Heroic Tales in the Twenty First Century – Conclusion
Here is the conclusion to my previous essay on heroic tales in the Twenty First Century, which time erenow forbade me to write:
The Twenty Firsters are in rebellion against all moral authority, in the name of independence, or of self actualization, or of self esteem, or something of the sort. Being against moral authority, they are also in rebellion against the truth about himself.
What is the truth about Man? It is mysterious, but certain facts about the human condition are so obvious that men prefer to forget them.
One such fact is this: Man is a creature who can envision what good and heroic life should be, and who falls short just often enough to let him realize that he cannot, under his own power, live such a life.
But the vision haunts and torments him. Despite his best and desperate efforts to lower himself to the moral condition of an animal who lives for nothing higher than simple, immediate gratification of appetites for food or mate or warmth or revenge against whatever frightens him, the vision of heroism will not let him be. The conscience that man by his own unaided, natural means cannot satisfy will not stay silent.
Without being literal, stories, even fantastic stories about impossible things can be truthful in three chords. Tales can be truthful and idealistic, telling about man as he should be in a better world, or be truthful and cynical, telling about man as he is in this fallen world. Some can even be truthful and despairing, warning of how much worse it might be in men surrendered to their base instincts.
But stories can also be lies.
I do not mean a story is a lie because it is not literal: no story is literal. I mean it lies fundamentally about the human condition.
The lie that currently preoccupies the Twenty Firsters is a false promise, offered by many liars under many different names, that man can find heaven on earth if only he disobeys all moral authority. The Socialist, for example, promises that if man breaks faith with the covenants and laws that make private property, liberty, and goodwill sacrosanct, abundance will shower from nowhere upon one and all. The Nazi promises that breaking faith with the brotherhood of man, the weakness caused by the Christian religion, and the chains placed on the bold, new leader by the dead hand of law and order, that all will be well. The Pop Psychologist promises likewise that if men cease to attempt to avoid guilt by avoiding bad acts, but instead commit the bad acts and merely wish the guilt not to trouble them, they will be guilt-free and filled with self-esteem. The Feminist promises that by violating the sacredness of matrimony and virginity, overturning the authority of males, abolishing masculinity from men and femininity from females, all the evils of the world will vanish like bad dreams. Once all the evil slut-shamers are shamed to silence, for example, we can all be sluts together, and happy.
The modern lie is that there is some third option, some new form of mankind, different from the ideal man, the hero, as once he was before the fall, and different from the common man, the sinner, as we all here and now find ourselves to be. This new man will give up on moral rules he cannot follow; he will write his own; he will invent a new morality as different from old morality as a new primary color is different from red or blue or yellow.
But this third man is not found in nature and not found in our consciences. We have neither experience nor instinct to tell us what he should be like. He is a mere extrapolation invented by an intellectual of what a man would be like if he lacked one of the most basic truths about human nature. He is an homunculus, a mannequin.
And so all stories are staffed with the mannequins that the Twenty-Firster theory of how men should live dictate. The mannequins neither act like real people you know nor like heroes and heroines you can, in the light of your conscience, imagine and recognize as an ideal.
They are a false ideal, a self-contradictory ideal, an ideal based on a lie, and so their stiff, painted smiles and dead eyes eventually repulse any normal man of good taste or proper artistic insight.
On the theory that there is no difference between black and white historical experience, the mannequins are stuffed awkwardly into roles of the wrong race. On the theory that there is no difference between male and female psychology, the mannequins are stuffed into roles of the opposite sex. On the theory that all moral authority is false, male figures such as fathers and husbands are shown to be despots or fools or both. On the theory that sex is so important that it gives once license to violate all fealty and good faith between the sexes, and at the same time so unimportant that only a fool would expect fealty and good faith, sex is always portrayed as if marital sex is unappealing, but adultery, fornication, and perversion are daring and romantic and consequence-free.
The fakes don’t act like real people, sinners, or like ideal people, saints and heroes.
And that is why the Twenty Firsters, even if otherwise superb in their skill at telling tales, always veer into the boring, stupid, unconvincing swamp of political correctness, and take a beloved character who otherwise lives and breathes and has verisimilitude, kill him, dunk him in wax, and turn him into a waxworks doll, just enough like a real storybook character that a man of taste can sense how unreal the mannequin is.
You can have political correctness in a story, You can have a combination and mix or realism and heroism in a story. But the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Political correctness is unrealistic and unheroic.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
