My late colleague Pat Moynihan coined the phrase defining deviancy down to criticize how American culture in the late twentieth century embraced situational morality in reaction to increasing rates of crime and other social ills rather than insist on the preservation of moral absolutes as the foundation of a functioning liberal society. America, he argued, evaded the hard choices such absolutes require and had, disastrously, learned to tolerate "much conduct previously stigmatized."
Similarly, American culture over the last thirty years or so has defined courage down. We have attributed courage to all manner of actions that may indeed be admirable but hardly compare to the conscious self-sacrifice on behalf of something greater than self-interest that once defined courage. We have come to identify one or more of the elements of courage - fortitude, discipline, daring, or righteousness, for example - as the entire virtue. Today, in our excessively psychoanalyzed society, sharing one's secret fears with others takes courage. So does escaping a failing marriage. So does "having it all," a career, children, and leisure. Refusing to help enable a loved one indulge a ruinous vice is an act of courage. We say it takes courage to be different from the mainstream in our preferences in fashion, music, the length and color of our hair.
If the standard of courage remains, as I think it should, acts that risk life or limb or other very serious personal injuries for the sake of others or to uphold a virtue - a standard often upheld by battlefield heroics but one that is certainly not limited to martial valor. But what are the consequences of generosity in defining courage? If a people believe that courage constitutes something less perilous, less dear, than the standard defined above, don't we risk having too few examples of real courage, grand courage, the kind that inspires a person and a society to reach beyond goodness to greatness? If children are taught that simply being honest or doing the best they can or appreciating what they have without complaint is considered by their society to be an act of courage, will they be more or less motivated to summon the real thing in a crucible? Will they take the hill in a battle when no shame is attached - on the contrary, when courage is ascribed - to holding one's ground, if that were the best they could do? Will they risk imprisonment or some grave wrong to themselves to defend a political principle if no less courage is attributed to cherishing the principle privately in safety?
Angela Dawson hated what drug dealers were doing to Oliver, her East Baltimore neighborhood. Many of the families there were fighting to maintain a decent quality of life despite limited economic means and the depravations that surrounded them. Oliver is a place where neat row houses, active churches, and carefully tended playgrounds line streets that were once happy with the laughter of innocent children. But now they called her part of the neighborhood "the badlands." Many of the row houses had been abandoned and boarded up, and some streets seemed paved with broken glass, crack vials, and bullet shells. Hard young men patrolled the streets, habitual criminals by their early teens, prowling for customers and on the lookout for cops and anyone who might disrupt their trade.
She was thirty-six years old, the mother of five children, who struggled not only to keep them safe in a culture of extreme violence, but to rise above despair and help them make something of themselves that would prove her values and courage superior to the cruelty and misery that an outside observer would have assumed were the natural state of their environment. She walked them to school, ate lunch with them, talked with their teachers, supervised their schoolwork, played with them, and kept their home as clean and comfortable as time and circumstances allowed.
She had some kind of guts. She would not accept that people in her situation were consigned to violent and destitute lives. She complained when the commotion on the streets got to be too much to keep some semblance of order, when kids were fighting or breaking windows or playing music too loudly or when they were selling crack to one another and to the suburban types who came to the badlands in search of it. She refused to let the dealers ply their trade in front of her home and her children. She talked to them, yelled at them, threatened them, and called the police when they wouldn't take her seriously. Some of her neighbors, who admired her, thought she might have gone too far sometimes, pushed the dealers a little too hard, a little too publicly. She made them look bad, and that could get you in a lot of trouble in their neighborhood. They were right.
She didn't seem to care at first. She kept right after them even when some of them threw bricks through her windows as a warning that they had had enough of her crusade. But when an angry neighbor threw a couple of Molotov cocktails through her window, she began to fear the consequences of her actions. She reached a point where she was too afraid to take her kids to school. But still she refused to leave the neighborhood. She refused to give in and give up.
Then, at 2:18 on the morning of October 16, 2002, a twenty-one year old neighbor set Angela's house on fire, killing her, her husband, and her five children. Before she perished, her neighbors heard her cry, "God, please help me. Help me get my children out."
It's not hard to wish, as some of her neighbors did, that Angela Dawson had had a little less courage. Isn't it better to give in to despair than die for your hope of a better life? Or worse yet, to see your children die for the sake of your aspirations for them?
Popular culture usually conceives heroism, especially heroism that sacrifices the hero's life, as the ultimate in romantic gestures, the defiant last stand, one person alone against a host of evil. It almost seems a painless, welcome death. So far removed are they from our experience, these grand and inspiring legends, that we almost picture the hero as more than prepared, even happy to die with his virtue and courage intact. But then the composed nobility of the courageous act seems to get lost a little in the grim details that depict the sacrifice in it full horror, when we hear the mother's anguished appeal to God for her children's survival. All we can think about is how terrible and pointless and avoidable an end it was. We picture ourselves in the situation pleading for life, and we're somehow surprised to learn that heroes have to suffer the same agony. It confounds us. But why should it? Such are the wages of courage. Not for every act of courage, of course. Maybe not for most. But Angela Dawson wasn't the first person, nor will she be the last, to pay such a terrible price for her courage.
If you want to possess a true appreciation of courage, you must comprehend all its possible consequences in all their horror. They'll make you flinch. But however uncomfortable we are made by the grisly and unimaginably heartbreaking details of such sacrifice, we should not feel less the nobility of it. On the contrary, despite the urge to avert your eyes from the suffering, the only way to really appreciate the nobility of courage is to familiarize yourself with its costs so that you will come to understand how rare a thing it really is.
As courage may demand such appalling sacrifice, so it demands economy in its definition. What person who heard Angela's last cry could ever again ascribe courage to someone who stuck with a diet or quit an unrewarding job or changed a hairstyle? It is no easy thing being truly brave.