Courage is a popular theme not only among the warriors, but also among the philosophers, politicians and ordinary people. Do you remember the last time when you had to show courage? Courage often is a measure of our self-esteem. William Ian Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, is a specialist of Icelandic sagas; medieval history; and emotions, vices, and virtues. He has something to say about courage. Recently he published a book, The Mystery of Courage (Harvard University Press) that deals exactly with this human quality. In an article with a title " Danger, Death, and... Dieting? " Miller gives a short resume of his book. Not surprisingly the article has been published in The In Character magazine.
Miller says that courage was a great subject for the ancient Greeks - Athenians were proud that their courage is "natural" and "voluntary" in contrast with those of their enemies, the Spartans, who were forced, according to Pericles (the Athenian statesman whose marble bust prominently resides in British Museum), to be courageous through extensive training and painful discipline. Spartans, in other hand, were keen to give a prize to the most courageous and careful of their warriors. Courage without cautiousness or "prudence" (as Hans Morgentheau says) was not highly esteemed by them. Evidence for that was Aristodemus, a Spartan warrior who lost the prize because his rashly heroism in the battle of Plataea (479 BC). Miller says the courage was a politics for the ancient Greeks - it invoked a kind of national self-esteem as well as personal and its standards ruled citizens and warriors to act against the provocations of the providence.
Everybody knows that this politics is still alive today. Politicians and leaders all over the world call for courage, nations and groups prize themselves with the courage they have. "People still care intensely about courage- says Miller - and we're still trying to stack the deck in our own favor. Determining who has courage, what actions count, who gets the prize, is disputed now no less than in the Iliad. In our day we hear people praised for their courage for sticking to a diet, for giving up smoking, even for investing in a Silicon Valley start-up."
Courage has value among the philosophers as well. Plato, speaking about the courageous Socrates, speculates that the true philosopher is a courageous person because of his knowledge that life is lesser than the ideas. Miller however says that some of the braver people he has met do not happen to be in humanities departments, nor in law schools. But this does not mean that Plato does not suggest some clever things about the courage. Quite contrary, he says that the courage is not only to resist fear and pain, but to keep in control your desires and pleasures.
Miller says that the stricter or narrower (or to said "political") view of courage gets its classic formulation in Aristotle, who makes courage a matter of risking life and limb in war for the polis. "The martial view is easily the dominant view, informing heroic literature and songs of triumph from Ur to Ugarit , to Judea and Nineveh , to the Germanic North. Indeed, it is pretty nearly a universal view of courage."
But Miller sees two basic conceptions: the conceptions of courage as offence, and the courage as defense. "The courage of offense was and remained the preserve of men and, by widespread ideology across a multitude of cultures, upper-class men. The courage of defense, though by obvious necessity and by definition, was no less at home on the battlefield than the courage of offense. Consider that a good portion of ancient and medieval warfare was siege warfare. More than anything it involved the ability to endure long, drawn-out suffering, pain, and hunger, and the constant importuning visions of eating your children, or being eaten by them."
Probably from the courage of defense comes the idolization of martyrdom. "The courage of defense, martyr-like fortitude, began to dominate on the battlefield," says Miller and gives us the examples of mechanized war, the trenches, the mud, cold, filth, and death that the soldiers had to endure.
The theories and tales about the courage are lot but as Abner Small, a Civil War veteran, wrote (cited by Miller): men were heroes or cowards "in spite of themselves."
Miller finishes his essay with the question of moral courage, "Moral courage is a rather recent development; the term does not appear in English until the nineteenth century. It took a largely pacified society for people to think to distinguish stand-up-in-meeting kind of courage - the courage of risking ridicule, humiliation, loss of employment, or social ostracism for speaking out against injustice, or of defying immoral or illegal orders from a superior - from plain old courage."
The thing that distinguishes moral courage from physical one, and this seems the most interesting point of Miller's essay, is that the moral courage usually is a lonely courage. To fight injustice or persist the difficulties alone - physically and morally - often without the support of "political courage" of tales, orthodoxy of sermons and public opinion, needs courage that not everyone can bear.  |
