuous to praise people for making a sacrifice society forced upon them. And, perhaps intentionally, this praise focuses attention on those forced to sacrifice and away from the society failing them.
• And praising employees as heroes often serves as a cheap substitute for making their jobs safer and paying them more.

I’m not interested in the question of who deserves to be called a hero. The interesting question to me is what does it say about a society that it increasingly relies on heroism, particularly on the part of the most vulnerable who never signed up for that? Wouldn’t an ideal society not need heroes at all because it is capable of meeting its challenges in safe, boring ways? (And what does that say about the worlds in all of those superhero movies?)

Devops

In software development, thanks largely to the devops movement, we are learning this lesson. Early in my career, it was common to see praise heaped upon the engineer who jumped in at 3am on a Sunday to bring a service back up or fix a sudden issue. Today, while we would still thank that engineer (who, one hopes, was part of an on-call rotation and was adequately prepared for the possibility), we would rightly respond with pointed questions for the organization. What factors contributed to the incident? For those we were aware of, what prevented us from taking earlier action? For those we weren’t aware of, what systems could we put in place to be aware of them next time?

When anything akin to heroics is required in engineering, we don’t say “What a great opportunity to demonstrate heroism.” We ask “How can we make sure this never happens again?” I think that is the systems thinking approach.