The Art of Manliness - The Perils and Powers of Cowardice

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.580 Now, there have been many books written about courage.

00:00:12.580 About cowardice, however, there's only been one.

00:00:15.280 The author of this alone book on cowardice joins me today to talk about why cowardice,

00:00:18.280 though much ignored, is at least equally important to understand as courage, and how the fear

00:00:21.760 of the former may actually serve as a stronger motivator towards doing daring deeds.

00:00:25.800 His name is Chris Walsh, and his book is Cowardice, A Brief History.

00:00:28.780 Today on the show, Chris explains how a coward can be defined as someone who, because of

00:00:32.680 excessive fear, fails to do what he's supposed to do, and yet how the assumptions behind this

00:00:37.300 definition can be hard to pin down.

00:00:39.220 We discuss why cowardice has been so condemned through time, so much so that in the military

00:00:42.680 it was long considered a crime worthy of execution.

00:00:45.680 We also discuss why the fear of being a coward is so tied into manliness, and why that label

00:00:49.360 constitutes the worst insult you can level out of man.

00:00:51.700 Chris delves in the way that external checks on cowardice, the depersonalization and mechanization

00:00:55.660 of warfare, and the rise of the therapeutic lens on life have diminished the moral heft

00:00:59.820 of cowardice.

00:01:00.600 He then argues that despite this fact, and the way that cultural contempt for cowardice

00:01:03.960 and a personal fear of it can lead to negative effects, it remains an important prod towards

00:01:07.900 doing one's duty and a foundation of moral judgment.

00:01:11.000 And we enter conversation with how we can use the fear of cowardice as a positive motivator

00:01:15.100 in our lives.

00:01:15.720 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash cowardice.

00:01:19.180 All right, Chris Walsh, welcome to the show.

00:01:34.480 Thanks for having me.

00:01:35.200 So you've got a book out called Cowardice, A Brief History.

00:01:39.700 And you note in the beginning of the book that there haven't been any books written about

00:01:44.200 cowardice.

00:01:45.380 Why is that?

00:01:46.240 And why did you feel like you needed to do a deep dive into the history of cowardice?

00:01:51.460 Yeah, surprisingly, I mean, it is a, I think, an extraordinarily important idea, thing, phenomenon.

00:01:58.720 And last I looked, my book was the only text on the subject in the Library of Congress catalog.

00:02:05.520 And there's a long history of saying, let's not talk about cowardice, going back to Socrates.

00:02:11.220 Dante, I know the man who cataloged human sin and baseness, spends very little time on cowards.

00:02:20.200 In fact, he doesn't actually quite put them in hell.

00:02:22.900 As Dante and Virgil get into the lobby of hell, Dante notices this sound and sees just

00:02:29.760 hordes and hordes of ghosts, entities, people racing along, chasing a banner and says,

00:02:36.680 who are those people to Virgil? 0.98

00:02:39.400 And Virgil says, well, those are the cowards. 0.67

00:02:42.360 Those are the neutrals, the people who never participated truly in life. 1.00

00:02:46.820 And then he says, let us not speak of them.

00:02:50.080 And Kierkegaard, who maybe talked about cowardice more than anybody, any modern philosopher, also

00:02:57.480 kind of makes short work of it and says that the very term, it's sort of evasive and it's

00:03:03.240 so terrible that we try to talk about it, but we can't.

00:03:06.620 And then when I was actually in the course of writing the dissertation that became the

00:03:11.200 book, I got wind of a man named William Ian Miller, who had written a book about disgust

00:03:16.220 and he's written some really interesting books.

00:03:19.320 And I reviewed, I wrote a review of his book, The Anatomy of Disgust and then wrote and asked

00:03:24.040 him, what's he working on now?

00:03:25.960 And he said, cowardice.

00:03:27.680 And my heart fell because there I was a graduate student and there he was, this eminent writer

00:03:33.480 whom I very much admired working on my topic.

00:03:36.260 But then he wound up publishing a book called The Mystery of Courage.

00:03:40.940 And in it, he said he tried to write a book about cowardice, but cowardice gave way.

00:03:46.140 That's what it always does.

00:03:48.400 And so in a way, I kind of backed into the topic.

00:03:50.460 I started to write about courage and then found myself intrigued by the idea of cowardice.

00:03:57.120 Finished the dissertation, abandoned it, ran away from it for five years, and then finally

00:04:02.520 went back to it.

00:04:03.980 Well, yeah, I think it's interesting.

00:04:04.920 Like philosophers, they've talked about cowardice and we'll talk about how they defined it, but

00:04:09.320 they don't want to talk about it.

00:04:10.760 But as you make the case in the book, cowardice often looms larger in our psyche than courage.

00:04:16.220 Yeah, and studies have shown for among soldiers, for example, and the kind of quintessential

00:04:24.640 place and the place that I spend the most time examining the phenomenon of cowardice is

00:04:29.000 in the military context.

00:04:30.660 And it's been often reported that soldiers worry much more about cowardice and about being

00:04:37.660 thought cowardly than they aspire to be courageous or held up as a hero.

00:04:44.020 And what ultimately motivates soldiers is that sort of fear, the fear of being cowardly and

00:04:52.580 the shame that would go with it.

00:04:54.860 Okay, I want to dig deep into that.

00:04:57.000 Before we do, let's be Socratic and let's do some definitions.

00:05:02.060 How have philosophers defined cowardice throughout the ages?

00:05:05.020 In fuzzy ways, I kind of run through a couple of things in the book that relate to, so for

00:05:13.560 example, Aristotle talks about there being a kind of spectrum between excessive fear, which

00:05:20.100 characterizes the coward, and excessive confidence, which characterizes somebody who's reckless.

00:05:26.660 And in between, in that golden mean is somebody who is proceeding courageously.

00:05:34.080 And he talks about, but not kind of explicitly in the Nicomachean ethics, as I recall, that the

00:05:41.700 coward is failing to do something he's supposed to be doing.

00:05:45.040 And that is an element of the definitions that actually the sort of standard military definition

00:05:53.860 really makes crystal clear.

00:05:56.160 That is that a coward is someone who fails to do something he is supposed to do, fails to

00:06:03.040 do his duty because of excessive fear.

00:06:08.040 And does fear need to be present for there to be cowardice or courage, according to philosophers

00:06:11.940 and according to your definition?

00:06:13.520 Yes, according to my definition, definitely.

00:06:17.940 And in most of the philosophers that I looked at, yeah, there's an element of fear.

00:06:22.540 I mean, even to the point where they question sometimes somebody who is fearless.

00:06:27.940 If somebody is not feeling fear and they do some daring feat, it's a fair question to wonder,

00:06:34.700 are they courageous?

00:06:35.520 There are examples of soldiers who just did amazing things and did so with fear.

00:06:44.540 And if they don't have fear, then it's, I guess, it's fair to question whether they needed

00:06:49.820 courage to do what they were doing.

00:06:51.580 And that's where I think actually courage can be a slipperier concept.

00:06:56.660 And cowardice is not in part because cowardice makes clear that the matter of duty and the

00:07:05.440 matter of fear always figure in the calculations and in our evaluation of conduct and of character.

00:07:12.780 Making cowardice is even more slippery.

00:07:14.840 Even Aristotle observed that people who are reckless usually are cowards.

00:07:21.060 So that's kind of weird because you think, hey, if you're reckless, then you're not cowardly.

00:07:24.480 But Aristotle, yeah, maybe in some cases the reckless man could also be a coward because he's maybe hiding.

00:07:30.460 Yeah.

00:07:30.920 He's showing his bluster to hide his fear.

00:07:32.380 Yeah, it's a curious kind of loop where you can put it out on a page, on a continuum, you know,

00:07:39.240 the reckless on the left and the cowardice on the right.

00:07:42.660 But they kind of meet behind in the phenomenon where we have somebody who's reckless.

00:07:48.780 Maybe I think Aristotle might say because they're actually what they fear is being fearful or seeming

00:07:55.660 fearful and so act recklessly, causing as much damage sometimes as a coward might.

00:08:03.960 Although Samuel Johnson notes that while those two things seem like, in a way, equals, if opposite

00:08:12.440 matters, recklessness and cowardice, there's something self-checking about recklessness that,

00:08:18.020 you know, if somebody behaves recklessly, reality will get them.

00:08:21.880 Somebody launches an attack or something and when they're not supposed to, they'll get 0.55

00:08:27.440 shot down, whereas the coward can keep running and spreading fear as he goes.

00:08:34.840 So there's, yeah, there's curious wrinkles to trying to dissect the philosophical foundations

00:08:40.660 of this stuff.

00:08:42.200 And it's often very situational too, which makes it hard because like for Aristotle's definition

00:08:46.580 of cowardice, it depends on the circumstances in often cases.

00:08:49.680 What's the psychological status of the person who we are labeling cowardly or courageous?

00:08:56.320 What's the situation they're in?

00:08:58.160 So I think that's probably why it's so hard to pin down.

00:09:00.400 Even I think Ian Miller, he wrote that, he said that a unitary concept of cowardice can

00:09:05.780 never be sufficiently refined to get the moral call right.

00:09:08.480 So it's a slippery thing.

00:09:10.340 Yeah.

00:09:11.000 But you have a working definition that you use throughout your book is a coward is someone

00:09:15.160 who, because of excessive fear, fails to do what he is supposed to do.

00:09:20.520 And that's supposed to is sort of duty bound.

00:09:22.960 And we'll talk about that here in a bit.

00:09:24.960 But let's talk about this, like the state of the word cowardice today in our modern world.

00:09:30.320 So people talked about it some throughout history, but you show that you have this great graph

00:09:35.080 of how often cowardice gets used in books.

00:09:38.800 You can do this on Google and it's been declining since about 1800 and just as drops.

00:09:45.820 Like, what do you think is going on there?

00:09:47.460 Why has there been a decline in our referencing cowardice in our moral vocabulary?

00:09:52.760 I think in part that's a kind of a piece with larger trends in our language and thinking

00:10:01.640 where we've become less moralistic in the way we judge things, more apt to understand

00:10:10.460 failures of conduct or character as the result of psychological ailments, medical issues,

00:10:21.220 rather than sinfulness or flaws in character.

00:10:26.640 And so that's, I think, a general term, a general trend.

00:10:31.080 And cowardice in particular, I think, has been pressed down or displaced by the horrors of

00:10:37.540 modern war, the industrialization of war, you know, and war being its quintessential home,

00:10:44.000 as I said before.

00:10:44.860 Or it's one thing to talk about cowardice when, you know, men are meeting in combat individually

00:10:53.020 or in small groups or whatever.

00:10:55.520 But when you have giant armies contending against each other from miles away or nuclear arms in

00:11:04.280 play, it makes cowardice seem less relevant.

00:11:06.700 And so that, coupled with the growth of more of a sort of a psychological mindset that doesn't

00:11:12.580 consider, that displaces or delays moral judgment, explain it in part.

00:11:17.340 But it's also the case that the graph using this Google Ngram tool goes pretty steadily down

00:11:24.520 from 1800 to 2001.

00:11:26.920 But then it goes up.

00:11:29.140 And that was, I think, mostly or entirely because of rhetoric after 9-11, when the terrorists were

00:11:36.640 held to be cowards and the idea of cowardice came into play when we were debating what would

00:11:42.360 be the best reaction to the terrorist attack.

00:11:46.100 And it's something I actually, in preparation for this discussion, I googled it because I hadn't

00:11:50.840 googled it for a while.

00:11:52.020 And it's kept going up.

00:11:53.700 And I think, actually, during the Trump administration, it was a kind of key word that came up a lot

00:11:59.880 and not just relative to war.

00:12:03.300 Yeah, I thought that was interesting how it started going up around 2001.

00:12:06.280 And you highlight, I remember when this happened, the controversy, when people, we started calling

00:12:09.840 the terrorists cowards. 0.65

00:12:11.900 And then there was this debate, famously, this is what got Bill Maher Act, his show Politically 0.88

00:12:16.120 Incorrect Acts.

00:12:16.980 Like, he made the case, no, where the terrorists, they weren't cowards.

00:12:20.660 Like, they got into a plane and, like, flew into it.

00:12:22.920 That's not cowardly.

00:12:24.760 And so, again, it's that slipperiness of the word.

00:12:27.060 It's a hard, like, we know it carries moral weight.

00:12:29.860 We want to throw it at people who we don't like.

00:12:33.040 But then there's just like, well, was what they did cowardly or not?

00:12:36.420 And it causes a lot of debate even still today.

00:12:39.280 Yeah.

00:12:39.840 Yeah.

00:12:40.040 And I think the word coward, as opposed to the word cowardice, has been especially, if

00:12:48.020 you look at the graph, the usage of the word coward has gone way up in the past 20 years.

00:12:53.960 The word cowardice, not so much.

00:12:55.780 And I think that's because it's, the word coward is a great insult.

00:13:01.160 It's, you know, the Urban Dictionary defines it as the worst insult known to man.

00:13:05.920 And, but cowardice, you know, is this abstract concept that's not so easy to throw around

00:13:13.140 and requires some thinking, which I obviously think is worthwhile.

00:13:18.320 Okay.

00:13:18.840 So, as you said in the book, you use military history to explore the cultural history of

00:13:23.160 cowardice because that's where it's most salient and most visceral.

00:13:26.920 And as you noted earlier, you note that if you look at letters from soldiers or speeches

00:13:31.560 by military leaders, there was more of a concern for cowardice than there was for being courageous.

00:13:38.200 So, that is, you know, soldiers would write home, especially in the Civil War, they write

00:13:41.600 home their family and say, I want to make sure that I'm not a coward.

00:13:46.140 They didn't talk about, I want to be brave to bring glory.

00:13:49.120 I just, I don't want to shame my family by being a coward.

00:13:52.180 So, what's going on there?

00:13:53.240 Why is it that this negative attribute seems more of a motivator to do things that you'd

00:14:00.220 feel like you're supposed to do than this more positive courage?

00:14:02.820 Like, what is going on there?

00:14:04.640 Yeah.

00:14:05.200 And I think the, partly we can look at sort of the evolutionary history.

00:14:09.200 I mean, George Washington actually gets at it.

00:14:12.260 One of his first acts when he took over the Continental Army and he came, and I actually

00:14:18.480 use this as an epigraph for the book, but he comes to marshal the troops and he's faced

00:14:25.100 with a couple of cases of cowardice and he calls it, you know, the worst thing that can

00:14:30.720 afflict an army because the cowardice of a single officer may prove to be the destruction

00:14:36.700 of the whole army.

00:14:39.380 So, there's just the danger of the coward and how much harm they can inflict on one's

00:14:45.500 own side that helps explain why it's so condemned.

00:14:50.380 And, I mean, but the evidence is just all over the place.

00:14:54.540 I mean, as you said, in the Civil War, it was especially salient, maybe, in part because

00:15:00.580 soldiers were serving with men from their hometowns.

00:15:06.040 Stories of their conduct would be published in local newspapers.

00:15:09.000 So, James McPherson talks about how common the fear of cowardice was expressed in letters.

00:15:15.480 He also says that that fear is what gave them courage.

00:15:19.140 And so, there is a sense in which the worry about cowardice, it's kind of this sort of

00:15:25.540 dark side of duty of what is going to happen to you if you don't do your duty, and that

00:15:32.160 is you will be thought a coward.

00:15:34.820 And the people you care about most in war, meaning the people who are your immediate comrades

00:15:40.520 in arms, are going to think ill of you and not trust you.

00:15:44.060 And that is something we just don't want, human nature, not to want to be despised by

00:15:50.220 those closest to us.

00:15:52.460 Yeah.

00:15:52.560 And if you look also, one thing that military historians have noted is that when they look

00:15:56.520 at diaries or letters or interviews of what compelled men to fight, they didn't say these

00:16:02.600 sort of aspirational things for country or some ideal.

00:16:06.320 It was also, usually it just got down to like, I didn't want to let the guy next to me down.

00:16:10.160 Right.

00:16:10.340 I didn't want them to think less of me.

00:16:11.800 That's what it was.

00:16:13.840 And again, so yeah, cowardice, and from a military perspective, it was feared because

00:16:20.260 if a leader showed cowardice or if soldiers started running away from battle, that could

00:16:24.680 spread.

00:16:25.240 They were aware, we would call it social contagion today with our idea.

00:16:29.860 But they understood that if people started running, then like it would cause everyone

00:16:33.220 else, like that fear would spread and that would be disastrous.

00:16:35.620 And so they really punished it hard.

00:16:39.160 And since early human history and militaries, the punishment for cowardice has been harsh.

00:16:44.560 Can you walk us through the history of military punishment for cowardice?

00:16:48.740 Sure.

00:16:49.380 Yeah.

00:16:49.600 It could indeed be harsh in ancient times.

00:16:52.680 The Greeks, the Romans, you'll probably know the term decimation. 0.55

00:16:57.080 What it originally meant was the execution of one-tenth of a group of soldiers when that

00:17:04.920 group of soldiers had behaved in a cowardly fashion.

00:17:09.340 And that was often done by the term is frustiarium, very dramatic, in which the head of the unit

00:17:16.180 would gently touch the accused with a cudgel. 0.96

00:17:20.360 And then the other soldiers would then come at him and kill him.

00:17:26.140 And so these soldiers who were doing the punishing were also getting a vivid, up-close

00:17:33.640 experience of what could happen to them.

00:17:36.100 Also, going back to ancient times, cowardly soldiers would be dressed up as women.

00:17:41.940 Branding of soldiers has a long history that faded out, at least in the American context,

00:17:48.360 in the Civil War, and also other kinds of humiliation, putting one instance in the Civil War of a

00:17:57.320 bunch of soldiers who had fled battle, being put in barrels.

00:18:02.000 And one barrel said, I skedaddled. 0.96

00:18:05.060 Another said, coward. 0.93

00:18:07.000 Another said, deserter or something like that. 0.95

00:18:09.320 And they were just required to stand and rotate in front of their comrades in arms to be shamed.

00:18:16.940 So yeah, a lot of shaming during the Civil War.

00:18:19.860 If you were convicted of cowardice, oftentimes there was a report published in your local newspaper

00:18:25.040 saying what you did.

00:18:27.180 It's a lot of humiliation, but the ultimate was death.

00:18:30.200 It was an executable offense. 0.99

00:18:31.900 You could die.

00:18:32.460 As recent as World War II in the United States, I think there's only one person you talk about.

00:18:36.940 Yeah. 0.91

00:18:37.400 You can be executed for showing cowardice. 0.98

00:18:39.680 Yeah. 0.99

00:18:40.940 Yeah.

00:18:41.800 And certainly in other countries, this happened much more.

00:18:45.960 And in World War I, Great Britain executed 306 soldiers for cowardice or related offenses.

00:18:54.700 The Germans and the Russians executed many, many more in World War II.

00:19:00.740 And yeah, that's the ultimate penalty.

00:19:05.240 It's gone, for the most part, out of use.

00:19:08.780 And we can talk about why the Germans and the Russians and the British might have been

00:19:14.280 slower to relax the punishments.

00:19:17.140 But yeah, it's the worst thing a soldier can do.

00:19:20.660 And so it's punished accordingly.

00:19:23.040 Well, yeah, let's talk about that.

00:19:23.860 Because in the U.S., the U.S. used the threat of execution as a deterrent for cowardice.

00:19:30.400 Because they picked that up from old world militaries. 0.76

00:19:32.700 Like George Washington was trained in the British military.

00:19:35.200 He brought that in when he took over the Continental Army.

00:19:38.160 But as you know, there really weren't that many U.S. executions for cowardice during the

00:19:43.020 Revolutionary War.

00:19:44.040 In the Civil War, there were executions for cowardice in America.

00:19:47.340 But oftentimes, they were commuted.

00:19:50.040 Like you just did hard labor.

00:19:51.340 And then World War I and World War II, the U.S. didn't execute for cowardice as much

00:19:57.200 as European countries.

00:19:58.760 Like what happened there?

00:19:59.400 Why did the U.S. didn't use execution for cowardice?

00:20:03.900 Why did they use it less compared to the European countries?

00:20:06.120 Yeah.

00:20:06.860 Anyway, I mean, I think because they didn't have to.

00:20:10.560 That is, well, I'm thinking of actually my dissertation advisor was Saul Bellow, the novelist.

00:20:16.880 And he has a line about, this is something.

00:20:18.880 When I say American, I mean uncorrected by the main history of human suffering.

00:20:25.060 And, you know, the European powers were not only fighting the war, but their, you know,

00:20:31.100 countries were the battlefields.

00:20:32.940 And they didn't have the luxury of being gentle with those they thought were cowardly.

00:20:39.280 And in the States, I think we could be that way.

00:20:43.540 And they're also because of, you know, American consideration for individual difference, maybe

00:20:51.900 being greater than in those other places in some ways.

00:20:56.060 So also another reason that cowardice was so punished was, as there's the social contagion

00:21:01.080 of fear, there also can invite aggression, right?

00:21:04.380 People have to be trained to fire on somebody, but they find it much easier to fire on somebody

00:21:10.500 whose eyes they can't see.

00:21:13.580 And so somebody fleeing is actually a more inviting target than somebody who's not.

00:21:20.700 And then also the reputation for cowardice on one side can give confidence and momentum

00:21:26.880 to those on the other side.

00:21:28.480 And so, and obviously those are considerations for American soldiers and American military

00:21:33.400 authorities, but I think they were even more important and pressing on the, on the other

00:21:38.140 side of the Atlantic and not to mention Japan and other places.

00:21:42.900 And so the last person that was executed for cowardice in America, was it in World War II,

00:21:47.220 the private Slovik?

00:21:48.660 Right.

00:21:49.340 That was, what was it about him, like his case where they're like, yeah, we're going to

00:21:53.380 make him the only one we're going to execute for cowardice.

00:21:55.260 Yeah.

00:21:56.520 And he, and he was technically was executed for desertion and he has a hard luck case in

00:22:03.540 all sorts of ways.

00:22:04.880 And he was also not his own best witness.

00:22:10.700 He wrote a defiant note about why he left.

00:22:14.580 And he said, if he has to go out there again, he's going to run away again.

00:22:18.280 And I think there are a couple of other similar cases were given reprieves.

00:22:22.580 And he was just that, that one case is actually quite an affecting movie about him and his

00:22:30.600 case called the execution of private Slovik with Martin Sheehan playing the lead role, grueling

00:22:37.020 movie that was aired on TV and to great acclaim and, and very widely seen in the early seventies,

00:22:46.120 as America was trying to figure out how it would get out of Vietnam without feeling cowardly in the

00:22:52.320 process.

00:22:53.840 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:22:57.940 And now back to the show.

00:23:00.180 Let's talk about this, the idea of cowardice and courage in a military context.

00:23:03.580 The most famous book that explores the complexity of courage and cowardice on the battlefield is a book.

00:23:09.820 If you grew up in the United States, you probably read, I think I was in 10th grade.

00:23:13.760 And I read this, uh, the red badge of courage by Stephen Crane.

00:23:18.280 What insights about cowardice does Crane extract in that book?

00:23:23.760 Yeah.

00:23:24.240 I mean, it's an amazing book and it actually, and it, and it is the book that everybody said when I was telling

00:23:31.400 me when I'm writing about, Oh, you're talking about red badge of courage.

00:23:33.760 Yep.

00:23:33.880 I am, although the book actually never quite mentions that word, but it makes eminently

00:23:40.440 clear that there is this, what Crane calls this eternal debate going on in the youth in Henry

00:23:48.400 Fleming's mind.

00:23:49.660 He was 17 years old or whatever, when he joins about whether he would run or whether he would

00:23:55.100 prove to be someone of, of traditional courage.

00:23:58.400 And then he gets his red badge of courage, as you might remember, not in, you know, some heroic

00:24:04.700 charge, but in the course of a kind of chaotic retreat where he's trying to talk to a fellow

00:24:10.720 union soldier who gets agitated with him and smacks him with his rifle butt on the head.

00:24:17.140 But then he's got this kind of what in World War II would be called a million dollar wound.

00:24:21.680 And then, and then when he does charge the enemy later in the book, the depiction of his charge

00:24:29.940 is that it's, it's almost identical to the depiction of when he's running away from the

00:24:37.760 enemy.

00:24:38.280 And so Crane kind of, when he was writing the book, he called it a psychological portrait of

00:24:44.200 fear.

00:24:45.200 And I think that's what the book does.

00:24:47.480 It just, it insists on holding at arm's length, the traditional ways of, of judging and depicting

00:24:57.500 battlefield behavior that glorified it, that, that, that evaluated it in moralistic terms.

00:25:04.440 And Crane is kind of not having that.

00:25:07.580 He holds all that stuff at a, at a bit of a distance in the book.

00:25:12.000 And we just kind of experience what this youth is experiencing and hoping for.

00:25:18.400 Well, yeah, what's interesting too, you know, when he makes that, the kid makes the first

00:25:20.960 retreat, he realizes that no one saw.

00:25:24.260 Yeah.

00:25:24.540 And so he starts doing, he's like, well, it wasn't cowardice.

00:25:27.620 And I think what Crane was trying to get at there is that cowardice and courage, it's,

00:25:32.280 it's very, it's a very social virtue.

00:25:34.580 Like it needs, it needs an audience for it to really hold moral weight.

00:25:38.400 Like, yeah, he made his mistakes in the dark, I think as he puts it.

00:25:43.020 And so he was still a man.

00:25:44.760 That's what he, that's what he thinks about it.

00:25:46.300 Yeah.

00:25:47.100 Yeah.

00:25:47.620 And so if anything is that dependent on social perceptions, then, then how real is it?

00:25:56.580 I think Crane wants us to consider and he doesn't, I don't, I don't think he dismisses,

00:26:03.780 he doesn't say cowardice doesn't exist.

00:26:05.400 Courage doesn't exist.

00:26:06.260 But the traditional ways we think of it, and certainly the kind of naive ways that Henry

00:26:12.380 Fleming ponders it do very much get questioned in the book.

00:26:16.300 And then, and then he wrote actually a story called The Veteran, fast forwarding 30 years

00:26:22.000 later, and we get Henry Fleming as a grandfather looking back and kind of making a joke about

00:26:29.000 running away.

00:26:30.020 And then actually, if I'm remembering correctly, heroically going into a barn to save some animals

00:26:36.200 and, and, and dying in the process.

00:26:38.460 And, and Crane was certainly celebrating that act, even as his grandson was scandalized by

00:26:45.740 the grandfathers, by Henry's making light of a traditional notion of cowardice.

00:26:54.040 It's kind of a proto-Ernest Hemingway or kind of Ernest Hemingway got cynical about cowardice.

00:26:58.700 It's like, yeah, it's, maybe it's not really a thing.

00:27:00.580 You know, it's just, it's just words.

00:27:02.740 Yeah.

00:27:03.440 Yeah.

00:27:03.920 One of those abstract words that means nothing.

00:27:06.120 I'm sure you talked about that when you talked about honor.

00:27:09.740 Right.

00:27:10.200 No.

00:27:10.500 Yeah.

00:27:10.640 Well, Shakespeare even talked about that.

00:27:12.060 Sure.

00:27:12.340 What is honor?

00:27:13.140 The word.

00:27:14.480 So you mentioned to say the character in Red Badger Courage, when he discovered that no

00:27:18.300 one saw him running away, he's like, I'm still a man.

00:27:21.220 This reason my next question, courage and cowardice is inherently tied up with manliness and

00:27:25.860 unmanliness.

00:27:27.400 Why is that?

00:27:28.060 What's going on there?

00:27:28.760 Yeah, that's a great, great question.

00:27:32.780 And I mean, I got to start that inquiry by just thinking about the evolutionary picture

00:27:40.700 again, and why we might be naturally inclined to condemn fearfulness and failures of, you

00:27:50.020 know, born of fearfulness in men more than in women.

00:27:53.300 And one is just like men are bigger than women.

00:27:57.880 And they've done studies of like 10 month old kids who can, you know, tell that difference

00:28:05.240 and react differently to the physical abilities of a bigger person or figure that, and a smaller

00:28:11.540 person.

00:28:12.000 So, so there's a, without being sort of a determinist about it, evolutionarily speaking, there is

00:28:18.680 a sense in which because men are on average significantly larger than women, we're more

00:28:25.180 likely to judge them negatively if they show fear.

00:28:28.580 And also men's lives are cheaper, given that eggs are much rarer than, than sperm.

00:28:36.100 And there are studies of primates, non-human primates, where the males are sentinels in a band and they face

00:28:47.740 greater risks.

00:28:48.440 And if they die, that's too bad, but better that they die than a precious female. 0.99

00:28:56.040 So I think that has a little, it's sort of at the foundation of, of why it's a masculine, more

00:29:02.960 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. 0.99

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 0.97

00:29:37.260 you, if you call it a guy, a chicken, that's gonna, that's gonna sting. 0.97

00:29:41.300 Yep.

00:29:42.060 Yeah.

00:29:42.420 It's deep.

00:29:43.540 It's funny.

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.

00:29:53.520 Yeah.

00:29:54.060 Yeah.

00:29:54.700 Yeah.

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

00:30:13.760 to offenses to their honor.

00:30:16.900 But yeah, but it, so, and, and, but I, but even in the North, yeah.

00:30:21.340 Yeah.

00:30:21.700 Call a dude a chicken and that's, that can be a motivator.

00:30:25.240 It can be a motivator.

00:30:26.120 Right.

00:30:26.380 Like that's the, uh, what in back to the future, right?

00:30:29.060 Marty McFly.

00:30:29.780 Right.

00:30:30.160 Right.

00:30:30.300 Call him a chicken.

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.

00:30:35.320 Yeah.

00:30:35.620 Yeah.

00:30:35.860 All right.

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

00:31:03.860 you have to do this thing?

00:31:05.860 Yeah.

00:31:06.880 Yeah.

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.

00:31:44.260 It pushes him back and forth, right?

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.

00:31:54.820 And that theme goes back a long ways.

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

00:32:11.660 64 soldiers in an eight by eight box.

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

00:32:29.300 them to go in certain places.

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.

00:32:39.600 Right.

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.

00:32:44.860 There's no agency involved.

00:32:46.280 Yeah.

00:32:47.260 Yeah.

00:32:48.120 Yeah.

00:32:48.600 And, and yeah, that question of, does it, does that take away some of the moral heft?

00:32:52.700 Yeah.

00:32:52.940 I mean, I think it does.

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

00:33:15.680 mean anything.

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

00:33:29.080 people are differently configured, right?

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?

00:33:42.420 No.

00:33:42.580 Yeah.

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.

00:33:49.980 They saw it didn't matter what you did.

00:33:52.720 You're just going to die.

00:33:53.900 Right. 0.98

00:33:54.280 And you had no choice.

00:33:55.340 There's nothing involved.

00:33:56.220 There's nothing glorious about it.

00:33:57.680 You'd just be sitting in a trench and then just a shell hits you from two miles away.

00:34:01.960 Right.

00:34:02.520 Right.

00:34:02.760 Yeah.

00:34:03.560 Yeah.

00:34:03.760 James Jones is great about this stuff too in The Thin Red Line.

00:34:06.940 Yeah.

00:34:07.240 That's something he explores as well.

00:34:09.500 All right.

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.

00:34:22.560 It's like that's, you're in the box.

00:34:24.300 Like there's, you can't escape the box.

00:34:25.740 And so how do you be courageous or a coward in that situation?

00:34:31.400 That's, it makes it even fuzzier.

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

00:34:57.180 Reif wrote.

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?

00:35:08.720 Yeah.

00:35:09.580 Yeah.

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 0.99

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

00:36:14.340 be understood as cowardice.

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

00:36:30.040 stress disorder.

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.

00:37:55.940 Reif's son, David Reif is writing a book.

00:37:58.560 I think it's called The Triumph of the Traumatic, and that I think is going to take a similar

00:38:03.960 angle.

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

00:38:36.820 lay claim to being traumatized.

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

00:39:07.780 stress disorder.

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.

00:39:22.080 Yeah.

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

00:39:27.300 contempt.

00:39:27.800 It's like, well, this is actually a good thing.

00:39:29.760 Right.

00:39:30.180 And that's, that just mucks up the whole idea of cowardice and courage even more.

00:39:34.740 Yeah.

00:39:35.420 Yeah.

00:39:35.640 Yeah.

00:39:36.080 Yeah.

00:39:36.600 And instead of hiding one's weakness, a hundred years ago, we thought of weakness, we exhibit

00:39:42.820 it proudly even.

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

00:40:02.480 ways.

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.

00:40:22.380 Yeah.

00:40:22.540 He would have, he had like, he'd had dreams where he was being called a coward.

00:40:26.260 Yeah.

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.

00:40:32.580 Yep.

00:40:33.380 Right.

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

00:41:11.220 have.

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,

00:41:29.320 which are, what is our duty?

00:41:31.680 What should we do?

00:41:32.880 And why aren't we doing it?

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.

00:41:44.740 Yeah.

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 0.96

00:42:10.640 something stupid, it's like, I just don't want, I didn't want them to think I was a 0.99

00:42:13.480 chicken. 1.00

00:42:14.220 Right.

00:42:14.480 But as you said, you don't want to get rid of it completely because it is, it can be

00:42:17.500 rightly understood.

00:42:18.800 It can be used as a motivator to do good.

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

00:42:51.820 think, in the world.

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

00:43:06.540 that it is, it's focused on duty and fear.

00:43:09.700 Okay.

00:43:09.880 What is our duty?

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

00:44:04.300 than you are in a plane 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.

00:44:12.040 I liked that.

00:44:12.780 I thought it was useful was when, when you explore why you didn't do something, whether

00:44:18.780 it was, you didn't quit your job, right.

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

00:44:56.740 what can I do to change that?

00:44:57.820 Yeah.

00:44:59.000 Yeah.

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

00:45:22.760 you where you want to go, right?

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

00:45:37.320 company of others.

00:45:39.120 And yeah, that's, that's the, my kind of self-help pitch for using cowardice to help

00:45:46.540 get you where you think you should go.

00:45:49.500 Like even Dante, Dante had Virgil the entire time he was in purgatory.

00:45:54.580 Right.

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. 0.99

00:46:08.640 And he hesitates.

00:46:09.560 And then he tells Virgil, I'm, this is just really hard.

00:46:12.620 I don't understand.

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.

00:46:26.440 Yeah.

00:46:27.680 Yeah.

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

00:46:43.020 should I do?

00:46:44.060 Why am I afraid of doing it?

00:46:46.020 Uh, it can be a, can be a useful thing.

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.

00:46:58.680 I think that's brave.

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

00:47:07.100 emails.

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

00:47:34.780 from anybody.

00:47:36.100 Fantastic.

00:47:36.360 Well, Chris Walsh, thanks for your time.

00:47:37.320 It's been a pleasure.

00:47:38.160 Thank you, Brett.

00:47:39.020 Really appreciate it.

00:47:40.360 My guest name is Chris Walsh.

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 Make sure to check out our website at art of manliness.com where you find our podcast

00:48:04.340 archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything

00:48:07.300 you'd think of.

00:48:08.140 And if you'd like to enjoy ad free episodes of the A1 podcast, you can do so on Stitcher

00:48:11.380 Premium.

00:48:11.980 Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month

00:48:15.760 trial.

00:48:16.340 Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying

00:48:19.700 ad free episodes of the A1 podcast.

00:48:21.500 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review

00:48:24.540 on Apple podcast or Stitcher.

00:48:25.760 It helps out a lot.

00:48:26.580 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:48:28.080 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something

00:48:31.300 out of it.

00:48:31.880 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:48:33.600 Until next time, it's Brett McKay.

00:48:34.880 Remind you to not only listen to the A1 podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:48:38.440 Never want to be a Woman. 1.00

00:48:49.420 Bye.

00:48:50.840 Bye.

00:48:51.060 Bye.

00:48:51.540 Bye.

00:48:51.660 Bye.

00:48:52.040 Bye.

00:48:52.060 Bye.

00:48:52.460 Bye.

00:48:52.600 Bye.

00:48:53.120 Bye.

00:48:54.860 Bye.

00:48:55.040 Bye.

00:48:55.180 Bye.

00:48:55.220 Bye.

00:48:55.260 Bye.

00:48:55.780 Bye.

00:48:56.280 Bye.

00:48:56.860 Bye.

00:48:57.580 Bye.

00:49:00.100 Bye.

00:49:00.560 Bye.

00:49:00.700 Bye.

00:49:04.820 Bye.

00:49:05.860 Bye.

00:49:06.060 Bye.

The Art of Manliness - December 13, 2021

The Perils and Powers of Cowardice

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript