The Courageous Animal: 4 Types of Courage You Need
Humans are the only animal that displays courage (or least, that can). Without our self-awareness, our courage couldn’t exist. We have the wonderful talent of dreading the future — the embarrassment of starting a failed licorice-flavored-only jelly bean company, the pain of dating someone emotionally unavailable who turns out to be emotionally unavailable.
It’s only our knowledge of risk that begets our choice to face it.
Animals live a simple life, hanging out in flowering fields until some other simple-living animal snaps their spine or a human makes wall decor out of them. Zebra continue grazing in the presence of lions who aren’t in hunting formation, happily oblivious until the threat is obvious. We lack the simplicity of animal lives, but simplicity isn’t always a virtue — courage is.
I last wrote about whether the virtue of courage has expired in our safe and lion-less society and the need for a new kind of courage — the existential bravery to be. In a society where no enemies lurk in the shadows besides maybe those people who try to shove 50 flyers through your car window, the challenges we face aren’t physical acts of survival, but psychological— we prove our courage on an internal battlefield.
Will you risk criticism? Will you risk emotional pain? They’re no lions, but the threat of death remains. Every obstacle you overcome is a mini-death — the you who came before ceases to exist.
Today we step out of our houses with little fear for our physical safety but cower internally, terrified to face our most ancient predator — the unknown.
Rollo May gives four types of courage in his book The Courage to Create. He argues we should develop each sphere of courage: physical, moral, social, and creative. For millions of years of human evolution, physical courage has been the catalyst for our progress. The person willing to explore new lands is the person who moves their tribe forward. Today the courageous person explores new yet unseen and equally threatening lands.
Today’s astroturf jungle yields a pathetic new existence; like a lion jumping through hoops in a circus, we rarely touch the power that millions of years conspired to design.
We’ve escaped the dangers of the jungle only to live in fear of each other.
We prove ourselves in all the wrong directions — addiction, aggression towards ideological enemies, a lust towards destruction for destruction’s sake. We no longer know what courage is, but the impulse to overcome danger still drives us.
Weak substitutes for tests of courage are a trap. There are no wellness retreats or positive affirmations that will bring you confidence like a true test of courage. An uncourageous culture can only degrade; its people live the wasted lives of caged lions and their society relies on an insecure, comfort-seeking populace.
With courage lost, a culture of insecure people turns to cheap substitutes in place of true confidence — group submission, extremism, authoritarianism, driving unnecessarily loud cars in crowded areas.
If you want to see a more progressive world, teach less sensitivity training and more courage.
Physical Courage
There’s still a place for physical courage in our society and some seek it out like the ghosts of ancestral warriors. Once revered, today our culture is less enamored with pure displays of traditional physical courage; athletes are expected to be role models as well as Olympians (and let’s not even talk about police).
May offers a modern alternative that goes deeper. He was ahead of the body positivity movement by a few decades but takes it beyond an extra glass of wine and a hashtag. To him, the physical courage of today will be viewing your body not like a tool or symbol, but a language, a crucial vessel of connection. It’s not easy to treat your body like some kind of soft Excalibur in our added-sugar, Insta-cart world. Yet, #gymlife alone isn’t physical courage any more than your daily selfie — both overlook the body’s true value, something beyond simple strength and aesthetics.
What would it look like to have the courage to care for your body not for its strength and appearance, but as the center from which every connection to the world outside you originates?
Moral Courage
May’s definition of moral courage isn’t what you’d assume — it isn’t roasting your grandma’s lack of progressive politics. The kind of moral WWE smackdowns common today lack a crucial ingredient for true moral courage — empathy.
Moral courage requires you to remove the focus from your own beliefs long enough to see the suffering of others, even those whose suffering your morals tell you doesn’t matter. Maybe grandma isn’t politically correct, but she’s probably suffered a bit more than you. Moral courage means listening.
What would it look like to have the courage to see the suffering in every person, regardless of how poorly they uphold your morality?
Social Courage
The path towards intimacy today is hidden behind the fog of our supposed freedoms. You’re free to take up any form of social closeness you like — sex with strangers, staying celibate, married for 20 years or never. We’re living in an era of a la carte connection. With all barriers of cultural repression torn down, we should be happier and closer than ever. Yet, our relationships are vaguer and less committed than ever.
Social courage is the bravery to share your full self with another person, not just your physical self. The free love ideals of the 60s played a cruel trick upon us; we thought our overbearing sexual restrictions were an obstacle to deep connection. We were wrong.
In a culture that’s never been more sexually free, the depth of our relationships has recoiled like a flower blooming in reverse.
With no restrictions on our sex lives, they’ve become meaningless; if I can have everything and do anything, my choices no longer matter — the outcome is always the same. Instead, our culture has created new restrictions on emotional intimacy. Don’t be too clingy, don’t chase commitment too obviously, don’t love too openly. When every song on the radio is an anthem for sexuality or superficial adoration, intimacy is the new taboo.
What would it look like to have the courage to bear your whole self, to be seen as you are in all your vulnerabilities, without one hand on the door handle?
Creative Courage
There are some songs we cry to, and others we take shots of cheap vodka to. Creative courage is what’s needed to go to the depths of ourselves rather than wading on the surface of human experience.
Creative courage exposes the danger of superficial art and propaganda. Just as a hollow relationship of pure physicality allows you to avoid the call to social courage, empty art robs you of the chance for creative courage.
Rollo May mentions the kind of pure beauty that comes to us in bittersweet moments — a beautiful song or genuine appreciation for someone we love. The bitterness comes in knowing the beauty of that moment is destined to end. While Knuck If You Buck is a timeless anthem, it doesn’t stir the depths of our existential fears with its beauty (debatable, I know).
There is nothing more courageous than deeply embracing what you know will end.
What would it look like to bear the fear of loss and leave the safe shallows long enough to experience true beauty?
To be human is to be courageous; it’s to know the danger before us and pursue a noble challenge anyway. A new world requires new courage — today’s frontiers are not beyond us, but within us.
Will you be the lion who eats from a silver bowl or will you be what only humans can?
This (relatively) mini-essay belongs to a series that analyzes the books I’m reading.
Keep up with the analysis, discussions, and find other mind-expanding books by checking out the Read Güd Book Club. It’s a no-pressure, no-guilt book club designed to breakdown important concepts in books without making you read along.
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