This American Life did a show some time ago about superpowers, and in Act One John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose--Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing.
One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that she could steal sweaters from Brooks Brothers, and another about how he would choose it so he could watch different beautiful women taking showers--but then changed his mind because he knew that was unacceptable. In the end he would choose Flight to prevent himself from using Invisibility as a Peeping Tom. He would not be able to control himself if he had Invisibility. Another person speculated that most people would choose Flight, but that they would be lying because they don't want to admit to all the sneaky ways they would use Invisibility. It's interesting how sneaky people assume everyone else is. I suppose Hodgeman's choice of these people reflects his own bias that they are admirable because they are honest. Or maybe it's just that there's little entertainment value in the non-transgressive.
Although Hodgeman tried to frame his own thoughts on the matter ambiguously, the thrust of the piece was shaped by what I think of as the Tarantino aesthetic, a sophisticated nihilism that assumes that the only thing that is truly, deeply, unambiguously real in human beings is their base instincts. Or as a character on "Mad Men" said a couple of weeks ago, people are unhappy because they're living to meet other people's expectations instead of doing what they really want, and for folks like Don Draper, for want of any other ideas about it, what they want is defined by lust, greed, and the will to power.
In Freudian terms we restrain our indulgence of these instinctual drives because they are proscribed by the superego, the rules of the tribe, not because there is something inherently good that it is possible to choose. We do "good" to avoid the shame of being caught and punished, not because there is actually something Good to choose.
So there's what we do to get along in society--being nice, following the rules, etc., which is alienating, and there's doing what we want to do, which is to live instinctually, which is fulfilling. We'd all be HBO Rome's Mark Antony, if we could be--the model of the uninhibited pursuit and fulfillment of lust, greed, and the will to power. "Oh, how we lived," he says to Cleopatra shortly before killing himself. He went for it, and so would the rest of us if we had his balls, according to the Tarantino aesthetic.
Antony's character is contrasted with Octavian's, who is no less single-minded in his instinctual pursuits, particularly the will to power, but he wants the appearances of virtue and decorum. Antony could care less about appearances, and he is the more appealing character. Antony is honest and straightforward, guileless in his own way; the priggish Octavian is not.
These assumptions--that the only reason we behave well is in order to get along in society, but we wouldn't if there were no price to pay--frame the Hodgeman piece. We've heard it a thousand times since we were in college: "I may be a selfish, manipulative bitch, but at least I'm honest." Virtue, decency, kindness are always a lie, a kind of sucking up, a refusal to be "real". It's interesting how there's always a tone of sanctimony in people who think like this, as if their position is the only morally acceptable one.
I accept that each of us in a fallen world has a dark side, each of us has transgressive urges and desires, but the Tarantino aesthetic assumes that those urges and desires are more real, more truthful, more authentic than those impulses that would restrain us from doing something that is intrinsically morally ugly. For the Tarantino aesthetic, those restraints or any impulse that would lead us to do the Good are mere acculturation, a trip that's laid on us by "society" so that we "share" and "play nice" and "use our words" instead of "hitting with our hands". They are fictions that keep us from tearing one another to pieces, and the Tarantino aesthetic assumes that there is nothing in humans that intrinsically wills to do the Good because there is no Good to will.
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In the summer of 2007, I put up a series of posts entitled Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism I, II, III, and IV. If you've some time and the subject interests you, take a look. It lays out an alternative set of assumptions to those of the Tarantino aesthetic. The discussion that went on in comments was pretty interesting as well. And I remember the one thing that discussion brought into clearer focus for me was the argument that moral behavior, doing the Good, does not depend on a set of religious beliefs. I said somewhere a la Dostoyevski, If there is no God, then nothing is impermissible. And some commenters objected.
The most robust objection was the social-contract argument--people behave well because it's in their self-interest to do so because a society of law-abiding citizens is a society in which everyone prospers, not just the powerful who do what they please with impunity. You don't need God to be the enforcer; the law and customary norms are sufficient. But isn't being a law-abiding boy scout in this way precisely what the Tarantino aesthetic rejects as the alienation of living up to other people's expectations? Isn't that precisely why the transgressive man is celebrated in popular culture? He's the one who does what he wants, not what is expected of him. He is powerful and charismatic, and the rest are grayed-out, bourgeois Last Men whose lives are a mere going through the prescribed, socially acceptable motions.
The social-contract argument refutes the nothing is impermissible argument, but not Glaucon's argument in Plato's Republic, which is Hodgeman's argument, that if we were invisible all of us would transgress because we could do what we really wanted with impunity. And it doesn't solve the deeper problem of alienation and fulfillment. There is a deep sense in each of us that fulfillment lies in the transgressive, that the law and our acculturation are a kind of prison from which we must be liberated. That problem is solved either by embracing the human being as instinct-driven talking animal, which is at the heart of the Tarantino aesthetic and the Hodgeman piece, or by embracing the idea that the human being is in addition to being an animal, also a spiritual being with a conscience, the faculty that enables us to cognize the Good, and a will capable of freely choosing it.
The great spiritual traditions offer a path to fulfillment, but it is not a fulfillment immediately realized or easily achieved. In the Christian tradition that fulfillment has more to do with following the dictates of conscience and not superego. And it requires behaviors that are transgressive and at times subversive of the social contract when the laws and customs are abusive of human dignity, as they were, for instance, in the South in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.
Paul's epistle to the Romans talks about liberation from the law; Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical explores how conscience can lead one to commit criminal acts when conscience requires them; Dostoyevski celebrates the transgressive, freedom-embracing character of the Christian message in his depiction of the encounter between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor. Gandhi, King, the Berrigans, Mandela were all transgressors in the service of the Good.
So it's not just a choice between living out others' expectations or doing what you want. There are also the transgressions in the service of the Good. And I think that while it is easier to do the Good if you believe there is such a thing, it's not essentially a head thing. It's a will thing, and a belief in God as enforcer is not necessary for people to will it. I think that believers don't have a significantly bigger advantage than non-believers. Grace is ubiquitous. I think that coming under the spell of the Tarantino aesthetic, however, makes it harder insofar as it smugly celebrates what is worst in us while sneering at what is best. It's harder to embrace possibilities that you assume are impossible.
There is something in each of us, regardless of our beliefs, that wills the Good, and this is the second, I think deeper, objection to the assertion that without God any atrocity is permissible. Call it natural law, call it the Tao, call it what you want, but it's intrinsic to human nature to long for and to do the Good, even if it is also intrinsic to our natures to revert to behaviors motivated by the baser instincts. Both are intrinsic to our human nature; they live side by side in our souls. But in the long run what matters is which one plays the dominant role in shaping the lives we live. Because we often want and do what is not Good does not mean that there is no Good and that it is impossible to want to do it. The Tarantino aesthetic finds such an idea embarrassing.
This American Life does not, on the whole, embrace the Tarantino aesthetic, even if occasionally stories like the Hodgeman piece do. The great thing about Glass's show is that in so many of the stories on it are the stories of people who are sniffing out and doing the Good whether they think about it in spiritual/religious terms or not. Because in the long run it doesn't matter what you think or say about it, it only matters what you choose to do. It's just that there are more possibilities for authentic choices than Hodgeman seems to understand.
[This is a slightly reivised re-post of "Superpowers: Invsibility vs. Flight" from August 2010.]