Blog by member Rich Folsom- Arete Event 15th February 2011
Courage in the 21st Century
Courage is eloquent. It charms us with stories, and it dominates myths, legends and super heroes the world over. But what is it, and does anything about today make courage different to yesterday? This question – what is courage in the twenty-first century – brought Areté members and guests together last month for an evening of stories and debate.
Our three speakers approached the subject with insight, honesty and humour – making me, for one, sit up and try to figure out how I think about courage. I left with more questions than I arrived with but was in good company doing so.
First we can state the obvious. There are different types of courage – the soldier’s courage to storm a beach is different to the moral courage of Atticus Finch, which is different from the psychological courage of the stroke victim. Courage is not the absence of fear, but a resistance to it – the child that doesn’t recognise danger is not courageous, nor is the maniac who has lost his mind. From this, it follows that the external act is not itself sufficient to identify courage, we need to know what the person was thinking. More on that later.
An act of courage might involve a calculation – a fireman might run into a burning building to save 10 lives, but not 1. That does not make the act where he saves 10 lives less courageous, but we might comment on his courageousness in general if we know how large a social benefit he needs to justify a particular personal risk. Still, an act does not become less courageous because there exists some other situation beyond that person’s risk appetite. Indeed, the person who would always seek a particular benefit, no matter the potential cost to them and others, may be courageous, but will likely also be dangerous – and is straying towards the child and the maniac who cannot perceive and judge risk.
The relation between different types of courage is an interesting one. If you had tested me a few weeks ago, I probably would have instinctively assumed that the physically courageous are, on the whole, more morally courageous, and also more psychologically courageous. Clearly this is unfounded but shows how intellectual laziness can sneak up on us. The physical courage to do a specific, but perhaps gruesome, act involves controlling and suspending deep and primitive (and powerful) fears. Some employ tricks to control these fears – not focusing on the potential consequences and compartmentalising their thoughts – to maintain focus and do the courageous act.
Presented like this, physical courage contrasts with the moral courage to stand true to your beliefs, often over a longer period, with plenty of opportunity for analysis and retreat. The mind in the physically courageous is split – the drive to be virtuous fights and beats the drive to survive. In this battle each of virtue and fear summon mental tricks to influence us. In the physically courageous, virtue wins, and in the coward fear wins. The mind in the morally courageous is different – it recognises the fears and risks along with virtue, but simply selects a winner. Once each of virtue and fear have presented their cases, a judgement is made and the conflict vanishes. True moral courage, for me, has a peace to it that means there was never a conflict, just a decision.
So what of transferability between flavours of courage? I think my thoughts are best expressed with a simile. If we think of selfless behaviour as a destination, and courage as the badge of having reached that destination, then physical courage and moral courage are two routes. The paths are different, as is the view of where you have come from (the physical courage path is littered with internal conflict), but both paths are rocky. It’s the perseverance to deal with rocky terrain that will equip someone to be able to walk both paths. The idea that the end justifies the means, and the ability to suppress the desire to quit, will serve one well on either path. It is this perseverance which will be found in the morally, physically and psychologically courageous, and will make each type of courage a good indicator of the others.
A further factor is the role of competence in courage. We have already mentioned that we should not call it courage when someone is unaware of the risks, or has no fear at all but we should probably also add that an act does not stop being courageous if some unforeseen force makes the plan fail. We call the first recklessness, and the second bad luck or inexperience.
Yet cultures celebrate more the hero who succeeds through courage and skill, than the dead fool who misjudged the risks or exceeded his competence. It seems unfair to hand out the awards of courage and reckless in hindsight. Courage should be divorced from success, and only take into account the person’s thoughts at the time of the act. But if we keep our discipline, and judge courage at the time of the act, do we throw the praise of being courageous around too freely? It incentivises recklessness as people exceed their competence in search of society’s respect. The soldier who charges out of formation, or the race driver that brakes too late, or the journalist that publishes a damning exposé that turns out to false – their drive (be it for virtue, status, or some other cause) exceeded their judgement with bad consequences. Perhaps hero worship, combined with “out of sight being out of mind”, serve a social purpose as they make sure our desires for social status are checked by self-examination of our own abilities.
There is also a Superman bias going on here. Superman risks less than the fireman, but the fireman doesn’t get a comic book and action figure in his name. This is partly the halo effect – the natural tendency to think that all positive traits are correlated. When people are given personality profiles, the attractive profiles are also rated higher for talent, intelligence, kindness and honesty. Not just will we forget that the unsuccessful may also have been courageous, but we will amplify the courageousness of the successful because of their other positive traits. Why this is our inclination is another essay – perhaps the evolutionary biology discussion belongs in the comments – and I’m not sure I have a conclusion here, other than realising I have been using the term courage too blandly.
You will notice in my journey simile above, the destination was virtue, rather than courage. I think this is important. It takes more courage for the fireman to run into a burning house to save 10 lives than 100. It takes even more courage to run into the house to save 1 life than 10. For the same personal risk, he shows how highly he regards the value of his neighbour, revealing virtue, and so we call him courageous. If he searched for empty burning houses to run into though, it would be a lost purpose. He would be a fool, not a hero, as you can not reveal virtue by attempting to reveal virtue. While the courage needed increases as the number of people in the house decreases, running into the empty house would discredit the motive for all the previous acts. Of course, everyone knows this and so no-one runs into burning buildings which they know are empty, but it’s hard to separate out what the chief motivation is as the number of lives available to be saved decreases. As the opportunity to show courage increases, label seekers will be more attracted. The man who wants the label, with the good deed as a happy accident, is behaving very differently to the altruist who does the same good deed. The label seeker is certainly brave to risk life and limb, but he is also looking to reap the benefits, so I hesitate to call him courageous.
This is all shades of grey. Very few are truly ambivalent to social status, just like very few are truly amoral. The rest of us are a blend, and have all kinds of motives for doing things, which sometimes align and sometimes don’t. I am motivated by virtue to do good deeds. I am certainly also, deep down in places I don’t talk about at parties, motivated to do good deeds at personal risk due to the status of being perceived as that kind of person – often then talking down the personal risks afterwards. The balance between the altruism and status seeking varies. I would say I’m only really being courageous when the altruism is the dominant force, but I don’t think it needs to be 100%. What per-cent it needs to be, I haven’t a clue. Your morals are what you do when no-one is watching, but I don’t think it immediately becomes immoral if a spectator is an additional reason to put yourself at risk.
Walph Rando Emerson said “Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world”. It’s real evidence that he truly means his ideas, and so lends weight and honesty to all the other things that he does. It has so much social weight that it has become, to some people, an end in itself. Society has ended up with a clever social trick, the altruistic do good deeds inherently, and the self-serving do good deeds in search of the same label. This is old news, but good news, with the great news that it won’t be changing in the next century.
