Sunday Evening Assembly - 3rd February 1963
COURAGE & COWARDICE
It was by coincidence that that hymn was chosen tonight, because the people that chose the hymns didn’t know what I was going to talk about, and you will see how it repeated the message of the Reading. I am going to talk about cowardice.
I wonder what the word “cowardice” means to each one of you. The dictionary gives the word “faint-heartedness”, which doesn’t tell you anything more; it’s simply another word for the same thing. But it does follow with a definition of “moral cowardice”, which it calls “fear of disapproval”. I think nearly everybody would hate to be called a coward, or thought a coward; it’s one of the good things about the human race that the appeal to courage always, or nearly always, strikes a chord somewhere in a human being. That doesn’t mean that people attain to courage – many people remain mainly and largely cowards.
Two years ago there was a sort of movement among young people in America – which spread a little to this country and other countries – a movement in which people were driven by mob opinion to do stupidly dangerous things; to get into jalopies (old cars) and drive them at each other, and the first person to swerve out of the way was called chicken. And it was presumed that the person who hung on to the end was not chicken-hearted – he was the brave one. Examine that situation for evidence of cowardice or courage. Is it courage to risk death for something stupid? Is it courage to do something dangerous because you’re afraid – afraid of being called chicken? Where does true courage lie in that situation? That kind of thing passes – it’s a sort of mob-neurosis that will seize a group of people for whom life is not sufficiently worth-while.
Among normal people that kind of situation does not arise – not in quite such a dramatic a form, but some elements of it do. Among soldiers people who risk their lives unnecessarily are badly thought of – a man who risks his life unnecessarily in war is a nuisance to his fellows – he may bring danger upon them, and he’s thought of as a fool anyway.
Now let’s face it, we all have our own particular difficulties where courage is concerned and you can’t apply a universal judgement to people. It’s harder for some people to do certain things than it is for others, and even if they get a little way towards it, it means that they have overcome a good deal of cowardice. I am terribly afraid of heights – I can’t bear to walk near to the edge of the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head; if I am with anybody I have to go about 20 yards inland and keep there – I can’t move any nearer to the cliff than that. What would I do if I saw a small child tottering on the edge? I don’t know! I hope that my feeling of the danger in which the child was placed would make me forget altogether my fear of heights and I would rush and get the child. As things are at the moment, I feel I would be more ready to rush into a burning building to save a child than I would be to go to the edge of Beachy Head, although I know quite well that I should probably survive Beachy Head because, after all, there is no need to fall over – whereas I might die in a burning building!
We none of us know what we are capable of until we actually face it, and often a new motive will overcome our fear. I remember going to see somebody at the top of the Rockefeller building in New York – the last storey but one it was – and being left in a room while I waited to see him. The window came down to a foot from the floor and the window was open. I shrank back in terror from that open window, but I had a camera in my hand and I was gradually caught up with a feeling of “wouldn’t it be wonderful to take a photograph down the side of the building”. I got down on my hands and knees and I crawled to the window; I gradually eased both arms and shoulders and head over the window sill and got my photograph – right down the face of the building, with the cars looking like little dinky toys at the bottom! So to some extent, you see that what one can do depends upon the feelings of the moment. I’ve also found myself on a dangerous cliff, incidentally, with a camera in my hand, without knowing quite how I got there; I just wanted to take a photograph!
In the first war they made – what shall I say – categorical judgements about cowards. A man who broke down in the face of the danger was taken behind the lines, given a summary courts martial, and shot. That went on until they realised that men were being subjected to a strain that was unknown to mankind hitherto; a strain until they broke down into madness – it was called “shell-shock” – and normal men broke down under shell-fire and cried like children; cried incessantly, so that they could take nothing in; they could obey no orders; they could do nothing. And this became so widespread that the War Office had to take note of it and regard those men as ill.
In the second World War shell shock was almost unknown, because they learnt how to help men overcome that particular kind of strain; but many men died before a firing squad in the first World War before they realised they were dealing with something new, and something for which men were not to be blamed. But nevertheless, in spite of all these variations, we most of us have a certain amount of physical (sic) courage, especially when it is challenged; we have more than we know. Not many have enough moral courage, and I have taken the dictionary definition of moral courage – or moral cowardice, rather – as fear of disapproval. Many of us would save somebody from the danger of death, but far fewer of us will risk being disapproved by our friends.
Think of what those young people in Germany had to do. It wasn’t immediately the danger of death that they had to brave; they had to stand out against all their companions. They were in the Youth Movement to begin with, and when they just did a few things that were different from what the other Youth Movement members did they were criticised, and they suddenly began to realise that this Youth Movement was a movement that was trying to make everybody feel and think alike, and they thought that wrong and they began to stand out against it; to stand out against their teen-age friends – and can you imagine how hard that would be, in masses of other people of 14, 15 or 16, to stand out and say “This is wrong, I can’t go on with this – I must give up my membership”. How many of you would have had the courage to do this? - to stand out against your teen-age friends?
Now Germany, under the Nazis, became one seething mass of moral cowardice. Ordinary people, everywhere, became moral cowards – they shrank within their skins at the thought of merely criticising what was happening, far less taking any action against it – and to us it seemed that this was the most astonishing phenomenon in the whole of history, that countless millions of people should become such arrant cowards that they should, in their masses, fail to stand up for what they believed to be right; and even further, should allow their minds to be switched right round to that in the urgent desire to think like everybody else they began to think that black was white. And they became convinced that black was white, that evil was good! I met crowds of them coming over to this country, before war broke out - of young Nazis who argued that what we thought was evil was good. That is what moral cowardice does to people.
But let me say quickly that this wasn’t just because they were Germans – it was beginning to happen in this country. It happened in Germany because they were the inheritors of a particular intellectual and governmental tradition, and because of their particular circumstances, and some of us in this country realised that this would have happened to us had we been placed in their situation, because in the last few years before 1939 Sir Oswald Mosley was massing an army of blackshirts in this country who had the same beliefs and who were prepared to terrorise people in the same way. It was beginning to become impossible for a person to speak the truth or to criticise at a meeting for fear that a number of blackshirts would converge upon him and throw him down the steps after beating him up with knuckle-dusters, and we take such pride in our police force that our police force became cowards too. During those two or three terrible years when we were threatened by Sir Oswald Mosley the police turned coward too, they stood by and they watched it happen. In some ways it was a relief when war broke out, and suddenly the British public realised the evil that was growing up in their midst; that the disease that had shaken Germany to the very foundation was beginning to raise its head in this country too.
So don’t let us merely blame the Germans; moral cowardice lies latent in the hearts of all of us and if enough pressure is put upon us we may go the same way. In every one of us there is the tendency to sink back into the mob rather than stand out alone for what we believe; not merely to sink back into the mob and fail to stand out alone, but to begin to jeer at the person who does stand out alone. You see, it is always easier to fall back into the arms of evil than it is to move forward, and understand and accept what is good. That is why the progress of the human race has been so slow, because the mass of people were always falling back and jeering at the few who try to move ahead. We have to drag with us this inertia, this jeering, this cynicism – we have to drag against this in order to move the human race forward and we still have the weight of it against us in all our efforts to save the world today.
One of the things that comes easy to the lips of those who fall back and jeer is the term “goody-goody”. Now there are such things as goody-goodies; there are people who pretend to be good in order to get into favour, or because it gives them a sense of pride and superiority; but let’s put those people aside. The mob still jeers at those who are genuinely and humanly good; the people who are not currying favour, but the people who, like Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, see the good and have the courage to follow it.
Think of your own experience in the school – we’re dropping now from perhaps what may seem to you to be from the sublime to the ridiculous, but we don’t know what happened in the lives of those six young people before they reached the great challenge. What was it in the everyday lives of those people that was building up the courage that enabled them to face death? It couldn’t have come suddenly; it must have been the product of some very fine community and family experience that gave them the strength when they needed it. Think of your own experience. Let’s take one that will immediately challenge some of you. A lot of you want to go off to the wood and smoke. Perhaps one says that “I’m not sure that we ought to – there’s some sense in trying to resist it”. What’s the reaction of the others to the one? Do they say “yes, all right, you think it’s not right – all right – we’ll go alone – you needn’t come”, or do the other five or six say “well, so what!” Or suppose it’s a matter of bad behaviour at a meal or siesta. Again some person would rather like to have a civilised table to eat at, a quieter meal that would be less exhausting, or somebody wants to be quiet in siesta and says so. How do you behave towards that one person? Do you say “Yes, perhaps you’re right: let’s be quiet”, or do you say “Phew”? Or suppose you are in class, and out of a class of twenty there are four or five people who are rather anxious to get on with the work. They know that in the class it’s possible to sabotage the discipline. Four or five want to get on, and what do the others do? Do the[y] say “Yes, this class exists so that we shall learn something – let’s give it a chance,” or do they look at the four or five in such a way as to make them feel that they will be disapproved of by the group if they try to be quiet and try to make the class work? And suppose there’s a group bullying a person who is a bit different – a bit odd! What do you say to one person who says “Now look here, this isn’t fair”. What do you do? Do you think he is a goody-goody? That is precisely the situation in which the Germans found themselves. There came a time when everybody who looked like a Jew would be battered to death by half-a-dozen 16,17 or 18 year old boys: battered to death with truncheons until he was a bleeding pulp in the gutter. And the German public watched it and passed by. That’s what bullying becomes when it is allowed to grow up into the adult community.
Now everyone passes through primitive stages on the way to growing up. You will all pass through stages of moral cowardice, but it is terribly important that you should recognise it for what it is and grow out of it before you are adult, because if you don’t grow out of moral cowardice before you are adult you may never grow out of it at all, and I have told you that the majority of people remain, largely, moral cowards. Only the minority of people is able to stand out for what is good and true against the dragging back of the mob, so if you see this in yourself, say to yourself “This is something that has got to pass – I’ve got to find moral courage”, and I do hope that it will be one of the characteristics of people from this school when they meet the challenges of the world, that they will meet them with moral courage. I do hope that what they see to be true and good they will follow – headless of what other people may say; heedless of other people’s jeers. You will find heaps and heaps of cynicism. You know that the majority of our pupils who choose a profession choose teaching, and when they go into schools elsewhere they often have to meet cynicism; they try new methods; they try to be friendly and kind to their classes, or they try some stimulating new technique of teaching, and the other people in the common room say “Huh! We’ve seen lots of youngsters try that sort of thing, so what?” Well, I hope that our people – and by and large they that our people will have the moral courage to keep on in spite of the jeers and the cynicism. And they won’t always meet jeers and cynicism. If you stand out you’ll find other people beginning to stand out too.
A curious thought came to me while you were singing – you didn’t sing that very well, that last hymn – and at the end of last term you did sing well, and you sang well because one or two of you, during the practice for carol singing, had suddenly decided to open your mouths, and low (sic) and behold because two or three had the courage to open their mouths nearly everybody opened their mouths. So you may be surprised to find what good there is in people if you have the courage to follow it yourself – you will find other people responding, and we don’t know how deep the effect on Germany may have been of those young people who died amid a welter of evil. If you remain moral coward you drop back eventually to a sub-human level – not to an animal level, but something lower than that; an animal, in all its moods, is often an admirable creature, but a human being when he becomes less than human is less than an animal, and that is what the Germans became, many of them, when they surrendered their personal integrity, and what we what we would have become had we been there and gone through the conditioning that they experienced.
So let me remind you once more of what a moral coward is. He’s one who sinks back into the crowd; who gets encouragement from the crowd in his own cowardice. You see we really can’t really bear to be cowards, or to think ourselves cowards, but it’s easier to bear if others are supporting us in our cowardice; it’s easier to be a jeering coward if others are helping you to jeer and others jeer with us. It’s much easier to surrender yourselves to them than it is to stand out for what you know to be good and right; and don’t forget that those who stand out – even though they seem to be alone at the time – are not alone in history. Sophie Scholl, the Hanz, the Alex Schmorell, and Kurt Huber, and the other two or three – those people stand out in history among those who have made us human; among those who have taken us up out of our fear and our barbarity, and made us into human, loving, and courageous creatures. Don’t forget that practically all the freedom that you approve of and that you enjoy in this country have been won by somebody with the moral courage to stand out from the mob and to say “This is wrong – I can’t bear it”. Now, which are you going to be? Are you going to be among those who go on supporting and increasing the freedom and the love in humanity, or those who will simply let evil happen because you haven’t got the courage to protest.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 37