XVI. Moral Courage

XVI

MORAL COURAGE

I MUST extend a few warnings before we part, and I can do it briefly.

Never boast to your friends about your will-power. They are apt to become cynical and facetious, especially when you have broken some major or minor resolution in a fit of absent-mindedness. You want your friends to know of your will-power, but the best way for them to discover it will be through your actions, not your words.

Don’t (O Don’t), be a prig. A prig is person who has become vastly well satisfied with himself. His chief pastime is to fill the air with lamentations over the shortcomings of other people. He is satisfied with himself because he is so easily satisfied. He is the little Jack Horner who says, “What a good boy am I!” A prig’s mind dwells on his successes and on what he has accomplished. Now true willpower is perfectly compatible with true humility, and a man of true humility dwells on his shortcomings and on what he has failed to accomplish. The prig is satisfied with himself because in his own eye he is realizing his ideals; but one of the reasons for this is simply that his ideals are low enough to make it easy to realize them. A man of true humility puts his ideal always a little beyond his reach. A prig for instance takes credit to himself because he reads good books. The man who is destined to grow criticizes himself because, though he reads good books, he does not think enough for himself. A prig admires himself because he has given $5 to the Red Cross. A true man, in the same financial circumstances, may be a little ashamed of himself because he has only given $15.

Things of a similar tenor have been said before. “It is in general more profitable,” says Carlyle, “to reckon up our defects than to boast of our attainments.” And the words of Phillips Brooks are more thrilling:

Sad is the day for any man when he becomes absolutely satisfied with the life that he is living, the thoughts that he is thinking and the deeds that he is doing; when there ceases to be forever beating at the doors of his soul a desire to do something larger, which he feels and knows he was meant and intended to do.

To resume our admonitions. Don’t try to be a “dominating personality” by shouting down your opponents or co-workers. Willpower has no necessary connection with noise.

Don’t be stubborn. Especially don’t be stubborn in your social recreations, under the impression that that is will-power. Don’t say, “We will play bridge,” whether anybody else wants to or not. Don’t “break up the party” just because it won’t play your way. Don’t fancy that will-power is incompatible with making yourself agreeable.

The difference between stubbornness and backbone you may imagine to be merely a difference in invective. A man who stands for principles in which you believe, has backbone; a man who stands for principles in which you do not believe, is stubborn. But the true difference, as I conceive it, is that the stubborn man will not listen to reason. He will persist in a course he has adopted simply to maintain his vanity. He won’t admit that he has been wrong, though, he may know it in his heart. His notion of will-power is sadly false. Will-power is consentaneous to the utmost spirit of conciliation. This does not mean compromise. The man with backbone is willing to listen to argument; he will keep his mind open. But he will not deviate an inch in principle if he knows himself to be right. He will give in before convincing argument; he is big enough to admit that he can make mistakes, and even that he has made one in this particular instance. But he will never give in because of mere lack of physical and moral courage.

And moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns and the machine guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told; that many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to up-hold the right, but simply that they hadn’t the moral courage to face the stigma of “slacker” or “conscientious objector.”

Perhaps it would be unwise to take for granted that the passions of the war have completely cooled, and possibly many would miss the point if I were to discuss this question from the point of view of our own side. But let us look at it from the German side. The Germans surely had physical courage. Not all of them shouted “Kamerad,” or if they did, it is rather strange that it took a world in arms more than four years to defeat them. But how many had moral courage in Germany? How many dared, like Maximilien Harden, to lift their voices against the dominant German creed, and how high dared he lift his? Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their fellows.

What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear? The ancient Greeks were not a superior race of people, but in the little city of Athens, in a period covering only a few hundred years, there came forth thinkers the splendor of whose fame has not been paralleled, certainly not exceeded, in all the nations of the world in all the thousand of years that have come since then. Where is the modern triumvirate of philosophers that is greater than Aristotle, Socrates and Plato? There may have been a number of reasons that brought this flowering of Greek culture, but one of them was this; that thought in Greece was free. A man could arrive at an opinion on a fundamental question different from that of his fellows without bringing himself into contempt. For a thousand years after Aristotle there were no thinkers; and the reason was, that thinking for oneself was despised. The authority of Aristotle was absolute. It applied not only to what he had positively said, but to what he had omitted to say. If it was not in Aristotle, it did not exist. When, in time, a few great spirits began to think for themselves, they faced a bitter struggle. Galileo, supporting the discovery of Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the sun around the earth, was compelled publicly to repudiate it. Bacon had to plead against the authority of Aristotle. Locke had to write:

some will not admit an opinion not authorized by men of old, who were then all giants in knowledge. Nothing is to be put into the treasury of truth or knowledge which has not the stamp of Greece or Rome upon it, and since their days will scarce allow that men have been able to see, think or write.

What can it profit a man to be able to think, if he does not dare to? One must have the courage to go where the mind leads, no matter how startling the conclusion, how shattering, how much it may hurt oneself or a particular class, no matter how unfashionable or how obnoxious it may at first seem. This may require the courage to stand against the whole world. Great is the man who has that courage, for he indeed has achieved will-power.

The End