The Soul of Cowardice

It seems odd, even unpatriotic, to speak of cowardice on a day meant to honor the men and women who have served in the American military. But then, as history has shown, it is never a good time to speak of cowardice.

Plato’s “Laches” shows how it is typically shunted aside. The dialogue mentions cowardice a couple of times in relation to the main subject, courage, and then about halfway through Socrates asks, “Then what are cowardice and courage? This is what I wanted to find out.” Much more about courage follows; cowardice is not mentioned again. Kierkegaard probably paid more attention to cowardice than any other philosopher — and one of his main themes is how it evades our attention, and how we evade it. “There must be something wrong with cowardice,” he wrote, “since it is so detested, so averse to being mentioned….” If it ever appeared in “its true form” we would banish it from our lives — “for who would choose to dwell with this wretchedness?” But cowardice is much too cowardly — too clever and slippery for that, says Kierkegaard. It sinks deep in the soul and cloaks itself in more appealing clothes — those of humility, to name an obvious example, but also, according to Kierkegaard, common sense, intelligence, and even pride.

A much more recent example of cowardice’s evasiveness comes from the law professor and author William Ian Miller, a specialist in writing about the negative. After publishing two books in the 1990s — “Humiliation” and “The Anatomy of Disgust” — he set out to write one about cowardice, to complete this trilogy of human baseness. He could not do it.

His intended subject “gave way,” he wrote — “that’s what cowardice always does.” The book Miller wound up publishing was “The Mystery of Courage” — the lone positive title in his oeuvre.

It is not just cowardice that evades our attention.  Cowards do, too. Literature gives us striking exemplars on occasion, anti-heroes like Falstaff, but try to think of a famous historical coward and you may find that there is no such thing. The label of coward is nowadays often reserved for our most feared and hated enemies, who carry out deadly violent attacks on civilians. Many called the 9/11 attackers cowards. The Boston Marathon bombers were branded as cowardly, too. More recently, the killing of a soldier guarding the National War Memorial in Ottawa was seen, as one politician put it, as a “cowardly act designed to strike at the very heart of our democracy.” Were these acts cowardly? After 9/11 some commentators who rejected that label, most notably Bill Maher, William Safire and Susan Sontag, were met with outrage. Cowardice is being very clever indeed in such cases. Seeming to appear in plain sight via these spectacular villains, it distracts us from its true self.

Which is what, exactly? As Kierkegaard suggests, cowardice is very shifty, but we can nonetheless settle on a working definition. In some times and places — among some soldiers early in the American Civil War, for example, or in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, or in certain warrior tribes and street gangs — cowardice has been equated with simply feeling fear. Usually the picture is more nuanced than that, but we typically judge someone cowardly when his fear is out of proportion to the danger he faces, and when this disproportionate fear leads him to do something he should not, or to fail to do something he should. In military terms — war being the archetypal setting for cowardice, since the stakes are so high and the code of conduct so clear — the coward is a soldier who fails to do his duty because of excessive fear.

This formulation leaves some charged matters unresolved, of course. The notion of excessive fear is inherently subjective, and duties can conflict. But emphasizing duty can help us distance cowardice from the powerful gravitational pull of courage. Some philosophers argue that a courageous act occupies a different “ethical matrix” than a cowardly act because courage is defined apart from duty, or above it. Courage is “supererogatory.” In keeping with this spirit, the United States reserves the Medal of Honor only for someone who “distinguished himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” Simply doing one’s duty doesn’t quite cut it.

This may seem a miserly distinction, but it helps justify labeling the “mere” fulfillment of certain duties as courageous. We call people courageous for doing their duty when we refrain from calling those who do not perform the same duty cowardly. Consider for example the case of Kevin Vickers, who fatally shot the attacker in Ottawa. One could argue that because Vickers is the sergeant-at-arms of the Canadian House of Commons, he was doing his duty and so should not be called courageous. But Vickers’s post was, as news accounts frequently noted, largely “ceremonial,” and if he had let someone else stop the killer — a SWAT team, say — no one would have called him a coward. And that means he was courageous. If not technically supererogatory, what he did was still extraordinary.

The connection of cowardice to duty may also help explain why worries about cowardice figure much more strongly in the minds of soldiers than do aspirations to courage. As many students of war have observed, most soldiers don’t actually aspire to be heroes, and they are generally quick to dismiss their own courageous acts. An act of cowardice, meanwhile, can haunt them forever, and they are earnest, desperate even, in their desire not to be seen as cowardly.

Having duty as a measuring stick makes cowardice a more definite, substantial thing than courage. The great damage cowardice can do reinforces this sense. Confirming a court-martial for cowardice in July 1775 just after he took over the Continental Army, George Washington declared it “a Crime of all others the most infamous in a Soldier, the most injurious to an Army, and the last to be forgiven; inasmuch as it may, and often does happen, that the Cowardice of a single Officer may prove the Distruction of the whole Army….”

But the potential cost of cowardice does not fully explain why it haunts us so, why Adam Smith wrote that “No character is more contemptible than that of a coward,” or why Kierkegaard described the “cowardly soul” as “the most miserable thing one can imagine.” A traitor probably has greater potential and certainly more intent to do harm than a coward, but his act can also have an element of daring about it, an element that despite ourselves we respect — and one that a cowardly act lacks. The proverbial traitor stabs you in the back, but at least he does something; at least he is present. The proverbial coward strives, more than anything, for absence, and if he (he is proverbially male) can’t be absent, if he can’t run or hide, then his body betrays his cowardice through incontinence. The coward combines the destructive and the pathetic in a singularly reviling way.

This revilement has great power, most obviously in the military context. The belief that the other side is cowardly, coupled with the punishment and prevention of cowardice on one’s own side, feeds confidence; the belief that it would be cowardly not to fight feeds belligerence. The pattern is evident in, perhaps essential to, every war.

But the contempt for cowardice applies far from the field of battle, too. In the new film “Force Majeure,” a Swedish man named Tomas is having lunch with his family on the deck of a ski lodge when he sees an avalanche coming. Rather than leaping to shield his wife and children, he runs away (after grabbing his sunglasses and cellphone). The avalanche, it turns out, was man-made, controlled, harmless. The rest of the movie explores the ruinous aftermath of this episode. Tomas fearfully failed in his duty as father and husband. Now his family may be collapsing under a different sort of avalanche — the shame of cowardice.

That avalanche is not quite as monolithic as it might appear to be. There are wrinkles, paradoxes. It has often been acknowledged that excessive fear of being cowardly can itself be cowardly (the 9/11 attackers may have been cowardly in this way) — and did I say cowardly acts had no element of daring? An 18^th-century proverb had it that “every man would be a coward if he durst,” and the Soviet practice of executing deserters during World War II led General Georgy Zhukov to declare that “it takes a brave man to be a coward in the Red Army.”

Contempt for the archetypal cowardice of war seems to be fading in an age when some weapons are so fearsome that the very idea of being excessively fearful seems absurd, when we know that reactions to fear depend on physiological factors such as cortisol levels, and when we know that past traumas can diminish our capacity to deal with present ones.

Yet the contempt for cowardice seems too deeply rooted in us to disappear. William James wrote that “our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us,” an assertion supported by the emerging consensus that our closest relatives in the animal world, chimpanzees, have a natural tendency toward violence against their fellow chimps.

This is not necessarily a reason to despair. Our pugnacity and the contempt of cowardice that goes with it does not condemn us to war. James thought we could apply them to constructive rather than destructive ends, and fight “the moral equivalent of war.”

Perhaps the most common and profound cowardice has to do with the long tradition of not thinking about it. A rigorous and nuanced consideration of the idea — one applicable not so much to terrorists as to ourselves — can help us cultivate what James called “toughness without callousness.” It can help us think critically about our own fears and obligations — to family, community, and country, and to causes beyond any of those. It can help us honor these obligations more than aspiring to heroism can. And it can help us appreciate, even as we emulate, those many veterans who thought about cowardice and resisted it, who, without ever crediting themselves with courage, managed their fears and did their duty.

Chris Walsh is the acting director of the Arts & Sciences Writing Program at Boston University and author of “Cowardice: A Brief History.”