This post may have been provoked by
...but it also draws on something I wrote thirty years ago...
Lately I've found myself thinking about a claim some Republican commentators made during the election: "Trump, Musk, and Kennedy," and they might as well have added Gabbard, "have no fear."
In recent years our chattering class have had little to say about courage. In the 1960s and 1970s most of my generation were saying, or "discovering"--oh, how we liked to "discover" things!--that fighting wars, or at least fighting the war in which we all knew someone who was fighting or had fought, was not really a brave, heroic thing to do. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori but in what way was the Vietnam War "for the sake of our country"? We wanted no more of the older generation's idea of courage in battle.
The insurance industry was making its first attempts to control culture, too. I remember an "Electric Company" skit from the early 1970s. The brave little explorer, an unseen voice cackled, got into a spot where there was danger to the right of him! Danger to the left of him! (Cartoons blinked, illustrating cliff edges, wild animals, etc.) Danger from above him! Danger from below him! Danger ahead...and danger creeping up behind! What did he do? Why, he went home! The brave little explorer smiled and said, "A kid could get hurt that way, Sahib."
In the early 1970s it sometimes did take courage, of a sort, to do things you were told to do "to be safe." You might be taunted about being a "chicken" (we "chicks" were never supposed to be "chicken") or perceived as insulting someone--someone's driving, say. It was prudent to wait to be invited to buckle a seat belt, if the car had one, and if you weren't too badly intimidated by the ongoing debate about whether seat belts did more harm or more good. "Take that fool thing off! You think I'm going to wreck this car? If you don't think I know how to drive, you can walk!"
All the same, something about the ideas of courage and being a goody-goody seemed incompatible. Then, around 1980, as the bubble of popularity for psychotherapy swelled close to the popping point, came the fad use of "courage" to mean doing whatever ill-advised thing someone wanted to push you to do. "He courageously shared his history of major mental illness with his co-workers." "She found the courage to abandon her disabled husband and two small children." In the 1980s "courageous" could sound like a rather horrible thing to be.
During the COVID panic the backlash against "courage" seemed still to be going on. Participation in the panic was hailed as "bravery" instead. When the danger to be faced with either bravery or courage was a chest cold so mild that most young people didn't know when they had it, people naturally understood "bravery" to mean ignoring it and working through it. Instead a person whose age and voluntary behavior put him at elevated risk was allowed to dictate that everyone else should act as if we, too, were in mortal danger from COVID. In fact behavior that protects the weakest from infectious diseases as much as possible, not locking down businesses but redesigning them to keep people at a good healthy distance from one another, could be described as virtuous, and arguably even courageous. If bureaucratic mandates had been less dictatorial, less fear-driven, and ultimately less dangerous in the straw-clutching demand that people have a new untested vaccine that may have harmed more healthy people than it saved unhealthy people, the idea of compliance as showing "bravery" might have been less bitterly mocked.
Such exploitative appeals to our instinctive admiration of fortitude may have estranged some people from that admiration of fortitude. We now live in a world that recognizes taking risks for the sake of taking risks, as teenagers (especially boys) instinctively do, as foolish. We live in a world that teaches us that we "shouldn't" share cars, much less our homes, even with family members and even for the clear benefit of all concerned--except the insurance companies. We live in a world that derides and denies the clearly understood benefits of self-control, a world where people know in theory how to avoid flabbiness and promiscuity but nevertheless participate in a youth culture that seems not only to tolerate but to demand both; instincts still seem to tell the young that the courage to say no to appetites is a good thing, but a glance at their classmates tells them that the lack of that kind of courage is at least socially acceptable. We live in a world that is at least ashamed that wars are still raging; at least people no longer run around beating drums and screaming that all the real men ought to have the courage to kill the horrid Russians, any more, or tells young veterans to be ashamed of having post-traumatic stress when normal people feel that it was glorious to kill their quota of Palestinians. Our popular songs no longer celebrate people we admire by inflating the body count on their war record; we don't demand that our political leaders be veterans at all, and even when they are, we now admire their willingness to serve, their endurance of a "tough job," but nobody campaigns any more on slogans like...when was the last popular US candidate a combat veteran?..."Truman has slain his thousands, and Eisenhower tens of thousands." Truman and Eisenhower wanted to be seen as shrewd managers (which they were), not killers (which they were, also). War stories veterans tell with pride are now feel-good stories about fixing vehicles that broke down in unfavorable conditions, rather than boastful songs about how "the mercy that we showed them was to sink them in the tide." We now train employees not to try to defend the shop from attacks by homicidal maniacs, but to surrender at once and hope to give useful information to someone else who will try to find the maniacs later; we call that practical but some of our ancestors called it contemptible. We think we have, at least for the moment, reached a level of civilization at which nobody has to face any physical battles, and while this is commendable it seems to leave an impression that courage has become an obsolete virtue.
It has not. Aside from the fact that, in the slums to which our culture relegates many young parents and children and in the public schools, the young still do have to face physical battles...well, look at what happened in politics after people observed that the four (Musk wasn't born in the US, but he's hardly "conservative") Ds running on the R ticket were displaying physical courage. All four have received very credible death threats. Two have been shot. All have been threatened, reviled, hated, treated as enemies by their former friends. They don't care. They're not afraid of Hell. And obviously Americans admire that as much as our ancestors ever did. Having been shot at and narrowly missed did a lot to elect President Trump.
We do laugh at young men who seem to feel that they're practicing courage when we see them as stubbornly defending stupid positions. "I won't back down, I won't back down," the speaker in a popular song insists. But only when he's talking to his wife or child--someone who allows him to call person "baby"--out of "a world that keeps on pushing me around." The song was probably popular because people imagined this man going to his low-paid job where somebody even further down the company hierarchy is trying to annoy him into walking out, or defending "baby's" choices, or picking up a defaced campaign sign off his lawn and ordering twenty more. Meh. I tend to imagine him refusing to be the first to shake hands after a quarrel, or to mop the yellow spots off the bathroom floor.
We had this problem when I was a Bright Young Thing. I remember a man about my age, an attractive specimen of what I'd told friends was my favorite type, a rich yuppie climbing the career ladder fast, a good listener and interesting talker, who seemed congenial in Starbucks and when we took the conversations upstairs to his flat. One night we stayed late. I put on my trench coat. He did not reach for his. "You're safer on Dupont Circle than I would be," he said. It was probably true; the crowd of unsavory males who took over the Circle at night consisted of more homosexuals than really homeless men, at that point, and they left me alone as I scuttled around the Circle and down into the subway. I didn't question his judgment about this particular "gay community" as a threat to young, cute, not very large men. But I had some thoughts about the kind of man who, if really afraid to make the traditional gesture of escorting me to the train, continued to pay inflated rent for what had long ago been considered a fashionable address. He could at least have found a nicer neighborhood. I went home and wrote down a list of some other things a prospective friend might have done that would show that person had enough courage to deserve my respect.
Here, not greatly changed, is the list.
* Ignoring "peer pressure" at school.
* Refusing to participate in unethical corporate practices.
* Fighting inflation by doing business at uninflated prices.
* Hitting a rapist where it hurts.
* Choosing natural childbirth.
* Choosing to adopt rather than give birth.
* Declaring yourself asexual, when you are, even if you have reason to believe it's only temporary.
* Choosing to stay single and celibate when the option of marriage for sex alone, or even sex plus money, is available. Being able to enjoy your own company unless, and until, you find a Partner for Life.
* Refusing to buy things (cars, computers, television or stereo sets, the latest fashions when you have serviceable older clothes, airline tickets when you could go cheaper by bus) that advertisers tell you you need, when you can actually get by very well without them. Walking rather than driving. Not wearing lipstick. Attracting friends to your home with laundry machines, food, etc., rather than television. Having better uses for your money, like buying your own house or educating a child.
* Walking rather than driving, even if you do own a car.
* Starting your own business.
* Staying with your business when you realize it's not going to make you rich, because it's paying for itself and you enjoy the work.
* Having only safe sex--especially in marriage, when you've made a baby and can't afford another one.
* Refusing to let employers depend on your working overtime.
* Publicly claiming your religious faith within the dogmatic, fundamentalist, anti-religious "intellectual" subculture.
* Speaking out on behalf of genuine minorities (as distinct from large, overfunded pressure groups) that are genuinely oppressed or ignored. (Black Americans still count if they're not left-wingers. Members of "sexual minorities" count if they're pro-privacy and do not publicly identify in sexual terms. People whose individual sexual history might be unusual, but who want to get some sort of benefit by identifying with a sexual quirk that has not consistently complicated their lives for fifty years, are probably not a minority and have certainly hogged the funding, the attention, and the benefits of "victim group" status for the last thirty years; defending pro-privacy people against them counts.) Bonus points for defending the rights of a philosophical minority group whose philosophy does not appeal to you, e.g. Jehovah's Witnesses, the Flat Earth Society, or latter-day Socialists if right-wingers who felt oppressed by the Biden Administration really get going in pursuit of payback.
* Recognizing the absurdity of some claims advanced on behalf of some minorities, e.g. the minority of women who would ever actually choose abortion, or the minority of homosexual men who think their unpopularity is comparable with slavery or the Trail of Tears or even genuine societal oppression of homosexuals, or the minority of Black (mostly very young) Americans who think that "reparations" can be made to people who neither suffered the wrongdoing nor even know exactly what wrong was done, or by whom, to their great-great-great-grandparents. If you are a young Black American and you need some money, simply shouting in a crowd, "I need some money!" might show courage, and might actually raise some money; pretending you have a claim on "reparations for slavery" does not.
* Raising your own food.
* Making your own clothes.
* Being an artisan.
* Being a street vendor.
* Being a taxi driver.
* Finding quiet ways to share your faith in the course of doing a simple, low-wage job, while being an ordained minister, or, if not ordained, having earned the degree to qualify for ordination. (No, my father was not the only example I ever met. People who work with the public, although they're not extroverts, as bus drivers, taxi drivers, couriers, deliverymen, hospital staff, public school teachers, veterinarians, visiting nurses...there are actually quite a few of them.)
* Being self-employed, at anything, if you start with a small amount of your own money and persist even if you don't earn a profit right away. (No points if you're living on a trust fund or are at the top of a pyramid scheme.)
* Taking a job that feels like actual work, and doing it competently.
* Not everyone is called to military service (I'm a celiac myself) and not everyone supports every cause for which nations that are approaching civilization suddenly lapse into war. So, courage doesn't require everyone to enlist. But it requires everyone to be able to see how "making fun of uniforms that guard you while you sleep is cheaper than those uniforms, and they're starvation cheap." Support the troops. Save the armchair analysis and cafe chat about why you don't think the cause of the war was just until the troops come home. If a war was an unmitigated and inexcusable mess, like the one that hung over the heads of high school boys when I was a child, let its veterans be the first to proclaim this to the world.
* If you insist on talking about your pacifism, being an absolute pacifist. Put a sign on your front gate, "Thou shalt not steal. Help thyself," and leave the doors unlocked.
* Homeschooling your children.
* Being the visiting tutor or consultant who gives someone else the courage to homeschool children.
* Declaring your home a drug-free zone. "Drug-free" includes drugs prescribed for "pain" and "depression." There are better ways to cope with those "diseases."
* Putting a drug dealer in prison where he belongs.
* Putting a politician who owes his career to making deals with drug dealers, landlords who want to deny a problem, etc., to work on a day labor site where he belongs.
* The world can still produce enough cotton, linen, silk, wool, and leather to clothe and shoe everybody if people give up the idea of following "fashions" for wearing cheap, skimpy, inadequate plastic "clothes." Buy good durable clothes made of natural fibres, or make your own, and wear them until they wear out. This can take courage--it may cost you a job at a store that sells junk clothes, e.g., even if you were hired to work in the kitchenware department. It is also a way to save money. It is also, paradoxically, a way to look wealthy and to fit in with a richer crowd if business success, marriage, etc., brings you into contact with one. (By buying new, expensive clothes with big names in the labels at charity stores, I once incurred the one undesirable consequence this practice can have: a diplomat's gorgeous wife, possibly under the influence, started screaming that I'd stolen her dress. Nobody had stolen her dress, which was in fact a size smaller--I turned out the tag to show her. So practice saying cheerfully, "I don't believe your dress would even be the same size as this one! Look at the tag!" Or, if you don't happen to be top-heavy, you might have to say, also cheerfully, "Is it possible that someone donated some of your things to a good cause? I bought this dress at the AmVets store." But the risk of this kind of unpleasantness, though small, means that the decision to dress better for less takes real physical courage after all.)
* Writing, publishing, buying and reading genuinely subversive books...as distinct from left-wing twaddle. It can be hard to tell which books are subversive in a valuable way, like The Handmaid's Tale or The Last Word: On the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, and which are twaddle. For those who can afford either the time or the money it's nice to make a policy of buying any book the commercial media don't endorse. If your neighborhood still has a real public library, you can always donate the ones you do endorse. If what it has is "more of a 'community center' actually" and is used mainly by young working mothers, for free day care, donate the minority-viewpoint books you endorse to a respectable charity.
* Stopping to help people who need help.
* Getting to know people from different cultural backgrounds,especially different economic strata.
* Admitting it when a subordinate employee, or student, or child happens to know more about something than you do.
* If you make little dominance displays like patting people, calling them by name (and getting the name wrong), generally saying anything to anyone that you would not want to hear the person say to you, breaking that bad habit.
* If you approach other people "just to be friendly," breaking that bad habit. Recognize that demanding that others pay attention to you is selfish, and seldom if ever wins friendship or respect from thoughtful people. If you think hanging out in groups and making a lot of noise is "being friendly," save it for people who feel the same way. Many people do not enjoy mere groupiness and do not inflict it on their friends.
* Following a restricted diet faithfully...without telling everyone about it or pushing them to follow your diet.
* Conducting business in a way that respects the principle of a Sabbath day (yours, or someone else's).
* Sleeping back-to-back with a friend of the opposite sex. Not touching the other person. Not telling anyone else about it.
* Just saying no to premarital sex, even if you are sterile, or male, or both.
* Doing your own household repairs.
* Choosing home and office tools you can generally repair by yourself--typewriters not computers, bicycles not cars, hand-pushed not motorized lawnmowers.
* Paying cash. It's actually safer to carry around fifty or a hundred dollars in cash than it is to carry a plastic card. The difficulty is finding the courage to surrender an amount of cash that's not worth fighting over, if you do encounter a mugger--or wrest his weapon out of his hands, point it at him, and tell him to go home and sober up, if you prefer. Neither of these things is physically difficult. Little old ladies can do it; consider Langston Hughes' short story, "Thank You Ma'am." It's written as fiction but it's happened.
* Establishing financial independence the hard way--by building up a savings account, without being sucked into debts, especially by credit cards.
* Buying things that appeal to you even if you expect other people to laugh at your taste.
* Really standing up to a brawler or bully--by declining to fight.
* Excusing yourself if a "stag party" features prostitutes--or if a "hen party" features malicious gossip. Even if you heard the last quarrels between a couple who are now divorced, saying to someone who asks, "I wouldn't know anything about it." (This is not a lie. Knowing what angry people said to each other is a different thing from knowing what really happened.)
* For females, not depending on a man for money. Not having a baby as long as the mother might need to depend on any man, including Uncle Sam, for money to rear it.
* For males, asking their wives to tell them if they've missed a spot on the bathroom floor.
* At the time when this post was written, atrazine was not spawning enough "gender transitions" that people felt a need to talk about the gender-confused. Real, genetically gender-confused people were rare and were usually accepted as quirky individuals of whichever gender they claimed. This has changed. Statistics support the claim that the change is due more to genuine physical effects of atrazine than to any political philosophy or "indoctrination." Considering only people who really are physically confused or confusible, and leaving idiot boys who claim gender confusion as an excuse to harass girls out of it, I think it is appropriate to add a way gender-confused people can impress me with their courage: Shutting up about it, except to people who know you well enough to care. Letting the fact that, in a modern city, you can be known as Jane the big lumpy-frumpy waitress in one neighborhood and as Jake the flabby waiter in another neighborhood, satisfy your needs for self-expression. But having a good Atrazine Awareness campaign, which many people in Glyphosate Awareness will support to whatever extent our own conditions permit, which will skyrocket once we get that ban in effect, and well and truly sticking it to the corporations.
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