Of all the vices, none is easier to hide than cowardice.
In a prosperous society like ours, vices like lust, greed, envy, and gluttony are provoked constantly, but cowardice is a vice that can go unpracticed and unnoticed for years.
When his luck is good, the average man has no need of courage. He can go to work in the morning, complete his duties, collect his ducats, then it’s home for dinner, TV, bath, talc, and pajamas, all without any need to conquer his fears. Granted, he may suffer a little tension here, a little anxiety there—rising property taxes, a funny feeling in his flank—but provided he can tamp down his frustrations and keep his mouth shut for long enough, most of his problems will blow over without much fanfare. So, a year passes, then another, and none of the people with whom the fellow works or worships have any idea that he’s as yellow as a freshly painted school bus.
Unlike other vices, cowardice produces very few outward signs from one day to the next. The glutton announces himself silently and obviously. Envy outs itself in the breakroom on a quarterly basis—can you believe that slob got my promotion? And the lech can’t quite conceal the glances he steals of every short skirt in the office. But cowardice is generally dormant, no more active than a fat cicada, which is to say that a coward may only perform his cowardice once every several years.
In the meantime, though, dormant cowardice often takes precautionary pains to present itself otherwise. The coward boldly denounces any threat that is a safe distance off, even though this is where threats usually hang out. A coward is not necessarily a timid, hen-pecked man who winces at every loud noise. In fact, most cowards make decent bridge partners. They’re chatty and they can hold their liquor. In the movies, cowards are knock-kneed milquetoasts whose desertion “in the face of battle” is telegraphed from the moment they appear on screen. In real life, the revelation of a coward often comes as a surprise.
This is because most cowards talk a good game. You have heard the coward say he’d “teach that guy a thing or two if only he had the chance.” However, when the time to be courageous presents itself, the coward coolly dissembles. Cowards are forever dismissing the concerns of others and lampooning men of action for being worry-warts, overly passionate, reckless, and hot-headed. While the lech excuses his actions by insisting that he’s “just having a little fun,” the coward wants his cowardice to pass as real virtue. Cowards are forever counseling patience, prudence, longsuffering, circumspection—all of which are genuine virtues, except when the need of the moment is for courage and immediate, risky action.
The coward’s favorite proverb is, “Choose your battles carefully,” and he tells those on the cusp of action that he will not personally take action today because he is biding his time, waiting for the right moment. But the coward never chooses a battle. He merely defers the choice of battle for some hypothetical future that never comes. “Choose your battles carefully” is only sound advice from a man who has a few battle scars – the coward has none. When he is feeling pious, the coward may point to St. James’s injunction that Christians be “Quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” Nonetheless, cowards are quick to speak against the brave when they fear getting lumped in with them. If listening might make the coward look complicit in the risky maneuvers of the brave, nothing will keep him from blabbing to the “proper” authorities.
Anyone looking for cowards will often find them hiding behind the shield of bureaucracy and propriety. The coward insists the time for action is later. The place for action is elsewhere. The people for action are not us. Action is someone else’s responsibility, and it would be arrogant for us to assume their role. “The real work of courage here,” says the coward, “is to do nothing.” As cowards see it, taking action always means violating the chain-of-command. Action always means doing harm to the employee manual, the handbook, or the org chart—the precious and life-giving org chart!
When the time for action arises, the coward styles himself as someone who is calm and rational, unlike everyone else. The coward can’t see what all the fuss is over, the hysteria. Cowards regularly insist, with a roll of their eyes, “Everything is fine.” Cowards are cool. They don’t see what the big deal is. They can imagine everything being much worse. Cowards keep a long catalogue of “worse situations” at their beck and call and trot them out whenever brave men insist things are bad enough that “we ought to do something.” Besides, everything would get better if the people “itching for a fight” could just chill out and behave like adults, and not like horny, war-mongering teenage boys. It is the false virtue of cowards that has turned “slow down” into the wisest advice possible, regardless of the situation, and “hurry up” into the height of presumption.
Real men know that diplomacy is sometimes the answer. Cowards believe in no other way. For the coward, “moderation” always demands something less than whatever men of action are calling for. The coward knows that he has found the moderate way whenever he discovers a plan that will eliminate any risk to himself. For the coward, every genuine risk is reckless.
Cowards are divided, though, on whether they’d be better off if more men were like themselves. On the one hand, gutlessness seems all-the-more reasonable when committed en masse. Cowards hate standing out. The coward knows that nothing (bad) happens to those who say nothing and do nothing—at least, nothing bad happens to such people today, and cowards would much rather slowly and safely lose later than gamble anything on a win today.
On the other hand, the coward may also have something to gain from the courage of others, in which case he condescendingly accepts the trickledown benefits that come from their accomplishments, all the while protesting their methods. In retrospect, he feels justified in refraining from action. Yes, the men of action changed things for the better, and yes, the conscientious objector will certainly enjoy the fruits of their labor—but had the men of action simply followed the coward’s principles, they “might have accomplished so much more,” and done so with less harm to the vanquished.
The coward understands that the average man (the man of modest courage) is often on-the-fence about whether the time for action has come. A man who has decided only this morning that, “The time for action is now,” is generally still so unsure of himself that he could easily be persuaded otherwise any time before the first metaphorical shot is fired. Cowards know this and are very good at winning unwitting converts. Just when a few men have become convinced that action is now justified, along comes the coward to obfuscate the rationale of their resolve and settle them back into complacency.
The coward is given to recast his cowardice as patience, forbearance, and the extension of grace. The validity of coward’s views is often proved with pious quotations from Church Fathers who commend “mercy at all times,” even though such passages are often but a few lines away from counsel that children and novices be beaten only after they receive two warnings.
When pressed on the need for action, the coward loves comparing himself to some passive figure who was abused for decades by everyone he knew and then obtained validation as a saint or hero by an intervening authority at the end of his life, or after. While the suffering of the saints is not to be dismissed, their lives are nothing like the coward, who says nothing and does nothing not because he has the self-control to endure his blows silently, but because he’d rather suffer for fear than for whatever punishment will come from an unsuccessful act of courage. Like the lech and the glutton, the coward is a hedonist, but not a very good one.
Nonetheless, it must be admitted that courageous men of action rarely accomplish their goals without committing a few sins. This is not to say that they sin in order to accomplish their goals, though. The sins are not what make their accomplishment possible but are extraneous to it. The rightness of the Revolutionary War isn’t invalidated simply because a few soldiers lost their tempers during the battle of Saratoga. Granted, no sin can be swept under the rug simply because it was committed in the midst of a broader, better project with fine outcomes. However, the coward who refuses to fight can have no role in addressing such sins. He has recused himself from playing any legitimate role in their call to repentance.
Obviously, the coward does not see things this way. In fact, cowards have a tendency to seize the vacant positions of power formerly occupied by the incompetent and wicked men whom courageous men have ousted. Cowards often persuasively argue that the few small sins committed by courageous men during their action disqualify them from positions of authority, whereas the coward has done nothing incorrect (because he has done nothing). Cowards always have plenty of notes to offer on the actions that they stood by and idly watched. Besides, everyone knows that “action” is the work of commoners, whereas men “truly qualified” for positions of authority keep free of the filth that comes with getting things done. While the men of action did a good thing, their time is past. “The adults can take things from here,” says the coward, contentedly.
As you will have noticed, a great many things the coward says and does are, in fact, virtuous when set in their proper contexts. Indeed, sometimes a man should wait, say nothing, do nothing, cool off, think again, and all the rest. Sometimes the mob is animated by a demonic frenzy. Sometimes the aggrieved are a bunch of sniveling losers who want nothing more than to exact petty revenge—and the godly man will not sully his fingers on such tawdry foolishness. Sometimes following the org chart will actually make everything much better. Sometimes.
But the coward refuses to “discern the time,” as the Lord once put it. “Discerning the time” is not simply a difficult thing to do, it is even difficult to describe. It means seeing the way things have gone, recognizing the grooves in reality and the direction in which the world is headed. It means deciding that enough is known to render judgement—and then rendering that judgement. Given the interconnectedness of human existence, any criminal trial could conceivably go on forever as more evidence, more witnesses, and more facts continually piled up. How does the jury know they know enough to give a verdict? How does a woman know she knows a man well enough to agree to marry him? How does anyone know they know enough to make any decision whatsoever? And yet we’re all required to discern the time. We’re required to give a final “yes,” a final “no,” and to stand by it.
Cowards understand better than most men just how difficult it is to “discern the time” and they hide behind that difficulty. In our world, time is nearly meaningless. We can buy whatever we want, whenever we want it. We can have heat in the winter, cool in the summer, applies in and out of season. Credit cards mean there’s nothing we can’t afford. Rites of passage no longer exist, so kids can have all the adult things as soon as they’re old enough to want them. There’s no waiting. There’s no time left to discern, and so cowardice abounds to such an extent that it’s nearly invisible. When did you last hear anyone condemn cowardice? When did you last hear a sermon on it? Or hear a father tell his son not to be a coward? The word is nearly obsolete, a technical term born of the ancient battlefield—sort of like phalanx or trebuchet—which no longer has any bearing on the network of offices and online platforms that constitute our world. When every deadline can be deferred for a few more days, what need is there for courage?
And yet, for men, the term “coward” still carries weight. Most men can easily brush aside accusations of foolishness, laziness, sloppiness, even stupidity… These are the critiques common to the comments section. But if you call a man a “coward,” it will stick in his craw. While I wouldn’t recommend casually throwing around allegations of cowardice, the modern office-dweller would do well to consider the possibility far more often than he does.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. 