Are modern, middle class Westerners
cowards?
Although I have touched on this before,
I’ve been moved to write more after watching a documentary about the so-called
“Peasants Revolt” in England in 1381 (YouTube
here and here).
Despite the name given to that event, it
was actually led by people who would be the closest equivalent there was to a
middle class in that era – even including a Member of Parliament. These people
are often described as seeking justice over taxes, but the triggers also
involved tax collectors basically groping young women to see if they were
married (the assumption being that only
married women would not be virgins, and married women had to pay an extra tax).
They were outraged by these sexual assaults (not
mentioned in Wikipedia’s insipid
article: is that because men wrote it?), and their reactions to that were
the first steps in an event that wound up involving marches on London and
unrest elsewhere in England, and a violent suppression.
They were courageous, but eventually some
of their members “went too far”, with common thievery becoming violent vengeance,
with murder and ransacking.
It went off the rails, and that has lessons
in it around managing any movement, including controlling supporters. To be
fair, I suspect the closest any large movement has come to being able to ensure
its followers were behaving properly would probably be Gandhi’s
satyagraha-inspired
Indian
independence movement. (When I was
watching the YouTube documentaries, I idly speculated about Gandhi possibly
having been either part of, or a witness to, the Peasants Revolt in an earlier
life, and that it going so spectacularly off the rails helped give him the impetus
to be non-violent.)
Management of followers is easier if the
group is small – for instance, the team I was part of that was lobbying for
reform of Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Act in the late 1990s was able to be so effective
because, using the advice we were getting from our contacts in the various
political parties, we could tell our supporters when to back off on letters and
emails because it was becoming counterproductive (as it was annoying recipients – there can be a reaction against events
such as writing campaigns, or street marches [the evil Maggie
Thatcher is an example of that]).
Nevertheless, for most larger movements,
the consequences of what one says to followers can be significant – such as the
violent and vicious assaults inspired by neochristian homophobia, or the
equally violent and vicious racism inspired by racist “dog
whistling” politicians. (I firmly
consider all such people are accountable for the actions and reactions they
inspire, and that, in Australia, goes back to the evil John
Howard, who started the current xenophobic rot of Australian society and
morality, a rot that is being enthusiastically spread by MPs such as Peter
Dutton. Howard’s motivations are often ascribed to nostalgia – wanting to
go back to the 1950s when blissful ignorance meant most people were unaware of
the suffering that then existed: I think it was the more prosaic quest to keep
power.)
Going back to the Middle Class (so-called Peasants) Revolt, I compare
their reaction to the largely bland submission in response to outrages such as
the groping by airport security, and have to wonder: has fear robbed us of the
capacity to resist the unacceptable?
Unquestionably, some in the middle class (and upper class, looking back at some of
the social movements in the 19ths and early 20th centuries) are (and were) brave – and I am referring to
moral courage, as shown by things like standing up against the invasion of Iraq.
In our society, which has had millennia of, perhaps, too much unbalanced hero
mythology, physical courage tends to be what is recognised and revered – even when
both form of courage are present, as was the case with the Gandhi-inspired
march against the Dharasana
salt works, it is the physical courage that tends to be recognised, not the
moral courage that was at least equally present.
Opportunities to have moral courage crop up
many times in life – from resisting peer pressure at school, through conscientious
objection (this
was a new aspect of this topic for me; see also this,
on Israelis who object to some aspects of service) and not acceding to
group think in companies, to social progressivism. Those who choose to be
courageous are even more deserving of admiration given the lack of recognition –
which is only emphasised by the recognition given to some for their physical
courage, e.g., William
Coltman and Desmond
Doss.
There are situations where I consider courage
should be moderated – for instance, if one has a young baby or toddler, going
off to get arrested is perhaps not appropriate (especially in a situation where there is no support, as is often the
case in developing nations).
However, some of those failing to show
courage are simply lackeys of the oligarchs/elites – the hangers on that enable
despots like Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Putin, Erdogan, etc to stay in power.
Every manager who takes a hard line view of “having” to cut costs is one of
their agents - and is a coward. The brave thing is to be objective, and don’t
follow orders simply to curry the favour of bosses (who are themselves currying favour of their higher ups, etc).
In fact, as far as workplace courage goes,
in my opinion union busters and mass sackers are like those who ran the
concentration camps – there is nothing courageous about them, as they are
simply implementing the wishes of their bosses and ignoring the suffering that
is in their faces.
Now, some middle class people think they’re
brave – e.g., parents (yes, I have seen
parents flaunt their alleged bravery). Those middle class people are often
wrong – and certainly parents are wrong, as being a parent is difficult, but that
often doesn’t involve courage (sometimes it can - e.g., major illness, a “troubled
child”, etc). What I consider more courageous than being a parent is standing
up against pressure to have a child in this era of overpopulation and
over-consumption by a minority of the world’s population.
In other areas of society, working and
lower classes have often provided cannon fodder for army, so they certainly
have physical courage. Many I have known have also had moral courage.
On physical courage, adrenaline junkies are
not courageous: they’re addicted to adrenaline – I count them as the same as
people who like horror movies. Their reactions to one of theirs who dies also
suggests that they’re not actually expecting to die, so they aren’t same as
soldiers.
Another aspect here is that courage can be
misplaced. As an example, the undoubted courage shown by British soldiers at Rorke’s
Drift does not compensate for the fact that those soldiers were part of an army
violently invading and occupying another people’s land. Another example, an
example of misplaced moral courage, is those who are homophobic/transphobic
because of religious dogma - and I point out that such dogma often led to
racism [including slavery] and sexism, until people started to oppose that for
a range of reasons, including religious.
So, overall, I consider that there are signs
of courage, and of wanting to be brave (albeit
sometimes mixed up with other flaws) in most of what I’ve mentioned. People
may not have met my standards of courage, but they want to be – the hanger-on
may genuinely be motivated by wanting to stand up against pressure (it’s misplaced, in my view, but is probably
worth acknowledging). The middle class people talking about the courage
needed for everyday life are really, in my experience, talking about what lower
and working class people go through, but they are showing that they consider
courage to be an admirable thing, something they would like to have. There are
also specific examples of courage, such as anti-war movement, current campaigns
against underpayment (it takes courage to
openly stand against one’s employer), and animal rights activists - some of whom make the mistake of
going too far – I have only started to
appreciate in recent years just how important it is to take followers with one
on a journey of growth.
The courage is there – its
latency waiting to be drawn out, perhaps by a noble cause and truly inspiring
leaders, and with the sort of action – including good old-fashioned
consciousness raising -that will help those who are currently fearful to
realise their better selves, and to help shift the focus from physical to moral
courage.
