Competence, Courage, and the Decline of Literature

We no longer feel the need for the virtues that stories teach

If you watch Star Trek, you will notice that the main characters are all conspicuous for their competence, but almost never for their courage. The great difference between the original series and The Next Generation is that Captain Kirk frequently displayed physical courage, whereas Captain Picard almost never did. Kirk was a space cowboy. Picard was a space diplomat. The final frontier had been tamed.

World War One taught the world a lesson in the triumph of competence over courage. On the battlefields of the past, fought with short-range weapons and lines of men standing shoulder to shoulder, victory usually went to the side that did not break formation. Once the formation broke up, the more disciplined side could track men down individually and kill them. The most important thing for a soldier was to stand his ground. Discipline, which is simply a form of learned and habituated courage, was the key to victory. In World War One, men charging courageously into the face of entrenched machine guns simply died. Competence, rather than courage, had become the key to victory.

The primacy of competence over courage has advanced steadily since World War I. Competence was never irrelevant, of course. Both competence and courage are virtues, and both have always played a role on the battlefield and in life. But advances in competence have served to make life so much safer that the need for courage in everyday life has almost disappeared. It is now competence, rather than courage, that we principally admire.

This primacy of competence over courage has permeated every aspect of our lives. Very few jobs involve any real danger or even painful effort anymore. Machines do the hard and dirty work. Operating those machines safely and effectively requires competence, but not courage. Does anyone still teach their children, their sons in particular, that they need to learn to be brave? Seldom, I think. What we teach them is that they need to be competent.

And where’s the harm in that? Ridding society of the need for courage and focusing on the need for competence is surely a good thing. I’m certainly not going to make any argument against it. If there is a cause for concern, it is perhaps that competence has become so encapsulated in technology that we are now seeing a decline in the focus on competence in favor of compassion. In a pervasive welfare state, who feels the need to be wise or brave or even competent? At least for now, if competence is in decline in the schools, it still dominates in the workforce. But what I wonder about is this: has the shift in priority from courage to competence contributed to the current malaise in literature?

Competence dominates as a theme in literature today. The detective story is about competence in detection. The science fiction story is about competence in science and technology. The fantasy story is about competence in magic. The thriller and the military story are about competence in spycraft and soldiering. There are always exceptions, but neither courage nor wisdom are the primary themes of most modern fiction.

How did this come about? Stories are still about danger, but they use it for a different purpose. Danger produces a release of adrenaline. Adrenaline wakes up the body and gives it a thrill of excitement which is, in itself, highly pleasurable. This is the brain rewarding us for being brave, since bravery has been, for most of our history, a core survival trait. This is why people who have been in dangerous situations often report feeling alive for the first time in their lives.

As a consequence, we seek out experiences that produce that rush of adrenaline and the excitement and sense of being fully alive that come with it. But, being sensible, competent people, we do so in ways that are as safe as we can possibly make them. A roller coaster is designed to feel much more dangerous than it really is. A roller coaster that did not feel dangerous would be as unsatisfactory as one that actually was dangerous. We lie to the brain about the danger so that the brain will give us the jollies that come from facing danger, without the actual danger.

In addition to the jollies it gives, lying to the brain about danger is useful for developing courage. It allows us to feel what it is like to face danger and thus be better prepared when we face real danger. One of the ways we have always done this is through stories. I have argued before that the biological function of stories is to make us wise and brave. The way we make ourselves brave is by facing danger, and if we face danger in stories before we face it in real life, then we are much more likely to act bravely when we meet a tiger on the hunting trail or are ordered to stand fast on the battle line.

The rise of video gaming is a more direct and visceral way to trick the brain into releasing adrenaline without putting ourselves in any actual danger. Video games are violent not to encourage violence, but to evoke the brain’s adrenaline response to violence without all the messy bits to clean up afterwards. Movies have got bigger and brighter and louder for the same reason. Books too, particularly the popular genres that people read the way they eat popcorn, have become louder and more violent, again in pursuit of that release of adrenaline.

But when we seek the adrenaline rush of danger without any motivation to become brave in real life, our approach to stories changes. In the past, learning to be brave was an essential part of life. Learning competence was important too, but courage was an essential enabler of competence in almost every field. People who read or listened to stories to become wise and brave were keenly aware that they needed to learn to be brave, that both their acceptance in society and their success in life, and even their chances of survival, depended on learning to be brave. Certainly they felt the same thrill from a good story that the reader feels today. The difference is that the modern reader is only there for the thrill, not for the lesson in courage. And that can make a big difference to the kind of stories people read and the way they read them.

But if the modern reader does not feel a pressing need to develop courage, they do feel a pressing need to develop competence. Competence is how we make our way in the world today. But the brain does not give the same easy thrills for solving technical problems that it does for facing physical dangers. If it did, we would read technical manuals for excitement. The reason we don’t is that we still want that adrenaline kick that danger gives. Thus modern fiction tends to give us stories that mix complex technical problems with simple dangers. In facing these dangers, the protagonist’s competence is challenged far more than their courage or their wisdom. That combination provides the adrenaline fix that the body craves combined with the development of competence that the reader sees as valuable to their daily life. If courage is required at all, it is a simple courage, assumed rather than questioned or examined. Wisdom is generally reduced to technical competence or to simple pop psychology bromides.

If the reader believes that the development of competence is essential to their life, complex questions around the nature of competence and the failure of competence become of interest to them. If they don’t believe that the development of courage is essential to their life, then complex questions around the nature of courage and the failure of courage will not interest them. They may still want the adrenaline fix that comes from simulated danger, but they won’t crave the penetrating examination of courage that a story of danger could provide, and that classic stories were written to provide.

Thus, the way that we tell stories about danger has changed. The situations that prompt the brain to react to danger are similar, but the things we are looking for in those situations are significantly different. This means that while the tropes are the same, the way the stories are told is significantly different.

The same is true on the other side of the aisle as well. The literati, who study literature as a high art, are not looking to become wise and brave either. Their comfortable middle-class lives and tenured careers mean that they have even less practical daily need for courage than the rest of the population. The fact that their possessions all have easy user interfaces and are unfixable if they break means that they have little daily use for practical competence either. They may not be reading for an adrenaline release, and they may look down their noses at people who do, but they are not looking for the classical benefits of wisdom and bravery either. Instead, they are looking for the things that give them their jollies: ideas and aesthetics.

Thus they routinely misread the literature of the past because they too are not looking for the things that it was designed to provide: experiences that build wisdom and courage. They then teach and encourage a style of writing that is heavy on ideas and aesthetics, but that generally contains very little to produce any kind of adrenaline release, nor much to awaken any interest in competence. The general public is naturally bored by these works, which is sometimes a source of satisfaction to the literati, since they see it as a confirmation of their superior taste.

The general public and the literati alike, therefore, tend to miss what made the great stories of the past so good and so powerful. They have lost interest in what those stories provided, the things that people craved daily when they were written, experiences that could help make them wise and brave. Those readers felt an urgent need in their lives to develop wisdom and bravery, but we readers of the present age do not. We look at the stories of the past, therefore, either as something to be discarded, or as something to be pillaged for parts.

Pillaging for parts is how Disney has treated the fairytale tradition. It is how Hollywood treats the classics. It is how the literary establishment and the universities treat the classics as well, though they tend to be interested in taking different parts from the works they pillage, and remaking them into strange and unlovely shapes.

The question I have to ask myself is: is this a bad thing? Obviously it is a thing I don’t like personally. But then, I don’t personally like the fact that cars don’t have manual transmissions anymore, and it is not at all clear-cut that that is a bad thing. I dare say that my grandfather, a teamster, literally, did not like it when he had to replace his horses with trucks.

Maybe the kind of stories that I love to read, and that I strive to write, are just as obsolete as the clutch pedal and the horse collar. I don’t think I have the perspective to judge this fairly. I do still think that it is important to be wise and brave, even if I am neither of these things myself. But the fact that I admire virtues that I don’t particularly possess and do not personally rely on in my daily life suggests that I am perhaps just being sentimental about them. After all, the desire for salt and fat is as much part of our makeup as our desire to be wise and brave, and all those desires do for us today is make us fat and give us high blood pressure.

The desire to be wise and brave is still innate in us, and therefore we can still respond to those stories that explore the full complexity of the experiences which call forth wisdom and bravery in us. We can still recognize their excellence. But our innate desire for wisdom and bravery is not encouraged or made urgent and practical by the experience of our daily lives, as it would have been for our ancestors. Rather, the almost complete absence of danger, or even the appearance of danger, in our lives leaves us longing for the sense of excitement, of being fully alive, which comes from the adrenaline response to danger or the appearance of danger. Thus, even if we can see the virtues of the classics, we are often still more driven towards the quicker adrenaline fix of TV and video games.

I’m not about to look down on anyone for having this preference. I am not complaining about the state of the modern world. Personally, I am very grateful that my life is safe and comfortable and makes almost no demands on my very limited supplies of wisdom and courage. If my life had been harder, I might be wiser and braver because of it, but if I were offered that life, I do not think I would make the trade. I am very glad that I was able to make my living in a field that required competence but not courage, one that did not expose me to the elements or to danger.

I am not one to wring my hands over the lost arts and virtues that have been made obsolete by the progress of the modern world. I do not think it is a civilizational crisis that our children are no longer taught to write in cursive, any more than I think it is a civilizational crisis that I learned to write with a ballpoint instead of a dip pen, or that I learned on paper, not on a slate or a clay tablet. I do not think it is a great loss that I learned to drive a car rather than a horse and cart, or that I get water from a tap instead of pulling it up from a well in a bucket.

All that being true, I am a little at sea when I ask myself if there is still any real need for the kinds of stories that make us wise and brave, the kinds of stories that I like to write and that I like to read? In our technocratic society, have those virtues become as obsolete as the skills of writing with a dip pen, saddling a horse, or driving a manual transmission car?

I read a study the other day that said that driving a manual car helps slow cognitive decline in older men. That makes sense to me. There is a combination of physical dexterity and mental acuity involved in driving a manual. You have to be thinking about what gear you will need to be in next and executing the gear changes smoothly and at the correct time. The physical and mental coordination required can’t help but be good for the aging brain. (And it handily justifies my recent purchase of a manual Toyota Celica convertible that I certainly didn’t need for any practical transportation purposes.)

And yes, you can find many other such studies claiming that there is more mental engagement in reading on paper than on screen, or in learning multiplication tables rather than using a calculator. But I suspect that if you were to perform such studies at every turn of the technological screw, you would find the same pattern: that lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks together to cook a rabbit that you caught with a snare that you made yourself out of sticks and twine is more mentally engaging than putting a frozen dinner in the microwave. All this is beside the point if removing an old source of mental engagement frees time and mental resources for engagement with a new problem.

So maybe we don’t need stories the way we did. Maybe this is why literature has devolved into either adrenaline chasing and the worship of competence over courage, or into aesthetic and intellectual pursuits that devalue competence and courage alike. Maybe we just don’t feel the need to become wise and brave anymore, and so we don’t turn to the kind of stories that help us develop those virtues.

It is very little use telling people that they ought to want these things. I do think they ought to want them, but I know very well that it is the urging of life and experience, not the urging of internet pundits, that actually moves people to pursue things, and modern life is specifically crafted to minimize the need for either wisdom or bravery on the part of the average citizen. And, honestly, I like it that way.

If you are of a pessimistic mien, you might say that a civilization that produces a citizenry that lacks both wisdom and bravery is doomed to collapse, and perhaps that is so. And if so, those who live in the ruins will feel the need to be wise and brave once again, and their natural affinity for stories that make them wise and brave will come to the fore again and save them.

Perhaps we are doomed to live in a cycle of chaos and civilization, in which civilization makes redundant the very virtues that are needed for a civilization to sustain itself. If we are doomed to repeat this cycle, though, I see very little point in wringing our hands about it, other than for a cheap adrenaline rush. It will happen willy-nilly. Human beings don’t develop or retain virtues for which they have no present need. That is simply not how we are made.

For my own part, I am confident that our current civilization will last out my remaining years. I suppose there is some part of me that sometimes wishes for trials that would awaken a demand for better stories. Perhaps even for my stories. But I don’t think that wish is particularly wise.