Courage is the choice and inclination to provoke uncertainty, intimidation, or danger. Courage can be displayed physically, morally, or both simultaneously. Physical courage is bravery exhibited in the face of adversity, physical pain, or threat of death. Moral courage is the fortitude to act true and right challenging popular opinion, opposition, shame, scandal, discouragement, enduring the risk of personal or emotional loss. Many times, what starts as a self-obligation to moral courage, evolves into a state blending both mental and physical courage. What makes courage curious is that it flies in the face of what many philosophers, theologians and scholars agree is mankind’s strongest desire. This desire is the idea that self-preservation is the most fundamental characteristic of all human behavior.
So, what is it that makes people buck mankind’s strongest behavioral instinct and put it all on the line? Though we may not all agree on one conclusive answer, I would suggest that courage is dependent on one specific thing, love. Love for a person, love for a group of people, love for a principle founded in truth like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (freedom). If fear is a condition of courage, so too is love. It is love that makes us willing to sacrifice, love that delivers courage.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many words that define complex concepts, the word itself is misapplied to other topics or events to try and heighten the importance of the event or bolster the situation. As an example, if a person has a strong fear of dogs and overcomes this fear by moving forward to pet a friend’s dog, this is not courage as there is no love for the dog. I am not disputing that this act may have required much effort to overcome the emotions inherent in overcoming an uncomfortable situation but the act in and of itself is not courageous. Another example of this misuse can be illustrated by the defense posed by Apple marketing chief, Phil Schiller, when explaining that the 3.5mm headphone jack would not be making its way to the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Schiller said on stage during the announcement, “The reason to move on: courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us.” Now don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone, but it is hard for me to ever imagine an engineering decision to include or eliminate a feature on an electronic device as being courageous.
Winston Churchill called courage “the first of human qualities . . . because it guarantees all the others.” In today’s world, it seems that we, as a society, go to great lengths to create situations where no one takes responsibility for failure, or responsibility is so generally shared amongst “the group” that individual accountability is ignored and failure becomes tolerable. Promoting societal norms that eliminate the importance of individual accountability will make even the thought of developing “the first of human qualities” so foreign to individual behavior that this quality may just fade away.
Whether one agrees with his politics or not, the late U.S. Senator John McCain who in October 1967, while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese understands and embodies the concept of courage. He experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer and had war wounds that left him with lifelong physical limitations. Senator McCain provides one of the clearest descriptions of courage. “Courage is that rare moment of unity between conscience, fear, and action, when something deep within us strikes the flint of love, of honor, of duty, to make the spark that fires our resolve. Courage is the highest quality of life attainable by human beings. It’s the moment — however brief or singular — when we are our complete, best self, when we know with an almost metaphysical certainty that we are right.”