Fearlessness and courage are not the same thing. If you don’t have fear, you have no need of courage. For courage is the virtue by which we master our fears and do what needs to be done. Courage is action rather than reaction, and the measure
of one’s courage is in his ability to master his fear when fear seeks to
take hold of the steering wheel.
The kind of tough talk we get from the right wing in this country is not courageous; it’s hysterical. It’s compensatory for feeling weak and out of one’s depth. It exaggerates threats and proposes actions that are not motivated by courage but rather by thinking that is adrenaline soaked and without poise and dignity. It’s shameful. Such talk doesn’t come from courageous thinking; it’s not thinking at all; it’s pure, instinctual survival reactivity. It’s like freaking out if you see a mouse, and thinking you’re courageous because you didn’t jump up on a chair but instead threw a stick of dynamite at it. How satisfying to high-five your wife and kids in the rubble of your kitchen. How noble to have sacrificed so selflessly in the cause of defeating the enemy.
That’s the right-wing’s m.o. in a nutshell, but the kitchen they’re destroying is the constitution and the rule of law. And, of course, there will be no celebrating when the family is awakened by a family of raccoons that have invaded the house through the dynamite created breach in the wall. So should we throw more dynamite to get rid of the raccoons? And does throwing all this dyanmite really protect us from the wolves and other varmints that are waiting for their opportunity? I’ll leave it to the reader to make draw the obvious political analogies.
Stupid, adrenaline- or instinct-motivated actions are not courage. Courage is a supranatural virtue that enables us to behave in a counter-instinctual way–to neither fight nor to flee, when every cell in your body is screaming for you to do one or the other, but instead to remain cool and clear headed under pressure and to find the course of action appropriate to the situation. If risking one’s life is required, so be it. But courage is the opposite of the folly that leads to unnecessary risks. And the tough talk of our government stinks far more of folly than it ever has of courage.
America at this time is a highly anxious, deeply fearful country. But what do we fear? I think humans experience fear in two basic ways: fear for their physical survival and fear of humiliation. The first is about basic issues of life and death, the second about identity and self-worth. It’s possible to be physically secure but living in a state of indignity and humiliation. It’s possible to live with enormous dignity while at the same time living in a chronic state of physical insecurity.
Conservatives have always argued against the paternalism of the welfare state because of the unintended negative consequences of its good intentions. It aims to provide for the physical security of people while unintentionally robbing them of their dignity. Liberals have always argued that dignity for anyone isn’t a possibility if he or she is always living on the margins of physical survival. Conservatives counter by saying that people earn their dignity and self worth by becoming self-reliant and meeting their own physical survival needs. Liberals counter when they say that’s nice in theory, but very difficult in practice, and the most enterprising of the poor people are forced to meet their survival needs by entering into criminal activity because legitimate means to earn a living are not available to them. Conservatives counter that it’s better to be poor and honest than to be a successful criminal. Liberals counter . . . and on the argument goes.
Both are right and both are wrong, but my point now is that the two are intertwined. It’s at root a question of social or cultural psychology. There are many cultures where people live lives of joy and dignity with hardly anything in the way of material prosperity by US standards. And in the developed countries like the US there are lots of people living lives of anxiety and high stress whose standard of living is a hundred times those of the first group. The first group lives with cultural security and physical insecurity. The second group lives with physical security and cultural insecurity. For the latter, its cultural insecurity is the price it has paid for its affluence and relative physical security.
I would argue that the real fear for most Americans has little to do with threats to their physical survival, but with threats to their identity, individual and collective. There is something about American culture that promotes what I would describe as a dignity deficit with a correlative anxiety surfeit. People who have dignity are secure in their identities. They are people who know who they are. They have confidence and poise.
The mechanisms that promoted identity formation in traditional societies are not at work in American society, and while it’s important to understand the historical cultural reasons why this has happened, it’s important first to identify the problem. Many, many Americans, especially conservatives, are living in a continuous state of anxiety about being humiliated. It seems silly and counter-intuitive that the most powerful nation on earth should have a populace which should feel this way, but I think it’s key to understanding the American predicament right now.
I think that the reason for it with conservatives lies in their continued reliance on traditional structures to give them their sense of who they are. Modernity and the forces of consumer capitalism have worked relentlessly to destroy the traditional values infrastructure of American society. And people on the cultural right who remain identified with traditional values feel attacked and threatened as these larger cultural and economic forces erode the infrastructure that gives them their sense of identity and "metaphysical" security.
So it’s not surprising that they feel deeply anxious. And I sympathize. But where I lose patience with the cultural right is in their obtuseness in misidentifying the causes of their anxiety in the physical threat posed by Communists or more recently Islamo-fascists. No, the real cause of their anxiety is creative destructive materialistic forces unleashed by consumer capitalism, which these same conservatives enthusiastically embrace as the key to American greatness.
Why are Americans fearful and anxious?–because at the roots of their souls their identities are riven by an unresolved contradiction they have failed to recognize. They want their cake and to eat it, too. They want all the benefits of consumer capitalism, and they want their traditional-values infrastructure. The contradiction is symbolized by Wal-Mart, the ravenous company that nevertheless drapes itself in red-state values while it destroys traditional family-owned business and exploits red-state workers in small towns throughout the country. But Wal-Mart is what makes American great, right? We’re fighting in the Middle East to defend American values, right? And what better represents American values than Wal-Mart, right? Wal-Mart short-circuits the red-state brain functioning and forces it into a state of resigned, anxious passivity toward the forces that are destroying the fabric of their lives. Easier to just work up a frothy hatred of ragheads than to resolve the contradiction.
What’s the solution? Whatever it is, it’s not to hand out buttons to people that say, "I’m special." It has to start with ordinary people getting smarter about understanding why they feel the way they do, so that then they can develop an effective, courageous, strategy to force the system to stop exploiting them and rather to be responsive to their interests.
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