Our Crisis of Worldly Courage

Roger Berkowitz
For what do we live? Over the long course of human history, we developed answers to that fundamental question. Aside from mere survival, we raised castles in the air to justify and make sense of what is often a deeply painful and alienating existence. Religions promised that there is some ultimate sense to suffering; traditions weave us into a story that has a beginning and, in the future, an end. The myth of progress suggests that we play our role in the eventual emergence of a better world. For Hannah Arendt, the break of tradition that occurred in the middle of the 20th century means that none of these traditional answers to the question of human meaning can last into the future. For Arendt, we are left alone, free, and exposed; her answer to this predicament is another path towards the construction of human meaning: politics. We must, Arendt sees, have the courage to build public worlds of meaning through acting together for common goals.

The biggest obstacle to political action today, Arendt saw, is that we increasingly don’t have ideals for which we are willing to fight. We no longer know What We Are Fighting For. Maurits de Jongh argues that the war in Ukraine has laid bare our uncertainty about those common values that might inspire us to collective action. And he worries that as the world hurdles towards confrontations amongst nuclear powers, the courage needed to act politically may be lacking. De Jongh writes:

On the first day of the invasion, as Russian armoured columns rolled towards Kyiv, the Americans apparently offered to evacuate President Zelensky and he replied “I need ammunition, not a ride.” From the determined armed resistance of civilians-turned-soldiers, to the non-violent protest of the inhabitants of Kherson in the face of the Russian occupiers, that the Ukrainians display courage is beyond doubt. But we hardly seem to realize how the spectre of nuclear escalation lurking in the background calls into question the virtue of courage itself. This is the third insight Arendt offers us. The danger of nuclear weapons, she argues, unsettles the very meaning of courage as a disposition to take care of the world.
All the heartfelt words of praise from the West may be accompanied by a certain embarrassment. We may wonder what value Ukrainians place on them, when Putin’s provocations went on virtually with impunity for years; when financial and legal service providers in the West so diligently obliged Russian oligarchs; when half-hearted promises of NATO or EU membership were made; when the sufficiency of Western military support for Ukraine remains in question; and when the short-sighted energy dependence of Europeans on Russian fossil fuels financed the Kremlin’s war preparations.
Considerations like these are not the only reason for our discomfort. This discomfort touches on a deeper disorientation afflicting the rich, free countries of the West. Francis Fukuyama already pointed it out thirty years ago, when he claimed we were reaching the end of history with the spread of liberal democracy and the capitalist market economy: he wrote that ‘the last man’ would be tormented by an unbearable sense of emptiness and boredom. We hardly find salvation in our conspicuous consumption and our obsession with social climbing. We continually fall short in our solidarity with one another, let alone with the rest of the world.
Precisely because we find it so difficult to find meaning and orientation, it was tempting to experience the courage of Zelensky and his people as a triumph which, for a fleeting moment, freed us from the liberal void we inhabit – our alienated world, in which ‘heroism’ is a term reserved for top athletes and pop stars, but in which we cannot succeed in embracing our own individuality. Our waning attention for the war as the months pass shows just how ephemeral our ecstasy is. Since ongoing Russian terror is the price Ukrainians pay for their courage, it is outright perverse for us to use it in the satisfaction of our own psychological needs.

Arendt insists that courage takes no interest in our psychological states. Courage instead finds meaning in care for the world. Indeed, courage requires self-sacrifice for the sake of the earth, and for humanity as a whole. Arendt insists that awareness of the fact that “man is not immortal, that he sacrifices a life that one day will be taken from him in any case” is a prerequisite for courage. After all, without our mortality, there is little to risk or sacrifice. But self-sacrifice, in turn, presupposes the belief that death is preferable to a life deprived of dignity and freedom – especially if that deprivation results from political oppression.

But courage does not only find meaning in our individual mortality. The endurance of the world, and the survival of humanity as a whole, also constitute necessary conditions for courage. According to Arendt, at basis courage comes from the assurance we need to leave our mark on the world. By showing courage – by sacrificing ourselves for the freedom of our countries, for the preservation of the world, or for the dignity of all life – we obtain, as it were, a second life. Our contributions live on in the small and great stories that people tell each other and pass on. Courage, then, does not lie in the expectation of eternal life, but consists instead of aspiring to what Arendt calls a ‘worldly immortality’. Courage rests on the conviction “that posterity will understand, remember, and respect the individual mortal’s sacrifice. Man can be courageous only as long as he knows that he is survived by those who are like him, that he fulfills a role in something more permanent than himself, ‘the enduring chronicle of mankind,’ as Faulkner once put it’.”
So understood, the threat of nuclear war threatens an irreparable break in human courage.