Courage: a product of practice rather than faith

The question of moral courage – and whether you can get better at it – has stayed with me ever since I was shot at by Israelis

by Giles Fraser in The Guardian


OK, we all get it. Captain Francesco Schettino was a coward. Sinking the Costa Concordia was one thing – a mistake, even. The running away bit, though: that's a different order of moral failure. But how do we know what sort of person we would turn out to be in such circumstances? Hero or villain?



Years ago I was shot at by Israeli soldiers on the Gaza/Egypt border. Bullets kicked up a line of dust a few feet to my right. Despite being in the company of a dozen Palestinian children, I ran and hid. Sick with adrenaline, I cowered behind a block of flats for a good 10 minutes. To be fair on myself, we all did, and that may well have been the only thing to do. Nobody got hurt. But the question of moral courage has remained with me ever since: in particular, the question of how those who do this sort of thing, day in day out, build up the emotional resources to confront danger with bravery. Is courage something you are born with; or can you get better at it?



"Each of us has a bank of courage," explains Peter de la Billière, a former commander of the SAS. "Some have a significant credit balance, others little or nothing; but in war we are all able to make the balance last longer if we have training, discipline, patriotism and faith." This feels so much like the advice of a bygone age. For these are values whose stock has not fared well in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. Indeed, those of us who at school learned by heart the war poem Dulce et Decorum Est have come to associate a whole cluster of courage-based values – valour, sacrifice, etc – with what Wilfred Owen called "The old Lie". For these were values so soaked in blood, so purloined for the purposes of militaristic propaganda, that their rehabilitation remains problematic, even now.



But the idea that courage requires discipline and training needs a fairer hearing. For at least since Aristotle there has been an important strain of moral thought that has recognised human virtue not as some innate given, but rather as something that one can prepare for, and indeed get better at. The reason the soldier strips and re-strips his weapon a thousand tedious times on the parade ground is so that he can do it, without thought, when he hasn't slept for days and the bullets are pinging about his ears. Over time, it becomes a matter of instinct. And the advice of the modern army is that the same is true of courage. If you rehearse "doing the right thing" enough, you are much more likely to do the right thing when terrified or confused.



This sort of advice is not peculiar to the army. Alcoholics Anonymous has the phrase: "Fake it till you make it." If you want to become a different sort of person, first act like you are, and the acting will eventually transform you. Pretend to be the person you want to be and you will end up becoming more like that person. This cuts right against the grain of familiar assumptions that moral change comes from within, that the most important thing is expressing who you really are – "To thine own self be true", as Polonius puts it in Hamlet. From this perspective, an honest confession of our own weakness – our lack of courage, for instance – becomes the only real expression of virtue. In other words, an emphasis on authenticity can easily become an alibi for a refusal of character development.



While awaiting execution in Flossenburg concentration camp for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an extraordinary poem entitled Who Am I? that dramatised the gap between his outward display of courage and his inner fear. "I stepped from my cell's confinement … like a squire from his country house"; and yet inwardly he was "faint and ready to say farewell to it all". Which is the real me, he ponders. "Am I both at once?"



Courage isn't about not being afraid. Indeed, not being afraid in life-threatening situations is simply foolishness or foolhardiness. Rather, courage is being afraid and doing the right thing nonetheless. Which is why Bonhoeffer is remembered for his bravery and not for being the "contemptibly woebegone weakling" he so feared himself to be. Faith may have been a part of his moral construction. But, a propos Peter de la Billière's list of what boosts courage, I suspect faith itself is considerably less significant than the sort of moral formation that comes from inculcating certain habits of behaviour.



Yes, church itself can be a school of virtue, encouraging a set of practices that transform character. In the trade it is known as formation. But the faith bit may well be incidental. For we can be schooled in virtue by a whole range of institutional practices, the army and AA being two others. The Jesuits believed that the acting out of virtue as expressed in theatre could function in this way too.



All of which suggests that it's not the fear of our inner Captain Shettino that matters most. He lurks within us all. The real question is how we shape our behaviour. Which is why the issue of being true to oneself offers so little to the task of becoming the person we would want to be. Change requires practice.

Europe's gutless collapse

By Reuven Brenner

The US and European financial crises have this in common: too much credit was advanced at too low prices to households in the United States and to governments in Europe. In the US, the recipients did not have either the collateral or the prospect of revenues to pay back creditors. In Europe, the governments, with their present institutions, cannot create enough taxed wealth to pay back the debt with their current institutions, taxes and regulations.

In both cases, the recipients of the loans either lied through their teeth or deluded themselves (and delusions can be powerful when they serve one's interests). In the case of mortgage recipients in the US, few did any due diligence about their future ability to pay or about the mortgage-backed bonds.

In Europe, the move toward the European Community and the euro started with lies (or delusions of German rescues). Recall that the Italians called 1987 the year of il sorpasso, since suddenly 18% was added to their gross domestic product (GDP). The politicians claimed that this number reflected part of their undeclared, unmeasured incomes.

Why 18%? Because this was the number that allowed Italy to conform to the European Community requirement of debt/GDP ratios. The European bureaucrats were aware of much undeclared incomes in Greece too. Eventually they sued the Greek government for the false national statistics.

The result? To this day in both countries some 30% of incomes are undeclared in a variety of imaginative ways, often hidden by these countries' intricate customs, traditions and systems of patronage.

The national governments will not have an easy time changing such deeply rooted arrangements. Too many complex taxes, too many regulations, and too much corruption "on the top" resulted in ingrained perceptions that governments are wasting the money and that the courts are unreliable, rationalizing the culture of tax evasion. Why should hard-working people pay taxes when politicians and the rich get away with murder?

As it is in private life, start relationships with lies and they are unlikely to last or to end well. No trust, no finance; diminished trust, finance at a higher price. It is not rocket science.

But if all this was known, why were lenders willing to advance massive amounts of loans to these irresponsible, unaccountable entities?

Whereas in the US the case can be made that it took some time until it dawned on some that things were going awry, in Europe's case the issues surrounding Italy and Greece were well known. It was no secret that the continent was divided into "junk countries" and others where the tribe - the German one - could be called on for sacrifices and fulfilling duties, as was the case after the reunification.

Who made the mistakes that led to offering the loans to these profligate entities, aggravating mispricing of credit around the world and failing to correct the errors?

After all, the rationale for capital markets is simple: when all parties are held accountable, they correct mispricing faster than any other institutions that supply capital. There are only two other main entities that supply capital in every society: families and governments. The first is unlikely to correct mistaken allocation faster because of emotions. The second is unlikely to correct mistakes faster than arms-length financial intermediaries because a wide variety of political considerations get in the way.

So what went wrong in the presumably accountable financial institutions? Improper fiscal, regulatory and monetary policies. When combined with political considerations, however, none were considered "mistakes" by large segments of academics, central bankers, and politicians.

China illustrates in an extreme way the main difficulty with the finding solutions, but it is not dissimilar to what now confronts Europe too.

Most people agree that communism, as once practiced in the Soviet Union and China, was a colossal mistake. Tens of millions of people were killed, generations were made miserable, and talents and resources became severely mismatched. How do you correct for such mistakes? What is the path from totalitarian societies to more open ones backed by rule of law and equality?

There are no unique answers. There are no theories, no models, since the countries do not have either the legal precedents or the personnel to create, interpret and enforce them. Governments may emulate a successful country, but that too can take a generation or two.

China bet on a strategy of keeping the monopoly of the communist party, but allowing part of its population to integrate with the West. To achieve this integration, they pegged their currency to the US dollar, thus allowing dollar prices to guide the drastic restructuring. What was the alternative? Since accounting, balance sheets, prices, costs under communism were all fiction, the new government needed an anchor, and dollar prices served as such anchor.

Since wages in China were much lower than in the US, employment and exports expanded quickly. The country rapidly accumulated trillions of dollar assets. The Fed's low interest rate policy from 2004 and on distorted China's massive flow of trade to the US and its purchasing of Treasuries.

One could make the point that if the Chinese Communist Party opened up its domestic financial markets more rapidly, dispersing power and allowing entrepreneurship to thrive, the financing of the housing bubble could have been significantly mitigated, if not avoided, even with the pegged currency. Was the US able to use its negotiating powers at the time to force China to open its domestic markets more quickly? I believe so - though this option wasn't pursued.

The main point though of the above example is not to regret some foregone opportunity but to show that there are no models describing either how exactly countries should correct their political mistakes or how other countries should react while countries go through such transitions. There are no roadmaps and general theories for successful transformation: using negotiating power matters.

The European crisis
The financing of profligate, unaccountable governments, sanctioned by rating agencies and the Bank of International Settlement in Basel as being "riskless", brought us to the present situation. The solution for the eurozone required a drastic change in domestic policies cajoled by the European Union. After all, the EU knew all along about the extensive black and grey markets and the intricate patronage. Solutions were known too: simplified taxes, simplified regulations, more accountable governments.

Note that these solutions have very little to do with financial markets. They are a matter of political leadership. The political and financial institutions of China, Italy, Greece, and so forth shaped intricate institutions and habits and will not be altered because some economist or politician disapproves of it or devises some new technical models. Changing these is a matter of political leadership.

Unfortunately, such leadership is today nowhere in sight. If it does not emerge, bankruptcy, a distant second best, will bring about the changes. It is a distant second best because it could involve an extremely disorganized process, whose political outcome is unpredictable. What could then be done now while we wait for the Club Med countries to put their houses in order?

Since the European banks are at the center of the present crises, the best solution would be to emulate what happened in the US banking system in the 1990s. Namely, let them raise money by selling their loan book.

Banks would be much smaller. Ownership of non-investment grade loans would be much more dispersed. If the US banks could diminish their ownership of such loans from 80% in 1994 of their assets to 20% by 2009 (the balance distributed in a variety of collateralized loan obligations), there is no particular reason why Europe cannot achieve the same in much shorter time.

No need to implement a myriad of regulations. Disgorging debts from the zombie banks would also mitigate the much discussed "too large" or "too interconnected" to fail issue. Pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign funds could offer the capital for such purchases.

But this takes guts, which are lacking in both Europe and the US. Yet again, I sound like Machiavelli waiting for his prince who never came.

Let's hope that he will emerge in 2012.

Reuven Brenner holds the Repap Chair at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management. The article draws on his books Labyrinths of Prosperity and Force of Finance.

BBC's TOP GEAR and Creative Truth

Top Gear's electric car shows pour petrol over the BBC's standards

Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC's editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts?

Jeremy Clarkson test drives the Leaf electric car Photograph: BBC

 

What distinguishes the BBC from the rest of this country's media? There's the lack of advertising, and the lack of a proprietor with specific business interests to defend. But perhaps the most important factor is its editorial guidelines, which are supposed to ensure that the corporation achieves "the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality and strive[s] to avoid knowingly and materially misleading our audiences."
Here's a few of the things they say:

"Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest."
"We will be rigorous in establishing the truth of the story and well informed when explaining it. Our specialist expertise will bring authority and analysis to the complex world in which we live."
"We will be open in acknowledging mistakes when they are made and encourage a culture of willingness to learn from them."

Woe betide the producer or presenter who breaches these guidelines. Unless, that is, they work for Top Gear. If so, they are permitted to drive a coach and horses – or a Hummer H3 - through them whenever they please.

Take, for example, Top Gear's line on electric cars. Casting aside any pretence of impartiality or rigour, it has set out to show that electric cars are useless. If the facts don't fit, it bends them until they do.

It's currently being sued by electric car maker Tesla after claiming, among other allegations, that the Roadster's true range is only 55 miles per charge (rather than 211), and that it unexpectedly ran out of charge. Tesla says "the breakdowns were staged and the statements are untrue". But the BBC keeps syndicating the episode to other networks. So much for "acknowledging mistakes when they are made".

Now it's been caught red-handed faking another trial, in this case of the Nissan LEAF.
Last Sunday, an episode of Top Gear showed Jeremy Clarkson and James May setting off for Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, 60 miles away. The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln, and had to be pushed. They concluded that "electric cars are not the future".

But it wasn't unexpected: Nissan has a monitoring device in the car which transmits information on the state of the battery. This shows that, while the company delivered the car to Top Gear fully charged, the programme-makers ran the battery down before Clarkson and May set off, until only 40% of the charge was left. Moreover, they must have known this, as the electronic display tells the driver how many miles' worth of electricity they have, and the sat-nav tells them if they don't have enough charge to reach their destination. In this case it told them – before they set out on their 60-mile journey – that they had 30 miles' worth of electricity. But, as Ben Webster of the Times reported earlier this week, "at no point were viewers told that the battery had been more than half empty at the start of the trip."

It gets worse. As Webster points out, in order to stage a breakdown in Lincoln, "it appeared that the Leaf was driven in loops for more than 10 miles in Lincoln until the battery was flat."

When Jeremy Clarkson was challenged about this, he admitted that he knew the car had only a small charge before he set out. But, he said: "That's how TV works". Not on the BBC it isn't, or not unless your programme is called Top Gear.

Top Gear's response, by its executive producer Andy Wilman, is a masterpiece of distraction and obfuscation. He insists that the programme wasn't testing the range claims of the vehicles, and nor did it state that the vehicles wouldn't achieve their claimed range. But the point is that it creates the strong impression that the car ran out of juice unexpectedly, leaving the presenters stranded in Lincoln, a city with no public charging points.

Yes, this is an entertainment programme, yes it's larking about, and sometimes it's very funny. But none of this exempts it from the BBC's guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts.

The issue is made all the more potent by the fact that Top Gear has a political agenda. It's a mouthpiece for an extreme form of libertarianism and individualism. It derides attempts to protect the environment, and promotes the kind of driving that threatens other people's peace and other people's lives. It often creates the impression that the rules and restraints which seek to protect us from each other are there to be broken.

This is dangerous territory. Boy racers, in many parts of the countryside, are among the greatest hazards to local people's lives. Where I live, in rural mid-Wales, the roads are treated as race tracks. Many of the young lads who use them compete to see who can clock up the fastest speeds on a given stretch. The consequences are terrible: a series of hideous crashes involving young men and women driving too fast, which kill other people or maim them for life. In the latest horror, just down the road from where I live, a young man bumped another car through a fence and into a reservoir. Four of the five passengers drowned.

Of course I'm not blaming only Top Gear for this, but it plays a major role in creating a comfort zone within which edgy driving is considered acceptable, even admirable. Top Gear's political agenda also persists in stark contradiction to BBC rules on impartiality.

So how does it get away with it? It's simple. It makes the BBC a fortune. Both the 15th and 16th series of Top Gear were among the top five TV programmes sold internationally by BBC Worldwide over the last financial year. Another section of the editorial guidelines tells us that "our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures". But in this case we can't be. I suggest that it is purely because of commercial pressures that Top Gear is allowed to rig the evidence, fake its trials, pour petrol over the BBC's standards and put a match to them. The money drives all before it. 

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