Since I always do what Dan Kelly tells me to do, here’s a revised and expanded version of my proposed opening for a Justice League movie.

My concept here is a setup that would allow the script to build a story about American identity. The last Superman movie tried to run away from Superman’s essential Americanness (“Does he still stand for truth, justice . . . all that stuff?”). The comics have done the same in recent years (not long ago they had Superman appear at the U.N. and renounce his citizenship). That’ll never work. Take away America and you take away the rich, textured cultural background in the American heartland that stand behind “truth and justice” part. Everyone’s for truth and justice in theory; big deal. Without the American way, what do you really have with Superman?

As I pointed out in my previous post, Superman and Batman represent the two most basic sources of cultural strength in America – the moral backbone of the heartland and the cosmopolitan commercial drive of the coastal cities. Wonder Woman is the unassimilated European immigrant – a classic element of the American story. The Flash’s traditional role as comic relief makes him suitable to play a sort of Ben Franklin role – in my story, he would be the moderate (both in views and in temperament) who facilitates compromise between powerful, strong-willed allies who might otherwise be torn apart by their differences. And in a selection that the comics fans will either love or hate, I’m plugging in Black Orchid, a human/plant genetic hybrid who was grown in a lab and has nature powers; she’ll provide opportunities to explore the role of technology and our increasing mastery over nature – a perennial American preoccupation. (Detailed notes for the comics fans appear below the script.)

So I’m calling this a “Justice League of America” script rather than merely “Justice League.” Let me know what you think. Encouragement to write the whole script and encouragement to stop embarrassing myself by posting screenplays would be about equally welcomed. I have ideas for what comes next, which I might share if encouraged.
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Oh, Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood. What are we going to do with you?

DC apparently just had to scrap its “terrible” script for the Justice League movie. Mark Millar, a consultant on some Marvel properties, crows that the film can’t be made. The characters are too old, they’re irrelevant, and their godlike powers (as opposed to the more moderately powered Marvel heroes) make them logistically impossible to portray on screen.

Yeah, that’s right, a Justice League movie can’t be made – unless you have an ounce of talent.

Look, you have here a team consisting of:

1) A virtuous hero raised by decent ordinary folk on a farm in Midwest corn country;

2) A self-made billionaire genius whose parents were slaughtered in front of him in a big east coast city;

3) A beautiful, fascinating noblewoman from an advanced but bizarre civilization who doesn’t believe in our ways but is stuck here and is trying her best to make our home hers; and

4) A couple other less important characters (choose any two from dozens of DC universe possibilities).

In other words, you have:

1) The moral backbone of America;

2) The cosmopolitan entrepreneurial genius of America;

3) The exotic immigrant from aristocratic Europe; and

4) Comic relief.

If you can’t make that movie, get out of the storytelling business.

Here’s how I would do it. Open on a shot of a burned-down barn. Voice over of an older male voice:

We always knew you were different, son, but we never realized how much.

Images of destroyed tractors, dead farm animals.

We didn’t realize what kind of power you had. It’s not your fault. But now that we know, things have to change. I’m afraid you just don’t have the luxury of being a boy any longer. I’m sorry to say it, but in this life we don’t get to choose what happens to us. We have to live the life God gives us as best he shows us how. So you’re going to have to become a man – starting now.

You have to decide now what kind of man you’re going to be. With your power, the kind of man you choose to be might matter more than anything else that happens in the world during your lifetime. Your mother and I have been talking about it and – well, to us it all seems to boil down to three things.

You need to make up your mind that you’re going to be an honest man. But that’s not enough. If you’re strong, you can’t just leave the weak and the helpless to fend for themselves. So you need to be a man who stands up for everyone. And there’s one more thing. If you do stand up for folks, some of those folks are going to want you to just go ahead and take over, and run the whole show. To rule them. No one could stop you if you did. But that’s not how we do things in this country. People have to be free to live their own lives, to stand or fall in their own ways.

Truth. Justice. The American way. I want you to make up your mind right now that you’re going to be the kind of man who stands for those things. What do you say, Clark?

We see a boy. He’s about eight. Without hesitation he says:

Absolutely.

Cut to a police station. We see a sergeant talking to someone but we can’t see whom:

Listen, I know you don’t want to hear this right now. That’s okay. For right now you don’t have to do anything. Just listen and remember it. Believe me, soon you’ll be glad to know it.

I’ve seen a lot of people killed. Shot, stabbed, hit by cars, you name it. One time I saw a guy’s chest blown clean open by a shotgun at point blank range. I’ve seen a lot of death. And when you see death, well . . . it makes you wonder what it all means. If anything’s worth doing. If it isn’t all just a waste.

Right now you’re in shock. You probably don’t feel much at all, except like crap. Am I right? Well, pretty soon the shock’s going to go away. And then there’ll be grief, and anger. And then that will fade, too. And your parents are still going to be dead. And sooner or later you’re going to wonder whether anything means anything.

I want you to remember that it does. Life is worth it. But you have to make it mean something. You have to make it count. You have to leave your mark. That’s what I do. Every time I put a bad guy away, every time I break up a fight or get a woman to a shelter – hell, every time I fill out one of those friggin’ reports, I’m leaving a mark. “Jim Gordon was here.”

You hear what I’m saying, kid? You leave your mark. You focus everything on that, and I promise you, you won’t wonder whether it’s worth it. You’ll know.

We see a boy. He’s about eight. He’s staring into the distance. We hear the cop’s voice:

Oh, hey. One other thing and I’ll leave you alone. This isn’t the last time you’re going to meet bad guys. It sucks, but take it from me, bad guys are everywhere. Don’t you run from them. You fight back tooth and nail. And don’t go soft on them afterwards, either. When people go rotten, the best thing you can do for them is break those bastards, break them as hard as you can. You hear me?

He turns, looks at the sergeant.

Absolutely.

This is not hard. Come on, Hollywood, do your job.

In a recent post, Karen posited that while there are those beliefs that by their very nature cannot be subjected to the disciplines of philosophy and science because of their meta-rational nature, shouldn’t we as Christians still put at least some effort into having reasonable explanations for what we believe?

The answer to that question lies in the greatest commandment, the Hebrew Shema: Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. For the Hebrews, heart encompassed the mind as well, a fact that the gospel writers and Christ himself made more explicit in the New Testament, where Deuteronomy 6 is quoted as “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, MIND, and strength.

Today, Christians emphasize discipleship of the heart and the soul. It’s about how you feeding your soul and the emotions of the heart. Important, true, but incomplete. Many a well-intentioned person has simply responded to philosophy and theology with “I just love Jesus” or the other famous cliche “It’s a relationship, not a religion.” The fact, though, is that Christianity IS a religion in the purest sense of the word, and as such contains teachings, doctrines, and beliefs which must be rational in and of themselves for Christianity to be a rational religion. Christianity can be understood as a consistent, comprehensive, rational system of beliefs that can and should be examined by the mind as part of loving God with our mind.

Consider for just a moment if Christianity taught that God was finite. The very framework of Christianity would begin to crumble. Or, what if Christianity taught there is no life after death. Again, the result would be the internal disintegration of Christianity as a rational religion. Only a pure simpleton would believe in a ‘irrational’ religion, such as one that taught that squares were really circles, unless they were triangles. Needless to say, the Church Fathers were not simpletons. As challenges arose to the doctrines of Scripture, they responded with well-thought out, rational explanations from the consistency of Scripture.

And yet, as Karen has pointed out, many Evangelicals (Catholic and Protestant) seem to be content to treat this religion of God and His Word as though the requirement of faith eliminates any need for rationality. Instead, as part of our Discipleship of the Mind (nod to James Sire and his book of the same title), we should stand amazed and awed at the internal rationality and comprehensive consistency of the doctrines which believe. This is the value of catechizing, as catechisms present a systematic, rational explanation of Christianity.

To allow our children to go off to college without a well-thought out understanding of the rationality of our holy religion is to disciple them incompletely, allowing them to think that Christianity is a religion of the heart and not mind and HEART. One can see the conflict of sending someone who understands only on the level of the heart into a world that examines only with the mind. No wonder the two sides rarely understand each other. Rather than trying to come up with rational “proofs” per se of Christianity, we should be preparing our children and students to present the rational of Christianity itself, complete with its avoidance of square triangles.

Is this the face of a “conservative”?

On NRO, Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven offer what they call a “moral case for conservatism.” They invoke the great debate a century ago between George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton:

Shaw, sounding like a modern progressive, said this about wealth and equality:

The moment I made up my mind that the present distribution of wealth was wrong, the peculiar constitution of my brain obliged me to find out exactly how far it was wrong and what is the right distribution. I went through all the proposals ever made and through the arguments used in justification of the existing distribution; and I found they were utterly insensate and grotesque. Eventually I was convinced that we ought to be tolerant of any sort of crime except unequal distribution of income.

In came Chesterton:

We say there ought to be in the world a great mass of scattered powers, privileges, limits, points of resistance, so that the mass of the people may resist tyranny. And we say that there is a permanent possibility of that central direction, however much it may have been appointed to distribute money equally, becoming a tyranny.

Chesterton added, “Mr. Shaw proposes to distribute wealth. We propose to distribute power.”

All great stuff, to be sure. But there are two problems with this approach.

1) Chesterton’s concerns about the centralization of power, simply as such, are no longer easily identified as “conservative” in the current use of the term. Today, unlike a century ago, hostility to centralized power is as much invoked in support of progressive policy as conservative. This is not simply a matter of the old trick by which politicians centralize power by posing as opponents of centralized power. There is still plenty of that, of course. The new factor is the existence of a substantial intellectual movement that sees capitalism and socialism as equally tools of oppression by the powerful and responds by rejecting the modern economy entirely. And this was more or less Chesterton’s position as well. Chesterton is one of the fathers of the naive and unworkable idea of “distributism,” in which private property and freedom of exchange are respected (as in capitalism) but large accumulations of weath, and large corporations primarily owned by a small investor class, are not permitted to arise (by what means is never specified). The idea seems to be that we can get back to the Shire if we all just wish hard enough.

This is a challenge for Habeeb and Leven’s case because the traditional moral, metaphyiscal and religious justifications for a free economy as against socialism are no longer unambiguously deployed only in favor of capitalism. Chesterton was one of the originators of this movement; now it has reached sufficient maturity to remove the necessary social preconditions for the kind of argument Habeeb and Leven want to make. Those who reject the modern economy simply as such must be accounted for.

The starting point for that accounting is to explore why those who say they reject both capitalism and socialism always, without exception, end up empowering socialism. There are good reasons for that. But that’s a line of thought to develop another day.

2) Suppose we succeeded in establishing that what Chesterton means by the “distribution of power” – that is, the primacy of the dignity of the human person over the claims of the state to serve as Platonic guardian – requires that we support broadly capitalistic economic policies (with allowances for reasonable regulation, a moderate safety net, etc.). Can that agenda succeed if it is identified with “conservatism,” which is one side in a deep ideological rift – and not the more powerful one culturally?

In fact, doesn’t the identification of this agenda with conservatism ensure its failure? Because if we establish that conservatives are for the dignity of the human person as against the claims of the state to serve as Platonic guardian, we equally establish that those who are not conservatives are not for that. Thus we reduce what ought to be, and what once actually were, robust moral commitments that ran deeper than party and ideological lines to a mere contested poilcy preference.

Robert Sirico has said that “the only society worthy of the human person is a society that embraces freedom and responsibility as its two indispensable pillars.” I would add that the only society capable of embracing them as indispensable pillars, rather than as the transient policy preferences of one party, is a society in which those pillars are accepted as trans-partisan moral commitments, rooted in the deep bedrock of a shared national culture.

A while back I blogged about Brian Leiter’s book, Why Tolerate Religion?, or at least a review of the book by the A in GAG (see Greg’s post). While I would rather be addressing the really important questions Greg raised about marriage, I’m afraid I’m in the process of digesting Leiter’s book and think that the issue of the reasonableness of religion needs some attention. (I promise this actually has to do with the issue of the defense of marriage; I’m just taking it bit by bit.)

Leiter thinks that religious claims are not fundamentally different from other claims of conscience, at least as far as claims for legal protection go. This isn’t a book review, so I’ll just go ahead and say that one of the key premises to get him there is the supposed ‘fact’ that religion is “insulated from the standards of evidence and reasons that have been vindicated a posteriori since the scientific revolution”. In other words, we religious people do not have to provide evidence for our beliefs; we can simply aver them. This is distinguished from what we might still term “beliefs” in science, because “beliefs based on evidence are…revisable in light of the evidence,” whereas  even in the most intellectual traditions of religion (i.e., in which doctrines/beliefs might answer to evidence in some way), “the whole exercise is one of post-hoc rationalization, as is no doubt obvious to those outside the sectarian tradition.”

Ok, fine. I’m going to go ahead and admit that the resurrection of Christ, the Trinity, any number of miracles – these probably don’t stand up to the scrutiny of normal scientific reasoning. (Leiter has yet to answer why it is that these are the only acceptable reasons in the public sphere or in law, and I’ll go ahead and blaspheme one of the superstars of legal theory and say that he should know better.) Does this mean that I am unreasonable to hold them as truth? No, and my goodness, has ink been spilled defending that proposition. Since I assume I’m writing largely to a friendly audience, let’s not repeat it for the time being.

What I want to ask, rather, concerns education. Are we as Christian…intellectuals, parents, educators, people, name the hat and put it on – are we doing enough to educate young Christians about the, er, reasonableness of Christianity? Leiter’s view of religion – “insulated from evidence” – is far, far from the fringe; if I had to guess I would say that he is friendlier to religion than the average academic, though that would have to be qualified quite a bit. But as a teacher of undergraduate students, many of whom were raised Christian, I wonder if we’re doing enough to provide young people with a third way, as it were. That is, they do not need to leave their beliefs wholly unexamined, but nor do they need to exalt science (or philosophy) in the place of God and insist that all truth appear in the same form.

I worry about this in large part because of the peculiar mix of students I teach. Georgetown undergraduates, speaking from experience are somewhat more religious than average college students,  above average in intelligence and motivation, and probably average on my imaginary scale of Figuring-Things-Out. That is, perhaps they were (as many in fact were) raised in Catholic schools their whole lives but don’t quite know if tradition has enough to get them through this new, confounding and exciting world they face at university (and in Washington). Or maybe they were raised as Evangelical Christians and are very enthused about the new opportunities to practice their faith that college, a new city, and new ideas present them with. Or they’re secular, having been raised by well-educated parents who themselves never placed a high priority on religion, and a Jesuit school requires – sometimes meeting with interest, other times not – that they study at least some theology and philosophy.

So what are we offering them? While entirely conceding that no culture has been evangelized (or re-evangelized) by arguments alone, I nevertheless think it’s critical that the Catholic student learns how her dry introduction to the Summa is every bit as profound as the (not making this up) Freudian reading of Genesis she is now being subjected to (by which I mean, infinitely more so, but I would settle for parity). The Evangelical student, who, in my experience, has usually had church (faith) and school (reason) separately up until this point, needs to be exposed not only to the wonders of the scientific revolution but also to Christian metaphysics. And the secular student often needs to learn that those weird religious people might not just be brainwashed or supremely old-fashioned; maybe Augustine actually was really smart, after all. And maybe he’s worth considering, even with all of the fancy Freud and physics and lit crit he is learning for the first time.

Why? Let me use Plato to defend the use of Plato. In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the need for prudence in bringing philosophical enlightenment to those still living “in the cave.” There are risks, Socrates implies, in pulling individuals away from justice-by-convention, i.e., living according to how one was raised (see students above) and directing them towards the philosophical life.

(Socrates): But what happens when such a man confronts the question: what is honorable? After giving the answer he learned from the one who taught him the laws, he is refuted in argument. Many and diverse refutations follow, upsetting his faith and making him believe that there is really difference between being honorable and being base. When he goes through the same thing with justice and goodness and all the things he values most, will he honor and respect them as before?

(Glaucon): Impossible.

 (Socrates): Then when he no longer regards the old beliefs as binding and true principles still elude him, will he not be likely to settle in to the life that feeds and flatters his desires?

He will.

Then he will have ceased to be a law-abiding man; he will have become an outlaw.

Necessarily.

So what will happen when my students, raised to live as “good Christians,” start to think about “what is the good?”  When the Brian Leiters of Georgetown and University of Wisconsin and Carroll College teach them that their beliefs are mere belief, not tested by or answerable to either philosophical or scientific standards, will they be able to turn to other professors, pastors or parents to keep both their faith and intellects alive? Or will they be offered the mutually exclusive choices of either convention–including their Christian upbringing–or the philosophical life?

I don’t think that important issues like the defense of marriage or religious freedom will be settled by Christians making the best philosophical arguments available; culture and face-to-face relationships matter so much more directly in so many more cases. Nevertheless, I’m glad that GAG and others like them are making those arguments and doing the hard work of presenting the reasonableness of Christianity to a generation raised on Leiter-esque attitudes toward religion. Why? Because the people who will be building culture and establishing those face-to-face relationships in the future are more likely to be Christians if, when presented with scientific and philosophical challenges to their faith when they were 19-year-old freshmen in college, they also knew a professor who could nurture their intellects while also, if indirectly (and probably better that way), feeding the faith in their souls.