Cowardice by Walsh Chris

Author:Walsh, Chris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Yet there is a kind of cowardice whose commonness does not redeem it. In a 1901 polemic against lynching, Mark Twain wrote of “man’s commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the supreme feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000.”24 The notion of moral cowardice has remained mostly implicit in this book, where physical cowardice has been in the foreground, if also in retreat. The moral versus physical distinction is a fraught one. Moral courage is typically understood to involve social rather than physical risk.25 But someone acting out of moral courage (denouncing her corrupt boss even when she’ll get fired for it; defending a view so unpopular that his reputation and material fortunes may suffer) may well experience emotional and even bodily symptoms like those a soldier in mortal danger experiences. And a soldier doing something that everyone would call physically courageous may feel no such physiological consequences. As British lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen has noted, “The distinction between moral and physical courage is, in fact, a distinction without a difference.” 26

But there may be a significant distinction between these kinds of courage, and it may well lie in cowardice—the weak link that proves to be the crucial one. William Ian Miller speculates that in some cases you don’t have to be physically courageous to be morally courageous, but you can’t be too much of a physical coward either. Standing your ground, even metaphorically, requires not caving in to fears that one experiences bodily.27 One wants to stick up for some cause, but gives in to his fear of public speaking or of ridicule. Worry about making fools of ourselves leads us to fail our friends, family, faith, or selves in countless ways. In such cases prudence or tact or politeness or decorum or discretion is the better part of valor, we may tell ourselves, corrupting a proverb as Falstaff did after playing dead in battle.28 But such rationalization doesn’t necessarily stop us from feeling cowardly. After writing that moral cowardice governs 9,999 men out of 10,000, Twain added, “I am not offering this as a discovery; privately the dullest of us knows it to be true.”29

The worst moral cowardice may not be failing out of fear but instead not attempting anything at all. Even doing evil is better than that, as Dante implies in making the Inferno’s neutrals envy the fate of everyone else, even those across the river in the circles of hell. T. S. Eliot was more explicit about the superiority of choosing iniquity to not choosing at all when he praised Charles Baudelaire as a poet who was man “enough for damnation.” “[I]t is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing,” wrote Eliot; “at least, we exist.”30 The souls in hell’s anteroom never really did exist.

When Virgil tells Dante not to speak of them, just to look and pass on, he does as he is told.

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