UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, CORK
FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY/ ENGINEERING CONFERRINGS
Thursday, 28th September 2000
The Necessity of Courage
Eoghan Harris

Congratulations. So far, so good. Sit still for a moment and feel it. What you feel is pretty complex, and difficult to analyse. But Aristotle, a genius who straddled both the sciences and humanities, had a name for it. He called it happiness. And said it was the supreme good.

But how to be happy? Aristotle was not an American so he did not think that you could become happy by getting in touch with your true feelings, or by making a million, or even by making a record. And being a good scientist he wanted a definition of happiness that would be true for all time.

After much thought Aristotle concluded that happiness comes from consistently pursuing what he called our private goods, so that they become public goods, and by pursuing public goods in a way that makes them become private goods. Happiness comes the habits of doing good in a way that benefits us, and benefits our society.

Accordingly Aristotle does not see happiness as something you luck into but as something to be achieved under pressure. In today's language, Aristotle's idea of happiness can be summed up in a single sentence. We can only be happy if, over a testing period of time, we carry out with some success, a series of difficult tasks, which are good for us and good for our society

To carry out these tasks Aristotle said we need four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage and temperance. And courage comes first because it is the condition for all the virtues. How can you be just if you haven't the courage to confront a lynch mob?

So what is courage? Courage can be defined as the readiness to put yourself at risk for conscience or community. And we shouldn't make too many fine distinctions between physical and moral courage. If you speak out in public against some popular prejudice you will find your voice shaking and your mouth dry. Moral and physical courage are close companions.

So when I say congratulations I am not congratulating you on being brainy or being good students. I am congratulating you on being brave students. Now at least you know that you have what it takes to complete not some cosmetic little task but what it takes to complete a course which tests your moral character as much, if not more, than it taxes your mental powers.

What it takes of course is courage. That is why you feel happy. Not because you are clutching your degree, which is only a symbol of what you have done. The real reason you feel happy, is that you feel proud of yourself, proud because you had to the courage to carry on during the times you wanted to drop out and do something else, you had the courage to what had to be done to get that degree.

It took courage for you to come so far. Courage on your part, but also courage on the part of those who care for you. Courage from your parents, from your friends, from your partners and from your professors and teachers. As a partime teacher myself let me say in passing that it takes tremendous courage to be a full time teacher. All too often on a Monday morning I think of what Andy Warhol said when asked what he had done in life. " I showed up". Showing up to face a class that is not fully corpus mentis takes its own kind of courage.

At this point I should make it clear that Aristotle did not see courage- or indeed any other virtue- as something we are born with. Courage has to be cultivated. Courage is a habit. We are not born brave. We learn bravery bit by bit. We learn courage the same way we learn everything else. By doing it. Luckily this far from perfect world gives us plenty of chance to practice at it!

Aristotle sees private and public courage as two sides of one coin. But for clarity it might be convenient to consider them separately for a moment. First let's look at courage in our private lives. And if you think about it for a moment you will figure out that although we may not do it consciously, courage is one of the crucial things we look for in a lover or a friend. Because of course we must be able to trust them, in advance, to be brave when the crunch comes.

Accordingly in classical society courage was a crucial ingredient in friendship. And isn't that still the case? How can you carry on a caring sexual or social relationship without the courage to commit yourself, the courage to take risks? And don't we draw courage from each other? Of course we do. The courage of my friend, my wife, my husband, and my partner my lover, convinces me that I can take a chance too.

Courage is also prized in public life. And since classical times it is connected with acting as well as speaking. A man in ancient Ireland as in ancient Greece was not what he said but what he did. There was not point in asking what Cuchullainn was "really like". All you had to do was watch him in action, tied to a tree, crows circling his head, his enemies afraid to advance until the crows settled on his shoulders and pecked out his eyes.

The classical conception of courage is what makes a great life, just as it makes a great movie. In John Ford's great film, Young Mr Lincoln, the most stirring scene is factually based and shows Lincoln as a young lawyer facing down a lynch mob. Life is full of lynch mobs, and modern life is full of media lynch mobs. And you need courage to confront these mobs. You need the courage to be wise when the mob wants to mob law, the courage to be just when the mob wants lynch law, the courage to be temperate when the mob wants too much law.

But deep down private and public courage are deeply connected. If we speak up against racial prejudice in our local pub then it becomes easier for politicians to speak out at a national level. Conversely if politicians take risks for principle in their public lives it makes it easier for us to be brave in our private lives. A society which prizes courage, in public and private, makes us feel safer and more secure. And as we all know too well, the absence of courage opens the door to corruption.

Corruption is a constant in human history. But the courage to confront is needed at all levels, and not just at the top. The recent scandals could have been stopped if people had the courage to do their duty -if tax inspectors, bank managers and public servants had stood their ground and blown the whistle.

And of course you too must cultivate courage in your work as scientists. Let me explain why. For you to feel fulfilled, in your professional life as an engineer or a food scientist, you need to live in a society which publicly salutes science and engineering as good and honourable work which contributes to the common good. So if the principles of pure science or pure engineering are corrupted at the expense of the public good, and the status of your profession publicly suffers, then you too will also suffer a loss of personal self esteem in your private life.

In short there is no way you can get what is called job satisfaction, unless you accept that your private goods must also be public goods. Accordingly if you want to be privately happy as a scientist or engineer Aristotle would say you need to make sure you are doing work of which you can be proud. Now nobody is going to structure society to suit you. You will have to do it yourself. Accordingly, if you want to be happy, that is if you want to do good work, then it follows as night follows day that you have to take part in the politics of your profession.

As Aristotle says, man is a political animal. Scientists and engineers need to face that fact. Being a political animal does not mean joining a party or having views about some abstract political society. It means acting in the political arena where you have clout-that is in your commercial and professional place of work. That is where you must make sure that you are not merely doing your job but doing your duty.

So to sum up. Courage is not an individual quality, but also a social quality. Courage is what it takes to hold together a human society. And if you can show courage of this sort you earn what the Greeks call- and what we still call- kudos, or glory.

Now graduates go and get some of that glory.