On Courage
In my essay last week I talked about my ambivalent reaction to the movie Saving Private Ryan. Although visually powerful, I found the story full of holes and the overall moral framework poorly constructed. But it would take a cold heart indeed not to watch the opening invasion scene and not feel something of the terror experienced by the men who landed on the beach that day. Then, too, one can’t help but feel that the sheer massiveness of the undertaking, the incredible firepower unleashed, the waves of flesh and blood, somehow made each soldier seem inconsequential. Indeed, life was held cheap that day.
I watched that landing sequence and two questions kept passing through my mind: how on earth did they convince men to perform a task they had a poor chance of surviving (a theme repeated in Masters of the Air, and a question that also occurred to me on my visits to the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg), and how would I have performed in that circumstance? I have found no satisfactory answer to either question. To ask whether we could pass the test of courage in extreme circumstances also requires us to ask how me might fare in less extreme ones. One couldn't hide on the beaches of Normandy, but one can hide in the board room.
I thought Spielberg tried to individuate the experience of the soldiers in relief against the great mass of troops, and he also did an admirable job demonstrating that before the could conquer the Germans many of the soldiers had to conquer their own fear. I suspect that many soldiers also had to deal with the crisis of confidence that comes from believing that your commanders seemed largely indifferent to your individual fate, they having done in advance their calculus of probable casualties. This grinding mechanization of brute force on a massive scale is a defining feature of modern warfare, and it necessarily alters the way we view one of the central virtues we might otherwise identify with war: courage.
As we’ve argued before, all virtues take place in the midst of circumstances that require of us some sort of action. How do we respond to danger? To wealth or its absence? To disagreement? To strangeness? To temptation? In many ways our responses are visceral, if not simply reactive. We feel it in our gut. In Greek, thumos refers to the spirited part of our faculties that responds to these situations and directs our actions. One can have too much or too little thumos — that is to say, the part of us stimulated by the experience, our gut reaction, operates too strongly or too weakly. A virtuous response will avoid both extremes.
Nothing concentrates the faculties like the gallows. The intensity of our reaction relates directly to the seriousness of the threat. The higher the risk, the higher the stakes, the more our viscera are brought into play. Psychologists describe high-risk, high-stake situations as evoking a “fight-or-flight” syndrome, but such situations can also result in fools rushing in where wise men fear to tread. When faced with threats to life and limb, such as the soldiers faced on the beaches of Normandy, our reason will often fail us. We might misdiagnose our situation: hey, there are a lot of soldiers here, what are the odds that I get injured or killed? I’m special in some way, so I’m convinced no harm can come to me. It’s just my luck that I’ll be sitting in one of the doomed landing craft because bad things always happen to me.
If these examples are correct, they indicate that part of our ability to respond to high-risk, high-stakes situations results from our assessment of how we had responded in other situations either similar to the one we find ourselves in (equally high-risk and high-stakes), or from situations that were lower-risk and lower-stakes but nonetheless tested the quality of our ability to be steadfast in the face of danger. In other words, our ability to display the kind of virtue required in extreme situations may well result from our ability to display it in less extreme ones. “No man is a hero to his valet.” Those of us who regard self-reflection as an essential part of our maturation as human beings will recall well those times, likely too many to count, where our nerve failed us even in low-stakes situations. We will have to come to grips with the rationalizations we provide for such failure, usually predicated on some sort of risk-reward calculus. We easily convince ourselves either that our actions wouldn't make a difference or we might shrug our shoulders indicating a kind of indifference to what's at stake. We can easily delude ourselves by such devices.
One of the arguments Socrates engages involves whether virtue can be taught. We might regard teaching virtue as akin to teaching a child to ride a bike: it can’t be done in a classroom or by reading a book. It results from repeated activity and involves skinned knees. Often in life we don’t wear helmets, and so the risks involved may contain actual danger, but may also seem to us more dangerous than they actually are. One must prove oneself: you don’t put a beginning rider on a dangerous mountain path. We need smooth, open and empty sidewalks and training wheels at first, and then gradually graduate to more treacherous spaces. The lessons of our initiation are never negated; rather, they are carried forward into our new ventures. Balancing, pedaling, and braking will never not be part of riding a bike. Likewise, steady nerves and composure will never not be part of courage.
Virtue, an intentional act directed toward a proper end, requires such training. Here I want to talk a bit more specifically about courage as a virtue. We may not realize how often in life we are called upon to make risk-reward calculations. Do I stand up to a bully or for someone who is being bullied? Do I call my boss out for doing his or her job poorly? Do I question the authority of government bureaucrats when their actions don’t serve the public weal? Do I hold a friend accountable for suspect activity? Do I challenge regnant orthodoxies based on my conviction that they are ill-conceived? How do I act when I am putting a job or a relationship or my accumulated wealth or my reputation on the table?
I’ll use my experience in the academy as an example. One of the dominant clichés frequently used was that we must “speak truth to power.” This phrase not only obscured the question of who was really holding power — particularly rhetorical power — but also what speaking the truth entailed. It may be right for a college faculty member to denounce racism or sexism or binarism, but it can’t be considered an act of courage because that person isn’t risking anything in doing so. Contrariwise, one might as a professor boldly advocate for racist ideas, and you’d certainly be risking your career in doing so, but we’d hardly consider such advocacy virtuous. Being audacious isn’t the same as being courageous, for virtue not only selects the right means it also directs them to the right ends.
For this reason, philosophers have long found the conduct of soldiers to be both a model for how courage operates and also as posing one of virtue's biggest dilemmas. Let’s reflect back on D-Day. Most of us would agree that the soldiers who stormed the beaches that day displayed great courage, not because they had no fear but precisely because they experienced such a surfeit of it and managed it. But what of the soldiers protecting the beaches? Did the Germans display great courage in trying to hold their position in the face of such enormous force being thrown at them? Given our conviction that they were defending an unjust cause, how can we defend their courage?
More: given the machinations of modern warfare, how does randomly strafing a front or a firing of mortars at a distant target or dropping bombs from 30,000 feet on to helpless and hapless (and indiscriminate) persons beneath (or from behind a computer screen in a bunker somewhere) qualify as courage? Had modern warfare robbed the soldier of the opportunity to display courage?
Later in Saving Private Ryan the battalion tries to hold the bridge in Ramelle against superior German forces. Given the tightness of battle quarters the engagement devolves into hand-to-hand combat, presenting us with (for my money) the movie’s most disturbing scene: the slow insertion by a German soldier of his knife into the chest of his American victim. Spielberg presents it as an act of almost pornographic intimacy; but is it courage on the part of the German solider? Given the narrative point of view, we see him only as a vicious villain. I’ll confess, in a related vein, that part of my reaction to the movie was that it was foolish in the first place to try hold the bridge against overwhelming odds.
Once that decision was made, however, the soldier’s opportunity to “run and hide” was taken from them. Now engaged in “to the death” hand-to-hand combat it becomes a “him or me” situation. Spielberg does still allow for some distinction, however: Upham, a translator and not a “real” soldier and in some sense a moral anchor in the movie (and Spielberg’s alter-ego), having argued earlier against the execution of a German prisoner, now finds himself paralyzed with fear as his comrade is stabbed by the German soldier, who thereupon sneers at Upham as he saunters past him. After the previously released German soldier returns (implausibly!) to kill Tom Hanks’ character, Upham kills that soldier. My guess is that Spielberg means this to demonstrate war’s transformative effect on character, but I think it more likely indicates that Upham was only moved to act when he was in a risk-free situation. Without fully resorting to some sort of moral equivalence, Spielberg nonetheless has bracketed, or at lest extremely narrowed, the moral focus of warfare, and such narrowing may bring a sharper focus to the question of courage but also rob it of its sense of ultimate moral purpose.
I mean here to both complicate our understanding of courage and also to clarify it, so I must mention one related element and that is that courage is only one of the four cardinal virtues (justice, temperance, and prudence being the other three). We refer to these virtues as “cardinal” because they are the hinges on which all virtues turn. One important aspect of the virtues is their unity, which means that we can’t properly exercise one unless we exercise the others simultaneously. They must operate in balance and harmony with one another. Neither can we expect perfection in such balancing: many German soldiers displayed great steadfastness and nerve in fighting for their cause, but none of that made their cause just.
We might see a difference between “speaking one’s mind” and “standing up for what’s right.” Most of us are inclined to see the second statement as an example of courage, and the first statement might kind of look like the second, but there’s a distinct difference: the latter might not only carry within it more inherent risk, but it also involves prudence and temperance. It is not enough simply to “speak one’s mind” if such speaking does not carefully weigh its relation to the ends one is trying to achieve or the likelihood of achieving those ends by those means. In other words, prudence helps adjust our risk-taking both to the reality of the circumstances and to the likelihood of success. And we have to learn to temper our risk-taking so it doesn’t become mere foolishness or likely to produce the opposite effect of that which we intend. A person advocating for a particular point of view may be passionate and may even be right, but might so alienate people in the process that he actually produces in his audience an aversion to the ideas for which he advocates. That person might score high marks for courage and justice, but without prudence and temperance may soon consign himself to irrelevance or become a pariah.
To go back to my college example, I think campuses are replete with such persons. First of all, the more orthodox the position, which is to say the less risk there is involved in advocating for it, the more likely people will speak up in its defense and falsely regard themselves as courageous for having done so. It may or may not be the case that their cause is just — people typically not offering justifications for orthodoxies — but after awhile their words sound like clanging cymbals and clashing gongs because they have not been properly tempered. Neither have they been prudently employed, typically bullying people into compliance with veiled threats that heterodox opinions will be swiftly dealt with. Two phrases I heard often from the people suspicious of these orthodoxies and the heavy-handed ways in which they were enforced were that we had to “keep our powder dry” and choose carefully “which hills we were going to die on.” Sadly, all-too-often, these people never fired a shot or died defending something. And I wish I had a nickel for every time, after a faculty dust-up, I heard someone whisper in hushed tones “I really appreciate you speaking up there. I agreed with you and it needed to be said.” Oh yeah? Well, where were you when the matter was fully engaged? Your backroom affirmation bespeaks prudence and temperance perhaps — minimizing your risk — but where’s the courage?
To the point: if we can’t display courage in low-risk, low-stakes situations, we can’t be counted on to show it when the risk and stakes are higher. Courage has to be cultivated as a habit. Perhaps what makes training soldiers especially difficult is that such habits prove resistant to cultivation in artificial circumstances, particularly when they can’t possibly mimic the circumstances most of us will, thankfully, never have to face. I’m inclined to believe that there are times when soldiers face the highest-risk, highest-stakes circumstances so that we can keep ours relatively benign; but that, too, brings into play serious questions of justice and prudence. In any case, we can honor them by mimicking their courage when the circumstances warrant.
Photo courtesy of the National Archives. The graphic tells the story of how the French beachhead was supplied on 'D-Day'." Photographer: Steck
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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