In Praise of Courage

My talk at the Together Conference, London, 20 September 2024

We live in an era that is not hospitable to the values of freedom, risk-taking and courage. Every institution – including that of the police and the military assume that safety is the foundational value to which all others must be subordinated.

According to the cultural scripts that dominates our institutions you can never be safe since safety they perceive safety as an end-in -itself. The object of keeping us safe has led to a proliferation of health warnings. The impulse to keep us safe has led to the use of trigger warnings in the most unlikely places, such as museums of art.

At the same time our civil rights and freedoms are casually curbed supposedly in the interest of our health. Public health now serves as medium for regulating our behaviour and lifestyle. This objective is achieved through expanding the meaning of public health The managerial elites are committed to managing our behaviour to the point of turning the diet of private individuals into a public issue.

All this is justified by experts and policy makers who claim to know better than us about what is in our best interest. They are in the business if protecting us from ourselves.

In effect the social engineers that manage public affairs treat grown up citizens as if they are children. Not just children- but vulnerable children who cannot cope with the challenges of life on their own. Through encouraging us to embrace a state of dependence and vulnerability they are inviting people  to feel ill. Is it any surprise that we are witnessing an exponential rise in the number of long-term ill? Is it any surprise that gradually mental illness is becoming normalised?

Under the guise of protecting people from words that they might find hateful or offensive, new procedures and laws are encroaching on the right to free speech.

And of course, dissident political views are now subject to censorship and in some cases criminalised. The behaviour of the courts in the aftermath of the recent riots in Britain shows that instead of serving the principle of justice, they acted in the spirit of revenge, in service of a political agenda.

Moral Disarmament

The infantilisation of public life runs in parallel with the promotion of cultural attitudes that discourages the public from taking their freedom and rights seriously. We live in a culture that incites people to be cautious and risk averse. Instead of cultivating their resilience, young people are endowed with the status of vulnerability.

Young people are rarely acquainted with the foundational values of courage, duty and responsibility. Indeed, society is so thoroughly estranged from the ideals of courage and self-sacrifice that even historic acts of heroism are now viewed through a sceptical lens. The downgrading of this classic values leads to the development of what is best described as moral disarmament.

A striking illustration of the impact of moral disarmament was highlighted in a recent survey which indicated that most people stated that they did not feel proud to be British. I know that this is just a poll, but it nevertheless indicates that a significant section of society is indifferent to the traditions and accomplishments of the nation that they inhabit.

In effect moral disarmament dispossesses society of the values that have historically played a central role in helping society deal with the difficult challenges it faced. The moral disarmament of the west has acquired its most striking expression in the sphere of socialisation and public education. Many educators self-consciously questioned the desirability of transmitting their nations historical legacy. In the United States there has been a veritable crusade designed to de-authorise the status of Founding Fathers and the very act of founding the nation. In British schools too there is a discernible tendency to avoid public expressions national pride.

Traditional values, such as courage, duty, patriotism and solidarity, were replaced with therapeutic ones, such as emotional literacy, wellness and self-esteem.

In the vocabulary of the post-heroic West there is little room for terms like courage, risk taking, patriotism, duty and responsibility

Historic heroes are now presented as flawed characters at best, and power-hungry frauds at worst. A former literary critic at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, quoted Oscar Wilde in a 1994 piece noting the tendency of contemporary biographies to mercilessly debunk their heroic subjects: ‘Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to debunk them.’

Bringing heroes down to Earth comes easily to a culture that regards courage and sacrifice as alien virtues. As Christopher Coker remarked in his book, The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror, ‘we tend to deprive [heroes] of the fullness of their lives in order to support and sustain the smallness of our own’.

If we are to live as free citizens capable of influencing our future we need to re-acquaint  ourselves with the virtue of courage. Aristotle observed, the virtue of courage has always played an important role in people’s ability to overcome obstacles. It allows them to look fear in the face, and to develop a more self-confident, optimistic attitude towards the future. As Aristotle explained, ‘we feel confidence’ if we ‘have often met danger and escaped it safely’.

Those who possess courage still experience fear, of course. But they are not overcome by it. A courageous individual will be able to draw on their power of reasoning and judgement to face uncertainty, to evaluate risks and opportunities.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt went as far as to argue that courage provides society with hope and underpins our capacity to live freely. As she put it, ‘courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world’.

 And she approvingly cited Winston Churchill’s claim that courage is ‘the first of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees all the others’.

Without courage – we cannot live freely.

Those of us who are fed up with being treated like children or are concerned about defending are freedoms face a choice

Grumble and keep quiet or step up and defend our rights! And we do not merely have to react and defend our rights but also take the initiative and set the political agenda.