Perseverence...

Ingrid Betancourt gives gripping and deeply moving interviews of her extraordinary time as a captive of Columbia’s guerillas. Held for six years, she spoke about how she was witness to just about every perverse and cruel nuance of human nature there is.

Betancourt was taken in 2002 with 15 others at a roadblock and released in July 2008. Over the course of the six years, Betancourt was abused, humiliated, insulted and tortured. She has great difficulty talking about the torture.

She tried to escape six times. She paid the price for her daring, chained to a tree for one night, and after the next attempt, throughout night and day. Once, she says, she was made to stand for 3 nights and days chained by the throat to a tree.

Asked in a searing conversation with the BBC’s Alan Johnston (Johnston was kidnapped and held captive in Gaza) what the experience revealed about humanity’s most compelling weaknesses, Betancourt remarked that it was our tendency to buckle under peer pressure, how it is we in the end place group conformity above integrity.

Speaking generally, on balance, the characteristics of personality that make us conform come more naturally than those that make us stand out, whether the intentions that stand behind it are honourable or not. You can well see why. Genes that favour human cooperation are why we have survived and flourished and they in greater numbers of DNA tend to be kept in the pool.

To therefore stand up for what is right under life-threatening survival pressure takes courage, determination and monumental powers of self-will. In Betancourt’s circumstance, being utterly helpless victims of cruel and pathological men, none of them came out well, though as with normal human variation, some came out better than others.

What is human courage? How is it summoned? Why do some individuals appear to be more courageous than others? Is it subject to the principles of inheritance? Can it be learnt? What in other words is courage as a biological property and how does it interact with the social environment? Is the gene-environment interaction the right area to look for answers?

The Oxford English dictionary defines courageous as being brave or fearless, to nerve oneself into a course of action or to take a stand, courage being a Middle English word derived from the French corage that in turn comes from the Latin for ‘heart’. Biologically courage draws on one of the most powerful physiological repertoires needed for survival.

There are different kinds or types of courage. In Betancourt’s case, her courage was a defiance rooted in a deep sense of dignity that kept the flame of life alive under the most unthinkable circumstances. Her fellow captives described her courage as a ‘centre of gravity’. ‘Ingrid never cries’, a fellow captive and Colombian police officer Frank Pinchao once said, ‘she is too strong for that’.

There is the courage of putting one’s life on the line for a cause. This is Nelson Mandela’s courage, a person who was willing to die for the freedom of all of us and ended up spending 27 long years in goal with the same spirit of conviction to the dignity that keeps the flame of life alive. Mandela was not alone in this kind of courage, but his is justly one of the most celebrated.

There is Helen Suzman’s courage, of standing up to parliamentary colleagues for what was right and to keep at it day and night, never giving in, never buckling under pressure. Hers was the courage of principle in a society where the injustices were clear and iniquities obvious. She gave these a voice in the heart of one of the institutions of apartheid’s power. South Africa buried Suzman last week.

Betancourt, Mandela and Suzman set extraordinary examples for us to follow. The example is to stand up for what it is one believes in, to be counted for what is the right thing to do. It is an incredibly difficult thing to do, for our natural inclination is to toe the line, to conform, to not rock the boat, to do the things that meet the approval of our peers.

Our political system conspires with our natural weaknesses to cast courageous citizens out as treacherous or disloyal. Joint cabinet responsibility conspired with cowardice such that not a single cabinet minister resigned as a result of former President Thabo Mbeki’s and Minister Manto Tsabalala-Msimang wicked HIV/ AIDS policies. No one.