COURAGE leads starward, fear toward death," wrote Seneca. Man needs courage simply to live in spite of knowing that he must die. He needs it to live richly—to take risks and thereby define himself. There are many kinds of courage, moral and physical, but all involve a struggle against heavy odds. In that sense, the astronauts' courage is new and not easily, classified.
Obviously it takes brave men to climb into that capsule and undergo the immense risks that lie between the earth and the moon and the earth again. Yet, to thoughtful skeptics, the superorganized voyage of Apollo 11 suggests that lone, individual courage belongs to the past. The astronauts often seem to be interchangeable parts of a vast mechanism. They are buffered by a thousand protective devices, encased in layers of metal and wires and transistors, their very heartbeats monitored for deviation. Most of their decisions are made by computers. Hundreds of ships, planes, doctors and technicians stand by to rescue them from error. All this is strikingly different from the lonely struggles of the ancient mariners and American pioneers, the early Polar explorers like Scott and Peary, the early aviators like the Wright brothers and Lindbergh. To many of today's young, who view courage in moral terms as a battle against impersonal organization, the astronauts do not seem particularly heroic precisely because they epitomize the organization man.
Fear Is Worse than Death
Courage, like morality, is redefined by each generation. "The monsters of this sea are everywhere," reported a Phoenician explorer several centuries before Christ, "and keep swimming around the slow-moving ships." The monsters were whales, the sea the Bay of Biscay. In succeeding generations men would skim over that water as if it were a pool, and the heroism of the early sailors on their scary voyage would resemble that of fearful children in the dark. What the explorer does by courage, the settler does by habit. What the father does by taking a deep breath, the son will do with a yawn. If Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin succeed in leaving their footsteps on the moon, the steps may soon become a path—and the path a highway.
Still, there is more to valor than merely being first. For the Stoics, courage was every man's key to the province of the divine. From the Jewish defenders of Masada to the early Christian martyrs to the passive resisters Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the going was the goal—to be afraid was worse than death itself.
For lesser men, courage has often been a means to lesser ends. "Who gets wealth that puts not from the shore?" asked Poet Samuel Daniel in England's expansive 16th century. "Danger hath honor; great designs their fame/Glory doth follow, courage goes before." Daniel's poem was the mercantile ethic frozen in meter. In that spirit, the conquistadors braved terra incognita to bleed Montezuma of his gold; the slave traders kidnaped tribesmen from Africa. In that spirit empires were created—and the conflicts of colonialism that still haunt the world. The motives for these enterprises were not necessarily ignoble. Few men take risks for gain alone if glory does not follow, and most see in their glory a benefit to all mankind.