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Posted on 01/11/2007 11:04:59 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
On the day after New Year’s, as most of the world now knows, Wesley Autrey, a construction worker and a Navy veteran, was waiting for the train with his two daughters at the 137th Street Station in New York.
Then, a man collapsed on the platform and began convulsing. After Autrey helped him get up, the man collapsed again and fell onto the tracks. With the lights of the Broadway Local visible down the tunnel, Autrey had to make what he later called a “split decision”—a decision that inspired a nation and taught us a powerful lesson about what it means to be human.
Autrey jumped onto the tracks, risking his own life, to save the stricken stranger. After visiting the man in the hospital, Autrey, who denied that he had done anything “spectacular,” went to work.
While Autrey didn’t think that his actions were spectacular, other people did. At a time when most of the news is disheartening, Autrey’s actions inspired millions of people. Americans have become jaundiced and skeptical. We need heroes every now and then, a role model—and that’s what Autrey has become.
Not only did he inspire us, but he also helps remind us of some important truths about being human.
One of these is that materialism can never provide a satisfactory, much less complete, account of human nature. While neo-Darwinism offers a superficial explanation for human evil, it can’t begin to account for human goodness, such as Autrey’s actions.
What we Christians call “altruism,” Neo-Darwinists call “enlightened” selfishness. Thus, a Neo-Darwinist would say that parents care for their children and siblings as a way of ensuring that their “selfish genes” get passed on to the next generation.
Even if this were true, it says nothing about why a man jumps in front of an incoming train for a total stranger, as Autrey did. For that, you need the capacity for self-sacrifice, an utterly un-Darwinian trait.
Autrey’s actions also reminded of what true virtue looks like. As Scott Carson, a philosophy professor at Miami of Ohio, pointed out, people like Autrey nearly always deny that what they did was “spectacular.”
This is more than modesty; it’s what C. S. Lewis meant when he wrote that virtue is “precognitive.” A soldier in a foxhole who jumps on a grenade doesn’t ponder the issues; he acts on instinct: that instinct being the product of believing the right things and living that way—what philosophers call “habituation,” or character. As Autrey himself acknowledged after the fact, his actions seemed a bit foolish. But, happily for the stricken man, virtue always doesn’t work in rational ways.
Autrey’s story reminded me of the great Christian leader of the Czech revolution in 1989, Father Václav Maly. When I met him in 1990 in Prague and told him what a hero he was to me, he stopped and said, “Oh, no, Chuck. I was just doing my duty.”
Few of us will ever have to demonstrate what Carson calls “the extraordinary virtue of ordinary people” in such spectacular ways. But all of us can aspire to live in a way that will make our “split-second decisions” just as virtuous and praiseworthy.
There are links to further information at the source document.
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It's nice top see Wesley Autrey getting lots of recognition and nice gifts of cash and cars and free Disney vacations. Donald Trump laid $10,000 on him. And why not? There are plenty of scum in this world who have more "toys" than theory know what to do with
Catholic Ping
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This picture in the White House (?) -- is that this man?
Yes, that's Wesley Autrey in the center and those are his two daughters in the foreground.
They saw it happen and didn't know for 20 minutes whether their father had been killed by the train.
Wonderful post!
Like your commentary also ...
A vote for Obama is a vote for Osama bin laden.
Wesley Autrey is a true New York Hero, in my books. So are Julio Gonzalez and Pedro Nevarez: the two guys who (in the same week Mr Autrey became a Hero) successfully caught in midair a kid plunging toward the sidewalk from the fourth floor of an apartment building.
These incidents reminded me of what I probably knew already and yet had began to forget. 9/11 proved it but the passage of time makes everything blurry. So here it is for the record:
New York City is, and always has been, chock-full of Heroes: people who will get into the line of fire, people who will risk their lives, who will give their all, for their fellow human beings.
FDNY and NYPD and Rudolph Giuliani proved it 5 1/2 years ago, as did Rick Rescorla. Curtis Sliwa proved it back in 1979. Messrs Autrey, Gonzales and Nevarez provide us with a timely reminder.
We hear alot about NYC residents being rude, uncaring, brusque. To me, that is 100% pure bulldust.
NYC Rocks! NYC is a city of Heroes! A City that Never Sleeps.
Kia Kaha
*DieHard*
I think it is Gracie Mansion or City Hall in NYC. That is Mayor Bloomberg in the photo.
Personally I think he did it for selfish reasons and in my book, that makes him even more of a hero. I couldn't imagine just watching someone die if I had the chance to save them, I just couldn't look myself in the mirror the next day.
When someone saves another life, I think in general they do it for themselves. People automatically empathize with others who are in danger, they put themselves in their situiation and know they have to act because if they don't then they won't be able to live with themselves.
And a selfish reason for their benovelence make sense, the most common answer I've heard to the question "Why did you do it?" is "I couldn't live with myself if I didn't"
I've been in a situation that was nowhere near as heroic -- a horse got in trouble tangled up in his halter rope. He was on the point of blowing and hurting himself or someone else . . . and without even thinking I walked into his stall, got to his head, and quickly took his halter off.
It isn't a conscious thought, thinking what you're going to do, what the consequences might be, or what people might think.
It's as though there's a picture in your head. You SEE the problem, you SEE the solution, and your body acts. No time for conscious reasoning at all.
My riding instructor chewed me out afterwards, yelled that I could have been hurt or even killed. And my only response was, "I know, but I had to do it."
Can't explain it any better than that. It's not really automatic, because your brain is working, but at the time it seems like the only thing to do.
I want to be Wesley Autrey when I grow up.
The most amazing thing was that in interview after interview, the rescuer was asked, "How long did it take you to make the decision to do this?" I think the longest decision-making time was about 15 minutes.
None of this weighing, wondering, wavering and weeping. People just said, "My neighbor Mr. Goldman said they were rounding up Jews, and my wife and I gave each other a look, and she nodded, and I said, "Why don't you and your family move into our basement for awhile?"
Just like that. These people had a habit of virtue. They had dealt the issues in their own minds long before. Altruism was a settled, ingrained, almost automatic feature of their character.
Yes, that's what I want to be when I grow up.
I disagree but even if you are right it still shows that he wasn't acting altruistically.
Of course I was brought up to help folks in a fix -- that's what Southerners do.
But the habit becomes so ingrained that it's like sight-reading music, or a Marine marching . . . it doesn't process through the conscious mind at all. You do it because that's what you're SUPPOSED to do.
And how you're brought up has a lot to do with that. In other words, it's altruistically motivated but you're trained from birth to BE altruistic, so it becomes second nature.
I guess it's a "do the right thing before you think" kind of training.
God bless our soldiers, for whom heroism is routine.
This is an extreme case, many folks wouldn't have had the nerve, but to decry altruism is wrong.
A lack of altruism, of human feeling and charity to others, is not a GOOD thing.
I've knocked around the world for fifty years or so, and the only people I've known who seriously espoused the philosophy of "I'm all right Jack" were more or less disturbed. One turned out to be a murderer, and I wasn't particularly surprised.
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