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- [00:00]
Brett McKay
So there are certain weeks in the McKay household where it feels like we're just living out of the car. There's practices, games, activities. By the time we get home, the last thing anyone wants to do is grocery shop and cook from scratch. That's where Factor Meals comes in. Factor Meals are fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs so you're eating well without having to plan it all out. My favorite they have lots of meals. My favorite is they got a filet mignon. It feels like something you'd order at a restaurant, but it's sitting in your fridge, right? Ready in about two minutes. The meals are sent directly to your doorstep. They're fresh, never frozen, and they use quality ingredients. Lean proteins, real vegetables, healthy fats, no refined sugars, no artificial sweeteners, no refined seed oils. They've got around 100 rotating meals each week, including high protein and calorie smart options, which makes it easy to stay on track even when life's busy. There's no prep, no cleanup, no stress. Just heat it up and eat. It's ready in two minutes. Head to factorymeals.com manliness 50 off that's M A N L I N E S S 50 O F F and use code MANLINESS to get 50% off your order and free breakfast for a year. Offer only available to new subscribers only. Varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active again. That's factorymules.com manliness 50 off code manliness 50 off the Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, Thinkers and leaders that glean their edifying life, improving insights without the fluff and filler. The AOM podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles in artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in Our substack newsletter@dyingbreed.net and turn our content into real world action by joining the Strenuous Life program@strenuouslife.com now on to the show. Courage is one of our most prized and celebrated virtues. But once you really start exploring it, the nature of courage is surprisingly hard to pin down. Here to help us explore the fascinating complications of courage is William Ian Miller, a historian, professor of law, and the author of the Mystery of Courage. Today on the show, Bill explains how centuries of philosophers, soldiers and storytellers have approached courage and the hard to answer questions its manifestations raise. We discuss why courage has long been ranked among the highest virtues and the relationship between fear and courage, the fuzzy line between courage and cowardice, the association of courage and manhood, whether or not courage is domain specific, the difference between offensive and defensive courage, whether martyrs are courageous, whether deeds with evil ends are courageous, how fear, shame and honor shape brave action and more. After the show is over. Check out our show notes at aowim Is courage. Foreign? William Ian Miller, welcome to the show.
- [03:29]
William Ian Miller
Thank you. Happy to be here.
- [03:31]
Brett McKay
So you wrote a book 26 years ago called the Mystery of Courage, where you explore the moral psychology and sociology of the virtue of courage. I'm curious what led you to take a deep dive into this virtue?
- [03:43]
William Ian Miller
I am a. My field is the Viking sagas, the Icelandic family sagas, and. And there the issue of courage and cowardice is always front and center on display. The characters are anxious about it. And I just thought it was one step from there to just think about it generally, seeing as it's still very much with us. It's an anxiety. I think every little kid grows up wondering if they have what it takes or don't have what it takes. And mostly trying to figure out what it means to be a person of courage, if you're even reasonably tested anymore. But. So I just thought this would be an interesting thing to look into since there's no shortage of sources, because courage and cowardice are the two kind of standard themes of world literature from time immemorial.
- [04:40]
Brett McKay
Yeah. And it's not just fiction or epics or things like that. Philosophers have spent a lot of time on courage.
- [04:49]
William Ian Miller
It has been an obsessive topic, not just among fighters and anxious kind of males, but it has been a constant theme among philosophers because it's very hard to get a fix on once you start to think about what is it? And do I require certain mental states? What mental state is the driver of courage? Can we figure it out and if you ask the people who we look at and say, now that's a real courageous person, what do they think? And they often don't think about it at all. They just say, I did what I had to do. Or they said, I was scared out of my wits the entire time. I don't understand why I'm being called courageous.
- [05:30]
Brett McKay
So, like I said, the title of your book is the Mystery of Courage. And you got that from a phrase written by a Civil War soldier named Abner Small who pondered the mystery of bravery.
- [05:41]
William Ian Miller
Bravery, right. You know, one of the really blessings of researching this book was reading hundreds of war memoirs. Some of them are just literary masterpieces. And these are people who would not have stuck a pen to paper but for trying to puzzle through their own performance during their war service. And if I could recommend to whoever your listeners are to get a book called the Road to Richmond, it's the title of this Abner Smalls memoir. He was a Union officer at Fredericksburg, at Antietam, and he turns out to be a brilliant writer and never would have written anything but for trying to come to terms with his war experience. So it comes from him, and it's just a powerful, moving memoir.
- [06:35]
Brett McKay
And what he does and what you do in this book, you know, these men who are writing about their performance in battle, they're grappling with, well, am I courageous?
- [06:46]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [06:46]
Brett McKay
And then when you think about it, as you said, we think we know what courage is, but when you start thinking about it, you really have to be like, wait a minute. Well, I. I felt scared, but I did it anyways. Is that courageous? Or. Or I didn't feel scared and I was able to do the thing. I mean, it's.
- [07:05]
William Ian Miller
Yeah. Are you supposed to feel the fear and then overcome it? Or are you supposed to get rid of the fear and not feel it at all? Or. And nobody thinks, if you think of a person who does objectively what would have been a dangerous thing and succeeds at it, but had no clue, was too stupid to know that there was anything dangerous about it. We don't think they're courageous. They didn't have any temptation to flee. They weren't under any stress because they were too stupid to discern the risk. We don't want to give it to just the stupid person who just kind of luckily does the right thing. So that you want some idea that you are in the zone of danger. Right. There's no way that courage doesn't have a complicated waltz or dance with fear. But how, I mean, is fear Supposed to sit on the sidelines, or are you supposed to just do a little kind of cha cha with it? Or what are you supposed to do? How's the fear supposed to be managed?
- [08:09]
Brett McKay
You also begin the book with this example that showcases how. Yeah. Once you think about courage, it's like, what is this exactly? And the example is this. It's the description of a good coward.
- [08:22]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [08:22]
Brett McKay
What can the good coward tell us about the mystery of courage?
- [08:27]
William Ian Miller
Yeah. Here is this. When you start reading these memoirs, you just run into these wonderful storytellers. Here is a guy, guy, writing about his Civil war experience about 30 years after the fact, and he describes a man in his unit whom he calls the good coward. He didn't think he was a good coward when he was in the war with this guy. He thought of him as just a plain old coward. But now, in reflecting on him 30 years later, he thinks that he might have been, in fact, the most courageous of it all. Here is what he did. He lines up for every battle, and once the bullets start flying and the guy next to him takes a hit, he turns and runs. He's ashamed. He comes back to camp maybe a day or two later, is miserable. He does all the grunt work for everyone. He's trying to make amends for every run. And then the next battle, he runs away again. But every time, he lines up, takes his steps forward until the guy next to him gets crunched, he manages to steel himself to do it the next time. So the guy who wrote this up, a guy named Robert Burdett, says, you know, now that I think about it, he might have been the most courageous of us all. Us young guys, we were just all hell bent for leather. We never thought about it at all. This guy had to overcome the most monstrous demons to line up each time and think he was going to do it this time. And yet he showed up again, suffered all the opprobrium that his mates gave him. It turned out, though, that a lot of them just understood him, that he was making a good effort and were kind to him. There's a sense that the author was not kind to him and is now making amends by writing this memoir 30 years later.
- [10:18]
Brett McKay
Yeah. So the guy had the courage to keep trying and trying and trying, keep trying.
- [10:23]
William Ian Miller
He keep trying. So like Tim o', Brien, many of your listeners will have read some of Tim o' Brien's work. Vietnam War vet. He wrote a memoir when he's just 23 years old called if I Die in a Combat Zone. And the whole book Is a desperate attempt to figure out what courage is and whether he managed okay and to come up with a theory that would describe. To make it possible for him to have delivered at least reasonably well, what he describes. He comes up with a theory he was terrorized the whole time. He would just feel his stomach caved in. He would just feel sick with nausea, panic, terror. And he said, I just knew I didn't deliver then, but I promised I would do better the next time. And so what he comes up with a theory is of averaging your performances over time. Some days you'll have it, some days you won't. And, you know, in the great epics like the Homeric epics and stuff like that, battles never lasted even one day. They lasted an hour or so before one side turned and ran. So the efforts that you had to muster up were every spring to get it together once or twice to deliver. But imagine yourself when the most hellish of all Wars, World War I. Imagine yourself in a battle that in some places on the Western front lasted four years. You were under constant shelling and sniping for four years. Well, then nobody makes it. Everybody finally runs out of courage. They go crazy.
- [12:09]
Brett McKay
You note that in the earliest discussions of courage from ancient philosophers, it was either placed first among virtues or no lower than third among the four cardinal virtues. Why has courage always been ranked so highly?
- [12:25]
William Ian Miller
I think one is the people who are writing are men. And of course, it's the most anxious concern about little boys growing up and stuff like that. That's one issue. But the standard one is the explanation that if you don't have courage, you don't have the space in which to exercise the gentler virtues like temperance, charity, prudence and stuff like that. It buys you the space where you can cultivate kind of leisure hours and more refined behaviors. You can think of it as the spiny outer shell of love. Can you imagine saying you love somebody and you won't go into a burning house to try and get them out? What does love mean without a certain amount of courage? Huh?
- [13:09]
Brett McKay
So courage protects love. Courage makes civilization and all the civilized virtues possible. And it creates the security where we can even think about the sort of softer pursuits of life.
- [13:19]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [13:20]
Brett McKay
Something you talk about in the book when trying to suss out the definition of courage is. Is that sometimes philosophers or people writing war memoirs or politicians or whatever, there seems to be a bit of self interest in how they define courage.
- [13:37]
William Ian Miller
You better believe it.
- [13:38]
Brett McKay
Yeah, tell us about that.
- [13:40]
William Ian Miller
You cannot believe how. I mean, there's just the Politics of courage, who gets to define it? So who qualifies? Well, in the old regime, of course, women couldn't even. It was all the words for courage were the word for man, virtue, veer Andre in Greek, for men. Even in Hebrew, the word for man is the word for courage. But it was only allowed to upper class men too, and not to slaves or to workers or to lower class men. So you have like definitions that are always kind of, let's say, favoring one group as against another. And so people fight over what is courage to get themselves to qualify. I mean there's a big debate right from the start. Although the philosopher Nietzsche made it into a big deal. But it's right there from the very start in the first writings about courage is whether the most proper courage is displayed on offense, that is in the charge, or whether it's displayed on defense, that is taking it, taken crap and not running. And as we moved into modern warfare where battles lasted months, taking it and not cracking became more the defining way of describing courage. But you know, it's funny, the battle of offense versus defense is constantly being still fought over, but now we end up in our country with the silliness of people thinking that if you invest in a Silicon Valley startup you're showing courage. I mean that's that. But that's a move. Everybody's trying to claim it for their own behaviors and some of them are just downright laughable.
- [15:25]
Brett McKay
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. So there's often been a class divide with courage. So you have the upper class guys who are like, you know, these lower class guys, you know, they're just brutes, they're thugs and you know, it's just the mean streets that made them tough. But that's not the same thing as courage. And then you got the lower class guys who are like, you know, look at these effect rich guys, these officer guys, you know, think so highly of themselves, but they're actually really soft and they're going to be cowards when the stuff actually hits the fan. And you just generally have different types of men each claiming that courage belongs to people, people who are like them. And we might popularly think of courage as belonging to a certain type. But the interesting thing you see in war histories is that you couldn't always tell from the type who was going to be courageous.
- [16:08]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, yeah. Do you know what? My dad was in heavy combat in World War II, saw a lot of action in the Pacific. He was the most, let's say non martial human being. On the planet. He was not into sports. He was not. He was just a sweet, decent man. And it turned out he was a good soldier. He turned into a creditable soldier. He got two bronze stars for certain rescue missions. He went on. It's funny, one of the things that is a frequent theme in a lot of the Civil War memoirs and in the World War I memoirs is that there was no predicting from social background or employment who would deliver, who would actually be the good soldiers. And sometimes it was the accountant and not the bar room brawler. And in fact, the letters home from soldiers always love to note anytime one of these street thugs or barroom brawler types cowered and ran, they probably cowered and ran no more than anybody else did. But the other soldiers like to note that when they did. But one of the things that the unit commanders kind of constantly refer to is how surprised they are at who delivers and who doesn't, that there's no kind of predicting or because of people have good days and bad days of counting on a person who basically is pretty good delivering all the time, or counting on a person who's pretty not good not delivering sometimes.
- [17:47]
Brett McKay
I mean, in this idea of offensive versus defensive courage, you make the point that as warfare changed from ancient warfare, where like you said, you know, a battle might last maybe an hour, you know, you did the charge, it was kind of a shoving match. And so you needed that offensive courage. But then as war changed to mechanized warfare and you, you had to just trench in and just endure. We started valorizing the courage of defense, of endurance, of endurance. But I, I still think there's. We still valorize, we still hold in high regard that offensive courage.
- [18:25]
William Ian Miller
Yes, we do. I would recommend people to read Tim o' Brien's little memoir, if I Die in a Combat Zone, because he says, you know, the charge, the charge, that's the thing, that's pure courage. But then he just like day in and day out, he's just starting to think it can't be just that. But it still holds this kind of emblem for us of, I think ultimately the real kind of just basic original conception of courage is you facing off against another guy whose eyes you can look into modern warfare. You never see the eyes of your enemy, except in the rarest circumstances, and usually only when they're prisoners. The eyes who are watching you and judging you in modern warfare are your mates eyes. And it's different when you're matching up courage against something else.
- [19:21]
Brett McKay
You talk about how Aristotle, when he was, you know, trying to figure out what courage is. He thought that courage requires higher reasoning and practical wisdom.
- [19:31]
William Ian Miller
Right.
- [19:31]
Brett McKay
So here's another example of, you know, kind of hoity toity philosopher guy maybe using a little bit of self interest to define courage.
- [19:39]
William Ian Miller
Right.
- [19:39]
Brett McKay
You're suspicious of that rendering of courage or seem to be suspicious of that rendering of courage.
- [19:45]
William Ian Miller
Well, I'm suspicious because the philosophers are always making like unless you bring reason to the fray and know exactly when you should expend your courage only for valued goals and get the cost benefit analysis. Exactly right. You're just being, oh, either an insensate dumbbell, like a Celt in Aristotle's view, or a ferocious lion who just is just all fury. They want to bring reason and certain kinds of, let's say, mental refinements into the are arena. And I am always suspicious of that. And Tim o' Brien again is another wonderful example. There's a dying marine out in the mud and somebody hollers for a medic. And in heavy firefighting, this medic runs out and ministers to this dying marine holding up a plasma bag, an ideal target. So when he comes back, o' Brien says, you know, a manifest action of courage and actually a useless action because the poor guy was dead anyway or going to die. And just a noble act, but also just doing his duty. And the medic just says, well, I don't know, somebody collared medic. And I just guess I ran. So Tim o' Brien is kind of upset with the lack of, kind of intellectualizing of the demand made on this medic.
- [21:14]
Brett McKay
Like you said, you researched and wrote about the Icelandic sagas. Yeah, I don't imagine those Vikings really intellectualizing courage all that much.
- [21:23]
William Ian Miller
Well, you know, they had. There's standard, interesting little discussions about when you pick your moments to fight and when you eat crap and just sit back and wait. And they have a saying that says only the slave avenges himself immediately, but the coward never does. What that saying is meant to do is saying you do not waste the opportunity to have the ball in your court to make the next move to take revenge. You don't waste it by hitting back right away. You make the other side stew, wondering when you're going to hit back, but eventually you have to hit back or you become a coward. In that world, forgiveness is very hard to make into a virtue because it looks so much like cowardice. But managing your time between when you take the crap and then when you avenge it is your time to make the other side a nervous wreck. And so, you know, there's all these Kind of complicated. They talk about it. They talk about, don't be a hothead, don't hit back, eat that one. And they have a kind of a standard rule that if you avenge every offense, you have a very short life. Sometimes you just shrug your shoulders and say, it's not worth responding to.
- [22:45]
Brett McKay
So it sounds like the Vikings did have a bit of Aristotelian practical wisdom.
- [22:49]
William Ian Miller
They had a ton, I think, much more than the philosophers nowadays do, because they lived in that world. They truly bore the risks, and they're very smart about it. It's very interesting in those societies as to what constitutes fair play. Are you supposed to give your opponent a fair chance or notice? In Hamlet, our probably most famous revenge story, Hamlet comes up behind Claudius and he's praying, and Claudius doesn't know Hamlet's behind him with his knife pulled to stab him in the back. But Hamlet hears he's praying and thought, oh, no, if I kill him now, his soul goes to heaven. Hamlet wants to make sure his uncle goes to hell, but he shows no, not even the least bit of moral problem in stabbing him in the back. So the point is, you take your revenge. You don't have to offer fair odds.
- [23:48]
Brett McKay
This reminds me of this idea of fairness. It reminds me of. I think of Odysseus and Achilles. So sometimes Odysseus gets kind of portrayed as like the not courageous guy, because he's wily and sneaky, but he did some courageous things.
- [24:03]
William Ian Miller
Oh, he sure did. He sure did. But there's constant battle about, you know, whether you can win by trickery or whether you're supposed to just win by macho kind of your force against their force. But Montaigne, the great French essayist, writes, nobody says we can't take advantage of our enemy's stupidity just as well as our enemy's physical weakness. Yeah, right. You know, and since 90% of warfare is about trying to fool the other side as to what your alignments are, how many troops you have, which units they are, and so on and so forth. So trickery is just part of the game too.
- [24:47]
Brett McKay
Oftentimes, when we think about, okay, is this person courageous? We typically talk about, well, if you're courageous, you'll be courageous across all domains.
- [24:58]
William Ian Miller
Yeah. And that's just not true.
- [24:59]
Brett McKay
It's not true. Yeah. I've seen that in my own life. In my own life, there's certain domains where I feel like I'm pretty courageous.
- [25:05]
William Ian Miller
But then there are other ones. Absolutely.
- [25:06]
Brett McKay
I'm not.
- [25:07]
William Ian Miller
And I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I went to a working class high school, and there are the tough guys and then there are the little, you know, weenies like me. And they would. The tough guys turned out to be remarkably generous and letting me alone, because there was one or two domains in which I. I showed less fear than they did, and it was in drag racing, for some strange reason. So I was willing to crash a car and die before they were. And so they cut me slack in other domains where I was not very. Where I was just a downright coward, like in barroom brawls or something like that. And they were actually kind of generous in their attributions. And you know what, it's interesting. In the war memoirs, there's some people who are totally courageous and cool under artillery bombardment, as opposed to some who just completely collapse in terror under bombardment. Then there are some who can't take rifle fire and some people who are completely relaxed under rifle fire. But no one is cool under every way of dying, under every weapon. And there were these studies to try and map on with soldiers understanding of the dangerousness of a weapon, that is, how really lethal it was. And it's frighteningness. And you would think that the frighteningness and dangerousness should map on, but it doesn't. So, like, Stuka dive bombers scared the crap out of people, and they were very unlethal. It was just the noise they made that terrorized everybody. But there are people who just preferred rifle fire to artillery fire and people who could handle artillery fire but couldn't handle rifle fire. And it's just like for each weapon or for each kind of demand made on you, you needed a courage of its own sort to deal with it. So there wasn't one kind of. Unless you were a crazy person, there wasn't one kind of seamless virtue that could handle it all.
- [27:13]
Brett McKay
Yeah. So Montaigne said, a man who's truly brave will always be brave in all occasions. And. Yeah, I think Montaigne's wrong there. Yeah. Yeah. There's some examples where you see this. I remember reading about a boxer. I forget who it was. It was a professional boxer, and in a lot of ways, he was a really tough guy, tough demeanor, a real bruiser. And he could get into a ring with another guy who could possibly kill him. So he's courageous in that way. But when a handyman or, you know, service people came to his house to fix stuff, he was actually terrified to talk to them. So boxing didn't scare him, but small talk like that did.
- [27:46]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, there's all kinds of Funny stories like that. But look at these Greek heroes. So Achilles and those guys, if they heard a thunderstorm, they were all cowering and shaking. They couldn't bear thunderstorms. I mean, it was just that terrors are even culture specific as to what will be considered a terrifying thing. But a constant thing that is made in literature is like a warrior who will face like non stop, you know, bombardment, but can't get up the nerve to ask a woman out on a date.
- [28:18]
Brett McKay
If right, you think they should be able to do it, but they, they can't.
- [28:22]
William Ian Miller
They can't.
- [28:24]
Brett McKay
What's interesting about your book, I mean all the examples we've been talking about so far have been physical courage or martial courage. And your book primarily focuses on physical or martial courage.
- [28:37]
William Ian Miller
Right.
- [28:37]
Brett McKay
And people today, since we don't, a lot of people don't face circumstances where they have to display physical courage.
- [28:45]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, right.
- [28:45]
Brett McKay
We talk a lot about moral courage, but is moral courage without physical courage really courage?
- [28:53]
William Ian Miller
I don't feel I make a claim in the book. The standard moral courage is that kind of stand up and meeting type of courage to take and express a decent kind of a moral unpopular view to risk being mocked and laughed at, sneered at, howled at, to state what most people will recognize is an honorable, decent view. But can you imagine if that person could be backed off from stating that view if somebody just shot him a look and said after the meeting, man, you're going to deal with me. And then he sat down and didn't say a thing. So moral courage needs a certain amount of not being able to be scared off. Your ability to make your stand, you still have to be able to back it up. So I'm not sure that there's a coherent, consistent distinction between moral and physical courage in the writings like U.S. grant, Ulysses Grant is a wonderful, brilliant memoir he wrote when he was dying, kind of sneers at moral courage, kind of understanding that without the physical behind it, it's just not there. You know, there's another thing that kind of is interesting too. Generals will say that there's no shortage of courage that they see in their men in battle. That in fact courage seems to be quite common. But then you get into certain domains where it's rare beyond belief. And those tend to be the moral domains standing up for right in an unjust regime or something like that. Incurring risks to your job and your reputation by taking an unpopular but clearly morally right position. Who knows?
- [30:47]
Brett McKay
That's interesting. So it sounds like moral courage doesn't mean a lot if someone isn't willing to take on physical risk to back it up. But it also may be harder to exercise moral courage because in some ways it's easier to face physical danger than the social pressure to conform. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors so I've been sleeping on the Leesa Superior Chill Hybrid mattress for almost a year now and I can honestly say it was a solid upgrade. I tend to sleep hot. I move around a lot at night, so I need something that wouldn't trap heat or leave me feeling twisted up in the morning. The Superichl Hybrid mattress from Leesa has this heat dissipating quilted top plus pressure relieving foam and springs underneath so you get that comfortable cushion with real support. It feels cool when you lie down and it stays that way throughout the night. I wake up feeling aligned instead of stiff. Leesa mattresses are designed and assembled in the United States and they come with free shipping, easy returns and a 120 night sleep trial. And they donate thousands of mattresses each year to people in need. Go to Leesa.com right now for 20% off mattresses during their spring sale, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code AOM. This is exclusive for AOM listeners. That's Leesa.com L E-E S A dot com. You'll get 20% off your mattresses during their spring sale. Plus if you use code AOM, you'll get an extra $50 off. Show your support for our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. That's Lisa.com promo code AOM Duck AI a new product from DuckDuckGo solves a problem I think a lot of people have started to notice you're using AI to chat for useful stuff, work, questions, ideas, random things you're curious about. And every once in a while you pause and think, do I really want to be typing this in here? That hesitation is exactly why DuckDuckGo built Duck AI. You go to Duck AI and you can chat privately with the same AIs you might already be using, like ChatGPT or Claude. But your data stays yours. Your chats aren't used for tracking, training, or profiling you. There's no account required and it's completely free. You just go to Duck AI and start using it. Or you can use it inside the DuckDuckGo app where AI is always optional. It's a straightforward idea. Useful AI without the privacy trade off. If you want to use AI without giving up your privacy. Visit Duck AI Manliness today. That's Duck D U C K AI Manliness. A private way to chat with AI from DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and private. One of the things I like about spring is opening the windows, getting outside more, working on stuff around the house. But right on schedule every year the bugs show up too. And for me it's ants. And for some reason, they always show up in the same bathroom every spring without fail. You see one, then a few more, and you know where it's going to go. If you don't deal with it, it's just going to be an infestation. Last year I used pesti and it took care of it. Pesi sends you a kit with everything you need. A sprayer, the treatment, gloves, simple instructions. And it's the same pro grade pesticide the professionals use. It's customized based on your location, the season and the bugs you're dealing with. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes to apply around the outside of the house. No scheduling appointments, no having someone to come inside. And after that, the ants were gone. Haven't had to think about it since. It's simple, it works, and it's a lot more affordable than hiring out. Get bugs out of your house with Pesti. Go to pesti.commanliness for an extra 10% off your order. That's pesti.comP-E-S-T-I-E.com manliness for an extra 10 percent off your order. Check it out today. And now back to the show. Let's go back. Earlier you mentioned something about how courage, since you know, the beginning of Western civilization and you see this in other cultures as well, courage has been entwined with manhood. So like a lot of the words the ancients used to describe men were the same words for courage. So, you know, there was virtus, which was Latin for manliness. We're yeah, man, that means courage. Andrea, that's Greek. That also is man also means courage. And then the word in Hebrew for man is the same one for courage. So why the connection between courage and manhood?
- [34:52]
William Ian Miller
Do you think it is the ultimate. It's the image of the male as dominator, as protector, as the ruler in many cases, although in small communities it was the job of the men to kind of do the fighting and the women were to manage the home. So part of it is constructing an entire ideology of training men up to be tougher than they were likely to be in the interests of the defense of family and the community. An anthropologist who did his field work in New guinea among those violent, violent New guinea tribes, which are something else kind of graph the amount of intensive labor it took to raise up little boys to be violently death seeking that it takes much more social energy and work to raise up a bunch of blood feuders than it does to raise up a bunch of accountants. So it's not like it's not labor intensive from a child rearing point of view. And then you might ask yourself, who does the child rearing? In the sagas, it's the women. So the women are the ones who inculcate those manly virtues. I think they might cynically think this is a wonderful way to handle our men. We make them able to protect us and we make them able to get knocked off.
- [36:23]
Brett McKay
I mean, you even see this with the Spartans, right. So the Spartan mothers were famous for telling their sons or their husbands, you know, either come back on your shield or carrying it.
- [36:33]
William Ian Miller
It's like, it might be interesting, actually. Who invents this male ideology? Is it men or is it women? And there's all kinds of cultures in the North African kind of Berber and Arabic cultures, it's the women who keep score of how the men are doing and their feuds and fights, and they compose mocking songs of the losers. And in the sagas, the taunt their men for backing down from a fight or for not taking revenge.
- [37:08]
Brett McKay
You call this, you know, women keeping score about how men are doing in the courage department, you call it the female gaze.
- [37:15]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:16]
Brett McKay
I mean, we see this. I mean, you talk about. We see sort of this female gaze in African cultures and then also with the Icelandic Vikings.
- [37:24]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, but.
- [37:24]
Brett McKay
But you also saw this in World War I. The women, you know, keeping check on the courage of the men. So there were women in World War I. What they would do if they saw some guy who was fighting age and he wasn't out there in the battlefield? They would get a feather and like, put it on him.
- [37:40]
William Ian Miller
Yeah. Hand him a white feather. They would go around the streets of London handing any male they saw in civilian dress who was a warrior age, a white feather. And then, of course, that was. The women were out there shaming the men. In the memoirs of among the many, some of the guys who are just home on leave and badly wounded will get white feathers. I mean, that's when the women are making a mistake, right? Yeah.
- [38:09]
Brett McKay
So this is interesting. So this idea, you know, of men valorizing courage. Your interesting point here, or interesting argument is that maybe the women are the ones who inculcated this culture of courage.
- [38:22]
William Ian Miller
They certainly. It wasn't a case where the women are sitting back and saying, oh, the men and their crazy views of courage. The women were the ones who are inculcating it into the little kids in many of these cultures and who are wholeheartedly behind it.
- [38:36]
Brett McKay
And I think it's interesting, this whole idea of courage being entwined with masculinity or manhood. I think a lot of us in the 21st century might think, oh yeah, we're over that, you know, we're more enlightened. But I still think there's a vestige of it in men today. I mean, I think, you know, if you call a guy a coward or a chicken, they're going to be like,
- [38:57]
William Ian Miller
oh, wait a minute here, I got,
- [38:58]
Brett McKay
we got to step outside. We're going to take care of this.
- [39:00]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, you can't. It's still the worst insults. I mean, you. And just think of how much growing up as a little boy, the day to day just playing were often courage contests. Who could jump off the highest, you know, wall or the roof, or who could go steal strawberries from Mrs. Jo or. I mean, they're all tests of undertaking risk. And once you showed yourself able to do that, you only bought yourself a little bit of space for that day. You weren't a weenie, but then the next day there'd be some little test like a boxing match or a wrestling match or something like that.
- [39:41]
Brett McKay
Yeah, with masculinity or manhood. The rents due every day.
- [39:44]
William Ian Miller
The rents do every day. One law student said that the horrors of the anxiety of men in the sex act, where men have. If they fail, it's obvious to the woman. Yeah, so maybe it's. That is the deepest core anxiety. I'm saying this tongue in cheek, but it's certainly one of the core anxieties about manhood.
- [40:08]
Brett McKay
Something that's interesting to observe with the genderedness of courage is that even though courage has traditionally been associated with masculinity, women can be courageous too. And something you talk about is that women have historically been associated with the defensive side of courage. So taking pain, taking the pain of childbirth, enduring hardship. People have often said that women are actually better than men at defensiveness, courage, but it's still not typically part of a woman's, you know, self identity. Like for a man, being called a coward is one of the worst insults. But if you call a woman a chicken, they're probably not going to be that offended or want to fight you.
- [40:49]
William Ian Miller
That's Right.
- [40:50]
Brett McKay
So I think we've explored some of the cultural ideas around courage and, you know, it's muddled and it's kind of like what's going on there.
- [40:58]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [40:59]
Brett McKay
But let's return to something we were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation and get more into the psychology of courage and its relationship to fear. Do you think courage. Courage requires an internally courageous stance? Or can you be courageous while being terrified? As long as you act courageously, My
- [41:17]
William Ian Miller
view is that you're lucky if you somehow get rid of the fear and just do what you have to do. But are you going to think that anybody is. Even I would think somebody would be more courageous who is just overcome with fear, who still manages, in spite of it, to do what needs to be done. One of the things that's very interesting in a lot of these war memoirs from manifestly brave guys who were decorated, there was no doubt about them delivering under fire. Many of them do not understand why they got the medal, other than that they just somehow managed to do something. They don't know how they did it. All they can remember was that they were scared out of their wits. So they think my internal state, scared out of my wits was what we think of as the cowardly state that I ended up doing. The right thing happened by kind of accident. My body was on automatic pilot. We get the reverse. And what were common claims in the Civil War of a guy failing to go forward because his legs give out, weak legs. And Lincoln was famous for pardoning those guys who were brought up and court martialed to be shot for not advancing for cases of weak legs. Where as far as the internal state of the guy going forward, he wants to go forward. He is trying to keep up with the guys, but his legs give out. So his body revels against his courageous intentions or his dutiful contentions. What do you do then when the body just refuses to go along for the ride? Although your brain and your psyche is gung ho for your body to go along for the ride, but it doesn't. You know, I've been in my. My whole life a motorcyclist. I've ridden bikes. Now I'm going to be 80 in a couple of weeks. And I've had more near death experiences in the last five or six years than in the whole life up until then. And it's not because my reflexes are slower, which they are. It's because the drivers have gotten worse. And they're all texting, they're just texting. They're not paying attention to the road and putting my life at risk. Well, every once in a while you get put in a situation where you're dead, you're dead, you can't believe the situation you're in and something just takes over. My body took over on automatic pilot and did probably when I got through the mess, the only thing that could have been done to gotten out of it alive. Did I know what I was doing? No. My body in the exact opposite of weak legs took over when my mind was utterly in a state of terror and blank. So the body still functioned. Did the only thing when I got back when I would come out the other end and be gig, I burst out in the giggles because I couldn't believe how close a call it was. I couldn't believe when I thought about it that I did the only thing that could have been done to escape. So there you get a kind of an anti matter of the weak legs phenomenon, right.
- [44:29]
Brett McKay
So you're terrified, but your body somehow took over and did the thing that
- [44:34]
William Ian Miller
you were supposed the body took over and did the right thing. That is what the military actually came to think would be gained by the constant drilling, non stop drill, drill, drill, so that the body would behave automatically when the brain was just cashiered out in a state of terror.
- [44:55]
Brett McKay
And again, it makes you ask yourself, was that courageous if you're just like a automaton?
- [45:01]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, that's. See you don't. The assumption that most military leaders had is that all armies will eventually turn tail and run. That what's being contested between two armies is their fund of courage. It's kind of a moral battle and one side will cave and one won't. Eh, I'm not sure that's exactly right because one of the things that happened in the Civil War was that people started to see that it didn't matter. Courage just didn't matter. It's which side had the biggest guns and the most men. That the amount of, you know, bravery might have a little, nice little point here, but ultimately it was just the sheer amount of material brought to bear that was the difference. The courage didn't make the difference in a battle. Now of course you come up with some counter examples, but in a large sense it's true.
- [45:55]
Brett McKay
What role does shame and honor play in courage?
- [45:59]
William Ian Miller
Oh, it's the name of the game, right? Aristotle. And some will say that courageous deeds done because you would be unwilling to bear the shame of not delivering. Being called a coward, being just mocked is not the perfect courage. It's like you're more scared of being shamed in public than you are of getting killed. I just think that's a total misrepresentation. Every epic hero fails to be courageous, then by that measure, the shame of being seen a coward is what makes many men deliver. And there's funny little saying that I found in the 17th century. More men would be cowardly if they only had courage enough. And it's the sign of like being driven. The fear of being disgraced drives them to go forward in battle when what they want to do is run. It's complicated. I don't see how you get courage without the honor based, shame driven aspect to it. I just don't understand how it's psychologically possible except for a few very rare, rare people.
- [47:10]
Brett McKay
It also raises the point that courage isn't just an individual virtue. It really is a social virtue. Like you have to have an audience or an imagined audience to really think about, well, I'm going to be courageous because, I mean, it's hard to be courageous when you're by yourself.
- [47:28]
William Ian Miller
Yes, you better believe it. I think the one true test of whether you are courageous is whether you would go through the action when you are safely not seen. You could actually walk back and nobody would think that you shirk the duty. You would be home free. So you're totally alone with no eyes watching you of your own side. And will you still do the thing you're supposed to do? If you do it, then that is pure, pure courage. Lonely courage.
- [48:04]
Brett McKay
Yeah. I mean, if I look at my life when, you know, I've encountered having to muster up courage to do something, particularly when I was a kid, I remember I was with a bunch of boy scouts and we were doing cliff dives. Awesome, really high cliffs. And I couldn't do it, but everyone else was. I was terrified. And the thing that finally got me to do it was I just was thinking, I can't leave this place and be the only guy that didn't jump off that cliff. Like, I wanted to avoid shame and I wanted honor. But for me it was great because I actually did this thing and I felt really great afterwards. And then after I did it, I was able to just jump off this cliff over and over again. I wasn't scared anymore.
- [48:43]
William Ian Miller
Of course the shame motivated you to do it. I don't understand how most of us even do remotely courageous things unless we're too ashamed not to.
- [48:53]
Brett McKay
Yeah, it's the fear of cowardice.
- [48:55]
William Ian Miller
The fear of cowardice or the fear of being seen. Now that's why the eyes? Will you ever blame yourself if alone for your failure? Well, you will. But we're never as hard on ourselves as mocking others will be hard on us.
- [49:11]
Brett McKay
Is there a tipping point where shame driven or a fear of cowardice driven courage is no longer virtuous courage.
- [49:21]
William Ian Miller
Well, you know, I deal with this in a chapter talking about the Japanese performance in World War II, where death before dishonor, which is a rare, A rare achievement for which medals are awarded in the west was just the norm in Japan. I mean, whole entire 40,000 men, contingents on the islands Saipan refused to be taken prisoner and all got killed. Compliance in the west of those kind of things, just impossible. You don't see it. It. So is it that that courage, that death before dishonor become too easy for them? You wonder the cultural pressure to conform, the cultural shaming, culture so powerful that everybody suicided, is it a virtue then? Oh God, imagine the peer pressure in the Japanese culture doesn't mean they didn't make great soldiers. Man, oh man, did they make great soldiers. But you wonder if the virtue, it didn't become too easy for them. You know, the problem, a very difficult problem. When you see discussions of suicide, people say, oh, that was cowardly. Whereas people who say that, I think are wondering whether they would have the nerve to do it. Yeah.
- [50:43]
Brett McKay
That reminds me of Bill Maher, the talk show host. He got into a lot of hot water right after 911 when he said it took courage for the terrorists to fly a plane into a building.
- [50:58]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [50:58]
Brett McKay
And I remember when I heard that, I was thinking about, well, yeah, you know, like I couldn't do that.
- [51:02]
William Ian Miller
Well, I couldn't do it, but could you if you thought you were going to heaven, if you actually firmly, a 1.0 belief, thought you were going to heaven. So I always wonder whether the courage of, let's say a suicide bomber is indeed same with the early Christian martyrs. If you think that you're guaranteed and really believe it without any doubt. Although I wonder if martyrdom isn't because you do doubt and you want to prove that you're punishing yourself for doubting. But if you really don't doubt, then you're just doing the rational thing and you're rating of values and payouts. I don't know. Again, these are wonderfully complicated topics for which there are no easy answers.
- [51:43]
Brett McKay
Yeah. And another question that arises with the terrorist example and the reason people were so upset about Bill Maher's comments is that we typically think of courage as having courage for a Morally good cause.
- [51:56]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [51:56]
Brett McKay
And that's what we valorize. But does the cause need to be good for courage to be real or is courage a morally neutral virtue?
- [52:05]
William Ian Miller
No, you know, that's one of the problems that people have according their enemies, courage. I mean, take the case of the monstrously evil Nazi regime. There is no doubt that many of those soldiers were utterly courageous and very good soldiers. So you're. Unfortunately, with courage you have to admit that it can be employed for good or bad purposes.
- [52:31]
Brett McKay
I think we mentioned this earlier, but this idea that I thought was really interesting, this idea that courage is finite, that you only have so much of it.
- [52:39]
William Ian Miller
Yeah.
- [52:40]
Brett McKay
You talk about in this book. I think there's many people who study this in the military or they sort of observed it. Is that soldiers, right. You know, fresh on the battlefield, they weren't that great. But if they're there for a little bit, then that's where you see the most courage displayed. And then if you're there for a few months, like you're pretty much useless and need to get off the battlefield and go back to the camp.
- [53:02]
William Ian Miller
Yeah. The amazing thing is they did. Robert Graves, in his wonderful World War memoir, Goodbye to all that puts it at, he says roughly at about the six month level a soldier is totally worthless. And especially the young lieutenants and officers, they're totally worthless. They're at their best after about three weeks of getting their feet wet and then for about six more weeks and then they just start going downhill fast. The US sent in people after the troops in the Normandy invasion and actually did testings and interviews with soldiers and they found that the useful life of a soldier and intensive comb was at most about 30 days before deterioration set in. And then at about 60 days they just became what the GIs called. They had the 2000 year stare, that is they just became zombied. So you had under incessant combat courage levels where just six months is about it. At some cases if they're given pulled out of lines and given rest, soldiers could make it maybe 10 months. And that was about it. So starting in the Great war, World War I, people started to talk about having fixed funds, a fixed amount of courage, and you try not to draw on your account too often because it'll just be run down to bankruptcy. And then you end up in a vegetative state and basically post traumatic stress disorder or what they called shell shock back then.
- [54:33]
Brett McKay
I mean, here's another thing that muddles the moral calculus of courage. And you talk about this in the book. It's the factors of intelligence, expertise and experience.
- [54:44]
William Ian Miller
You know, it's just like, who's tougher? Who's the person who has more courage? The guy who's an actual trained swordsman, who, who's a, you know, Olympic gold medalist in sabers, or the clown against him, who's never picked up a sword in his life and still fights him. I mean, who's more courageous? The guy with skill. His courage isn't even brought into play. I suppose it was brought into play during the period when he was learning how to be a good fencer. But skilled people get their courage devalued. Think about the people who do bomb, you know, defanging bombs. Obviously they are trained to do it, but the risk level is so high that just a fly landing on their finger or something like that could, could it could detonate the charge. I don't know. With certain kinds of expertise will devalue the courage that it takes. But certain ones, it just seems to take a lot of guts, no matter when and how trained you are at it.
- [55:48]
Brett McKay
Yeah, and in terms of the, the example of the bomb diffuser, like the skill of being able to do that allowed them to display more courage. Like you had to be skilled to use the bomb so you could display that curve to actually diffuse the bomb. But I think other philosophers have talked about this intersection between skill and expertise and courage. I think it was Montaigne, he talked about people who are skilled swordsmen require less courage than the unskilled swordsman because you have that expertise so you know you can win.
- [56:18]
William Ian Miller
Well, yeah, Montaigne goes with that. He just says that in fact, in duels you get this crazy behavior of the French aristocratic class where the side who gets the choice of weapons will pick a weapon that he knows he's not as good with as the other guy, just to prove that he's more courageous. In other words, handicapping himself purposely so that he's testing his courage rather than his swordsmanship. And you know, then the thing about intelligence is how do we measure kind of intelligence? One of the ways is that smart people are able to discern risk. They're mathematically more astute. They will discern odds and risk at quicker and more accurate levels than dumber people. And that will tend to make them more risk averse in situations in which a dumb person doesn't see any risk. So the smart person looks like the coward. And of course, in fact, they often are because they're seeing too much risk
- [57:17]
Brett McKay
in a world, again, it's hard to figure out, like who's being courageous here again and again? It's that mystery of courage.
- [57:25]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [57:26]
Brett McKay
So I'm curious, after spending years thinking about this book and working on it, what do you want someone to do with the unsettledness of courage that this book explores?
- [57:38]
William Ian Miller
Be more modest about how we ascribe it and when we do and when we don't. But also I think kind of aspirationally, it's good to want to be courageous, and it's good to try and do those things which you can without cheating and without great inflation. Think that other people, maybe you are not the best person to make the call, will say, nice, nice, good work.
- [58:09]
Brett McKay
One thing you argue in the book is that modern middle class life rarely demands real courage from us. You know, the type of courage we've been talking about, this sort of physical martial courage of, you know, being like, I might die. So we've kind of trivialized the word. We call, you know, we call it courageous to, you know, stick to a diet or start a business or maybe reveal an embarrassing secret about ourselves. I mean, we do things like, you know, bungee jumping or skydiving to practice courage. So it's sort of like simulations of courage, the ancient courage. Do you think something's been lost when a civilization stops regularly asking its members to be genuinely brave?
- [58:57]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, something's lost, sure. We end up with the hedonistic kind of culture we have. Something definitely is lost. You know, it's funny because Adam Smith, like the guru of modern capitalism, was very, very nervous about the fact that wealth would make the people indolent. They would no longer be courageous. They would just be kind of, you know, gluttons and pleasure seekers. And so he joined a militia and drilled every weekend, marched, of course, he never saw any combat, but he just felt that you had to prepare because even that prompted a kind of discipline. But he was very nervous that that wealth that he promoted would, in fact have a real moral cost. And the cost would be in courage. There'd be less of it. And so you get all this kind of, you know, extreme sports and stuff like that, where people are desperate to find situations where they can increase the risk levels in their life, but still pretty safe risk levels. There's not somebody sitting behind a loophole shooting at you. Right.
- [60:08]
Brett McKay
Maybe one of the mysteries of courage is what happens to a society when people don't have to exercise much courage anymore. And, like, whether we can still train up those capacities somehow in the absence of immediate threat. Well, Bill, this has been a great conversation. We covered a lot of ground here. This has been, this has been really interesting.
- [60:28]
William Ian Miller
Very good questions. You were very prepared. Thank you very much for having me. And thank you for doing such a professional job with this.
- [60:36]
Brett McKay
Yeah, thanks so much, Bill. It's been a pleasure.
- [60:38]
William Ian Miller
Yeah, thank you.
- [60:40]
Brett McKay
My guest today was William Ian Miller. He's the author of the book the Mystery of Courage. It's available on Amazon.com check out our shownotes at AWIM is Courage where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that me reminds wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast. If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast player that you use. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think gets something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay remind listen podcast, but put what you've heard into action. Hey, before you go, here's one more episode to consider. In episode number 716, we dig into a paradox. How do you make your life easier without becoming passive? It's all about clearing friction, choosing your battles wisely, and crafting habits that help you move forward with less drag. You can find it at AOM is Effortless. That's AOM is Effortless. A lot of great actionable insights in this episode. Check it out today.