Are modern, middle class Westerners cowards?

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 20^th 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.