Some writers convince themselves that as long as they have clever technique, it doesn't matter if their CONTENT is foul and soul-sickening. I can't and won't let that attitude go unchallenged.
The notion that good and evil are only inventions which someone found convenient to fabricate is not new, no matter how often some people try to convince us that it’s a “daring new revelation.” Moral relativism has been ubiquitous in popular culture for the better part of a century, and can be found among skeptical philosophers reaching back far earlier than the birth of the pop culture we know. Its advocates deliberately keep up an endless chatter about clear morality being a device to enslave us…in order to prevent us from considering what a fine device for enslavement the LACK OF morality can be.
When the denial of objective ethical truth extends into the fantasy components of literature and media, an inevitable corollary (again, repeated endlessly) is the notion that humanity “creates” its gods BY believing in them. The skeptics, of course, either don’t want any real God to exist, or else have been snookered by earlier scoffers who didn’t want Him to exist and have authority over them. So they would never argue that living, walking, talking mythical deities were ever created as flesh and blood IN THE REAL WORLD by anyone’s belief in them; but if the skeptics undertake to write fantasy, they’ll enlarge the “man-creates-gods” concept to let fictional walking-talking supernatural beings get created (or at least empowered) in the story-world by people’s belief, because EVEN in fantasy, they prefer gods or elves or whatnot to be thus created rather than having any real, self-contained existence.
Now, I can guarantee that, no matter how stubbornly scoffers insist that there is no universal code of right and wrong which is binding on all of us, if those very scoffers are injured by someone, it will be very hard for them NOT to believe in their hearts that the offender in their case WAS VIOLATING a universal code of right and wrong that was binding on the offender. But even if they realize this, or especially if they realize it, they’ll strive to keep this realization out of their atheistic-existentialist writings. Accordingly-- what a surprise, not!-- they will write stories which offer no hope, no joy, no inspiration, and absolutely no spiritual insight.
Such stories can disguise their despair with a landscape of colorful plot details and superficial inventiveness, but the despair is no less despairing for this.
In the period from 1999 through 2002, Marvel Comics produced a long, intricate graphic novel titled “Earth X”: an alternate-history epic which, by existing outside the continuity of the monthly comic books, could freely poison the well as much as the story writer felt like doing. And the writer felt like poisoning everything: ideals were lost, relationships were destroyed, society was corrupted beyond remedy, love was ruined and mocked. No hope was offered to anyone, unless it were false hope for the sake of making failure more painful.
Everybody from Captain America to Doctor Strange was trampled into the mud; and the “man-creates-gods” theme was woven into a militantly non-theistic evolution scenario, just to make extra sure that the reader was not allowed to think there could be any redemptive meaning to anything.
Yet even in the act of denying all cosmic justice, the author couldn’t help talking now and then as if, how about that, he REALLY DID want some transcendent moral truths to be recognized. The catch was that what he considered moral truths had to conform to stylish political correctness.
Thus, in one stream-of-consciousness narrative, the writer made Captain America mimic neo-hippie talk which Captain America would never utter, because the original Captain America would not lie. The writer made the Captain say: “War makes us hate. It makes us hate everything including ourselves. And because we can’t live for long hating ourselves, we begin to hate others because of what they let us do to them.”
That supposedly profound speech is, in fact, nonsense. It is a lie, because it is a deliberate half-truth. Of course there is hatred in any war…but THERE IS ALSO LOVE. Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote, “Men do not fight because they hate, but because they love, and would defend what they love.” Sheen may have been over-optimistic in making his statement seem like an unvarying law; but it remains a fact, which countless war veterans can confirm, that hatred IS NOT ALL that is present in a war. Even a soldier who forgets patriotism will still feel love for at least some of those who fight beside him, and usually for those he left behind at home.
Another portion of the alien speech forcibly crammed into Captain America’s mouth is even more dishonest: “I believed that a soldier’s duty was to fight. I was wrong. Maybe that’s what some authorities and leaders would have us believe. But a soldier’s duty is to stop the war.”
I call this part MORE dishonest because, although many millions of human beings have mercifully escaped from being directly in a war and so are unfamiliar with the emotions that occur in soldiers, anyone above the age of six should be able to comprehend that not all OUTCOMES to a conflict are equally desirable. To say “Just stop the war” is to speak the obvious LIE that every possible ending to a war is as good as every other. And even a little knowledge of history wll show that it can make an ENORMOUS difference who wins a fight.
A mind so ignorant that it thinks saying "Stop the war" ends all discussion is the type of mind which can flatter itself that there’s great insight to be gained from treating Reed Richards as morally equivalent with Doctor Doom, as this graphic novel does.
Shallow sophistication can furnish entertainment; and for audiences who prefer dark, ugly stories of downfall and betrayal without any relief, “Earth X” was doubtless entertaining. But it’s junk food for the soul. Captain America was made to say that you can’t live for long hating yourself, but it is more relevant to say that you can’t live WELL if you hate TRUTH.
Accordingly, my copy of “Earth X” now rests in the trash, and will not be missed.
