A Decade of Heroes

[Geee]

National Review:


On a morning of horrors on Sept. 11, 2001, we witnessed acts of sacrifice that will live forever in American memory.

As people fled the World Trade Center, amid falling bodies and debris, firefighters ran into them. As people ran down the stairs, the firefighters marched up them. They carried 100 pounds of gear, moving slowly toward a fire hot enough to melt steel raging 1,000 feet above them.

After a flaccid decade of (somewhat illusory) prosperity and peace in the 1990s, the savagery of September 11 brought home the timeless relevance of the virtue of courage. Not “moral courage,” but old-fashioned physical courage of the sort celebrated since the days of Homer.
From the firefighters who set out to rescue the victims of al-Qaida’s war on America, to the passengers on Flight 93 who were the first to hit back, to the troops who have waged the fight abroad, it has been a decade of heroes, traditionally defined — men willing to risk life and limb for their country, their mission, their friends.

The esteem with which we naturally hold physical courage is deep-seated. Musing on this, the great English literary figure Samuel Johnson said, “Were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, ‘Follow me, and hear a lecture on philosophy;’ and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, ‘Follow me, and dethrone the Czar;’ a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange.”

Or formerly universal. We have done much to dumb down courage and make it more accessible through the decades. In his book The Mystery of Courage, William Ian Miller writes of how the definition of the virtue has shifted to accommodate the character of a modern commercial society. “Courage,” he writes, “is thus now held to be what it takes to invest in a Silicon Valley start-up or to vote no on a manifestly weak tenure file.”

If that. Increasingly, Miller notes, courage is used “loosely to congratulate anyone who by his own estimation undertakes some struggle for self-realization.” Search for books on courage on Amazon and you’ll find volumes about business leadership and self-esteem, under such titles as “The Courage to Be Free: Discover Your Original Fearless Self.”