My wife Pam is an Occupation Therapist who works at an Arthritis Clinic. In anticipation of a staff shortage at Vancouver General Hospital due to COVID-19, the administrators have closed the Arthritis Clinic, and all Occupational Therapists and Physiotherapists have been deployed to VGH. The weeks leading up to the deployment have been stressful. The growing pandemic and its uncertainties have put staff on edge. There was trepidation around the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPEs) and the uncertainties that surround the pending assignment.
Comments are circulating the airwaves. While most people are supportive of health-care workers, others are more indifferent to their plight. “This is what they signed up for,” they say, as if a job description justifies every risk, however unreasonable. Health care workers are indeed toiling at the front-lines, but the nature of their work should not leave them vulnerable to unnecessary dangers, especially if proper precautions can mitigate against risk. Amid a widespread shortage of PPEs, many of them are rightly nervous about going to work.
Yet, despite the raging contagion, I see health care workers walking to work every day. At 7pm every night, the neighborhood comes alive with clanging pots, joyful applause, and cheerful fireworks. Police vehicles and firetrucks form a cavalcade and circle the block around VGH, their sirens a tribute to the people who are saving lives every day. It’s a moving scene that reveals the solidarity of strangers, the shared love that bind us together amid calamity.
As Pam heads off to work every morning, I think about the meaning of courage. A middle-class life in a developed world is set in comfort and stability; there are few opportunities to muster courage. Perhaps through disuse many of us are no longer familiar with courage, nor are we practiced in the art of mustering mettle in the face of fear. The need for courage in this trying time sends me back to Aristotle, who wrote about courage in his influential book, The Nicomachean Ethics.
Courage, according to Aristotle, is “the right attitude toward feelings of fear and confidence”[1]. This “attitude” is neither a blithe disregard for present danger, nor a blind bravado against pending threat. Aristotle argues that the courageous person “will fear what is natural for man [sic] to fear, but he [sic] will face it in the right way and as principle directs, for the sake of what is right and honourable; for this is the end of virtue”[2]. “Honourable” in the English translation, comes from the Greek kalos, meaning the beautiful, fine, noble and admirable. In other words, to live courageously is to live beautifully, to exemplify the best human faculties.
Always vigilant against extremes, Aristotle does not place courage in the realm of the super-human. He believes that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to persist and function in the thick of something grim:
The man [sic] who faces and fears the right things for the right reason and in the right
way and at the right time is courageous (for the courageous man [sic] feels and acts duly, and as
principle directs). . . Thus it is for a right and noble motive that the courageous man [sic] faces the
dangers and performs the actions appropriate to his [sic] courage[3].
According to this view, courage is only apparent and notable in times of difficulty, when fear is pervasive. The courageous are not those who are impervious to terror, but those who act according to principle and duty despite their distress. Courage is noble and admirable precisely because it is difficult in times of turmoil; conversely, without turmoil, courage does not count. Fear and courage are inextricably bound — without crisis, there is no opportunity to summon one’s mettle.
In my view, courage is not a store of fortitude that is marshaled at will. One might never posess sufficient confidence during those times when courage is needed most. Without any assurance of a personal wherewithal to meet the task at hand, the agent acts nevertheless. Perhaps courage is this willingness to act in the absence of any certainty that one will equal the task. However, this begs another question: what exactly is compelling a person to act even though she is afraid? For Aristotle, rationality should be the primary motivator. Knowing what is right, one does what is required. Doing must accord with knowing. For the health-care workers, the rational inducement comes in the following: people are in need; many lives are at stake; I must do my part.
This noble service in the face of danger reminds me of a passage from Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva:
For all those ailing in the world,
Until their every sickness has been healed,
May I myself become for them
The doctor, nurse, the medicine itself [4].
This is a sacred vow, and perhaps a lofty ideal that few of us can live up to. But as with so many vows, they are aspirational – they point us to the best human possibilities and propel us forward. In Aristotle’s view, we need not expel every fear in order to be courageous. Rather, we should choose what lies within our power while remaining with the present fear. In these frightening times, it is what we do in the midst of fear that counts toward courage.
I see Pam off every morning. We say goodbye at the door. I can see that she is uneasy, but she departs nevertheless, just like countless other health-care staff who descend upon the hospital. Theirs is a work most courageous, noble and fine.
[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd edition (Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 127.
[2] Aristotle, 128.
[3] Aristotle, 129.
[4] Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 50.