Infinitesimal Courage
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a conversation with my friends Jim Rutt and Yasuhiko Kimura on the topic of courage. (Specifically, Jim…
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a conversation with my friends Jim Rutt and Yasuhiko Kimura on the topic of courage. (Specifically, Jim was wondering at the lack of it among Millennials, but we can skip that!)
This got me to wondering about the nature of courage itself. Just what is it? For me this kind of question means: what (evolutionary) forces gave rise to it in the first place? This is an interesting question.
[Note — what follows is even more ill considered and speculative than most of what I write, so be forewarned!]
As a first cut, we can consider that the first emergence of what we call “courage” might have been way back in the evolutionary history when some parent first discovered the survival advantage of being willing and able to decrement its self-survival instincts to the benefit of its young. Not self-sacrifice per se, but the willingness and ability to put itself at risk on the behalf of something that is other than itself.
We know that there are a lot of living things that don’t have this capacity. But somewhere in the evolutionary past, momma lions learned how to over-ride their survival instincts (e.g., ‘fear-avoidance’) in order to protect their young. Thus was courage born and made ripe for exaptation.
From “over-ride self-survival in favor of your young” comes the easy slide into “over-ride self-survival in favor of X”. Wherever X confers a survival advantage, you will begin to see a proliferation of kinds of courage. A pack of animals that are able to over-ride self-survival for mutual benefit is a potent combination.
Indeed, as we fast-forward to humans we can see that what we might call “coarse grained” courage is little more than a mapping of X to increasingly abstract phenomena. The Family. The Tribe. The Nation. Any number of Dieties and Principles. In each case, use is made of the primary machinery of “self-surival over-ride” to unlock a capacity to maintain a “clear head” under threat, rather than be captured by “amygdala hijack.” And to be able to go “all in” under appropriate circumstances. The generally high esteem of courage in almost all cultures is evidence of the fitness advantage it confers to the cultures that can most effectively cultivate and deploy it.
I call this kind of courage “coarse grained” because at the end of the day it lacks subtlety. When it comes to being willing and able over-ride your fear-avoidance response to the threat of physical harm (or death) it seems to work unreasonably well. Witness the mutual mass slaughter that courage has enabled in war throughout the ages. But when it comes to more subtle fear-avoidance responses, it can’t really grab hold.
Consider, for example, the number of soldiers (or suicide bombers) who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause, but are unwilling to face their more subtle fears and “come out” as gay (or, more importantly, to buck any socially-conditioned mores in favor of their authentic feelings, beliefs or preferences). This requires a courage of a much more nuanced texture than “coarse grained” courage can provide.
The more subtle fears are devious. Their tools are avoidance, rationalization, distraction, repression, self-righteousness. One rarely feels the pangs of cowardice when sacrificing self-honesty and personal integrity in favor of the safety of some public persona. To address these subtle fears requires the cultivation of an ‘infinitesimal courage.’ This seems to require:
A very high sensitivity to even the slightest twinge of the fear-avoidance response;
An autonomic over-ride of that response; and
An affirmative activation of the “seeking” response precisely *towards* whatever activated the fear response in the first place.
In other words, fear (even — especially —the most subtle fear) has to be turned from a sign of something to be avoided into a sign of something to be investigated. It is only in this way that the deep fear-induced structures of the psyche and persona can be identified, faced and, ultimately resolved.
And here, perhaps, we return to the original problem. Perhaps the principal challenge of the Great Transition is not cultivating the courage to fight for some great cause, but rather cultivating the infinitesimal courage to face our deepest and most subtle fears in the pursuit of our own deep integrity and authenticity. Perhaps it is precisely a society committed to this kind of courage that necessary and adequate to the 21st Century.