The Virtue of Courage: Can It Still Be Found?
“Speech and guns: two of the most contentious issues in America today, with controversies fuelled not only by personal passions and identity politics but by competing interpretations of the Constitution. Perhaps more than any other parts of the Constitution, the First and Second Amendments inspire religious-like fervour in many Americans, with accordingly irrational results.”
Mary Anne Franks, “Redo the First Two Amendments,”Boston Globe)
This is a talk about the virtue of courage. What is it? And can it still be found? I have begun by quoting Mary Frank’s discussion of the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution only to suggest that they possess a logical order and connection, even if that order is perhaps inverse. Let me explain what I mean.
The Second Amendment, the so-called “right to bear arms” in the U.S. Bill of Rights, is bedrock to American political thought – it was the Continental-army minuteman’s willingness to die, to risk life and limb for his cause, that originates the political miracle that gives birth to America’s revolutionary-era Constitution.
The American political mind created a nation of laws but only because the Constitution itself was founded on a moment of divine fiat, that is, on a political miracle or revolutionary violence. The “right to bear arms” in fact speaks to citizens’ virtue, their courage – his or her willingness to stake life and limb in service to that which is the highest goods of the self.
The rational status of the Second Amendment, a citizen’s right to bear arms in a cause, including the courage to express a willingness to suffer and die – to risk life and limb – in aid of that political miracle, is what guarantees the protections of the First Amendment – the right to the citizen’s own thought quarantined from interference by government, whether in the spheres of religion, philosophy, or social media opinion.
What the two amendments juxtaposed suggest is not just the right but the dire need of the citizen to be responsible for the truth of the state, which at minimum involves speaking one’s mind freely and courageously if the experiment of self-government is to continue.
However, that expresses matters in too ideal a form: for that great Soviet dissident writer and political prisoner of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, speaking at Harvard’s commencement in 1978, pointed out something problematical about the citizenry of the contemporary West:
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.”
I will return to Solzhenitsyn’s thought at the end, but for now let it stand as is. In what follows, I want to unpack (I) what virtues are in general; (II) what courage is specifically – how it is to be defined and understood in its forms; (III) how the virtues, especially courage, develop and what they contribute to humanness; (IV) I wish to say something about courage today in modern Australia; and finally (V) about free speech in this world governed by the many choking threats to its existence and vitality.
What I hope to show is how the virtue of courage develops, how it is intimately connected to the democratic citizen’s inherent right and need for free speech. It is our willingness to die for what we believe, I suggest, that allows us to surface those ideal verities not usually visible to sight, which we hold dearest: that is, courage shows the whole world that truth which we most truly hold to be worthy of our lives.
My first task is to define what virtue is in terms of human ethics and the best place to do this is to turn to the ancient Greeks.
I
First then, what is virtue? Virtue refers to character – more particularly the cultivated habits of character that shape what a person is, how they are formed, and in turn create modulating dispositions that determine their outputs and actions. As philosopher Daniel Statman of the University of Haifa puts it, virtue ethics holds that “the basic judgements in ethics are judgements about character”.
The ancient world bequeathed a moral vision to the medieval schoolmen like that great Dominican and Catholic Saint Thomas Aquinas who lived by the adage: agere sequitur esse, doing follows being. The virtues qualify character at the very roots of action and feeling. In terms of ethical theorising, virtue ethics asks us to focus our eyes not on the rightness or wrongness of actions, but rather on the goodness or badness of character.
The various theories of the virtues were first evolved by the major Greek philosophers, beginning with Socrates – who took virtue to be some distinct form of knowledge; Plato – who considered the role of the passions as well; and Aristotle – who is credited with developing the most coherent, totalising, and ultimately important ancient theory of virtue in his Nichomachean Ethics.
In all cases, virtue is a matter of the soul, and is defined best by the Catholic Aristotelian Aquinas when he says: a virtue is a habit that “disposes an agent to perform its proper operation or movement” (On the Cardinal Virtues 1; Summa Theologiae Ia IIae 49.1). Virtues concern human excellence in its moral dimension.
The first observation to note about the virtues, therefore, is that they relate to human nature viewed wholistically in its most perfectible light and in terms of a total vision of wellbeing and human flourishing, a complete metaphysically inspiring picture of the human good. Aristotle held that virtues were formative of total human character and, therefore, all the cardinal virtues, including courage, but most especially practical wisdom, were present if any were: “Virtue makes the goal right,” he says, “practical wisdom the things leading to it” (Ethica Nichomachea, 1144a7–8).
Though our English term “virtue” stems from the Latin virtus (a strength), the Ancient Greeks from Homer on spoke of ἀρετή (anglicised as aretḗ). Originally an aristocratic qualification, aretḗ named the manly qualities – like fortitude or courage – that made a warrior successful in manly competition, most especially martial combat, manu-a-manu, on the field of battle, where the warrior stakes his life for his highest ambition of noble honour. For the Greek, the very worst one could be qua human was “unmanly”.
Virtue concerns human excellence measured by the determinations of a particular time, space, and culture and since the Greeks thought of themselves as the highest form of humanity, neither a woman, nor a slave, and certainly not a barbarian could truly possess the virtues.
A second feature of virtue important to notice is best relayed by Aristotle in his doctrine of the mean. A virtue is a medial character habit between two forms of human deformation (vice). In the case of courage, for instance, Aristotle’s developed thinking suggests that it is the virtue medial to fear on the one hand (the fearful man is the coward) and confidence, or overconfidence (which characterises the rash man). At Ethica Nichomachea III.6 (1115a7-1115b7) we read: “Courage is the observance of the mean in respect of fear and confidence.”
How a virtue like courage can be a mean between fear and confidence is not absolutely clear – does this virtue stand on two registers of emotion or on one? Be that problem as it may, what is clear is that for Aristotle a truly brave man feels genuine fear – and it is not the case that he merely controls it, as that would simply make courage a qualification of the virtue of self-control.
By the time of Homer’s writings, if that paean to ancient Greek education and formation penned by Werner Jaeger (Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture) is to be believed, the time of aristocratic virtue is over. When we later meet discussions of virtue in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, it is now fully accommodated to the democratic way of life of the citizen-soldier, the hoplite who must risk life and limb with others in the battle-phalanx in order to win noble glory and to protect his beloved fatherland, his polis. And this will prove to be important for discussions of virtue even down to our own time.
So let us turn now to discuss more directly the virtue of courage in the citizen hoplite of an ancient Greek polis such as Athens.
II
Precisely here, with the ancient polis, we need to pause and take stock, recalling that what polis life gifts to human beings is the highest form of democratic reasoning – logos. The Greek art of thought and the craft of the free citizen’s speech is intimately linked to the shared life and vision of the polis.
The polis makes available to human beings the best possible life which Aristotle described as eudaimonia – human flourishing. For the spiritual universe of the ancient polis makes available enough of the goods of life for the self-sufficiency of the citizen, permitting leisure time for the highest arts of metaphysical contemplation, philosophy, and free speech citizen to citizen.
The shared life of the polis is considered so fundamental to virtue that Socrates, when expressing via Plato’s Republic how best to see what justice in a human agent is, suggests that rather than studying the issue microscopically by looking at the soul of one human being, it would be more appropriate to resolve it to a larger object – the polis that produces the people:
“But what analogy do you detect in the inquiry about justice?”
“I will tell you,” I said: “there is a justice of one man, we say, and, I suppose, also of an entire city.”
“Assuredly,” said he. “Is not the city larger than the man?”
“It is larger,” he said.
“Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object and more easy to apprehend.”
(Plato, Republic368e)
Plato’s theory of the good polis implicitly suggests that to know the human beings one must study the city in which they are formed, for the polis and the self whose soul possesses the virtue of justice are isomorphic.
The social transformations that moved military action from the heroes of Homer who excelled in the aristeia, victory in single combat and in deeds of passion (thumos), to the Hoplite citizen-soldier who stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow-citizens, are mirrored in the democratic reforms of the polis. As Jean-Pierre Vernant in The Origins of Greek Thought has rightly noted: “Those who made up the city, however different in origin, rank, and function, appeared somehow to be ‘like’ one another. This likeness laid the foundation for the unity of the polis.”
All those who shared in the life of the polis were considered homoioi, like one another, as each free citizen who could afford armour had to take his place with his fellows in the battle formation of the phalanx. Feats of single combat were no longer rewarded with glory; rather the distinctive mark of the hoplite’s fortitude and courage was staying put in battle formation with his fellows.1
Necessarily, the nature of Homeric aristocratic courage gives way to the courage (andreia2) of the democratic citizen. Thus, Aristotle insists that the definition of the virtue of courage runs like this: “The term courageous, then, in the strict sense, will be applied to him who fearlessly faces an honourable death and all sudden emergencies which involve death; and such emergencies mostly occur in war.” (EN III.6)
There are various debates among the Greeks as to that in which courage consisted. Did acting bravely at sea during a storm count as courage? Was courage a form of perseverance or endurance through hardship? Was it somehow a matter of skill? What is its relationship to practical knowledge or wisdom?3
In the end, however, the modern soldier basically follows the Greeks in suggesting that “courage consists in overcoming the fear of significant harm for a worthy cause”.4
We should note at this time, however, that it is not universally agreed by the Aristotelian tradition that the soldier dying in battle is the model of the virtue of courage. Medieval Aristotelians like Aquinas reserved the highest form of courage to the Christian martyr, dying for his faith – put in more “secular” terms, for his opinions!
Nevertheless, it is reasonable to follow Aristotle’s line of thought as it relates to the social world of polis as he knew it. The soldier who fights and dies for the polis earns the right to be a freely speaking citizen within the open space of the shared public square within the spiritual universe of the polis.
The free citizen is not just willing to sacrifice life and limb for his or her beloved polis; such a citizen knows how to deploy courage in the name of logos, reason, free speech, in the attempt to sway his fellow citizens in matters of policy and action. This is a thought worth pursuing for a moment and the best place to do so is to turn to Plato’s discussion of the virtue of courage in the dialogue we know as the Laches.
Let me briefly summarise the main features of this much misunderstood Platonic dialogue and I will resort to this dialogue again later when I conclude.
Lysimachus, the son of Aristides the Just, and Melesias, the son of the elder Thucydides, two aged men who live together, wish to educate their sons in the best manner. Their own education, as often happens with the sons of great men, has been neglected at least as they see it. They decide, therefore, that their children shall have more care taken with their educations, than they received themselves at the hands of their own fathers.
At their request, Nicias and Laches, two old and distinguished generals, have accompanied them to see a man named Stesilaus fighting in heavy armour. The two fathers ask the two generals what they think of this exhibition, and whether they would advise that their sons should acquire this skill. Nicias and Laches are quite willing to engage, but they suggest that Socrates should be invited to take part in the debate.
The Laches resolves itself ultimately into a sophisticated discussion of the virtue of courage (especially its third part, 190e-199e), with all the various Greek theories represented at one point or another5, but the view that Socrates forwards is novel: courage is “morally founded endurance”. The Socratic vision of courage, as presented to us in the Laches, concerns “what the Good in life is as a whole”.6
I briefly want to note the findings of Darrell Dobbs of the University of Houston who, in a significant essay on the Laches7 sets the whole discussion in the context of the citizen’s natural desire for certainty and so for the “expert” judge to decide. Hence the invitation to Socrates.
The Laches, argues Dobbs, is significant in recognising the need to obviate the citizen’s fear of uncertainty in dialectic: “In its opposition to this fear,” he writes, “courage underlies not only the soldier’s risk-taking but also the juror’s necessary firmness in distinguishing reasonable and unreasonable doubt.”8
Dobb’s critique of the modern neglect of courage argues that moderns “fail to consider the possibility that courage is not merely the virtue of the sacrificial lamb, but is perhaps a necessary aspect of even the greatest individual and political good”.9 Fear of the unknown leads to studied neglect:
“The dialogue as a whole penetrates beyond the role of courage itself as firmness or perseverance resisting the terrors of the unknown. These terrors pose a serious threat both to politics and to education by engendering a yearning for certainty that impedes prudent citizenship and precludes philosophical inquiry.”10
The citizen’s fear of uncertainty turns out to be problematic, not least because it opens out onto the misty-eyed vista of the technocrat, the expert who knows. (No clearer illustration of the problem of free speech in democracy can be offered than the wholesale assertion of expertise and therefore of the right to erase democratic debate and free speech than the whole covid19 era!)
In modern terms, where democratic citizens do not possess the courage to investigate freely and to speak freely (even on social media platforms) there is danger that the bureaucratic behemoth of the state, in its full industrial-managerial form, will make decisions about truth, misinformation, and disinformation. The citizen’s fear of the unknown may indeed encourage this “cult of expertise” pretending to certainty – as they certainly did during the covid period.
What the Laches shows is that all inquiry depends upon one’s convictions, and all convictions require courage. Rather than the citizen, therefore, ceding ground to the “experts”, there is a need to run the gauntlet of the unknown and for the citizen to speak their mind courageously.
So we see that in the Laches, Plato is expanding the geography of courage from the battlefield, where life and limb are risked against the enemies of the beloved polis, to the matter of logos, to the pursuit of truth within the polis by dialectic.
All reasoning requires courage to the extent that in putting forth a view as one’s own, one might be wrong. One must dare the unknown, in order to discover truth; and this requires the citizen to employ courage in thought and word.
I will say a bit more about the Laches later.
III
So much, therefore, for the importance of courage to the demos. I now want to ask how the virtues develop and what they contribute to humanness? For our purposes I will focus specifically on the virtue of courage.
The best way to get at how virtue grows within us is to look at a character who, starting from a completely untutored state, must develop the virtues by repeated action in order to be fully human.
Fortunately, an Italian writer made available to us just such a character who must develop practical wisdom, justice, the virtue of truth-telling, and courage in order to become fully human. I am referring of course to that loveable hunk of wood – Pinocchio the puppet, whose story begins thus:
“Once upon a time, there lived –
“‘A king!’ my little readers will say immediately.
“No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a hunk of wood. It was not an expensive piece of wood. Far from it. Just a common block of firewood, one of those thick, solid logs that are put on the fire in winter to make cold rooms cozy and warm.”
Pinocchio is not just a children’s story; it is an ethical treatise and, more than that even, a political tract. Nineteenth-century Italian statesman Massimo d’Azeglio claimed upon Italy’s rise to the status of nation-state: “L’Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani”: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”
Carlo Collodi, the author of the children’s work, Pinocchio, seems to have taken quite seriously the challenge of forming Italians when he has his story start with a lump of wood. Collodi, who himself was trained with a good classical education in formation for the Catholic priesthood before turning to revolutionary politics and journalism, presents us with something quite profound for thinking about the problem of virtue and human formation. For Pinocchio is not just a book of ethics and politics, it is an educational tract, and Collodi directs our attention to matter unformed.
Collodi in fact knew what Plato knew: “To get politics right, it is necessary to get education right.”11 Collodi’s story begins with a “lump of wood” – but a lump of wood with a soul exhibited by the power of speech (rationality/logos). The puppet Pinocchio is a human being in the making.
Only the education he works so hard to avoid(!) can truly form him (of course, unlike in our day, Collodi’s idea of an education had not yet been therapeutised). Pinocchio is a lump of wood being formed into the virtues of the citizen: Collodi is showing us how to “make Italians”.
In Collodi’s formal Catholic education, Aristotle had still been taught. Aristotle argued that the soul was “the form of a body capable of living”. Aristotle’s basic idea is known as hylomorphism – matter in-formed by soul. In Aquinas’ medieval Latin we still find Aristotle’s basic thought unchanged: “anima … est forma substantialis corporis” (“ the soul … is the substantial form of a body”).12
Even Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, who despised Aristotle, still knew this definition from his own university education, and since he considered the soul to be dead in sin he thought we were all “lumps of wood” to be revived only by the Holy Spirit. Soul is for both Aquinas and Luther the form of living matter.
Now, Aristotle’s Greek term for matter is hyle (ὕλη), wood. Collodi knew this; so at the very outset of Pinocchio he has presented us with raw hyle (matter) in the “lump of wood” turned puppet that will become the fully formed human boy Pinocchio.
What kind of formation must the raw material (the wood/matter/hyle) undergo? What this ὕλη requires is to have its soul formed by the virtues, one of which, the first listed by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics in his treatment of the virtues, is courage.
Collodi outlines for his readers the basis of a classical education, ancient Greek paideia; the Blue Fairy spells it out when she says to Pinocchio, who really longs to be fully human: “Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday, you will be a real boy.”
Pinocchio must develop the virtues of courage, justice, and truthful speech if he is to be fully human. Only the moral virtues, only formation can take the “lump of wood” that is Pinocchio and grow him up into a full human being. Pinocchio, therefore, is not just an amusing tale about a puppet running away from his father and playing truant from school; it is a story about formal and informal education in character – how one grows a virtuous human being, a citizen.
We all start out as “lumps of wood” (mere hyle, matter to be fashioned). But through practices and a deep formation making possible living in a world of the polis-community, we come to be useful as fully formed adults ready not just to lead our communities but to live courageously and to speak truthfully within them.
Can I suggest – only half-seriously of course – that Pinocchio might become a standard textbook(!) for citizens in Australia? To inculcate in us the virtues of the citizen, capable of living the fullest human life; no longer as lumps of unformed wood, but as real flesh-and-blood human beings capable of the democratic experiment in self-government. As such, too, we thereby are capable of thinking plain, clear thoughts of our own and taking responsibility to share them openly in the public square that is our polis, be that on social media or elsewhere.
Of course, Collodi was not the first to suggest a linear moral journey from puppet to fully formed human being through the virtues. That credit goes, of course, to Plato in the book we know as The Laws, a work from which Collodi is obviously borrowing.
The Laws is Plato’s last, longest, and, perhaps, most abused work. The book is a conversation on political philosophy between three older characters: an unnamed Athenian, the Spartan Megillus, and the man of Crete, Clinias.
These men work to create a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony and, of course, one of the main problems in constitution-making is how to make decent citizens worthy of the political vision of the divinity of the law-giver. Constitution-making raises a very central problem, with which Plato was obsessed: the distinction between seems and is.
The dialogue sets out in Book 1 with a discussion of virtue and human moral psychology, particularly “two antagonistic and foolish counsellors, whom we call by the names of pleasure and pain”. Plato next has the unnamed Athenian volunteer this view:
“And that, besides these two , each man possesses opinions about the future, which go by the general name of ‘expectations’; and of these, that which precedes pain bears the special name of ‘fear’; and that which precedes pleasure the special name of ‘confidence’; and in addition to all these there is ‘calculation’, pronouncing which of them is good, which bad; and ‘calculation’, when it has become the public decree of the state, is named ‘law’.” (644c-d)
To aid the Spartan and Cretan in the project of understanding his line of thought, the Athenian then offers this analogy:
“Let us conceive of the matter in this way. Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose – for as to that we know nothing; but this we do know, that these inward affections of ours, like sinews or cords, drag us along and, being opposed to each other, pull one against the other to opposite actions; and herein lies the dividing line between goodness and badness. For, as our argument declares, there is one of these pulling forces which every man should always follow and nohow leave hold of, counteracting thereby the pull of the other sinews.”13
The directing chord or string for the human lump of wood or marionette is of course logismos, practical reason, “calculation” in our translation, the citizen’s virtue of free thought and responsibility for the soul’s self-government. As for the golden chord of reasoning:
“It is the leading-string, golden and holy, of ‘calculation’, entitled the public law of the state ; and whereas the other cords are hard and steely and of every possible shape and semblance, this one is flexible and uniform, since it is of gold. With that most excellent leading-string of the law we must needs cooperate always; for since calculation is excellent, but gentle rather than forceful, its leading-string needs helpers to ensure that the golden kind within us may vanquish the other kinds.
“In this way our story comparing ourselves to puppets will not fall flat, and the meaning of the terms ‘self-superior’ and ‘self-inferior’ will become somewhat more clear, and also how necessary it is for the individual man to grasp the true account of these inward pulling forces and to live in accordance therewith, and how necessary for the state (when it has received such an account either from a god or from a man who knows) to make this into a law for itself and be guided thereby in its intercourse both with itself and with all other states.
“Thus both badness and goodness would be differentiated for us more clearly; and these having become more evident, probably education also and the other institutions will appear less obscure.” (645a-c)
The public law of the polis is isomorphic with the soul’s holy reasoning or common sense. But what Plato is suggesting is that the wooden marionette is at the beginning held in motion by two internal forces – fear and ambition. These twin forces represent the competing political visions of monarchy (whose power and authority makes afraid) and democracy (where citizens are driven forwards by their own desires and obsessions). The political tension staged between these two strings is that of striking the perfect balance between order and liberty.
The Law of the State – the Constitution – which is designed to form citizens, provides the middle ground of public reason bringing balance to the divided self and the divided images and forms of government. But this raises a problem: it announces the gap between what a citizen is (a puppet on strings) and what he seems to be (a free citizen), because at the outset it is only by following the law of the state that the citizen, who, not yet possessing the virtues, does not know which rule to obey, takes shape. In Plato’s thought the golden chord represents “the Form of the Good”.14
It is not a far reach to discover Plato’s thought about education in the outline of Pinocchio, a mere lump of wood, the marionette driven by the strings of fear and confidence, dragged hither and thither by mere feeling and passion, in need of the virtues in order to express the fullest possible human life.
Plato’s message is that of Collodi likewise: each citizen must develop the virtues in a good state or polis if we are to live out the fullest human life; and this is the great task of moral education for the citizen. For Pinocchio, this meant learning to speak truthfully (which requires courage) and learning to be brave enough to risk life and limb to save his poor father Geppetto from the ocean.
Enough said, then, about the citizen’s virtue and moral formation. I would like to turn now to our own time – to modern Australia to ask what courage is and can it still be found among our citizens.
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IV
As Australians we like to think of ourselves as brave; that is, courageous. On Greek terms that would make us virtuous. And yet I note with interest not just what Solzhenitsyn spoke at the Harvard commencement in 1978, which calls this vision into question right across the advanced West, but I also notice that for the first time in its history the Australian military cannot fulfil its recruitment goals. We are now recruiting Tongans and Samoans, asking them to die in battle for the modern Australian state because younger Australian citizens do not wish to do so.
The legend of Australian bravery has two main sources – the battlefield (Gallipoli, El-Alamein, Kokoda, Long Tan, etc.) and the bush. In regards to the bush, we can notice the theme of courage on display in a certain kind of bush activity – riding down the wild horses in A.B. “Banjo” Paterson’s epic ballad, The Man from Snowy River. The poem famously begins:
There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses — he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.
We are oriented into a space and a scene where the stock horse snuffs “the battle with delight”. Applied to a human actor, this is truly the language of the virtue of courage.
In the drama of the poem there are doubts expressed about the man from Snowy River and his stock-horse. So, the owner of the truant “colt from old Regret” suggests he should go home.
Clancy of the Overflow steps in, argues that the Snowy River horseman is needed, and names the man’s formation as the source of his reasoning: “For both his horse and he are mountain bred.” The Man from Snowy River is tough – he’s a mountain man, says Clancy, and consequently will possess the virtues of mountain men, including courage:
‘He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side,
Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough,
Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,
The man that holds his own is good enough.
And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,
Where the river runs those giant hills between;
I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,
But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.’
Then, of course, Clancy is proven correct in his judgement: they have to ride down a steep “mountain” decline to reach the wild brumbies, when not only equine skill but manly courage will be required:
When they reached the mountain’s summit, even Clancy took a pull,
It well might make the boldest hold their breath,
What starts out as wise boldness soon becomes fear:
But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,
And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,
While the others stood and watched in very fear.
Like the flow of a torrent of moving water at home in its river bed, the brave horseman bursts down the mountainside. Everyone else watches the descent with “fear”; arguably, what the Man from Snowy River possesses is not courage but mere skill. He is simply so skilled a rider that he has no great expectation of danger or risk.
This is one of the challenges that the Greeks had long ago put in their own clarifications of the virtue of courage; for they insisted that death must be wagered in the noblest deeds. Yet a Kosciusko horseman chasing down the brumbies might be held to be just that.
For economy, I don’t wish to say much more about Paterson’s poem, but only to bring to our notice the fact that poems like this exist because, before Federation (in 1901), Australians were debating not only the establishment of our Constitution, the founding of a modern nation, but the very character of that nation, and the virtues of the citizens who would embody its vision.
The Federation made Australia; but what men like Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson were debating in the pages of The Bulletin in the 1890s in the so-called Battle of the Bards, was how to make Australians.
In The Man from Snowy River, Paterson was arguing that the Australian spirit was best embodied in the courage and romanticised rawness of the bush horseman, including his fortitude, and this theory would be tested come 1915 and Gallipoli.
Indeed, from his time as a correspondent during the Boer War, Paterson, according to Grant Kynaston,15 had “equated our soldiers with bushmen” emphasising characteristics such as “horsemanship, courage tenacity, … expressed in a harsh landscape.”
The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014 published a piece about debates on Australian identity in the early Bulletin and concluded that the Australian character is “connected to the outback, to the rough larrikin identity”. Any sketch can be jingoistic, but I think you get the point.
That was the original vision. It is expressed, too, in many poems about Anzac courage and sacrifice at Gallipoli. To quote Paterson himself again, as he pens the poem We’re all Australians Now:
The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel,
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.
The honoured graves beneath the crest
Of Gaba Tepe hill
May hold our bravest and our best,
But we have brave men still.
But now I want to raise a question about all this talk of courage based on two experiences: the citizen’s sheepish behaviour during the state overreach of the covid19 pandemic, and our inability to rouse young people to serve in the military. It is possible we were brave once; it is quite likely we are courageous no longer. In other words, we no longer possess the virtue of courage.
For myself, the first issue is acute. As a Christian, I believe in resurrection from death. I am also the beneficiary of a tradition of faith which values martyrs and expects to produce more – not people who kill for their faith surely! But people who will die for it. I also have the benefit of 2,000 years of history in which the church has had to confront matters of faith in time of plague; we have documents to inspire us with wisdom and courage like Luther’s “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague” (I notice Luther still felt the need to query this theologically; he made no resort to the “certainties” of the German epidemiologists and medical technocrats of his day.)
Yet, modern Christians are so overtaken by the bourgeois virtues of self-preservation that it became clear to me that we were no longer capable of producing a martyr. When I speak of the bourgeois virtues, I am of course referring to that renegade from the Dutch synagogue Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) and after him the squeamish Englishmen Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (1651), who both placed the liberal desire for self-preservation at the centre of moral life.
Spinoza’s revised theory of the classical schoolmen’s notion of conatus cashes out with this statement from his Ethics: “The more each one strives, and is able, to seek his own advantage, i.e., to preserve his being, the more he is endowed with virtue.” (E4p22c). But this is a thought inconceivable to the ancient Greek who understood courage and virtue and stood manfully in the phalanx risking life and limb for the greatness of the polis.
A church without martyrs is a Spinozist and bourgeois church lacking the courage of its convictions, a church which will no longer risk life and limb, just because it actually believes in nothing substantial.
I suggest, too, on the secular front that our present army recruitment problems are best explained by the national desecration of our most unifying symbols. Banjo Paterson wrote the poem, We’re all Australians Now, on the assumption that the sacrifice of young Australian blood at Gallipoli performed a “Eucharist” unifying the once squabbling Australian states.
Gallipoli had indeed taken on mythic proportions in the Anzacs. As a Christian I may find all this talk bunkum (I don’t consider the death of young Australians in war a Eucharist, not even a simulacra of a Eucharist. Nor do I consider the shedding of blood in war as holy or as sanctifying anything necessarily), but it does not blind me from recognising that a nation that can no longer abide its statues, the treasures of its museums, or its national holidays, let alone its flag – when these no longer unify a nation but divide it – then this nation is not long for this earth.
No one will risk life and limb for an ideal such as this: being asked to die for modern Australia has become rather like being asked to die for Australia Post – a nameless faceless bureaucracy of dubious worth, always a day late and a dollar short.
So, can courage still be found? I have my doubts. For at least one conclusion we should draw from what has been said here is that courage exists at the point where one’s highest goods must be brought to light in the world in the crucible of battle and fierce opposition. That is why the hoplite died for the polis. It is why young men sacrificed at Gallipoli. Without courage, these goods can never find embodiment, can never appear.
Arguably, what our lack of courage shows is simply that modern Australians believe in nothing. As this was sagely put in online journal Medium16 recently, “Ask anyone what it is like to be an Australian and you will find a million different answers,” which is the reverse of why the hoplite is unclouded in his judgements even when risking life and limb.
Anna Olijinyk and Alexander Reilly writing on our Constitution argue that after Federation the “nature of Australian identity has only grown more complex.”17 That type of liberal complexity may be keeping us alive, but it also silently kills us.
Nationalism, of course, expresses political goods as if metaphysical, though they are mythic things that are not “real” in any physical sense but are rather socially real and totemic. Nationalism can often be equated with wicked forms of political religion as it certainly was in Nazi Germany. This is why our elites (our Qantas president’s lounge denizens) fear it.
Nations are, indeed, as Benedict Anderson argued in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), “imaginary” things. This is precisely why “because Federation was a sacred cause, poetry was considered the most appropriate medium to express its rationale and purposes” (“Federation: Destiny and Identity”, John Hirst); where reason and fact fail the muses must step in and, for good or for ill, like all others Australia was a nation “born in a festival of poetry”.
This is also precisely why Saint Thomas Aquinas says, in discussing martyrdom and the virtues:
“It belongs to courage to strengthen man in the good of virtue, especially against dangers, and chiefly against dangers of death, and most of all against those that occur in battle. Now it is evident that in martyrdom man is firmly strengthened in the good of virtue, since he cleaves to faith and justice notwithstanding the threatening danger of death, the imminence of which is moreover due to a kind of particular contest with his persecutors.” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.124)
Through courage, the martyr “cleaves to faith and justice”: but my thesis is the stronger one. Through courage, the martyr shows the whole world what is worth believing in and what the good truly is and so what is worth dying for.18
Only if I am willing at least to die for my truth, can that truth actually be seen. The martyr’s willing death is the greatest proof that his persecutors are wrong, or, as Aquinas puts, that “by suffering in body unto death they bear witness to the truth”. (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.124, a.5, Resp.)
This brings me to my conclusion. Why we need to recover our courage in this modern Australian democracy, especially around the matter of democratic (free) speech.
I earlier spoke of Plato’s Laches. We shall end by returning here.
V
In the Laches, we witnessed a Socratic Dialogue about education of the young, named after an Athenian general who could define courage in the traditional terms of “remaining in the ranks and not fleeing in battle” (Laches 190e). Prudent steadfastness (phronimos karteria) is Laches’ definition of what constitutes the virtue of courage.
Yet Laches is made to confess that Socrates displayed courage while retreating at the battle of Delium in the imperious form of a fierce self-possession (emphrôn), a courageous deed that ultimately saved General Laches’ skin. The message of Plato is clear: Socrates’ words and deeds coincide.
The whole task of the Laches is to contrast what Plato calls “political courage” and philosophic courage.19 Both Nicias and Laches ultimately show “a lack of bottle” when it comes to the tensions created between political courage – which responds to the needs of the state; that is, to civic duty, the requirements of the polis – and the uncertainty of philosophical inquiry staged by Socrates, who embraces the fear that goes with not knowing.
This tension between civic order and the citizen’s freedom to pursue truth apart from suppression by the “expert” class that serves the needs and requirements of the polis is not just relevant to Socrates’ time and the fag-end of the Athenian polis’ greatness. It is equally relevant in our own time.
My father was a strong Republican. He died several years back. He used to tell me: “Always fear what your government needs you to know and what they don’t want you to know!” A cowardly citizenry will allow the government to define truth for it; it will allay the natural fear of the unknown which demands inquiry and will replace it with the alluring blandishments of bureaucratic expertise and certainty.
What the Laches is witness to is the need for philosophic courage, the requirement of the citizenry to cultivate said courage, and so to embrace what is not yet known and so to be prepared to engage in inquiry in the public square – quite in the face of the sophistries of modern media misinformation and disinformation.
Rather than fearing these distortions of fact and knowledge, we must open up the public square to ever freer forms of civic inquiry and encourage our citizens to cultivate courage, to brave their own fear of the “unknown”, and to go on those curious quests that so often produce truth – even if the search for truth may offend.
We must all begin to cultivate the courage of the citizen journalist who doggedly (and courageously) pursues the truth of things wherever the facts lead. It is a curious and paradoxical feature of this late modernity in which we live that elites supposedly pursuing the highest forms of the “open” society any cultures have ever seen, are fearfully afraid of the open discourse of the citizenry in the public square.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked Harvard in 1979: “Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?” And he warned about the truly obsequious character of the Western press trading not in truth but in propagandistic soundbites and slogans:
“Hastiness and superficiality – these are the psychic diseases of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.”
Only a citizenry with courage will be able to hold back the tide of propaganda and expert bureaucratic opinion, let alone resist the censorship and cancel culture that so pompously flourish all around us.
So, as citizens at the fag-end of this project called modern Australia, we must cultivate our courage – find it and cultivate it. And make Socrates (and may I say, more importantly, Jesus?) proud!
— Craig Heilmann
Generally, on the virtue of courage in the ancient polis, see Ryan K. Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis: Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ↩︎
On the Greek concept of manliness (andreia), see Marguerite Deslauriers, “Aristotle on Andreia, Divine and Sub-Human Virtues”; and Michael Edward Stewart, “Contests of Andreia in Procopius’ Gothic Wars,” Parekbolai 4 (2014): 21-54. ↩︎
See the significant discussion in W. Thomas Schmid, “The Socratic Conception of Courage,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol.2, No.2 (April 1985): 113-29, starting at p.113. Also Josh Wilburn, “Courage and the Spirited Part of the Soul in Plato’s Republic,” Philosophers’ Imprint, Vol.15, No.26 (Oct. 2015): 1-21. ↩︎
See Andrei G. Zavaliy and Michael Aristidou, “Courage: A modern Look at an Ancient Virtue,” Journal of Military Ethics, Vol.13, No.2 (2014): 174-89, at p.174. ↩︎
See W. Thomas Schmid, “The Socratic Conception of Courage,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol.2, No.2 (April 1985): 113-29, at pp.113-4. I am indebted extensively to Schmid’s fine work on the Laches throughout this essay. ↩︎
Ibid., p.117. ↩︎
“For Lack of Wisdom: Courage and Inquiry in Plato’s ‘Laches’,” The Journal of Politics, Vol.48, No.4 (Nov. 1986): 825-49, at p.825. ↩︎
Ibid., p.826. ↩︎
Ibid., p.826. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
See Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, “Pinocchio and the Puppet of Plato’s Laws,” in Geoffrey C. Kellow and Neven Reddy, Eds., On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016): 282-304, at p.282. ↩︎
See Aquinas’s Sentence Commentary: Sent.I.D8 Q.5 A2, C. ↩︎
All references see Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 10 & 11 translated by R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1967 & 1968. ↩︎
See Kenneth Royce Moore, “Plato’s Puppets of the Gods: Representing the Magical, the Mystical and the Metaphysical,” Arion 22.2 (Fall 2014): p.116. I am indebted to Moore’s discussion throughout. ↩︎
“War and Nation-Building: How the Disaster of the First World War Helped Forge Australian Identity,” Unpublished Paper. ↩︎
“On Australian Identity” (Jan 27, 2019). ↩︎
The Australian Constitution and National Identity (Canberra: ANU Press, 2023). ↩︎
Here I have learned much and am still learning from Richard Avramenko, Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). ↩︎
For an excellent discussion, in part upon whom I am leaning here, see Aristide Tessitore, “Courage and Comedy in Plato’s Laches,” The Journal of Politics, Vol.56, No.1 (Feb. 1994): 115-33. ↩︎
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