(Literary) Tales of Courage

Shout out to @DavidABrock, whose piece on defeatist thinking inspired this post. I usually tell tales I know personally or first-hand. Today, though, I'm relying on four well-known literary sources.

First is Reinhold Niebuhr, a distinguished theologian and author of many books, but most famous by far for one single sentence, which came to be known as The Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

[Niebuhr's attribution is somewhat contested, but it's the message that counts here.] Nearly all the focus is on the first clause, about things we cannot change. This, I think, is because errors of commission are far more common, and easily recognized, than errors of omission.

Human nature is prone to many modes of refusal to accept reality: fear, resentment, blame, irresponsibility. These are "errors of commission," things we do wrong on a daily basis. We know better, as evidenced by sayings like: "An expectation is a premeditated resentment," and "Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die." And yet we rage on.

By contrast, the second clause – about courage – often goes unnoticed, like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark. Who's to notice a failure to exhibit courage? It's the default mode of life. We don't notice those who do nothing.

We often casually think of courage as overcoming or vanquishing fear, yet soldiers (as well as police officers and firefighters) attest that this is not the case. To see why, let's look at the second source: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn is often called The Great American Novel, but has also been frequently banned since its publication in 1885. (in recent years, it has ranked as the 4th and 7th most frequently-banned book in the US). This despite its canonical reputation among scholars, and this from Ernest Hemingway: "All modern American literature comes from [Huckleberry Finn]...There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." (Full disclosure: I'm with Hemingway.)

The book describes young Huck's struggles in the ante-bellum South to reconcile his growing friendship with the escaped slave Jim, and his own upbringing, social values and conscience. As he puts it:

"It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway." Huck's conscience tells him it is wrong to help Jim escape – yet he decides to do so anyway.

He chooses his actions despite wholeheartedly buying into the prevailing mores of society, famously saying he decided that "all right, then, I'll go to hell." In effect, Huck puts his heart, the meaning he attaches to his relationship with Jim, above his society and even his own conscience, fully accepting responsibility for what he is doing.

I suggests this is courage, something well beyond and deeper than overcoming fear. Which brings me to the third source, Viktor Frankl's Mans' Search for Meaning.

Frankl was a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, and noticed that some prisoners survived, while others did not. He suggested the difference was whether or not they had found some deep sense of meaning.

He lists three kinds of meaning that provide life-sustaining power: purposeful work, love, and – courage. He wrote about the importance of finding courage amidst adversity, finding meaning by choosing their attitude and response to suffering. He wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

My fourth source is John F. Kennedy's 1956 Profiles In Courage. The book is as relevant today as it ever was, perhaps even moreso because he draws from politicians, a field in low repute these days. As Kennedy says, "The stories of past courage can define that ingredient – they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul."

As noted at the outset, my friend David Brock was despairing of a defeatist attitude toward key social issues of the day, implying a passivity and lack of courage to face them. If he's right (I think he is), then the solution lies not in bucking up our self-confidence, or in therapy, or in self-help books or affinity groups, but in soul-searching to find out what we really believe in, and choosing to live our lives accordingly – not just in big decisions, but in our daily humdrum ordinary lives as well.