{"id":15,"date":"2002-12-04T09:20:00","date_gmt":"2002-12-04T14:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=15"},"modified":"2002-12-04T09:20:00","modified_gmt":"2002-12-04T14:20:00","slug":"sneering-at-courage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=15","title":{"rendered":"Sneering at Courage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the overdue lessons of 9\/11 is that we can&#8217;t afford to sneer<br \/>\nat physical courage any more.  The willingness of New York firemen,<br \/>\nSpecial Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93<br \/>\nto put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots<br \/>\nwe&#8217;ve had in the war against terror.  We are learning, once again,<br \/>\nthat all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the<br \/>\nwillingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful<br \/>\nresponsibility of using lethal force in our defense.<\/p>\n<p>(And, usually, it is men who do the risking.  I mean no disrespect<br \/>\nto our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an<br \/>\nexclusive male monopoly.  But it has been predominently the job of<br \/>\nmen in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ll return to this point later in the essay.)<\/p>\n<p>The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of <em>bien<br \/>\npensants<\/em> in our culture.  Many of the elite molders of opinion in<br \/>\nthe U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men.  They<br \/>\nhave spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning<br \/>\nit to fantasy, sneering at it &mdash; trying to persuade us all that<br \/>\nit&#8217;s at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.<\/p>\n<p>If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the<br \/>\nconnotations of the phrase &#8220;testosterone poisoning&#8221;.  Ask yourself<br \/>\nwhen you first heard it, and where, and from whom.  Then ask yourself<br \/>\nif you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man&#8217;s<br \/>\ndeclaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for<br \/>\nwhat he believes in.  When some ordinary man says he is willing to<br \/>\ntake on the likes of the 9\/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper &mdash; or<br \/>\neven ordinary criminals &mdash; them, do you praise his determination<br \/>\nor consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?<\/p>\n<p>Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support.  If we mock<br \/>\nour would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or<br \/>\nsimpletons, we&#8217;ll find courage in short supply when we need it.  If we<br \/>\nmake the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men<br \/>\n&mdash; cops, soldiers, firemen &mdash; we&#8217;ll find that we have<br \/>\ntrouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse:<br \/>\nour brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted<br \/>\nand despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and<br \/>\nentitled to take their due when it is not freely given.  More than one<br \/>\nculture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.<\/p>\n<p>Before 9\/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage<br \/>\nis a functional virtue in ordinary men.  But Todd Beamer reminded us of<br \/>\nthat &mdash; and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the<br \/>\nforms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage.<br \/>\nRemember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side<br \/>\nsocialites cruising firemen&#8217;s bars?  Biology tells; medals and<br \/>\ntickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero&#8217;s most<br \/>\nnatural and strongest reward is willing women.<\/p>\n<p>Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of<br \/>\npeople who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a<br \/>\njudgment on American sins; &mdash; the multiculturalists, the<br \/>\npostmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the<br \/>\nacademic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists,<br \/>\nand the plain old-fashioned loony left.  By and large these people<br \/>\nnever liked or trusted physical courage, and it&#8217;s worth taking a hard<br \/>\nlook at why that is.<\/p>\n<p>Feminists distrust physical courage because it&#8217;s a male virtue.<br \/>\nWomen can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just<br \/>\nas surely as nurturance is to femininity.  This has always been<br \/>\nunderstood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and<br \/>\nmodern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors.  If<br \/>\none&#8217;s world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and<br \/>\nmaleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is<br \/>\nregressive.<\/p>\n<p>For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect<br \/>\nbecause it&#8217;s psychologically linked to moral certitude &mdash; and<br \/>\nmoral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from<br \/>\nintolerance and bigotry.  Men who believe in anything enough to fight<br \/>\nfor it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &#038;mdash,<br \/>\nunless, of course, they&#8217;re tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which<br \/>\nfanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.<\/p>\n<p>Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more<br \/>\nthan a touch of class warfare about them.  Every upper crust<br \/>\nthat is not directly a military caste &mdash; including our own<br \/>\n&mdash; tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants<br \/>\nand proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they<br \/>\nknow their place is to be guided by their betters.<\/p>\n<p>For transnational progressives and the left in general, male<br \/>\nphysical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it&#8217;s an<br \/>\n<em>individualizing<\/em> virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about<br \/>\nautonomy and the proper limits of social power.  A man who develops in<br \/>\nhimself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less<br \/>\nlikely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who<br \/>\nhave not passed that same test.  Brave men who have learned to fight<br \/>\nfor their <em>own<\/em> concept of virtue &mdash; independently of<br \/>\nsocial approval or the party line &mdash; are especially threatening<br \/>\nto any sort of collectivist.<\/p>\n<p>The multiculturalist&#8217;s and the collectivist&#8217;s suspicions are<br \/>\nbackhanded tributes to an important fact.  There is a continuity among<br \/>\nself-respect, physical courage and ethical\/moral courage. These virtues are<br \/>\nthe soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in<br \/>\nindividualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another.<br \/>\nThey reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward<br \/>\nany of them tend to increase all of them.<\/p>\n<p>After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues.  We tried to teach<br \/>\nboys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men<br \/>\nare expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to<br \/>\nspecialists.  We preached the virtue of `self-esteem&#8217; to adolescents<br \/>\nwhile gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that<br \/>\nmight have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect.  Meanwhile,<br \/>\nour entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated<br \/>\nphysical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind.<br \/>\nWe taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant<br \/>\ntruth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood.<br \/>\nAnd we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.<\/p>\n<p>Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did.<br \/>\nBut they were written off as reactionaries &mdash; and many of us were<br \/>\nfoolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper<br \/>\ncrop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men<br \/>\napt to fold under pressure.  We became, in Jeffrey Snyder&#8217;s famous<br \/>\ndiagnosis, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rkba.org\/comment\/cowards.html\">a nation<br \/>\nof cowards<\/a>; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime<br \/>\nrates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.<\/p>\n<p>But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War,<br \/>\nwe could afford.  Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from<br \/>\nthe home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear<br \/>\nweapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant.  So it remained<br \/>\nuntil al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>Now we have need of courage.  Al-Qaeda&#8217;s war has come to us.  There<br \/>\nis a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue<br \/>\nis to smash state sponsors of terrorism.  But this war is not<br \/>\nprimarily a chess-game between nations &mdash; it&#8217;s a street-level<br \/>\nbrawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells<br \/>\noften having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda<br \/>\nother than by sympathy of ideas.<\/p>\n<p>Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and<br \/>\ncitizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be<br \/>\neverywhere that terrorists might strike.  John F. Kennedy said this during<br \/>\nthe Cold War, but it is far truer now:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to<br \/>\ntake arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic<br \/>\npurpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and<br \/>\nsacrifice for that freedom.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and<br \/>\nself-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman&#8217;s readiness than<br \/>\nhis weapons.  So the next time you see a man claim the role<br \/>\nof defender, don&#8217;t sneer &mdash; cheer.  Don&#8217;t write him off with some<br \/>\npseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He&#8217;s trying to<br \/>\ntool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for,<br \/>\nfighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.<\/p>\n<p>Whether he&#8217;s in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby<br \/>\n&mdash; we need that courage now.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=85522590\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the overdue lessons of 9\/11 is that we can&#8217;t afford to sneer at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen, Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93 to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots we&#8217;ve had in the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=15\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sneering at Courage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}