ON COURAGE IN THE LUNAR AGE

COURAGE leads starward, fear toward death," wrote Seneca. Man needs courage simply to live in spite of knowing that he must die. He needs it to live richly--to take risks and thereby define himself. There are many kinds of courage, moral and physical, but all involve a struggle against heavy odds. In that sense, the astronauts' courage is new and not easily, classified.

Obviously it takes brave men to climb into that capsule and undergo the immense risks that lie between the earth and the moon and the earth again. Yet, to thoughtful skeptics, the superorganized voyage of Apollo 11 suggests that lone, individual courage belongs to the past. The astronauts often seem to be interchangeable parts of a vast mechanism. They are buffered by a thousand protective devices, encased in layers of metal and wires and transistors, their very heartbeats monitored for deviation. Most of their decisions are made by computers. Hundreds of ships, planes, doctors and technicians stand by to rescue them from error. All this is strikingly different from the lonely struggles of the ancient mariners and American pioneers, the early Polar explorers like Scott and Peary, the early aviators like the Wright brothers and Lindbergh. To many of today's young, who view courage in moral terms as a battle against impersonal organization, the astronauts do not seem particularly heroic precisely because they epitomize the organization man.

Fear Is Worse than Death

Courage, like morality, is redefined by each generation. "The monsters of this sea are everywhere," reported a Phoenician explorer several centuries before Christ, "and keep swimming around the slow-moving ships." The monsters were whales, the sea the Bay of Biscay. In succeeding generations men would skim over that water as if it were a pool, and the heroism of the early sailors on their scary voyage would resemble that of fearful children in the dark. What the explorer does by courage, the settler does by habit. What the father does by taking a deep breath, the son will do with a yawn. If Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin succeed in leaving their footsteps on the moon, the steps may soon become a path--and the path a highway.

Still, there is more to valor than merely being first. For the Stoics, courage was every man's key to the province of the divine. From the Jewish defenders of Masada to the early Christian martyrs to the passive resisters Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the going was the goal--to be afraid was worse than death itself.

For lesser men, courage has often been a means to lesser ends. "Who gets wealth that puts not from the shore?" asked Poet Samuel Daniel in England's expansive 16th century. "Danger hath honor; great designs their fame/Glory doth follow, courage goes before." Daniel's poem was the mercantile ethic frozen in meter. In that spirit, the conquistadors braved terra incognita to bleed Montezuma of his gold; the slave traders kidnaped tribesmen from Africa. In that spirit empires were created--and the conflicts of colonialism that still haunt the world. The motives for these enterprises were not necessarily ignoble. Few men take risks for gain alone if glory does not follow, and most see in their glory a benefit to all mankind.

Whether used for good or ill, courage has never been in large supply in any society. Today's troubled feeling that it used to be far more common stems from the relatively recent Western belief that individualism equals virtue. The notion is contrary to the older (and Eastern) conviction that virtue lies in seeking balance with the community on earth and with the universe beyond. Especially in America, where individual courage once tamed the wilderness, pessimists now see an antlike mass society. There is no West to be wild in; the only terra incognita is under water. The plains are paved, farms are corporations, and, with too many of the young, dreams of adventure have been replaced by the haze of pot. Even in war, the brave man is not often truly alone with death. The team supports him, the group succors him. In the Philippine night, during World War II, Admiral Mitscher ordered an entire fleet to turn on its lights. The lives of 100,000 men were risked to let some 200 pilots see their way home. In Viet Nam, 50 planes suspended their air war for eight hours to try to rescue Major Jim Kasler, a popular ace who had gone down over North Viet Nam.

Yet a national character is like a genetic one; it may die in the grandfather only to reappear in the face of a child. Seemingly, whenever America has been in crisis, courage has been reasserted. The quality has both old and new dimensions in the technological age. Man's restless probes into the unknown have not exhausted his chances of danger and courage; they have merely spurred him to probe further. The more he knows, the bigger his frontier, from the atom to space. In a day of committee decisions and anonymous heroes, he has changed his style--but not much else.

Despite the moon shot's vast supportive forces, the astronauts themselves are essentially loners. Before they take off, they have no guarantees of success, let alone survival. Airborne, they can be aided only so far. After that, like the very earliest adventurers, they are on their own. Out in space, the future confronts the past. If they are stranded, no Navy will light their way home, no friendly tribes will take them in.

Grace Under Pressure

Sometimes it seems as if the astronauts have been chosen by some secret P.R. quotient to project a wholesome, understated image. Bravery yes, but no heroics; little eccentricities yes, but no flamboyance. Their press conferences are small Seas of Tranquillity. But, as with all other professional risk takers, the very absence of excitement suggests the presence of courage. In most valorous men there must be a diminution of the imaginative faculty. "Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily," wrote La Rochefoucauld. The talk of "fuel margins" and EVAs is, in part, a way of giving the eyes a rest. Moreover, each astronaut has the kind of test-pilot fatalism that calms --and deadens--the nerves. They need it. In the past, there were more imagined terrors to be dispelled. Today, the known dangers of failure, mechanical and human, are more numerous and harder to dismiss. The astronauts knew that if, on landing, the lunar module tilted more than 35DEG, they would be marooned on the moon. Each could remember that, with the best life insurance science could provide, three colleagues burned to death in a spaceship.

It is unimportant to dwell on why the astronauts have taken their risk. Undoubtedly, glory has something to do with it. So does sheer ego, plus the simpler notions of patriotism and unwillingness to let the team down. What is important is that individual valor can be preserved in a collective age. Hemingway once defined courage as "grace under pressure." In their balloon-shaped, ungainly suits, the Apollo 11 astronauts have demonstrated that man, despite his murderous and chaotic past, can still achieve a state of grace.

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