Martial Micrographia: Creation and Maintenance of the Military Courage Bank with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon

Abstract

Humans seem to have an intrinsic psychological need for courageous heroes to emulate and so virtually every society that has ever existed possessed a unique conceptualization of their own archetype versions of Achilleus, Herakles, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, John Wayne, or Rambo. But fictional heroes do not answer questions that stumped both Aristotle and Socrates: what transforms ordinary civilians into courageous soldiers? Where does their courage originate? And where does it go when they mutate into cowards as Aristotle believed? Although Western philosophers generally believe that courage is an important virtue, there is surprisingly little consensus on what it is, why some people appear to have more of it than others, and most importantly, the significant differences between civilian and military courage. My thesis defends the idea that martial/military courage is created by a complex psychological/physiological/philosophical behavioural modification continuum that transforms ordinary Butchers, Bakers, and Candlestick Makers into combat soldiers. These citizen-soldiers possess in varying degrees a mysterious something that civilian Western philosophers refer to as courage, but military minds designate as resolute morale, fighting spirit, will power and will to win. Martial Micrographia employs a groundbreaking methodology of asking research questions and searching for answers in empirical evidence from two World Wars, combat memoirs, and prominent works by military theorists are used to clarify what happens when humans are exposed to battlefield danger and how being afraid is not necessarily cowardice. One over-arching theme of my thesis is that military courage cannot be defined with one word because war is a continuum of battlefield actions and reactions that makes combat an infinitely variable combination of reciprocal actions that elicit variable fear reactions. Further, it defends my theory that Bronze Age concepts of courage/cowardice are irrelevant and immaterial to soldiers engaged in Modern Warfare. This will be reinforced by using integrated assessment models (algorithms) to clarify how civilian courage is transformed into military courage, and why individual soldiers possess variable levels of courage for a finite period of time and why they eventually become worn out. Perhaps most importantly of all, no real-world evidence was discovered during my research journey that illuminated Aristotelian courage; preliminary results indicate it to conceivably be as real as phlogiston.