Virtue: Courage, Integrity, Perseverance

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THE WARRIOR VIRTUES: COURAGE, INTEGRITY, PERSEVERANCE

I had very little success in trying to separate the roles of these three virtues, so I decided to try addressing them all as a group, based on what seems to me to be ADF's intention to roughly divide the nine virtues into three triads by Dumezilian function.

Although courage is arguably the defining virtue of the second function, I would argue that integrity is the animating force of the warrior spirit. Integrity means that one's actions are in complete accord with one's goals and principles. Simply put, to have integrity means that when we know what course of action is right, we take that course. At times that may be skirting the issue, but I think more often than not we know what is truthful, ethical, and beneficial, and we know what is evil. Putting that knowledge into practice is usually the difficult part, but the ability to do that is what integrity is all about. Do no evil. We know what we should be ashamed to do, and integrity is what hopefully prevents us from doing those things anyway and attempting to cover it up or justify it falsely.

Perseverance is so closely linked to courage that it is basically synonymous with what some people call "soft courage." It means, like courage, that we confront our obstacles instead of running from them, but in cases where perseverance is required, those obstacles are less obvious and more persistent. In some situations, just getting out of bed morning after morning can require the virtue of perseverance. Perseverance helps us face jobs we don't like so that we can meet our obligations, helps us keep studying in a class we'd rather give up on, helps us send out the thousandth resume even though we don't know if we can take the thousandth rejection. When we've faced a massive setback or a bereavement, we persevere so that the kids still get dinner and the dog still gets walked, when it might feel better to disappear into bed forever. When we have a history of failing at a task, whether it's hitting the fastball or maintaining a relationship, it takes perseverance to try it again and risk more failures. None of these are tasks, like slaying a dragon, that can be done once and for all. Having perseverance means committing yourself to a course over the long term, come what may.

Oddly, that leaves me with no real place for the virtue of courage, one of our ancestors' most cherished virtues. If integrity means that you act honorably and faithfully in spite of whatever pressures you may be under to act differently, and perseverance means you follow the path on which integrity has set you without letting yourself be turned aside by fear or despair, then what more would you possibly need? In what situation would having courage provide you with an aid toward living virtuously that integrity and perseverance could not provide?

Maybe even more oddly, as I was in the process of writing this essay, the store where I work was held up by an armed robber, giving me all the more to think about on the topic of warrior virtues. Our robber (who was arrested later that night) was a middle-aged homeless man armed with a small switchblade; the two of us who were working there that night were considerably younger and more athletic. We also had a major advantage of position behind the raised counter; there was no quick way for him to get anywhere near us, and as the robbery occurred early in the evening, he had not intention of staying in the store long enough to risk somebody else coming in behind him. In short, my friend and I were in essentially no danger at all from this man, and had I decided to say, "No, and get out of my store this second," when he asked me for money, he almost certainly would have run for it and tried his luck somewhere else.

That's not what I decided to do. I gave him the sixty dollars in my register; he fled without asking for my friend's register or anything from the safe. I obeyed the official company protocols for such an emergency, not because I couldn't have defended my store, nor because I was afraid to, but because that's what my basic cultural upbringing has taught me: that the second-function role of defending the tribe in our society is the province of a professional police force and should, if at all possible, be left to them. I responded the way I did because on some basic level I think that in a law-abiding society, that's what you're supposed to do.

The event made it immediately clear to me that I don't view myself as a warrior in any literal sense; in my mind, that's simply not my job, although certainly I would hope that in a true emergency I would do my best to fill in. As I've been researching the virtue of courage, I'm finding it mostly in the context of the second function, the class or profession of the warrior. There is plenty of lore extolling the unbreakable courage of the heroic warrior, and while it is exciting to identify with Cuchulainn defending the honor and strength of Ulster or Beowulf slaying monsters, two issues keep coming up for me: first, that's not really what I do for a living, and second, the heroic warrior of the lore dies in battle, in some cases after causing the death of loved ones in addition to a lot of enemies. Cuchulainn killed his son and his lover for the honor of Ulster. Because I have no desire either to fulfill the traditional role of the tribal warrior -- an early death after a lifetime of stealing cattle and taking slaves -- or my own society's warrior role in law enforcement or the military, I feel fairly alienated from what the lore has to teach us about the courage of the warrior in the face of the enemy.

Alexei Kondratiev has written some short essays on traditional Celtic values from the point of view of the linguist, tracing the etymology of the words. He gives two interesting etymologies for two Irish words for courage. The first is meisnech (misneach in modern usage), which comes from the root med-, to measure or reckon. According to Kondratiev, the word therefore implies self-control, the ability to modulate one's impulses and moods. I find that especially interesting in the context of physical courage, because so often we associate the word "courage" with the hothead who throws the first punch or draws the weapon that makes the disagreement turn dangerous; because his choices are not made through fear of danger he is commonly considered a brave person, though maybe lacking in other virtues. A meisnech-type courage, however, reminds me of the friends I've had who have served in the military who have much greater respect for courage that helps you execute a carefully laid strategy than for the kind of courage that never stops to count costs. Although the courage of self-control still seems more amoral to me than integrity -- who knows if the goal your strategy and your courage are in service of is a virtuous goal or not? -- it also seems positive in some way because it relies on judgement and discernment by definition -- although that represents a certain privileging of first-function values on my part that may or may not be fair.

The other etymology I found interesting is that of the word cro/dacht (modern usage, cro/gacht), from cro/dae, or bloodthirsty. In some ways the opposite of meisnech, this word seems to evoke the frenzy of the warrior. Kondratiev defines this type of courage as the "hardness that prevents one from being swayed by pity in battle," and also mentions that several other words for courage in both Gaelic and Brythonic languages come from a root word meaning "hard."

The heights of discipline and control implied by meisnech and the intense and apparently chaotic bloodthirst of cro/dacht, then, have in common a sense of hardness or immovability, the quality that enables one to resist the desire to, as they say in the military, lose the mission. They contrast quite vividly, in that sense, with perseverance, a word which puts across the idea of motion, of continuing forward against blocks or restraints. If perseverance is the irresistible force, courage is the immovable object.

I still question, however, whether either of them are inherently virtuous. Plenty of people have exhibited bravery and endurance in pursuit of goals they should never, in my opinion, have been pursuing at all, and I wonder if those qualities don't make such a person a menace more than a hero. In traditional cultures the difference probably depended on whose side you were on, but the world is too small now for there to be any truly foreign tribes, too interdependent to make the idea of the Other, the people who exist to be conquered, very safe or sensible. Survival is now not a matter of the individual warrior returning from battle with his shield or on it; in an age of genocide and environmental destruction, it's worth worrying about who will be left to remember the names of the warriors are their great deeds.

Which leads me back to integrity, the true virtue of a healthy second function, I believe. Maintaining integrity means allowing for no divide between our ideals and our actions; it means we cannot know what is good and then do what is evil. I believe that courage and perseverance are dual or twinned talents, skills of the heart and mind, that can be cultivated as tools to support our intention to live in truth and integrity. They are a powerful sword and shield, and like weapons, not inherently virtuous or not virtuous themselves, though they often make all the difference in the end.