The tyranny of petty coercion

Social Research, Spring, 2004 by Marilynne Robinson

COURAGE SEEMS TO ME TO BE DEPENDENT ON CULTURAL DEFINITION. BY this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true. I mean also, and more importantly for the purposes of this article, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it. Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission. We human beings also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves--prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one. This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression. But it is.

Physical courage is remarkably widespread in this population. There seem always to be firefighters to deal with the most appalling conflagrations and doctors to deal with the most novel and alarming illnesses. It is by no means to undervalue courage of this kind to say it is perhaps expedited by the fact that it is universally recognized as courage. Those who act on it can recognize the impulse and act confidently, even at the greatest risk to themselves.

Moral and intellectual courage are not in nearly so flourishing a state, even though the risks they entail--financial or professional disadvantage, ridicule, ostracism--are in fact comparatively minor. I propose that these forms of courage suffer from the disadvantage of requiring new definitions continuously, which must be generated out of individual perception and judgment. They threaten or violate loyalty, group identity, the sense of comme il faut. They are, by definition, outside the range of consensus. And it is true of consensus as it is of worthier things that whatever is not with it is against it.

Social comity is no doubt dependent on a degree of like-mindedness in a population. It does sometimes help when we are in general agreement about basic things--though it is never to be forgotten how much repression and violence consensus can support, or how many crimes it has justified. Still, it is so powerful and so effectively defended that I suspect it goes back to earliest humanity, when our tribes were small and vulnerable, and schism and defection were a threat to survival. Since Darwin at the latest, there has been a tendency to define "the natural" in a way that excludes human behavior in most forms known to or understood by writers on such subjects, and to assign great positive value to whatever behaviors they chose to retroject onto the imagined human past. I do not by any means wish to be understood as offering the impulse to consensus, however primordial it may be, as anything other than a fact, or to find demurral any less natural because it may have developed with the other arts of civilization. As with anything that figures in human history, weal and woe are thoroughly compounded in them both. As with anything that figures in human history, both require continuous ethical evaluation.

It is true that in most times and places physical courage and moral and intellectual courage have tended to merge, since dungeons, galleys and stakes have been so extensively employed in discouraging divergent viewpoints. For this reason our own society, which employs only mild disincentives against them and in theory positively admires them, offers a valuable opportunity for the study of what I will call the conservation of consensus, that is, the effective enforcement of consensus in those many instances where neither reason nor data endorse it, where there are no legal constraints supporting it, and where there are no penalties for challenging it that persons of even moderate brio would consider deterrents.

Let us say that courage of the kind I wish to consider can be defined as loyalty to truth. I am not entering any epistemological thicket here. The kind of truth that interests me is of the type sometimes represented in the statement "the house is on fire." Some truth is not relative, and to confound it with the kind that is is to make an epistemological error so blatant as to disqualify the most distinguished equivocator. It is consensus that conceals from us what is objectively true. And it is consensus that creates and supports "truths" that are in fact culturally relative. And, interestingly, it is consensus that is preserved when the objective truth is disallowed on the grounds that "truth" is merely the shared understanding of a specific group or culture.

Here is an instance: for some time the word "bashing" has been used to derail criticism of many kinds, by treating as partisan or tendentious statements that are perfectly available to being dealt with as true or false. To say that the disparity between rich and poor in this country exceeds any previously known in American history (putting aside the marked economic disparity between plantation owners and slaves) is to say something falsiflable--that is, for practical purposes, verifiable, and in any case arguable. But such criticism is called "Bush bashing" and also "class warfare." In other words, a statement that is objectively true or false can be dismissed as the slur of a hostile subgroup. It is interesting and germane to note how effective this tactic is. Perfectly sensible people flinch at the thought that they might have been a trifle Jacobin, and they are shamed out of saying what they believe to be true in the plainest sense of the word true. Nor, I believe, is it the critics alone who lose their bearings when these strategies are employed. Those who identify with the group toward whom the criticisms are directed--in this case the present administration--can hear irrational attack where they might otherwise hear a challenge to their values or to their theories and methods.