Courage, the Most Important Virtue | Bari Weiss | TED

Let me begin with some confessions.

I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

And I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, which is shocking, I know.

I'm pro-choice, and I think the European laws are sensible ones.

I'm a very proud supporter of Israel,

even though I'm a critic of its current government.

I think terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah are evil,

and there is a bright line between groups that aim to kill innocents

and those that try to avoid doing so at all costs.

I think that girls in Afghanistan shouldn't be sold into child marriages,

and that women in Iran should be free to show their hair in public

without fear of imprisonment or worse.

And that women in Somalia should not endure genital mutilation.

I believe that all people are created equal

and created in the image of God,

but that all cultures are not equal.

I believe in gay marriage, so much so that I'm actually in one myself.

(Laughter)

I believe that adults should make pretty much any decision they want

about their bodies,

but that children should not.

I think the SAT is an imperfect but useful tool.

I think defunding the police is a very bad idea.

And that living in a safe neighborhood is among the truest forms of privilege.

I think COVID probably came from a lab,

and that, in retrospect,

locking kids out of school for two years was a big mistake.

I think we should hire people based on their merit,

but cast as wide a net as possible.

I don't want to eat bugs,

nor do I want to drink water full of microplastics,

and I don't think there's anything coded right or left

about either of those things.

I believe that equality of opportunity

and not equality of outcome

is the true measure of fairness.

I am repelled by ideologies that insist that our immutable characteristics

are more important than our character.

I don't like riots,

I don't like mobs, and I hate lies.

And I love America for all of its flaws.

I believe, in part because Americans are free to debate those flaws

and to strive for a more perfect union,

that it really is the last best hope on Earth.

(Applause)

The point in all of this is that I am really boring.

Or at least I thought I was.

I am, or at least until a few seconds ago in historical time,

I used to be considered a standard-issue liberal.

And yet somehow,

in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces,

many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them,

have become provocative or controversial,

which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale.

Even bigoted or racist.

How?

How did these relatively boring views come to be seen as off-limits?

And how did that happen,

at least it seems to me,

in the span of under a few years?

Now the convenient answer, of course,

is the power of extreme activists.

People who burn down businesses and police stations,

people who shut down bridges and highways,

people who harass their fellow students

and shout down their professors.

People who vandalize,

who desecrate or tear down monuments of national heroes.

But do a handful of extreme activists really have the power

to dismantle the moral guardrails of a whole society,

to radically shift the Overton window

of what is politically and socially acceptable?

I don't think so.

There has always been and always will be a fringe.

The difference right now

is that the fringe seems to be calling the shots.

If you want to know why things have been turned upside down,

why so many people are asking themselves if they've gone crazy,

or if the world has,

as they hear feminist groups justify rape as a tool of resistance;

as groups that call themselves anti-racist

advocate for a new kind of segregation;

as young, highly educated people

chant the slogans of jihadi terrorist groups;

well, I ultimately don't think that's because of a few maniacs

that are throwing paint on masterpieces in our museums.

It's because they have been allowed to do so.

And the question is why?

Perhaps, to give the most generous read,

it's because the people shutting things down

claim to be doing so in the name of justice,

not in the name of nihilism.

And because we believe them.

Or perhaps it's because we told ourselves, "It's just a few nuts,

I don't need to get involved."

Or maybe it's because people looked at their portfolio

and decided that they were doing great by the numbers.

And those torched stores?

Ah, they probably had insurance anyway.

Or because it was a headache.

Or because they're just kids.

Or because, why die on that hill?

Or maybe it was because we thought they had a point.

That America and the West really were guilty

of all of the terrible things that they said,

or at least of some of them.

And though we wouldn't have torn down statues or shouted down speakers,

we lacked the conviction or the ideas to stop the people doing it.

Or because maybe in the end we prized comfort over complexity.

I was going to say prized comfort over truth,

but the thing is, truth isn't something you pull out of the ground

like gold or diamonds.

It is a process sustained by a culture of questioning,

including self-questioning.

Which is why right now it can look like the absolutists are winning.

(Applause)

My theory is that the reason we have a culture in crisis

is because of the cowardice of people that know better.

It is because the weakness of the silent,

or rather the self-silencing majority.

So why have we been silent?

Simple.

Because it's easier.

Because speaking up is hard,

it is embarrassing, it makes you vulnerable.

It exposes you as someone who is not chill,

as someone who cares a lot,

as someone who makes judgments,

as someone who discerns between right and wrong,

between better and worse.

The reason Aristotle called courage the first virtue

is because it is the one

that makes all of the other virtues possible.

Do you want to live in a world

that values justice, wisdom, compassion,

curiosity, rationality, equality

and the pursuit of truth?

I do.

But fighting to make sure we live in such a world is going to take courage.

That first virtue.

I think one of the lessons of the past decade

is that cowardice is perhaps more contagious than COVID.

But so is courage,

and a singular example can serve

as a powerful means of transmission.

So who are those examples?

Each one of you, when I say the word courage,

will have the ones that come to mind for you.

But for me, for me, they are people like Salman Rushdie,

sentenced to death by the Iranian ayatollahs in 1989

for the sin of writing a novel.

He lived under the shadow of a fatwa until two years ago,

on a stage like this one, he was viciously stabbed.

But he survived and undaunted,

this week, of course, he published a book about it.

Courage for me is someone like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman,

who insists that there is nothing contradictory

about his progressive values

and his belief that Hamas is a band of murderers that must be defeated.

Now suffice it to say, this has not made him popular,

but he doesn't seem to care.

While a lot of other people have moved on out of political expediency,

his office in DC is the one that remains papered with photos

of all of the hostages.

Courage to me

looks like Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Jay studies the health and well-being of vulnerable populations for a living,

and he foresaw the social and mental health crisis

that would follow the COVID lockdowns.

He said so, he explained it calmly.

But for doing so, Twitter blacklisted him.

YouTube censored him.

The medical establishment ostracized and slandered him.

He wrote, "I could not believe this was happening

in a country that I so love."

And yet he did not tremble.

He said, "The healing of the world starts by one person saying loudly,

so the whole world can hear,"

an important, true thing,

that he knows he's not supposed to say

and that he knows will get him in trouble for saying it.

I think about Roland Fryer, the economist who did just that.

His colleagues at Harvard warned him against publishing research

that he did into police violence.

"You'll ruin your career," they told him.

And that's because his research found

that while there was racial bias in low-level police force,

there wasn't when it came to police shootings.

Now Roland himself was shocked by these findings.

He knew it went against his own assumptions.

He knew it would outrage people.

But he published the research anyway.

And it wasn't simply that his reputation suffered.

He had to hire an armed guard in Cambridge.

His baby was seven days old,

and he had to go to buy diapers with an armed guard.

Where did he get the courage to do it?

"Simple," he told me.

"I don't covet what they covet."

He said, "Every day I have to look at myself in the mirror and say,

'What are you here for?'"

Masih Alinejad knows what she is put on Earth for.

With moxie and courage,

she is leading the campaign for women's rights in Iran.

Her sister was forced to denounce her on state television.

Her brother was thrown in jail for her dissent.

And now Masih lives in exile in America

but remains a hunted woman,

moving from safe house to safe house.

And yet she does not stop shouting for freedom.

Nor does Jimmy Lai,

the media mogul whose pro-democracy newspaper "Apple Daily"

was shut down as China took over Hong Kong.

Jimmy had more than the means to flee his country.

He is a billionaire with a British passport.

But he stayed.

"Now is not the time for safety," he said.

"This is a time for sacrifice."

Today is his 1,204 day in prison.

His son Sebastian said this of his father:

"Dad staying in Hong Kong is really proof

that this intangible thing we call liberty is a thing people yearn for.

You can call it Western values, but it's not really.

In the sense that it's not something that only people in the West

want or deserve."

Alexei Navalny was not born in the West,

but he yearned for that kind of liberty.

The opposition leader had refuge in Germany,

but he flew back into Putin's Russia,

sacrificing his freedom and ultimately his life

to oppose tyranny.

He knew that his death would expose the truth

about a totalitarian regime built on lies.

Which it can,

so long as we keep his memory alive.

Navalny lived and died beneath the shadow of a tyranny

that we are fighting to prevent in our still young

but ever-darkening century.

Ask yourself right now,

should it take courage in the West to denounce the hateful ideology

of the Islamic Republic of Iran,

which pronounces death on individual writers

and on entire countries, large and small?

Should it take courage to oppose those chanting "death to America?"

Should it take courage to say, “No, that’s wrong?”

Should it take courage to say

that those who praise the pristine subways of Russia

are not journalists, but propagandists?

(Applause)

Should it take courage to just say in public,

"I disagree?"

Right now it does.

My friend Coleman Hughes,

who spoke on this stage last year

and who advocates for the colorblind ideal

championed by Martin Luther King Jr,

rather than give in to the race essentialism

that's become chic these days,

he'll debate anyone.

He'll disagree with anyone.

But why is it that his angriest opponents prefer to call him hateful names

and to lobby for his exclusion?

The question, I think,

is whether or not the people I've mentioned

and those like them,

whether their photos and their names

and most importantly, their ideas

will show up at conferences like this one.

And that's up to you.

I've had enough people confess to me after lectures or in newsrooms

or on college campuses or in corporations or cafes,

really, everywhere I go,

that they wish they could say what they believe.

They tell me with some measure of shame

that they're closeted in our liberal democracies.

It's a really strange phenomenon.

The freest people in the history of the world

seem to have lost the hunger for liberty.

Or maybe it's really the will to defend it.

And when they tell me this,

it puts me in mind of my hero, Natan Sharansky,

who spent a decade in the Soviet gulag before getting his freedom.

He is the single bravest person that I have ever met in my life.

And a few years ago, one afternoon in Jerusalem,

I asked him a simple question.

"Nathan," I asked him, "is it possible to teach courage?"

And he smiled in his impish way and said, "No.

All you can do is show people how good it feels to be free."

Thank you.

(Applause and cheers)

Thank you so much. Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: Stay up, stay up a sec.

Friends --

Bari Weiss: Sorry I couldn't memorize, you guys.

CA: This session is going to run long.

I'm sorry, but it matters.

Thank you, that was a great talk.

Saw people stand and cheer,

other people didn't stand.

You're in the middle of all these issues --

BW: I was expecting hecklers, so I'm really happy.

CA: But these issues are so important.

And this is such an important conversation.

I think I want to ask you something

in the quest for common ground here.

Is it possible that, as well as lack of courage,

there's something else big going on

in the hearts of many of the "silent majority?"

Which, for want of a better word is love.

These are often debates between identity groups,

and many of us don't like the way that the battle is going.

But we also feel deeply the pain

that a lot of these groups have gone through,

the injustices that they have suffered.

(Applause)

And if you get involved,

it can so easily be seen as you are against that group.

And I guess I'm just wondering

whether there's common ground to be found in us all saying identity really matters.

And I mean, you care about the past injustices of people in America

and all the different groups you’ve talked about.

But that there are some things that are upstream of identity

that matter even more.

You mentioned truth, the pursuit of truth.

We have common ground on that.

I believe that passionately.

I believe that about ideas.

You know that some people want to say that ideas are a property of one group

and that, you know -- but no, no,

TED is all based on the notion

that ideas can spread from any human to any human.

BW: But the whole question is, sorry to interrupt,

how do you get to truth, right?

And the West has given us the most radical tools in human history.

I think Sam Harris is probably in this room, and I’m stealing his line.

But the radical departure is that here, in rooms like this one,

in cultures like the ones that we are lucky enough to live in,

we don't solve our conflicts with blows and with violence.

We solve them with words.

And that is why it is so absolutely crucial,

no matter how people who are really advocating to burn it all down

or tear it all down.

No, by tearing it all down,

by tearing down the rule of law,

by disallowing us to be able to have this kind of debate and discussion,

you're preventing the whole project itself.

And that has nothing to do with identity,

with claims of victimhood,

with actual victimhood.

The entire way that progress has been achieved

is by victim groups using the tools

that liberal democracies have provided them with.

Without freedom, without freedom of speech, freedom of religion,

without the rule of law,

none of the progress that I know so many people in this room celebrate

would be possible at all.

And so it's really about clinging to the tools rather than repudiating them.

CA: I agree with that.

(Applause)

But the tools of words in our current culture,

which is sound-bite, fast stuff,

it's so often heard as an assault,

it's heard not as words and exploration of truth.

It's heard as hatred or criticism.

And I just wonder whether there could be a coalition of the willing,

or double down exactly on what you said,

let's pursue the truth.

Let's pursue the best ideas.

Let's not be fearful of sharing things that are difficult with each other,

but do so in a spirit of love and respect,

and so that everyone can know that at heart, they are respected.

We're all trying to make things better.

(Applause)

BW: I don't see anything to disagree with there, only that ...

you know ...

Respect -- like ...

Love and compassion and all of that,

again, it's only possible if we agree to a certain set of rules

that I think many of us took for granted

in the way we take oxygen or gravity for granted.

And one of the things that has driven me and my choices

over the past years of my life

is a profound sense that the line between civilization and barbarism,

a word that maybe will provoke some people,

but I believe is an accurate description,

is paper thin.

The things that allow for us to do this

are so exceptional,

and they have to be fought for.

And the people that claim that words are violence

are taking away

the most fundamental tool we have

for all of the virtues that I was trying to talk about on stage here this morning.

(Cheers and applause)

CA: Bari, thank you.

You've ignited an incredibly important conversation here.

Thank you for doing that.

Please stay, please continue this conversation.

And thank you for what you said.

BW: Thanks for having me.

(Applause)