The Plague of Moral Cowardice

This past week, my friend's husband left her. He was a friend as well. Their family and mine have know each other for a long time. Their oldest son is good friends with my son. They play video games together. They cheer on each others' choice of sports.

The husband and father just up and left his family, saying that he'd had enough. This came out of the blue. My friend had no clue, no idea that her husband felt the way he did and was shocked when he left so abruptly and so completely.

The news saddens me because of lost friendship, sympathy for the remaining family, and because this man's actions diminish the overall good in the world. His actions demonstrate the paucity of moral courage lacking in today's world. His actions say that it's easier to give up instead of working to make something better. His actions are indicative of a growing social sickness that values self more than others.

I see such family tragedies all the time now - among relatives, among neighbors, among friends.  While such tragedies of family frequently occur, I find the ever increasing and often the attendant viciousness of family break ups a symptom of the greater problem of the moral courage to look beyond the self.

Selfishness is the easier path but it doesn't produce "the better" in humans. The utter and lonely focus on self, on the "me," on "what I want," rather than on the needs and concerns of others, especially the concerns of spouse and family, produces a plague of moral cowardice. Selfishness produces attitudes of entitlement. It blames others for misfortunes. It seeks comfort in belittling and denigrating others, in attacking what is right and good, and in seeking to replace happiness with excesses and excuses. It seeks justification for poor decisions and actions.

The danger to family stability is one manifestation of moral cowardice. Other manifestations occur in broader relationships between people, in business and in politics. We see a rise in uncouth speech, especially directed anonymously through the internet and texting. We see a need to bring others down, to lower others to the basest levels. We see name calling and accusations - all symptoms of a lack of moral courage to stand up for what is good and right - to stand up for "the better."

We have few role models to show us true moral courage. Our politicians nearly universally sink to the lowest common denominator of selfish behavior. Bill Clinton perjured himself in court to avoid admitting to his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. George Bush pressed for statist powers far beyond the limits of the Constitution, signing the onerous Patriot Act. Barack Obama ignores the Constitution all together claiming executive authority to sidestep Congress and the Court. Obama also bows before foreign governments, showing weakness and moral weakness in the face of dictators and autocrats.

More than with any previous president, Barack Obama reminds me of a quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famous novelist and Soviet dissident, from a speech he delivered at Harvard University in 1978:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

May we find the moral courage: to stand up for what is right; to stand up for the institution of the family; to consider selflessness and commitment; to think less about ourselves and more about others; and to stand up against a bankrupt political philosophy that would lead us further and further into paths of moral cowardice.