Last Sunday marked the 77th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. On that day, Operation Overlord began, launching the Allied invasion of Europe that would spell the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. At least 4,400 Allied troops died in the Normandy landings, and another 10,000 were wounded. As the invasion started, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves to ask Americans to join him in prayer: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity … let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.”
Nearly eight decades later, President Joe Biden had nothing to say or tweet about the D-Day anniversary. Breaking with bipartisan precedent, Biden remained silent on that topic. The next day, however, Biden did tweet something noteworthy about bravery: “To transgender Americans across the country — especially the young people who are so brave — I want you to know your President has your back.”
Bravery circa 1944: young men charging from the choppy seas of the English Channel onto the corpse-strewn beaches of Normandy, hellfire raining down upon them, to liberate a continent.
Bravery circa 2021: young men identifying as women, and vice versa.
Our definitions of bravery have shifted rather dramatically.
Our old definition of courage used to comport with the Aristotelian notion of virtue. The virtue of courage — andreia, or manliness, in Greek — lay in recognition of serious risk in pursuit of a heroic telos, a final end. “The courageous man withstands and fears those things which it is necessary (to fear and withstand), and on account of the right reason,” Aristotle explains in “Nichomachean Ethics.” Courage is calculated and calm risk-taking for the sake of the noble and the good.
Not anymore.
Now, courage lies in authenticity. Authenticity has not been, until recently, conflated with courage. In fact, authenticity very often cut directly against the virtue of courage: After all, wallowing in the solipsistic generally involves ignoring the demands of a higher noble goal. But now, our higher virtue isn’t in upholding and defending some standard for civilization at risk to ourselves. Higher virtue lies in finding our personal truths, and then demanding applause from the rest of the world. Heroism lies in forcing the world to bow before our subjective ideas of truth and decency.
Or perhaps there’s another possibility. Perhaps the new definition of bravery does serve some higher goal: the goal of tearing down the old definition of the good. True courage lies in personally rejecting old systems of thought and objective truth and in joining with others to demand that all systems of power be brought low. In this fight, the personal is political: Subjectivism isn’t the enemy of courage but a new form of courage, since the final good to be sought is the destruction of truth itself.
It remains to be seen whether a civilization obsessed with tearing down its most powerful institutions can long remain civilized, or whether a civilization that discards old-fashioned courage in favor of the newfangled “bravery” of authenticity can long hold. The early evidence is unpromising. When called upon to face true enemies of freedom, civilization requires men willing to charge beaches on behalf of higher truths, not men focused finding their “inner truths,” many of which bear no resemblance to reality. To use the same terminology to describe both phenomena is a betrayal of true courage.
Ben Shapiro, 37, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side Of History,” and “Bullies.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Two things to note about President Roosevelt in this instance: he was decisive and he had a plan and he took to the airways to encourage nationwide prayer.
Would today’s military. had it been the one to storm Normandy, have achieved the same results as those obtained by the military that we commemorate? Everything is turned upside down today. Our heroes, our monuments, our Constitution are all under attack because of twisted viewpoints that have been adopted into the mainstream and allowed to influence our ideals and values. Our history is of significance and should be preserved. Unfortunately, in the minds of many, freedom allows them to spit upon the events and causes that have brought our Nation to be the greatest on Earth. It not only takes bravery to defend that, but it takes bravery to stand in opposition to those forces that strive to destroy it.
Hell, if it was today’s military who had the choice of doing that storming, i doubt they’d have gone.. They’d have instead had standdowns to discuss feelings, LGBTQ agendas, and wokist dogma…
I can’t imagine a pregnant woman soldier or a man who thinks he is a she jumping off a landing boat and wading to shore among dead bodies.
They’d be more likely to play the “I am a woman card’ to get out of Having to have BEEN ON that landing boat in the first place.. Just like we see now days, with women using that card to get out of DEPLOYING On boats or with their batallions as is…
Those young men were real men when the beaches were stormed at Normandy. How many real young men do we have today, as many of these young men do not know what gender they are and they spit on our Constitution?