busybody..
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2002
- Posts
- 149,503
There are so many that diss the Armed Forces......from the comfort of their easy chairs........from the ivory towers of the "elite" universitys......form behind a computer keyboard.....
Where would we be if THEY LED OUR NATION???
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/Wednesday, December 04, 2002
Sneering at Courage:
One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can't afford to sneer at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen, Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93 to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots we've had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again, that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.
(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today. I'll return to this point later in the essay.)
The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of bien pensants in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning it to fantasy, sneering at it — trying to persuade us all that it's at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.
If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the connotations of the phrase "testosterone poisoning". Ask yourself when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man's declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper — or even ordinary criminals — them, do you praise his determination or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?
Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or simpletons, we'll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men — cops, soldiers, firemen — we'll find that we have trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse: our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.
Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of that — and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage. Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side socialites cruising firemen's bars? Biology tells; medals and tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero's most natural and strongest reward is willing women.
Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a judgment on American sins; — the multiculturalists, the postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists, and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people never liked or trusted physical courage, and it's worth taking a hard look at why that is.
Feminists distrust physical courage because it's a male virtue. Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If one's world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is regressive.
For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect because it's psychologically linked to moral certitude — and moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &mdash, unless, of course, they're tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.
Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust that is not directly a military caste — including our own — tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they know their place is to be guided by their betters.
For transnational progressives and the left in general, male physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it's an individualizing virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight for their own concept of virtue — independently of social approval or the party line — are especially threatening to any sort of collectivist.
The multiculturalist's and the collectivist's suspicions are backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another. They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward any of them tend to increase all of them.
After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem' to adolescents while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile, our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind. We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood. And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.
Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did. But they were written off as reactionaries — and many of us were foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder's famous diagnosis, a nation of cowards; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.
But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War, we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.
Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda's war has come to us. There is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not primarily a chess-game between nations — it's a street-level brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda other than by sympathy of ideas.
Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during the Cold War, but it is far truer now:
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman's readiness than his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role of defender, don't sneer — cheer. Don't write him off with some pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him, He's trying to tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for, fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.
Whether he's in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby — we need that courage now
Where would we be if THEY LED OUR NATION???
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/Wednesday, December 04, 2002
Sneering at Courage:
One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can't afford to sneer at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen, Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93 to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots we've had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again, that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.
(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today. I'll return to this point later in the essay.)
The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of bien pensants in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning it to fantasy, sneering at it — trying to persuade us all that it's at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.
If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the connotations of the phrase "testosterone poisoning". Ask yourself when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man's declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper — or even ordinary criminals — them, do you praise his determination or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?
Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or simpletons, we'll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men — cops, soldiers, firemen — we'll find that we have trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse: our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.
Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of that — and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage. Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side socialites cruising firemen's bars? Biology tells; medals and tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero's most natural and strongest reward is willing women.
Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a judgment on American sins; — the multiculturalists, the postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists, and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people never liked or trusted physical courage, and it's worth taking a hard look at why that is.
Feminists distrust physical courage because it's a male virtue. Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If one's world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is regressive.
For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect because it's psychologically linked to moral certitude — and moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &mdash, unless, of course, they're tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.
Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust that is not directly a military caste — including our own — tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they know their place is to be guided by their betters.
For transnational progressives and the left in general, male physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it's an individualizing virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight for their own concept of virtue — independently of social approval or the party line — are especially threatening to any sort of collectivist.
The multiculturalist's and the collectivist's suspicions are backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another. They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward any of them tend to increase all of them.
After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem' to adolescents while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile, our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind. We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood. And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.
Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did. But they were written off as reactionaries — and many of us were foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder's famous diagnosis, a nation of cowards; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.
But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War, we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.
Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda's war has come to us. There is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not primarily a chess-game between nations — it's a street-level brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda other than by sympathy of ideas.
Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during the Cold War, but it is far truer now:
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman's readiness than his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role of defender, don't sneer — cheer. Don't write him off with some pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him, He's trying to tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for, fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.
Whether he's in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby — we need that courage now
