Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb

1. (Re)Introducing Courage

one (Re)Introducing Courage The Retreat of Courage Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself, and nothing is more difficult to make than a courageous man. It is for precisely this reason that courage, as a topic of serious political and social debate, is not popular. At dinner parties it occasionally has its moments, and as a theme for ethicists and moralists it is afforded some serious consideration now and then. However, scholarly discussion regarding our social and political lives, for the most part, eschews serious discussion of courage. This has not always been so, and in the history of political thought one finds serious attention and praise given to courage by thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Mencius, Bacon, Montaigne, and so on. Much the same can be said of the history of literature, poetry, biography, music, and, for that matter, almost every realm of human artistic endeavor. Only in the modern and especially the postmodern age has courage retreated from the forefront of social and political considerations. There are various reasons for this retreat, but central is that to talk about courage, as will become abundantly evident in the following considerations, is also to talk about manliness. Thus to talk about political order 1 2  Courage and its relationship to courage is to be exclusionary, perhaps even­ sexist—a charge all prudent thinkers need to fear. Not only do we risk excluding the feminine when bringing courage into political considerations, we risk excluding those who do not live up to the difficult standard presented by courage. Although many modern thinkers regard it as a right and proper virtue , courage cannot be a requisite of political considerations and participation because making it a requisite would be tantamount to erecting barriers to full civic participation. The rationale here is straightforward: courage is a virtue possessed by few, and if one must possess courage to be a good citizen then there will necessarily be few good citizens. As such, many political theorists reject this virtue rather than hold it up as an integral part of general civic participation and good character.1 For example, Mark Warren argues that participation in democracy and democratic institutions should not require courage at all. If democratic institutions function as they ought, they are “reducing and containing the risks of political engagement .”2 The task of democracy is to ensure that citizens do “not require heroism” and to “protect spaces for moral persuasion—the most fragile of public spaces—so that moral voice requires something less than heroism.”3 Good citizenship, it seems, ought to be­ attainable regardless of one’s courage. And to push this position perhaps to its logical conclusion, if one demands of one’s fellow citizens the virtue of courage by, say, creating anything resembling a confrontational arena of participation, one is a bad citizen. There is further reason for the retreat of courage from our political and social considerations. To contend that good political order requires courage is to say the coward has no place in political life. We know that not all people are courageous, which means that at least a few people writing about politics will disqualify themselves from political participation. After all, it would be very difficult to hold courage a necessary virtue for political participation yet know oneself to be a coward. In other words, only the courageous will be inclined to say that courage is important, and because thinkers are a notoriously timid lot it stands to reason that scholars not only ignore courage but often reject it altogether. People are hardly inclined to argue that they themselves are inadequate for their own topic. (Re)Introducing Courage   3 Much the same can be said of the virtues in general. In the premodern world, especially in the world of the ancient polis, talk about virtue (arête) was de rigueur. Courage was considered part of virtue, and the central task of the polis was to assist in the fullest possible unfolding of the virtues and perfection of its citizens. However, as William Galston points out, two generations in the West have functioned on the assumption that one can, and should, sever the liberal polity from concerns not only of courage but of the virtues themselves .4 This view of virtue, and of courage in particular, is the progeny of Immanuel Kant’s proclamation that the good citizen is not necessarily the...