Real Courage
A Companion Essay to My Book
Author’s Note: In one of the chapters in my forthcoming book, I foreshadowed that I would be writing an essay on the subject of real courage, which I would make available on my website. Here it is. I’m publishing the book and the essay within days of each other, and when the book is live, I’ll throw a buy link in the comments. The essay and book are different from each other and I tried to avoid rehashing too much of the same material. However, they can be read completely independently.
In recent decades, the therapeutic has displaced personal agency, not just in therapy, but in the broader cultural narratives emphasized in Western society. We talk more of trauma today than in 1955. Some of this has been useful. We no longer stigmatize victims of what used to be called shell shock. Not all of the trauma-talk has been harmful.
But the language of trauma and therapy is part of a larger shift towards what some have called grievance culture, and what I and others call victimhood culture. A complete exploration of victimhood’s displacement of dignity and honor is beyond the scope of this essay. But for our purposes today, we can broadly say that the emphasis on trauma has gone too far. While it has helped to destigmatize talking about psychological pain – allowing more people to seek treatment instead of hiding mental health problems and also contributing to the willingness of victims of sexual abuse to step forward, which in turn has helped society begin to hold abusers to account – trauma has gone from the shadows to the limelight. In some circles, it approximates a monocausal explanation for everything from societal inequity to addiction to war to poor grades.
The narratives of trauma and victimhood develop out of a prevailing attitude that vast, impersonal forces make pawns of helpless individuals. While I find causality not only tedious, but entirely unconvincing (especially the atheistic variety which stipulates causality without a causer), I think it’s obvious to everyone that vast, impersonal forces do play a role in determining societal and individual outcomes. It’s a stretch to say that individuals have no control over their own lives, but it’s mundanely obvious that some things are outside of individual control. (And most things fall in the middle.)
What Does This Have to Do with Courage?
A full treatment of victimhood and trauma is beyond our scope. And these intertwined narratives are not the only factors contributing to the modern misunderstanding of courage. But the therapeutic approach to life outside of therapy has certainly played a major role in our loss of understanding about the nature of real courage.
We teach children now that life is filled with trauma, which will inevitably scar them. We teach them not only that the world is full of traumatizing experiences, but that they will be unable to handle them. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff attribute the stark rise in mental health issues among Generation Z (as compared to every previous generation, including my own, Millennial) to a number of factors. Chief among these, a narrative children learn early that, “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”
(Notably, this rise in mental health crises cannot be attributed to changes in reporting alone. In any data set, if the signal is large enough, it can’t all be noise.)
Technically, I grew up before Gen Z. But technically I didn’t – I’m in the last year of the Millennial Generation. Throughout my schooling (K-college), I encountered the “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” narrative. And while Nietzsche’s famous alternative can certainly be taken too far (breaking a bone usually won’t kill you but you shouldn’t test that anyway), in modern American schooling, we don’t have enough of the hard things that make you stronger.
The language of trauma now affects not only education, but how we talk about virtues like courage. When we raise two generations by telling them they’re helpless victims beset by causal forces, we cannot simultaneously teach them to revere heroism and bravery. You can’t tell someone that life will inflict on them debilitating trauma and also that great men and women overcome their circumstances through courageous action in the same breath. You can’t tell someone that nothing is their fault while still celebrating self-sufficiency, responsibility, and bravery. You can’t teach someone to be weak without also teaching them not to be strong.
Raising up victims is all well and fine. But we are rapidly approaching a point at which the only people who can be celebrated are victims. Applauding athletic accomplishment must be caveated lest you come off as ableist. Lauding successful entrepreneurs who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps somehow implies that poor people are failures. If you point out that the vast majority of people who lose a loved one will successfully transit the mourning period intact (meaning that, while they will forever miss the one they lost, they can move on with their lives), you’re somehow throwing shade on anyone who needs therapy. If you say that most people actually can cope with trauma and will get over it in a matter of months to a year, you’re a bigot. If you tell people that not everyone who experiences war will get PTSD, and that most of those who do will not be permanently psychologically damaged by it (even if they are still affected by it), you’re apparently denigrating victims of PTSD.
In this way, our egalitarian desire for inclusivity leads us to punish success and stigmatize lack of mental health problems (just as some in the body-positivity community actually stigmatize healthy weight loss). In encouraging people to solve their problems, or giving them the tools to do so, you’re accused of “hurting” anyone who hasn’t.
Heroism isn’t Inclusive (By Definition):
While not directly related to the ideology of therapy, our postmodern sensibilities have also bequeathed us another pernicious attitude, which joins the above sentiment in undermining the very concept of heroism. This is the attitude of the cynic who scoffs, “I have no heroes.”
(Now at this moment, some few readers will note than democracy has fueled egalitarian sensibilities throughout the American Republic, and that anti-elitism is as American as Huckleberry Finn. But the postmodern version is different in both degree and kind from the natural and healthy American sentiment that says, “I kneel to no man.”)
Today, we tear down heroes (and their statues), and even the concept of heroism. We celebrate schadenfreude. We celebrate the antihero, the helpless victim, the cynics, the critics, the sneering spectators, the “amoral” non-heroes, the con artists, and even the “complicated” villain.
This extends to mocking the concepts of courage and toughness and action. As if only low people needed those virtues – unlike the enlightened, who have no need to sully themselves with such things.
But the entire project of postmodernism extends beyond mocking. It extends to redefinition. Because if language affects how we understand ideas, changing language can change ideas and thus society.
Redefining Courage:
It wasn’t enough to mock bravery. It wasn’t enough to teach two generations to be weak. It wasn’t enough to replace the language of responsibility with the language of trauma. To truly change people’s hearts and minds, you have to redefine virtues themselves. Especially courage.
Recognizing areas and individuals that went overlooked for too long is all well and good. It is fine to celebrate courageous actions that at one time would have gone ignored. But we had to go further. It wasn’t enough to praise an athlete for speaking out about her mental health, or a victim for coming forward about a sexual assault. (Both are fine and good, I would say. We should support victims and bring abusers to justice. We should acknowledge mental health challenges and encourage people to seek treatment – if they need it.) But no, we had to go farther than that. We had to mock examples of what used to be considered courageous.
It is a little sick that we don’t seem satisfied with elevating people who are struggling, but feel the need to tear down those who are successful. But such is human nature. It may not make anyone better off to put someone else down, but some people can’t rest knowing that someone else has something that they can’t have.
And thus, we have turned the concept of courage upon its head. We tell people that “real courage is the courage to admit defeat,” or that “real courage is the courage to be weak.” And we pretend that dying for one’s country is not courage.
Sometimes you do have to admit defeat. Sometimes you must admit weakness. Sometimes it takes courage to do that. But that isn’t the end of courage or the definition of it, but rather a minor manifestation of it. Why focus more on the time the athlete courageously bowed out than the many medals she won performing daring, life-threatening feats of agility? Did not both take courage (albeit different forms)?
A backlash to one set of misguided stereotypes creates another set. If hiding all pain and repressing all emotion isn’t healthy, neither is flinching at all pain and displaying all emotion. We rightly proclaim that courage isn’t the chest-thumping, show-no-feelings, feel-no-fear bravado of cardboard characters in a cheap pulp fiction novel. But we don’t realize that characters defined solely by the inner turmoil they’ve carried for decades following a traumatic incident are not realistic either.
In our reckoning with trauma, we had to make everything about trauma, and therefore we had to make courage about trauma. But people aren’t defined by the trauma they experience. At least, they’re not solely defined by it. (Of course, in our victim-virtue-signaling, status-seeking-through-demonstrating-vulnerability culture of grievance, we now try to define ourselves by our “trauma.” But that’s not what I’m talking about.)
What I mean is that except in extreme cases, most people are not suffering from crippling inner turmoil (if you are, please see a therapist). And most people do not and will not suffer from anything they cannot overcome with time. Almost every human being who ever lived for more than a few years lost people they loved. Almost every human being who ever lived experienced pain and suffering. If we were a species of creature that “simply could not deal,” we never would have made it out of the jungle. Natural selection would have seen to it that we never survived long enough to pass our genes on.
Which means that we can deal with it, we do deal with it, and we are descended from the hardiest hominids in the history of the Earth. So, everything in life isn’t simply about trauma.
Getting Back to Courage:
Which brings me back to the point of this essay. In the West in 2022, we pretend that the only real courage is dealing with trauma. But many things involve courage that don’t involve trauma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that courage defines the human race much more fully than trauma does, even if both play some small defining role and neither is the sole defining factor (humans are complicated).
One of the factors – but by no means the only one – that got us to this moment is an ideology based on oppression (and victimhood), which sorts people into oppressor and oppressed. An ideology based on power, and power struggles. And the same ideology that tears down heroism and greatness.
It is interesting that a culture that seeks to destroy the concept of heroism would simultaneously make the term ubiquitous. We bestow the appellation of hero so liberally now that everyone has been called a hero at some point (or at the very least everyone has walked past a motivational poster instructing them to call themselves a hero). And just as over-heaping praise fragilizes a child and creates insecurity and praise-hunger in the child, constantly telling people who don’t feel like heroes that they’re heroes creates vulnerability.
Heroes demonstrate real courage. Heroes are noble. Courage is noble. But we don’t like nobility, because we don’t like greatness or hierarchy. We don’t like the idea that some people are better than others.
And for the record, I don’t fully like the idea either. I’ve never liked authority. I loathe the idea that some people are born into a higher position in society simply because their family owned some land many years ago. I don’t like the idea that power and status should confer on somebody due to their lineage. One of the best things about America is that we never had royalty. But while I detest the concept of nobility of birth, I truly admire the concept of nobility of character. And nobility of character requires courage.
C. S. Lewis famously wrote that courage was the form every other virtue took in the moment of testing. Put more simply, to have any virtue, you need to have the courage to demonstrate it when doing so is hard. It’s easy to be honest when you don’t have anything to lie about. It’s hard when you might face a penalty for admitting that you did something wrong. Temperance is easy when you’re never around alcohol. It’s much harder when you’re the only one at the party not drinking and everyone keeps asking you to take a shot.
Courage is central to the human experience, to the good life, to human flourishing, to ethics, and to keeping a just society just. It takes many forms, more than I can list. There is martial courage. There is intellectual courage. There is the courage of confronting an abuser. There is the courage demonstrated by MLK in the Birmingham Jail. There is the courage of the fighter in the ring. And, yes, there is the courage of admitting your mental health struggles and asking for help.
Most people recognize this. But some voices seem adamant on pigeonholing courage into one or two forms. It is as though in order to make up for the fact that for too long mental health issues were stigmatized, we had to stigmatize martial valor or athletic bravery to even out the score. (This is similar to the argument that because marginalized groups were denied justice for long periods of time, we ought to deny justice to a few members of historically powerful groups to even things out, rather than make amends for past injustice by working to treat everyone justly.)
Or perhaps some feel as though by celebrating some examples of courage, we might incidentally encourage behaviors we don’t like. By this logic, if we praise a soldier, we glorify war. Or if we laud a linebacker, we encourage concussions.
Denigrating Courage:
And some few go farther. Some individuals have such antipathy for physical courage, or intellectual bravery, that they attribute to insecurity what is due to courage.
“Only an insecure person would feel the need to take up boxing.”
“Why would anyone go backcountry hunting in the winter? Are they trying to prove something? Are they trying to feel better about themselves?”
“Anyone who races cars must be covering up for something.”
“Why is she trying to get over her phobia? Is she not okay with it? Why can’t she just live with it?”
“Isn’t it so childish that anyone would have some need, some compulsion, to climb a mountain? They must be making up for some deficiency.”
“Does that guy have a contrarian complex? Seriously, why can’t he just go along to get along?”
This argument inverts courage, by making the only acceptable form of courage, “the courage to be weak.” Not the courage to admit weaknesses, but the courage to be weak. And, no doubt, the courage to remain weak, because attempting to grow stronger is simply giving in to insecurity.
It is truly disgusting that anyone would feel threatened by other people’s examples of bravery. I don’t watch rugby (or any sport), but I’d never try to argue that playing rugby doesn’t require some real bravery. I have no desire to race cars. But it doesn’t make me uncomfortable to acknowledge that it takes guts to be a NASCAR or Formula One driver. Generally speaking, anyone who makes the argument that people who demonstrate physical or intellectual courage are only acting out of some deep-seated insecurity are themselves acting out of insecurity.
Racecar drivers die. Football players get concussions. Drivers and players know the risks, and they choose to participate in their respective sports anyway. That takes courage. It’s not because they gave in to outside pressure or believe some myth about physical bravery. It’s because they’re brave.
An Aside about Dueling:
All of this brings me to a point about dueling and honor culture. I’ll probably write at some point in greater detail about honor and dignity and victimhood culture. But others have given a much better treatment of the topic than I can, so I’ll give you a few links.
Here’s a quick cliff-notes version: Honor culture (which isn’t about integrity – honor and integrity once had somewhat unrelated meanings) prevailed in many societies around the world for centuries, and was intimately caught up in violence and reputation. One aspect of it was dueling. Perhaps the most famous example was Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton, but dueling was at one time quite common.
When dignity culture replaced honor culture in the 1800s (at least in much of America), dueling went out of style. In an honor society, a man defended his reputation with violence. (At some point in history, I’m sure two women dueled, but for the most part, this was an entirely male phenomenon.)
In a dignity society, it was beneath a man’s reputation to stoop to the level of his critics. Ignoring insults was seen as the better part of valor. In honor culture, a man who wouldn’t back up his words with a fight – potentially at cost of his life – was a coward. In dignity culture, it was a sign of character to allow the police to handle violence and it was a sign of low character to duel someone. Both cultures had their merits and their demerits.
But rather than explore those, I’d like to focus on how dueling relates to the discussion at hand. Dueling is one of the most anathema forms of violence today, even as it was the norm two hundred years ago.
In 2022, we’d like to pretend that dueling wasn’t courageous. “Well,” we tell ourselves, “Those men weren’t being brave. They simply conformed to the societal pressure that wanted them to duel each other. They were afraid of the damage to their reputations if they backed down from a duel and became widely known to be cowards.”
Yes. That might be true. In some cases, it was true.
But duelers still risked their lives. They knew that. Hamilton died. Do we really believe that the more frightening prospect for the millions of men who dueled over the centuries was loss of reputation, or death?
Even in the cases in which the answer was loss of reputation, it still takes courage to face death. The end of life. We pretend it doesn’t take courage to point a gun at another man and have him point one at you and know that this moment could be your last. But it does.
We may not like dueling. But – here’s the crux – what we like or don’t like doesn’t really have much bearing on what takes courage and what doesn’t.
Some people will also say here that, “it doesn’t take courage to shoot a man.”
I will choose my words carefully here: these people have no idea what they are talking about. It may take courage to say, “I won’t duel.” It took courage for those first dignity-culture proponents to do that. (Hamilton famously did not shoot at Burr, because he didn’t actually want to kill him.)
But it also takes courage to kill and it sure takes courage to die. It takes a lot of bravery to stand up and face a bullet you know might terminate your entire existence.
Finally, I’d point out that this shift from, “Name your date, time, and weapons of choice,” to “I will not duel,” is entirely due to the shift from honor to dignity culture. Victimhood had nothing to do with it, and doesn’t really add anything to what was gained from that shift.
My Larger Point:
The reason I included that extended aside is to illustrate that we don’t have to like something (i.e., dueling), to admit that it might take courage. Often, we are afraid to admit that certain forms of courage (i.e., the courage to kill a man) exist, so we deny their manifestations. In the past, we denied that it took courage for victims of sexual assault to come forward. We denied that it took courage to seek treatment for “shell shock.” We denied that it took courage to show weakness.
Today, we do the opposite. We’ve gone from, “don’t show weakness,” to, “only show weakness.” From, “don’t admit you’ve got PTSD,” to, “everyone’s got PTSD.” But not every soldier does have PTSD. And it isn’t enough to show vulnerability, you have to actually take action. The purpose of admitting you’re struggling with a mental health issue is to get help and treatment so that you can solve or mitigate the issue. We’ve gone from being insecure about being insecure to being insecure about violence.
(I think there’s also a bit of a male status anxiety thing going on with unathletic guys who dunk on physical courage, but that’s not something I’d really prefer to get into. A little status anxiety is natural and can be healthy or at least useful. But, there’s something to be said for letting go and not worrying about other people.)
The Courage to Cry:
This pendulum swing manifests itself in phrases like, “the courage to cry.” Surely there are scenarios in which it takes courage to show tears. But just as surely, there are scenarios where it doesn’t.
It’s a problem to always repress the urge to cry and stunt your emotional health. But crying shouldn’t be the natural response to every type of pain and trauma, and it’s natural not to feel an urge to cry in certain scenarios. Sometime in the last century, an idea entered the Western ethos that men shouldn’t cry (and sometimes that women shouldn’t either.) Despite the drumbeat of the last few decades to the contrary, there are some (mostly young) men today who still seem to believe that crying is unmasculine (although they may have arrived at that idea more in reaction to the “feminization of society,” than because they’ve never been “given permission to cry”).
But what seems to be lost on both sides of the “courage to cry” vs. “courage means never showing tears” debate is an understanding of what crying is and when it is and isn’t appropriate. Tears are a natural response to sadness and tragedy. But there are also times when it is not appropriate to cry. Suppressing tears when they’re inappropriate isn’t self-repression, just as crying at inopportune times isn’t healthy catharsis.
The word catharsis comes from a practice in Ancient Greece, where citizens would go to the theater to watch a tragedy and weep. The weeping gave release to their emotions and the theatrical performance allowed them to practice experiencing grief and sorrow. Catharsis wasn’t only about releasing emotions; it was about educating emotions.
All emotions are natural, but not all manifestations of them are. It is just as unhealthy to live on impulse and express great passion at every whim as it is to suppress all emotions and never experience the catharsis of a good cry. Emotional health requires not just having feelings, but having them at the right time and place and in response to the correct stimuli.
If you read history and literature and poetry and religious texts, you’ll see examples of men and women weeping at real tragedies. In ancient times, there wasn’t a “courage to cry,” because nobody thought it took courage to cry. And when there wasn’t social pressure against shedding tears, it didn’t. Tears were expected at funerals and at the sacking of cities. It is only relatively recently that we’ve developed a stigma against crying, so the “courage to cry” is a recent phenomenon. If we returned to an understanding of when tears are and aren’t appropriate, we wouldn’t need slogans about “the courage to cry” anymore.
The Virtue of Courage:
These debates over “courage to cry” and whether or not dueling took courage and the meaning of bravery really come down to myopia. Bravery doesn’t come in one or two prepackaged forms and it often looks quite different for one person than it does for another.
If we return to C.S. Lewis’s observation on “the form of every virtue at the testing point,” we’ll see why. Different virtues are tested by different temptations. For instance, the social courage of ignoring peer pressure to do drugs (i.e., the virtue of temperance), looks very different from the bravery of sacrificing one’s life for one’s country (i.e., the virtue of patriotism).
When a person bows to online pressure to disavow and repudiate and drag their own friend, we understand this as cowardice, because it's a failure to live out the virtue of loyalty. When a person lies out of fear, we understand this as a failure to exercise the virtue of integrity. When Peter denied Jesus, he failed to demonstrate many virtues, including loyalty and love and piety.
Conversely, when Isaiah said, “Here am I. Send me,” he was exercising piety in the face of fear and reluctance. When Charlie Simms refuses to give in to extortion, we understand this as honor (not because he didn’t snitch but because he couldn’t be bought). When the triathlete gets up off the ground and gets back on the bike, we understand this as the virtue of grit (perseverance and toughness).
In each of these examples, the crux is courage. The difference between virtue and the failure to exercise virtue is bravery. And because there are many virtues (although not infinitely many), real courage takes many forms.
What do all of those forms share that make them one thing? In every case, real courage requires confronting and overcoming fear. This is what dueling and confronting an abuser have in common. Real courage isn’t the opposite of fear (as the “I have no feelings” types might have you believe). It’s doing what makes you afraid. Pretending you’re never afraid is bravado. But isn’t that exactly what we’re doing when we denigrate examples of courage that involve physical risk and violence? Pretending we aren’t afraid?
I wrote in my book that you often need physical courage to have moral courage and intellectual courage, because the testing point often involves physical risk. Just as courage is the form virtue takes at the testing point, physical bravery is sometimes the form moral and intellectual courage take at the testing point. This isn’t always the case. Your classmates probably won’t beat you up for disagreeing with them about the minimum wage. Your parish priest won’t punish you for confessing your sins (this isn’t the Inquisition).
The point is that these different forms of courage quite often blend and overlap, which makes it even harder to argue for pigeonholing the virtue. Developing physical confidence quite often bleeds over into other areas of life, and vice versa. Fighters are often gentle, because they’re comfortable in their own skin. Overcoming timidity towards public speaking can help a person to overcome timidity towards physical risk. It’s easier to speak up in class after an intimidatingly heavy lift and a cold shower.
All of which is to say that if you want to achieve the virtue of courage, you need to develop physical and moral and emotional and social courage and intellectual courage. One of the mottos of Hardihood Books is mens sana in corpore sano. You need both mind and body. In an older era, we prioritized bodily courage over mental courage. Today, we quite often do the opposite (outside of high school boys’ locker rooms).
Yes, the body is worldly, but being a human has a physical dimension. Yes, physical courage is rawer and baser and more animalistic and rougher. But the noblest examples of moral courage all faced physical suffering and even death: Mandela, Gandhi, Christ, Bonhoeffer. Without the willingness to endure bodily suffering and death (i.e., without physical courage), moral courage falls apart in the face of true testing.
To Sum Up – We Still Need a Full Understanding of Courage:
Despite the fact that we are safer than ever, it will still sometimes require physical bravery to stand up for the downtrodden or prevent atrocities. We haven’t evolved as a species since the days of Genghis Khan or Achilles. When we stop encouraging people to develop the virtue of courage, we invite the strong to prey upon the weak. When stop believing in virtue, we create a society without it.
We redefine courage away at our peril. Why? Because someday we will need real courage, and will find ourselves unable to exercise it.
It doesn’t elevate us to pull other people down. We mock heroism at our peril, for tearing down heroism leaves us only with cowardice. We mock virtue and nobility and in doing so we hollow out our own chests. And therapy can’t take the place of our chests.