I hope this will be the first of several posts dealing with Marilynne Robinson's essay, "Petty Coercion." I have been stalled for several days now because it is an essay that has touched me powerfully and on quite a number of sides. The posts I have written (none sent) have been really long. So let me try just one part: Courage.
I have two ideas here. The first is that courage is always good. That's true in an easy sense, but also in a hard sense. The easy sense is that "courage" is positively connoted and if you don't like any particular manifestations of it, you just call it something else. Stubborn, pigheaded, insensitive, imprudent, etc.
The hard sense is that courage itself is always good. Courage on behalf of a bad cause is unfortunate, but that is because the cause is bad. The courage itself is still good. From a social standpoint, it is a good thing that, say, an anti-abortion activist with a gun lacks the courage to assassinate a doctor who provides abortions. But in celebrating the outcome (the doctor lives) I do not celebrate the cowardliness of the man with the gun. I don't think cowardliness should be celebrated.
That brings up to the lip of some statements you never hear. You could say, to pick notoriously caricatured examples, that Hitler showed courage in launching the Holocaust, that Stalin showed courage in killing off his top generals, and that Mussolini showed courage in attacking Ethiopia. No one says those things because the causes are so awful, but if we follow the line I am following here, in separating the internal attribute (courage) from the external action (genocide), it is a reasonable thing to say. It is not different in the least from saying that Martin Luther King Jr. showed courage in leading civil rights marches right into the teeth of segregationist rage.
Just don't say it in public. Or if you do, don't make a reference to this post.
The second point distinguishes "public courage," which is socially defined and socially supported, from "private courage," which is not. Marilynne Robinson's example of the first is the courage of a firefighter. It must be really really hard to go into a burning building, knowing that you might never come out. But it is not confusing. In a general way, everyone knows what "the courage of the firefighter" looks like and everyone knows it is good. The individual firefighter does not need to define the meaning of courage from one emergency to the next. This kind of courage is easy on the individual because the implications are clear.
Private courage is hard. From a formal standpoint, I want to take the time to say that it is hard for all the same considerations that make public courage easy. There is no generally accepted definition of private courage. If you are committed to acting courageously, you will need to define in each new situation, what "courage" is and whether, in this instance, it should be superseded by some other virtue, say, "tolerance" or "generosity." I want to distinguish as well between active courage and passive courage--although those might not be the best terms. By the first, I intend continuing in an action, although uncertainty or cowardice counsel you to quit. By the second, I intend continuing to hold a position although the context in which you live is hostile to that position and people will see to it that you pay the price for holding it. The first might be called persistence; the second endurance.
To keep our focus, with Robinson, on "petty" coercion, we need to remember that major hostilities are not being enacted. This is not martyrdom. No one is getting fired or beaten or excommunicated. You might get brushed in a hallway, or lumped unfairly into a category of people to which the lumpers know you do not belong, or derided as someone who takes seriously what everyone knows is just a joke. Those are "petty."
That's as far as I can go today. I'm in favor of distinguishing personal courage from the cause it supports. I'm in favor of courage. I'm in favor of good causes and opposed to bad causes. I recognize that not everyone agrees with me about what is good and what is bad. I'm OK with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment