CURRENCY OF COURAGE

Yesterday’s tomorrow is today, but without the disappointment, unlike tomorrow’s yesterday, where the disappointment has yet to be appointed. You can start and end wars with words, and document the future just as easily as you can document the past, for give me a torch and a sundial, and I’ll show you a time machine.

I wrote recently about how the nonconfrontational can become obedient through the idleness of their own morality, meaning that evil exists not just because some are evil, but because everyone else looks away. Eventually, through repetition, cruelty becomes just another pothole, and we conform to it as naturally as rainwater.

I fear I’m rainwater, I fear I’m a coward, for I fear that, whilst I am profoundly affected by the cruelties of this world, I’m equally affected by my own idleness in doing something about it.

I’ve spent much of my life, and much of this blog, analysing my relationship with morality. Because whilst my integrity could be as fortified as a rock, I suspect I’d still find myself in the pothole, swimming in the comfort of the delusion that I’m not the problem, despite playing a role within it.

There’s something deeply uncomfortable about being a moral coward. You’re trapped in a tug-of-war between opposing forces, yet powerless to influence either side.

We like to imagine that, had we lived through history’s darkest periods, we would have been among the brave – we would have hidden the persecuted, defied the authorities, spoken out against injustice. But statistically, most of us would have been ordinary people trying to preserve some facade of an ordinary life.

You’ll always know, deep down, like refusing to make eye contact as you pull out in front of someone in the car, hoping ignorance preserves righteousness. And then there’s the self-preservation, when you know you’re on the wrong side, but your mind can weave a series of justifications in a truly impressive feat of resourcefulness. The greatest danger isn’t becoming cruel, but our ability to accommodate it without cost.

And then arguably just as bad, what I’ve done so far, which is confessing a moral shortcoming, thus becoming a substitute for addressing it.

We can become so articulate about our failures, so painfully conscious of our contradictions, that the confession itself begins to feel like an act of moral courage. We have acknowledged the problem, and that acknowledgment provides just enough relief to allow us to continue exactly as before.

So perhaps the focus is then not morality, but bravery, which is a word I’ve not really given much time until now. Perhaps because I’ve always thought “bravery” sounded like a word that belongs in the past tense. Like a label applied once reality has finished judging the attempt, and the story settles on the genre. Success then turns recklessness into courage, while failure has a habit of restoring all the warning signs everyone apparently noticed from the beginning.

When we have all decided that someone was brave, we then tend to imagine it as an extraordinary quality possessed by extraordinary people. We picture someone standing defiantly before an oppressive government, knowing they’ll be imprisoned, but refusing to surrender their principles. Yet I imagine many genuinely courageous people began as frightened individuals who simply decided, on one particular occasion, that they couldn’t bear to remain silent.

Currently, for me, my fear lies in what I have to lose, for I have a pretty comfortable life. And perhaps bravery isn’t the absence of fear, but the decision that something else matters more than our fear. An everyday simple example of this can be seen in my fear of spiders, for when one confronts my daughter – who is also afraid of spiders – the concern for my daughter becomes more important. My daughter’s fear is immediate, personal, and something I have the power to alleviate, but the suffering of strangers, sometimes thousands of miles away, seems beyond my influence. One calls forth my protective instincts, the other confronts me with my apparent powerlessness, and with it, conveniently, hands me an excuse.

Obviously, I’m not comparing my battle with Aragog to the political resistance and suffering of someone like Sophie Scholl, but I think there is something to be said about scales here – like the distribution of weight between the cause and the cost. For a man who has nothing behind him to lose, has nothing in front of him to fear. There will always be a limit to how far you can push someone, but some appear to require a lot more pushing than others.

I think my current issue is that the moral expectations of myself are greater than the sacrifices I’m currently prepared to make. I have a lot to lose, so I have a lot of fear to conquer, only when the comforts of my own life are compromised to the point that I can no longer feel comfort, would I then find a backbone. Which would explain why the people who own the boat are never the ones rocking it.

Sadly, what this basically means, is that the only people you can rely on to stand up, are the ones who don’t have a comfortable chair to sit on to begin with. Which is perhaps unfair, as I’m basically saying that students are the first to stand up for change, as they’ve not yet acquired a life of comfort worth defending, and that the wealthy will never stand for anything that isn’t directly threatening their wealth.

Which is unfortunate, because then the next layer to that, is to conclude that if bravery is measured by what someone stands to lose, then bravery becomes a privilege of those who possess something worth losing.

And how does integrity fit into all of this, because, in all my cowardice, I do have integrity. I have, because of course I have, already written about integrity, and I stand by the vague conclusion I came to in that post – Morality is your environment, integrity is your identity, with empathy being the reactive variable that bounces you between those two boundaries. I have lost friends and family to my own principles, and I’ve taken pride within myself in that cost.

I can point to moments in my life when I have spoken up over matters that had little direct impact on me, and in doing so accepted consequences that made my own life less comfortable. So I am my own contradiction, but the cost has still always been minimal.

The danger, for me, lies in this entire process. I can sit here and write about how the pen is mightier than the sword, and convince myself that perhaps this is my own form of courage. That by writing, reflecting, and speaking honestly, I am doing something meaningful. But words possess a dangerous duality, you can change reality with words, you can even time travel, changing both past and future realities with words, but you can also hide behind words. Turning fear into prudence, hesitation into wisdom, and inaction into a principled position, not to deceive others, but to deceive yourself.

Suffering may be the currency of courage, but a simple thesaurus can provide the currency to avoid ever finding out how much courage you’re willing to pay for.