The Perils and Powers of Cowardice
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Summary
There have been many books written about courage, but only one about cowardice. In this episode, the author of this alone book on cowardice joins me to talk about why cowardice, though much ignored, is at least equally important to understand as courage, and how fear of the former may actually serve as a stronger motivator towards doing daring deeds.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, there have been many books written about courage.
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About cowardice, however, there's only been one.
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The author of this alone book on cowardice joins me today to talk about why cowardice,
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though much ignored, is at least equally important to understand as courage, and how the fear
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of the former may actually serve as a stronger motivator towards doing daring deeds.
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His name is Chris Walsh, and his book is Cowardice, A Brief History.
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Today on the show, Chris explains how a coward can be defined as someone who, because of
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excessive fear, fails to do what he's supposed to do, and yet how the assumptions behind this
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We discuss why cowardice has been so condemned through time, so much so that in the military
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it was long considered a crime worthy of execution.
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We also discuss why the fear of being a coward is so tied into manliness, and why that label
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constitutes the worst insult you can level out of man.
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Chris delves in the way that external checks on cowardice, the depersonalization and mechanization
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of warfare, and the rise of the therapeutic lens on life have diminished the moral heft
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He then argues that despite this fact, and the way that cultural contempt for cowardice
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and a personal fear of it can lead to negative effects, it remains an important prod towards
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doing one's duty and a foundation of moral judgment.
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And we enter conversation with how we can use the fear of cowardice as a positive motivator
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash cowardice.
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So you've got a book out called Cowardice, A Brief History.
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And you note in the beginning of the book that there haven't been any books written about
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And why did you feel like you needed to do a deep dive into the history of cowardice?
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Yeah, surprisingly, I mean, it is a, I think, an extraordinarily important idea, thing, phenomenon.
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And last I looked, my book was the only text on the subject in the Library of Congress catalog.
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And there's a long history of saying, let's not talk about cowardice, going back to Socrates.
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Dante, I know the man who cataloged human sin and baseness, spends very little time on cowards.
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In fact, he doesn't actually quite put them in hell.
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As Dante and Virgil get into the lobby of hell, Dante notices this sound and sees just
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hordes and hordes of ghosts, entities, people racing along, chasing a banner and says,
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Those are the neutrals, the people who never participated truly in life.
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And Kierkegaard, who maybe talked about cowardice more than anybody, any modern philosopher, also
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kind of makes short work of it and says that the very term, it's sort of evasive and it's
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so terrible that we try to talk about it, but we can't.
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And then when I was actually in the course of writing the dissertation that became the
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book, I got wind of a man named William Ian Miller, who had written a book about disgust
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and he's written some really interesting books.
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And I reviewed, I wrote a review of his book, The Anatomy of Disgust and then wrote and asked
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And my heart fell because there I was a graduate student and there he was, this eminent writer
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But then he wound up publishing a book called The Mystery of Courage.
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And in it, he said he tried to write a book about cowardice, but cowardice gave way.
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And so in a way, I kind of backed into the topic.
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I started to write about courage and then found myself intrigued by the idea of cowardice.
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Finished the dissertation, abandoned it, ran away from it for five years, and then finally
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Like philosophers, they've talked about cowardice and we'll talk about how they defined it, but
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But as you make the case in the book, cowardice often looms larger in our psyche than courage.
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Yeah, and studies have shown for among soldiers, for example, and the kind of quintessential
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place and the place that I spend the most time examining the phenomenon of cowardice is
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And it's been often reported that soldiers worry much more about cowardice and about being
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thought cowardly than they aspire to be courageous or held up as a hero.
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And what ultimately motivates soldiers is that sort of fear, the fear of being cowardly and
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Before we do, let's be Socratic and let's do some definitions.
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How have philosophers defined cowardice throughout the ages?
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In fuzzy ways, I kind of run through a couple of things in the book that relate to, so for
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example, Aristotle talks about there being a kind of spectrum between excessive fear, which
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characterizes the coward, and excessive confidence, which characterizes somebody who's reckless.
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And in between, in that golden mean is somebody who is proceeding courageously.
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And he talks about, but not kind of explicitly in the Nicomachean ethics, as I recall, that the
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coward is failing to do something he's supposed to be doing.
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And that is an element of the definitions that actually the sort of standard military definition
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That is that a coward is someone who fails to do something he is supposed to do, fails to
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And does fear need to be present for there to be cowardice or courage, according to philosophers
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And in most of the philosophers that I looked at, yeah, there's an element of fear.
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I mean, even to the point where they question sometimes somebody who is fearless.
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If somebody is not feeling fear and they do some daring feat, it's a fair question to wonder,
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There are examples of soldiers who just did amazing things and did so with fear.
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And if they don't have fear, then it's, I guess, it's fair to question whether they needed
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And that's where I think actually courage can be a slipperier concept.
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And cowardice is not in part because cowardice makes clear that the matter of duty and the
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matter of fear always figure in the calculations and in our evaluation of conduct and of character.
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Even Aristotle observed that people who are reckless usually are cowards.
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So that's kind of weird because you think, hey, if you're reckless, then you're not cowardly.
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But Aristotle, yeah, maybe in some cases the reckless man could also be a coward because he's maybe hiding.
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Yeah, it's a curious kind of loop where you can put it out on a page, on a continuum, you know,
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the reckless on the left and the cowardice on the right.
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But they kind of meet behind in the phenomenon where we have somebody who's reckless.
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Maybe I think Aristotle might say because they're actually what they fear is being fearful or seeming
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fearful and so act recklessly, causing as much damage sometimes as a coward might.
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Although Samuel Johnson notes that while those two things seem like, in a way, equals, if opposite
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matters, recklessness and cowardice, there's something self-checking about recklessness that,
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you know, if somebody behaves recklessly, reality will get them.
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Somebody launches an attack or something and when they're not supposed to, they'll get
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shot down, whereas the coward can keep running and spreading fear as he goes.
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So there's, yeah, there's curious wrinkles to trying to dissect the philosophical foundations
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And it's often very situational too, which makes it hard because like for Aristotle's definition
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of cowardice, it depends on the circumstances in often cases.
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What's the psychological status of the person who we are labeling cowardly or courageous?
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So I think that's probably why it's so hard to pin down.
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Even I think Ian Miller, he wrote that, he said that a unitary concept of cowardice can
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never be sufficiently refined to get the moral call right.
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But you have a working definition that you use throughout your book is a coward is someone
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who, because of excessive fear, fails to do what he is supposed to do.
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But let's talk about this, like the state of the word cowardice today in our modern world.
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So people talked about it some throughout history, but you show that you have this great graph
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You can do this on Google and it's been declining since about 1800 and just as drops.
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Why has there been a decline in our referencing cowardice in our moral vocabulary?
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I think in part that's a kind of a piece with larger trends in our language and thinking
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where we've become less moralistic in the way we judge things, more apt to understand
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failures of conduct or character as the result of psychological ailments, medical issues,
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And so that's, I think, a general term, a general trend.
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And cowardice in particular, I think, has been pressed down or displaced by the horrors of
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modern war, the industrialization of war, you know, and war being its quintessential home,
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Or it's one thing to talk about cowardice when, you know, men are meeting in combat individually
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But when you have giant armies contending against each other from miles away or nuclear arms in
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And so that, coupled with the growth of more of a sort of a psychological mindset that doesn't
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consider, that displaces or delays moral judgment, explain it in part.
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But it's also the case that the graph using this Google Ngram tool goes pretty steadily down
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And that was, I think, mostly or entirely because of rhetoric after 9-11, when the terrorists were
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held to be cowards and the idea of cowardice came into play when we were debating what would
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And it's something I actually, in preparation for this discussion, I googled it because I hadn't
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And I think, actually, during the Trump administration, it was a kind of key word that came up a lot
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Yeah, I thought that was interesting how it started going up around 2001.
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And you highlight, I remember when this happened, the controversy, when people, we started calling
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And then there was this debate, famously, this is what got Bill Maher Act, his show Politically
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Like, he made the case, no, where the terrorists, they weren't cowards.
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Like, they got into a plane and, like, flew into it.
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And so, again, it's that slipperiness of the word.
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It's a hard, like, we know it carries moral weight.
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We want to throw it at people who we don't like.
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But then there's just like, well, was what they did cowardly or not?
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And it causes a lot of debate even still today.
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And I think the word coward, as opposed to the word cowardice, has been especially, if
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you look at the graph, the usage of the word coward has gone way up in the past 20 years.
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And I think that's because it's, the word coward is a great insult.
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It's, you know, the Urban Dictionary defines it as the worst insult known to man.
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And, but cowardice, you know, is this abstract concept that's not so easy to throw around
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and requires some thinking, which I obviously think is worthwhile.
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So, as you said in the book, you use military history to explore the cultural history of
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cowardice because that's where it's most salient and most visceral.
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And as you noted earlier, you note that if you look at letters from soldiers or speeches
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by military leaders, there was more of a concern for cowardice than there was for being courageous.
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So, that is, you know, soldiers would write home, especially in the Civil War, they write
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home their family and say, I want to make sure that I'm not a coward.
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They didn't talk about, I want to be brave to bring glory.
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I just, I don't want to shame my family by being a coward.
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Why is it that this negative attribute seems more of a motivator to do things that you'd
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feel like you're supposed to do than this more positive courage?
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And I think the, partly we can look at sort of the evolutionary history.
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One of his first acts when he took over the Continental Army and he came, and I actually
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use this as an epigraph for the book, but he comes to marshal the troops and he's faced
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with a couple of cases of cowardice and he calls it, you know, the worst thing that can
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afflict an army because the cowardice of a single officer may prove to be the destruction
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So, there's just the danger of the coward and how much harm they can inflict on one's
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own side that helps explain why it's so condemned.
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And, I mean, but the evidence is just all over the place.
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I mean, as you said, in the Civil War, it was especially salient, maybe, in part because
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soldiers were serving with men from their hometowns.
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Stories of their conduct would be published in local newspapers.
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So, James McPherson talks about how common the fear of cowardice was expressed in letters.
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He also says that that fear is what gave them courage.
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And so, there is a sense in which the worry about cowardice, it's kind of this sort of
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dark side of duty of what is going to happen to you if you don't do your duty, and that
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And the people you care about most in war, meaning the people who are your immediate comrades
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in arms, are going to think ill of you and not trust you.
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And that is something we just don't want, human nature, not to want to be despised by
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And if you look also, one thing that military historians have noted is that when they look
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at diaries or letters or interviews of what compelled men to fight, they didn't say these
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sort of aspirational things for country or some ideal.
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It was also, usually it just got down to like, I didn't want to let the guy next to me down.
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And again, so yeah, cowardice, and from a military perspective, it was feared because
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if a leader showed cowardice or if soldiers started running away from battle, that could
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They were aware, we would call it social contagion today with our idea.
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But they understood that if people started running, then like it would cause everyone
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else, like that fear would spread and that would be disastrous.
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And since early human history and militaries, the punishment for cowardice has been harsh.
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Can you walk us through the history of military punishment for cowardice?
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The Greeks, the Romans, you'll probably know the term decimation.
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What it originally meant was the execution of one-tenth of a group of soldiers when that
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group of soldiers had behaved in a cowardly fashion.
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And that was often done by the term is frustiarium, very dramatic, in which the head of the unit
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And then the other soldiers would then come at him and kill him.
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And so these soldiers who were doing the punishing were also getting a vivid, up-close
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Also, going back to ancient times, cowardly soldiers would be dressed up as women.
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Branding of soldiers has a long history that faded out, at least in the American context,
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in the Civil War, and also other kinds of humiliation, putting one instance in the Civil War of a
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bunch of soldiers who had fled battle, being put in barrels.
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And they were just required to stand and rotate in front of their comrades in arms to be shamed.
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So yeah, a lot of shaming during the Civil War.
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If you were convicted of cowardice, oftentimes there was a report published in your local newspaper
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It's a lot of humiliation, but the ultimate was death.
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As recent as World War II in the United States, I think there's only one person you talk about.
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And certainly in other countries, this happened much more.
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And in World War I, Great Britain executed 306 soldiers for cowardice or related offenses.
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The Germans and the Russians executed many, many more in World War II.
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And we can talk about why the Germans and the Russians and the British might have been
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But yeah, it's the worst thing a soldier can do.
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Because in the U.S., the U.S. used the threat of execution as a deterrent for cowardice.
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Because they picked that up from old world militaries.
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Like George Washington was trained in the British military.
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He brought that in when he took over the Continental Army.
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But as you know, there really weren't that many U.S. executions for cowardice during the
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In the Civil War, there were executions for cowardice in America.
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And then World War I and World War II, the U.S. didn't execute for cowardice as much
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Why did the U.S. didn't use execution for cowardice?
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Why did they use it less compared to the European countries?
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Anyway, I mean, I think because they didn't have to.
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That is, well, I'm thinking of actually my dissertation advisor was Saul Bellow, the novelist.
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When I say American, I mean uncorrected by the main history of human suffering.
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And, you know, the European powers were not only fighting the war, but their, you know,
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And they didn't have the luxury of being gentle with those they thought were cowardly.
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And in the States, I think we could be that way.
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And they're also because of, you know, American consideration for individual difference, maybe
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being greater than in those other places in some ways.
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So also another reason that cowardice was so punished was, as there's the social contagion
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of fear, there also can invite aggression, right?
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People have to be trained to fire on somebody, but they find it much easier to fire on somebody
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And so somebody fleeing is actually a more inviting target than somebody who's not.
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And then also the reputation for cowardice on one side can give confidence and momentum
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And so, and obviously those are considerations for American soldiers and American military
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authorities, but I think they were even more important and pressing on the, on the other
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side of the Atlantic and not to mention Japan and other places.
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And so the last person that was executed for cowardice in America, was it in World War II,
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That was, what was it about him, like his case where they're like, yeah, we're going to
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make him the only one we're going to execute for cowardice.
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And he, and he was technically was executed for desertion and he has a hard luck case in
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And he said, if he has to go out there again, he's going to run away again.
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And I think there are a couple of other similar cases were given reprieves.
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And he was just that, that one case is actually quite an affecting movie about him and his
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case called the execution of private Slovik with Martin Sheehan playing the lead role, grueling
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movie that was aired on TV and to great acclaim and, and very widely seen in the early seventies,
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as America was trying to figure out how it would get out of Vietnam without feeling cowardly in the
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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Let's talk about this, the idea of cowardice and courage in a military context.
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The most famous book that explores the complexity of courage and cowardice on the battlefield is a book.
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If you grew up in the United States, you probably read, I think I was in 10th grade.
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And I read this, uh, the red badge of courage by Stephen Crane.
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What insights about cowardice does Crane extract in that book?
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I mean, it's an amazing book and it actually, and it, and it is the book that everybody said when I was telling
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me when I'm writing about, Oh, you're talking about red badge of courage.
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I am, although the book actually never quite mentions that word, but it makes eminently
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clear that there is this, what Crane calls this eternal debate going on in the youth in Henry
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He was 17 years old or whatever, when he joins about whether he would run or whether he would
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prove to be someone of, of traditional courage.
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And then he gets his red badge of courage, as you might remember, not in, you know, some heroic
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charge, but in the course of a kind of chaotic retreat where he's trying to talk to a fellow
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union soldier who gets agitated with him and smacks him with his rifle butt on the head.
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But then he's got this kind of what in World War II would be called a million dollar wound.
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And then, and then when he does charge the enemy later in the book, the depiction of his charge
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is that it's, it's almost identical to the depiction of when he's running away from the
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And so Crane kind of, when he was writing the book, he called it a psychological portrait of
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It just, it insists on holding at arm's length, the traditional ways of, of judging and depicting
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battlefield behavior that glorified it, that, that, that evaluated it in moralistic terms.
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He holds all that stuff at a, at a bit of a distance in the book.
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And we just kind of experience what this youth is experiencing and hoping for.
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Well, yeah, what's interesting too, you know, when he makes that, the kid makes the first
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And so he starts doing, he's like, well, it wasn't cowardice.
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And I think what Crane was trying to get at there is that cowardice and courage, it's,
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Like it needs, it needs an audience for it to really hold moral weight.
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Like, yeah, he made his mistakes in the dark, I think as he puts it.
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That's what he, that's what he thinks about it.
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And so if anything is that dependent on social perceptions, then, then how real is it?
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I think Crane wants us to consider and he doesn't, I don't, I don't think he dismisses,
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But the traditional ways we think of it, and certainly the kind of naive ways that Henry
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Fleming ponders it do very much get questioned in the book.
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And then, and then he wrote actually a story called The Veteran, fast forwarding 30 years
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later, and we get Henry Fleming as a grandfather looking back and kind of making a joke about
00:26:30.020
And then actually, if I'm remembering correctly, heroically going into a barn to save some animals
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And, and Crane was certainly celebrating that act, even as his grandson was scandalized by
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the grandfathers, by Henry's making light of a traditional notion of cowardice.
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It's kind of a proto-Ernest Hemingway or kind of Ernest Hemingway got cynical about cowardice.
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It's like, yeah, it's, maybe it's not really a thing.
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One of those abstract words that means nothing.
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I'm sure you talked about that when you talked about honor.
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So you mentioned to say the character in Red Badger Courage, when he discovered that no
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one saw him running away, he's like, I'm still a man.
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This reason my next question, courage and cowardice is inherently tied up with manliness and
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And I mean, I got to start that inquiry by just thinking about the evolutionary picture
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again, and why we might be naturally inclined to condemn fearfulness and failures of, you
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know, born of fearfulness in men more than in women.
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And one is just like men are bigger than women.
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And they've done studies of like 10 month old kids who can, you know, tell that difference
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and react differently to the physical abilities of a bigger person or figure that, and a smaller
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So, so there's a, without being sort of a determinist about it, evolutionarily speaking, there is
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a sense in which because men are on average significantly larger than women, we're more
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likely to judge them negatively if they show fear.
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And also men's lives are cheaper, given that eggs are much rarer than, than sperm.
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And there are studies of primates, non-human primates, where the males are sentinels in a band and they face
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And if they die, that's too bad, but better that they die than a precious female.
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So I think that has a little, it's sort of at the foundation of, of why it's a masculine, more
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associated with masculine framework and then build on that, you know, thousands of years
00:29:09.260
of culture with its own wrinkles in the States.
00:29:13.120
It's, you know, what I think is so fascinating about that, like, you know, cowardice encourages
00:29:17.680
connection to manliness and how gendered it is.
00:29:20.300
Like, I feel like us in the modern age, we think we're above that.
00:29:22.960
Like we're, we're beyond that, but it's still interesting whenever we want to get a dude
00:29:28.120
to do something, you know, what do you, you call him a chicken.
00:29:31.520
And if you call a woman, a coward, like that doesn't have the same sting, but we know if
00:29:37.260
you, if you call it a guy, a chicken, that's gonna, that's gonna sting.
00:29:44.280
We think we're above that, but like those, there's like some vestiges of that still in
00:29:47.760
our little primal brain where we know, we know the things that can, can needle people.
00:29:55.120
And again, and, and, you know, culture does affect that.
00:29:57.520
There's an interesting study comparing Southern and Northern college students and their reactions
00:30:05.160
to insult and the Southern students were more likely to be, to, to react in a strong way
00:30:16.900
But yeah, but it, so, and, and, but I, but even in the North, yeah.
00:30:21.700
Call a dude a chicken and that's, that can be a motivator.
00:30:26.380
Like that's the, uh, what in back to the future, right?
00:30:31.020
And like, that's what God, that's what needled him.
00:30:33.140
That's what got him to do something he shouldn't have done.
00:30:36.280
So let's talk about the intersection of cowardice and duty.
00:30:39.220
Cause your definition of cowardice is you don't do something out of excessive fear.
00:30:42.920
And that's something you're, you're supposed to do.
00:30:46.380
Militaries enforce punishments of dereliction of duty with death.
00:30:51.600
But this is kind of weird because you're coercing someone to not be cowardly.
00:30:57.420
So is, do you kind of, do you strip away the, the moral heft of cowardice by telling someone
00:31:07.360
I mean, I, I, I, I talk about the, the paradox of duty that it is something compulsory we
00:31:15.760
feel, but it's also something that is performed voluntarily duty bound.
00:31:23.840
We are, we are bound to do this duty and that if we're bound to it, then it sounds like
00:31:28.940
we're being forced to, and yeah, it does apply some, some pressure.
00:31:33.400
I mean, Stephen Crane in, in the red badge of courage, Stephen Crane talks about Henry
00:31:37.760
Fleming feeling like he's in a moving box and that box constrains him.
00:31:46.200
It pushes him to the, to the front towards battle.
00:31:48.960
And if he's in a moving box, what he's not responsible for what he is doing.
00:31:59.140
I mean, the, the idea of the Greek or these ancient phalanxes would put soldiers in groups
00:32:07.380
of whatever of, I don't even know what the exact number typically would be something like
00:32:16.020
And, you know, each one of those soldiers maybe is theoretically free to do what they want,
00:32:21.600
but they are in this phalanx that has a power greater than any one of them and is forcing
00:32:32.240
Well, you, you also talk about like the ancient generals picked up, like we got to put the,
00:32:35.820
the really fearful people in the middle so they don't have a choice.
00:32:40.380
So it's like, are they actually being brave or cowardly?
00:32:43.100
I mean, they're not, they're not doing anything.
00:32:48.600
And, and yeah, that question of, does it, does that take away some of the moral heft?
00:32:53.880
It, it, and I think one of the big critiques of cowardice and especially in the past century
00:33:01.460
and a half or whatever, is that the forces constraining human beings and especially soldiers,
00:33:08.300
especially soldiers at war are so great that ideas like courage and cowardice really don't
00:33:16.880
We are subject to these greater forces, modernized weaponry and tactics, industrial war.
00:33:23.580
And also, you know, there's been greater understanding of human psychology where we know that some
00:33:31.560
Simply we're going to naturally be more fearful or less fearful.
00:33:35.800
And so that makes us think, hmm, what really, is cowardice really relevant?
00:33:42.680
And that's what Hemingway, like what he saw in World War I and a lot of that lost generation,
00:33:46.220
that's what caused them to question the whole idea of courage and cowardice.
00:33:57.680
You'd just be sitting in a trench and then just a shell hits you from two miles away.
00:34:03.760
James Jones is great about this stuff too in The Thin Red Line.
00:34:09.740
So this paradox of duty makes cowardice even harder, particularly with modern warfare,
00:34:15.100
where there isn't oftentimes any agency involved.
00:34:18.720
You're just kind of, I mean, even you talk about the threat of a nuclear annihilation.
00:34:25.740
And so how do you be courageous or a coward in that situation?
00:34:33.800
So another argument you make, sort of the decline in our talk about cowardice.
00:34:38.500
So the changing ways of warfare made cowardice a little fuzzy to talk about.
00:34:43.000
It's sort of harder to convict someone for cowardice when they might not have had a choice.
00:34:47.560
There wasn't any moral action or agency or going on.
00:34:51.100
But you also talk about in the past, I would say 50, 60 years, there's been what Philip
00:34:58.700
He's, we're living in an age where the therapeutic has triumphed.
00:35:02.700
How has the triumph of the therapeutic taken some of the moral heft out of cowardice and courage?
00:35:10.160
I mean, Reif's book is really compelling kind of critique of the phenomenon of the therapeutic.
00:35:17.300
It's not, and especially in the modern age, although when it comes to
00:35:20.860
cowardice, I mean, it's not as if there was some time in primeval era when people didn't
00:35:31.320
thought about these terms in totally in black and white ways.
00:35:35.440
You know, the Iliad, the Old Testament, Aristotle, they all acknowledged that different people
00:35:41.560
were different men, especially were differently constituted.
00:35:45.680
And, you know, the Deuteronomy advises to, you know, keep the faint-hearted men at home
00:35:52.660
rather than sending them to war and tainting the troops in that way.
00:35:57.080
But those were, you know, observations that didn't have what we have now, which is a kind
00:36:04.160
of officially sanctioned institutional medical vocabulary for understanding what might otherwise
00:36:15.900
And so it goes back, I trace it back to what was called nostalgia in the civil war.
00:36:21.720
And then in World War I, famously shell shock and then battle fatigue and on to post-traumatic
00:36:31.620
And these are all ways of understanding this transgressive behavior out of fear without judging
00:36:41.460
it and thinking of those behaviors as cause for therapy as opposed to punishment.
00:36:49.400
And I think that certainly has reduced the amount of contempt that we have for cowardice in some
00:37:01.140
cases, and it's reduced the scope of application of the term as well.
00:37:08.820
We simply don't apply it or consider applying it.
00:37:13.100
Even as at the same time, we've already talked about it, it's still a term that has great power
00:37:21.580
and nobody, especially no man, likes to be called coward.
00:37:26.180
And there is great stigma still attached to psychological terms like post-traumatic stress, right?
00:37:33.580
Especially among soldiers and soldiers generally did not want to be known as, you know, a victim
00:37:40.780
of shell shock or of battle fatigue because of the undying stigma attached to those ways of speaking.
00:37:50.860
So it's a complicated, I don't think that the therapeutic has quite triumphed.
00:37:58.560
I think it's called The Triumph of the Traumatic, and that I think is going to take a similar
00:38:04.640
In the book, I do talk about the excesses of the therapeutic culture, right?
00:38:08.020
The fact that more soldiers applied for a sort of post-traumatic stress diagnosis and
00:38:16.340
attendant benefits after the Vietnam War than actually saw combat.
00:38:21.640
And now the definition of trauma at the heart of post-traumatic stress has become so broad
00:38:29.680
that one need not have experienced trauma firsthand, but just have heard about it to be able to
00:38:39.880
And you take that far enough and cowardice could be displaced completely.
00:38:45.780
We can't expect anybody to do their duty, no matter the fear or the tiny cause for fear,
00:38:54.600
because they have been traumatized or they are predisposed to fear excessively.
00:39:00.960
Yeah, it is that concept creep that's happened with that word like trauma or post-traumatic
00:39:09.000
And it's interesting too, you see in some instances where someone who admits like, I've
00:39:14.360
got this problem, I've been traumatized, they actually get like praised, right?
00:39:17.760
Like you're so brave for, you know, admitting you have this problem.
00:39:22.260
So it's sort of like a Nietzschean inversion of values.
00:39:24.460
It's like, well, there's one thing that would be a hundred years ago, we'll look down with
00:39:27.800
It's like, well, this is actually a good thing.
00:39:30.180
And that's, that just mucks up the whole idea of cowardice and courage even more.
00:39:36.600
And instead of hiding one's weakness, a hundred years ago, we thought of weakness, we exhibit
00:39:43.940
And I mean, I, I see, you know, benefits of, of these, the larger trend.
00:39:50.080
Certainly, I think we've become more humane about a lot of things and about human difference,
00:39:55.700
but it can be, you know, cowardice still has the power to, I think, motivate us in good
00:40:02.940
It's done untold amounts of damage on the sort of global scale when wars have been fought
00:40:10.860
because of, you know, offenses to honor, because of the worries about seeming cowardly.
00:40:16.380
We escalated in Vietnam in part because LBJ was worried about that.
00:40:22.540
He would have, he had like, he'd had dreams where he was being called a coward.
00:40:26.660
And it, and that, that was kind of what, it shook him.
00:40:29.480
He's like, I got to keep, I got to stay in Vietnam because I can't be a coward.
00:40:34.440
And, and then at a smaller scale, you know, people, whatever, violent street corner acts
00:40:40.860
or just the, the deep shame that some people feel about their belief that they're being
00:40:46.700
cowardly can lead to violence against themselves, against others.
00:40:50.100
So there's, so there's definitely reasons to be critical and skeptical about applying cowardice,
00:40:56.360
but I don't quite want to throw out the term entirely because I think it does, if we don't
00:41:02.740
have to fulfill a duty because of fear, then I don't know what kind of morality we can really
00:41:11.720
It seems that that's a foundation to moral judgment where we can actually judge some act
00:41:20.680
or based on the questions that the idea of cowardice rightly understood makes us ask,
00:41:34.680
And if it's because of fear, is that fear justified or is it excessive?
00:41:39.340
And I think those are good moral questions that the idea of cowardice keeps in play.
00:41:45.120
And I think at the end of the book, you do this, you try to explore what the role of
00:41:48.580
cowardice in just our day-to-day life or moral lives outside of the military.
00:41:52.480
And I think the question you're grappling with is you're just talking about there is like,
00:41:55.800
how do you get the benefits of the fear of cowardice that, as you said, can compel us
00:42:01.140
to do terrible things, go to war, get into fights, do immoral things.
00:42:06.580
I mean, think of, I mean, that's oftentimes like, yeah, if you look at when people do
00:42:10.640
something stupid, it's like, I just don't want, I didn't want them to think I was a
00:42:14.480
But as you said, you don't want to get rid of it completely because it is, it can be
00:42:23.560
So have you figured out how to get the benefits of the fear of cowardice without the downsides?
00:42:29.920
I think part of it is just entirely not using the term coward about other people or about
00:42:39.380
yourself, in part because it's just, it sheds far more heat than light.
00:42:45.400
You know, it's a great insult, but, you know, insult really doesn't do much good, I don't
00:42:52.560
But if we contemplate the concept of cowardice and think about those questions that we've
00:43:01.580
just been talking about, that the concept of cowardice pushes us to ask, you know, given
00:43:11.560
The Google engram for, for duty goes down from 1800 to the present day as well, like cowardice.
00:43:19.480
And so I think it's something that we can usefully think about more than we do.
00:43:27.240
And then thinking about our, thinking critically about our fears.
00:43:31.540
And there's a lot literature out there about how typically, I mean, and Aristotle says it,
00:43:37.260
that we, we fear the wrong things at the wrong time and looking at the fears that 2021 Americans
00:43:45.780
have as opposed to what we, what we fear and what we should fear are two different things.
00:43:51.980
I think banal example is fear of flying versus fear of getting in a car.
00:43:58.120
Everybody knows, or most people know that you're far more likely to die in a, in a car accident
00:44:05.600
But with most, most people, I think are a little more fearful of getting in a plane.
00:44:09.760
No, and I think you made this good, great case.
00:44:12.780
I thought it was useful was when, when you explore why you didn't do something, whether
00:44:22.280
And like go after, and cause you're going to go after another job that you thought would
00:44:25.740
be better, or you do something morally gray and, and questionable.
00:44:31.580
Oftentimes we come with like reasons like, well, it just, it would be too hard or it would
00:44:38.620
cause problems or it would financially hurt my family.
00:44:43.080
You suggest maybe you're just being like, maybe you're acting cowardly and use that as
00:44:48.220
a, as a brace, like kind of sort of a gut check to your, for yourself instead of like
00:44:52.580
relying on those, you know, sort of self-justifications, maybe say, well, maybe I was being cowardly and
00:44:59.360
And then, and, and partly given what we were talking about, the social nature of, of the,
00:45:05.400
this phenomenon of cowardice and for that matter of courage, the next move would be often to
00:45:12.200
put yourself in a kind of phalanx where you can use the power of your comrades to help get
00:45:24.280
If your fears aren't going to disappear, but soldiers by banding together can do things that
00:45:30.540
they wouldn't otherwise do be more courageous or less cowardly, thanks to the, the bracing
00:45:39.120
And yeah, that's, that's the, my kind of self-help pitch for using cowardice to help
00:45:49.500
Like even Dante, Dante had Virgil the entire time he was in purgatory.
00:45:55.140
And Virgil was pretty much there telling him, don't be afraid, don't be a coward.
00:46:00.060
I mean, he says, I like how you end this in the book talking about how Dante saw the inscription
00:46:04.780
over the gates of hell, abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
00:46:09.560
And then he tells Virgil, I'm, this is just really hard.
00:46:13.220
I, this is scary, but Virgil says, you need to go through this.
00:46:16.480
And Virgil tells him here, you must put all cowardice to death.
00:46:20.680
And that braced Dante for this thing that he did.
00:46:23.060
And he was able to get to paradise because he put cowardice to death.
00:46:28.040
And, and, and, you know, that's his spiritual journey and, and I think it applies in other
00:46:33.940
realms of life as well in love and friendship, asking those questions and of yourself, what
00:46:49.600
Well, Chris, this has been a great conversation.
00:46:51.000
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:46:53.200
One of the things I'm especially cowardly about is social media.
00:47:00.800
I'm going to, um, so I don't have much of a presence online, but I'm glad to respond to
00:47:07.520
I'm at, I'm at Boston university at C Walsh at B U dot E D U C W A L S H at B U dot E D U.
00:47:17.340
And I've written about cowardice and sort of international affairs for the magazine.
00:47:23.200
Foreign Affairs and about cowardice in academia for the times, higher education and a few
00:47:29.820
other things that people might be interested in looking at and then be glad to, to hear
00:47:41.500
She's the author of the book, Cowardice, A Brief History.
00:47:43.800
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:47:45.720
Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is slash cowardice.
00:47:48.680
We find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.
00:47:53.200
Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast.
00:48:01.340
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00:48:04.340
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