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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast which, since 2008, has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers and leaders that glean their edifying, life-improving insights, without the fluff and filler.
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Now on to the show.
Courage is one of our most prized and celebrated virtues.
But once you really start exploring it, the nature of courage is surprisingly hard to pin down.
Here to help us explore the fascinating complications of courage is William Ian Miller, a historian, professor of law and the author of The Mystery of Courage.
Today on the show, Bill explains how centuries of philosophers, soldiers and storytellers have approached courage and the hard-to-answer questions its manifestations raise.
We discuss why courage has long been ranked among the highest virtues, the relationship between fear and courage, the fuzzy line between courage and cowardice, the association of courage and manhood, whether or not courage is domain specific, the difference between offensive and defensive courage, whether martyrs are courageous, whether deeds with evil ends are courageous, how fear, shame and honor shape brave action and more.
After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash courage.
All right, William Ian Miller, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Happy to be here.
So you wrote a book 26 years ago called The Mystery of Courage, where you explore the moral, psychology and sociology of the virtue of courage.
I'm curious, what led you to take a deep dive into this virtue?
My field is the Viking sagas, the Icelandic family sagas.
And there, the issue of courage and cowardice is always front and center on display.
The characters are anxious about it.
And I just thought it was one step from there, to just think about it generally, seeing as it's still very much with us.
It's an anxiety.
I think every little kid grows up wondering if they have what it takes or don't have what it takes, and mostly trying to figure out what it means to be a person of courage if you're even reasonably tested anymore.
But so I just thought this would be an interesting thing to look into, since there's no shortage of sources, because courage and cowardice are the two kind of standard themes of world literature from time immemorial.
Yeah, it's not just fiction or epics or things like that.
Philosophers have spent a lot of time on courage.
It has been an obsessive topic, not just among fighters and anxious kind of males, but it has been a constant theme among philosophers, because it's very hard to get a fix on.
Once you start to think about what is it and do I require certain mental states?
What mental state is the driver of courage?
Can we figure it out?
And if you ask the people who we look at and say, now that's a real courageous person.
What do they think?
And they often don't think about it at all.
They just say, I did what I had to do.
Or they said, I was scared out of my wits the entire time.
I don't understand why I'm being called courageous.
So like I said, the title of your book is The Mystery of Courage.
And you got that from a phrase written by a Civil War soldier named Abner Small, who pondered the mystery of bravery.
Bravery, right.
You know, one of the really blessings of researching this book was reading hundreds of war memoirs.
Some of them are just literary masterpieces, and these are people who would not have stuck a pen to paper but for trying to puzzle through their own performance during their work as service.
And if I could recommend to whoever your listeners are to get a book called The Road to Richmond.
It's the title of this Abner Smalls memoir.
He was a union officer at Fredericksburg, at Antietam, and he turns out to be a brilliant writer and never would have written anything but for trying to come to terms with his war experience.
So it comes from him, and it's just a powerful, moving memoir.
And what he does and what you do in this book, these men who are writing about their performance in battle they're grappling with well, am I courageous?
And then when you think about it, as you said, we think we know what courage is, but when you start thinking about it you really have to be like wait a minute.
Well, I felt scared, but I did it anyways.
Is that courageous?
Or I didn't feel scared and I was able to do the thing.
Yeah.
Are you supposed to feel the fear and then overcome it?
Or are you supposed to get rid of the fear and not feel it at all?
And nobody thinks.
If you think of a person who does objectively what would have been a dangerous thing and succeeds at it but had no clue, was too stupid to know that there was anything dangerous about it.
We don't think they're courageous.
They didn't have any temptation to flee.
They weren't under any stress because they were too stupid to discern the risk.
We don't want to give it to just the stupid person who just kind of luckily does the right thing.
So that you want some idea that you are in the zone of... danger, right?
There's no way that courage doesn't have a complicated waltz or dance with fear.
But how?
I mean, is fear supposed to sit on the sidelines?
Or are you supposed to just do a little kind of cha-cha with it?
Or what are you supposed to do?
How's the fear supposed to be managed?
You also begin the book with this example that showcases how yeah, once you think about courage, it's like what is this exactly?
And the example is this.
It's the description of a good coward.
Yeah.
What can the good coward tell us about the mystery of courage?
Yeah, here is this – when you start reading these memoirs, you just run into these wonderful storytellers.
Here is a guy writing about his Civil War experience about 30 years after the fact.
And he describes a man in his unit whom he calls the good coward.
He didn't think he was a good coward when he was –
In the war with this guy, he thought of him as just a plain old coward.
But now, in reflecting on him 30 years later, he thinks that he might have been, in fact, the most courageous of it all.
Here's what he did.
He lines up for every battle.
And once the bullets start flying and the guy next to him takes a hit, he turns and runs.
He's ashamed.
He comes back to camp maybe a day or two later, is miserable.
He does all the grunt work for everyone.
He's trying to make amends for every run.
And then the next battle, he runs away again.
But every time he lines up, takes his steps forward until the guy next to him gets crunched, he manages to steal himself to do it the next time.
So the guy who wrote this up, a guy named Robert Burdett, says you know, now that I think about it, he might have been the most courageous of us all.
Us young guys, we were just all hell-bent for leather.
We never thought about it at all.
This guy had to overcome the most monstrous demons to line up each time and think he was going to do it this time.
And yet he showed up again, suffered all the opprobrium that his mates gave him.
It turned out though, that a lot of the mates just understood him, that he was making a good effort, and were kind to him.
There's a sense that the author was not kind to him and is now making amends by writing this memoir 30 years later.
Yeah, so the guy had the courage to keep trying and trying and trying.
He kept trying.
So, like Tim O'Brien, many of your listeners will have read some of Tim O'Brien's work.
Vietnam War Vet.
He wrote a memoir when he was just 23 years old called If I Die in a Combat Zone.
And the whole book is a desperate attempt to figure out what courage is and whether he managed okay, and to come up with a theory that would describe, to make it possible for him to have delivered at least reasonably well.
And what he describes, he comes up with a theory.
He He was terrorized the whole time.
He would just feel his stomach caved in.
He would just feel sick with nausea, panic, terror.
And he said, I just knew I didn't deliver then, but I promised I would do better the next time.
And so what he comes up with a theory is of averaging your performances over time.
Some days you'll have it, some days you won't.
And you know, in the great epics, like the Homeric epics and stuff like that, battles never lasted even one day.
They lasted an hour or so before one side turned and ran.
So the efforts that you had to muster up were, every spring, to get it together once or twice to deliver.
But imagine yourself when the most hellish of all wars, World War.
I Imagine yourself in a battle that in some places on the Western Front lasted four years.
You were under constant shelling and sniping for four years.
Well, then nobody makes it.
Everybody finally runs out of courage.
They go crazy.
You note that in the earliest discussions of courage from ancient philosophers it was either placed first among virtues or no lower than third among the four cardinal virtues.
Why has courage always been ranked so highly?
I think one is the people who are writing are men and of course it's the most anxious concern about little boys growing up and stuff like that.
That's one issue.
The standard one is the explanation that if you don't have courage, you don't have the space in which to exercise the gentler virtues like temperance charity, prudence and stuff like that.
It buys you the space where you can cultivate kind of leisure hours and more refined behaviors.
You can think of it as the spiny outer shell of love.
Can you imagine saying you love somebody and you won't go into a burning house to try and get them out?
What does love mean without a certain amount of courage?
So courage protects love.
Courage makes civilization and all the civilized virtues possible.
And it creates the security where we can even think about the sort of softer pursuits of life.
Yeah, is that sometimes philosophers or people writing war memoirs, or politicians or whatever?
There seems to be a bit of self-interest in how they define courage.
You better believe it.
Yeah, tell us about that.
You cannot believe how, I mean, there's just a politics of courage.
Who gets to define it so who qualifies?
Well, in the old regime, of course, women couldn't even.
It was all.
The words for courage were the word for man.
Virtu vir, Andre, in Greek for men, even in Hebrew, the word for man is the word for courage.
But it was only allowed to upper class men too, and not to slaves or to workers or to lower class men.
So you have like definitions that are always kind of, let's say, favoring one group as against another.
And so people fight over what is courage to get themselves to qualify.
I mean there's a big debate right from the start although the philosopher Nietzsche made it into a big deal, but it's right there there from the very start, in the first writings about courage is whether the most proper courage is displayed on offense, that is, in the charge, or whether it's displayed on defense, that is, taking it, taking crap and not running.
And as we moved into modern warfare, where battles lasted months, taking it and not cracking became more the defining way of describing courage.
But you know it's funny, the battle of offense versus defense is constantly being still practiced.
Thought over.
But now we end up in our country with the silliness of people thinking that if you invest in a Silicon Valley startup, you're showing courage.
I mean, but that's a move.
Everybody's trying to claim it for their own behaviors.
And some of them are just downright laughable.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
So there's often been a class divide with Courage.
So you have the upper class guys who are like you know.
These lower class guys, you know they're just brutes, they're thugs.
And, you know, it's just the mean streets that made them tough.
But that's not the same thing as Courage.
And then you got the lower class guys who are like you know.
Look at these effet rich guys, these officer guys, you know, think so highly of themselves, but they're actually really soft and they're going to be cowards when the stuff actually hits the fan.
And you just generally have different types of men, each claiming that courage belongs to people who are like them.
And we might popularly think of courage as belonging to a certain type.
But the interesting thing you see in war histories is that you couldn't always tell from the type who is going to be courageous.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you know what?
My dad was in heavy combat in World War II.
Saw a lot of action in the Pacific.
He was the most... let's say, non-martial human being on the planet.
He was not into sports.
He was just a sweet, decent man.
And it turned out he was a good soldier.
He turned into a creditable soldier.
He got two bronze stars for certain rescue missions he went on.
It's funny.
One of the things that is a frequent theme in a lot of the Civil War memoirs and in the World War I memoirs is that there was no predicting from social background or employment who would deliver, who would actually be the good soldiers.
And sometimes it was the accountant and not the barroom brawler.
And in fact the letters home from soldiers always love to note any time one of these street thugs or barroom brawler types cowered and ran.
When you know they probably cowered and ran no more than anybody else did.
But the other soldiers like to note that when they did.
But one of the things that the unit commanders kind of constantly refer to is how surprised they are at who delivers and who doesn't.
That there's no kind of predicting or because of people have good days and bad days, of counting on a person who basically, is pretty good delivering all the time, or counting on a person who's pretty not good not delivering sometimes.
I mean in this idea of offensive versus defensive courage.
You make the point that as warfare changed from ancient warfare
Where, like you said, a battle might last maybe an hour.
You did the charge.
It was kind of a shoving match.
And so you needed that offensive courage.
But then, as war changed to mechanized warfare and you had to just trench in and just endure, we started valorizing the courage of defense, of endurance.
But I still think there's, we still valorize, we still hold in high regard that offensive courage.
Yes, we do.
I would recommend people to read Tim O'Brien's little memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, because he says you know the charge, the charge, that's the thing.
That's pure courage.
But then he just like day in and day out, he's just starting to think.
It can't be just that, but it still holds this kind of emblem for us.
I think ultimately the real kind of just basic original conception of courage is you facing off against another guy whose eyes you can look into.
Modern warfare, you never see the eyes of your enemy, except in the rarest circumstances, and usually only when they're prisoners.
The eyes who are watching you and judging you in modern warfare are your mate's eyes.
And it's different when you're matching up courage against something else.
You talk about how Aristotle, when he was trying to figure out what courage is, he thought that courage requires higher reasoning than practical wisdom.
So here's another example of you know kind of hoity-toity philosopher guy, maybe using a little bit of self-interest to define courage.
You're suspicious of that rendering of courage, or seem to be suspicious of that rendering of courage.
Well, I'm suspicious, because the philosophers are always making like.
Unless you bring reason to the fray and know exactly when you should expend your courage only for valued goals and get the cost-benefit analysis exactly right, you're just being oh, either an insensate dumbbell like a Celt in Aristotle's view, or a ferocious lion who just is just all fury.
They want to bring reason and certain kinds of, let's say, mental refinements into the arena.
And I am always suspicious of that.
And Tim O'Brien, again, is another wonderful example.
There's a dying Marine out in the mud and somebody hollers for a medic and in heavy firefighting this medic runs out and ministers to this dying Marine holding up a plasma bag.
An ideal target.
So when he comes back, O'Brien says you know, a manifest action of courage and actually a useless action because the poor guy was dead anyway or going to die.
And just a noble act, but also just doing his duty.
And the medic just says, well, I don't know, somebody collared medic and I just guess I ran.
So Tim O'Brien is kind of upset with the lack of kind of intellectualizing of the demand made on this medic.
Like you said, you researched and wrote about the Icelandic sagas.
I don't imagine those Vikings really intellectualizing courage all that much.
Well, you know, they have their standard interesting little discussions about when you pick your moments to fight and when you eat crap and just sit back and wait.
And they have a saying that says only the slave avenges himself immediately, but the coward never does.
What that saying is meant to do is saying you do not waste the opportunity to have the ball in your court to make the next move, to take revenge.
You don't waste it by hitting back right away.
You make the other side stew, wondering when you're going to hit back.
But eventually you have to hit back or you become a coward.
In that world, forgiveness is very hard to make into a virtue because it looks so much like cowardice.
Managing your time between when you take the crap and then when you avenge.
It is your time to make the other side a nervous wreck.
And so, you know, there's all these kind of complicated – they talk about it.
They talk about don't be a hothead.
Don't hit back.
Eat that one.
And they have a kind of a standard rule that if you avenge every offense you have a very short life.
Sometimes you just shrug your shoulders and say it's not worth responding to.
So it sounds like the Vikings did have a bit of Aristotelian practical wisdom.
They had a ton, I think, much more than the philosophers nowadays do, because they lived in that world.
They truly bore the risks.
And they're very smart about it.
It's very interesting in those societies as to what constitutes fair play.
Are you supposed to give your opponent a fair chance?
Notice.
In Hamlet, our probably most famous revenge story, Hamlet comes up behind Claudius and he's praying.
And Claudius doesn't know Hamlet's behind him with his knife pulled to stab him in the back.
But Hamlet hears he's praying and thought, oh, no, if I kill him now, his soul goes to heaven.
Hamlet wants to make sure his uncle goes to hell.
But he shows no, not even the least bit of moral problem in stabbing him in the back.
So the point is you take your revenge.
You don't have to offer fair odds.
This reminds me of this idea of fairness.
It reminds me of I think of Odysseus and Achilles.
So sometimes Odysseus gets kind of portrayed as like the not courageous guy because he's wily and sneaky.
But he did some courageous things.
Oh, he sure did.
He sure did.
But there's constant battle about whether you can win by trickery or whether you're supposed to just win by macho kind of your force against their force.
But Montaigne, the great French essayist, writes Nobody says we can't take advantage of our enemy's stupidity just as well as our enemy's physical weakness.
Yeah, right.
And since 90 percent of warfare is about trying to fool the other side as to what your alignments are, how many troops you have, which units they are, and so on and so forth,
So trickery is just part of the game.
Too oftentimes, when we think about okay, is this person courageous, we typically talk about well, if you're courageous, you'll be courageous across all domains.
Yeah, and that's just not true.
It's not true.
Yeah i, I've seen that in my own life.
In my own life there's certain domains where I feel like I'm pretty courageous, but then there are other ones where I'm not.
And I grew up in Green Bay Wisconsin, and I went to a working class high school and there are the tough guys and then there are the little.
You know, weenies like me.
And the tough guys turned out to be remarkably generous in letting me alone, because there was one or two domains in which I showed less fear than they did.
And it was in drag racing for some strange reason.
So I was willing to crash a car and die before they were.
And so they cut me slack in other domains where I was not very, where I was just a downright coward, like in barroom brawls or something like that.
And they were actually kind of generous in their attributions.
And you know what?
It's interesting in the war memoirs there's some people who are totally courageous and cool under artillery bombardment, as opposed to some who just completely collapse in terror under bombardment.
Then there's some who can't take rifle fire and some people who are completely relaxed under rifle fire.
But no one is cool under every way of dying, under every weapon.
And there were these studies to try and map on With soldiers' understanding of the dangerousness of a weapon, that is, how really lethal it was and its frighteningness.
And you would think that the frighteningness and dangerousness should map on, but it doesn't.
So like Stuka dive bombers scared the crap out of people and they were very unlethal.
It was just the noise they made that terrorized everybody.
But there are people who just preferred rifle fire to artillery fire and people who could handle artillery fire but couldn't handle rifle fire.
And it's just like for each weapon or for each kind of demand made on you.
You needed a courage of its own sort to deal with it.
So there wasn't one kind of – unless you were a crazy person.
There wasn't one kind of seamless virtue that could handle it all.
Yeah, so Montaigne said, a man who is truly brave will always be brave in all occasions.
And I think Montaigne's wrong there.
Yeah, there's some examples where you see this.
I remember reading about a boxer.
I forget who it was.
It was a professional boxer.
And in a lot of ways, he was a really tough guy, tough demeanor, a real bruiser.
And he could get into a ring with another guy who could possibly kill him.
So he's courageous in that way.
But when a handyman or service people came to his house to fix stuff, he was actually terrified to talk to them.
So boxing didn't scare him, but small talk like that did.
Yeah, there's all kinds of funny stories like that.
But look at these Greek heroes.
So Achilles and those guys, if they heard a thunderstorm, they were all cowering and shaking.
They couldn't bear thunderstorms.
I mean, it was just that terrors are even culture specific as to what will be considered a terrifying thing.
But a constant thing that is made in literature is like a warrior who will face like nonstop bombardment but can't get up the nerve to ask a woman out on a date.
Right.
You think they should be able to do it, but they can't.
They can't.
What's interesting about your book?
I mean, all the examples we've been talking about so far have been fascinating.
Physical courage or martial courage.
And your book primarily focuses on physical or martial courage.
Right.
And people today, since we don't, a lot of people don't face circumstances where they have to display physical courage.
Yeah, right.
We talk a lot about moral courage, but is moral courage without physical courage really courage?
I don't feel I make a claim in the book.
The standard moral courage is that kind of stand up and meeting type of courage to take and express a decent kind of a moral, unpopular view, to risk being mocked and laughed at, sneered at, howled at, to state what most people will recognize as an honorable, decent view.
But can you imagine if that person could be backed off from stating that view if somebody just shot him a look and said after the meeting man, you're going to deal with me?
And then he sat down and didn't say a thing.
So moral courage needs a certain amount of not being able to be scared off your ability to make your stand.
You still have to be able to back it up.
So I'm not sure that there's a coherent, consistent distinction between moral and physical courage.
In the writings like U.S.
Grant, Ulysses Grant, in his wonderful, brilliant memoir he wrote when he was dying, kind of sneers at moral courage, kind of understanding that without the physical behind it it's just not there.
You know, there's another thing that kind of is interesting, too.
Generals will say that there's no shortage of courage that they see in their men in battle.
That, in fact, courage seems to be quite common.
But then you get into certain domains where it's rare beyond belief, and those tend to be the moral domains standing up for right in an unjust regime or something like that, incurring risks to your job and your reputation by taking an unpopular but clearly morally right position.
Who knows?
That's interesting.
So it sounds like moral courage doesn't mean a lot if someone isn't willing to take on physical risk to back it up.
But it also may be harder to exercise moral courage because in some ways it's easier to face physical danger than the social pressure to conform.
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And now back to the show.
Let's go back earlier.
You mentioned something about how courage since the beginning of Western civilization and you see this in other cultures as well courage has been entwined with manhood.
So like a lot of the words the ancients used to describe men were the same words for courage.
So, you know, there was which was Latin for manliness, we're, man, that means courage.
Andrea, that's Greek, that also is man, also means courage.
And then the word in Hebrew for man is the same one for courage.
So why the connection between courage and manhood, do you think?
It is the ultimate...
It's the image of the male as a dominator, as protector, as the ruler.
In many cases, although in small communities, it was the job of the men to kind of do the fighting and the women were to manage the home.
So part of it is constructing an entire community ideology of training men up to be tougher than they were likely to be, in the interests of the defense of family and the community.
An anthropologist who did his fieldwork in New Guinea among those violent, violent New Guinea tribes which are something else, kind of graph the amount of intensive labor it took to raise up little boys to be violently death-seeking, that it takes much more social energy and work to raise up a bunch of blood feuders than it does to raise up a bunch of accountants.
So it's not like it's not labor intensive from a child rearing point of view.
And then you might ask yourself, who does the child rearing?
In the sagas, it's the women.
So the women are the ones who inculcate those manly virtues.
I think they might cynically think, this is a wonderful way to handle our men.
We make them able to protect us, and we make them able to get knocked off.
I mean, you even see this with the Spartans, right?
So the Spartan mothers were famous for telling their sons or their husbands either come back on your shield or carrying it.
It might be interesting, actually, who invents this male ideology.
Is it men or is it women?
And there's all kinds of cultures in North African kind of Berber and Arabic cultures.
It's the women who keep score of how the men are doing in their feuds and fights.
And they compose mocking songs of the losers.
And in the sagas, the women taunt their men for backing down from a fight or for not taking revenge.
You call this, you know, women keeping score about how men are doing in the courage department.
You call it the female gaze.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean we see this, I mean you talk about.
We see sort of this female gaze in African cultures and then also with the Icelandic Vikings.
Yeah.
But you also saw this in World War I, the women keeping check on the courage of the men.
So there were women in World War I.
What they would do if they saw some guy who was fighting age and he wasn't out there on the battlefield they would get a feather and like Put it on him.
Hand him a white feather.
They would go around the streets of London handing any male they saw in civilian dress, who was a warrior age, a white feather.
And then, of course, that was – the women were out there shaming the men.
In the memoirs of – among the many –
Some of the guys who are just home on leave and badly wounded will get white feathers.
I mean, that's when the women are making a mistake, right?
Yeah.
So this is interesting.
So this idea, you know men valorizing courage, your interesting point here, or interesting argument, is that maybe the women are the ones who inculcated this culture of courage.
They.
Certainly it wasn't a case where the women are sitting back and saying oh, the men and their crazy views of courage.
The women were the ones who are inculcating it into the little kids in many of these cultures and who are wholeheartedly behind it.
And I think it's interesting, this whole idea of courage being entwined with masculinity or manhood.
I think a lot of us in the 21st century might think, oh, we're over that.
We're more enlightened.
But I still think there's a vestige of it in men today.
I mean, I think if you call a guy a coward or chicken, they're gonna be like oh wait, a minute, here i got, we gotta step outside, we're gonna take care of this.
Yeah, you can't, it's still the worst insults.
I mean you, and just think of how much, growing up as a little boy, the day-to-day just playing were often courage contests Who could jump off the highest wall or the roof.
Or who could go steal strawberries from Mrs. Jones?
I mean, they were all tests of undertaking risk.
And once you showed yourself able to do that, you only bought yourself a little bit of space.
For that day, you weren't a weenie.
But then the next day there'd be some little test like a boxing match or a wrestling match or something like that.
Yeah, with masculinity or manhood, the rents do every day.
The rents do every day.
One law student said that the horrors of men, the anxiety of men in the sex act, where men have – if they fail –
It's obvious to the woman.
So maybe it's that is the deepest core anxiety.
I'm saying this tongue in cheek, but it's certainly one of the core anxieties about manhood.
Something that's interesting to observe with the genderedness of courage is that, even though courage has traditionally been associated with masculinity, Women can be courageous too.
And something you talk about is that women have historically been associated with the defensive side of courage.
So taking pain, taking the pain of childbirth, enduring hardship.
People have often said that women are actually better than men at defensiveness courage.
But it's still not typically part of a woman's self-identity.
Like, for a man being called a coward is one of the worst insults, but if you call a woman a chicken, they're probably not going to be that offended or want to.
That's right.
That's right.
So i think we've explored some of the cultural ideas around courage and you know it's it's muddled and it's kind of like what's going on there.
But let's return to something we were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation and get more into the psychology of courage and its relationship to fear.
Do you think courage requires an internally courageous stance, or can you be courageous while being terrified, as long as you act courageously.
My view is that you're lucky if you somehow get rid of the fear and just do what you have to do.
But are you going to think that anybody is?
Even I would think somebody would be more courageous, who is just overcome with fear, who still manages, in spite of it, to do what needs to be done.
One of the things that's very interesting in a lot of these war memoirs from manifestly brave guys who were decorated, there was no doubt about them delivering under fire.
Many of them do not understand why they got the medal, other than that they just somehow managed to do something.
They don't know how they did it.
All they can remember was that they were scared out of their wits.
So they think my internal state, scared out of my wits, was what we think of as the cowardly state.
Then I ended up doing the right thing.
It happened by kind of accident.
My body was on automatic pilot.
We get the reverse in what were common claims in the Civil War, of a guy failing to go forward because his legs give out weak legs.
And Lincoln was famous for pardoning those guys who were brought up in court martial to be shot for not advancing for cases of weak legs.
Where as far as the internal state of the guy going forward, he wants to go forward.
He is trying to keep up with the guys.
But his legs give out.
So his body revels against his courageous intentions or his dutiful contentions.
What do you do then, when the body just refuses to go along for the ride, although your brain and your psyche is gung-ho for your body to go along for the ride, but it doesn't?
You know, I've been in my whole life a motorcyclist.
I've ridden bikes.
Now I'm going to be 80 in a couple of weeks.
And I've had more near-death experiences in the last five or six years than in the whole life up until then.
And it's not because my reflexes are slower, which they are.
It's because the drivers have gotten worse.
And they're all texting.
They're just texting.
They're not paying attention to the road and putting my life at risk.
Well, every once in a while, you get put in a situation where you're dead.
You're dead.
You can't believe the situation you're in.
And Something just takes over.
My body took over on automatic pilot and did probably, when I got through the mess, the only thing that could have been done to gotten out of it alive.
Did I know what I was doing?
No, my body, in the exact opposite of weak legs, took over when my mind was utterly in a state of terror and blank.
So the body still functioned, did the only thing.
When I got back, when I would come out the other end and be – I burst out in the giggles because I couldn't believe how close a call it was.
I couldn't believe, when I thought about it, that I did the only thing that could have been done to escape.
So there you get a kind of an anti – matter of the weak legs phenomenon.
Right.
So you're terrified, but your body somehow took over and did the thing that you were supposed to do.
The body took over and did the right thing.
That is what the military actually came to think would be gained by the constant drilling, nonstop drill drill drill, so that the body would behave automatically when the brain was just cashiered out, in a state of terror.
And again that makes you ask yourself was that courageous?
If you're just like a automaton yeah, that's see, you don't.
The assumption that most military leaders had is that all armies will eventually turn tail and run, that what's being contested between two armies is their fund of courage.
It's kind of a moral battle and one side will cave and one won't.
I'm not sure that's exactly right, because one of the things that happened in the Civil War was that people started to see that courage just didn't matter.
It's which side had the biggest guns and the most men that the amount of bravery might have a nice little point here, but ultimately it was just the sheer amount of material brought to bear.
That was the difference.
The courage didn't make the difference in a battle.
Now, of course, you could come up with some counter examples, but in a large sense, it's true.
What role does shame and honor play in courage?
Oh, it's the name of the game, right?
Aristotle and some will say that courageous deeds done because you would be unwilling to bear the shame of not delivering, being called a coward, being just mocked.
It's not the perfect courage.
It's like you're more scared of being shamed in public than you are of getting killed.
I just think that's a total misrepresentation.
Every epic hero fails to be courageous then by that measure.
The shame of being seen a coward is what makes many men deliver.
And there's a funny little saying that I found in the 17th century.
More men would be cowardly if they only had courage enough.
And it's the sign of being driven.
The fear of being disgraced drives them to go forward in battle when what they want to do is run.
It's complicated.
I don't see how you get courage without the honor-based, shame-driven aspect to it.
I just don't understand how it's psychologically possible, except for a few very rare, rare people.
It also raises the point that courage isn't just an individual virtue.
It really is a social virtue.
You have to have an audience, or an imagined audience, to really think about.
Well, I'm going to be courageous.
Because it's hard to be courageous when you're by yourself.
Yes, you better believe it.
I think the one true test of whether you are courageous is whether you would go through the action when you are safely not seen.
You could actually walk back and nobody would think that you shirked a duty.
You would be home free.
So you're totally alone with no eyes watching you of your own side.
And will you still do the thing you're supposed to do?
If you do it, then that is pure, pure courage, lonely courage.
Yeah.
I mean, if I look at my life, when I've encountered having to muster up courage to do something, particularly when I was a kid.
I remember I was with a bunch of Boy Scouts and we were doing cliff dives off some really high cliffs.
And I couldn't do it, but everyone else was.
I was terrified.
And the thing that finally got me to do it was i just was thinking i can't leave this place and be the only guy that didn't jump off that cliff, like i wanted to avoid shame and i want an honor.
But for me it was great because i actually did this thing and i felt really great afterwards and then, after i did it, i was able to just jump off this cliff over and over again.
I wasn't scared anymore.
Of course, the shame motivated you to do it.
I don't understand how most of us even do remotely courageous things, unless we're too ashamed not to
Yes, the fear of cowardice.
The fear of cowardice or the fear of being seen.
Now, that's why the eyes, will you ever blame yourself if alone for your failure?
Now you will, but we're never as hard on ourselves as mocking others will be hard on us.
Is there a tipping point where shame driven or a fear of cowardice driven courage is no longer virtuous courage?
Well, you know, I deal with this in a chapter talking about the Japanese performance in World War II, where death before dishonor which is a rare, a rare achievement for which medals are awarded in the West was just the norm in Japan.
I mean whole, entire 40000 men contingents on the island Saipan refused to be taken prisoner and all got killed.
Compliance in the West of those kind of things, just impossible.
You don't see it.
So is it that that courage, that death before dishonor become too easy for them?
You wonder, the cultural pressure to conform, the cultural shaming culture so powerful that everybody suicided.
Is it a virtue then?
Oh, God, imagine the peer pressure in the Japanese culture.
Ooh, doesn't mean they didn't make great soldiers.
Man, oh, man, did they make great soldiers.
But you wonder if the virtue, it didn't become too easy for them.
You know the problem, a very difficult problem.
When you see discussions of suicide, people say oh, that was cowardly.
Whereas people who say that, I think, are wondering whether they would have the nerve to do it.
Yeah, that reminds me of Bill Maher, the talk show host.
He got into a lot of hot water issues right after 9-11 when he said it took courage for the terrorists to fly a plane into a building.
And I remember when I heard that, I was thinking, well, yeah, you know, I couldn't do that.
Well, I couldn't do it, but could you if you thought you were going to heaven?
If you actually firmly, a 1.0 belief, thought you were going to heaven?
So I always wonder whether the courage of, let's say, a suicide bomber is indeed same with the early Christian martyrs.
If you think that you're guaranteed and really believe it without any doubt.
Although I wonder if martyrdom isn't because you do doubt and you want to prove that you're punishing yourself for doubting.
But if you really don't doubt, then you're just doing the rational thing in your you know rating of values and payouts.
I don't know.
These are, again, these are wonderfully complicated topics for which there are no easy answers.
Yeah.
And another question that arises with the terrorist example and the reason people were so upset about Bill Maher's comments is that we typically think of courage as having courage for a morally good cause.
And that's what we valorize.
But does the cause need to be good for courage to be real?
Or is courage a morally neutral virtue?
No, you know, it's one of the problems that people have according their enemy's courage.
I mean, take the case of the monstrously evil Nazi regime.
There is no doubt that many of those soldiers were utterly courageous and very good soldiers.
So you're unfortunately with courage, you have to admit that it can be employed for good or bad purposes.
I think we mentioned this earlier, but this idea that I thought was really interesting, this idea that courage is finite, that you only have so much of it.
You talk about in this book.
I think there's many people who study this in the military or they sort of observed it is that soldiers right, you know, fresh on the battlefield, they weren't that great.
But if they're there for a little bit, then that's where you see the most courage displayed.
And then if you're there for a few months like you're pretty much useless and need to get off the battlefield and go back to the camp.
Yeah, the amazing thing is they did.
Robert Graves in his wonderful World War memoir Goodbye to All That puts it at.
He says roughly, at about the six-month level, a soldier is totally worthless, and especially the young lieutenants and officers.
They're totally worthless.
They're at their best after about three weeks of getting their feet wet, and then for about six more weeks, and then they just start going downhill fast.
The US sent in people after the troops in the Normandy invasion and actually did testings and interviews with soldiers.
And they found that the useful life of a soldier in intensive combat was at most about 30 days before death.
Deterioration set in.
And then at about 60 days, they just became what the GIs called, they had the 2,000-year stare.
That is, they just became zombied.
So you had under incessant combat, courage levels were just six months was about it.
That some cases, if they're given pulled out of lines and given rest soldiers, could make it maybe 10 months.
And that was about it.
So, starting in the Great War World War I people started to talk about having fixed funds, a fixed amount of courage, and you try not to draw on your account too often because it'll just be run down to bankruptcy and then you end up in a vegetative state and basically post-traumatic stress disorder, or what they called shell shock back then.
I mean, here's another thing that muddles the moral calculus of courage.
And you talk about this in the book.
It's the factors of intelligence, expertise, and experience.
You know, it's just like, who's tougher?
Who's the person who has more courage?
The guy who's an actual trained swordsman, who is a you know, an Olympic gold medalist in sabers, or the clown against him who's never picked up a sword in his life and still fights him.
I mean, who's more courageous?
The guy with skill, his courage isn't even brought into play.
I suppose it was brought into play during the period when he was learning how to be a good fencer.
But skilled people get their courage devalued.
Think about the people who do bomb, you know, defanging bombs.
Obviously they are trained to do it, but the risk level is so high that just a fly landing on their finger or something like that could detonate the charge.
I don't know.
Certain kinds of expertise will devalue the courage that it takes, but certain ones, it just seems to take a lot of guts, no matter when and how trained you are at it.
In terms of the example of the bomb diffuser.
The skill of being able to do that allowed them to display more courage.
You had to be skilled to defuse the bomb so you could display that courage to actually defuse the bomb.
But I think other philosophers have talked about this intersection between skill and expertise and courage.
I think it was Montaigne.
He talked about people who are skilled swordsmen require less courage than the unskilled swordsmen because you have that expertise.
So, you know, you can win.
Well, Montaigne goes with that.
He just says that in fact, in duels you get this crazy behavior of the French aristocratic class where the side who gets the choice of weapons will pick a weapon that he knows he's not as good with as the other guy, just to prove that he's more courageous.
In other words handicapping himself purposely, so that he's testing his courage rather than his swordsmanship.
And, you know, then the thing about intelligence is how do we measure kind of intelligence?
One of the ways is that smart people are able to discern risk They're mathematically more astute.
They will discern odds and risk at quicker and more accurate levels than dumber people.
And that will tend to make them more risk averse in situations in which a dumb person doesn't see any risk.
So the smart person looks like the coward.
And of course, in fact, they often are because they're seeing too much risk in a world.
Again, it's hard to figure out who's being courageous here.
Again and again, it's that mystery of courage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I'm curious after spending years thinking about this book and working on it, what do you want someone to do with the unsettledness of courage that this book explores?
Be more modest about how we ascribe it and when we do and when we don't.
But also, I think, kind of aspirationally, it's good to want to be courageous and it's good to try and do those things which
You can, without cheating and without grade inflation, think that other people maybe you are not the best person to make the call will say hmm nice nice, good work.
One thing you argue in the book is that modern middle-class life rarely demands real courage from us.
You know the type of courage we've been talking about, the sort of physical, martial courage of you know being like I might die.
So we've kind of trivialized the word.
We call it courageous to stick to a diet or start a business or maybe reveal an embarrassing secret about ourselves.
I mean, we do things like bungee jumping or skydiving to practice courage.
So it's sort of like simulations of courage, the ancient courage.
Do you think something's been lost when a civilization stops regularly asking its members to be genuinely brave?
Yeah, something's lost.
Sure.
We end up with the hedonistic kind of culture we have.
Something definitely is what you know.
It's funny because adam smith, like the, the guru of modern capitalism, was very, very nervous about the fact that wealth would make the people indolent.
They would no longer be courageous.
They would just be kind of, you know, gluttons and pleasure seekers.
And so he joined a militia and drilled every week, and marched.
Of course he never saw any combat, but he just felt that you had to prepare, because even that prompted a kind of discipline.
But he was very nervous that wealth that he promoted would in fact have a real moral cost, and the cost would be in courage.
There'd be less of it.
And so you get all this kind of extreme sports and stuff like that, where people are desperate to find situations where they can increase the risk levels in their life, but still pretty safe risk levels.
There's not somebody sitting behind a loophole shooting at you, right?
Maybe one of the mysteries of courage is what happens to a society when people don't have to exercise much courage anymore.
And whether we can still train up those capacities somehow in the absence of immediate threat.
Well, Bill, this has been a great conversation.
We covered a lot of ground here.
This has been really interesting, very good questions.
You were very prepared.
Thank you very much for having me and thank you for doing such a professional job with this.
Yeah, thanks so much bill, it's been a pleasure.
Yeah, thank you.
My guest today was William Ian Miller.
He's the author of the book, The Mystery of Courage.
It's available on amazon.com.
Check out our show notes at awim.is slash courage.
We find links to resources.
We delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 Podcast.
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