Danger, Death, and... Dieting?

Courage is first among virtues in epic and in cultures of honor. Men cared to be known for their courage. It not only took courage to fight well, but often the issue being fought over was who had more of it. Courage was competitive. Men were ranked according to the degree of courage they possessed. Arguments arose as to what counted as truly courageous, the perfect form of the virtue, and what were lesser though still worthy semblances of it. Not only philosophers theorized about courage: warriors, politicians, and even spectators did as well. The stakes were high, and so there emerged a politics of courage, a jockeying to define your performances as worthier than your competitor’s.

Thus we have Pericles of Athens arguing — and trying to convince his fellow citizens — that Athenian courage is superior to Spartan courage. His claim is that courage came naturally and voluntarily to Athenians, while Spartans had to be force-fed theirs by laborious, state-imposed training: “The prize for courage will surely be awarded most justly to those who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger.” Wishful thinking? Rigging the criteria of the prize for courage? Or just trying buck up the citizenry for the war at hand?

Was it more courageous to seek death in battle or to fight well, fully wanting to come out alive? Thus one Spartan, Aristodemus by name, was denied the first prize for courage (“prize” is not a metaphor; these prizes were official evidences of recognition) at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, though he had rushed forward in fury and routed a large force of Persians. The prize was instead given to Posidonius, a man who had fought bravely but held his place in the phalanx line. Aristodemus’s courage was judged inferior because he wanted to die in battle to redeem honor he had lost at Thermopylae, whereas Posidonius had fought bravely without any wish to die. He wanted to get out alive if he could, though he would die if he must. The Spartans wanted to reduce the glory of that courage born of despair.

The politics of courage is with us today. People still care intensely about courage, and we’re still trying to stack the deck in our own favor. Determining who has courage, what actions count, who gets the prize, is disputed now no less than in the Iliad. In our day we hear people praised for their courage for sticking to a diet, for giving up smoking, even for investing in a Silicon Valley start-up. Some might lament the debasing of courage’s coin, but others might rejoice that the virtue has been rescued from danger and death, softened and made more readily available to all by eliminating risk to life and limb while still employing martial metaphors to describe takeovers and acquisitions, the entrepreneurial risk. But it was ever thus. Theories of courage cannot escape tendentiousness or self-interest.

Indeed, Plato claims that philosophers, not warriors, are the purest exemplars of courage. The former, he says, do not fear death at all because they know life is really something best gotten over with, while the latter face death because of a greater fear of shame. He tries to preempt criticism of this preposterous claim by putting it in Socrates’ mouth as he awaits death. No one doubted Socrates’ courage. He was rather vain about it himself and, as a younger man, had won a reputation as a fearless soldier in the polis’s wars. Socrates was not fearless because he was a philosopher, but because he was Socrates, a man who, as once was said of U. S. Grant, didn’t scare worth a damn.

Needless to say, Plato’s view is hardly disinterested; one detects the influence of the philosophers’ lobby. Some of the braver people I have met do not happen to be in humanities departments, nor in law schools, for that matter. A good portion of the wondrousness of Joshua Chamberlain’s stand at Little Round Top was that he managed it even though he was a classics professor.

The broad view of courage, the view that would make resisting pleasure a matter of courage, is hardly the dominant view, nor is it a recent invention of the American self-esteem movement. Plato articulates it in an early dialogue. Socrates asks Laches, a well-known general, to define courage, and when Laches comes up with a quite reasonable one from combat — “remaining at one’s post and not running away” — Socrates presses him to expand it to include those “who are not only courageous against pain or fear, but mighty to contend against desires and pleasures.” Plato may thus well be the first to grant courage to the dieter or to the person who says no to a tempting adulterous affair.

The stricter or narrower view gets its classic formulation in Aristotle, who makes courage a matter of risking life and limb in war for the polis. The martial view is easily the dominant view, informing heroic literature and songs of triumph from Ur to Ugarit, to Judea and Nineveh, to the Germanic North. Indeed, it is pretty nearly a universal view of courage, and the broad view must be understood as a reaction to it, an attempt to steal a bit of martial courage’s luster.

Yet even within the confines of the stricter view of courage two basic conceptions warred against each other as to which best represented the purest form. In a nutshell: was courage best exemplified by offense, marching into the teeth of danger, by single heroic combat in the Homeric style, or was it best exemplified by defense, by refusal to quit one’s post, by patient suffering over time? Later this dispute was captured by warring ideologies: heroic aggressive honor vs. Christian and Stoic fortitude. The contrasts are not only substantive but also stylistic. Offense tended to be noisier, favoring intense expenditures of energy in short bursts with long, lazy intervals in between. Defense required stolidity, insistence, constancy, and above all endurance.

The courage of offense was and remained the preserve of men and, by widespread ideology across a multitude of cultures, upper-class men. The courage of defense, though by obvious necessity and by definition, was no less at home on the battlefield than the courage of offense. It also had within it seeds of expansion, for it was called to service in a multitude of miserable and horrific conditions. Consider that a good portion of ancient and medieval warfare was siege warfare. More than anything it involved the ability to endure long, drawn-out suffering, pain, and hunger, and the constant importuning visions of eating your children, or being eaten by them. Consult the curse of Deuteronomy 28.53–57 for a vivid depiction of such siege horrors: denying your remaining children the flesh of their brothers and sisters because you want it all for yourself. Those trapped inside the walls were not just aristocratic men. But even the besiegers’ virtue was of the defensive variety, as they too had to scrounge for food and had to endure in their tents and huts the cold and wet, the inevitable diseases, until it came time to storm the breach in the walls. In siege, both besieger and besieged were vying to see who could suffer longer.

The ability to take it, not dish it out, becomes the prize-winning form of courage — resulting in an express ticket to heaven — for it was argued that courage was best exemplified by martyrdom. And women were no less eligible than men, rather more so in fact, for some of the most stunningly heroic of martyrs were women: Saints Perpetua in the third century AD and Blandina in the second. They could not be broken morally, even though every part of their bodies had been broken. The courage of defense, martyr-like fortitude, began to dominate on the battlefield. As war became more mechanized, the virtues needed to endure started to trump those needed to charge, though the charge, with its grandness and intensity, never lost its allure. The image to keep in mind is the trenches of the Great War, where for all the extraordinary courage it took to go over the top, months could go by before one had to charge. And in the meantime, one had to suffer unrelenting mud, cold, filth, constant shelling, gas, the ubiquitous corpses and the stench of their rot, and the rats who ate them, the flies that hatched their young in them, and the smell of your own rotting trench feet. Take away the gas and shelling and some of the corpses and you have the endurance required of Roman legions doing duty on the Rhine, who mutinied on occasion because of the sheer misery of cold and wet and a term of service that never seemed to end.

The death camp and Gulag of the twentieth century succeed in making survival itself its own kind of courage. Tales of escape and corresponding tales of rescue, life-saving rather than death-dealing, begin to elicit their share of prizes: Victoria Crosses and Medals of Honor become as likely to be won by medics and stretcher bearers as by the man who storms the machine-gun nest.

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A Civil War veteran, Abner Small, wrote of the “mystery of bravery.” What baffled Small was that men were heroes or cowards “in spite of themselves.” Character seemed, to him, to bear little relation to action. There was no predictability as to who would play the hero and who the coward, or that once having played such, they would resume the same role the next battle, or instead switch costume, willy-nilly. Something, though, makes us want to resist the starkness of Small’s view that character does not matter, for even Small, and surely his sergeants, would have a fairly good sense of who was more likely to deliver, even if they had to recognize they were dealing with probabilities, not certainty. Good men could break, mediocre men could have a good day.

It might have been easier to predict who would play what role in the conditions of ancient Greek or medieval battle, which were often over in a few hours, or avoided, or made seasonal events. This gave soldiers time to restore their inner resources in the off-season. Less frequent demands were made on their courage than would be the case when battles lengthened in the nineteenth century and began to share some of the characteristics of siege.

Once battles started to last weeks, even months, it was less clear who would bring what virtues or vices to bear on any particular day, except for the roughly 1 to 2 percent who are constitutionally fearless or a bit mad (Gideon’s three hundred who lappeth like dogs), or the perhaps somewhat larger number who are constitutionally craven. Most people fall in between and will have their good days and bad days. The speeches of army leaders from the earliest recorded periods assume that exhortation is necessary to get a better-than-average performance. The assumption behind those speeches is that one and the same army, one and the same man, can fight courageously one day or run in panic the next; courage can be fragile and needs to be nurtured. Everyone knows that fear is the presiding deity in battle.

Sometime in the midst of the Great War, courage came to be conceptualized as a bank account. Each man had a fixed amount that could be drawn on only so many times before he went bankrupt. Even the best of soldiers had to economize on their courage, save it up, replenish it. The bank account image can hardly excuse us comfortable sorts who seldom have demands made on our courage, unless in an emergency, when what will be demanded of us is akin to that one-shot courage of the charge. And if we fail then? Will we suffer for a lifetime, as did Conrad’s Lord Jim trying to live it down? This issue was discussed with unsurpassable brilliance 3,800 years ago in the Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe. Sinuhe, though he subsequently proved himself a great warrior, never fully assuaged the anguish he spent a lifetime trying to live down. Why did his heart betray him and cause him to flee his lord? Some acts of
cowardice are more easily redeemable than others, though in cultures of honor they must be redeemed by the forgiveness of others, not by the easy self-forgiveness urged on us today.

Another Civil War memoirist, Robert Burdette, was also mystified by courage, but in a different way from Small. He doubted whether it was possible to tell who was a coward and who a hero. How, he asks, does God tell? His bafflement was prompted by a man in his unit whom he called the “good coward,” who ran away from every battle but always showed up for the next one, fully intending to do his duty. But as soon as the person next to him got hit, he would run away yet again. The good coward felt his shame acutely; he tried to make up for it by sharing his food and taking smaller portions. The good coward’s virtue was not, however, just a matter of his good intentions and inner struggle. Burdette is not that foolishly generous, for making courage solely a matter of one’s inner state would excuse the bulk of cowardly action. It is not only that he overcame his inner demons to show up for the next assault, but also that he faced real danger before he ran away. Courage absolutely requires facing real danger. The good intentions of soldiers who got details in hospitals in St. Louis or Cincinnati, who never faced danger and thus never risked the shame of flight from battle, are thus of a significantly lower moral order in Burdette’s mind than those of the good coward. (And that is why, though we might call the phobic who steels himself to pet a beagle courageous, we are using the term out of pity more than admiration. Courage requires dealing with an objective peril.)

Many soldiers are exceedingly anxious and judgmental about their own courage. Even manifestly courageous people, those who performed unambiguously courageous deeds or who stood firm under the most withering bombardment, doubt whether they manifested courage, or whether they just got lucky. Why so ungenerous to themselves? Two reasons emerge from the memoirs of soldiers. For one, they have seen too much of the politics of courage, in which the medal spoils system is not always just, with many wondrously courageous men getting none and some recipients getting theirs for reasons other than their courage, if any. But mostly because their overwhelming experience, no less than the coward’s, was one of consuming fear and confusion, with the luck to have their fear trigger the fight rather than the flight reflex.

Can we train ourselves to have more dispositional likelihood to have our fear make us fight rather than flee or freeze? Aristotle thought so, and those who train soldiers agree. One can practice courage, or learn rote movements so that a kind of automatism will take over when fear smothers your soul.

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My politics of courage, which should by now be pretty apparent, keeps largely confined to the narrow Aristotelian view of facing real danger to life and limb, the courage demanded by war and brutal conditions. So I will expand my account to raise the question of moral courage. Moral courage is a rather recent development; the term does not appear in English until the nineteenth century. It took a largely pacified society for people to think to distinguish stand-up-in-meeting kind of courage — the courage of risking ridicule, humiliation, loss of employment, or social ostracism for speaking out against injustice, or of defying immoral or illegal orders from a superior — from plain old courage. Before then, to stand up against the judges trying to burn your neighbor as a witch or your cousin as a heretic could get you burned as one too. Your life was on the line.

But moral courage bears one particular worthy distinction from physical courage, to the extent they really are all that distinguishable. Moral courage is lonely courage. Physical courage is no less courageous for having the support of comrades on the left and right in a shield wall, and when it must be carried out alone, it is all the more admirable. But moral courage loses its virtue when it is backed by a substantial support group. It takes no courage, moral or otherwise, for instance, to speak out against war in a university setting.

Moral courage, though, cannot dispense completely with physical courage. Imagine the person who quite alone speaks out against an injustice in a meeting hostile to the just position, but who retracts his statement as soon as someone threatens to punch him once the meeting breaks up. And though there are myriad examples of people with physical courage who are sorely lacking in moral courage, moral courage is largely hypothetical to the physical coward. Moral courage, to be entitled to its morals, or to its courage, cannot let itself be squelched by a threatening glance.

It may be that the purest moral courage is to be found in war, for someone fully committed to honor in a culture of honor to refuse battle when it would be unwise to fight, knowing he will be taunted as a coward, the insult more painful to him than any other (or even demoted or shot, in some regimes). It is the courage to refuse the temptation of the primal courage of the charge. Some, such as Fabius Cunctator, eventually are honored when the wisdom of their strategy is proved; others, like the Confederate defensive genius Joseph E. Johnston, just lose their position.

Recall Pericles’ assertion that Athenian courage was more praiseworthy than Spartan courage because the Athenian version existed even in the face of the good life they had. Pericles may be protesting too much, for he is well aware of the conventional wisdom, which was conventional even then. Moralists have always feared that wealth and peace, both good things to be sure, are hard on virtues like courage and toughness. But then it seems that the inevitable cost of the successes won by courage, sacrifice, and other virtues is that they secure the conditions for their own undoing. Sons and daughters grow up spoiled and soft, rich enough to buy substitutes to fight the wars their polity still deems necessary, but which they, deep down, feel are not worth fighting.