Courage

I have stated a few times over the years that courage is the easiest virtue to imitate, yet it remains in short supply.  I have just as often repented of the first half of that statement.  All the virtues can be imitated. Shame, social pressure, and pride have all been used to make us look better than we are. Courage is a virtue that is unnoticed until it is suddenly the main one needed.  It is therefore more subject to imitations in times of need.  Daring to do things that might have high cost can be defined as courage, but can also be defined as stupidity.  That's what makes like difficult.

Yet if no virtue comes naturally to us and can only be learned, then pretending is the only way forward. Imitation may be fairly called discipline, especially in retrospect, after the habit is set.  Those in authority to teach the virtues often rely on precisely those imitations - shame, social pressure, and pride - to teach the real thing.  All that may come down to awareness of what is happening and some humility about how we got there.

All well and good, and it is not merely theory, but what we have observed throughout our lives.  We see where any virtue is present and where it is lacking in ourselves, our children and in those around us.

Except the whole thing falls apart when we also observe that many have had virtue demonstrated to them and taught to them for years yet seem to have learned nothing.  Some can be taught and others cannot. There is a problem reading Aristotle or Aquinas or any teacher of virtue that they may not see themselves.  They cannot help but write only to those who will listen.  They think they are writing to all people, and the durability of their wisdom across time and place reinforces this idea that their wisdom is universal.  But it is not universal.  It was not in their own day and is not universal in any other.

I am reminded of a frequent argument I get into online, of how much better schools were in the Good Olde Days, which I contend is not so.  I am answered in anecdotes about how terrible things are now, and sometimes even statistics of how little students know.  I don't much disagree with that part. But students (and adults) didn't know all that much in 1970 either. The other half of those arguments is the remembering of what schools were like years ago as a comparison to now.  There are two problems with this, either one of which is enough to discredit the premise.  First, the sample is so thoroughly biased as to be useless.  The people who are going online to a general-topic site to discuss the history of American education (unless they are themselves educators with a professional/financial interest), even in an informal and anecdotal way, are going to be much smarter than average.  This means that their siblings, cousins, and friends in their school years were generally smarter as well.  How many dropouts do they think are browsing around Maggie's Farm or Ann Althouse prepared to discuss what their 5th-grade math curriculum was like? I have heard friends live, and seen many more online, say things like "I think students were more focused and respectful of authority when we were in school.  They wanted to get ahead, so they took things more seriously."  They didn't go to Straw School in Manchester.  My high school was de facto tracked, because if you took Algebra I, a foreign language other than French, and either Early Ages or Earth Science as a freshman, there were only going to be a few English I classes you could be scheduled into.

You didn't see those other students.  Some of us knew them anyway for a variety of reasons, but they were different worlds.

Second, out memories are poor, for similar reasons.  The personal accidents of our social circle loom larger, for the reasons above.  But we also remake our memories in the service of the stories we want to tell ourselves. Our certainty that we have got it right, replete with examples of great chemistry teachers and smart girlfriends we had comes close to a belief in Middle- Earth.

That was a bit of a digression, but I pull it back now to the discussion of Aristotle and courage or other virtues.  The people discussing Aristotle and virtues  this late in the day. wondering whether such things can be taught and reflecting over their own experience, are simply not a representative sample.  Aristotle and Aquinas and others writing about virtue, discipline, and courage may have had every intention of writing for and about humankind in general.  However hard they try to stand aloof and view the human condition from 30,000', they can't.

I suppose I am just reverting to priors, which I so often deplore in others, but the great writers about virtue have not escaped the influences of the entire culture surrounding their readers - and they have not escaped the influences of genetics.  While it is true that the young men of elite culture have long been educated in these virtues, often to no avail, and where social rise has been permitted, those of the "lesser" classes have sometimes learned the lessons quite well.  I don't see that as evidence of anything but that elite culture correlates with ability, but never exactly, and in many cases not all that well. Americans (and historically, the Chinese) have done better at that than most cultures, and it has served us well. I believe virtue can be taught, mostly because the wise of many cultures have insisted this is so.  They may be wrong, but I'd prefer to take my risk in their direction.  Yet I do go against them anyway.  I believe that all humans can be taught some wisdom, and over many years, perhaps even a fair bit of wisdom. But generally, men end up about where they started.