The Art of Manliness - The Mystery of Courage

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00:01:08.220 meals.com slash manliness50off, code manliness50off. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition

00:01:15.300 of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors,

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00:01:42.140 strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.

00:01:50.000 Courage is one of our most prized and celebrated virtues.

00:01:55.920 But once you really start exploring it,

00:01:57.480 the nature of courage is surprisingly hard to pin down.

00:02:00.700 Here to help us explore the fascinating complications of courage

00:02:03.080 is William Ian Miller, a historian, professor of law,

00:02:06.380 and the author of The Mystery of Courage.

00:02:09.300 Today on the show, Bill explains how centuries of philosophers,

00:02:12.320 soldiers, and storytellers have approached courage

00:02:14.280 and the hard-to-answer questions its manifestations raise.

00:02:17.880 We discuss why courage has long been ranked

00:02:19.540 among the highest virtues, the relationship between fear and courage, the fuzzy line between

00:02:23.960 courage and cowardice, the association of courage and manhood, whether or not courage is domain

00:02:28.720 specific, the difference between offensive and defensive courage, whether martyrs are courageous,

00:02:33.960 whether deeds with evil ends are courageous, how fear, shame, and honor shape brave action,

00:02:38.060 and more. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awimp.is slash courage.

00:02:49.540 All right, William Ian Miller, welcome to the show.

00:02:58.680 Thank you. Happy to be here.

00:03:00.080 So you wrote a book 26 years ago called The Mystery of Courage,

00:03:04.620 where you explore the moral psychology and sociology of the virtue of courage.

00:03:09.280 I'm curious, what led you to take a deep dive into this virtue?

00:03:12.400 I am a my field is the Viking sagas the Icelandic family sagas and there the issue of courage and

00:03:23.900 cowardice is always front and center on display the characters are anxious about it and I just

00:03:31.680 thought it was one step from there to just think about it generally seeing as it's still very much

00:03:38.280 with us. It's an anxiety. I think every little kid grows up wondering if they have what it takes

00:03:44.000 or don't have what it takes and mostly trying to figure out what it means to be a person of courage

00:03:51.540 if you're even reasonably tested anymore. But so I just thought this would be an interesting thing

00:03:58.520 to look into since there's no shortage of sources because courage and cowardice are the two kind of

00:04:06.220 standard themes of world literature from time immemorial.

00:04:10.540 Yeah, it's not just fiction or epics or things like that. Philosophers have spent a lot of time

00:04:16.720 on courage. It has been an obsessive topic, not just among fighters and anxious kind of males,

00:04:25.520 but it has been a constant theme among philosophers because it's very hard to get a fix on.

00:04:31.060 once you start to think about what is it and do I require certain mental states? What mental state

00:04:37.820 is the driver of courage? Can we figure it out? And if you ask the people who we look at and say,

00:04:44.740 now that's a real courageous person, what do they think? And they often don't think about it at all.

00:04:50.360 They just say, I did what I had to do. Or they said, I was scared out of my wits the entire time.

00:04:56.440 I don't understand why I'm being called courageous.

00:05:00.200 So like I said, the title of your book is The Mystery of Courage.

00:05:03.260 And you got that from a phrase written by a Civil War soldier named Abner Small, who

00:05:09.180 pondered the mystery of bravery.

00:05:11.180 Bravery, right.

00:05:12.280 You know, one of the really blessings of researching this book was reading hundreds of war memoirs.

00:05:21.140 Some of them are just literary masterpieces.

00:05:24.160 And these are people who would not have stuck a pen to paper, but for trying to puzzle through

00:05:30.720 their own performance during their work service. And if I could recommend to whoever your listeners

00:05:38.700 are to get a book called The Road to Richmond. It's the title of this Abner Smalls memoir.

00:05:46.460 He was a union officer at Fredericksburg at Antietam, and he turns out to be a brilliant

00:05:53.600 writer and never would have written anything but for trying to come to terms with this war

00:05:58.100 experience. So it comes from him and it's just a powerful, moving memoir. And what he does and

00:06:06.520 what you do in this book, you know, these men who are writing about their performance in battle,

00:06:12.060 they're grappling with, well, am I courageous? Yeah. And then when you think about it, as you

00:06:18.240 said, we think we know what courage is, but when you start thinking about it, you really have to

00:06:23.440 be like, wait a minute. Well, I felt scared, but I did it anyways. Is that courageous? Or I didn't

00:06:30.800 feel scared and I was able to do the thing. I mean, it's. Yeah. Are you supposed to feel the

00:06:36.480 fear and then overcome it? Or are you supposed to get rid of the fear and not feel it at all?

00:06:42.820 Or, and nobody thinks, if you think of a person who does objectively what would have been a 0.99

00:06:49.780 dangerous thing and succeeds at it, but had no clue, was too stupid to know that there was anything 1.00

00:06:56.320 dangerous about it. We don't think they're courageous. They didn't have any temptation to 0.99

00:07:00.740 flee. They weren't under any stress because they were too stupid to discern the risk. 1.00

00:07:05.820 We don't want to give it to just the stupid person who just kind of luckily does the right thing. 1.00

00:07:12.060 So that you want some idea that you are in the zone of danger, right? 0.99

00:07:19.080 There's no way that courage doesn't have a complicated waltz or dance with fear.

00:07:25.880 But how?

00:07:27.200 I mean, is fear supposed to sit on the sidelines or are you supposed to just do a little kind of cha-cha with it?

00:07:34.180 Or what are you supposed to do?

00:07:36.020 How's the fear supposed to be managed?

00:07:38.160 You also begin the book with this example that showcases how, yeah, once you think about courage, it's like, what is this exactly? And the example is this. It's the description of a good coward. What can the good coward tell us about the mystery of courage?

00:07:56.300 Yeah, here is this. When you start reading these memoirs, you just run into these wonderful storytellers. Here is a guy writing about a civil war experience about 30 years after the fact. And he describes a man in his unit whom he calls the good coward. He didn't think he was a good coward when he was in the war with this guy.

00:08:19.460 He thought of him as just a plain old coward.

00:08:22.200 But now in reflecting on him, 30 years later, he thinks that he might have been, in fact, the most courageous of it all.

00:08:30.320 Here's what he did.

00:08:31.760 He lines up for every battle, and once the bullets start flying and the guy next to him takes a hit, he turns and runs.

00:08:39.460 He's ashamed.

00:08:40.820 He comes back to camp maybe a day or two later, is miserable.

00:08:45.100 He does all the grunt work for everyone.

00:08:47.480 He's trying to make amends for having run.

00:08:49.820 And then the next battle, he runs away again.

00:08:52.660 But every time he lines up, takes his steps forward until the guy next to him gets crunched, he manages to steel himself to do it the next time.

00:09:03.820 So the guy who wrote this up, a guy named Robert Burdett, says, you know, now that I think about it, he might have been the most courageous of us all.

00:09:12.680 Us young guys, we were just all hell-bent for leather.

00:09:15.840 We never thought about it at all.

00:09:18.040 This guy had to overcome the most monstrous demons to line up each time and think he was

00:09:25.860 going to do it this time.

00:09:27.920 And yet he showed up again, suffered all the opprobrium that his mates gave him.

00:09:33.360 It turned out, though, that a lot of the mates just understood him, that he was making a

00:09:38.400 good effort and were kind to him.

00:09:40.400 there's a sense that the author was not kind to him and is now making amends by writing this

00:09:46.420 memoir 30 years later. Yeah, so the guy had the courage to keep trying and trying and trying again.

00:09:52.040 He kept trying. So like Tim O'Brien, many of your listeners will have read some of Tim O'Brien's

00:09:58.100 work, a Vietnam War vet. He wrote a memoir, and he's just 23 years old, called If I Die in a

00:10:05.900 combat zone. And the whole book is a desperate attempt to figure out what courage is and

00:10:12.480 whether he managed okay and to come up with a theory that would describe, to make it possible

00:10:20.680 for him to have delivered at least reasonably well. And what he describes, he comes up with

00:10:27.760 a theory. He was terrorized the whole time. He would just feel his stomach caved in. He would

00:10:34.120 just feel sick with nausea panic terror and he said i just knew i didn't deliver then but i

00:10:41.360 promised i would do better the next time and so what he comes up with a theory is of averaging

00:10:47.740 your performances over time um some days you'll have it some days you won't and you know in the

00:10:54.620 great epics like the homeric epics and stuff like that battles never lasted even one day

00:11:01.040 they lasted an hour or so before one side turned and ran. So the efforts that you had to muster up

00:11:09.560 were every spring to get it together once or twice to deliver. But imagine yourself when the

00:11:16.860 most hellish of all wars, World War I, imagine yourself in a battle that in some places on the

00:11:23.680 Western Front lasted four years. You were under constant shelling and sniping for four years.

00:11:31.040 Well, then nobody makes it. Everybody finally runs out of courage. They go crazy.

00:11:39.060 You note that in the earliest discussions of courage from ancient philosophers,

00:11:44.000 it was either placed first among virtues or no lower than third among the four cardinal virtues.

00:11:50.600 Why has courage always been ranked so highly?

00:11:53.640 I think one is the people who are writing are men. And of course, it's the most anxious concern about little boys growing up and stuff like that. That's one issue. But the standard one is the explanation that if you don't have courage, you don't have the space in which to exercise the gentler virtues like temperance, charity, prudence and stuff like that.

00:12:17.700 It buys you the space where you can cultivate kind of leisure hours and more refined behaviors.

00:12:25.980 You can think of it as the spiny outer shell of love.

00:12:29.580 Can you imagine saying you love somebody and you won't go into a burning house to try and get them out?

00:12:34.240 What does love mean without a certain amount of courage?

00:12:38.700 So courage protects love.

00:12:40.600 Courage makes civilization and all the civilized virtues possible.

00:12:43.800 And it creates the security where we can even think about the sort of softer pursuits of life.

00:12:49.800 Something you talk about in the book when trying to suss out the definition of courage is that sometimes philosophers or people writing war memoirs or politicians or whatever, there seems to be a bit of self-interest in how they define courage.

00:13:06.820 You better believe it.

00:13:08.040 Yeah, tell us about that.

00:13:08.800 You cannot believe how, I mean, there's just the politics of courage.

00:13:14.500 Who gets to define it?

00:13:15.960 So who qualifies?

00:13:17.860 Well, in the old regime, of course, women couldn't even, it was all the words for courage 0.97

00:13:22.860 were the word for man.

00:13:24.520 Virtue, vir, andre, in Greek for men, even in Hebrew, the word for man is the word for

00:13:32.020 courage.

00:13:32.420 But it was only allowed to upper class men too, and not to slaves or to workers or to

00:13:38.240 lower class men so you have like definitions that are always kind of let's say favoring one group as

00:13:47.700 against another and so people fight over what is courage to get themselves to qualify i mean there's

00:13:54.200 a big debate right from the start although the philosopher nietzsche made it into a big deal but

00:13:59.760 it's right there from the very start in the first writings about courage is whether the most proper

00:14:05.680 courage is displayed on offense that is in the charge or whether it's displayed on defense

00:14:13.040 that is taking it taking crap and not running and as we moved into modern warfare where battles

00:14:22.720 lasted months taking it and not cracking became more the defining way of describing courage but 0.93

00:14:32.100 You know, it's funny, the battle of offense versus defense is constantly being still fought over.

00:14:38.960 But now we end up in our country with the silliness of people thinking that if you invest in a Silicon Valley startup, you're showing courage.

00:14:46.700 I mean, that's that, but that's a move.

00:14:49.320 Everybody's trying to claim it for their own behaviors.

00:14:52.240 And some of them are just downright laughable.

00:14:55.520 Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

00:14:56.720 So there's often been a class divide with courage.

00:14:59.100 So you have the upper class guys who are like, you know, these lower class guys, you know, they're just brutes, they're thugs, and you know, it's just the mean streets that made them tough. But that's not the same thing as courage. And then you got the lower class guys who are like, you know, look at these effet rich guys, these officer guys, you know, think so highly of themselves, but they're actually really soft. And they're going to be cowards when the stuff actually hits the fan. And you just generally have different types of men, each claiming that courage belongs to people who are like them.

00:15:25.440 And we might popularly think of courage as belonging to a certain type, but the interesting thing you see in war histories is that you couldn't always tell from the type who is going to be courageous.

00:15:38.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:39.340 Do you know what?

00:15:39.940 My dad was in heavy combat in World War II, saw a lot of action in the Pacific.

00:15:46.140 He was the most, let's say, non-martial human being on the planet.

00:15:51.280 He was not into sports.

00:15:52.700 He was not. He was just a sweet, decent man. And it turned out he was a good soldier. He turned

00:16:01.300 into a creditable soldier. He got two bronze stars for certain rescue missions he went on.

00:16:07.540 It's funny. One of the things that is a frequent theme in a lot of the Civil War memoirs and in

00:16:13.240 the World War I memoirs is that there was no predicting from social background or employment

00:16:21.040 who would deliver who would actually be the good soldiers and sometimes it was the accountant and

00:16:28.380 not the barroom brawler and in fact the letters home from soldiers always love to note any time

00:16:36.800 one of these street thugs or barroom brawler types cowered and ran when you know they probably

00:16:43.220 cowered and ran no more than anybody else did but the other soldiers like to note that when they did

00:16:49.620 But one of the things that the unit commanders kind of constantly refer to is how surprised they are at who delivers and who doesn't, that there's no kind of predicting or because of people have good days and bad days of counting on a person who basically is pretty good delivering all the time or counting on a person who is pretty not good not delivering sometimes.

00:17:15.960 I mean, in this idea of offensive versus defensive courage, you make the point that as warfare changed from ancient warfare, where like you said, a battle might last maybe an hour, you did the charge, it was kind of a shoving match.

00:17:33.740 And so you needed that offensive courage, but then as war changed to mechanized warfare, um, and you, you had to just trench in and just endure, we started valorizing the courage of defense, of endurance, but I still think there's, we still valorize, we still hold in high regard that offensive courage.

00:17:54.640 yes we do i i would recommend uh people to read tim o'brien's a little memoir if i die in a combat

00:18:02.360 zone because he says you know the charge the charge that's the thing that's pure courage but

00:18:08.680 then he just like day in and day out he's just starting to think it can't be just that but it

00:18:15.040 still holds this kind of emblem for us of of i think ultimately the real kind of just basic

00:18:23.900 original conception of courage is you facing off against another guy whose eyes you can look into.

00:18:31.760 Modern warfare, you never see the eyes of your enemy except in the rarest circumstances and

00:18:37.060 usually only when they're prisoners. The eyes who are watching you and judging you in modern

00:18:42.560 warfare are your mate's eyes. And it's different when you're matching up courage against something

00:18:49.800 else. You talk about how Aristotle, when he was trying to figure out what courage is,

00:18:56.280 he thought that courage requires higher reasoning than practical wisdom. So here's another example

00:19:02.260 of kind of hoity-toity philosopher guy, maybe using a little bit of self-interest to define

00:19:08.360 courage. You're suspicious of that rendering of courage or seem to be suspicious of that

00:19:13.620 rendering of courage. Well, I'm suspicious because the philosophers are always making,

00:19:18.080 like unless you bring reason to the fray and know exactly when you should expend your courage

00:19:25.620 only for valued goals and get it the cost benefit analysis exactly right you're just being oh either

00:19:33.880 an insensate dumbbell like a celt in aristotle's view or a ferocious lion who just as is just all

00:19:43.080 fury they want to bring reason and certain kinds of let's say mental refinements into the arena

00:19:50.840 and i am always suspicious of that and tim o'brien again has another wonderful example

00:19:56.940 there's a dying marine out in the mud and somebody hollers for a medic and in heavy

00:20:02.940 firefighting this medic runs out and ministers to this dying marine holding up a plasma bag

00:20:10.900 an ideal target. So when he comes back, O'Brien says, you know, a manifest action of courage and

00:20:18.680 actually a useless action because the poor guy was dead anyway or going to die. And just a noble

00:20:25.960 act, but also just doing his duty. And the medic just says, well, I don't know, somebody call her

00:20:32.560 medic and I just guess I ran. So Tim O'Brien is kind of upset with the lack of kind of

00:20:39.080 intellectualizing of the demand made on this medic. Like you said, you researched and wrote

00:20:45.560 about the Icelandic sagas. I don't imagine those Vikings really intellectualizing courage all that 1.00

00:20:52.580 much. Well, you know, they have their standard interesting little discussions about when you

00:20:58.700 pick your moments to fight and when you eat crap and just sit back and wait. And they have a saying 0.66

00:21:05.680 that says only the slave avenges himself immediately but the coward never does what

00:21:13.440 that saying is meant to do is saying you do not waste the opportunity to have the ball in your

00:21:20.760 court to make the next move to take revenge you don't waste it by hitting back right away

00:21:26.720 you make the other side stew wondering when you're going to hit back but eventually you have to hit 0.97

00:21:33.980 back or you become a coward. In that world, forgiveness is very hard to make into a virtue

00:21:40.880 because it looks so much like cowardice. But managing your time between when you take the

00:21:48.200 crap and then when you avenge it is your time to make the other side a nervous wreck. And so, 0.97

00:21:56.260 you know, there's all these kind of complicated, they talk about it. They talk about don't be a

00:22:00.340 hothead. Don't hit back, eat that one. And they have a kind of a standard rule that if you avenge

00:22:06.280 every offense, you have a very short life. Sometimes you just shrug your shoulders and

00:22:12.600 say it's not worth responding to. So it sounds like the Vikings did have a bit of Aristotelian

00:22:17.460 practical wisdom. They had a ton, I think much more than the philosophers nowadays do, because

00:22:23.120 they lived in that world they truly bore the risks and um they're very smart about it it's

00:22:31.000 very interesting in those societies as to what constitutes fair play are you supposed to give

00:22:36.000 your opponent a fair chance notice in hamlet our probably most famous revenge story hamlet comes

00:22:46.140 up behind claudius and he's praying and claudius doesn't know hamlet's behind him with his knife 0.85

00:22:52.360 pulled to stab him in the back. But Hamlet hears he's praying and thought, oh no, if I kill him 0.99

00:22:58.980 now, his soul goes to heaven. Hamlet wants to make sure his uncle goes to hell. But he shows, no, 0.99

00:23:06.120 not even the least bit of moral problem in stabbing him in the back. So the point is,

00:23:14.100 you take your revenge, you don't have to offer fair odds. This reminds me of this idea of

00:23:20.620 fairness, it reminds me of, I think of Odysseus and Achilles. So sometimes Odysseus gets kind of

00:23:26.340 portrayed as like the not courageous guy because he's wily and sneaky, but he did some courageous

00:23:32.300 things. Oh, he sure did. He sure did. But there's constant battle about, you know, whether you can

00:23:39.700 win by trickery or whether you're supposed to just win by macho kind of your force against their

00:23:46.760 force. But Montaigne, the great French essayist, writes, nobody says we can't take advantage of

00:23:53.220 our enemy's stupidity just as well as our enemy's physical weakness. Yeah, right. 0.99

00:23:59.820 And since 90 percent of warfare is about trying to fool the other side as to what your alignments

00:24:08.840 are, how many troops you have, which units they are, and so on and so forth. So trickery is just

00:24:14.720 part of the game too. Oftentimes when we think about, okay, is this person courageous? We

00:24:21.220 typically talk about, well, if you're courageous, you'll be courageous across all domains. Yeah.

00:24:28.260 And that's just not true. It's not true. Yeah. I've seen that in my own life. In my own life,

00:24:31.620 there's certain domains where I feel like I'm pretty courageous, but then there are other ones

00:24:35.520 where I'm not. And I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin and I went to a working class high

00:24:41.020 school and there are the tough guys and then there are the little, you know, weenies like me.

00:24:46.940 And they would, the tough guys turned out to be remarkably generous in letting me alone because

00:24:53.780 there was one or two domains in which I showed less fear than they did. And it was in drag racing

00:25:00.740 for some strange reason. So I was willing to crash a car and die before they were. And so they cut

00:25:08.100 me slack in other domains where I was not very, where I was just a downright coward, like in

00:25:15.120 barroom brawls or something like that. And they were actually kind of generous in their attributions.

00:25:21.140 And you know what? It's interesting in the war memoirs, there's some people who are totally

00:25:25.900 courageous and cool under artillery bombardment, as opposed to some who just completely collapse

00:25:32.860 in terror under bombardment. Then there's some who can't take rifle fire and some people who

00:25:39.520 are completely relaxed under rifle fire. But no one is cool under every way of dying, under every

00:25:49.160 weapon. And there were these studies to try and map on soldiers' understanding of the dangerousness

00:25:57.240 of a weapon. That is how really lethal it was. And it's frighteningness. And you would think

00:26:03.660 that the frighteningness and dangerousness should map on, but it doesn't. So like Stuka dive bombers

00:26:10.680 scared the crap out of people and they were very unlethal. It was just the noise they made that 1.00

00:26:15.520 terrorized everybody. But there are people who just preferred rifle fire to artillery fire and

00:26:20.920 people who could handle artillery fire, but couldn't handle rifle fire. And it's just like

00:26:25.760 for each weapon or for each kind of demand made on you, you needed a courage of its own sort to

00:26:32.500 deal with it. So there wasn't one kind of, unless you were a crazy person, there wasn't one kind of

00:26:39.380 seamless virtue that could handle it all. Yeah. So Montaigne said a man who is truly brave will

00:26:45.740 always be brave in all occasions. And I think Montaigne's wrong there. Yeah. Yeah. There's

00:26:50.660 some examples where you see this. I remember reading about a boxer. I forget who it was.

00:26:54.580 It was a professional boxer.

00:26:56.160 And in a lot of ways, he was a really tough guy,

00:26:58.780 tough demeanor, a real bruiser.

00:27:00.720 And he could get into a ring with another guy 0.99

00:27:03.220 who could possibly kill him.

00:27:04.400 So he's courageous in that way.

00:27:05.980 But when a handyman or service people

00:27:08.640 came to his house to fix stuff,

00:27:10.640 he was actually terrified to talk to them.

00:27:12.620 So boxing didn't scare him, but small talk like that did.

00:27:16.400 Yeah, there's all kinds of funny stories like that.

00:27:19.580 But look at these Greek heroes.

00:27:21.240 So Achilles and those guys.

00:27:22.520 if they heard a thunderstorm, they were all cowering and shaking. They couldn't bear

00:27:28.500 thunderstorms. I mean, it was just that terrors are even culture specific as to what will be

00:27:35.460 considered a terrifying thing. But a constant thing that is made in literature is like a warrior who

00:27:42.200 will face like nonstop, you know, bombardment, but can't get up the nerve to ask a woman out on a 0.99

00:27:47.720 date. Right. You think they should be able to do it, but they can't. They can't. Well, it's

00:27:54.540 interesting about your book. I mean, all the examples we've been talking about so far have

00:27:59.900 been physical courage or martial courage. And your book primarily focuses on physical or martial

00:28:05.900 courage. And people today, since we don't, a lot of people don't face circumstances where they have

00:28:12.560 to display physical courage. Yeah, right. We talk a lot about moral courage, but is moral courage

00:28:19.120 without physical courage, really courage? I don't feel, I make a claim in the book,

00:28:25.960 the standard moral courage is that kind of stand up and meeting type of courage to take and express

00:28:32.400 a decent kind of a moral unpopular view to risk being mocked and laughed at, sneered at, howled

00:28:42.120 that to state what most people will recognize is an honorable, decent view. But can you imagine

00:28:50.900 if that person could be backed off from stating that view if somebody just shot him a look and

00:28:58.160 said, after the meeting, man, you're going to deal with me. And then he sat down and didn't say a

00:29:03.840 thing. So moral courage needs a certain amount of not being able to be scared off your ability to

00:29:11.400 make your stand, you still have to be able to back it up. So I'm not sure that there's a coherent,

00:29:19.460 consistent distinction between moral and physical courage. In the writings like U.S. Grant, Ulysses

00:29:25.340 Grant in his wonderful, brilliant memoir he wrote when he was dying, kind of sneers that moral

00:29:31.060 courage, kind of understanding that without the physical behind it, it's just not there.

00:29:38.040 You know, there's another thing that kind of is interesting, too. Generals will say that there's no shortage of courage that they see in their men in battle, that, in fact, courage seems to be quite common.

00:29:52.740 But then you get into certain domains where it's rare beyond belief, and those tend to be the moral domains, standing up for right in an unjust regime or something like that, incurring risks to your job and your reputation by taking an unpopular but clearly morally right position.

00:30:15.260 Who knows?

00:30:16.200 That's interesting. So it sounds like moral courage doesn't mean a lot if someone isn't

00:30:22.800 willing to take on physical risk to back it up, but it also may be harder to exercise moral

00:30:27.560 courage because in some ways it's easier to face physical danger than the social pressure to

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00:33:05.660 and now back to the show let's go back earlier you mentioned something about how courage since

00:33:13.160 you know the beginning of western civilization and you see this in other cultures as well

00:33:19.160 courage has been entwined with manhood so like a lot of the words the ancients used to describe men

00:33:27.000 were the same words for courage so you know there was weirdus which was latin for manliness we're

00:33:32.820 Yeah. Man, that means courage. Andrea, that's Greek, that also is man, also means courage.

00:33:39.060 And then the word in Hebrew for man is the same one for courage. So why the connection between

00:33:43.780 courage and manhood, do you think? It is the ultimate, it's the image of the male as a dominator,

00:33:53.560 as protector, as the ruler in many cases, although in small communities, it was the job of the men

00:34:01.940 to kind of do the fighting and the women were to manage the home. So part of it is constructing an 0.96

00:34:08.820 entire ideology of training men up to be tougher than they were likely to be in the interests of

00:34:18.160 the defense of family and the community. An anthropologist who did his field work in New

00:34:24.100 Guinea among those violent, violent New Guinea tribes, which are something else, kind of graphed 1.00

00:34:31.460 the amount of intensive labor it took to raise up little boys to be violently death-seeking,

00:34:41.260 that it takes much more social energy and work to raise up a bunch of blood feuders than it does to

00:34:49.660 raise up a bunch of accountants. So it's not like it's not labor-intensive from a child-rearing

00:34:55.840 point of view. And then you might ask yourself, who does the child-rearing? In the sagas, it's

00:35:00.640 the women. So the women are the ones who inculcate those manly virtues. I think they might cynically 1.00

00:35:07.960 think this is a wonderful way to handle our men. We make them able to protect us and we make them

00:35:14.520 able to get knocked off. I mean, you even see this with the Spartans, right? So the Spartan

00:35:19.840 mothers were famous for telling their sons or their husbands, you know, either come back on 1.00

00:35:24.520 your shield or carrying it. It's like, it might be interesting actually, who invents this male

00:35:30.100 ideology. Is it men or is it women? And there's all kinds of cultures in North African kind of

00:35:37.800 Berber and Arabic cultures. It's the women who keep score of how the men are doing in their feuds 1.00

00:35:47.040 and fights. And they compose mocking songs of the losers. And in the sagas, the women taunt their 0.92

00:35:55.660 men for backing down from a fight or for not taking revenge. You call this, you know, women 1.00

00:36:02.280 keeping score about how men are doing in the courage department. You call it the female gaze. 0.90

00:36:07.900 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we see this, I mean, you talk about, we see sort of this female gaze in 0.68

00:36:12.740 African cultures and then also with the Icelandic Vikings. Yeah. But, but you also saw this in World

00:36:18.900 War I, the women, you know, keeping check on the courage of the men. So there were women in World

00:36:24.620 war one what they would do if they saw some guy who was fighting age and he wasn't out there in

00:36:30.060 the battlefield they would get a feather and like put it on him yeah hand him a white feather they

00:36:36.180 would go around the streets of london handing any male they saw in civilian dress who was a warrior

00:36:43.140 age a white feather and then of course that was the women were out there shaming the men 1.00

00:36:48.580 And in the memoirs of among the many, some of the guys who are just home on leave and badly wounded will get white feathers.

00:36:58.480 I mean, that's when the women are making a mistake, right? 1.00

00:37:02.020 Yeah. So this is interesting.

00:37:03.040 So this idea, you know, men valorizing courage, your interesting point here or interesting argument is that maybe the women are the ones who inculcated this culture of courage.

00:37:14.580 they certainly it wasn't a case where the women are sitting back and saying oh the men and their

00:37:19.700 crazy views of courage the women were the ones who are inculcating it into the little kids in 1.00

00:37:24.980 many of these cultures and who are wholeheartedly behind it and i think it's interesting this whole

00:37:31.000 idea of courage being entwined with masculinity or manhood i think a lot of us in the 21st century

00:37:37.120 might think oh yeah we're over that you know we're more enlightened but i i still think there's a

00:37:43.500 vestige of it in men today i mean i think you know if you call a guy a coward or a chicken they're

00:37:49.840 gonna be like oh wait a minute here i got we gotta step outside we're gonna take care of this

00:37:53.600 yeah you can't it's still the worst insults i mean you and just think of how much growing up

00:37:59.820 as a little boy the day-to-day just playing were often courage contests who could jump off the

00:38:07.060 highest you know wall or the roof or who could go steal strawberries from mrs jones or i mean

00:38:15.300 they're all tests of undertaking risk and once you showed yourself able to do that you only bought

00:38:22.940 yourself a little bit of space for that day you weren't a weenie but then the next day there'd be

00:38:28.320 some little test like a boxing match or a wrestling match or something like that yeah with masculinity

00:38:34.960 or manhood, the rents due every day. The rents due every day. One law student said that the

00:38:40.940 horrors of men, the anxiety of men in the sex act, where men have, if they fail, it's obvious to the

00:38:49.360 woman. So maybe it's that is the deepest core anxiety. I'm saying this tongue in cheek, but

00:38:57.100 it's certainly one of the core anxieties about manhood. Something that's interesting to observe

00:39:02.280 with the genderness of courage is that even though courage has traditionally been associated

00:39:08.000 with masculinity, women can be courageous too. And something you talk about is that women have

00:39:13.700 historically been associated with the defensive side of courage. So taking pain, taking the pain

00:39:19.800 of childbirth, enduring hardship. People have often said that women are actually better than men

00:39:26.340 at defensiveness, courage, but it's still not typically part of a woman's, you know,

00:39:32.640 self-identity. Like for a man being called a coward is one of the worst insults. But if you

00:39:38.040 call a woman, a chicken, they're probably not going to be that offended or want to fight you 0.99

00:39:42.360 over it. So I think we've explored some of the cultural ideas around courage and, you know,

00:39:48.740 it's muddled and it's kind of like what's going on there, but let's return to something we were

00:39:53.180 talking about at the very beginning of our conversation and get more into the psychology

00:39:57.420 of courage and its relationship to fear. Do you think courage requires an internally

00:40:03.080 courageous stance or can you be courageous while being terrified as long as you act courageously?

00:40:09.480 My view is that you're lucky if you somehow get rid of the fear and just

00:40:15.820 do what you have to do. But are you going to think that anybody is even, I would think somebody

00:40:23.280 would be more courageous who is just overcome with fear, who still manages in spite of it

00:40:29.420 to do what needs to be done. One of the things that's very interesting in a lot of these war

00:40:35.160 memoirs from manifestly brave guys who were decorated, there was no doubt about them

00:40:41.880 delivering under fire. Many of them do not understand why they got the medal other than

00:40:48.380 that they just somehow managed to do something. They don't know how they did it. All they can

00:40:54.860 remember was that they were scared out of their wits. So they think my internal state,

00:41:00.820 scared out of my wits, was what we think of as the cowardly state. That I ended up doing the

00:41:06.320 right thing happened by kind of accident. My body was on automatic pilot. We get the reverse

00:41:11.940 in what were common claims in the Civil War of a guy failing to go forward because his legs give

00:41:21.520 out, weak legs. And Lincoln was famous for pardoning those guys who were brought up and

00:41:27.100 court-martialed to be shot for not advancing for cases of weak legs, where as far as the internal

00:41:33.540 state of the guy going forward he wants to go forward he is trying to keep up with the guys

00:41:40.080 but his legs give out so his body revels against his courageous intentions or his dutiful

00:41:48.440 contentions what do you do then when the body just refuses to go along for the ride although

00:41:54.840 your brain and your psyche is gung-ho for your body to go along for the ride but it doesn't

00:42:01.360 You know, I've been in my whole life a motorcyclist.

00:42:04.760 I've ridden, now I'm going to be 80 in a couple of weeks.

00:42:09.000 And I've had more near-death experiences in the last five or six years

00:42:13.040 than in the whole life up until then.

00:42:16.420 And it's not because my reflexes are slower, which they are.

00:42:20.360 It's because the drivers have gotten worse and they're all texting.

00:42:25.560 They're just texting.

00:42:26.600 They're not paying attention to the road and putting my life at risk.

00:42:29.740 well every once in a while you get put in a situation where you're dead you're dead you can't

00:42:35.780 believe the situation you're in and something just takes over my body took over an automatic

00:42:42.200 pilot and did probably when i got through the mess the only thing that could have been done

00:42:47.320 to gotten out of it alive did i know what i was doing no my body in the exact opposite of weak

00:42:53.740 legs took over when my mind was utterly in a state of terror and blank. So the body still

00:43:00.540 functioned, did the only thing when I got back, when I would come out the other end and burst out

00:43:07.060 in the giggles because I couldn't believe how close a call it was. I couldn't believe when I

00:43:12.300 thought about it that I did the only thing that could have been done to escape. So there you get

00:43:17.340 kind of an anti-matter of the weak legs phenomenon. Right. So you're terrified,

00:43:23.740 but your body somehow took over and did the thing that you were supposed to do.

00:43:27.560 The body took over and did the right thing. That is what the military actually came to

00:43:32.240 think would be gained by the constant drilling, nonstop drill, drill, drill, so that the body

00:43:40.980 would behave automatically when the brain was just cashiered out in a state of terror.

00:43:47.340 And again, that makes you ask yourself, was that courageous? If you're just like a automaton?

00:43:54.340 Yeah, that's the you don't. The assumption that most military leaders had is that all armies will eventually turn tail and run that what's being contested between two armies is their fund of courage.

00:44:06.180 it's kind of a moral battle and one side will cave and one won't. I'm not sure that's exactly

00:44:12.220 right because one of the things that happened in the Civil War was that people started to see that

00:44:19.820 courage just didn't matter. It's which side had the biggest guns and the most men. That the amount

00:44:26.920 of, you know, bravery might have a little nice little point here, but ultimately it was just

00:44:33.520 the sheer amount of material brought to bear that was the difference. The courage didn't make

00:44:41.160 the difference in a battle. Now, of course, you could come up with some counter examples, but

00:44:46.080 in a large sense, it's true. What role does shame and honor play in courage?

00:44:52.520 Oh, it's the name of the game, right? Aristotle and some will say that courageous deeds done

00:44:59.540 because you would be unwilling to bear the shame of not delivering, being called a coward, being

00:45:06.360 just mocked. It's not the perfect courage. It's like you're more scared of being shamed in public

00:45:14.560 than you are of getting killed. I just think that's a total misrepresentation. Every epic

00:45:22.060 hero fails to be courageous then by that measure. The shame of being seen a coward is what makes

00:45:29.460 many men deliver. And there's a funny little saying that I found in the 17th century,

00:45:37.020 more men would be cowardly if they only had courage enough. And it's the sign of like being

00:45:42.640 driven, the fear of being disgraced drives them to go forward in battle when what they want to do

00:45:49.620 is run. It's complicated. I don't see how you get courage without the honor-based, shame-driven

00:45:55.560 aspect to it. I just don't understand how it's psychologically possible, except for a few very

00:46:01.140 rare, rare people. It also raises the point that courage isn't just an individual virtue.

00:46:07.540 It really is a social virtue. You have to have an audience or an imagined audience to really

00:46:14.440 think about, well, I'm going to be courageous. Because I mean, it's hard to be courageous when

00:46:19.740 you're by yourself. Yes, you better believe it. I think the one true test of whether you are

00:46:27.100 courageous is whether you would go through the action when you are safely not seen. You could

00:46:34.600 actually walk back and nobody would think that you shirked a duty. You would be home free. So

00:46:41.540 you're totally alone with no eyes watching you of your own side and will you still do the thing

00:46:50.420 you're supposed to do if you do it then that is pure pure courage lonely courage yeah i mean if

00:46:58.320 i look at my life when you know i've encountered having to muster up courage to do something

00:47:03.460 particularly when i was a kid i remember i was with a bunch of boy scouts and we were doing

00:47:08.600 cliff dives off some really high cliffs and i couldn't do it but everyone else was i was

00:47:14.220 terrified and the thing that finally got me to do it was i just was thinking i can't leave this

00:47:20.580 place and be the only guy that didn't jump off that cliff like i wanted to avoid shame i wanted

00:47:25.160 honor but for me it was great because i actually did this thing and i felt really great afterwards

00:47:29.900 and then after i did it i was able to just jump off this cliff over and over again i wasn't scared

00:47:34.160 anymore. Of course, the shame motivated you to do it. I don't understand how most of us even do

00:47:41.780 remotely courageous things unless we're too ashamed not to. Yes, the fear of cowardice.

00:47:47.980 The fear of cowardice or the fear of being seen. Now, that's why the eyes, will you ever blame

00:47:53.960 yourself, if alone, for your failure? No, you will, but we're never as hard on ourselves as

00:48:00.500 mocking others will be hard on us. Is there a tipping point where shame-driven or a fear of

00:48:08.900 cowardice-driven courage is no longer virtuous courage? Well, you know, I deal with this in a

00:48:16.200 chapter talking about the Japanese performance in World War II, where death before dishonor,

00:48:22.900 which is a rare achievement for which medals are awarded in the West, was just the norm in Japan.

00:48:32.540 I mean, whole entire 40,000 men, contingents on the island Saipan refused to be taken prisoner

00:48:40.280 and all got killed. Compliance in the West of those kind of things, just impossible. You don't

00:48:46.720 see it. So is it that that courage, that death before dishonor become too easy for them? You

00:48:53.560 wonder the cultural pressure to conform, the cultural shaming culture so powerful that

00:49:01.300 everybody suicided. Is it a virtue then? Oh, God, imagine the peer pressure in the Japanese culture. 1.00

00:49:10.200 Ooh, doesn't mean they didn't make great soldiers. Man, oh man, did they make great soldiers.

00:49:16.720 But you wonder if the virtue, it didn't become too easy for them.

00:49:21.780 You know, the problem, a very difficult problem, when you see discussions of suicide, people say, oh, that was cowardly.

00:49:29.660 Whereas, people who say that, I think, are wondering whether they would have the nerve to do it.

00:49:36.000 Yeah, that reminds me of Bill Maher, the talk show host.

00:49:40.320 He got into a lot of hot water right after 9-11 when he said it took courage for the terrorists to fly a plane into a building.

00:49:51.300 And I remember I heard that and I was thinking about, well, yeah, you know, like, I couldn't do that.

00:49:55.460 Well, I couldn't do it, but could you if you thought you were going to heaven?

00:49:58.900 If you actually firmly, a 1.0 belief, thought you were going to heaven?

00:50:03.160 So I always wonder whether the courage of, let's say, a suicide bomber is indeed same with the early Christian martyrs.

00:50:11.380 If you think that you're guaranteed and really believe it without any doubt, although I wonder if martyrdom isn't because you do doubt and you want to prove that you're punishing yourself for doubting.

00:50:23.560 But if you really don't doubt, then you're just doing the rational thing in your rating of values and payouts.

00:50:30.820 I don't know.

00:50:31.400 These are, again, these are wonderfully complicated topics for which there are no easy answers.

00:50:36.620 Yeah.

00:50:37.080 And another question that arises with the terrorist example, and the reason people were so upset about Bill Maher's comments, is that we typically think of courage as having courage for a morally good cause.

00:50:49.380 Yeah.

00:50:49.680 And that's what we valorize.

00:50:51.100 But does the cause need to be good for courage to be real, or is courage a morally neutral virtue?

00:50:58.000 No, you know, it's one of the problems that people have, according their enemies, courage. I mean, take the case of the monstrously evil Nazi regime. There is no doubt that many of those soldiers were utterly courageous and very good soldiers. So you're unfortunately with courage, you have to admit that it can be employed for good or bad purposes. 0.65

00:51:23.700 I think we mentioned this earlier, but this idea that I thought was really interesting,

00:51:27.860 this idea that courage is finite, that you only have so much of it.

00:51:32.740 You talk about in this book, I think there's many people who study this in the military

00:51:35.980 or they sort of observed it, is that soldiers right fresh on the battlefield, they weren't

00:51:42.440 that great.

00:51:42.980 But if they're there for a little bit, then that's where you see the most courage displayed. 0.60

00:51:47.740 And then if you're there for a few months, you're pretty much useless and need to get

00:51:52.640 off the battlefield and go back to the camp. Yeah. The amazing thing is they did Robert Graves 0.69

00:51:57.800 in his wonderful World War memoir, goodbye to all that, puts it at, he says roughly at about the

00:52:03.760 six month level, a soldier is totally worthless. And especially the young lieutenants and officers

00:52:08.860 are totally worthless. They're at their best after about three weeks of getting their feet wet. And 0.85

00:52:14.820 then for about six more weeks, and then they just start going downhill fast. The U.S. sent in people

00:52:21.440 after the troops in the Normandy invasion

00:52:23.980 and actually did testings and interviews with soldiers,

00:52:27.660 and they found that the useful life of a soldier

00:52:30.660 in intensive combat was at most about 30 days

00:52:34.620 before deterioration set in,

00:52:37.100 and then at about 60 days,

00:52:38.960 they just became what the GIs called,

00:52:41.740 they had the 2,000-year stare.

00:52:43.960 That is, they just became zombied.

00:52:45.800 So you had, under incessant combat,

00:52:48.580 That courage levels were just six months is about it.

00:52:52.540 In some cases, if they're given, pulled out of lines and given rest, soldiers could make it maybe 10 months.

00:52:58.940 And that was about it.

00:53:00.180 So starting in the Great War, World War I, people started to talk about having fixed funds, a fixed amount of courage.

00:53:10.460 And you try not to draw on your account too often because it'll just be run down to bankruptcy and then you end up in a vegetative state and basically post-traumatic stress disorder or what they called shell shock back then.

00:53:26.340 I mean, here's another thing that muddles the moral calculus of courage. And you talk about this in the book. It's the factors of intelligence, expertise, and experience.

00:53:36.940 You know, it's just like, who's tougher? Who's the person who has more courage? The guy who's an actual trained swordsman, who is a, you know, an Olympic gold medalist and sabers, or the clown against him who's never picked up a sword in his life and still fights him. I mean, who's more courageous? The guy with skill, his courage isn't even brought into play.

00:54:00.360 I suppose it was brought into play during the period when he was learning how to be a good

00:54:06.940 fencer. But skilled people get their courage devalued. Think about the people who do bomb,

00:54:14.260 you know, defanging bombs. Obviously, they are trained to do it, but the risk level is so high

00:54:22.040 that just a fly landing on their finger or something like that could detonate the charge.

00:54:28.520 I don't know with certain kinds of expertise will devalue the courage that it takes but certain ones

00:54:35.600 it just seems to take a lot of guts no matter when and how trained you are at it yeah and in terms of

00:54:42.580 the the example of the bomb diffuser like the skill of being able to do that allowed them to

00:54:48.480 display more courage like you had to be skilled to to defuse the bomb so you could display that

00:54:52.820 courage to actually defuse the bomb but I think other philosophers have talked about this

00:54:57.160 intersection between skill and expertise and courage. I think it was Montaigne. He talked

00:55:03.360 about people who are skilled swordsmen require less courage than the unskilled swordsmen because

00:55:08.680 you have that expertise, so you know you can win. Well, yeah, Montaigne goes with that. He just says

00:55:13.900 that, in fact, in duels, you get this crazy behavior of the French aristocratic class

00:55:19.380 where the side who gets the choice of weapons will pick a weapon that he knows he's not as good with

00:55:26.200 as the other guy just to prove that he's more courageous. In other words, handicapping himself

00:55:31.660 purposely so that he's testing his courage rather than his swordsmanship. And, you know, then the

00:55:39.040 thing about intelligence is how do we measure kind of intelligence? One of the ways is that smart

00:55:44.620 people are able to discern risk. They're mathematically more astute. They will discern

00:55:51.220 odds and risk at quicker and more accurate levels than dumber people. And that will tend to make 0.99

00:55:58.560 them more risk averse in situations in which a dumb person doesn't see any risk. So the smart 0.98

00:56:04.980 person looks like the coward. And of course, in fact, they often are because they're seeing too 0.58

00:56:10.020 much risk in a world. Again, it's hard to figure out like who's being courageous here. Again and

00:56:16.120 again, is that mystery of courage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious after spending years thinking

00:56:22.160 about this book and working on it, what do you want someone to do with the unsettledness of

00:56:27.900 courage that this book explores? Be more modest about how we ascribe it and when we do and when

00:56:37.180 we don't. But also I think kind of aspirationally, it's good to want to be courageous and it's good

00:56:45.320 to try and do those things which you can without cheating and without great inflation cause think

00:56:54.180 that other people maybe you are not the best person to make the call will say nice nice good

00:57:00.920 work one thing you argue in the book is that modern middle class life rarely demands real

00:57:09.400 courage from us you know the type of courage we've been talking about the sort of physical

00:57:13.840 martial courage of, you know, being like, yeah, I might die. So we've kind of trivialized the word

00:57:20.740 we call, you know, we call it courageous to, you know, stick to a diet or start a business or maybe

00:57:26.580 reveal an embarrassing secret about ourselves. I mean, we do things like, you know, bungee jumping

00:57:31.360 or skydiving to practice courage. So it's sort of like simulations of courage, the ancient courage.

00:57:39.140 Do you think something's been lost when a civilization stops regularly asking its members to be genuinely brave?

00:57:50.260 Yeah, something's lost, sure.

00:57:52.780 We end up with the hedonistic kind of culture we have.

00:57:56.500 Something definitely is lost.

00:57:57.900 You know, it's funny because Adam Smith, like the guru of modern capitalism, was very, very nervous about the fact that wealth would make the people indolent.

00:58:11.800 They would no longer be courageous. 0.74

00:58:14.360 They would just be kind of, you know, gluttons and pleasure seekers. 0.96

00:58:19.740 And so he joined a militia and drilled every week and marched.

00:58:25.560 Of course, he never saw any combat, but he just felt that you had to prepare because even that prompted a kind of discipline.

00:58:32.360 But he was very nervous that wealth that he promoted would, in fact, have a real moral cost, and the cost would be in courage.

00:58:42.720 There would be less of it.

00:58:43.600 And so you get all this kind of, you know, extreme sports and stuff like that, where people are desperate to find situations where they can increase the risk levels in their life, but still pretty safe risk levels. There's not somebody sitting behind a loophole shooting at you, right?

00:59:00.340 Maybe one of the mysteries of courage is what happens to a society when people don't have to exercise much courage anymore. And whether we can still train up those capacities somehow in the absence of immediate threat. Well, Bill, this has been a great conversation. We covered a lot of ground here. This has been really interesting.

00:59:21.020 Very good questions. You were very prepared. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for doing such a professional job with this.

00:59:28.960 Thanks so much, Bill.

00:59:30.200 It's been a pleasure.

00:59:31.440 Yeah, thank you.

00:59:33.740 My guest today was William Ian Miller.

00:59:35.220 He's the author of the book, The Mystery of Courage.

00:59:37.300 It's available on Amazon.com.

00:59:38.940 Check out our show notes at awim.is slash courage.

00:59:41.260 We find links to resources.

00:59:42.380 We delve deeper into this topic.

00:59:51.280 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast.

00:59:53.780 If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give his review

00:59:57.320 on the podcast player that you use.

00:59:59.180 And if you've done that already, thank you.

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01:00:04.820 As always, thank you for the continued support.

01:00:06.680 Until next time, it's Brett McKay.

01:00:08.080 Remind us on the list day one podcast,

01:00:09.600 but put what you've heard into action.

01:00:27.320 before you go here's another episode worth adding to the queue in episode number 821 we explore why

01:00:35.800 routines especially over rigid ones can actually make life harder not easier we talk discipline

01:00:41.100 without obsession structure without rigidity and where real growth comes from you can find it at

01:00:45.780 aom.is slash routines that's aom.is slash routines go check it out episode number 821

The Art of Manliness - March 31, 2026

The Mystery of Courage

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