The Tyranny of Petty Coercion

Marilynne Robinson The Tyranny of Petty Coercion COURAGE SEEMS TO ME TO BE DEPENDENT ON CULTURAL DEFINITION. BY this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behav­ iors in different cultures, though that is clearly true. I mean also, and more importantly for the purposes of this article, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it. Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission. We human beings also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves—prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one. This ought not to be true in a civiliza­ tion like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression. But it is. Physical courage is remarkably widespread in this population. There seem always to be firefighters to deal with the most appalling conflagrations and doctors to deal with the most novel and alarming illnesses. It is by no means to undervalue courage of this kind to say it is perhaps expedited by the fact that it is universally recognized as courage. Those who act on it can recognize the impulse and act confidently, even at the greatest risk to themselves. Moral and intellectual courage are not in nearly so flourishing a state, even though the risks they entail—financial or professional disadvantage, ridicule, ostracism—are in fact comparatively minor. I social research Voi 71 : No 1 : Spring 2004 29 propose that these forms o f courage suffer from the disadvantage of requiring new definitions continuously, which must be generated out of individual perception and judgment. They threaten or violate loyalty, group identity, the sense of comme ilfaut. They are, by definition, outside the range of consensus. And it is true of consensus as it is of worthier things that whatever is not with it is against it. Social comity is no doubt dependent on a degree of like-mindedness in a population. It does sometimes help when we are in general agreement about basic things—though it is never to be forgotten how much repression and violence consensus can support, or how many crimes it has justified. Still, it is so powerful and so effectively defended that I suspect it goes back to earliest humanity, when our tribes were sm all and vulnerable, and schism and defection were a threat to survival. Since Darwin at the latest, there has been a tendency to define “the natural” in a way that excludes human behavior in most forms known to or understood by writers on such subjects, and to assign great positive value to whatever behaviors they chose to retroject onto the imagined human past. I do not by any means wish to be understood as offering the impulse to consensus, however primordial it may be, as anything other than a fact, or to find demurral any less natural because it may have developed with the other arts of civilization. As with anything that figures in human histoiy, weal and woe are thoroughly compounded in them both. As with anything that figures in human history, both require continuous ethical evaluation. It is true that in m ost times and places physical courage and moral and intellectual courage have tended to merge, since dungeons, galleys and stakes have been so extensively employed in discouraging divergent viewpoints. For this reason our own society, which employs only mild disincentives against them and in theoiy positively admires them, offers a valuable opportunity for the study of what I will call the conservation of consensus, that is, the effective enforcement of consen­ sus in those many instances where neither reason nor data endorse it, where there are no legal constraints supporting it, and where there 30 social research are no penalties for challenging it that persons of even moderate brio would consider deterrents. Let us say that courage of the kind I wish to consider can be defined as loyalty to truth. I am not entering any...