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ELIOT COHEN: I was very struck when I look at the book, the section on courage I think
is six selections, which five are really about martial courage. And I guess my question is:
isn’t there as much need for civic courage, including frequently individual courage. As
I was reading through it I was reflecting on the television series which had a huge
impact on me growing up, “Profiles in Courage,” which was a television version of John F.
Kennedy’s award winning book. And I was very struck that there were cases of, which
I think we’d all agree, of people showing enormous courage, which usually meant standing
alone against their own crowd—John Adams being willing to defend the soldiers accused
at the Boston Massacre; there’s a senator from Alabama in the 1920s who took on the
Ku Klux ***, and lost his seat as a result, and then many others…: isn’t that kind
of courage as necessary for the continuation of the republic as martial courage? And in
general if you could just reflect on the relationship between civil courage and martial courage.
AMY KASS: Definitely yes: that courage is necessary in civilian life. Part of the reason
we have martial courage here is, I think, as Leon was suggesting, that you’re putting
your life on the line, so what’s at stake is something different from what’s at stake
when you…we went to Mississippi, for example, in the summer of 1965, and worked with the
Civil Rights Movement. It took a great act of courage on my part to drive down there
with Northern license plates. And I had an accident the first five minutes on the road,
and I thought that was it, I was finished. Turns out that wasn’t the case, but, yes,
courage is necessary, courage is necessary to speak out against unpopular, for unpopular
opinions. But it’s a different kind of courage that we’re talking about.
LEON KASS:. What are the virtues that citizens are, in a way, called upon to display? The
first thing, strange to say, the first thing called upon it seemed to us to practice some
sort of self-command, and to earn some self-respect. I mean, if they have their own house in order.
Second, they’re obliged to be law-abiding, and also have some care for the doing of justice.
But then there’s the question of what happens when the polity as a whole is threatened,
and therefore the question is don’t we need people who are willing to make the sacrifice
and to display courage against the fear of that particularly great evil, the fear of
death, when the polity itself and its own existence and safety is on the line. That
doesn’t mean that that’s the only place where the character of the polity is on the
line.