One reason to have a liberal education—one that’s usually
neglected by all those experts these days who are saying that the value
of an education is measured by the money you earn after graduation—is
that it's indispensable for understanding the political teachings of the
better summer blockbuster movies, such as the very thoughtful new
Superman film—Man of Steel.
Let’s face it, what grown up doesn't need a deeper teaching to divert him from all that boring action? In
Man of Steel, battle scenes sometimes seem to drag on forever, because it just isn’t so clear what it takes to kill someone from Krypton.
Man of Steel is all about Plato’s
Republic,
something that would hit you immediately if you had actually read that
great book. The filmmakers make it clear enough that they want you to
read it to get their message. They show Clark Kent sitting in his car
reading Plato, presumably to help him get some clue about who he is and
what he’s supposed to do. (Message to all you young men and women: If
you want to be as good as Superman, read Plato. It goes without saying
that there’s nothing you can do to be as strong as Superman. Message
number 2: You Plato readers better be prepared to endure bullying for
your intellectual virtue, as Superman himself did.)
The film also has all kinds of Christian New-Agey imagery that you
can grab onto if you’re not much of a reader. Superman is compared in
some ways to Jesus; he begins his mission at age 33, for example. But
that kind of comparison doesn’t really hold up that well. Superman is
only here to help us, not redeem us, certainly not to save us from our
sins or from death. And he doesn't have any deep insight into the
meaning of life or love. His life, like each of ours, is shaped by
choice and chance. He has extraordinary power that falls way short of
omnipotence. He's a man born to love and die—not a god. Superman's
Kryptonian father predicts that the people of our planet would regard
his only begotten son as a god, but that we did not do. We've never
become so Nietzschean or whatever that we've come to think a merely
Superman can replace our need for God himself.
The discovery of intelligent life from Krypton teaches us that we're
not alone. But it also teaches us that "aliens are us." The residents
of Krypton call themselves people, and their personal experiences
haven't taught them anything fundamental about who we are and what we're
supposed to do that we didn't already know. So the film gently mocks
Carl Sagan's view that the discovery of intelligent and more
technologically advanced life elsewhere in the cosmos would produce some
deep transformation in our self-understanding, prove there is no God,
and peacefully free us from our troubles. We were darn lucky that the
Kryptonian discovery of our existence didn't mean the end of us.
The movie uses a kind of Christian “product placement” to veil
its deeper anti-utopian affirmation of the Biblical understanding of who
we are as free persons—or not merely parts of some "city"
or deterministic nature. The film’s spiritual surface draws upon the
superficial spirituality of our time, but there’s a lot more.
We learn that Krypton at one point was an empire—not unlike the
Athenian empire or even the American empire. Science flourished—as it
had to for the high civilization to develop in such a harsh environment,
and all the nearby planets were colonized. Babies were made the
old-fashioned way, and the life of the “city” was full of choice and
chance, as free countries are.
At some point, for reasons not all that clear, Krypton turned inward,
abandoned its imperial outreach, imposed population control, ended
natural reproduction, and turned its science to breeding beings for the
functions they will perform in their regime—workers, warriors, and
leaders. We get the suggestion that they actually bred two kinds of
leaders. Those—like General Zod—whose whole purpose in life was the
perpetuation of Krypton as a people or regime. And those—like Superman’s
enlightened father—who were bred to be something like philosopher-kings
(who still cared for their people).
This scheme—the use of scientific wisdom to sustain the political
order—is close in all the details mentioned to the one found the “city
in speech” Socrates constructs with his interlocutors in the
Republic.
One difference is that the Kryptonians actually had the technology to
impose control—or abolish choice and chance—on reproduction by taking
people (Kryptonians) out of the picture altogether. One difference
between our time and all the preceeding ones is a reasonable person
could believe today that imposing such control by moving reproduction
outside the womb might actually be possible.
The attempt to replace nature completely with technical control, we
learn, destabilized the core of Krypton, and the result was decline and
eventual destruction. In the
Republic, the breakdown of the
perfect city is caused by scientific miscalculation. On Krypton, any
miscalculation, we can think, should have been corrected by the
philosopher-kings, but, not surprisingly, their wisdom turns out to be
imperfect and so unreliable.
Superman’s philosopher-leader dad—Jor-El—realizes, too late, that the
only hope for Krypton is a return to nature—to choice and chance,
beginning with the risky business of having a natural baby. His wife
gives birth in secret, and the parents are immediately filled with love
for their own child, as opposed to a child of Krypton. That child is a
return to hope; the S that comes to stand for Superman is actually
Kyrptonian for hope.
Jor-El now cares for both his people and his particular person, and
he plans for both their futures. He sends his son in the direction of a
promising planet with the “codex”—or the genetic material of a billion
future Kryptonians—embedded in his body with hope for them all.
General Zod leads a rebellion against this “heresy” and on behalf of
the eugenics-based people. He’s defeated and sentenced to indefinite
rehabilitation. But Krypton is soon destroyed, and Zod manages to escape
into the cosmos with his genetic mission of somehow sustaining the
Kryptonian people into the future. His hope is first in the colonies,
but they all died out in the absence of Kryptonian direction. But he
also has hope in the continued existence of the “codex” that left his
planet with his son.
Zod's is a purpose-driven life, and his fanaticism flows from the
fact of his lack of freedom, of his inability to choose who he is. He
can’t help but do whatever is required to defend his people, and he’s
probably not wrong to think that their future depends on his conquest of
Earth. It goes without saying that nobody in the movie’s audience—which
includes no one from Krypton—cares about his people’s future. And so
nobody really “gets” the nobility of his mission. The Kryptonians of the
future that he aimed to liberate from their encoded slavery in Kal’s
body would have, of course, built monuments to his magnanimity.
A fundamental issue raised by the film is whether a being
artificially made to be only a part of a political community could be a
person in full. We see that Zod really isn’t, despite his fearless and
skillful devotion. Arguably Kal’s biological father is, but he was one
of the few bred with the freedom required to make a leader’s prudential
decisions. We’re not given the comfortable lesson that in each
particular case irreducible individuality or personality triumphs over
genetic manipulation.
The Greek and Roman efforts to make citizens through education sometimes failed, and it’s the not-so-secret teaching of the
Republic
that it’s contrary to nature—or both undesirable and impossible—to
eradicate personal choice through some comprehensive and highly
intrusive process of political socialization, one that abolishes privacy
and the family and chains even sexual behavior to the requirements of
the just city. But the founders of "the city in speech" in the
Republic couldn't even imagine an artificial replacement of natural birth.
In the
case of Krypton, genetic control—not merely educational
manipulation—seems to have been successful in producing beings who
reliably performed the functions for which they were made. To eradicate
chance or unpredictable behavior, sexual behavior had to be detached
from reproduction; all sex, in a way, became safe sex.
Although artificial reproduction can produce beings who are merely
“parts,” we still learn that regime that aims to make itself that closed
or unfree or detached from natural spontaneity is contrary to
nature. Zod's fiercely loyal female subcommander tells Kal-El
(Superman) that “evolution always wins” to explain why his dad's
last-ditch experiment in personal freedom will fail. But of course the
irony is that no regime has ever been more opposed to nature than
Krypton.
Krypton’s inevitable decline and fall is a victory of natural
evolution over the effort to provide a conscious and volitional
replacement for it. It's not true that human liberty is defeated by
evolution; the truth is that we are “hardwired” for choice and
chance and can’t flourish without them.
I'm just getting wound up here. More soon.
