The End Of Courage

The strange death of an old virtue.

Mr. Scruton is a writer and philosopher in England and the author of An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy.

ONE of the lessons to be drawn from the conflict in Kosovo is that, while our governments are ready to use military force, they are reluctant to take the risk of fighting. The strategy adopted is essentially one of window dressing. "Look how strong we are!" NATO declares; "we can destroy factories, bridges -- whole towns, if we desire!" The Serbs know that the cost of rebuilding those factories, bridges, and towns will be borne, in the end, by the states that are currently destroying them. What matters, to them, is the war on the ground, in which men face each other and fight -- as the Kosovo Liberation Army would fight, if we had the sense to arm it. Killing, intimidating, and driving into exile are the real business of war: and on this level, everything has proceeded, from the Serb point of view, as smoothly as could ever be expected.

What explains the reluctance of NATO to fight? Some speak of the enormous monetary cost of mobilizing troops on the ground. But it is a cost that Europe and America, controllers of the world's wealth, could easily meet. Besides, it would be far less than the cost of repairing the damage caused by continual bombing and of housing the Kosovan refugees. Others refer to the inevitable casualties, and the reluctance of Western democracies to accept them. But this is a doubtful argument. In Britain, at least, public opinion is behind the use of force, and eager for a speedy and definitive end to the conflict. Our airmen are already expressing their frustration at rules of engagement that prevent them from making use of their low-flying skills, and from taking the risk of direct air-to-ground combat.

The history of modern warfare tells us that, in the end, the swiftest resolution to a conflict, and the one most economical in both military and civilian casualties, is the decisive victory on the ground -- the breakthrough that leads to the capture of disputed territory. That victory could be achieved tomorrow, to the immense relief not only of the Kosovan Albanians but of the nations that have been half-reluctantly persuaded to defend them. In some peculiar, metaphysical way, however, the hands of our governments are tied. It is as though all options were open, provided nothing were at risk besides machines. The crucial factor on which victory has always depended -- the willingness to risk life and limb -- has been removed from the equation.

In effect, the war in Serbia is an exercise in sanitized aggression -- force without the risk of force, violence without tears, destruction from a place of safety. Not only is this cowardly: It is profoundly counter-productive, as we are beginning to see. Courage is a higher value than safety, and a life without risk diminishes the gift of freedom. And part of the value of courage over hesitation lies in the fact that it moves more decisively, more economically, and with less catastrophic destruction, to its goal. Courage is not just intrinsically admirable; it is also the most efficient means to achieve what we want.

If we wish to understand the mentality of our leaders, we must remind ourselves of the liberal priorities in politics. The Founding Fathers believed that the purpose of politics is to safeguard the space in which individuals can grow. The Constitution was devised to promote freedom and enterprise, and to encourage individuals to take full responsibility for their lives. The liberal heirs of the Founding Fathers believe that the purpose of politics is to look after all citizens from cradle to grave, regardless of what they have done to deserve it. For them, politics is a rescue service, offered unconditionally to all. Hence safety, health, and comfort become the primary political values. The aim is to create a risk-free society. If we contemplate war, it is only war at a distance, a series of "warning shots" that will deter the villains from their purpose without exposing our citizens to risk. Such a war, however, is both costly and essentially unwinnable.

It is not only in war that the liberal priorities are dangerous. The obsession with health is profoundly unhealthy, and the pursuit of safety unsafe. If we believe that the state is there to cushion us from misfortune, to compensate every loss and make up for every suffering, then we automatically relinquish control over our lives, while drastically narrowing the sphere of human action. Regulations of a mind-numbing complexity now govern activities, consumer products, and employment, with the aim of ensuring that the citizen can amble through a risk-free world, picking his pleasures from shelves loaded with packaged and sanitized products, waddling onwards in a state of moral obesity. As a result, the citizen lives longer than he might. But his life is less completely his own. We have suffered an enormous diminution in the value of human existence, because we have removed risk from the heart of it. It is only by staking your life, that you fully possess it.

AN EXAMPLE OF CONFIDENCE
It is worth harking back to the great days of the Empire, when the British exuded such confidence in their laws and customs. A robust sense of adventure, and a delight in the world, radiates from all that the British then did. Of course they were arrogant. But whatever contempt they showed toward other peoples was tempered by a sense of justice and fair play. They acknowledged our universal equality in the eyes of God, and regarded their own nationality as a stroke of good fortune that brought with it a corresponding duty to govern wisely and well. We laugh at this now; but not without a sense of regret, and with an inner recognition that theirs was a healthier and a happier world than ours.

The British rejoiced in an unparalleled sense of safety -- they were at home in the world, and entitled to enjoy it. This self-confidence can be witnessed in all the great buildings -- government offices, cathedrals, parish churches, colonial mansions -- that they spread over the surface of the globe; it can be read in their colonial literature, and heard in their repertoire of rousing hymns. Yet, paradoxically, their sense of safety existed only because they courted danger. They took risks, and were fortified by overcoming them; they ventured into disease-ridden and fear-haunted places, to emerge after their ordeal with shy self-satisfaction, quietly resuming their place beside the hearth. Home was safe, because they fought for it and died for it. General Gordon of Khartoum was portrayed, in the picture that took pride of place in so many schoolrooms, as facing the spears of savages with a calm acceptance of his fate, as safe and unflustered in death as he would have been on the thickly carpeted stairway of his London club.

Of course, this attitude was fortified by myth, and depended upon constant rehearsal. The entire education of the English was devoted to instilling the attitudes that suited them for those adventures overseas -- adventures both profitable and mad. But the resulting state of mind was not a myth -- on the contrary, it was a real achievement, and one that, in our century, the Americans too have emulated. By courting danger, you make yourself safe -- not safe in fact (14 million British bodies lie buried far from home) -- but safe in your heart. Since death is inevitable, there is no other form of safety that really matters to us. The citizen of the liberal state, surrounded on all sides by his protectors and encouraged to avoid every risk that might shorten his life, does not achieve the sense of safety that the British then achieved. On the contrary: The more shielded he is from risk, the more terrible does his death appear to him. Anxieties about health fill his waking moments, and his long last years -- when work is over and there is no life of adventure to look back upon -- are ones of disappointment, fear, and boredom.

Once health and safety are guaranteed by the state, we begin to see them not as gifts of fortune but as rights. No one has a right to take them from us, and should they be taken in any case we think of ourselves as wronged. This attitude is now so widespread in America as to form the primary subject-matter of litigation. If you fall down and hurt yourself, your first instinct is to look round for someone to sue. If you smoke yourself to death, your survivors claim millions of dollars from the tobacco companies. If you die on the operating table, the doctor who tried to save you foots the bill. In a world where health is a right, death becomes a wrong.

To say that this attitude is unhealthy is to identify only the smallest part of what is bad about it. Death is not just inevitable: It is the root of our condition. A life in which death is put out of mind, but confronted when necessary with courage and honor, is the only life that accords with human dignity. "A free man," wrote Spinoza, "thinks of nothing less than of death." He meant not that we should look on death with lordly indifference, but that we should not look on it at all -- and above all that we should not devote our waking thoughts to the absurd endeavor of postponing it. To live properly is to accept that we shall die. For without this fact nothing would have meaning for us -- death and suffering are the occasions of human virtue. Compassion, courage, sacrifice, all are predicated on our mortality. By cultivating these virtues we overcome the fear of death; we also prepare ourselves for emergencies. We throw off our moral obesity, and become useful both to others and to ourselves.

Which brings me back to the war in Kosovo. In any real emergency, it is the courageous person who sees us through, just as it is the risk-taker who makes an economy work. In a limited war, like that in Kosovo, we can rely on technology and expertise. But, when the going gets tough, there is only one thing that can guarantee our survival, and that is the bravery of those who are locked in combat. Just as the risk-free economy destroys the enterprise on which it depends, so does risk-free warfare sap the courage needed for warfare. Indeed, there is no greater threat to safety than the obsession with safety.

I have no doubt that our soldiers and airmen are willing to take risks. For the liberal rot has not yet destroyed military institutions. The military, however, are schooled in another ethos than the politicians who command them; and when the commander in chief is a president whose only experience of war is to avoid being called upon to fight in it, then the liberal mindset takes center stage. That is what we are witnessing in Kosovo; and the sad thing is that there will not be fewer deaths and less suffering as a result of this hampered strategy, but more deaths and more suffering, precisely because the time for decisive action has been so unconscionably postponed.