Four Fragments on Courage
On really not being OK with resignation.
1.
How the hell am I supposed to react to this video of a Tufts student getting dragged off the street? I’m seeing it for the fifteenth time, and I still don’t know the answer to that question.
While I write this, there is a burst of DC spring rain falling outside my flat. It’s the sort of rain with the smell of soil and musk that I’ve never experienced quite this way anywhere else. The mix of warmth — hospitality even — in the rain; and lightning that feels nearer than the lights on the building next door. This morning, before the rain, I watched a stream of young professionals jogging down to the large forest near my flat. All this, while in a similarly wealthy suburb, a few cities north, masked figures calling themselves law enforcement were able, apparently, to surround a completely helpless individual, crowd her into an unmarked car and fly her to a dubiously legal holding facility 1,500 miles away without notification to the people who love her.
2.
As far as I can tell, “resistance writing” is no longer a genre in active development. In the first years of Trump’s rise to power, the media became filled with what seemed like an endless supply of essays and op-eds by anxious liberals fretting about the decline of democracy and warning about the dangers of populism. It was an anxious genre, full of rhetorical escalations about the dangers of our circumstances; heavy on moralism, and usually light on self-interrogation.
I’m sure I could still find a few examples of this kind of writing, but it is fascinating to see how passé it seems now. It is not just that it is hard to find individual authors who feel that specific frenzied indignation again, but also that the media itself seems to have turned sharply against it. Many publications seem newly sensitive to the risks to their businesses of this style of writing. In the most dramatic example, Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion page would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
I’m not sad to see the resistance essay go. I was sharply critical in those years of the entire mood of moral superiority of #resist rhetoric. It portrayed itself as the adult and intellectual option, but too often seemed to be the voice of a society desperately trying to avoid spotting itself in the mirror.
But now, what do we have instead? Vaguely resigned cultural essays and books about political economy that seem out of step from the world in which we are now living.
3.
In 2011 the French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle published a spirited denunciation of modern attempts to eliminate risk — and especially the risk of death — from society. In a beautiful turn of phrase about safety culture, she writes: “we build towers in order to protect ourselves against imaginary enemies without seeing that the apparatus is coiled inside of us.” Openly, habitually learning to confront risk — and risk of death in particular — she argues, is the only way to inhabit a world that is large enough for humanity. As she put it there “what is to become of a culture that can no longer think about risk except as heroic act, pure madness, deviant conduct.”
On 21 July, 2017, according to witnesses on the beach, Dufourmantelle jumped into the water near St. Tropez after seeing two children getting caught in the strong waves off the coast. Dufourmantelle tried to swim to them but herself got caught in the “Red flag” current and was pulled further out to sea, perhaps suffering cardiac arrest before drowning.
There are two drastically different visions of life — of virtue — colliding on that beach where Dufourmantelle died.
One suggests that there may be something noble, but ultimately mis-calculated in her actions. Sure, saving those children is good, but only if you can in fact pull it off. Surely she should have assessed the conditions more carefully, tried to alert beach patrol to the danger; a lifeguard did, after all, end up saving the children in the end.
The other voice is less confident about reducing life to analysis. Dufourmantelle was there. And there were children, drowning. She saw them — and rushed herself into the sea.
Both voices are calculating risks, but of very different kinds. The former, a calculus about death. The latter, a calculus about life. As Dufourmantelle puts it: “risk lets chance take hold. We would wish it to be voluntary but it originates in obscurity, the unverifiable, the uncertain. I interrogate risk in a matter that does not permit its evaluation or its elimination, within the horizon of: not dying.”
We usually think about courage at the level of will. What’s happening in the world is obvious, the only question is will I have the nerve for what’s needed. But it’s not really nerve that’s elusive, but the world. To lose courage is to diminish the whole world to the limits of one’s own safety. By force of fear, one ends up unable to see — phenomena that don’t fit are reduced, filtered out.
The great danger that I see at the moment in society — and in myself — is the pull to lose the world. It’s as though there is a gravitational mass dragging us to see reality not through its full sinewy texture. But instead to limit our sense of vision to what is feasible (or perhaps even just easy)? If the rage of the sea or political authority are enough to make action seem entirely inefficacious, it’s as though our eyes become unable to see even the drowning children themselves.
4.
How might we become people serious enough for this moment? To have worlds that don’t reduce themselves to the contours of expediency? To be robust enough not to allow things — people — to slip away like coins between the floor boards?
Our word courage comes to us via Old French (corage) from Latin cor—heart. Somewhere deep in our language is sunk the sense that strength in the moment of decision, comes not from coldness or stoic ruggedness, but from the opposite. Deep wells of feeling. Blood constantly heating our human veins. Habits of sensitivity so well established that when the critical moment comes, it is instantaneous to see what is at stake. And act.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!
Strangely, „resistance writing“ seems to have been 8 years early. Now that it would actually be required, it is nowhere to be found because it’s not the aesthetic/ vibe of the moment.
In most sermons, it's important to have an application. I'd like to request the same from your writing, Sam. You're pointing at the right things but so often they're obscured by over-thinking and under-doing.