We have a wonderful used-book store in our city, which until recently was within walking distance of our house. One of our favorite pastimes was to rummage through the “free bins” parked outside the store.
We found many treasures in it: a whole entire set of encyclopedias, for instance, missing only “volume 11.” Thousands of Martha Stewart magazines, back when she even still dared put her face on every cover. Tattered books in Italian, or about calculus, with which to impress one’s older brother. And once, an ancient copy of Atlantic Monthly, in which I found an essay by Marilynne Robinson about courage and the petty coercion of society that conspires against it. It was gorgeous.
It drove me crazy to misplace it, which I inevitably did, almost immediately.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, in a fit of extravagance, I ordered several books from Amazon.com (to get the “free shipping,” of course) and among them I chose one by Marilynne Robinson called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. I’d seen the list of contents and knew my essay wasn’t in it.
But tonight, after an exhausting day I started leafing through the book. And there, at the very end, the final essay in the collection, I found it. Really! I don’t know how it got there, but it feels like a gift. This is what it’s called:
“The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.”
Which (my usually good memory not-withstanding) apparently appeared in the August 2004 issue of Harper’s Monthly, not in the Atlantic, and here, moreover, is a quote:
Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition. By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true. I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it. Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission. We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves – prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one. This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression. But it is.
. . .
It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness. The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd convention. We have our own Rosa Parks. That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers is a demonstration of the power of social consensus. How many minor coercions are required to sustain similar customs and usages? How aware are any of us, absent direct challenge, of how we also deal in trivial coercion?
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