A friend of mine used to say that when discussing art, you can find meaning where you want, and back up opinion where you see fit. It’s certainly not a view I share, but I can see the point he was making: there’s little room in the humanities and liberal arts for definitive answers. There are very few absolutes but there are trends, and the occasional consensus.
The way we lionize the natural sciences has made us look for absolutes when sometimes there isn’t one
What I do admit is the interpretation and social warping of concepts over time. Abstract concepts such as virtue, truth, morality, and evil are arguably matters of linguistic illusion rather than being absolutely definable, which make them slippery and hard to pin down.
As far as most people are concerned, math and science exist in near absolutes, or near certain inferences. Uncertainly is measured in the 0.01%s rather than what a concept means at any given time in our cognitive or linguistic economy, or how a brush stroke reveals political uncertainty, or whether a certain piece of music fairly reflects postmodernism. The way we lionize the natural sciences has made us more susceptible to looking for these absolutes in human affairs, for the security of a definite answer, when sometimes there isn’t one.
It’s fairly easy to see why someone would share my friend’s opinion on literature, at least. Once stories are consumed, they belong to the reader. With the infinite idiosyncrasies of a readership, each word, phrase, and paragraph will mean something different to each person. We map our own ideas, experiences, emotions, and beliefs onto what we read, and then we take from it what our desires tell us to. Films, paintings, dance, and music in a similar sense belong to the audience once they have left the artists hand. I recently got into the habit of tearing up over venerable acts of virtue: honor, truth, and determination in the face of oppression. My wife still enjoys telling everyone about my tears over ‘The Hundred Foot Journey’, which she points out, is simply a heart-warming tale about an Indian restaurant being set up opposite an established French restaurant, “but it’s about the acceptance of different cultures…” I sniffed, “…about understanding our ethnocentrism” – I think I was having a moment.
Do our shared interpretations of some of these concepts disguise issues from us?
Although the arts may well be open to some interpretation, and we may feel we emotionally make them our own, this doesn’t mean we aren’t heavily influenced by the message story tellers, artists and other creators set out to engender. In fact, what we take from stories, art and music can center on shared experiences, shared values. Along this vein, certain abstract concepts have been refined through cultural and social history to allow us some form of agreement on what they can come to mean. A society’s hegemonic values can agree, for example, on what evil is generally held to be. But does our shared interpretation of some of these concepts cloak issues from our attention, do they hide other more useful and progressive interpretations?
I’ll illustrate this with the superhero paradigm. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, underwater, with a terrible WiFi connection, it can’t have escaped your attention that superhero films are the big deal. Stories like this pervade western culture. Their affect makes us feel powerful as individuals, as if we can be agents of change. We should respect bravery and honor, and maybe the notion that sometimes it’s okay to resort to violence to solve our problems. (Maybe that’s why there are so many sequels?)
What seems less open to interpretation is that the main catalyst for heroism in this paradigm is antagonism: some untempered evil to overcome. But aren’t evils something we see in the real world day to day? Not Dr Doom, but Assad; not Venom, but Trump; not the trickster Loki, but Osborne. We still have evil in the world. In fact, let’s be honest, Marvel and DC villains might think some of these things were ‘a bit much’ – Lex Luthor might be fine smashing Metropolis to pieces, but it’s hard to see him systematically killing the disabled and telling their grieving families that he’s curing their laziness. And yet we don’t see vigilante justice on the scale you’d expect from a superhero in the face of such overwhelming antagonism.
I would expect a little more spandex for the level of abhorrent acts in the world, so I went looking
Plenty of people have the time to fight evil. A lack of a super powers doesn’t stop Batman, Iron Man, The Black Widow, and nor would it be reason enough to stop any other person. I imagine plenty of people would jump at the chance to take on the danger, and the ethical consideration of the law wouldn’t be a major deal breaker, and many more would like to see their own sense of justice realized, so it can’t be diffusion of responsibility.
If we’ve got unmitigated evil, where are our heroes and heroines to restore balance? I would expect a little more spandex for the level of abhorrent acts in the world! So, I went looking.
It didn’t take much to find a few ‘superheroes’, but of course many of their identities were secret, so it was hard to track them down. I can see the problems villainy faced with this simple defense mechanism. Unperturbed, I eventually found Dark Guardian, a martial arts instructor turned self-proclaimed superhero, who patrols various parts of NYC . Decked out in a red bullet proof vest and red leather trousers, he’s hard to miss.
Dark Guardian has also run free self-defense seminars when there were homophobic attacks going on in the local area
His real name is Chris Pollak, and he awaited my first question with what I imagine was staunch stoicism; although that could have just been my imagination. Dark Guardian tells that me his reasons for doing what he does stems from the inspirational heroes in films and comics: “The idea of someone who does [this] without pay and puts themselves on the line ‘just because’ is what I found inspiring”.
I liked the answer. After all we all can find inspiration in stories, and the ideal of giving time for people for free appeals to me in a world where a lot of things are only contemplated if there is financial incentive. Aside from patrolling, breaking up fights and giving descriptions of violent pimps to the police, Dark Guardian has also run free self-defense seminars when there were homophobic attacks going on in the local area. Hard to argue with that one either.
Public support, being visible, matters to him. “I like people to see what I’m doing. It’s a chance to promote getting out and doing good. I’ll let people decide what they want about me. It really doesn’t matter, but I do try to hold myself to a high standard because it’s my passion and a reflection of who I am. I’ve been ridiculed and made fun of but honestly it meaningless. What matters is the work.”
So, why don’t more people do this? Why are there not more moonlit heroes? Why are there not thousands more like Dark Guardian? What was interesting throughout our conversation was the idea of promoting good, yet the reasons Dark Guardian and others often give for deciding to become superheroes come from a wish to restore a personally intuited imbalance. Address an evil to fight and overcome, because “you grow up seeing what crime can do to a community and it has an effect on you.”
Our classic idea of evil is all too often viewed in the singular: attached to some individual or action that needs a quick fix to overcome
But most people who decide to take on the role of hero have turned to promote good through community deeds rather than tackle evil head on. Why? This question presupposes that the key necessity for these heroic creations is already available as people believe it is, and this is the mistake. It is not that we lack the tools to create classic superheroes – we have them in abundance – but what we don’t have is an acceptable antagonist to forge one, no supervillains that fit the bill. We have few real world instances of the genre’s classic idea of evil.
True evil doesn’t take the form of the lone villain waiting for a fistfight in the shadows, and equally doesn’t require people to fight it with onomatopoeic roundhouses. The Dark Guardian may solve some criminal issues, but the majority of his work is doing good, not fighting evil doers. It’s actually quite hard to find this classic concept of ‘evil’, and when criminal acts are confronted, they are superficial solutions at best, a drug to fight the itch; not the cure for the cause.
Our classic idea of evil is all too often viewed in the singular: attached to some individual or action that needs a quick fix to overcome, rather than being shown to be the wider systematic political, economic or societal injustices that hide behind these individual moments. In the real world, evils are often clandestine, hidden or intangible, even accidental and, due to this, far more potent and far more deserving of this slippery abstract word. Racism is so more more than the explicit singular newsworthy items of violence against individuals. That would ignore the seed of the issue which is the evil of systemic, often implicit bias. Sexual exploitation is seen in the hero-villain paradigm as an individual criminal act, and not a wider issue of the automatically assumed power and entitlement of men. Homelessness is a rare discomfort to our halcyon hideaways, and not a vice of our wider economic system and attitudes surrounding personal value. The Panama Papers leak doesn’t reveal a handful of sneaky morally questionable acts, but an ingrained sense of entitlement and theft from those in positions of financial and political power on.
The more we reevaluate our idea of evil, and focus on the fundamental evils we have become used to, demotivated and disillusioned by, the more people can put on their own capes and tackle them with lasting potency. What I took away with me after talking to Dark Guardian was that I felt change wouldn’t need any more incentive than the human need for justice, only more elbow grease; and although our social and economic structures have given us a number of vices, they may have at least provided for us enough confidence in whatever agency we have to make some difference by both promoting good and tackling the insidious evils that we may, without knowing, be maintaining.
Image: Stick Kim
