Bravery

It's time to be brave again.

Bravery

Imagine a bank robber enters a bank with a gun and yells for everyone in the bank to get down on the ground. Everybody drops to the ground except for one little boy. His mother, out of arm’s reach of him, starts to get up and move towards her son in an attempt to get him to obey the robber. The bank robber immediately points the gun at the mother demanding she move no further. The little boy sees this and he steps between the robber with a gun and his mother. He says, “shoot me, not Mommy.” The bank robber, taken aback at this development, doesn’t know what to do. He hesitates. Sensing the hesitation, another person in the bank makes a move and is able to tackle the robber, knocking the gun out of his hand. The situation is resolved.

After the bank robber has been apprehended, a local news reporter is interviewing different people as they come out of the bank. Hearing the story about this little boy’s remarkable actions, the reporter finds him and asks what led him to step in front of a gun. The little boy, sensing he has done something significant, smiles before answering.

“I’ve been shot a lot and it doesn’t hurt,” he responds.

“What do you mean you’ve been a shot a lot?” the reporter asked with much confusion.

“My older brother always shoots me but it doesn’t hurt unless he hits me in the eye. I get angry but then I take his bullets to use for my Nerf gun later.”

I use this (made up) story because I think it gets to an important point about bravery: to act in ignorance is not worthy of admiration regardless of how “brave” the action may appear. The actions of the little boy, told without any context, seem to be the epitome of bravery, risking his own life to save his mom. However, the realization that the little boy believed the robber was using a Nerf gun like him and his brother changes the entire story. The actions of the little boy, while still saving a life, no longer come across as brave but breathtakingly naive. His knowledge, or lack thereof, changes whether his actions are deemed brave or not.

Thousands of years ago the Greek historian Thucydides came to a similar conclusion. He wrote,

“But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undettered to meet what is to come.” -Thucydides

I recently came across this quotation in The History of the Peloponnesian War and was instantly taken aback by its insightfulness. Not only does Thucydides recognize the connection between knowledge and bravery but he specifies what kind of knowledge enhances bravery. If a person has knowledge about “what is sweet” and “what is terrible” in life and faces life nonetheless, that person ought to be considered brave. As I was thinking about this, I realized that this description of bravery, and its promotion, provides helpful insights and practical considerations for both our country and the church.

What is Sweet

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, whenever the main character Bilbo gets into trouble he immediately starts to think about the comforts of his home that he left behind. When Bilbo does this, he quickly regrets leaving his home to go on the adventure that he is on. However, Bilbo continues on his adventure and doesn’t abandon it for the home that he continually longs for (at least he hasn’t yet, I am only a third of the way through the book). According to Thucydides, this would mark Bilbo as brave.

Bilbo knows some of “what is sweet” in life, namely comfort, safety, and stability when he reflects on his home. Bilbo continuously chooses to forgo those sweet things to continue on the adventure in which he has been called. This is in stark contrast to someone whose life has only been full of misery. When someone has only experienced misery, the act of facing more misery is par for the course. They have no understanding of what is good in life so to face pain or suffering is merely a continuation of what they have always experienced. They don’t know any different and have nothing to lose so they act “bravely.”

What is Terrible

Likewise, someone who has only lived a life of joy and happiness with little to no suffering can only imitate bravery out of sheer ignorance of the possible consequences. The little boy in the story above did not know a world in which real guns exist and can cause real death; he only knew a world in which guns shot foam bullets that cause no pain. If everyone else believed that the robber was holding a Nerf gun, they would have been just as willing to stand up to him. It was their knowledge of the consequences that made them realize the magnitude of the situation.

As someone’s understanding of the depths of suffering increases, our admiration for them increases when they still face the suffering. I think about Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who was poisoned by the Russian government after exposing endemic corruption. Navalny was in a coma in critical condition before he eventually recovered under the care of German doctors. Upon recovery, Navalny was discharged from the hospital and announced a few months later that he would return to Russia and continue to expose corruption.

Navalny’s announcement was met by widespread admiration from people across the globe. The reason is clear: Navalny intimately knew, more than anyone, the suffering that such an action entailed and still chose to face it.

Home of the Brave

At the start of any major event in the United States, the idea of bravery is reinforced through the singing of the National Anthem. The last line, usually belted out by the singer, declares the United States as “the home of the brave.” Bravery is central to the identity of America as a nation. America was settled by people who risked their lives on a dangerous, months-long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, founded by men who revolted against the most powerful country on earth, expanded by families who faced nature’s unknown, powered economically by entrepreneurs who risked bankruptcy, and defended by young men being showered by bullets on the beaches of Normandy. Bravery was needed every step of the way.

While bravery has always been engrained in American culture, we have access to more information now than ever before. Using Thucydides’s formulation, that means that we have more access to both what is sweet and what is terrible in life. This is where the last part of Thucydides’s description of a brave person is crucial. A brave person, with this knowledge, “then goes out undettered to meet what is to come.” This is the part that I believe America needs to address.

Yuval Levin wrote a wonderful piece in The Dispatch a couple of months ago that described that modern social breakdown that is occurring in America. Levin wrote,

Most notably, both marriage rates and fertility rates are at all-time lows in the United States. Total fertility in our country is now about 1.7 births per woman, well below the population-replacement rate. Younger Americans are having trouble pairing off—so that not only teen sex but also teen dating have dipped dramatically…

Fewer teenagers are dying in car accidents because fewer teenagers are getting driver’s licenses. There is less social disorder, we might say, because there is less social life. We are doing less of everything together, so that what we do is a little more tidy and controlled. 

In other words, Americans today are doing less living than any generation before them. Levin calls this decline of all aspects of social life the “pathology of passivity” which couldn’t be a more perfect description for the situation. Americans have become passive consumers of entertainments instead of active participants in cultivating civilization.

While there are numerous explanations and remedies for this, it shouldn’t be surprising that people are passive as the amount of information they have access to increases. The more people know about what is sweet in life, the more people will want to indulge in those aspects. Similarly, the more people know what is terrible in life, the more people will want to avoid those dangers. It is the brave person that, in spite of these tendencies, faces life head on. Americans need to rediscover their identification as “the home of the brave.”

A Brave Church

The church would also benefit from a reconsideration of bravery, albeit in a slightly different way. Instead of passivity due to overwhelming knowledge about what is sweet and terrible in life, the church’s passivity often stems from sheltering itself from the outside world. Christians often remain ignorant of the true pain and suffering caused by sin in a world full of sin because they distance themselves from it as a form of self-preservation. While continuously emphasizing what is sweet (namely, the Gospel) is vital, ignorance regarding what is terrible will leave Christians naively entering situations like the little boy during the bank robbery. By the grace of God, that still works occasionally, but it also frequently makes a situation infinitely worse.

While that sounds easy enough, it is important to remember that as knowledge about what is terrible increases, true bravery becomes more necessary. A better understanding of the devastation of sin and its consequences will arouse a desire to avoid it all the more. Most dissidents are not like Alexei Navalney for a reason. Once they escape their oppression, they know the true depths of the suffering it inflicts and don’t want to experience it again. And nobody blames them. Likewise, Christians that enter into the darkest, most broken places in this sinful world will feel a desire to flee and nobody would blame them. It requires enormous bravery to remain and continue fighting.

The beautiful thing about being a Christian though is that we have the epitome of bravery to follow. Jesus was with the Father in all His glory, basking in the fullness of His glory, and experiencing the pinnacle of joy. There is nothing sweeter in the universe. At the same time, Jesus- being God- understood the depths of evil and brokenness in this world beyond our wildest imagination. And yet, Jesus chose to forgo the ultimate joy of fellowship with the Father and knowingly enter this world, not just to witness the suffering, but to actively experience suffering for Himself on the cross. As if that wasn’t brave enough, Jesus took it to the next step by enduring the wrath of God that far surpasses any suffering on earth that we may go through.

When Christ calls us to “take up your cross,” He is calling us into this same kind of bravery- understanding the fullness of joy we have in God the Father, while experiencing the sufferings of this world.

Bravery in Movies

I’ll admit that bravery seems like an odd, maybe even melodramatic, concept to write an entire newsletter about. It seems odd though, not because we don’t have a desire to be brave, but because it is so infrequently discussed in such concrete terms. If we didn’t have a desire to be brave, then most movies would never sell a ticket. Let’s think about almost all movie plots for a second. The main character is faced with some sort of challenge, conflict, or dilemma that they must overcome. In the process, more difficulty arises and moments of fear, doubt, or hesitation begin to creep into the mind of the main character. Nonetheless, the main character overcomes and audiences celebrate.

The reason that these stories resonate so much with people is because we experience the same kind of story in our own lives. We have an earnest desire to be like those heroes on the screen that demonstrate bravery and rise to the occasion. There are popular movies or TV series that end with the character tail spinning out of control and never overcoming (such as Joker, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.), but the recent popularity of these kinds of stories are more demonstrative of our nihilistic age. They don’t reflect our deep yearning to be a hero, but our baser selves screaming to be unleashed.

Ultimately, these kinds of antihero plots are entertaining but not satisfying because it doesn’t take bravery to be evil. Doing wrong is easy because it’s in our nature. A coward can do it. Heroism, on the other hand, requires bravery, stirs us to imitate, and in the fullness of time, proves to be fulfilling.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett