Courage

The subject of courage baffles me. I hear people use the word, I see it in news stories, but I fail to grasp its essence. Maybe it has no essence. I’m told it has a relationship with fear and virtue, but I can’t find a felicitous connection. I’ve sought help in collections of quotations, and … well, I’ll just show you what happens.

I’ll start with the view of courage held by Joe Sixpack, as expressed by John Wayne, The Duke of Hollywood legend. With cowboy brevity, he said:

Courage is being scared to death … and saddling up anyway.

So many problems there. Wayne is offering only the warrior’s notion of courage, the kind that would probably be the death of me. I imagine my sergeant ordering me and a few others to charge up Pork Chop Hill and take out a machine gun nest. That sounds pretty reckless to me; I’ve got a family back home, and, oh yeah … I don’t want to die. And damn that sergeant for the conflict he’s laid on me — either being labeled a coward and court-martialed or being riddled with bullets.

OK, say I and one other soldier survive. We make it home, and we’re decorated for valor. Years pass, we age. My war buddy starts losing his hair. He can’t stand the thought of being called “Baldy.” His courage deserts him and he buys a toupee. What would The Duke say?

It’s also doubtful that being “scared to death” is obligatory. It fact, maybe a simple “Oh, God no!” and an involuntary spritz of adrenaline are enough to trigger an act considered courageous. We’ve all seen interviews of people hailed as heroes who say, in essence, “I didn’t think about the risk to myself. I didn’t think at all. I just acted.” Can an involuntary action be rightly called virtuous?

I chastised myself for taking The Duke seriously and swung from the pole of zero gravitas to its opposite, the ancient Greeks. This quotation from Plato caught my eye:

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

This aphorism needs unpacking. By implication, it also means knowing the contrary, what to fear. And “knowing,” of course, means having knowledge — in this case, knowledge of what is fearful. Further, by knowledge Plato must mean ideas gained from experience, instruction, or both. Therefore, Plato believed that courage is a virtue that is learned. This conclusion is clearly established in the dialogue Laches, in which two Greek noblemen prevail on Socrates to guide them in putting their sons on a virtuous path.

Plato would never assert that a child could be courageous, that a courageous act could be reflexive, or that courage could be seen in someone without earlier moral guidance. Chief among his guiding concepts is a hierarchy of fears. The most fearful thing, surprisingly, is not death; it’s shame. A warrior, raised properly, would know that death is preferable to fleeing and facing the contempt of his countrymen.

Aristotle echoed Plato’s notion of courage. He claimed a courageous act was one of moderation. It was the middle ground between cowardice and foolhardiness. In fact, all of Aristotle’s virtues lie between extremes. So Greek!

In Laches, Socrates gets to the verge of declaring that all the virtues are derivatives of courage. Plato seems to lack the … what? courage? … to put the words in his mouth. Aristotle takes up the idea, sort of. He asserts that other virtues — honesty, for instance — will be present if courage is present. It seems that Aristotle never met a brave man who inflated his war stories or cheated on his wife.

What disturbs me most about the ancient Greeks is this progression: honor is fidelity to one’s ideals and one’s polis; shows of courage may be necessary to demonstrate one’s honor; if this means violence and death, so be it. Perhaps their thinking would have taken a different turn had they known of Buddha or could have imagined a future in which large populations are annihilated. They had no experience of Christ, the Quaker movement, conscientious objectors, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Hence they had no exemplars of passive resistance. Would they judge such people to be cowards for not meeting violence with violence? I’m inclined to think they’d have only contempt for nonviolence.

Would the ancient Greeks also respect a life sacrificed for the sake of a non-Greek culture? For example, would they say that the 9-11 terrorists were courageous? I can’t imagine they would. In fact, most of the world today, including many Islamic nations, believe suicide terrorists are cowards. After all, the people they kill are usually civilians, innocent and defenseless. Yet, their plea might be compelling:

In the eyes of the West, we are subhuman. You spit on us and mock our beliefs. You take our land and disrespect our leaders. You perpetuate inequality and leave us with no respectable way to win our rights. You say we are contemptible cowards. We say that we fight with the only tools left to us.

It would be a revelation to discover a dialogue in which Socrates made this case. A revelation and an impossibility. Such thoughts would never enter his mind.

I have one more quote to share. It comes from Jim Hightower, author of The Hightower Lowdown and “America’s most popular populist”:

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

I know where breaking with conformity would go in Plato’s hierarchy of fears. He told us — at the top. The scorn of one’s neighbors is more terrible than violent death. This is the first sentence of a warrior’s creed. I can draw a straight line between its acceptance and a world in the shadow of supersonic missiles with nuclear payloads. If we were ever in need of nonconformity, it’s now.