My conscious preoccupation with my topic commenced one bright sunny morning sixty-one years ago when, on seeing a group of shouting, fierce appearing men called Indians dancing to rapid drum beats. Terror stricken, I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s long black skirt to escape what I assumed was their intention to hurt me severely. Grandmother drew me from her voluminous garment and laughingly told me to be brave and not to cry. Her words provided some comfort so I little resisted the return to daylight. There the sights and sounds remained as frightening as before; as I clutched tightly my grandmother’s hand, I wondered why she thought being brave was important. Unlike eating candy or taking a nap when tired, being brave was neither pleasant nor satisfying. But, of course, I accepted her teaching. Ever since that summer morning in 1924 when the Indians attached to the Glacier National Park lodge danced for the guests I have sought to be brave.
It has not been easy. Tears, I learned, were in some fashion not brave, not cowardly exactly, just not brave. My mother at one point resorted to promising me a nickel for every day I could go without shedding a tear. This form of behavior conditioning worked. My tear ducts dried up. To this day have remained substantially dry.
I was pleased when my crying ceased because then my mother and father, on occasions when I had hurt myself, would say, “There, there. That’s a brave boy. It will be all right in a moment.” I was proud to have entered the rolls of the brave, but being brave remained a very unpleasant state.
Slowly the range of fear-inducing experiences increased. From the possibility of tripping and falling, to meeting older children from outside the family, to encountering water not intended for drinking or bathing, to confronting school and its regime—the demands on what I was taught was bravery grew. Looking back on it I think I can hear that child that was myself saying, “I can’t cry. I must be brave,” many times each day. And when, despite my best efforts, I sniffled at some physical or emotional hurt, I felt ashamed.
Moist-eyed whimpers gave way to howls, bellows, and curses as the years moved by. Yet when pain or fear held me fast I could plainly hear my childish admonition “I must be brave.” Recently I have begun to reflect on just what being brave means. Perhaps I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that, while the time is not yet now, in a few short years it is quite likely that tears, in obedience to the commands of age, will commence to flow again. Whatever the reason it quickly became apparent that “bravery” is not an easy concept to grasp.
Commonly we associate it with one who, without forewarning, puts his person at substantial risk to save the life of another. We say he is brave because he risked his life for another. But “brave” is also proper when applied to one who, while aware of death’s imminence, confronts it calmly. Equally applicable is it to one who, like Coriolanus, sacrifices a cherished course of action to serve an end from which he will benefit little, if at all. These examples can be multiplied. But what are their common elements?
For example, why does one place himself at great risk to save another? What motivates such action? I suggest that it is because to do so conforms to a tenet of the actor’s code of morality. Some might say that to risk one’s life to save another is simply part of being human. Whether that is so is unimportant, I think. What matters is that we can begin to understand bravery by realizing that frequently it involves adherence under high risk circumstances to a code.
That this insight provides only a starting point is evident when we ask which was more brave, a Congressional Medal of Honor holder who, in the heat of battle frenziedly saved his companion’s life, or a dog who, by barking while remaining at his owner’s side during a fire, enabled the owner to escape the blaze. Most, I think, consider the Medal of Honor holder more brave. The dog’s action, we are likely to say, was merely a conditioned response while that of the soldier was substantially less so. We know this because we know from our own experience that the soldier knew fear at the time he acted. We are not so sure of the dog. This suggests that an act of bravery either requires, or is enhanced by, the presence of fear.
Even when designated as “brave,” reflexive acts fraught with great risk rank toward the bottom of the scale of bravery. The validation of fear is missing. Put another way, bravery seems assured when there was an opportunity to be a coward: Transcending fear imparts authenticity to the designation of an act as brave. The greater the time in which to measure the risks the more certain we are that the cowardice opportunity existed.
Often we read of firefighters, policemen, and ordinary soldiers whose exploits we readily designate as brave but who, upon being questioned, freely admit that what they did was reflexive. The admission does not cause us to withdraw our designation in part because we do not entirely believe them and also because we treat their occupational choice as evidence of, or at least a surrogate for, their rejection of the cowardice opportunity. Nonetheless, what we frequently call their heroic responses lack a bit of luster because, to some extent at least, it must be acknowledged that those responses are conditioned. We implicitly recognize the cowardice opportunity at the moment of action was less real and more fictional. On the other hand, when an untrained, thus unconditioned, person performs a similar feat, such as rescuing an elderly person from a gang of thugs, our designation of the rescue as brave is somewhat less qualified. We believe that in those circumstances the cowardice opportunity was more real, despite the person’s assurance that he acted without thinking. The source of our belief is our knowledge that in all probability most of us would not have attempted the rescue. Most, including me, would have foregone the opportunity to be brave.
It was the undeniable opportunity to forego bravery that led Winston Churchill to place very high on bravery’s scale General MacArthur’s virtually unarmed landing in Tokyo immediately following the Japanese surrender. Towering above this courageous behavior is the manner in which Socrates met his death. Indicted and convicted of “impiety” by his political enemies he was sentenced to death, a sentence he, in effect, refused to permit to be reduced. For a month his execution was delayed because of a general moratorium for sacred reasons on executions. During this time he conversed daily with his friends about, among other things, the wrongfulness of suicide. On his last day, immediately following the removal of his chains, in an action that Montaigne believed evidenced the serenity and joy in the soul of Socrates, he rubbed his leg with pleasure and commenced a discourse on the relationship between pain and pleasure. His act of accepting death is high on the bravery scale because, not only did it conform to the “code” of Socrates, it was preceded by the opportunity to act, if not the coward, at least less brave.
However, the death of Socrates, as does the crucifixion of Christ, raises a most troublesome question. As said before, reflexive actions, even if deserving the designation brave, occupy a lower rung of the bravery ladder. If this be so, what must be said of actions “compelled” by “what one is,” or by one’s sense of identity, if you prefer. If one does only what one must, for whatever the reason, does that impair the act’s entitlement to be described as brave? The question brings us face to face with the issue of determinism versus free will, an issue each of us has argued since no later than adolescence. The issue remains alive because its resolution requires faith; scientific proof is not possible. The communist accepts on faith his alignment with the deterministic forces of history while the Christian, although not entirely free of a deterministic taint, generally accepts the notion of voluntary sin: one may refuse to be saved. Similarly, the notion of bravery assumes that there exists the opportunity to be a coward. If what is, is merely what must be, then cowardice and bravery are but labels we affix to opposite sides of a coin.
We assume it is more than that. Socrates and Christ—the man if not the Son of God—had a choice. Nonetheless, each of us has experienced the awareness that our next decision in a certain matter in fact was made previously, perhaps even long ago. Proposals of marriage, I suspect, are frequently such decisions. The samurai when he contemplated suicide must have reflected on how his past dictated his future. We reject determinism, however, when we hail the brave and shun the coward. Perhaps we err in doing so. In that case, the final irony is that a sense of personal worth compels the error.
The choice that we insist we have is to abide, or not to abide, by a particular code or, as Hamlet put it, “To be or not to be” what that code commands. Christ, the man, served an order which to him and his followers had no equal. To his followers his submission to crucifixion to further God’s will was a consummate act of bravery worthy of honoring forever. The leader of a prison gang, on the other hand, who defies death threats because he refuses to betray his comrades, acts bravely but in a way we praise only faintly.
These two examples underscore the profusion of codes by which personal conduct can be measured. This variety makes the comparison of acts which can be called brave very difficult. Whether it was more brave for a young man of draft age to have fled the country during the Vietnam War or to have served in that war turns on whether the traditional McArthurian code of “Duty, Honor and Country” has been amended, or replaced, by one which honors “Duty to Conscience.” It is to the latter that the draft evader in the Vietnam War points when he asserts his superior bravery, while his peer who served points to the traditional code. We are confused and, at least for the time being, are inclined to suspend judgment about who is the more brave.
History is littered with codes. An obvious one is that which we associate with knighthood. It purported to govern a warrior class dedicated to the protection of “God and the ladies”; and its spirit found expression in the Chansons de Geste, perhaps most effectively in the Chanson de Roland, which date from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries. While it is true that these warriors sought land, wealth and power, it is also true that the code of knighthood provided the legitimacy from which came much of their zeal and confidence.
On the other side of the world, at approximately the same time, there developed the Japanese warrior class, the samurai. Their code stressed frugality, fealty and filial piety. It dealt with daily routine, dress, diet, social behavior, and morals. Ascetic stoicism lay at its heart and hari-kiri (suicide) was an anticipated form of death. The samurai formed the backbone of Japanese defense until the nineteenth century. Their code was a demanding one, vestigial remnants of which exist in Japanese life today.
In the classical world, numerous examples of codes can be found. Plutarch in his life of Cato the Elder furnishes a good description of the code of the proper Roman citizen of the Republic. Sobriety, frugality, paternal dominance in the family, and public service—both as a soldier and as a civilian—are key elements of this code. Most important was the obligation of rectitude and severe honesty in the discharge of public duties. Cato maintained an almost impossible standard in this respect. His attacks on the Scipios for their lavish distribution of the spoils of their campaigns; his scrupulous refusal to accept spoils in his own campaigns; his sumptuary laws directed at such luxury items as dress carriages and women’s ornaments; his tenacious insistence that the profits from public contracts be reasonable and many similar actions established a pattern of conduct that, while both hated and admired, could not be ignored. More than two millennia later, the pattern provides a substantial part of the code by which we measure the performance of public officials. True, we do not expect them to be Cato, but we do expect their deviation from his pattern to be seemly.
The almost bewildering number of codes or orders by which we humans have attempted to live make it difficult to distinguish the more brave from the less brave. What code is better than another? The certainty with which we answer this question waxes and wanes from century to century. At present I think it wanes. Is Clint Eastwood, as depicted on the screen, more brave than Pope John Paul? The issue may be closer than one might think. An abiding theme of drama is the triumph of the outsider over the combined force of all insiders. The outsider abides by a code which insiders have either abandoned or never acquired and which the dramatist suggests is superior. Whether the outsider’s purpose is redemption or destruction is frequently unclear. Are we, for example, certain about the purpose of either Hamlet or Clint Eastwood? On the other hand, John Wayne, although frequently an outsider, almost always seeks redemption.
The point is that Pope John Paul, despite evidencing outsider tendencies from time-to-time, is clearly an insider defending a relatively ancient faith, while Clint Eastwood depicts the outsider uncompromisingly adhering to a code more pure than that of most insiders. Should this contrast between Clint Eastwood’s dramatic personality and the Pope appear to you either silly or blasphemous, substitute any President of the United States for the Pope and repeat the exercise.
Not only is it necessary to compare acts of bravery by reference to what I have called the cowardice opportunity and the perceived merit of the code being served, it is also necessary to distinguish bravery from foolhardiness and self-destructiveness. Imagine with me an arrangement of actions along a spectrum, commencing, say, with insanity on the far left and irredeemable cowardice on the far right. Bravery must reside somewhere near the center. Slightly to bravery’s left is an action we designate as daring, which merges into a reckless act, which, moving continually leftward, becomes a foolhardy one, and finally an insane one. To bravery’s right lies the cautious act, the procrastinating one, inaction, and an act of cowardice. And inasmuch as extremes always have much in common, so do insanity and cowardice.
What distinguishes these actions is the actor’s assessment of the peril with which he is confronted in relation to the resources available to him. A mistakenly low assessment of high peril by one with few resources leads to his being described as foolhardy, or more charitably, extremely daring. Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight to Paris provides an example that makes my point. Perhaps it was marginally foolhardy, and no doubt would have been so described had it failed. Icarus, on the other hand, in acting against the advice of his father, Daedalus, was extremely foolhardy in his soaring flight over the Mediterranean.
Conversely a mistaken high assessment of peril by one with ample resources leads to the charge of inaction or cowardice. General McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee after Antietam and his hesitance to act forcefully in the absence of perfect conditions and abundant resources earned Lincoln’s disgust. Upon learning of McClellan’s complaint after Antietam of the fatigue of his horses, Lincoln replied, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the Battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?” True cowardice, not merely inaction, perhaps characterizes General Rosecrans’ flight from the field of battle at Chickamauga. Although he had the resources to remain in the field against General Bragg, he retreated hastily to Chattanooga, a decision that led to his being relieved of command.
Bravery and cowardice, including their adjacent states, are never a person’s sole characteristics. The brave may be ascetic or sybaritic, learned or unlearned; so too may be the cowards. One’s identity is described by isolating and identifying its different characteristics. Individuals who capture our attention are those whose combined attributes are unusual and dramatic. Literature gives us many examples. Falstaff, for example, combined cowardice with buffoonery, lechery and worldly wisdom. Don Quixote combined his dedication to the outmoded code of knighthood with a detachment from reality almost hallucinatory, a combination that reminds us of our shared and enduring vulnerability to illusion and ridicule. Sidney Carton combined dissoluteness and undiscipline with redemptive and ennobling bravery.
As many of the persons and events I have referred to indicate, bravery is usually in response to events that imperil the flesh, but these events also can imperil the spirit. Indeed, the latter kind of peril summons forth either bravery or cowardice of large dimensions. By the phrase “imperiling the spirit” I refer to circumstances that threaten to destroy one’s identity by laying bare a fatal flaw, or flaws, in the system of beliefs and attitudes around which that identity has been formed. A biblical example of this is the striking blind of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. You know the story well. Saul, an ardent persecutor of the Christians, was struck down by a great light, spoken to by Jesus, and, upon baptism by Ananias, became the Lord’s “chosen vessel” to spread his gospel. The miracle was that Saul survived this destruction of his old beliefs and, as Paul, became a new person.
Each of us has observed, or been involved in, “encounters on the road to Damascus” of a sort less dramatic and important than Saul’s, but, nonetheless, of sufficient impact to constitute a very serious threat to self. Being lied to and cheated by a longtime, but faithless, friend; being informed by your spouse that a divorce shall be sought; realizing after many years that your children are indifferent to your welfare; losing the political campaign toward which your career had always pointed, recognizing in middle age that in your occupation you are no more than second or third rate; and seeing a business you built from nothing slide into bankruptcy are the types of “encounters on the road to Damascus” of which I am speaking.
A response to these encounters which achieves a successful reconstitution of the self involves bravery. A new code, or codes, around which the future can be built must be created to which must be given new commitments. Only the very brave can summon the strength to do this successfully. Few of us can count on the level of assistance that Saul received from the Lord, or even that which it is said Saint Augustine received; but there are even fewer who will reject assistance from any beneficent quarter.
Successful reconstitutions encourage all of us. Gore Vidal recognized this when he wrote his novel about Aaron Burr. We admire U. S. Grant for being able to put aside his failures in private life and meet with firmness and assurance the challenges of the command of armies. The determination of Charles II to regain the English crown after the execution of his father and the Cromwellian revolution earns our praise. The repeated but unsuccessful attempts of Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan to capture the presidency indicate their ability to rise above defeat. Each of us knows among our friends those who have bravely rebuilt their lives following their “encounters.”
Frequently, however, the “encounter” is lethal. Shakespeare drives this lesson home forcefully. The last haunting line of Lady Macbeth, “What’s done cannot be undone—To bed, to bed, to bed!” foretells her death. Her ambition destroys her being so thoroughly that she cannot recover. Macbeth is also destroyed but he confronted his failure with a stoicism that requires bravery. The lines are ones you remember:
“Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Nor did he die in bed; he fought to the death.
“Lay on Macduff,
And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!'”
These are his last lines. They both chill and inspire us; chill us because we hear a broken man who has lost all other than the sense of duty that requires him to give a good account of himself on the battlefield; and inspire us because he has managed to retain that much.
Each of us can recall a figure in history or literature who, following an “encounter” such as I have described, has responded as well or better than did Macbeth or his lady. Coriolanus and Brutus embraced death with a firmness not lacking in nobility, while the embrace by Don Giovanni clearly measures up to that of Macbeth. The death of Woodrow Wilson and Robert Taft, on the other hand, prompts me to muse on whether they chose the way of Lady Macbeth. Their dreams were smashed, Wilson’s by the Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations and Taft’s by Eisenhower’s nomination and election victory in 1952. Medical science may brand this thought as little more than superstition; but how often do we see the utterly defeated act as if muttering the lines “to bed, to bed, to bed?” I continue to marvel that Richard Nixon did not do so.
The mention of Nixon enables me to make my final point. His career reminds us that from time to time there appears in history a figure whose character resists description in terms of either bravery or cowardice. Examined from one angle the stain of cowardice appears pervasive while examined from another angle the luster of bravery is plainly visible. The difficulty springs neither from an occasional apostasy from bravery’s demands nor the infrequent surges of courage that even a coward might experience. Rather it results from the total ambiguity of the entire career of the person.
My favorites for illustrating this point are Alcibiades and Talleyrand. Both survived events which ordinarily would have destroyed them many times over. Both served numerous masters always with great skill and daring. Both were exiles from their native land for extended periods; and both rarely failed to fatten their purses when it was possible to do so. Early in his career Alcibiades, it is said, was a tentmate of Socrates during a military campaign undertaken by Athens. He later served Sparta and other enemies of Athens and ended his days while operating as a kind of warlord in what is now Turkey. Talleyrand, handsome, as was Alcibiades, but, unlike Alcibiades, lame from an accident during his infancy, was a bishop by the age of 34, a leading figure in the French Revolution by 35, and an ex-bishop by age 37. The remainder of his long life followed a similar pattern. Always he moved with the tide of events, early, imperturbably, and efficiently. Seldom was he either out of power or poor. At the close of his life Victor Hugo described him as follows: “A strange, awesome, prominent personality, his name was Charles Maurice de Périgord; he was nobly born like Machiavelli, a priest like Gondi, a renegade like Fouché; witty like Voltaire; and lame like the Devil.” This was certainly not intended as praise. More subtle was Carl Sandburg’s assessment manifested by one of his poems about a cat named Alcibiades. Nonetheless, most of us hesitate to praise either the Frenchman or the Greek. They are too enigmatic. Were we to ask whether they were brave we might well respond that the question is irrelevant in the light of their self-centered duplicity. If pressed we might respond that neither served any code well, abandoning each when expedient to do so.
Plainly our responses would not be unusual. Yet the more I have reflected on the meaning and essence of bravery the more uncomfortable I am with that assessment. The case to the contrary runs along these lines. Plutarch’s evaluation of Alcibiades places him above Coriolanus and finds in him not only the bravery of the battlefield but also a constant concern about the welfare of Athens. Jean Orieux, a recent biographer of Talleyrand, finds in his career a devotion to France and family that was both deep and constant. Could it be, I ask, that these two by bending every rule of human conduct in the interest of their people were perhaps the bravest of all? Their code, one would argue, was clear, the perils they encountered many and grave, and their obedience to the rules of the code was unwavering. Most of us pride ourselves, or sometimes hate ourselves, because we adhere to, or occasionally depart from, a fairly simple code of honesty and fair dealing of which we all approve. Our bravery or cowardice as the case may be, is fairly discernible by most. We serve no ends difficult to observe and comprehend. As my instruction in bravery began while wrapped in my grandmother’s skirt, this code is rooted in our childhood. Is it possible, I ask, that Alcibiades and Talleyrand ran greater risks for larger ends and, thus, are among the bravest of all?
So I close, in selecting the bravest, “Would you vote for Alcibiades and Talleyrand?”