145 lines
10 KiB
Plaintext
145 lines
10 KiB
Plaintext
Sneering at Courage
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<p>One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can’t afford to sneer<br />
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at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen,<br />
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Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93<br />
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to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots<br />
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we’ve had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again,<br />
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that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the<br />
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willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful<br />
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responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.</p>
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<p>(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect<br />
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to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an<br />
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exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of<br />
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men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today.<br />
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I’ll return to this point later in the essay.)</p>
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<p>The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of <em>bien<br />
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pensants</em> in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in<br />
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the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They<br />
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have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning<br />
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it to fantasy, sneering at it — trying to persuade us all that<br />
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it’s at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.</p>
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<p>If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the<br />
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connotations of the phrase “testosterone poisoning”. Ask yourself<br />
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when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself<br />
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if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man’s<br />
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declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for<br />
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what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to<br />
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take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper — or<br />
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even ordinary criminals — them, do you praise his determination<br />
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or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?</p>
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<p>Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock<br />
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our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or<br />
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simpletons, we’ll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we<br />
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make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men<br />
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— cops, soldiers, firemen — we’ll find that we have<br />
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trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse:<br />
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our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted<br />
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and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and<br />
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entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one<br />
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culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.</p>
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<p>Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage<br />
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is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of<br />
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that — and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the<br />
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forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage.<br />
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Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side<br />
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socialites cruising firemen’s bars? Biology tells; medals and<br />
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tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero’s most<br />
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natural and strongest reward is willing women.</p>
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<p>Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of<br />
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people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a<br />
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judgment on American sins; — the multiculturalists, the<br />
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postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the<br />
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academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists,<br />
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and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people<br />
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never liked or trusted physical courage, and it’s worth taking a hard<br />
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look at why that is.</p>
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<p>Feminists distrust physical courage because it’s a male virtue.<br />
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Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just<br />
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as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been<br />
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understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and<br />
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modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If<br />
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one’s world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and<br />
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maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is<br />
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regressive.</p>
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<p>For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect<br />
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because it’s psychologically linked to moral certitude — and<br />
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moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from<br />
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intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight<br />
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for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &mdash,<br />
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unless, of course, they’re tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which<br />
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fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.</p>
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<p>Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more<br />
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than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust<br />
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that is not directly a military caste — including our own<br />
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— tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants<br />
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and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they<br />
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know their place is to be guided by their betters.</p>
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<p>For transnational progressives and the left in general, male<br />
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physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it’s an<br />
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<em>individualizing</em> virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about<br />
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autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in<br />
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himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less<br />
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likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who<br />
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have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight<br />
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for their <em>own</em> concept of virtue — independently of<br />
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social approval or the party line — are especially threatening<br />
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to any sort of collectivist.</p>
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<p>The multiculturalist’s and the collectivist’s suspicions are<br />
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backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among<br />
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self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are<br />
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the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in<br />
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individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another.<br />
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They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward<br />
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any of them tend to increase all of them.</p>
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<p>After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach<br />
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boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men<br />
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are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to<br />
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specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem’ to adolescents<br />
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while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that<br />
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might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile,<br />
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our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated<br />
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physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind.<br />
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We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant<br />
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truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood.<br />
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And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.</p>
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<p>Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did.<br />
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But they were written off as reactionaries — and many of us were<br />
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foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper<br />
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crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men<br />
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apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder’s famous<br />
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diagnosis, <a href="http://www.rkba.org/comment/cowards.html">a nation<br />
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of cowards</a>; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime<br />
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rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.</p>
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<p>But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War,<br />
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we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from<br />
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the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear<br />
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weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained<br />
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until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.</p>
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<p>Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda’s war has come to us. There<br />
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is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue<br />
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is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not<br />
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primarily a chess-game between nations — it’s a street-level<br />
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brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells<br />
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often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda<br />
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other than by sympathy of ideas.</p>
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<p>Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and<br />
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citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be<br />
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everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during<br />
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the Cold War, but it is far truer now:</p>
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<blockquote><p>
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“Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to<br />
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take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic<br />
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purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and<br />
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sacrifice for that freedom.”
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and<br />
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self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman’s readiness than<br />
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his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role<br />
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of defender, don’t sneer — cheer. Don’t write him off with some<br />
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pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He’s trying to<br />
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tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for,<br />
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fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.</p>
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<p>Whether he’s in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby<br />
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— we need that courage now.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=85522590">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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