The Courage of a Citizen

Each of us is drawn to pleasure and repulsed by pain. Perhaps Jeremy Bentham made too much of this observation, but it is nevertheless true that we are instinctually driven away from pain, poverty, social ostracism, poor health, shame, and fear. For a species so programmed, courage as an almost universal virtue is a bit of an oddity, but as a species we are odd in never being at peace with what we are. There is, however, intelligence in even this eccentricity.

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, writes that, “The courageous man withstands and fears those things which it is necessary [to fear and withstand] and on account of the right reason, and how and when it is necessary [to fear or withstand] them, and likewise in the case of being bold.” The presumption here, and the reason for the intelligence in this eccentricity, is that there are some things that merit our rising above our fears. Courage is necessary, but it is not always simple, nor is it even of a single kind.

Generally, when Aristotle considers courage, he has in mind the courage of a soldier. This is fitting since death is perceived to be the most fearful condition, and it is this fear that a soldier is called upon to surmount. To quote from William James’ The Moral Equivalent of War (1910), “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.”  However, courage, like any other virtue for Aristotle, is still a mean between a deficiency and an excess. Courage (ανδρεια) sits between fear (φοβος) and Boldness (θαρσος), or alternatively, between cowardice (δειλος) and rashness (θρασυς). As with so much in Aristotle, courage is defined in a qualified way—in evaluating an act, the observer must take into account whether the right thing was done in the right way, at the right time, in the right manner, for the right reason, and according to the right motivation.

Ridgeview touts two character pillars that are closely related: citizenship and courage. We write of citizenship, “I recognize that I am a member of an established community and will practice my rights, duties, and privileges in such a way as to uphold and preserve the benefits of citizenship for others,” and of courage: “I recognize that this endeavor will require a disposition characterized by nobility and valor; to make hard decisions with a view to virtue rather than popularity, to justice rather than ease, and to magnanimity rather than self-regard.” How are these connected?

With citizenship, we speak of “rights, duties, and privileges”—membership essentially, and membership matters as a benefit to us, and by extension, to others. It is not something that is guaranteed by a third party; it is guaranteed by all those who enjoy it. Membership, whether in a society or a nation, amounts to very little if its members esteem courage too lightly since whatever is worth having will inevitably require defending. Regardless of whether we are speaking of physical, moral, intellectual, or even spiritual courage, our society is the less without it.

Perhaps one of the most misattributed quotations within recent memory is that of Thucydides having allegedly said or written that, “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.” These were the words of Sir William Francis Butler and taken from a speech he delivered in 1889. Their popularity and attribution to Thucydides is interesting. People, arguably, intuitively understand that courage, whether it is in the trenches or the drawing room, is indispensable. Without it, there are not only no Medal of Honor recipients, but no Dietrich Bonhoeffer and no Atticus Finch: no heroes and no saints.

If we are reluctant to extol courage because of its centrality to war, we should pause and consider whether we truly have alternatives sufficient to develop this part of ourselves as a species. William James in writing his essay quoted from a German author S.R. Steinmetz: “War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential form of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health, and vigor there isn't a moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another.” James sums up in further quoting another author, Simon Patten, “mankind was nursed in pain and fear, and…the transition to a "pleasure-economy" may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences. If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.”

It is not at all clear that in abjuring war or deriding courage, we have risen rather than fallen. There seem to be many indicators now prevalent that James prophesied; namely, that we have sunk into a vain materialism and daily devour ourselves in the process. That said, we do not fight wars because we seek our development, but rather because we hold certain principles in higher esteem than our lives or our mundane comforts.

Those principles are as important in a school as they are on a distant battlefield. That a school is composed of courageous people, or of people who at least aspire to become courageous, is critical if that school is to sustain any meaningful principles. That it has principles worthy of defense is what make membership, or citizenship, in it desirable.

D. Anderson

Headmaster