Graeme Hamilton looks at why courage is so rare
Posted on 04/21/2007 5:25:07 PM PDT by GMMAC
Uncommon heroes
Graeme Hamilton, National Post
Published: Saturday, April 21, 2007
Liviu Librescu's actions saved lives at Virginia Tech.
Graeme Hamilton looks at why courage is so rare
When a deranged gunman began his shooting rampage at Virginia Tech's Norris Hall on Monday, most of the dozens of students in the vicinity cowered under desks or fled, according to witness accounts. But, before being fatally shot himself, 76-year-old Professor Liviu Librescu thrust himself against his classroom door and held off Cho Seunghui long enough to allow many of his students to jump to safety. The professor's heroism gives rise to some awkward questions: How could a single gunman kill 30 people in one building without being overpowered? Why are acts of courage like Prof. Librescu's so uncommon?
The nature of courage has preoccupied thinkers since ancient times. Aristotle called courage "the first of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees the others." The philosopher saw courage as a virtue lying between the two extremes of cowardice and fearlessness, a notion echoed by Plato, who wrote: "A man becomes perfect in courage by fighting against and conquering the cowardice within him."
When considering a tragedy like Virginia Tech, people naturally wonder whether they would be "perfect in courage" if confronted with similar circumstances. Would they have reacted like Mr. Librescu? Would they have risked their lives to save others?
William I. Miller, author of an acclaimed book on the topic, The Mystery of Courage, believes that for most of us, the answer to those questions is no. "That's just classic grand, heroic behaviour," Prof. Miller, a historian and law professor at the University of Michigan, said of Mr. Librescu's deeds. Such heroic acts are "pretty rare," he said.
He wonders whether such acts will be come only rarer, whether Western society has become so risk-averse that we are increasingly incapable of heroism. He despairs when he sees kids in his Michigan neighbourhood wearing "armour at the level of a medieval knight" as they learn to ride a bicycle and hears that touch football has been banned at the local elementary school because the ball is pointed.
"We so shield our children and ourselves from any encounter where we're called on to deliver," he said.
His research into courage led him to study soldiers' memoirs, particularly from the U.S. Civil War, and what he found is that it is difficult to predict who will behave courageously under fire. "One of the things that features very prominently in these memoirs is that people are always sizing up everyone else in the unit: 'Who's the courageous guy, and who's the coward?' There are some tendencies but they can never quite predict. The little nerdy accountant turns out to be a great soldier and the barroom brawler turns out to just crack when he hears gunfire."
Another interesting finding was that courage is not inexhaustible. Valiant soldiers can only be asked to go to the well so many times before cracking under pressure. But, by the same token, someone who fled battle in one instance could "deliver in spades in the next one because he was so ashamed," Prof. Miller found.
Because grand heroic acts such as Mr. Librescu's are so rare, Prof. Miller prefers to focus attention on people a little lower down the bravery scale. "What do we call just the ability to be there every day and not run, like these poor guys in Iraq?" he asked. "They see guys every day get maimed and sniped and roadside-bombed, and yet they just go and get in their Humvee every day and discharge their duty. They're not doing anything that's going to get mentioned in the papers, but they're showing up doing a dangerous, terrible crappy job, right? At some level you want to say that takes some sort of moral quality that is to be admired."
Obviously, armed soldiers in a war zone are better equipped to confront danger than students on a bucolic campus. But that has not stopped people from wondering how Cho was able to wreak such destruction before taking his own life.
Five classrooms were occupied in the area on the second floor of Norris Hall where Cho began shooting. According to reports, Mr. Librescu and one student were the only people killed in his mechanical engineering class. Another class managed to fend off the gunman when students jammed a table against the door and blocked his entry.
One of those students, Zach Petkewicz, told CNN that a classmate had looked out the door after hearing shots and seen a gunman in the hallway. "I was just completely scared out of my mind originally, just went into a cowering position, then just realized, you have got to do something." He and two others pushed the table against the door and pushed with all their might to keep Cho from entering. "I'm just glad I could be here," Mr. Petkewicz told an interviewer when asked how he felt to be considered a hero.
In the other classes, there would be no heroes, just the lucky and the unlucky. Some survivors have described playing dead as shots went off around them, punctuated by grunts and groans of the wounded and long pauses as the gunman reloaded.
"This is a hard post to write," New York poet Levi Asher wrote on his blog, The Cherry Orchard, the day after the shootings, "because everybody who's watching the terrible tale of mass murder on the Virginia Tech campus can sympathize with the devastated students and faculty members who lived through the horror."
But Mr. Asher was left with a nagging question: "I can't be the only one wondering why a roomful of students did not try to overpower a lone gunman," he wrote. "I thought this was the lesson of September 11, the lesson of United Flight 93: In the face of any type of murderous rampage, whether a carefully planned act of terrorism or a random act of insane violence, a crowd's ability to overtake an attacker might offer their best chance. Sure, it takes incredible bravery to rush a guy with automatic weapons, even when the gunman is reloading, and there would have been casualties. But with 10 or more students in a room, there is no question that the crowd could have prevailed within a matter of seconds."
There are examples of unarmed people successfully confronting a gunman. In 2002, an Australian university instructor, Lee Gordon-Brown, struggled across a classroom while wounded to disarm a heavily armed gunman. In the United States, 17-year-old Jake Ryker credited his knowledge of guns for being able to recognize when a high school shooter in Springfield, Ore., in 1998 needed to reload. He seized the opportunity to tackle the shooter.
John Darley, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, has extensively studied how people respond to emergencies. He said the reactions of people at Virginia Tech were understandable and follow a familiar pattern.
As a professor, Mr. Librescu likely felt a responsibility toward his students that would not have been reciprocated, just like a captain who ensures his passengers are all safe before leaving his sinking ship. "In these situations, it is sometimes the case that there are people who are responsible and they extend that responsibility to dealing with unexpected emergencies," he said.
Another phenomenon that appears to have occurred at Virginia Tech, and that could have contributed to the body count, was a natural reflex to discount the possibility of an emergency. Survivors have said they thought the initial shots were construction noise.
Prof. Darley says research has shown that people confronted with crises usually look to those around them for cues on how to respond.
"Everybody is frozen in place," he said. "In our culture, we don't want to cry wolf, we don't want to overreact." So instead, the tendency is to read our neighbour's inaction as a sign that nothing is wrong, and response time is delayed.
Rather than imagining improbable scenarios where they play the hero and tackle the bad guy, Prof. Darley would like people to recognize the signs of danger and not be shy to sound the alarm. "I would like them to imagine people around them not acting, the people around them being puzzled. I would like them to imagine that they themselves will be feeling very unsure about what to do. They won't immediately have the impulse, 'I will now be heroic.' I would like them also to think about ways they could engage other people, if they would simply break the ice by asking other people, 'What is this?' "
Being mentally prepared can help people respond to a crisis, Prof. Darley said. And Prof. Miller expressed the hope that Mr. Librescu's heroics could prove inspirational. "What do the people feel who know that they are only alive because of that man? It has to haunt them, because you owe a debt you can never pay back," Prof. Miller said."
Does the example this wonderful professor set, does that mean that every one of those kids will feel obliged, if their turn ever comes up, to pay him back by acting as courageously as he did?"
Ghamilton@nationalpost.com
© National Post 2007
PING!
The professor is in Heaven now.
A real beautiful guy. Thank God for men like this in the world.
It's called leadership and taking command.
Professor Liviu Librescu was an adult.
Sad that those sorry, scum bag anal hole muck diving traitors like John Kerry, Hairy Read,Nancy Pepoloser, Dickie Turdbin, Henry Waxwoman, Jessie Jackass, Alvin Sharptongue and Hellary Clinton can not recognize a true hero when presented to them.
In fact anyone who declares to be a cowardly, cut and run, no logic left wing Democrat in my book is lower than fly fecal matter.
“In fact anyone who declares to be a cowardly, cut and run, no logic left wing Democrat in my book is lower than fly fecal matter”.
OKIEDOC, you have to learn to express yourself. Don’t be shy.
They should have been but they have been taught to be children, as have most pseudo-adults in this Nanny State.
Your 100% right. It seems to me that young Western adults up to around the age of 28, not only won’t stand up for themselves & go out fighting, they are actually rewarded for being wussies. Case in point, I just read that one of The English “Iranian Hostage’s” (who surrendered with out any resistance) cried when the iranians called him Mr. Bean & took away his IPOD. He’s getting paid to sell his story & is a minor celebrity.
It’s sad when the only person to fight this guy off is a 78 year old man in the middle of An American Collage.
"NBC showed the Cho tape because, they say, 'we need to know how Cho thought". That's wrong, entirely wrong. What we need to know is how Liviu Librescu thought."
Just read “Blame the killer”. It’s right on point.
As a matter of fact, another instructor, a veteran came downstairs to confront the gunman and was killed. He was a military veteran. He went to the sound of the guns, The main purpose of military training is to accustom people to fight rather than flee.
The people on the east and west coasts are infected with European attitudes. In Europe the populations have been disarmed for hundreds of years. Switzerland is the exception, but they have no fought a war for more than two centuries.
That’s the most profound thing I’ve heard to come out of this tragedy - we need to know how Librescu thought. This was a 20th century man who learned the meaning of courage and honor in the midst of the bloodiest atrocities in history. He graced this century with his brief presence in it.
The person who said that “Liberalism is a mental disorder” had great insight into the qualifications it takes to be a liberal Democrat.
In my personal point of view the person who identifies as a liberal Democrat supporter is just one rung on the Bash America Ladder above any of the terrorists trying to harm America.
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