On Courage

I’d like to extend some remarks I made recently to a group of students at our university, on the subject of courage. I note the original context for what I’m about to say because one thing I want to say is that the virtue of courage has always been of special importance for young people, and that it is especially important for young people today.

I guess I’m not what my students would call young, though it still feels odd to call myself old. It also feels odd to talk about courage, as if I had the benefit of long experience in being courageous. I haven’t fought any wars, or survived any tragedies, or confronted any epic evils. I haven’t had many great obstacles to overcome. My life has included some adventures, but probably not enough to make a movie. Most of our lives are like that. And I think that’s part of what makes it harder to talk about courage than to talk about some of the other virtues. “Courage” feels like something we see on a screen. What does it have to do with everyday life?

I suppose we know, at an intellectual level, that courage is not just for heroes, and that some people are heroes just for getting out of bed in the morning. But that seems sentimental. We need to think through this a bit more; otherwise we’re just throwing around words that sound nice to make people feel good. Courage isn’t just for heroes, true. But if that means you get to call yourself courageous even though you fold when the chips are down and it’s time to be an actual, honest-to-god, more-than-everyday-sort of hero, then your idea of “courage” will have turned into an excuse for cowardice.

When I think about screen-worthy courage, I think of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. Malick tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, a farmer who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler, for which he faced imprisonment and execution. He stood alone, against his neighbors, who saw in his refusal not courage but betrayal. To us, the film’s viewers, he’s a hero. But to the in-story “viewers,” to his neighbors watching his actions not as a story on a screen but as real life, he is a coward. And his heroism has a lot to do with the fact that he is not lauded for it, except by us, after the fact. Jägerstätter is a hero; but he is definitely not a superhero.

The difference, of course, is that heroes exist and superheroes do not. A Hidden Life is a true story; Iron Man is a fantasy. And yet, if Iron Man is no more than a melodrama, A Hidden Life is more than a little dramatic, and the courage that Franz Jägerstätter shows is so extreme that we might still be left wondering what his story has to do with us, even if the story is true. You wake up, you go to class, you go to work, you do your thing, you go to bed, you do it all over again the next day, and there are no Nazis in sight. There’s real courage and there’s comic book courage, but what do you even need the real kind for? It sounds so lofty it might as well be a fantasy. And fantasies are for children. Eventually, you have to grow up – right?

When I was a boy, I spent a lot of time fighting invisible enemies. My parents talk about how they would watch from the house as I walked out to the barn to do chores, and I’d be swinging a stick in all directions, slashing away at the bad guys. As I recall, they were usually ninjas. My own boys do the same thing. Fantasies are for children: that’s how it should be. And it’s no accident, I think, that as children so many of our fantasies are dreams of courage in the face of danger. We are practicing for something, playing at being what we must become. Nor is it any accident that this child’s play is inspired by children’s stories of heroes, and maybe even by stories of superheroes, which do have their place. To become what we must be, we need not only practice, but the inspiration to practice.

You do have to grow up. But growing up does not mean giving up on the romance of courage and embracing the cold logic of utility in that overheated pursuit of pleasure which our culture so drearily persists in calling “real life.” If childhood is about a fantasy of courage, manhood and womanhood is about having the courage to be done with the fantasy, and getting on with the reality. It is about actually becoming courageous, with all the seriousness that real courage entails. But what is it, then? What is “real courage”?

Courage is a virtue, and it may help to say first what “virtue” is, for those not familiar with the term, and for those who think it has something to do with being prudish about sex. Virtues are habits of the heart and mind that are necessary for the pursuit of human flourishing. “Flourishing” is not the same as pleasure, and it cannot be understood in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. No one would say, for example, that Franz Jägerstätter’s experience was “pleasant,” or that his decision to defy Hitler was “rational” because he could expect it to produce more benefits than costs and thus “maximized utility.” Sacrifice is not pleasant, and it doesn’t maximize utility. But I think all of us would say that Jägerstätter lived a good life, that he flourished to a degree that most people don’t, precisely because he lost that good life. And all of us can see that it took courage to flourish in this way. That is what it means to say that courage is a virtue. It is a quality we need to develop in order to become not a happy or an efficient but an excellent human being.

Besides courage there are many other virtues, and one of the old questions is about how all the virtues relate. For it seems that some virtues depend on others, in the sense that you cannot exercise one without the other. Courage, or “fortitude,” has long been considered one of the cardinal virtues, and it is not hard to see why. If compassion is another virtue, for example, there will be times when it takes courage to show compassion. C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters that courage is “not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”

All the virtues, even the intellectual ones, are in some way about action. Being virtuous is not about assenting to the proposition that it would be good to do good. It is about doing good. We must have not only convictions but “the courage of our convictions,” as the saying goes. But the saying is getting at a feeling, one that is perfectly familiar yet deeply strange. Probably we all know that giddy sense of hovering before we act, of hesitating, of having that fateful confession on the tip of the tongue, of already but not yet having our minds made up, of standing at that precipice before we take the leap into thin air on our way to the holy grail, like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade. In those moments we feel paralyzed by the double awareness of our absolute freedom to jump, and by the choices that will be immediately foreclosed if we do. The first gesture, the first syllable, the first step, will take less than a second, but once taken it can’t be taken back, and so that second can feel like eternity. I think “courage” is the virtue that shakes off that feeling and plunges forward into whatever will come when we take the plunge and confront that “point of highest reality.”

But this still sounds so dramatic, does it not? I’ve had a few of those paralyzing moments, but the fact that I’ve only had a few of them – and that I remember them with cinematic clarity – suggests that they are not the stuff of daily life. And my claim is that you need courage for daily life. Look then at what the drama is always about, at bottom, regardless of the circumstances.

The drama of courage is always about choosing between things that are better and things that are worse, things that are higher and things that are lower, which are – almost always – things that are harder and things that are easier. Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction; narrow is the way that leadeth unto life. But we face that kind of choice all the time! That is the point. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The choice between higher and lower is the basic stuff of everyday life, the warp and woof of it. Will I sleep in, or will I wake up? Will I do my homework, or will I play video games? Will I eat the junk food, or will I eat the good food? Will I scroll TikTok, or will I put my phone down and talk with my friend? We show courage, or cowardice, in every decision we make. Some choices are more dramatic than others, but the drama of choosing is always present. Courage is not just a virtue for extraordinary situations; it is perhaps the most ordinary of all the virtues, the virtue most directly necessary for living life itself, whether that life is the kind we make movies about, or whether it is the kind that passes unremarked, the kind most of us live. Courage is not just for show. Courage is for hidden lives, too, where the goods and evils seem small and unimportant.

But now I want to make an observation. Examples like “junk food versus real food” makes it seem like the virtue of everyday courage is a matter of “self-discipline.” I think it is, in a sense, but I also think there is a better way to think about it. The idea of “self-discipline” comes with a lot of baggage that can get in the way here. For one thing, self-discipline is usually in the service of some definite goal that we’ve chosen (or at least endorsed) for ourselves: I want to lose weight, or look good, so I’ll be “disciplined” and eat my vegetables instead of this twinkie. But courage often means an openness to outcomes I did not and probably would not choose. “Self-discipline” does not seem like the right way to understand Jägerstätter’s courage, even if he might also have lived a disciplined life. He was a farmer, and being a good farmer does mean waking up when you want to sleep in. But surely there were many good, self-disciplined farmers among his neighbors.

Also, the idea of self-discipline is often used, ironically enough, to dodge responsibility. It’s easy to invoke “self-discipline” when you want to transfer responsibility for certain problems (like the fact that so many of us are overweight, or that so many are addicted to our phones) from the people who benefit from those problems (like the junk food companies and the tech companies) to the people who suffer the costs (the people who consume their products). Courage is about the small choices that all of us make; but the rhetoric of self-discipline is very useful for obscuring or excusing the big choices that some of us make. Meanwhile, actual self-discipline can make you a very successful marketer of twinkies, or smartphones, or whatever else, and your ability to studiously ignore the larger effects of your work will be a key part of that discipline.

For these reasons I think it might actually be very helpful to think of courage, counterintuitively, as a kind of impulsiveness. We might do well to think of courage as the capacity to act on a whim. Conversely, we might think of cowardice as an inability to do what we unexpectedly find ourselves moved to do. It’s true that courage is usually associated with something like “steadfastness,” and that a traditional term for it is “fortitude,” both of which involve an ability to carry through in the face of fearful obstacles, and that our impulses are among these obstacles. But there are impulses, and there are impulses. There are good ones and bad ones, and I think it’s important to see that the good ones are still impulses, movements of the heart. Virtuous action is a matter of habit, but the habit adds up to an ability to act in a way that may feel very “impulsive” to you, and may appear that way to others. Some well-known lines from Confucious capture what I mean. “At fifteen, my heart was set upon learning. At thirty, I had become established. At forty, I was no longer perplexed. At fifty, I knew what is ordained by Heaven. At sixty, I obeyed. At seventy, I could follow my heart’s desires without transgressing the line.” “Courage” is the ability to act on our heart’s desires, when those desires have been properly formed. When we talk about virtue (if we ever do), we usually emphasize the second part, about proper formation. But we should not forget the first part, which shows us what it feels like to act virtuously. It feels like doing whatever we want. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; but so, perhaps, do the very wisest among us. Not perfect self-discipline, but perfect love casts out fear. “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?”

I have in my own life shown both courage and cowardice, and when I recall those episodes what stands out is my success or failure at following my better impulse. I was once a poverty-stricken graduate student, living alone in a dingy basement in Toronto, where it was sometimes easy to imagine I was suffering. I had to walk about a mile to my classes, and I would often come back very late at night. On the corner of my street there was a convenience store, and as I passed that store on my way to the dingy basement apartment, I would sometimes see two or three homeless men huddling at the door, trying to get out of the cold (this is Toronto, remember), hoping, as I supposed, for someone to give them a few bucks so they could buy a hot cup of coffee. Several nights I passed them by. One night I got back to my room and had a very odd thought: that I should make a pot of coffee, put it in an old thermos, and take it down to them. I thought about this thought for quite some time, and I could not get it out of my head. And so, after some minutes of hesitating, I did.

I cannot emphasize enough what a weird thing this was for me to do. If you think I’m tooting my own horn here, you misunderstand. What I did was out of character, and that’s the point. A truly virtuous person, someone in whom the virtue of compassion was perfected, would be doing that kind of thing all the time, because “virtue” is about a settled habit. The fact that it felt weird shows that I was not virtuous, although – crucially – I did act virtuously. I acted like a virtuous person, and that is how one becomes a virtuous person. But in doing so I wasn’t acting like myself; hence the “weirdness.” At the same time, what was interesting about the experience is that, when I finally walked down the street with that pot of coffee and gave it to those men, I felt like I was doing what I actually wanted to do – in spite of not wanting to do it – and that to do so, I had to act in the face of fear. Fear of what might happen on a poorly lit street filled with sketchy characters late at night, to be sure; but also just the fear of being weird, of acting out, of following my heart’s desire when it seemed like it was leading me away from myself – even when no one else would see what I did.

On other occasions, I’ve failed to follow that heart’s desire. Just after I’d graduated from college, while backpacking in Spain, I found myself on a subway car in Madrid, sitting opposite a friend: I was facing him, he was facing me. From my vantage I could see behind him, and behind him I saw a pickpocket slowly and carefully lifting my friend’s camera from his bag. I had all the time in the world to say something, to warn my friend and stop the pickpocket. And that is exactly what I wanted to do. But I just sat there, silent, totally frozen by fear of conflict and uncertainty about what might come of it. And so the pickpocket continued his work (his patient, methodical, extremely disciplined work), until a stranger saw what was happening and started yelling at him. Now, I am not very physically imposing, but I was more imposing than this good samaritan, a slight man with a high squeaky voice. Also I was with three friends who were all more imposing than me; two of them were actually soldiers. And anyway there would have been four of us against the one pickpocket. But I left it to this lone man to respond to what he’d seen, while I pretended that I hadn’t seen, in order to excuse my failure to respond. And I left it to this man to endure the pickpocket’s own response, which was to wave a knife in the samaritan’s face.

That was me being a coward. Until then I had not thought of myself that way. I always figured that if such a situation ever happened to me, I’d act like the heroes I admired in the movies. But my fantasy of being brave hadn’t prepared me to act bravely when the situation came. The desire was there; my immediate impulse was to stand up to the bad guy. And no doubt all those movies about good guys fighting bad guys had played their part in shaping that desire, which is one reason why stories of courage are good for us. But I lacked the ability to follow that impulse, to do what my heart told me to do in the moment. And that is one reason why stories of courage are also bad for us: it is very easy to confuse the desire they inculcate with the ability to act on it when the time is at hand.

Fantasy can teach us to want what is good, by giving us heroes to emulate. But fantasy can also enervate our ability to do what we have learned to want, by allowing us to live vicariously through our heroes. The more we live vicariously, the more we forget, or fail to learn, how to actually live. And now I want to say that our time – especially if we are young – is defined above all by the vicariousness of our lives.

The animator Steve Cutts has a short film called “Mobile World,” which I encourage you to watch. It’s in the style of a black and white cartoon from the mid-twentieth century. That was certainly not a “mobile world,” in the sense that it was not a world in which people had screens in their pockets. But the film is actually set in the present day, and the nostalgia it invokes for “the before-times” throws the present into sharp relief. To watch it is to watch people watching people suffering pain, inflicting pain, being humiliated, humiliating themselves. In one scene, a woman climbs to the top of a skyscraper and jumps to her death, as the crowd follows the plunge, phones in front of their faces. They don’t laugh, they don’t cry, they don’t cringe; they just record. She dies alone in the company of a thousand blank stares. In Mobile World, no one actually sees anything; all they see is the screen that will always show them something. And all the somethings are the same: just something to post. But we, the viewers, are also being shown something. If we recognize it – and there is no guarantee that we will – then we suffer, too.

What we recognize, if we do, is the extent to which we live vicariously through other people’s responses to reality: which is to say, the extent to which we ourselves live unresponsively. Understand this: the main problem with Mobile World is not that everybody is watching “bad stuff” on their phones. Of course there is a lot of bad stuff, and you shouldn’t watch it. I’m not even talking about pornography, though we should talk more about that. Apparently there are worse things. There are videos of people being murdered, for example, or of people committing suicide. We should assume that some of the cartoon characters in Cutts’ film have been entertained by such things, and this is part of why they can watch a suicide without trying to stop it. But I’m willing to bet that most of the characters in that crowd of bystanders have spent a lot of time watching not the bad stuff but the good stuff. How many of them must have seen, through those same screens, a thousand stories of heroes who did not watch but rather acted in situations like that? And then imagined, over and over again, that they would act like those heroes, when the time came?

The problem with Mobile World is not what it shows us (or not only that); it is that it makes us content with the show. We suppose that if we admire the good guys on our screens and not the bad guys, that makes us the good guys in real life. We live vicariously; and then when the moment arrives, we fail to live, to take the leap, because we never really have. What’s worse, the more we fail to act, the less we care about that failure. The crowd that can’t be moved by a suicide certainly can’t be moved by its own failure to be moved. You stare blankly enough for long enough, and there’s probably a point of no return. God gives us up to the hardness of our hearts. We become cowards, but what’s worse, cowards without shame. We have committed a kind of spiritual suicide.

I think you – you who are younger than me – are living in a peculiar time. Every time is peculiar, of course, and in a sense there is nothing new under the sun. Courage has always beckoned and cowardice has always tempted, and people have always had to make choices. But at no time in history has it been so possible for so many to live so vicariously, to live without taking action, to live without feeling even the need for courage. At no time in history has it been so possible to live in a fantasy. And so it is a hard time for young people especially, because being young means feeling that need for courage more instinctively and passionately than most older people do (since you are hungry for real experience, and must have courage to get it), while at the same time being more invested in fantasies (since you have fewer memories of real experiences, which can only come with time). The screens are robbing you of your youth, in the most literal sense. The more you give yourself to them, the less self you’ll have when you get old. For we are what we repeatedly do, and we are not doing anything when we are scrolling. We are watching other people do things. The writer Donald Miller put it well, though I am paraphrasing: you would never watch a movie about people watching a movie. When you watch a movie, you are enthralled by what the characters are doing. But while you are watching, you yourself are not doing anything. The more you watch, and the less you do, the less of a character you are able to become.

If you think I am an old(er) man griping about the kids these days, well, maybe I am. But I am also an older man looking back with some regret on all the impulses I didn’t follow, the times I was too cowardly to step out of character, too cowardly to do not only the right thing but also to “sin boldly,” as Martin Luther put it. Because sometimes sinning boldly is the right thing to do. And I’m shuddering to think how much more sin I would have avoided if I’d had a phone in my pocket. The statistics are troubling. Young people having less sex, for example. That’s “less sin,” perhaps. But they’re having less sex mainly because they’re spending so much time watching other people have sex, on their handy-dandy porn machines. Once again, the problem here is not what people are watching (even if that is also a problem): it’s that they’re increasingly content to watch.

Now – every moment, but now especially, this moment in history – is the time not to watch but to act. Now is the time to be impulsive, even and especially if your impulse is to put down your screen and sit quietly for a few minutes, “doing nothing.” As Jenny Odell argues, doing nothing is, in our time, one of the most radical and most active things you can do. And after you’ve done nothing for a while, you might just find yourself wanting to do something. Pay attention to all those “somethings,” all the different ways you could go, and go do the things you actually want to do. Take the little leaps of everyday life, the hidden life of choosing that all of us must live. Because someday you might just be called to take a bigger leap, called to make the kind of sacrifice that only the most courageous people can make, the kind they make movies about. The question is whether you’ll be ready – or whether you will have watched too many movies.

Image Via: Pickpik