Sneering at Courage
<p>One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can&#8217;t afford to sneer<br />
at physical courage any more.  The willingness of New York firemen,<br />
Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93<br />
to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots<br />
we&#8217;ve had in the war against terror.  We are learning, once again,<br />
that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the<br />
willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful<br />
responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.</p>
<p>(And, usually, it is men who do the risking.  I mean no disrespect<br />
to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an<br />
exclusive male monopoly.  But it has been predominently the job of<br />
men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today.<br />
I&#8217;ll return to this point later in the essay.)</p>
<p>The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of <em>bien<br />
pensants</em> in our culture.  Many of the elite molders of opinion in<br />
the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men.  They<br />
have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning<br />
it to fantasy, sneering at it &mdash; trying to persuade us all that<br />
it&#8217;s at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.</p>
<p>If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the<br />
connotations of the phrase &#8220;testosterone poisoning&#8221;.  Ask yourself<br />
when you first heard it, and where, and from whom.  Then ask yourself<br />
if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man&#8217;s<br />
declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for<br />
what he believes in.  When some ordinary man says he is willing to<br />
take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper &mdash; or<br />
even ordinary criminals &mdash; them, do you praise his determination<br />
or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?</p>
<p>Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support.  If we mock<br />
our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or<br />
simpletons, we&#8217;ll find courage in short supply when we need it.  If we<br />
make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men<br />
&mdash; cops, soldiers, firemen &mdash; we&#8217;ll find that we have<br />
trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse:<br />
our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted<br />
and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and<br />
entitled to take their due when it is not freely given.  More than one<br />
culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.</p>
<p>Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage<br />
is a functional virtue in ordinary men.  But Todd Beamer reminded us of<br />
that &mdash; and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the<br />
forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage.<br />
Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side<br />
socialites cruising firemen&#8217;s bars?  Biology tells; medals and<br />
tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero&#8217;s most<br />
natural and strongest reward is willing women.</p>
<p>Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of<br />
people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a<br />
judgment on American sins; &mdash; the multiculturalists, the<br />
postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the<br />
academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists,<br />
and the plain old-fashioned loony left.  By and large these people<br />
never liked or trusted physical courage, and it&#8217;s worth taking a hard<br />
look at why that is.</p>
<p>Feminists distrust physical courage because it&#8217;s a male virtue.<br />
Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just<br />
as surely as nurturance is to femininity.  This has always been<br />
understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and<br />
modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors.  If<br />
one&#8217;s world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and<br />
maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is<br />
regressive.</p>
<p>For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect<br />
because it&#8217;s psychologically linked to moral certitude &mdash; and<br />
moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from<br />
intolerance and bigotry.  Men who believe in anything enough to fight<br />
for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &#038;mdash,<br />
unless, of course, they&#8217;re tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which<br />
fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.</p>
<p>Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more<br />
than a touch of class warfare about them.  Every upper crust<br />
that is not directly a military caste &mdash; including our own<br />
&mdash; tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants<br />
and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they<br />
know their place is to be guided by their betters.</p>
<p>For transnational progressives and the left in general, male<br />
physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it&#8217;s an<br />
<em>individualizing</em> virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about<br />
autonomy and the proper limits of social power.  A man who develops in<br />
himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less<br />
likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who<br />
have not passed that same test.  Brave men who have learned to fight<br />
for their <em>own</em> concept of virtue &mdash; independently of<br />
social approval or the party line &mdash; are especially threatening<br />
to any sort of collectivist.</p>
<p>The multiculturalist&#8217;s and the collectivist&#8217;s suspicions are<br />
backhanded tributes to an important fact.  There is a continuity among<br />
self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are<br />
the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in<br />
individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another.<br />
They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward<br />
any of them tend to increase all of them.</p>
<p>After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues.  We tried to teach<br />
boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men<br />
are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to<br />
specialists.  We preached the virtue of `self-esteem&#8217; to adolescents<br />
while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that<br />
might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect.  Meanwhile,<br />
our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated<br />
physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind.<br />
We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant<br />
truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood.<br />
And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.</p>
<p>Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did.<br />
But they were written off as reactionaries &mdash; and many of us were<br />
foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper<br />
crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men<br />
apt to fold under pressure.  We became, in Jeffrey Snyder&#8217;s famous<br />
diagnosis, <a href="http://www.rkba.org/comment/cowards.html">a nation<br />
of cowards</a>; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime<br />
rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.</p>
<p>But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War,<br />
we could afford.  Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from<br />
the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear<br />
weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant.  So it remained<br />
until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.</p>
<p>Now we have need of courage.  Al-Qaeda&#8217;s war has come to us.  There<br />
is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue<br />
is to smash state sponsors of terrorism.  But this war is not<br />
primarily a chess-game between nations &mdash; it&#8217;s a street-level<br />
brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells<br />
often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda<br />
other than by sympathy of ideas.</p>
<p>Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and<br />
citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be<br />
everywhere that terrorists might strike.  John F. Kennedy said this during<br />
the Cold War, but it is far truer now:</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to<br />
take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic<br />
purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and<br />
sacrifice for that freedom.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and<br />
self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman&#8217;s readiness than<br />
his weapons.  So the next time you see a man claim the role<br />
of defender, don&#8217;t sneer &mdash; cheer.  Don&#8217;t write him off with some<br />
pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He&#8217;s trying to<br />
tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for,<br />
fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.</p>
<p>Whether he&#8217;s in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby<br />
&mdash; we need that courage now.</p>
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