In 2012, I argued, “The most important virtue for our time is courage.” Yesterday, I read Christopher Rufo’s manifesto, “New Right Activism,” in which he states, “The most important virtue of our time is courage.”

Despite the fact that Rufo’s claim is situated within a particular political context–for him, it’s the New Right’s attempt to take back the American Republic from what he regards as the woke, illiberal left–whereas mine was appearing in that “widening gyre” moment following the economic collapse of 2009, I think the synchronicity–the only difference in these two sentences being a mere preposition (“for” versus “of”)–nonetheless reveals something deep about our time and, therefore, about what’s needful.

For we cannot deny that fear is the great, perhaps greatest emotion of our time. Many people are tense and nervous (“high strung”) when they’re not anxious or, indeed, quite trepidatious. “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx famously quipped. And what seemingly solid something hasn’t been melting into air?

To name just a few: The nuclear family or before that the intergenerational family (see Brooks on the “nuclear family being a mistake”); fraying, sometimes out of touch educational institutions; Americans’ declining health (ergo–whether right or wrong or otherwise–MAHA); increasing social atomism and, in turn, the rise of singleton households; the promises, yes, but also the threats posed by AI to the current workforce; the dissolution of the working class and, in turn, the massive federal assistance provided to this lost class; the tragic homeless problem plus the fentanyl–and emerging Xylazine–epidemic: all these, and plenty of other issues, are evidence for widespread cracking, quivering, and uncertainty in the air and palpably felt.

Though what I’m about to write isn’t sufficient to meet the challenges faced by the current social order, it is a start, albeit a small one. It will take as its point of departure your own fears. Consider, then, what it is that you’re turning away from. What are you overlooking? Passing by? Glossing over? What can’t you bear to look at or be with?

We do well to zoom out before we dive back in. The invitation, to begin with, is to discover what is the highest good, that for the sake of which “all this” is. I suggest that the highest good is either (a) universal love, or (b) living wisdom, or (c) abiding peace. If you can genuinely embrace one of these three, then you know why it is that you’re turning toward what you’ve hitherto avoided.

Let’s suppose, for the purpose of illustration, that the telos is abiding peace. The necessary–not to say also sufficient–condition of abiding peace is self-knowledge. Yet to know yourself, you need, minimally, to turn toward what it is that you’ve been too afraid to take note of. Consequently, the exercise of courage will figure prominently in any account of self-knowledge–and so it does here.

Now that you know that being courageous is necessary so long as you care (in this example) about abiding peace (above all else), then you have every reason to turn toward what you’ve avoided. Courage is encouraged by wisdom concerning the articulation of the highest good.

My account of the virtue of courage, then, holds that courage is like “a swinging turn”: cowardice succumbs to fear whereas courage, “swinging open,” turns toward fear for the sake of the good (here, self-knowledge = abiding peace). Courage, never alone, is playing its role well just in case it is guided, in its confrontation with fear, by the highest good.

Having rehearsed the above argument time and again, you’re now ready to face, in the situation at hand, whatever it is that seems, prima facie, as if it’s too much to bear. Bearing it by turning toward it, you find that there’s a deeper truth: the truth that the very essence of fear is being, or being-peace. Fear, ultimately, is not fear, but to see this, you have to go all the way through fear. Just as Andy Dufresne, in the movie Shawshank Redemption, had to crawl all the way through a sewer pipe in order to discover freedom on the other side, so we must keenly and courageously go all the way through fear in order to know what abiding peace really is.