Courage is sophisticated recklessness

I was avoiding doing my essays today, when I stumbled across this article, and I thought it was very inspiring. It has a lot of original ideas on courage, and what it takes to be courageous. I edited out some of the not-so-important stuff, but even so please excuse the length. If you are inclined to read the original, here is the link.

http://www.portlandstudios.com/blog/?p=136

Beowulf and Courage

Posted on Friday 16 November 2007

At the end of Chesterton’s wonderful book, The Man Who Was Thursday, an anarchist rages against authority. He says, “We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!”

Today if you listen carefully, or even, it seems, if you listen casually, you hear this assertion: Revolutions are admirable, not because they seek to overthrow evil, but because they seek to overthrow. Courage, according to the popular wisdom, is a product of momentum. Those that champion order seek a social construct that is static, and such a neglect of dynamism proclaims a shameful weakness. We are reminded of T.S. Eliot’s expression of despair: “what have we to do/ But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards/ In an age which advances progressively backwards.” …

This may seem to have little to do with a Children’s adaptation of Beowulf, but it has much to do because it asks humanity to choose how it will define Courage. The fight for Courage is essentially a matter of Truth. Chesterton draws a line in the sand and asks humanity to either affirm that Courage is sophisticated recklessness, or to cross the line and proclaim that Courage presupposes ethical fiber.

If we agree with Chesterton, we must concede that recklessness is the coward’s way. It follows our world’s natural impulse for ruin. It is the man swimming downstream and roaring to the world about his mighty speed. We might instead insist that to construct, to preserve, to battle for right–these are the elements of courage because this is what it truly means to swim upstream. Winston Churchill once declared that “The name of every virtue at its apex is courage.” If Churchill is right–if Courage is virtue set ablaze–then “fighting to fight” must always fade before “fighting to right”.

In the poem Beowulf, Grendel is descended from Cain, who committed the first murder. Michelle Szobody indicates the destructive effects of evil in her text: “In the dark marsh nearby wandered a monster. Each day he grew madder. He hated the sounds of laughter, harp, and worship-songs. God had cast off the fiend, called Grendel, for his evil deeds.” Grendel proceeds to destroy Heorot, it’s Heroes, and Hrothgar’s will to fight. He wrecks both community and culture with a coward’s boldness.

In 1978 Alexander Solhenitsyn addressed the graduating class at Harvard University. He said, “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately … Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?”

Courage itself seems to be of diminished importance in a world full of material prosperity. A society with a surprising lack of risk–one where kids don’t climb trees or ride bikes that aren’t virtual–succeeds in eroding our convictions and separates us from our heritage. Historian David McCullough writes about the bold ethical fiber of our American forebearers: “The importance of what those people accomplished cannot be overstated, and under those costumes and wigs they were as vivid and as capable as any generation in our history. To fight and get shot and to die like that, to suffer disease and hunger and really horrible conditions, to be poorly clothed, poorly fed, and poorly led, and to still fight on? They were as strong as any characters! To have been in Philadelphia in the first days of July in 1776, knowing that the British had just landed 32,000 troops — a force larger than the population of Philedelphia — in Staten Island, just a day and a half’s march away, and to still declare independence? These are characters!” Unfortunately, in the fight to define courage, these characters are losing and by extension we are losing.

Courage is a word frequently draped around the shoulders of violent activists, but seldom lavished on the ordinary man seeking to swim upstream–the man fighting the whole universe. You can call the Symbionese Liberation Army courageous. You can call The Weather Underground’s bombings of the U.S. State Department courageous…In other words, you can swim downstream with the reckless might of Grendel. Courage used the way Churchill used it–the way the British people embodied it in WWII–the way the Founders embodied it during the American revolution–courage like this seems archaic. We half expect to see it in a hospital bed with the words “Do Not Resuscitate” written on the clipboard. Where does a kid today go to see virtue set ablaze? A bookstore or library? I’d like to believe it, and many times a thoughtful parent can make good use of those institutions. But with increasing frequency, our experience mirrors the observations of Simone Weil. Here was a woman sometimes seduced by the romance of recklessness, nevertheless, she identifies the problem with much of today’s fiction. She writes, “Nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it’s the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm.”

While our experience often confirms this, I’m not convinced that it needs to be the case. It especially need not be the case with a story as inspiring as Beowulf. J.R.R. Tolkien says, “Let us by all means esteem the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall.” Beowulf is not a hero struggling merely against an earthly foe, but against the powers of darkness–enemies of God. Beowulf fights evil at every turn–even evil that’s not his own, and he fights it simply because evil needs to be fought. Tolkien maintains that “Something more significant than a standard hero, a man faced with a foe more evil than any human enemy of horse or realm, is before us, and yet incarnate in time, walking in heroic history, and treading the named lands of the North.” How fortunate are we, that English poetry is built on such a strong foundation.

We need heroes the way Alexander needed Achilles… Here’s to swimming up stream!