House of Eratosthenes

Let’s revisit American cinema in the 1970’s. The big screen. We have vigilante justice movies, we have disaster movies, we have natural predator movies. Then Star Wars comes along, and bam! Science fiction is the new hotness. Suddenly, everything has to have a spaceship. James Bond goes into outer space. Battlestar Galactica takes off. Buck Rogers and Star Trek are revived.

But nothing really has the staying power of Star Wars. We look back, and we see the astonishing success of Star Wars had very little to do with the birth of a new outer-space genre, but rather, the reincarnation of an older one: American Westerns, with the timeless confrontation between good and evil. It was always about this contrast; half a dozen characters, at the very most, represented “right” things and “wrong” things, and this was the hub around which the rest of the story revolved. Cute robots, humming swords — they were just glitter.

Not everybody will agree with me on that. But a lot of other people do “get it,” including the people who make and lose real money on this stuff.

So here is my question.

Where was, or is, the revival with regard to “Good versus Evil” movies? The demand is there; the supply is not. Some social taboo keeps getting in the way. We can’t have something like “High Noon” even when the audience wants it. Every hero, it seems, has to have a prison record and a bad attitude. Every villain, two thirds of the way through, has to deliver a monologue to the hero about “we are not so different, you and I” and the message has to be delivered that on some level, the villain is correct. And the audience loses interest.

I am frequently instructed by people more wealthy and powerful than me, that I’m supposed to believe good and evil depend greatly on one’s perspective; one man’s good, is another man’s evil. And yet, some people are evil because they target innocents. They want something, they perceive some method of acquiring it that involves putting civilians in harm’s way…civilians who have no dog in the hunt…civilians, against whom, the protagonist has no beef. And then they go about acquiring the “MacGuffin” — salvation in the next world, respect in this one, revenge, goods and services — and get innocent people killed. Is it really such a subjective thing to call that evil? Really?

Now my liberals instruct me that I’m I’m supposed to believe America’s own military operations, and those by Israel, are wonderful examples of the evil of which I speak, when & if they involve collateral damage. Bloody Palestinian babies and all that. Problem: In those examples, the “MacGuffin” would be self-defense — unless the argument advanced, seeks to simultaneously support some conspiracy theory about “Blood For Oil.” Say what you want about airstrikes for the purpose of self-defense that involve civilian casualties, either calculated, or accidental; they fall outside the scope of my statement. As for Blood-fer-Oil, should this be proven, it would fall well within said scope but disrupt nothing in the definition of evil. In other words, show me we really got people killed just to get our grubby mitts on oil, and I’m down with that — that would be evil. But my definition stands. The debate is whether or not some things are objectively evil, and so far, the opposing side in the debate has forfeited.

Some things are simply, rottenly, evil. And people are innately programmed to see it defeated — bring it down ourselves, or cheer for someone else who does so. Somehow, it seems, we have these cultural taboos against telling a story about evil being trumped by good, or to even acknowledge the existence of evil.

I don’t mind a cultural taboo or two, but I do ask that a taboo make some sense. And that it not be suicidal. These are the thoughts on my mind, as I peruse this excellent piece by Bret Stephens that appeared over the weekend in Opinion Journal. It seems to me all the huffing-and-puffing about midterm elections, and September 11, and terrorism, is all about this.

Here’s a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains–namely, liberals–are typically the most reluctant to fight it?
:
An instinct for pacifism surely goes some way toward explaining the left’s curious unwillingness to sign up for a war to defend its core values. A suspicion of black-and-white moral distinctions of the kind President Bush is fond of making about terrorism–a suspicion that easily slides into moral relativism–is another.

But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: “Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit–that confronting evil is counterproductive,” says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. “They think that by appeasing them–allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools–they will win their friendship.”

A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. “Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them.” [emphasis mine]

Isn’t that last bit something interesting, and haven’t we run into that an awful lot before. You talk about perverts and psychos and sickos and weirdos kidnapping little kids and chopping them up, or Islamo-fascist murderers shooting schoolgirls in the back and flying planes into buildings; many among us stumble around, insisting that evil is a matter of perspective. But then you toss in the word “corporation” and — almost as if someone yelled “Go!” — everything changes.

Last year, the Star Wars franchise was wrapped up by an episode in which the Obi-Wan Kenobi character ignited speculation that the whole story may be a screed against President Bush, with a single line: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Anti-war liberals entrenched in the habit of gleaning their moral philosophies from movies — united with the anti-war liberals who instinctively grasp for compatriot arguments, perceived or imagined, wherever they can find them — clucked with glee. All year long.

Until someone pointed out Kenobi’s statement, in itself, was an absolute. Oops.

If it was an anti-Bush screed, Kenobi suffers from the cognitive dissonance of the forementioned “Chomskyite left”: There is no such thing as absolute evil, and yet, the hated corporations are absolutely evil.

But I’m much more intrigued with that first crowd, the “I don’t like comparisons between good-and-evil, and neither should you” crowd. One of the most interesting things about people, I notice, is that the instincts with which they are wired down to the marrow of their bones, tend toward consistency — no equal-and-opposite reaction, for the action. Ninety-nine of us will have an instinct not to touch a hot stove…and yet, the likelihood that you’ll find a hundredth guy with an opposite instinct, is quite remote. Ninety-nine mothers will want to see their children live and prosper. Searching for a hundredth mother who likes to kill her children, maybe you’ll find something — probably not. Such mutations of the human genome are to be found after the searcher has sifted through millions, maybe more. After such an abundance of rejections, the anomaly found can no longer be characterized as an alternative flavor of the species, but purely an aberration. In other words, we are “designed” to resemble the millions of specimens thrown away before you got that one mutant.

Yet with good and evil it’s different; people do come in flavors, like ice cream. Some of us, down to the depths of our souls, have this longing to see good triumph and evil defeated. But then there are a bunch of others among us, who, down to the depths of their souls, have this irrational phobia about ever seeing evil defined, let alone defeated. I can easily find representative instances of both classes. The aberration that can’t be found so easily, would be the fellow who falls in between the two — he is the one who doesn’t seem to exist, except as a mutation. The folks with the irrational phobia, are actually quite plentiful.

They rankle and sneer at the idea of Matt Dillon facing down a guy in a black hat in Dodge City…drawing second, shooting first, saving the town, doing his job. They act like they have a rational argument for why people shouldn’t watch “cowboy” movies — but if you ask them to articulate that argument, you quickly find out there is no such thing.

It’s fear, and a smoldering emotional resentment, nothing more. It appears such people have reached maturity with the conviction that if there is such a thing as justice, dedicated to the triumph of good over evil, then such a thing has never helped them. And if the concept of justice has not been known to bring them any tangible benefits, then it shouldn’t help anyone else either, no matter what the circumstances and no matter how desperately justice may be needed in some parts of the world.

And so…they easily slide, as Stephens said, into moral relativism. Justice is something that should benefit them, or else it should benefit nobody, and to the best they can see it has yet to benefit them.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Easily Slides Into Moral RelativismWednesday, September 20th, 2006

Easily Slides Into Moral Relativism
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006