Once Upon a Time on a Motorcycle

AVI's post of yesterday got me thinking about a trip I took with my son up the Blue Ridge Parkway on the back of a bike.  This blog has been around long enough that I can simply go back and link the post I wrote at the time.  It was a motorcycle camping trip in which more or less everything went wrong.  The weather was far worse than advertised, the campsites were not open as expected, the Forest Service roads to the campsites were made slippery and dangerous by the rain, and those roads ran by perilous gorges.

It's a good story, and in fact one of the most treasured memories of my son and me.  We still talk about it regularly.  Shared hardship often builds good memories, and one's character is often the result of having survived your bad decisions. I did listen to 'the experts,' too. I had followed the weather reports closely. It's just that the experts were wrong.

That said, I do remember that my wife tried to get me to reconsider taking that trip.  She said to me, "If you get your son killed doing this, you will never forgive yourself."  I knew that was true when she said it, but decided to do it anyway. 

What I said at AVI's place yesterday was this:

I suppose my own tolerance for risk is dangerously high; hopefully I’m better at recognition of risk. Perhaps not.

The other side, though, is Aristotle’s point that virtue is cultivated by habituation. In regularly encountering danger while engaging your rational mind, you develop the capacity to perform rationally under threats. This virtue, courage, wins wars and keeps us all free. It is the root of whatever goods liberty provides.

It is true that courage is a virtue even though (as Aristotle himself points out right at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics) courage is sometimes just what gets you killed. The world contains many uncertainties, but on balance courage provides benefits. You can only develop it by running risks to practice the habits.

There’s an acceptable synthesis: the hazards are meant to be encountered in a manner that engages the rational part of the soul. So wear your seatbelt; become skillful at the dangerous things; do the things, but be smart about it.

That's not wrong, but it's also not complete. Even virtues turn to vices if you push them to excess; courage is meant to be the middle position between cowardice and either rashness or what Aristotle calls a nameless vice:

Of the characters that run to excess, he that exceeds in fearlessness has no name (and this is often the case, as we have said before); but a man would be either a maniac or quite insensible to pain who should fear nothing, not even earthquakes and breakers, as they say is the case with the Celts.

The Celts, as you all know well, are R. E. Howard's Cimmerians and the largest part of my ancestry; I have long looked at that passage and wondered to what degree it was descriptive of me. Yesterday I found myself driving my Jeep down a steep and twisty mountain pass in what turned out to be a tremendous thunderstorm, which turned into a hailstorm at the steepest and twistiest part. I saw other drivers had pulled off the flooding road in places, but that Jeep is designed to get through hard roads and I figured that if I just went a little slower and took care I'd make it fine. I did in fact make it fine, but it was objectively perilous. I remember noting the danger and making adjustments for it, but I don't remember feeling afraid. Is that courage, the virtue of skill and preparation and rational adjustment producing success? Or is it the nameless vice of the Celts?

AVI's anger at his friend's recklessness with his (AVI's) life is justified and understandable. My wife's concern was justified and understandable. What I did I thought justified at the time, but now I wonder. Different people probably would come to different conclusions about it; lots of motorcycle riders take their kids on the back, and few come to harm. Other people won't ride a motorcycle even themselves, thinking them too dangerous. Habituating courage can be done in other ways, but if it isn't done in some way it won't be the case that we have courageous people when we need them. Habituating the excess -- either rashness or the nameless vice -- causes harm in just the way that habituating courage brings about good.

In the end we have to judge, as Aristotle says, by the probable outcomes.

There is a similar uncertainty also about what is good, because good things often do people harm: men have before now been ruined by wealth, and have lost their lives through courage.

Our subject, then, and our data being of this nature, we must be content if we can indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and if, in dealing with matters that are not amenable to immutable laws, and reasoning from premises that are but probable, we can arrive at probable conclusions.

The difficulty is that bad results in a particular case do not prove that a vice was in play; acts of true courage still sometimes lead to death. But the fact that a thing worked out well -- that a motorcycle camping trip led to lifelong good memories and a strengthened paternal bond -- also then does not prove that it wasn't a vice of excess, rather than a virtue, that was at work.

I suppose I say all of this by way of confession, uncertain as I am as to whether or not I have sinned; or if I have, to what degree. But for this, and all my sins, I ask forgiveness of the one whose judgment is not uncertain.