Recently I watched The Man Who Was Too Free, a moving documentary about Russian dissident politician Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down in front of the Kremlin in 2015.
A young, handsome rising political star in the 1990s, Nemtsov later refused to bend to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism and went into opposition, where he was harassed, imprisoned and finally killed.
The film left me thinking about the diminished role of heroism and courage in modern life, and also about the fate of Russia.
Illustration: Mountain People
Heroism is a product of extreme situations — classically, involving war and violence. Because today’s Western way of life is non-extreme, the value of heroism has fallen, but its stock is rising in most of the rest of the world, including Russia.
The hero is both noble and self-destructive. He or she not only prefers an honorable death to a dishonorable life, but also would rather die young and gloriously than spin out a long and compromised existence loaded with easily gotten and forgotten honors.
Hector in Homer’s Iliad says: “’Tis true I perish, yet I perish great.”
The heroic life is inherently tragic; immortality is its only reward.
Nemtsov was cast in this mold. According to some of those interviewed in the film, he believed that, having previously been a government minister, and once former Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s preferred successor, he would never be assassinated. Yet it seemed to me that he was challenging Putin’s regime to kill him.
Unlike heroism, courage is not necessarily tragic, but it has suffered a similar fate.
War, the main arena for displaying courage, has declined in importance, and is now mechanical rather than labor-intensive. And although we rightly admire acts of personal courage, we no longer demand it as a public virtue. We do not expect our politicians to be like kings who once led their troops into battle, but merely skilled and suitably thick-skinned.
Moral courage, as distinct from physical courage, is a civic rather than a military virtue. A person might be afraid of physical harm, but morally fearless.
However, moral courage has always been less admired than physical courage, because it involves going against the grain. Rulers hate it because it “speaks truth to power,” and crowds are made uncomfortable by it because it confronts their prejudices.
From an ethical perspective, moral courage has been considered the highest form of courage in the liberal age, because it is deliberate, not instinctive, but its value has diminished along with the penalties for displaying it.
Opinions once considered courageous are now merely “controversial,” and although they might lead to the loss of one’s job or friends, this is hardly the same as being burned at the stake.
In the 1660s, philosopher Thomas Hobbes prefigured the decline of public heroism and courage when he wrote of citizens who “the less they dare, the better it is, both for the commonwealth, and themselves.”
The growth of professionalism and the spread of peaceful commerce and manufacturing lessened the need for heroic or courageous acts. The overall tendency of modern science and social organization has been to create a world in which courage and other virtues will no longer be necessary.
In the West, at least, acts of heroism and valor are now confined to stage and screen, where we can admire them without having to suffer their consequences.
Heroism and courage have always been regarded as masculine virtues.
In her famous Tilbury speech at the time of the Spanish Armada, Queen Elizabeth I of England played to the stereotype, declaring: “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”
Women with the hearts of men were thought exceptional.
Conversely, Hobbes argued that “men of feminine courage” should be exempted from military service, owing to the risk that they might desert.
Scottish economist Adam Smith was not alone in fearing that commerce would make the population “effeminate and dastardly.”
The huge reservoir of largely untapped courage, especially of the moral sort, that women constitute, has been generally ignored by (male) writers. Yet the emancipation of women was the result of rising female courage.
Hannah Arendt, who fled Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, displayed exemplary moral courage in writing her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the trial of the Holocaust’s logistical mastermind.
Nor should it surprise us that young women, most recently teenager Greta Thunberg, have emerged as Green political leaders. Women are thus compensating for the decline in male courage in public life, something that many men find deeply uncomfortable.
This brings me back to Nemtsov and Russia. In 1996, Nemtsov was the only “liberal” Russian politician who argued that the recently overthrown Russian Communist Party, then leading in the polls, should be allowed to compete in the nation’s presidential election.
He said that this was the only way to establish a tradition of legitimate transfers of power. Other Russian liberals thought Nemtsov was mad.
In the event, Yeltsin’s re-election was corruptly bought, and his successor, Putin, has kept himself in power by a kind of “soft dictatorship.”
Nemtsov was prescient in advocating genuine democracy as the only legitimate modern form of rule.
Since 2011, Putin’s rule has looked increasingly fragile in the face of growing street protests in Moscow and other Russian cities.
When such regimes can no longer be relied on to deliver economic prosperity, their future is bound to come under threat as new heroes rise up in opposition. This is the lesson emerging not only in Russia, but also in the Middle East and East Asia.
In much of the world, then, the value of heroism is again on the rise. The future might well lie not with politicians and diplomats, but with those men — and women — who are not afraid to die.
Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this