Daring to imagine

Pilot of the Future

The imagination of the child is very powerful, and sometimes we can still recall the mystery with which it invested the pages of the comic books we devoured when young. There is an atmosphere, a richness, a whole universe associated with those now dulled and faded inks on cheap paper, as the fragrance of our childhood wafts from the page for a moment.

What did I see in them all those years ago? It is gone almost before I can ask the question. Yet it was something beautiful, uplifting, intriguing, amusing, enriching. Maybe even the artists and the writers don't have it any more, and maybe they – as adults – are trying to recapture it for themselves.

For me it was Dan Dare to begin with, the very "R.A.F." hero developed by Frank Hampson, who started life as a chaplain to the Interplanetary Patrol before being successfully relaunched as chief pilot of Earth's Space Fleet. Later I prowled the streets looking for American superhero comics, beginning with Batman and moving on to Marvel, where fantasy and humour were fully alive, thanks to the fun-loving personality of Stan Lee ("Nuff said"). I have
written about all this before.

The greatest dynamic artist of the comics was Jack Kirby (d. 1994), their greatest draftsman Neal Adams. Reading these comics changed the way I looked at the world, saw shadows, perceived colour and movement. Kirby (the "William Blake of comics") was interested in gods, and raided the pantheons of many cultures including the Norse and the Greek before creating his own "New Gods" and "Forever People", "Eternals" and "Celestials". The costumes and the characters merged – each costume an emblem, almost a kind of heraldry. These were people representing something the archetypal, elemental forces of nature and human personality. The original Fantastic Four were earth, air, fire, and water, their arch-nemesis the technologically enhanced but humanly ruined Doctor Doom (a model for George Lucas's Darth Vader), their unpredictable ally, the Silver Surfer, representing the energies of the cosmos as a whole. Kirby's instincts were sound.

The new wave of interest in superheroes, fuelled by the coming-of-age of CGI in cinemas and the need for blockbuster appeal, is a mixed blessing, of course. The movies that succeed manage to be iconic, fast, and humorous. Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man is all these things, which is why he is currently worth his weight in gold. But this brings us to the real point. So far I have said much of this already, and have repeated it here mainly to have an excuse for showing some more of the gorgeous artwork – so much better than the boring frames copied by Roy Liechtenstein and turned into fine art in the 1960s.

In search of the winning formula for a successful blockbusting movie, the producers, for all their lack of imagination, have stumbled on the true archetypal conflict of our time – not just the conflict between Good and Evil, but the conflict between Man and Machine. It is the same battle that goes on in The Lord of the Rings around the Ring as "Machine", and in Kafka where the Machine is a bureaucracy, and in the Terminator movies, and so on. But it also goes on in real-life labs and abortuaries.

In SF and comics, the human imagination is free to run wild – to explore what we really want to have and to achieve as human beings. The present generation of scientists and nerds grew up on Star Trek and set about making those beloved technologies real. The same is happening with Tony Stark's gadgets today. At the end of Iron Man 3, having destroyed his own inventions, Tony bends down and picks up a screwdriver. Whether he is wearing the suit or not, "I am Iron Man," he admits. These stories form part of our process of self-invention, and at the same time (if there is to be a real story) they enable us to explore the peril of our humanity in this new world, perhaps even to rediscover that humanity, as Tony does with his engineer friend in the first movie, his girlfriend in the second, and a little boy in the third.

Kirby's Machine Man

"Nobody's a nobody," says Agent Coulson in the TV series Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nobody is to be used, exploited, or discarded. We are here to become more human, not to become all-powerful. Moral choices, and ultimately acts of compassion and love, are the only way to find meaning and joy. But the big debate worth noting in all this, discussed in Humanum recently, is about ends and means. Is technology just a screwdriver, just a tool, neutral in itself, that we pick up and use, or does it change us? Does the new tech, for example, by breaking the world down into bits of information and reassembling these into simulacra, render us less free to think in terms of wholes and natural ends – making us, in a sense, much less inclined to contemplation and more to action, to subordinate all matter to human desire? Is an alternative technology even possible? That may be to stretch our imaginations even further than the comics can reach.

Knowing the Good

In an interview with Eugenio Scalfari, published in La Repubblica on 1 October 2013, Pope Francis was asked, “Your Holiness, is there is a single vision of the Good? And who decides what it is?” He replied, simply, “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.” Scalfari pushes him: “The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that's one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope.” Francis responds, “And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them.”

The “subjectivity” of the Pope’s approach puzzled some, but what he said was perfectly in line with the rest of Catholic teaching. It did not aim to be a complete or systematic teaching on conscience, which can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church to which the Pope adheres. It was certainly not an “authoritative” statement, of the kind that emerge when a Pope is called to speak from the “chair of St Peter” to resolve some matter in dispute for the whole Church. It was a conversation, an interview, a friendly engagement. It was one of the things that Pope Francis does best.

In particular, it did not mention our responsibility to develop and educate this “vision” or “idea” of good and evil that we may have. We do not just pick it off the shelf, or let another (whether it be a parent or a teacher or a newspaper) determine it for us. The Church’s teaching on morality is part of that process of self-education – that is, assuming we give any credibility to the Church as an authority for us, then we will need to take her teaching into account as we work through the arguments and concerns in our own minds, rationally. (She is one factor, but an important one.)

The statement is right, and corresponds to what John Henry Newman wrote in his famous Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in stating that we can only fight evil and follow the good according to our own best idea of what these are. Even if we are going to make mistakes, because we have not yet fully understood everything, we have to do the best we can in the given moment with what is available to us.

In a previous post (How We Know) I explored the way in which our minds know the world around us. This time I want to reflect on how we know Good and Evil, and discern between them. I take it that one lesson of the Genesis
account of the Fall and the taking of the Fruit concerns this very question, for the Serpent tells the couple that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:5). This raises a host of questions, not least what is supposed to be wrong with “knowing good and evil”?

The answer seems to lie in the difference between knowing good, and knowing good and evil, and knowing evil. God wants us to know the good, not to know evil. We often assume we can only know the good if we have a choice between them, and know them both equally. But that is not right. If we know them equally, we are changed by both, and our knowing of the good is changed and spoiled. In the end, if we know both, we will know only evil. On the contrary, if we know the good, by adhering to God, the evil becomes irrelevant to us.

But what is the good? What makes it part of the world? What kind of thing? It is any kind of thing, provided it will fulfill and complete us. It is what we are drawn towards because we want to become fully what we were made to be. We see our fulfillment in the “good”, and we are attracted by the radiance – the “beauty” – that connects us with it, like a pathway across the water.

Aquinas and others have seen Beauty as an aspect of the Good, and these ideas are certainly very closely interwoven, but they are not identical. Beauty is the radiance of the Good and the True, and that radiance of being is another aspect of Love, which is the self-giving act at the heart of all existence, especially the existence of God. It is the dynamic act, the verb not the noun, that reaches out and across the differences between things and unites them, or gives them the savour of one another. That is how the angels communicate, according to St Denys – by the giving of light. God himself dwells in light, inaccessible light (1 Tim. 6:16). It is inaccessible because it is his gift to himself; and at the same time it has become accessible, because he has given us this very self in his Son.

We know evil by suffering it. We know the good by being drawn to its beauty and ultimately by sharing it. And as for conscience, that is the self-knowledge, the eye of the heart, the memory of the breath of God (Gen. 2:7), by which we recognize the good as good – as containing that promise for us. No wonder we must each have “our own vision of good and evil”. No one else can do our seeing for us.