HAVE YOU EVER MET A BOYOSAURUS? THAT IS THE TERM COINED BY the Canadian journalist Joseph Brean to describe something that everyone has observed about boys:
Film makers and paleontologists have long known this simple fact to be true: Boys love dinosaurs. Boys are suckers for loud roars and inaccurate computer-generated terror. They shudder in their seats. They have the nightmares. They buy the toys.
The love of young boys for maximum dinosaur violence is recognized by the film industry. According to the anthropologist Douglass Drozdow–St. Christian, “The first Jurassic Park was a girl’s movie, because it had a strong environmentalist theme.” The third installment of the series, by contrast, was marketed exclusively to boys, because “this one is about fear and conquering monsters.”
Girls and boys relate to their dinosaurs in very different ways. Girls want to nurture them. Boys want to become their comrades. According to Joseph Brean, when boys visit museums, “they expect the dinosaurs to be large and vicious…. Girls, on the other hand, like to imagine taking the vegetarian hadrosaur home as a pet.” Gayle Gibson, who spent eleven years leading the dinosaur tours at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, sums up her experience of thousands of kids’ visits: “For the girls, a dinosaur is kind of a secret friend, but for the boys it’s a secret protector.”
I can confirm these stories with my own tour of that same dinosaur skeleton collection with my ten-year-old nephew. Nothing in the museum interested him more than the dinosaurs, and he asked the guide dozens of questions. By contrast, when it came time to look at the rock collections, he literally fell prone to the floor with boredom. Only the Egyptian mummies interested him half as much, and then it was mainly the mummy of a small boy that caught his eye. He asked me if we could do that to his younger brother. (I said no.)
As I read these reports about boys and dinosaurs, one phrase jumped out at me: that boys liked Jurassic Park III because it was about “fear and conquering monsters.” As we’ll see in this chapter, that in a nutshell sums up many discussions of courage in the Western tradition. Courage is a virtue we summon out of ourselves when confronted with someone or something terrifying.
But is courage a trait we should really be encouraging in boys? Is it, in fact, a virtue, as the traditional view from Homer, Aristotle, and the Bible to Theodore Roosevelt and JFK has consistently maintained? Or does any praise for the use of force merely serve to exacerbate what is already a strong built-in tendency in boys to be violent? Instead of praising some kinds of aggression as virtuous, should we perhaps be working harder to get rid of it altogether?
As numerous studies demonstrate, boys are certainly more prone than girls to spontaneous aggressiveness and combativeness. This trait can have its lighter side, as seen in the boyosaurus. But it’s not always a laughing matter. Sometimes little boys who are fascinated with the power of a Tyrannosaurus rex grow into older boys who actually want to destroy people they perceive to be their foes. Many times throughout the 1990s, the same ghastly scenario unfolded—an underfathered young man suddenly and without any previous signs of violence sprays his classmates and teachers with bullets.
The most notorious case involved Timothy McVeigh, the product of a broken home, who looked for something to blame for his terminal drift and rootlessness, and decided his own government was the oppressor. The result was a libertarian Jihad fed by the fantasies of the lunatic Right that the American government is in fact the “Zionist occupying authority,” suppressing individual liberties on behalf of the world Jewish conspiracy. But often there’s no ideological or political motivation. The killers at Columbine and other high schools were usually just kids who felt excluded from the In Crowd of the beautiful and the athletic—Tom Sawyer in fatigues, hefting an assault rifle in place of the more innocent slingshot.
Parents, educators, and political leaders have all agonized over these developments as signs that the culture is in crisis. Some have made the case that virtual violence in video games and action movies has become a model for real life. Young men who, in a previous era, would have picked a fistfight, or confined their anger to their private feelings, now find it all too easy to make a direct transition from the violence that washes over them from TV, movies, and video games into their own situations, and to apply the methods of a Rambo in their own suburban enclaves.
To me, there is little doubt that this entertainment culture of virtual violence contributes to an atmosphere that prompts real-life rampage killings. There may not be a direct cause-and-effect relationship: It may not be possible to demonstrate, with complete empirical rigor, that Person A killed Person B because Person A watched Movie C. But the virtual violence does have an indirect and corrosive effect on morality. Its endless stream of fantasies of solitary omnipotence and open-ended violence cannot help but undermine those ethical and psychological mechanisms of self-restraint which a civilized society must ingrain in all its members.
According to Charles Mandel, a journalist specializing in the entertainment culture, a recent study shows that “roughly one in four children is addicted to [video] gaming (specifically, 24 per cent play between seven and thirty hours a week).” And what games they are. How many parents, Mr. Mandel asks, know what their kids are playing on the computer? Here’s an example:
Duke Nukem runs forward, grabs the shotgun and pumps a round into the chamber. “Groovy,” intones the video-game hero in his gravelly voice, just before he starts blasting alien scum into a gory pulp.
Sound violent? Mandel continues:
Not to some video-game developers, apparently. Major U.S. software companies are about to make such infamous “splatter” games as Duke Nukem and Doom seem like child’s play as they prepare to release a new wave of titles this fall that enable players to manipulate photorealistic images of humans into acts of torture, mutilation and even—if you can believe it—prostitution.
One of the innovators in digitalized carnage is Interplay Productions, whose sales for the previous six months had been $81 million. Now you don’t have to proceed directly to massacring your enemies. You can have some extra fun by torturing them first! Mandel goes on:
Interplay Productions proudly promotes its Wild 9 as the first-ever action game that encourages players to torture enemies. Shiny Entertainment, a subsidiary of Interplay, is completing work on Messiah, a game in which a cherub tries to cleanse the world of corruption. “Ever seen a body with 10,000 volts run through it?” the game’s advertising slogan teases. “Want to?” Not to be outdone, Virgin Interactive is set to release Thrill Kill, a series of gladiator-style battles between demented characters that bite and tear at each other in a torture-chamber setting.
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a retired infantry officer and an expert on the psychology of violence, has labored tirelessly to alert parents to the corrosive effects of what he calls “television’s virus of violence.” He believes there is a direct link between television’s glamorization of violence and the search for recognition by alienated boys through rampage killings of the kind that took place at Columbine High.
What disturbs him the most is the resemblance he sees between television violence and techniques used by the Marines and other military organizations to desensitize soldiers to the moral impact of inflicting death in combat. Killing loses its horror when it becomes a repetitive act carried out against enemies whom you are conditioned to regard as completely alien to yourself. However, while the military uses these techniques only in the dire situation of war, the last resort of national self-defense, television and other electronic media desensitize young men to the existence of their own fellow citizens, schoolmates, and parents. And, of course, while professional soldiers are taught to direct their ability to kill beyond U.S. borders, restricted to those comparatively rare episodes when foreign combatants imperil Americans, the climate of violence fed by the entertainment culture spreads indiscriminately to target one’s own fellow citizens.
By a strange coincidence, Jonesboro, Arkansas, where one of the school shootings took place, is Colonel Grossman’s hometown. It is a cruel irony that his worst fears about the “virus of violence” spread among young men by the entertainment culture were played out in the ghastliest way in the small town to which he returned after retiring from the Marines. He writes:
Before retiring here, I spent almost a quarter of a century as an army infantry officer and a psychologist, learning how to enable people to kill. Believe me, we are very good at it. And just as the army enables killing, we are doing the same thing to our kids—but without the military’s safeguards.
He believes that violence has been trivialized by its prevalence on television, to the point where the young people watching it cannot distinguish between the fantasy version and the real thing:
The TV networks are responsible for traumatizing and brutalizing our children as they watch violent acts—a thousand a month, according to the latest research financed by the cable industry itself—at a young, vulnerable age when they cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Children really only know what they have been taught, and we have taught them, ever so cleverly, to laugh and cheer at violence. In Jonesboro, we saw an indication of just how good a job we have done.
Even when they confront it directly, children can confuse real-life violence with something they’ve seen on a screen and react as if they were detached spectators enjoying a completely fictitious act of carnage. Grossman witnessed this creepy spectacle firsthand in the aftermath of the Jonesboro incident:
I spent the first three days after the shooting at Westside Middle School, counseling teachers, students, and parents. One high school teacher told me about the reaction she got when she informed her students that someone was shooting at their little brothers, sisters, and cousins in the middle school. “They laughed,” she told me in amazement. “They laughed.” We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans who cheered and snacked as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.
As accounts like this one make disturbingly clear, before we can think about how best to prevent young men from committing acts of pointless violence, we have to think about why they may be psychologically prone to them. We must pose the disturbing but crucial question: Is warlike aggression natural to man? Only if we know why men are warlike will we know how to direct their courage toward good aims and away from bad ones.
Even posing this question goes against a powerful grain in our academic culture and the opinion elites influenced by it. Some believe that the use of force is always regrettable—that there is no ethical distinction between using force for just and unjust purposes. People holding this view are often drawn to the idea that warlike behavior can be explained only by an involuntary biological drive in males, since it falls beyond the pale of rational discussion or moral justification under any circumstances. Typical of this reductionist approach is a recent study by the psychologists Neil Wiener and Christian Mesquida. “How do you explain the universality of war?” Dr. Wiener asks. “It’s ubiquitous.” Using demographic data provided by the United Nations to compare war zones in El Salvador, Northern Ireland, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania, and Chechnya, he and his colleague came up with a single answer: “Wars are not triggered by ideology or religion, but by a society that has too many young, unmarried men.”
This kind of broad empirical generalization has the seductive appeal of providing a single answer for the occurrence of violence everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, upon reflection, I believe it obscures rather than clarifies the nature of war and courage. Drs. Wiener and Mesquida begin by setting aside the complex conditions that make each war zone they analyzed unique. They take what is in fact the least interesting and informative characteristic in every one of these cases—the predominance of unmarried males under thirty years old—and elevate it to the most interesting and informative characteristic. But in each case studied, what is primarily motivating the belligerents is their conviction that they are fighting for honor, justice, and the dignity of their people or faith. These views are in turn rooted in complicated competing views of the histories of the opposing sides—how each side interprets the cultural, religious, and ethnic experiences of its people, perceptions of oppression, insult, and grievance, culminating in a feeling on both sides of justified zealotry and the need to reestablish dignity and freedom. In short, contrary to what the researchers maintain, wars are “triggered by ideology and religion.” Any psychology of male aggression must be able to comprehend those deeper motives.
In order to arrive at the simplistic and reductionist conclusion that all wars are “caused” by young males, we have to set aside our entire accumulated knowledge of history, politics, and civilizational clashes. We have to ignore the reasoned opinions that belligerents advance to justify their cause in favor of the view that wars are driven by a dumb sub-rational compulsion akin to the need to eat. Above all, the empirical approach prevents us from arriving at a substantive conception of male psychology that includes an understanding of courage as a virtue connected to the aspiration for honor and the service of justice. When we look at war and violence from that perspective, we find that the predominance of young males is not the cause of war but its effect. Men don’t fight wars because they’re young. Men fight wars because a desire for justice, honor, and human dignity is intrinsic to human nature, and that desire is often threatened, challenged, or derided by other people or by external events. Fighting wars for those reasons requires young men. Wars are caused by the need to fight for justice.
IS WAR NATURAL?
Of all the traditional virtues, none is more directly connected with manhood than courage in war. Indeed, in both ancient Greek and Latin, the words for courage are synonyms of the words for manly virtue in general. Andreia, the Greek word for courage, is derived from the word for a “manly man”—aner, somewhat like the Spanish word hombre. A manly man is understood in contrast with a mere “human being” (anthropos), the undistinguished mass of mankind, including women, children, slaves, and others who did not have the privilege of bearing arms. As for Latin, the word for a manly man (vir) is connected to the term for virtue of any kind (virtus), as if all excellence of character can be summed up under the heading of manly courage.
Now, to be sure, the full story of the traditional morality of manhood is a good deal more complicated. The ancient philosophers argue that courage is a necessary but not sufficient condition for becoming a fully virtuous man. Every man needs to acquire courage in order to defend his country in war. According to the Western tradition, bravery in a just war is entirely to be admired and deserves public honor and commemoration in art and literature. From pagan philosophers like Aristotle through the great Christian theologians including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to the present day, a just war has meant the defense of one’s country from an unprovoked attack or the defense of the weak and innocent in another land against an external or internal oppressor. (The Clinton administration’s action in Kosovo to rescue the minority Muslim population from genocide, for example, would certainly qualify as the latter.) Courage in this kind of war was deemed virtuous. By contrast, the deliberate slaughter of noncombatants, unprovoked attacks on a country that has done you no palpable harm, and sneak attacks on civilian targets with no military significance have been deemed unjust wars and ignoble acts. Fighting on that side was a vice, no matter how much ferocity or cunning you displayed, or even if you risked your life. The same is true of the great religions of the world. All of them have an honored place for courage in a just cause, and all of them decry wars of unprovoked aggression and the deliberate killing of noncombatants.
At the same time, however, these traditional authorities are also pretty much unanimous in ranking courage as being among the lowest virtues. If we educate boys and young men only to be courageous, they say, we run the risk of rearing savages who are fit only for fighting. When they lack a foreign foe, they will turn on their own kind rather than live in peace. That is why Aristotle’s praise of Sparta, for example—of all Greek city-states the one most completely dedicated to honoring the “manly men”—was so lukewarm. The Spartans were good soldiers. But they lacked the higher virtues that made a man in full—moderation, generosity, pride, justice, civic-spiritedness, and a liberal education in the civilizing influences of poetry, science, and history, all combining to engage in informed deliberations about the common good. Pericles, the great wartime leader of Athens during its long geopolitical rivalry with Sparta, makes a similar point in his famous Funeral Oration praising Athenian democracy. Our foes, the Spartans, he says, know only how to fight. Otherwise, they’re crude, ignorant, intolerant, xenophobic, distrustful of intellectuals, don’t know how to enjoy themselves, and can’t converse—a bit like Klingons. (That’s my comparison, not that of Pericles.) We Athenians, by contrast, have a gracious way of life, we enjoy the pleasures of the senses, we admire beauty, wit, and learning, we support culture and the arts—and we can still whip the Spartans’ butts any time we feel like it.
So the praise for courage in the Western tradition is limited. It’s the baseline qualification for being a true man. But it’s not an end in itself—it’s more like a starting point for building a deeper and broader strength of character. Even so, it would never have occurred to these traditional authorities to argue that we could do entirely without educating boys to be courageous, or that a healthy society could deliberately avoid honoring its brave soldiers. Unlike our contemporary doctrines of behavior modification, it was not a question of getting rid of the “competitive” traits in boys—their spontaneous desire to wrestle, yell, and play army. Instead, it was a matter of channeling those spontaneous energies away from bad purposes—criminal violence, vendettas, dueling over a woman, picking fights about some imagined slight—and channeling them toward the proper goals of battlefield courage on behalf of the common good.
Moreover, it was recognized that the raw courage required of a soldier in combat could provide the emotional basis for the more subtle kinds of courage required of a good citizen in later life—the civic courage to aid fellow citizens in danger or distress, go against the dictates of an unjust government (even a democratically elected one), or combat unjust laws and social practices. Courage is not confined to the battlefield. It would be hard, for instance, to imagine battlefield combatants braver than the firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero in Manhattan, or, back in the sixties, the Mississippi Freedom Riders, including the idealistic young Northern college students who tried to help them, facing bullwhips and truncheons wielded by the legal authorities in order to change an unjust law.
And yet, there is perhaps no manly virtue so poorly understood today or with so mixed a reputation as courage. When I was a student at Yale in the 1970s, I remember hearing students argue seriously that Vietnam veterans should not be allowed to vote in elections because their earlier participation in the “mindless violence” of that war had made them permanently unstable. The students hadn’t actually met any veterans. But endless television shows like Hawaii Five-O and Mannix had taught them that a “disgruntled ex-Vietnam vet” was always the likeliest suspect in a murder or robbery. Fortunately, society’s attitudes about public honor for military valor have improved enormously since then. Nevertheless, throughout my adult lifetime, our opinion elites have continued to show a pronounced tendency to see no intrinsic difference between courage well employed and courage badly employed.
For many of these people, all forms of aggression or force boil down to the category of “violence,” which is considered to be the same phenomenon with the same psychological origins whether it occurs in combat, street crime, or child or spousal abuse. Yes, they would concede, it may be necessary at times—although regrettable—for military and police force to be employed. But the last thing we want to do is draw attention to military courage or praise it as the basis for other virtues of character. After all, that would be to “glorify violence” and encourage “militarism,” “patriotic fervor,” “hysteria,” or a “war spirit” in the populace. This tendency became deeply entrenched during the Vietnam War. The coolheaded systems managers and Boston Brahmins who planned that war regarded popular fervor, including pride in the military, as dangerously vulgar passions that might fan a “war spirit” in the uneducated masses and distract the planners from their flowcharts. They wanted to wage a war for experts, a war with strategic objectives that the soldiers fighting it, and the electorate at large, could not possibly be expected to understand. As a consequence, when the troops began to come home, they found a public that, in contrast with World War II or even the Korean conflict, had been carefully insulated from any atmosphere of hero worship for the military. Instead, students at Yale and other such bastions of privilege often regarded them as “baby killers.”
The technocrats’ distaste for popular patriotism is one reason for our deep-seated ambivalence about courage. But there’s an even deeper reason, which goes to the core of the Western tradition. Try asking yourself the following question: Is it natural or unnatural for human beings to want war? This is the central issue. It has a profound if often unconscious and unrecognized influence on the way in which our opinion elites assess international conflict.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s natural for human beings to be warlike. If you take this view, does it necessarily mean that all men are motivated to be warlike all the time? Obviously not—that doesn’t follow, either logically or from observation. People could have varying intensities of a warlike disposition, from almost none to a great deal and everything in between. Does it mean that our warlike tendencies are necessarily beyond our control? Again, that does not follow from taking the view that humans are naturally warlike. The traditional authorities I began with all believe that men do have an innate and ineradicable disposition to be warlike, but that education can go a long way to moderating aggressive traits and harnessing them to constructive goals.
It’s all a question of knowing when to fight and why—in other words, the doctrine of the just war that I’ve already outlined from Aristotle to the theologies of the monotheistic faiths. Not only is it impossible to eradicate the warlike side of human nature but if we are in our right minds, we shouldn’t even want to, for a country needs those aggressive traits to defend itself from external and internal predators. Otherwise, we will suffer the same fate as the foolish sheep in Aesop’s fable who agree to sign a peace treaty offered by the wolves. Theodore Roosevelt, a great American warrior and statesman, perfectly comprehended the traditional view of courage as it had evolved in the American national experience. In a letter to his son, he admonished him never to be a bully, never to run from a fight when bullied, and to fight if another boy needed protection from a bully. In a nutshell, that is the American code of military honor.
Moreover, in the traditional view, for people who can’t be persuaded by education or moral exhortations to avoid pointless or shameless violence, there’s always the rule of law and the fear of legal retribution. In other words, to recognize that human beings have a natural disposition—among their other dispositions—to fight does not mean necessarily to approve of it on all occasions, much less to be “glorifying” it, or to regard war as inevitable or necessarily a good thing. The very fact that most law-bound and democratic societies are not usually plunged into anarchy or civil war, and that most states are not usually at war with each other, is sufficient proof that a natural predisposition to be warlike can be moderated, chastened, and sublimated by the forces of civilization. To concede that there is a warlike side to human nature is in no way to preclude the existence of higher and nobler dimensions to human nature. As all the traditional authorities maintain, courage can and should be governed by faith, civic virtue, prudence, and learning.
Believing in the naturalness of war, however, does lead one to adopt a very different perspective on the sources of violence and conflict around us, in contrast with those who believe that war should never be considered an innate human tendency. In order to see how this is so, let us now turn to the other side of the debate—the assumption that we have no innate tendencies to violence and aggression, that war is unnatural. If that is so, where do these traits come from? One answer often given is social conditioning according to those long-standing traditions that honor certain forms of courage—the very traditions I have been recommending as a guide for manly virtue. If you believe human beings are—or can be encouraged to become—naturally unaggressive, then even the carefully qualified kind of praise given by Aristotle for courage in a just war poses the risk of stimulating a passion for conflict that might otherwise not occur to people spontaneously. This is the reasoning, conscious or unconscious, behind the view that any form of public honor for courage is tantamount to “glorifying violence.” It corrupts our natural pacificity. This is a very deep strain in the heritage of modernity and the Enlightenment, as we will later consider in more detail. According to Hobbes, Voltaire, and other modern thinkers, the very praise of martial honor going back to Homer, Plato, and the Bible, far from decreasing crime and tyranny by distinguishing legitimate courage from illegitimate violence, increases violent tendencies by giving those whose naturally peaceful natures have already been corrupted some rhetorical camouflage for their thrusting ambitions. As Hobbes puts it, “young men mad on war” love to read the Greek and Roman classics because those books teach them how to disguise their passion for power and glory as a virtuous aspiration to serve the common good. The young man who claims to want to imitate Marcus Brutus and protect the Republic from tyrants secretly yearns to be a tyrant himself once he makes it to the top.
If people are naturally peaceful, why, then, do crime and war exist at all? The general response is that people don’t feel aggressive by nature, but everyone wants the basic material necessities of life and the economic wherewithal to pursue whatever vocation or value they see fit, and the ability to pass this freedom on to their children. If people are violent, it’s because they are being denied these basic freedoms. If we give them these freedoms, or prevent them from being curtailed, their aggressive traits will melt away, and their natural pacifism will flower. In the words of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” all men will be brothers.
In the pacifistic view of the world, peace is the normal condition, and war is the perversion. True, at any given time there may be a number of wars going on, and many conflicts brewing or barely suppressed. But that’s only because of the distorting influences on human nature introduced by poverty or by baleful cultural conditioning in old-fashioned militaristic bombast. Peace is still normal in the sense that it’s the underlying reality, an ideal that can be brought to the surface if only the distorting influences of history, politics, competition, and power seeking are curtailed. When war occurs, it is an abnormality that can be reversed if certain basic utilitarian goods are provided to the combatants. Human beings may think they enjoy the glory and honor of combat and martyrdom for their God or soil. But this is just a displacement of their pain at being deprived of their reasonable freedoms, and a rationalization for the fear and anxiety they are actually experiencing behind their bravado. Bring them the benefits of economic prosperity and personal liberty, and their hatreds will melt away. Give them Baywatch, DVDs and SUVs, and they’ll hang up their Kalashnikovs.
What are the practical consequences of this debate over the naturalness of war? If you believe the second proposition—the view that humans are not naturally warlike—you will have a tendency to dismiss the actual claims of the combatants as mere rhetoric, or as a confused state of mind. They may say that they are fighting for the honor and dignity of their people and faith, and that they want to destroy the interlopers who currently occupy their sacred soil or corrupt their daughters. But you know that what they really want is a Western standard of living, and that, once this is within reach, religious and ideological hostilities will evaporate in the sunny uplands of Western prosperity, personal freedom, and entertainment. If, however, like me, you believe the first proposition—that war is an innate natural propensity in mankind—you will have a much more pessimistic view of the prospects for world peace.
If you share my view, you will desire peace just as fervently as those who believe peace is the natural human condition. But you will also put more faith in national security, the balance of power, and the deterrent effect of military preparedness as the perhaps regrettable but necessary real-world basis for whatever limited cooperation between combatants is possible. Moreover, you will also put more faith in the power of liberal education, the jewel in the crown of the West’s achievements, not to eradicate violence from the world but to persuade young people that there are many ways of fighting—shameful and noble, despicable and admirable. And that requires a careful study of the psychology of manly courage in both its destructive and its admirable dimensions. Only if we know how to spot the potential predator and tyrant will we have any prospect of nipping those aberrant violent impulses in the bud and rerouting those passions toward the service of a just cause and the common good.
Obviously, these reflections have a bearing on the disaster of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing struggle against terrorism by the democracies. In my discussion of patriotism in Chapter 5, I’ll return to that most recent example of the just war and suggest how the traditional teaching about courage as it has evolved in a specifically American context might illuminate our understanding of it. In the rest of this chapter, though, I want to examine the psychology of courage in broader strokes, from Homer to the present.
TAMING THE WARRIOR
Throughout much of the Western tradition, the puzzle about courage has been how to rechannel it away from lawless violence and toward justice, moderation, and the common good. The West’s original model for courage—in both its good and its bad dimensions—was the beautiful young Greek demigod, king, and war hero Achilles. In a sense, taming this type of young man became the chief project for civic education beginning with the ancient Greek and Roman moralists, continuing through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and well into the twentieth century (including American heroes who wrote about courage like Theodore Roosevelt and JFK). Our chief source for the legend of Achilles is Homer’s great epic of the war between the Greeks and Trojans, the Iliad. Through Achilles’ example, Homer shows that righteous wrath is necessary in a warrior. But when that wrath is driven by jealousy and wounded pride, it can create dangerous instability for the common good.
Ostensibly, the main theme of the Iliad is the war between the Greeks (or, as Homer calls them, the Achaians) and the Trojans, sparked when the Trojan prince Paris abducts Helen, the legendarily stunning wife of the Mycenaean king Menelaos. Menelaos’s brother Agamemnon, the preeminent Greek king, assembles a multinational force to conquer Troy, recover Helen, and avenge the insult against his brother. But the deeper theme of the Iliad is the war within the war—the feud between Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest fighter, and his overlord Agamemnon. When the king of kings deprives Achilles of his war prize (yes, I’m afraid it’s a young woman), the young warrior withdraws in fury from the army, depriving his comrades of their best warrior. A king in his own right, Achilles has believed all along that he is a better man than his commander in chief. Having been mortally insulted by this feeble superior, he is ready to sacrifice the safety and success of his own side to avenge his wounded pride. It’s an age-old conflict between an impetuous youth and a more cautious older superior—a conflict, at bottom, between the natural, as-yet-unrecognized merit of the young and the established authority of older men resting on their laurels. For his part, Agamemnon has long resented Achilles’ disregard for his supreme rank, as their heated argument makes plain. In Homer’s dialogue, you can hear them spitting the words out between clenched teeth as they square off:
Then glowering at him Achilles spoke:
O clothed in shamelessness, you of the crafty mind, how shall any Achaian obey you with all his heart, whether it be to go on a journey or to fight the foe bravely in battle?
Achilles has nothing against the Trojans, he says. The whole war is nothing but an ego trip for Agamemnon as he avenges a slight to his less than impressive brother (Homer hints strongly that Helen might not have been an entirely unwilling captive of the dashing Paris). Achilles rages on:
I did not come here to fight because of the Trojan spear-men, for they have done me no wrong…. It was for your sake, you shameless one, that we all followed you here to please you, you dog-face, by avenging your honor and Menelaos’ against the Trojans.
I’ve done most of the fighting, Achilles claims, while you get most of the loot:
My reward is never as big as yours, but whenever the Achaians sack any populous citadel of Trojan men, my hands bear the brunt of furious war. But when the booty is divided, your share is always far greater; I go back to my ships with at least some small thing I can call my own when I am exhausted from fighting. But I am no longer willing to stay here in dishonor while I pile up riches and wealth for you.
Like a CEO who is being challenged by a junior executive, Agamemnon responds with equal hostility to this cocky young upstart:
Then Agamemnon king of men made answer to him:
Run away, yes, by all means, run, if that’s what you’re set on doing. I won’t beg you to stay for my sake. I have others by my side who honor me. By Zeus, lord of counsel, you have always loved strife and war and quarrels. So go home with your ships and your companions. I don’t care about you, and I could care less about your anger.
The result of Achilles’ desertion of the Greeks is just what he hoped for—the Trojans come close to defeating the Greeks. As the Greeks’ best warrior sulks in his tent, Achilles’ best friend Patroklos, shamed by his friend’s desertion, dons Achilles’ armor and dies taking his place in battle. In this way, Homer teaches us, excessive anger and pride are due for a fall. Achilles wanted the Greeks to suffer so they would realize how much they needed him, and to show up Agamemnon as a mediocre commander when deprived of Achilles’ superior prowess. He got his wish, but at an awful price—his best friend’s life. As Homer intones, “Thus the will of Zeus was fulfilled.” The gods even things out in ways that mortals can never anticipate.
Achilles remains the original model of manly honor for the ancient Greeks. When Plato discusses in the Republic how ambitious young men might be educated to channel their love of honor into serving the common good, Achilles is the main example he has in mind. But for Plato, the restless, moody, and beautiful young demigod is mainly a negative example. Careening between extremes of frenzied daring and hopeless despair, Achilles represents everything that should be avoided in educating a young man. Socrates dwells disapprovingly on the passages in the Iliad that depict the headstrong youth as being so filled with irrational fury that he tries doing battle with a river, or even threatens the gods with punishment if they get in his way. In Plato’s depiction, Achilles is a good deal more like an angry teenager slamming his bedroom door when he’s been grounded than a formidable general.
Much of Homer’s own portrait of Achilles confirms Plato’s view of him as narcissistic, self-absorbed, prone to self-pity, oblivious to the existence of others, and with a hair-trigger temper—in other words, a typical adolescent. Manly pride and honor have both good and bad potential. The good potential is for a vigorous service of the common good. The bad potential is for hubristic ambition, arrogance, and tyranny. The same aggressiveness and boldness that can invigorate public service and courage on behalf of a just cause can also, if not properly guided, lead to war, imperialism, and crimes of passion. Achilles betrays his own fellow Greeks while they are fighting for their lives against a deadly enemy because of a purely personal vendetta against his commander. He is willing to sell out his own side because he resents Agamemnon for stealing his loot and his woman.
Much of the subsequent Western tradition is dedicated to exploring the problem so vividly illustrated by Achilles: How can masculine ambition be deflected away from tyrannical and exploitive behavior, and redirected toward honorable citizenship? Properly shaped, battlefield courage can lay the foundation for civic courage, vigor of mind, and boldness of thought. The key to this transformation is what the Greeks called paideia, usually translated as “education.” Although it eventually came to stand for all learning and culture in general in the ancient world, originally and literally it meant the rearing of male youths (from pais, the word for boy).
At this point, before looking more closely at the classical ideal of paideia, we should pause to note the parallels with other traditions, particularly religious traditions. The Hebrew Bible, for example, displays a deep ambivalence about kingship and martial prowess. Both are necessary in order to defend the Israelites against their oppressors and enforce God’s law over His chosen people. But the Israelites were troubled by the feeling that in elevating one of their own to the same heights of power and prestige exercised by the unbelievers around them—the bellicose and arrogant Egyptian and Assyrian monarchs—they would offend God by giving too much grandeur to a mere mortal. If God is the true king, they wondered, ruling His people directly through His covenant and laws, is it right to have a human monarch like the idolaters, full of pomp and pride? By looking to the prophet Samuel to give them a king, the Israelites tried to make the royal authority come as much as possible from divine revelation, rather than from mere human ambition, military might, or pragmatic calculations based on power politics and international relations.
The story of that first king, Saul, and his relationship with the future king David perfectly parallels the dilemma explored by Homer, Plato, and other ancient philosophers: how a young man’s valor can serve his ruler but also threaten his authority. But while Achilles bears much of the blame for his feud with Agamemnon, David is the undeserving victim of Saul’s jealousy and suspicion. David meant only to serve his country by slaying Goliath and through his other victories. But Saul feared that David’s exploits as a commander, and the soldiers’ love for him, might fuel the young man’s ambition to overthrow Saul and make himself king. The Bible vividly evokes the paranoid atmosphere of Saul’s royal household:
Next day an evil spirit from God seized upon Saul; he fell into a frenzy in the house, and David played the harp to him as he had before. Saul had his spear in his hand, and he hurled it at David, meaning to pin him to the wall; but twice David swerved aside. After this Saul was afraid of David, because he saw that the Lord had forsaken him and was with David. He therefore removed David from his household and appointed him to the command of a thousand men. David led his men into action, and succeeded in everything that he undertook, because the Lord was with him. When Saul saw how successful he was, he was more afraid of him than ever; all Israel and Judah loved him because he took the field at their head.
There’s no question that Saul’s jealousy and suspicion toward David are completely unfounded, the product of his own arrogance and having grown too addicted to absolute power, just as the pious had feared might happen when they first approached Samuel to choose a king. Even Saul’s own son and heir Jonathan takes the side of his friend David against his father:
Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and all his household about killing David. Jonathan spoke up for David to his father Saul and said to him, “Sir, do not wrong your servant David; he has not wronged you; his conduct towards you has been beyond reproach. Did he not take his life in his hands when he killed the Philistine, and the Lord won a great victory for Israel? You saw it, you shared in the rejoicing; why should you wrong an innocent man and put David to death without cause?”
In the next chapter, which deals with pride, I’ll return to the issue of biblical revelation and the serious argument to be made that it is a better source for the manly virtues than any kind of secular reasoning, even the stalwart defense of the moral virtues undertaken by the ancient Greek and Roman authors, including Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. But let’s dwell for now on the classical approach to taming ambition. Achilles must be replaced with a new model for young men—what Socrates in the Republic describes as a moderate “Guardian” of the common good, whose gracious repose and consistency mirror the rationality of the cosmic order. Being a Guardian probably isn’t as much fun as being the wild, moody, beautiful, and charismatic demigod of youth, Achilles. Socratic manliness may not match the glorious excesses of Achilles’ daring, but it also doesn’t plunge into his adolescent self-pity, fury, and pointless aggression. For Socrates, a real man will never do battle with a river or any other god or disobey his lawful commander. Just as reason governs the cosmos, Socrates argues, an orderly soul must govern the passions. And since the soul is common to human beings regardless of physical differences—including the physical differences between men and women—everything Socrates proposes for the education of young men applies to young women as well.
Thus, under Socrates’ influence, “courage”—which, as we’ve seen, in ancient Greek was literally a synonym for “manliness”—becomes primarily a quality of soul, mind, and will, not of brute strength or martial prowess. Plato derives a distinct masculine psychology from a more widespread trait he calls “spiritedness.” Spiritedness is not necessarily the same as courage. Spiritedness is a zeal common to all living organisms, and to both sexes. Battlefield courage is only one of its manifestations. Socrates wants to discourage us from confusing spiritedness with a gender-specific trait. Women have it, too.
At its crudest level, spiritedness is a passion for struggle provoked in us by a feeling of vulnerability in the face of enemies or opposition. When we’re cornered, we lash out like an animal terrified into a spasm of rage as the only alternative to extinction. Socrates wants to channel this raw emotion by educating it to become moral zeal guided by the intellect in the service of the common good. Our aim should be not the tyrannical mastery of others, he suggests, but the inner mastery of our own base impulses on behalf of the rule of law and justice. This ethic of self-mastery leads away from imperialistic conquest to a more inward-looking politics devoted to domestic affairs. If a people lust to conquer other peoples, they will need to equip their fellow citizens with enormous military powers. More likely than not, those commanders, swollen with victorious pride from their conquests abroad, will turn on their former fellow citizens and become their masters. Untamed courage fed by tyrannical ambition and inflamed desires can lead to catastrophe for everyone—wars of imperialistic aggression abroad and the subversion of lawful government at home. In order to stave off such threats to the well-being and happiness of both individuals and communities, courage must be carefully defined and circumscribed within the bounds of justice.
COURAGE DEFINED
Following upon Plato, Aristotle and his student Theophrastus sum up the classical teaching on courage, one that has been profoundly influential even to the present day. Courage is a mean, they say, between the extremes of cowardice and mad daring. “It holds the middle place between those vicious extremes,” Aristotle writes. “It is calm and sedate, and though it never provokes danger, is always ready to meet even death in an honorable cause.” Moreover, Aristotle continues, you have to experience fear in order to be brave. If I can kill my enemy by flicking a switch on a console a thousand miles away, or by leaving a bomb in a pizzeria timed to explode when I’m safely out of range, I may be smarter or better trained technically than he is. But I’m not courageous, because I don’t feel fear. I have no low passion to overcome when confronted by another determined warrior, thereby demonstrating my courage by standing my ground.
According to Aristotle, that’s why a raw recruit heading into battle, whose guts are melting at the sight of the enemy’s guns, is more courageous than a general miles behind the lines moving pins on a map. Of course, in making such a judgment, Aristotle expects us to bear in mind that the general has seen combat many times himself in his younger days, and shown his courage on those occasions. Now, as an older man directing younger men who are risking their lives in the fighting, the general is fulfilling graver, broader, and more important responsibilities that involve the overall plan of the campaign, the safety of all the troops, and probably even the war’s impact on political and civilian life at home. As we will see in the chapter on pride, there are higher virtues than courage, and for Aristotle they are summed up by prudence, the mark of a truly distinguished leader. A young man can ascend over time from courage to prudence, but he can’t begin that way. Prudence is born of age and experience. Only mature older men can possess it.
A brave man, Aristotle tells us, is “unshaken and dauntless, subjecting the instinctive emotions of fear to the dictates of reason and honor.” But while a coward “lives in continual alarm, and is therefore spiritless and dejected,” we must also avoid the opposite extreme: “an excess of courage called rashness, a boastful species of bravery…which is nothing but madness, a most stupid insensibility that can make any man preserve, amidst earthquakes and inundations, that unshaken composure which has been ascribed to the Celts.” (As a descendant of Welshmen, I will ignore the philosopher’s last remark.)
According to Aristotle’s student Theophrastus, whose sense of humor was considerably better than that of his teacher, cowards tend to be rather bad companions on a cruise:
On shipboard the coward is the sort of man who mistakes a rocky headland for a pirate brig, and who asks if there are unbelievers aboard when a big wave hits the side. Or he will show up suddenly alongside the helmsman, trying to find out what the weather means or if they are halfway yet; and he explains to the nearest listener that his fright was caused by a dream.
Cowards also have a way of disappearing when things get hot on the battlefield:
Suppose, again, that he is on active duty. As the infantry advances into battle, he shouts for his friends from home to come over by him. He wants them to stop for a look round before they go farther, it’s a job he says, to tell which is the enemy. And as soon as he starts hearing the shouts and seeing men drop, he explains to those on either side of him that all the excitement made him forget to take his sword. So back he runs to the tent, then he sends his orderly out on reconnaissance, hides the sword under a pillow, and takes his time pretending to hunt for it.
The Aristotelian teaching about courage as a mean between cowardice and rashness sums up the ancient approach to the psychology of the warrior and ties it to the doctrine of the just war. The psychology of courage and the ethical limitations on war go hand in hand. If soldiers are rash, they will undertake wars based on trivial slights, vendettas, or a lust for plunder, or because they confuse battlefield honor with mad daring, frenzy, and an orgy of bloodshed. If they are cowardly, they will find ways of avoiding combat even when directly threatened by an unscrupulous aggressor, like the Italian city-states in the Renaissance that employed foreign mercenaries because they had grown too used to the pleasures of peacetime. These mercenaries fought only for money, and so of course routinely took the money and ran without fighting, or took the money and promptly changed sides so they could collect another fee.
If a just war is limited to self-defense or aiding the oppressed, it is because citizens have already been educated to avoid these extremes of cowardice and rashness, and to choose the peacetime domestic affairs of virtuous self-government over imperialistic expansionism. They won’t go to war unless provoked. But then they will fight in an orderly and steadfast way until they repel the invader. Depending on the circumstances, a good leader must encourage a peaceful spirit in his people on some occasions, a warlike spirit on others. A nice example of the appropriate rhetoric is to be found in Shakespeare’s Henry V, as the young hero-king rallies his troops before the walls of Harfleur, where they have come to wrest back their lands lost to France:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man,
As modest stillness, and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.
To visualize the difference between the sober, self-disciplined courage recommended by Aristotle and the extreme of rashness, picture those silent closed ranks of Roman legionaries in the movie Gladiator, moving as a single unit, never flinching as spears pour down on them, tramping relentlessly forward. Rashness, by contrast, is summed up by the barbarians in the film—who look, by the way, as if they came directly from filming Braveheart. They run forward pell-mell, a disordered mob screaming and waving battle-axes, each individual thinking he can kill a million Romans. Guess who wins.
But does the doctrine of the just war, and the psychology of courage as a mean between extremes on which it is based, cover all cases? Here is where things can get messy. If a neighboring country shows no overt signs of attacking you but has steadily built up its military might and conquered other countries, are you justified in launching a preemptive strike before they are strong enough to roll over you? Machiavelli, the Renaissance-era founder of the Realpolitik school of warfare, argues that the traditional doctrine of the just war handed down by the ancient and Christian authorities leaves us helpless in the face of this kind of threat. For if, in obedience to Aristotle, St. Thomas, and the other traditional just war teachings, we wait until actually attacked, the enemy will already have beaten us.
According to Machiavelli, the Romans professed to believe in those fine Aristotelian virtues of moderation and self-control, but fortunately for their empire, they didn’t practice what they preached. That’s why they ended up with a world empire, while the Greeks had only a collection of piddling little city-states. The Romans were always ready to go to war at short notice in order to avoid having a war forced upon them later at a time not of their choosing. Above all, they were always willing to strike a preemptive blow now, in order to knock out a potential enemy before he got too strong, thereby avoiding a longer war on worse terms down the road, a war that they might lose and that would result in much greater death and suffering for both sides. As Machiavelli observes, exercising preemptive force in the present often maximizes the chances for greater peace in the long run—whereas avoiding combat because of Christian scruples about love and charity can end up plunging your country into the horrors of invasion and conquest. He sums up—and savors—the paradox by concluding that, for a leader, sometimes cruelty is the most compassionate course of conduct, while a preference for being compassionate can subject your people to the cruelty of defeat, conquest, or civil war. A leader may have to be ready to sully his reputation in order to be successful in pragmatic terms.
These reflections may be unpleasant, but unfortunately they have been confirmed time and again by events. When Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland in 1936, taking back a piece of German territory annexed to France by the Versailles treaty ending World War I, some two hundred divisions of the French army and its allies stood idly by. The force Hitler sent into the Rhineland was purely symbolic—a single division—and at the time the entire Wehrmacht totaled fewer than ten divisions in all. They had orders to withdraw at the first sign of French retaliation. We know from records captured after World War II that Hitler’s generals thought he had lost his mind to do something so rash. If France and England had made any move to expel the German contingent—which they could have done easily—there’s a good chance the German high command would have deposed Hitler rather than risk an Allied invasion at a time when the German army was still quite weak.
Because Hitler’s rash gamble worked, his prestige soared among the military, particularly the bolder young officers, who were eager for the glories of war (including the medals and promotions) and tended to side with the Fuehrer’s view of the generals as timid and weak-willed. It also convinced Hitler that the Allied leaders were irresolute and lacking conviction, which emboldened him to grab more and more territory (Austria and the Sudetenland) in a series of bloodless victories that played upon the French and British leaders’ desire to avoid war at any price. After Munich, where they sanctioned his rape of Czechoslovakia, he would always say of them: “These men are ghosts. I saw them at Munich.” By failing to expel the Germans from the Rhineland when they had the overwhelming military superiority, the Allies emboldened the most bellicose elements of the Nazi regime, and hastened a war that eventually consumed millions of lives.
YOUNG MEN MAD ON WAR
Beginning in the seventeenth century, with the rise of representative government, commercial free enterprise, and the Enlightenment, there was a conscious effort to pacify the ambitions of what Thomas Hobbes termed “young men mad on war” and make them into orderly private individuals devoted to the peaceful arts of moneymaking. This was an enormous shift. As we’ve seen, the earlier tradition of the West had argued for the right kind of civic education to rechannel courage and the other aggressive traits of boys and young men. With the rise of modernity, for the first time serious efforts were made to get rid of manly honor altogether. Hobbes began the line of reasoning that denies there is any independent capacity for honor seeking in the human soul.
It is still an enormously influential position, one of the important sources for the pacifistic side of the debate we considered earlier over whether and to what extent warlike leanings are innate to human nature. According to this view, the pursuit of honor is reducible to a frustrated desire for material prosperity, stemming from our anxiety about staying alive and resentment toward those who are better off. For Hobbes, the solution is to encourage people to gratify their desires through peaceful economic enterprise, protected from one another’s tyrannical impulses by an all-powerful benevolent despot. In effect, Hobbes takes the famous Aristotelian definition of courage as a golden mean between cowardice and rashness and says, When you look at the real world, there is no golden mean—all we see are cowards or the insanely rash. If you praise courage as a virtue, all you’re accomplishing is providing usurpers, revolutionaries, and would-be tyrants with nice-sounding rhetoric to disguise their lust for power. Since, in the real world, there are only the cowards and the rash, according to Hobbes, it’s better to be a coward. If we all come to realize that self-preservation and fear of death motivate everything we do, we’ll lose any pretensions to male bravado and settle down to the peaceful art of making money. Glory seekers are nothing more than muggers and thieves on a grand scale.
With his stigmatization of “macho” pretensions to glory, fed by reading the ancient authors and historians of valorous deeds, Hobbes is one of the forebears of modern feminism. Unfortunately, he’s also the first Western political theorist to endorse despotism openly as a necessary instrument for crushing the pretensions of the “vainglorious” to heroic honor. Basically, he recommends equipping one vicious S.O.B. with a big enough club to keep all the other S.O.B.’s in line. While social peace was being preserved through the monarch’s capacity to strike terror in the other S.O.B.’s in case they were thinking of usurping him, the universities (as Hobbes hoped) would begin educating the young in his new psychology of materialism, nipping up-and-coming S.O.B.’s in the bud by convincing them that it was far better to act on their ambitions by becoming Bill Gates than by becoming Julius Caesar. One man gets to be the boss. The rest of us get to be retail clerks and burger slingers.
Here begins a dilemma about the place of courage in the modern world that we have yet to resolve. In order to banish the dark side of manliness, must we get rid of it altogether, through a blend of terror and indoctrination, as Hobbes recommends? If we look back over the entire course of modernity, especially the catastrophically destructive wars and totalitarian tyrannies of the twentieth century, it might seem as if the human race has increasingly fallen into one or the other of the extreme versions of courage—excessive pacifism or excessive violence, just as Hobbes said was the case when you forsook the Aristotelian ideal for the real world. But maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps this division into extremes of timidity and rashness is the price we have paid for following Hobbes in abandoning the golden mean—the classical view of courage as the restrained exercise of force on behalf of a just cause. Hobbes’s therapy for “vainglorious” young men anticipates the treatment in A Clockwork Orange of Alex, a modern Alcibiades who identifies masculinity with mayhem, crime, and rape, because none of the traditional outlets for honorable courage are available to him. Since he isn’t pacified by the banal material comforts and entertainment culture into which he is born, the state has to rob him of his masculinity altogether through a torture regimen of psychotropic drugs and Pavlovian reconditioning. Seeing the movie today, one can’t help but conclude that what Stanley Kubrick depicted in 1971 as a grotesque futuristic fantasy has in many ways been normalized by the widespread use of Ritalin to rewire the brain circuitry of young boys in order to cure them of their excessive boyish aggression and lack of concentration.
Hobbes hoped to see the world rid of “young men mad on war.” But their numbers seem to have increased during the last thirty years. When I first saw A Clockwork Orange in 1971, people stalked out of the theater in disgust at the infamous rape scene, in which Alex and his fellow “Droogs” invade the trendy pad of a rich, cultured couple and chase them with a huge dildo. At that time, the movie seemed mainly a nasty dystopian fantasy, pumped up with exaggerated and gratuitous violence. But in some ways it only mirrored disturbing cultural trends that were already under way, such as the Manson Family’s eerily similar slaughter of a house party of privileged celebrities a few years earlier, or the Rolling Stones’ horrifying performance at the Altamont Music Festival, where the Hells Angels beat a young man to death before Mick Jagger’s eyes. These trends only grew worse with time. In England, with the rise of the punks and the soccer thugs, it was as if the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange were stomping off the screen straight into the real world. The punks, with their fascistic leather gear, shaved heads and snarling demeanor, were reacting to the reigning hippie Establishment, with their combination of self-satisfied privilege and smug otherworldliness, rolling their joints in the Jacuzzi and listening to meditation tapes in their Jags (crystallized by Paul Simon’s wonderful turn as the rich, laid-back, too-hip-for-thou West Coast producer in Annie Hall ).
The punks’ crude, three-chord thrash rock, with its deliberate avoidance of melody and deliberately irritating nasal wailing, was designed to be a cruise missile aimed at the increasingly precious, sanctimonious, and overblown art rock of the High Late Hippie era (with its “suites” and “operas”). Their early cinematic manifesto, Rude Boy, a vérité chronicle of the rise of the Clash interwoven with scenes from the deepest punk recesses of East London, made a brilliant gesture toward A Clockwork Orange by placing its protagonist—a punk rock lover and fringe member of the skinhead fascist scene—in exactly the same kind of dreary public housing complex that Stanley Kubrick had chosen for his Alex. In this way, the punks were saying, it’s all come true in one short decade—the Droogs are here.
And that, of course, brings us right to the present—and to the opening pages of this book. The characteristic dichotomy brought out by Fight Club between the wimp and the beast was already at work in the war between hippie and punk culture, and this in turn was deeply rooted in the original Hobbesian argument that there is no middle ground for manly combativeness in the real world of passion and self-interest. There are only pacifists and the insanely daring; those unwilling ever to fight, and those always ready to fight for no sound purpose.
THE MODERN AMBIVALENCE ABOUT COURAGE
Now, to be sure, there are more balanced approaches within the modern tradition than the Hobbesian strain, approaches that seek to marry traditional notions of courage to the new civilization of democracy and the elevation of the commercial virtues over the old knightly codes of valor. Few avatars of the Enlightenment shared Hobbes’s taste for extremes. According to them, the fact that we want to get rid of the retrograde side of the old martial culture doesn’t mean we think that war is going to disappear forever, or that soldiering can’t still be an honorable profession. The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, for example, believed that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey should still be the models for manliness in the modern age, precisely because the increasing emphasis on self-interest and material prosperity needed tempering with a reminder about heroic valor, duty, and self-sacrifice.
By contrast, later modern thinkers like Rousseau and Marx began to maintain that war is completely unnatural because humans actually have no spontaneous desire for competition at all. Whereas Hobbes thought you had to be either a warrior or a coward, the socialist school went further, contending that all human beings are peaceful. When you remove the distortions that cause war—class, inequality, religion—war will vanish forever. This heady brew of different moral perspectives in the modern West about the role of courage has much to do with why we are so ambivalent about it today. We know we can’t do without courage. But we can’t endorse it completely without seeming to oppose progress and peace.
One of the ironies often noted by historians and moralists is that, as the values of democracy, free enterprise, and the Enlightenment spread throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proclaiming the impending brotherhood of all mankind, war, revolution, and violence have actually intensified rather than withered away or even decreased. Once again, it seems as if we might reluctantly have to concede the prescience of Hobbes. Given the terrible wars and genocide unleashed by totalitarianism in the twentieth century, an unprecedented level of barbarism that emerged in the very heartland of the liberal, enlightened, democratic, and prosperous West, again it seems as if real-life history has offered an ever more worrisome division between the pacifists and the fanatics. While the Enlightenment and liberalism have preached the message of peace, tolerance, and reconciliation, in practice the democracies time and again have had to mount extraordinary military efforts against the resurgence of tyrannies of the Left and Right, and most recently against terrorist zealots and their state sponsors.
As a consequence, and not surprisingly, while psychology, sociology, political science, and other academic disciplines have been ill-equipped during much of the twentieth century to give a nuanced account of courage that does not simply stigmatize it or wish it away in accordance with the socialist ideal of universal peace, actual statesmen and commanders from the twentieth-century’s wars have provided some of the best contemporary insights into the meaning of courage. In truth, reading de Gaulle, Churchill, or John F. Kennedy on courage makes us realize how impoverished and reductionist the academic and professional psychological literature is by contrast. While modern behaviorists like Harold Lasswell and other conventionally celebrated academic experts on aggression could offer little more than a rehash of Hobbes and a pious hope for a future utopia of peace, their contemporaries in the real world of warfare reached into the richest insights of the Western tradition to make some sense of the terrible conflicts of the democratic age.
Among the best of these are Charles de Gaulle’s writings on the soldier’s virtues and the good and bad sides of war. De Gaulle argues that we cannot imagine life without military force—and that we should not want to. Why? Because human nature cannot change. More important, although ambition and pride can do evil things in the world, it’s equally true that nothing noble or just can be accomplished without these same qualities:
Hope though we may, what reason have we for thinking that passion and self-interest, the root cause of armed conflict in men and in nations, will cease to operate; that anyone will willingly surrender what he has or not try to get what he wants; in short, that human nature will ever become something other than it is?…Is it possible to conceive of life without force? Only if children cease to be born, only if minds are sterilized, feelings frozen, men’s needs anaesthetized, only if the world is reduced to immobility, can it be banished. Otherwise, in some form or another, it will remain indispensable, for, without it, thought would have no driving power, action no strength. It is the prerequisite of movement and the midwife of progress.
In war, we can observe men’s basest passions of cruelty and revenge. But we can also observe their finest aspirations to self-sacrifice and duty. While war can serve exploitation and domination, it can also defend the oppressed and spread the ideals of civilization and religion:
War stirs in men’s hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, bolsters tyranny…. But, though Lucifer has used it for his purposes so, sometimes, has the Archangel. With what virtues has it not enriched the moral capital of mankind! Because of it, courage, devotion, and nobility have scaled the peaks. It has conferred greatness of spirit on the poor, brought pardon to the guilty, revealed the possibilities of self-sacrifice to the commonplace, restored honor to the rogue, and given dignity to the slave. It has carried ideas in the baggage wagons of its armies, and reforms in the knapsacks of its soldiers. It has blazed a trail for religion and spread across the world influences which have brought renewal to mankind, consoled it, and made it better. Had not innumerable soldiers shed their blood there would have been no Hellenism, no Roman civilization, no Christianity, no Rights of Man, and no modern developments.
Whether we enjoy facing it or not, de Gaulle is saying (like Machiavelli before him), military conquest can have beneficial consequences. The supreme example of this sometimes disturbing paradox is de Gaulle’s legendary predecessor Napoleon, the founder of modern French military honor. The traditional just war doctrine had restricted military action against another country to self-defense or rescuing the oppressed. Beginning with Napoleon, however, war could be waged for the modern ideals of the rights of man and representative government. Those ideals could be taken to justify invading not only countries that are obviously tyrannical but even those that, by any traditional standard, do not oppress or menace their subjects. All must be reformed into democracies in which the People and the Rights of Man are sovereign.
On a personal level, Napoleon was motivated by an insatiable craving for victory and glory. He dreamed of matching and even surpassing the exploits of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. But as the war leader of revolutionary France, Napoleon used his victories to spread the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. His defeat of the European powers was not just an old-fashioned victory for French territorial and dynastic ambitions of the kind that European states had always fought. His victories also brought about the collapse of the old feudal order, and gave the Enlightenment parties in those countries a chance to foster the cause of constitutional democracy, civil liberties, and individual self-advancement through commercial enterprise. Napoleon was a liberal imperialist, a progressive conqueror. To this day, liberal democracies remain troubled by the question of how far we are justified in imposing our military will on other countries, not merely to restore peace or rescue them from an aggressor but to reform them into our own kind of pluralistic liberal democracy. This is a complication we must frankly confess the traditional just war doctrine did not envision.
As for Napoleon himself, this complex genius who spread death and destruction to millions in order to make them free, one of the best portraits of his good and bad sides comes from an unexpected source: the American Transcendentalist and clergyman Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like de Gaulle writing a century later, Emerson sees the value of military might when it is allied with the spread of freedom and the rule of law. But not being a man of war himself, he is perhaps more sensitive than the French general to how military ambition can distort the soul of a man who devotes himself to it above all else:
Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed; never had a leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again.
At the end of the day, Napoleon sacrificed everything—the ideals for which the armies of revolutionary France were fighting, and finally France herself—to his unquenchable thirst for glory:
Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was, “Enough of him”; “Assez de Bonaparte.”
The paradox of the liberalizing conqueror Napoleon draws together a number of themes in our examination of courage. The old just war doctrine made a distinction between the just and moderate employment of courage, limited primarily to a country’s self-defense, and unjust wars of imperialistic expansion. With Napoleon, we get something new and unanticipated—an imperial conqueror who spreads democratic justice. It is as if the vainglorious young man “mad on war” decried by Hobbes as the source of all upheaval drew his sword on behalf of Rousseau and Marx. As pacifists and socialists, we must condemn this throwback to the blood-soaked empires of the past. But as believers in progress, we applaud his overthrow of reactionary feudalism. Once again, it proves devilishly difficult to find the golden mean between the extremes of passivity and rashness.
Nowhere are these paradoxes of modern courage better explored than in the novels of Tolstoy. War and Peace unforgettably portrays the attractions and drawbacks of a life devoted to martial valor and patriotic service and the more retiring, inward-directed life of a family man, husband, and father. The novel’s main character, Pierre Bezukhov, sums up all the ambivalence of the modern liberal about war and conquest, an ambivalence later to be repeated over Stalin, Mao, and other self-proclaimed liberators of mankind. Pierre is a decent and well-meaning man, a member of the aristocracy who believes in progress, tries to be a benevolent master to his serfs, studies the social sciences and agronomy in order to modernize production on his estates and spare his serfs back-breaking labor, and longs for the simple pleasures extolled by Rousseau of a life in the country with his wife and children. He abhors violence. And yet he is thrilled by the advance of Napoleon across Europe, and mesmerized by the emperor’s charisma. As a liberal who believes in the rights of man and the inevitable moral victory of representative government, he cannot shed tears over the reactionary Prussian and Austrian monarchies being crushed by the French. Pierre wonders constantly: Is Napoleon a liberator or a tyrant? In truth, he is both, for only a tyrant could have imposed the Enlightenment on the old regimes.
In contrast with Pierre, his friend Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is a professional soldier devoted to martial honor and patriotic service. He longs for a cause in which to sacrifice himself, and the art of war provides the surest means. His father, the old Prince, is modeled on Voltaire, lost in his books and telescopes, sleeping in different rooms of his palace every night as he rummages restlessly through his manuscripts and collections. But the son is not content with a life of peace and learning; he longs for conflict. In this way, Tolstoy shows us that the Enlightenment’s credo of peace, liberal education, and the satisfactions of private life are not for everyone. To use the Platonic term, a young man’s thumos—his zeal and daring—cannot always be repressed or tranquilized by family life or the enjoyment of prosperity. Some men are born warriors. When Napoleon invades, he provides both Pierre and Andrei with a solution for their inner conflicts: loyalty to the Russian fatherland. The war of national defense gives the restless Andrei an outlet for his courage. For his part, Pierre finally realizes that, if he has to choose between liberalism imposed by a foreign conqueror and a Russia that is imperfect but still free, he will choose the latter.
America has experienced its own version of the paradox that conquest is sometimes the only means to freedom. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was compelled, with infinite regret but inflexible purpose, to wage war on the half of his own country that refused to part with slavery, the most intolerable contradiction to democratic values imaginable. Stephen Crane’s novel about that conflict, The Red Badge of Courage, is the classic American story of a young man coming of age on the battlefield. As it begins, its hero, Henry Fleming, recalls his excitement at enlisting in the Union army. Although he had been taught to regard warfare as the vestige of a bygone age, happily left behind by the modern march of progress, like most young men, he secretly fantasized about being in battle:
He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life—of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess. But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles. There was a portion of the world’s history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever.
Like all young men about to taste combat for the first time, he cannot escape a nagging question: Will I run? In his first encounter with the enemy, he does in fact flee. But in the second battle he stands his ground and, in Crane’s words, becomes a “war-devil.” He had passed the test of manhood, surprising himself with his own ferocity:
These incidents made the youth ponder. It was revealed to him that he had been a barbarian, a beast. He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion. Regarding it, he saw that it was fine, wild, and, in some ways, easy. He had been a tremendous figure, no doubt. By this struggle he had overcome obstacles which he had admitted to be mountains. They had fallen like paper peaks, and he was now what he called a hero. And he had not been aware of the process. He had slept and, awakening, found himself a knight.
TERRORISM, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE PERVERSION OF COURAGE
Napoleon was a new kind of conqueror, a democratic Caesar who destroyed for the sake of peace. Adding a new twist to the old doctrine of courage as a mean between two extremes of rashness and pacifism, he exercised limitless daring on behalf of an ideal of perfect brotherhood. Napoleon thus anticipates the even more catastrophic ideological wars of the twentieth century, in which brutal despots like Hitler and Stalin justified the conquest and murder of tens of millions on the grounds that, once the impediments to the brotherhood of mankind were finally exterminated, a thousand-year kingdom of heaven on earth would reign. And well-meaning Western intellectuals, bewitched by these charismatic tyrants speaking the language of millenarian happiness, experienced the same ambivalence about them as Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov does about Napoleon; initially starstruck, they would later grow profoundly disillusioned and disgusted.
Totalitarianism and terrorism have spawned an extreme perversion of courage. As we know only too well from the last century and the opening years of the new one, the attraction of young men to struggle and glory has been perverted to serve some of the worst tyrannies known to human history. What leads young men to murder innocents for the sake of a cause? How does a man come to the point where he is rigging a bomb to explode on a school bus full of children, or aiming a machine gun at a line of naked women in front of a mass grave? There are, of course, many theories. A psychological profile presented at the French trial of Carlos the Jackal (his real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez), the notorious terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Olympic Village massacre and many other acts of bloodshed, suggested that he was revenging himself on bourgeois society for taunts he had received as a child for being overweight and unathletic. This interpretation has its attractions. In a sense, it would be morally satisfying to believe that cowardly sneak attacks by a sniveling nonentity on unarmed civilians stem from a desire to feel powerful; that performing terrorist acts masks a deep sense of inner weakness and worthlessness, a worm trying to convince himself that he’s a lion by killing children.
But it would be simplistic to leave it at that. For one thing, not all terrorists are cowards in the ordinary sense of the traditional definition going back to Aristotle. The men who destroyed the World Trade Center in September 2001 were neither rash nor cowardly in the obvious meaning of those terms. They did not act on an impulse of spasmodic fury but planned their action methodically for months, including all the necessary technical training. And then they deliberately sacrificed their own lives as the necessary guarantee of success in attaining their objective. This was evil, but it was not cowardly or rash.
Such observations don’t invalidate the traditional distinction between courage and cowardice. They only demonstrate that courage itself is not the most important criterion for evaluating honorable and dishonorable action. When terrorists act on principle, they need to be condemned not primarily for their lack of courage but for the moral bankruptcy of their principles. Murdering innocent civilians, even when it requires courage, is nevertheless dishonorable because it is unjust and despicable, the act of a soul twisted and scarred with resentment, intolerance, and hatred. Terrorists may not be lacking physical courage in the narrowest meaning of the term, but their war is unjust.
The two worst totalitarian systems of our age, Nazism and Bolshevism, were brought to power by terrorist movements made up of young men with the same twisted psychology and perverted idealism as the cadres of al-Qaida, Hizbollah, or fringe radicals like Timothy McVeigh. Both Nazism and Bolshevism appealed strongly to young men and encouraged a bizarre idealism whereby they could convince themselves that wars of aggression and mass murder served a shining ideal that would bring about a golden age for all mankind. The leading Bolsheviks who served under Lenin, including Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin, were surprisingly young when they took power. As for the Nazis, one of the first demographic groups to join their ranks as a bloc in the 1930s were university students, which is why the Nazis were often simply referred to as the Jugendbewegung, the youth movement. The Hitler Youth traced its origins to a hippielike “back to nature” movement beginning around the turn of the century known as the Ramblers (Wandervogelin). Mostly middle-class and well off, they liked to hike, camp, and sing around the campfire as a way of asserting their opposition to materialistic bourgeois life. First regularized by the Nazis as the boy troops we see in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will, the Hitler Youth formations often passed directly into the SS, the elite ideological warriors who carried out the Holocaust.
Young men are attracted to revolution because it appears to justify heroism, valor, and self-sacrifice, which have few permissible outlets in modern democratic society. Capitalism often corrodes premodern traditions of patriotism and faith, and if it doesn’t succeed in bringing about the prosperity it promises and isn’t accompanied by genuine democratic reform, it can provoke a backlash in the name of national dignity against the Enlightenment’s entire civilizational project of individual liberty, tolerance, and elected government. This backlash helps to explain the appeal of third-world socialism and what the Chinese Communist ideologue Lin Piao termed the revolt of “the backyard of the world” against the wealthy West. V. S. Naipaul makes the same observation about the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism to young men in the Muslim world. It begins with the unsatisfactory progress of economic modernization in developing economies and harnesses that resentment to the deeper anger over the loss of a traditional collective identity, so that war against the West simultaneously avenges what is seen as the West’s economic exploitation and roots out its corrupt secularizing values.
Western intellectuals have often displayed an armchair voyeurism about this kind of revolutionary violence. Those who are most addicted to the vision of a future utopia of perfect peace have often been among the most fervent apologists for terrorism in the present, as long as it is aimed at destroying corrupt bourgeois society (the same liberal democratic civilization that provides their professorships and villas). From Sartre to Foucault, French leftist intellectuals rarely encountered a form of revolutionary terror they didn’t like. Sartre’s hit parade of genocidal pinup boys included Stalin and Mao. Foucault effused about the Ayatollah Khomeini as “a mystic saint.” Closer to home, American intellectuals have sometimes displayed a similar ambivalence about violence, decrying it as a general ideological position while being attracted psychologically to it as a matter of personal voyeurism and aesthetics.
A leading example is Norman Mailer. He has argued that twentieth-century military technology removes glory from combat because it allows us to kill anonymously by raining bombs from the sky. In this view technology both insulates us from the perils of combat and restricts our freedom for brave deeds by making us cogs in the wheel of mechanized and computerized destruction. In my view, this was always an exaggerated claim. One would be hard-pressed to deny the many acts of battlefield bravery by the soldiers of the democracies during the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, or the wars of aggression launched on Israel. There was no dearth of battlefield bravery and honor, including air combat. One suspects Mailer of shedding crocodile tears over something he’d loathe if it were accorded more public recognition and gratitude. When commentators claim to bemoan the loss of glory in combat, it is often in order to justify doing nothing warlike in the present. This was particularly evident during the air campaign against Kosovo, when the odd view was aired that the bombing of a genocidal regime was somehow unworthy because no one on our side ran the risk of being killed. People who regarded military honor with suspicion in principle were suddenly arguing that only if American combat troops were “blooded” would the war against Milosevic be worth fighting. And yet military doctrine from Julius Caesar to Dwight Eisenhower—not to mention common sense—has held that the purpose of war is victory at the smallest possible cost in lives.
In the case of Mailer, his professed admiration for an allegedly long-departed creed of truly manly combat—in contrast with the allegedly “bloodless” and “technological” war of today—also justifies an unhealthy and self-indulgent hero worship of criminal violence and revolutionary fanaticism as a legitimate protest against bourgeois complacency. Mailer experienced his own personal little Vietnam when he lionized a convicted murderer, Jack Abbott, helped him to publish his prison memoirs, and obtained his release from prison by speaking to the parole board on his behalf. Mailer gave Abbott a research job and introduced him to celebrities and literati around Manhattan. Mailer seemed to believe that this heartless sociopath was a genuine “homegrown” revolutionary, our version of those brave freedom fighters under Ho Chi Minh or the Red Guards. Mailer’s voyeuristic thrill ended when, six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed a young man to death outside a Manhattan restaurant for the wrong choice of words. When you lionize a murderer and help him get out of prison, is it surprising that the first thing he does is murder another innocent, because he was enraged at an imagined petty slight?
Mailer and intellectuals like him perfectly illustrate Aristotle’s point, at least in their heads and from the safety of their privileged enclaves. They are incapable of seeing courage as a golden mean between extremes. Either they are pacifists and one-worlders or they worship mad daring and fanaticism, often because of a patently ludicrous belief that a world of peace can be brought about by bloodshed and terror. In the face of such stubborn resistance to common sense, one wonders if their utopian ideology of global peace doesn’t mask and excuse the vicarious love of violence and fantasies of revenge by cloaking them in a humanitarian motive. Foucault’s Marxism was largely based on the writings of Georges Sorel, a worshiper of vitality and struggle against the complacency of materialistic bourgeois wimps; Sorel’s writings are widely viewed as one of the inspirations for fascism. Sorel influenced Mussolini, and his vision of manhood can be seen in both fascist and Bolshevik poster art, those brawny titans whose more benign American descendants are comic book heroes like the Hulk or the actor-acrobats of World Wrestling Entertainment. When academics grow effusive about hip and daring young warriors against the West, such as Che Guevera, it’s hard not to wonder if their enthusiasm doesn’t stem from a long-standing desire to be one of the guys, as if they had found a way in adult life finally to be chosen for the football team.
OUR SQUEAMISHNESS
As I observed earlier, modern theories of motivation from Hobbes down to Harold Lasswell and the contemporary social sciences are frequently unequipped to account for and make sense of this depraved version of the warrior spirit, because the theories reduce human behavior to material self-interest. The traditional wisdom about courage as a mean between rashness and cowardice has never been more relevant than during the century just past and the century just begun. From Stalin and Hitler to al-Qaida, totalitarian and terrorist movements force us to abandon this pedestrian theory of human motivation, which ignores the capacity for glory, honor, and self-sacrifice, and return to the full-blooded evocations of male aggression and tyranny found in Plato and Aristotle. Before we can redirect these darker masculine passions, we have to begin by admitting they exist, and recovering the richness of the traditional psychology of manly valor. Until we do, we will be doomed to veer endlessly between pacifism and fanaticism or, as Aristotle would have put it, between cowardice and rashness.
The obstacles to recognizing the traditional wisdom about courage are formidable. They involve sacred cows that our opinion elites and universities cling to in defiance of all known historical experience and common sense. Let’s consider a few of those delusions. Since the 1960s, we have witnessed a relentless campaign to demystify and demythologize war and martial valor. In university courses on international relations, wars of the past are almost always reinterpreted in light of the war in Vietnam. Hence all war is reduced, as we saw earlier, to the moralistic abstraction of “violence.” This abstraction ignores the substantive differences between good and evil causes, and leaves little room for a legitimate role for manly honor. Even the history of World War II, the best example of a clear-cut battle between good and evil, can be rewritten by academic theorists of international relations as another lamentable expression of a universal “patriarchal” impulse toward “hegemony” rather than as something caused by the unjust ambitions of Germany and Japan. This kind of vapid moralizing, which is so fastidious and embarrassed about making judgments as to which sides are just or unjust, leads to a view of history as driven by impersonal forces and universal abstractions rather than by virtuous and vicious men.
As a consequence, it has become increasingly impermissible to extol or even explore masculine martial prowess or statesmanship. Partly out of a distaste for martial honor, partly out of an overfastidiousness about giving offense by describing male psychology, universities increasingly opt not to teach the narrative history of war, statesmanship, and diplomacy in international relations courses. All events are explained in terms of global economic trends and dependency theory. War is treated as an aberration or a selfish power agenda, and rarely judged as honorable or dishonorable depending on the cause for which it is waged. The memoirs of Lloyd George, Churchill, Acheson, or Kissinger are less likely to be found in the course syllabus than something along lines of “a Foucauldian analysis of international dependency theory with special attention to patterns of gendered aggression, supplemented by queer theory and a Derridean deconstruction of neocolonialist hegemony.” Genuine military and diplomatic achievements go uncelebrated, for fear of stimulating the alleged latent warmongering spirit of the American people.
As a consequence, we have come perilously close during the last thirty years to losing the sense that war can be ennobling. Whereas our victory in World War II produced a long celebration and reflection on the evils of totalitarianism, the victory over the equally evil Soviet regime produced no comparable national dialogue. In the case of both victories, fine work has been done by scholars for the benefit of other specialists. But there is no Cold War equivalent of the hugely popular middlebrow epic of World War II, William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When I was growing up, it seemed like almost every household had this book on display, often alongside Churchill’s memoirs of the war. For the most part, the works of major scholars of the Soviet era, such as Robert Conquest, have not crossed over into best-sellerdom, as did, say, Alan Bullock’s study of Hitler. No sooner was victory over the evil empire in view than liberal commentators such as Michael Kinsley were rushing to warn us against taking any credit or feeling any sense of pride in the achievement. It was “inevitable,” they constantly proclaimed, it would have happened anyway and in no way confirmed the moral superiority of American democracy to Soviet Communism or (God forbid above all) the sagacity of the Reagan administration’s statesmanship.
And yet the victims of Soviet totalitarianism, who had seen it up close and felt the wolf’s hot breath on their necks, usually took a very different view. Andrej Sakharov was a notable case in point. A Nobel laureate and one of the creators of the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability, he was also an indefatigable critic of the regime and its human rights abuses, and had suffered a long internal exile in harrowing conditions before being pardoned by Gorbachev. Interviewers sometimes asked him about his opinion of Ronald Reagan, confident that, like educated people in the West with their horror of Reagan’s “simplistic” distrust of the Soviet leadership and lack of a “nuanced” approach to the “ambiguity” of international relations, he would decry this “cowboy” for provoking the Soviet Union by departing from the “bipartisan” approach supposedly embodied by Jimmy Carter.
Sakharov’s reply? He endorsed Reagan’s policies. Sakharov favored U.S. and NATO deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe as a necessary countermeasure to the Soviet Union’s relentless pursuit of nuclear superiority. As he knew from long experience of the Soviet system, its rulers, not Reagan, were to blame for escalating the arms race. In standing up to the Soviets over their attempt to block placement of the new missiles, Reagan had delivered a timely check to their bullying bluff. As for the peace movement, Sakharov sympathized with its ideals but criticized its naïveté in blaming only the United States while swallowing Soviet propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
There is a widespread perception among American opinion makers that to discuss the psychology of violence and tyranny at length is in some way to indulge in a taste for it. This is rather like concluding that Alan Bullock and Robert Conquest must have had a secret hankering to be Hitler or Stalin because they wrote such brilliant biographies of the tyrants. This discomfort with distinguishing dishonorable from honorable motivations for the use of force has increasingly sapped our ability to recognize tyranny for what it is, along with our ability to distinguish between legitimate regimes ruled by law and despotisms that maintain their dynamism through saber rattling and aggression.
When the innate and ineradicable male taste for contest and command is stigmatized and repressed in public life and expelled from respectable academic debate, not surprisingly it is deflected to the trivia of private life, like computer games, or worse, the murderous nihilistic fantasies of a Timothy McVeigh. An underfathered and lonely misfit, McVeigh came to see the real world as a series of video targets ranged against himself, until he blew up the building in Oklahoma City containing what he perceived to be hundreds of little stick men and women who deserved death for making the world a frustrating place for him.
As we observed at the outset of these reflections, certain strains of popular entertainment culture contribute to the narcissism exemplified in its most extreme form by McVeigh. They flatter the young male ego into thinking that one can be a hero without knowing anything about the past, or about the substantive policy debates of the present. Technological wizardry and game playing foster the illusion that precocious young men can do without the moral and intellectual education that was the traditional hallmark of manliness. For example, in the movie WarGames, the teenage hacker played by Matthew Broderick can’t keep his room clean and changes his grades by hacking into the school computer. He knows nothing about the Cold War, but through these same value-neutral game-playing skills, saves the world from nuclear destruction. In many schools, history now is taught through video games; in one that I’ve seen, a kid with a skateboard shows up at various disconnected historical crisis points (for example, Lincoln pondering the Emancipation Proclamation) and solves the problem with a few flippant remarks about everybody’s need to chill out.
These trends only reinforce the wisdom of Aristotle’s view of courage as a mean between two extremes. Often it seems as if we’re either too passive or too wild—there’s no middle ground. In the world beyond the United States, the weakening of the nation-state combines with the parody of masculinity as nihilistic violence to produce a cult of “road-warrior” ethnic tribalism. As the empirical research we touched upon earlier shows, these wars are being fought by young men in their teens and twenties—but not because of a biological drive. They are warriors in the revolution for nihilism. In Rwanda, the Balkans, Somalia, and Afghanistan, they have been acting out in real life the creed of violence for the sake of violence that Edward Norton’s character fantasizes about in Fight Club through his creation of his blond beast of an alter ego, Tyler Durden. (What’s more, the Rambo kids in many of these third-world murder zones are probably watching the movie between killing sprees.) In his book The Warrior’s Honor, Michael Ignatieff revealingly describes the “militias” in Rwanda and the Balkans: “The young warriors on both sides wear the same international uniform: the tight-fitting combat fatigues, designer shades and headbands popularized by Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo.” As globalization erodes substantive differences between peoples, the remaining small symbolic differences are blown out of all proportion, a trend that Ignatieff sums up perfectly as “the narcissism of minor differences.” One tribe wants to kill another simply because it’s another group, or over some imagined slight or rumored injury. The lines blur between patriotism and the mentality of the Cosa Nostra. It’s as if Tyler Durden ruled a country.
The degeneration of military tradition into sociopathic thuggery yields a conclusion diametrically opposite to the one advanced by Neil Wiener and Christian Mesquida, the psychologists whose survey research on the causal connection between young males and international conflict we discussed earlier. The rise of the road-warrior militias on the crumbling margins of failed or stalled modernization, where traditional communal values of self-restraint and peaceable deliberation have been undermined without being successfully replaced by the civilizational project of the secular Enlightenment, points not to the absence of “ideology and religion” as causes of conflict but to their intensification in an increasingly morally debased and intellectually vulgarized form. The doctrine of the just war, with its mooring in the psychology of virtue, once gave different faiths and ethnic communities at least a chance to converse in common terms about the sources of enmity between them, and agree that limits were imposed on the use of military force by all civilized societies. The languishing of those traditions, however, reduces war to the most naked, historically ignorant, and hate-filled clash of Us against Them. It’s not the continued influence of traditional concepts of manly honor that has made the wars of our era so dismally pitiless and stupid but the absence of those concepts.
All of these observations converge in a single overwhelming conclusion: You can’t get rid of the male character, you can only drive it underground, where it will assume a distorted shape and sometimes resurface as a monster. During the same period that real wars and martial prowess were being demystified and stigmatized, martial pride was steadily deflected to the realm of entertainment fantasy (Star Wars, Star Trek, Rambo, The Terminator), becoming one of America’s most profitable businesses at home and for export. In this realm, our admiration for courage can safely reemerge, because it is detached from an explicit defense of the United States, liberal democracy, and the West. The Star Wars trilogy was a revealing case in point. Faithfully viewed by millions over a ten-year period, it amounted to a Baby Boomers’ Ring Cycle. In it, the same generation that prided itself on leading the peace movement and preaching “love not war” was able vicariously to scramble on the flight deck and risk their lives against a tyrannical aggressor, the Empire. That empire was a transparent stand-in for the Empire, the source of all oppression—the superpower the New Left had delighted in branding, with a gesture to Kafka’s tales of faceless bureaucratic oppression, “Amerika.” By deriving the warrior spirit from a New Age concoction of California Zen and hippie mysticism, Star Wars was covertly exploring the fantasy of an armed counterculture battling the Nixonian Darth Vader—a longing for honorable combat that its real-life counterparts could not express.
The deflection of the suppressed taste for warfare and honor to the entertainment culture can have positive dimensions. Some video games, movies, and television series do appeal to a boy’s wish to be a hero in a constructive way, engaging his imagination in solidly researched historical adventures that hone his thinking skills. In the second Star Trek series, for example, we get a nice illustration of the argument in Plato’s Republic that reason should govern spiritedness. Riker, the second in command, is courageous in a steady, sober, and dutiful way. He is the ideal combat officer, subordinating himself willingly to the larger strategies of Picard, an exceptionally cerebral and reflective captain whose favorite off-duty relaxations include archaeology, the piano, and reading Klingon philosophical commentaries on the shortcomings of Kant’s system of ethics. Star Trek comes closer to exploring traditional masculine themes of bravery, self-sacrifice, insubordination, republican virtue, and imperialism than a good deal of contemporary schooling. Its elaborate pseudohistories of peoples like the Klingons embody warrior virtues that are politically incorrect to attribute to human beings today. It’s a way of studying them on the sly.
Still, the majority of video games and combat movies stress endless death, battle, and destruction bereft of historical context or redeeming moral purpose—and our civic culture pays a heavy price for this flight into fantasy. As the memoirs of de Gaulle and other modern soldiers reveal, the study of actual military history shows us how the material and physical conditions of the empirical world—together with our human limitations, virtues, and character flaws—temper our expectations of military prowess and how much can be achieved by relying on it. This is why the history of war is a such valuable component in the history of manly virtue—not because it “glorifies” war but because, on the contrary, military history moderates the warrior spirit and brings it under the guidance of courage tempered by prudence and knowledge. Anyone who has met high-ranking military men knows that, if anything, they tend to be unusually restrained, reflective, and moderate about the use of military force. War is too lethal a business to revel in. By contrast, much of our entertainment culture stimulates an onanistic fantasy of the solitary power to destroy, severed from the experience of relations with one’s fellow citizens or from the defense of any honorable public aim. Game culture is ultimately infantilizing, like giving an angry child a howitzer.
THE HAPPY WARRIOR
As recently as JFK, a president could still openly praise courage in the full-blooded traditional language we have recalled in this essay. I wonder if much of our distorted thinking about courage doesn’t stem from the still-tragic hole his assassination left in American life. An unquestionably brave war hero, he turned to public service and as president represented a generation of veterans in a way that served the highest ideals of liberal progress at home and liberal internationalism to oppose tyranny abroad. His death brought to power men who sometimes had not fought but were willing to send the next generation of young men to their deaths in a war which they were ashamed to declare openly and which privately they neither believed in nor thought winnable. This moral vacuum placed veterans in a difficult position. Although they honored their own service, they couldn’t always blame their sons for not wanting to fight a war waged in secret and with no convincing justification or strategy for victory. More than one World War II vet who began by being ashamed of his son for protesting the war and avoiding service ended up by admiring his courage in taking a stand, even risking jail.
JFK’s crucial point was that, however much we admire battlefield courage, its highest vindication is that it can help to instill the psychological temperament needed for moral courage. There is an intrinsic connection between battlefield courage and the courage of democratic citizenship. As he wrote in the conclusion to Profiles in Courage:
To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. Politics merely furnishes one arena which imposes special tests of courage. In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience—the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men—each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.
JFK was something of an Anglophile, and the English poet Wordsworth’s poem “The Happy Warrior” is very much in the spirit of Kennedy’s reflections. So perhaps that is a good place for this exploration of courage to come to rest. The taste for battle—on behalf of justice and ideas—can ennoble us. Anything worthwhile we want to do in life requires bravery.
Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
—It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavors are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care…
Rises by open means, and there will stand
On honorable terms, or else retire
And in himself possess his own desire;
Who comprehends his trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honors, or for worldly state.
This returns us to our opening reflections. Courage on behalf of a good cause is honorable and necessary, but it is not among the very highest virtues. It needs to be governed by higher virtues of moderation and prudence. Its chief justification is that it provides a man with the moral energy and strength of will to fight for what is right in our larger civic culture. Public service is higher than military glory, for it calls on us to exercise higher moral and intellectual faculties. Ultimately, the noblest form of courage is the struggle to defend and extend justice and to overcome our own baser instincts. And that requires pride—our next topic in the search for the manly heart.