You Can Always Resist

"If they can force you," Seneca has Hercules say in one of his plays, "then you’ve forgotten how to die."

The Courage to Commit

Since the time of the Sophists, academics have, for whatever petty reason, used their considerable brains to muddy the waters rather than clear them.

When Violence Is the Answer

Without bravery, without the warrior ethos, no one—and no nation—survives long enough. There are plenty of brave pacifists out there, but even they understand at some level that their idealism is feasible only because others are willing to be pragmatic in their place.

To Get Up and Leave

Leaving is scary. The end of something can feel like a kind of dying. Somewhere or something new means uncertainty. It is risky.

The Cause Makes All

There were many brave soldiers in the Confederacy. Same goes for the British army in its wars in India and Africa. Or Japan as it defended the islands it had taken in the Pacific. You read about some of these feats and your jaw drops. Yet, intuitively, you know that there is something empty about this courage. It’s empty because of how craven and wrong what they fought for was.

The CEO who stares down incredible odds to further an exploitative, toxic business. The anti-vaxxer risking opprobrium and illness, literally going against the herd. The dictator who seizes power in a dazzling, daring coup. The police who resign in solidarity when an officer is punished for pushing over an old man in Buffalo. The soldiers taken into custody for refusing to testify against Colonel William Calley after My Lai. Courage. Hollow courage. As an instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy explained: Jumping on a grenade only matters if you jump on a grenade to accomplish something, to save someone. The difference between raw courage and the heroic lies in the who. Who was it for? Was it truly selfless? Was it for the greater good? There is a logic to heroism, even as illogical as it is to override your own self-preservation. "The Stoics," Cicero would write, "correctly define courage as the virtue which champions the cause of right . . . No one has attained true glory who has gained a reputation for courage by treachery and cunning."

The Braver Thing Is Not to Fight

Even at the showdown over Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Lincoln chose only to send much-needed food and supplies to the trapped men, not guns or troops, because he would not unnecessarily escalate an unbelievably tense situation.

Gandhi had said he’d rather choose violence than cowardice. What he and other nonviolence practitioners chose instead was something even more magnificent and heroic. It took even more courage to do battle without weapons, to fight with one’s soul and one’s spirit against armed and angry enemies. Imagine the courage of young Malala Yousafzai, targeted and left for dead by the Taliban, for trying to go to school. "Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me," she said, "I would not shoot him." Is that not tougher than the toughest warrior? The problem is that usually this kind of heroism is less cinematic than a cavalry charge. People want to read books about wars . . . not the diplomacy that prevented them from happening. People want to hear about the whistleblowers . . . not the leaders who were able to effectively reform companies from the inside without it needing to come to that. We make movies about those brave iconoclasts who do everything differently . . . but what about someone who makes a difference and is able to fit in and function in society? Remember: Nobody gets credit for things that didn’t happen. We think about FDR and how he stared down the Great Depression. His real accomplishments were the reforms that prevented countless other future depressions, that were responsible for catching financial crooks and manipulations, reforms that continue operating quietly in the background even today.

And by the way, that’s how it worked out for Lincoln. Despite his valiant efforts, he could not stop those who preferred to "make war rather than let the nation survive." He did, through his restraint, however, manage to maneuver the South into its unwinnable role as the aggressor in the Civil War. The Southern leaders stupidly rushed themselves into firing the first shot in a war they claimed to be the victim of. It was a moral contradiction that they never overcame.

What Are You Willing to Pay?

The (braver) philosopher John Stuart Mill would concede that war was an ugly thing—ambition can be ugly too—but, he said, the "decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse." You have to care enough to draw the line somewhere, and the failure to do this is ultimately far uglier than most of the excesses of history.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some businesses were willing to sacrifice for public health, while some were not. It seems like an obvious trade, but if it were so obvious, everyone would have done it.

when CVS stopped selling cigarettes, even though tobacco products earned the chain some $ 2 billion per year. It’s not quite Jonas Salk declining to patent the polio vaccine, but it is impressive. As it happens, it actually did make a difference. Because customers didn’t simply shop elsewhere, many of them just quit smoking. Tobacco sales fell industry-wide—even though no other major retailers followed suit—all because one store was willing to sacrifice revenue for what was right.

Courage Is Virtue. Virtue Is Courage

a writer becomes one by writing—and a great writer by writing that which is worth reading—"

Whether it was at Thermopylae in 480 BC, or with British troops two thousand years later in the same pass with the same table stakes against the Germans,

In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he concludes that the most powerful phrase in Christianity is timshel. When we read the commandments translated into English, they are rendered as just that, commandments. But Steinbeck thinks the Hebrew rendering is more accurate, not "Thou shalt" but "Thou mayest."

Afterword

as I often tell angry readers, I didn’t build my platform to not use it to say what I believe.

Samuel Johnson joked that "every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier."