Darth Vader, Superman, and Christ's Deposition from the Cross

It is an escapable fact that we are products of the world we live in. We do not live in a vacuum, devoid of influence, but instead we are immersed in a constant barrage of sensations, thoughts and actions, be they our own or those of others. It is the “Nurture” end of the “Nature and Nurture” debate, it is our environment and we are affected by it at all moments of our lives. To discern the effects the world around us has on our own actions and ideas can be exceedingly difficult; how do we objectively view that which we cannot hope to stand outside of and observe? We instead have to make our observations from inside the box, from within our environment, with only our imaginations to help us step outside and gain some perspective.

The history of human kind is a story of our desire to reconcile the things we observe in the world around us with the questions that arise from our experiences. This ability to question that which we see is perhaps the most fundamental difference between us and the rest of life on the planet; or perhaps it is our ability to answer those questions for ourselves that truly sets us apart. Either way, as a consequence of our conscious viewing of our world, we long ago created religion, created myths, created God. To all questions God is the final answer, and is a deeply satisfying answer for most. "Why did _____ happen?" Answer; "God." The concept of God answers all questions, by the very nature of the idea of God, while simultaneously providing that which we desire in all our answers; comfort. The feeling that all is under control, that power exists to give order to that which is chaotic, to provide answers for all questions our conscious minds may create.

Over thousands of years we have added to and refined our religious ideals, creating edifices of extreme complexity and nuance which provide answers to any and all questions presented. The various ideas at the core of our beliefs have permeated culture, again to such a omnipresent degree that we can hardly be aware of their influence. They are everywhere, from birth to death, and we rarely, if ever, question them no matter how strange or thoroughly absurd they may be. For example, why is it that so many find the idea of Athena springing fully formed from the cracked open head of Zeus, or Aphrodite being born of the lopped off genitalia of Uranus falling into the sea comical, weird, childish even, while at the very same moment holding the idea of a virgin birth, parting seas, Sunday resurrections and six headed monsters sacred? These Christian ideals have saturated Western culture, become part of the public consciousness to such a degree that the very lunacy of their details no longer register to our minds. Their influence is immense, despite our lack of conscious awareness of their effects.

Central to the Christian paradigm is the idea of the single omnipotent and omniscient God. Catholics have been kind enough to define three versions of Him; God, the guy sitting up in heaven, Jesus, the manifestation of God that walked on earth, and the Holy Spirit, the unseen, all knowing, omni-present influence of God. While they decided that making these aspects more tangible and defined was their preferred route, these same basic constructs exist within all Christian concepts of a God. He is a person, Jesus was at least part of Him (and thusly was something more than human), and He has influence and power over all things in this world, whether He is seen or unseen. Lodged deep in the social consciousness after generations of exposure to these tenets is the idea that metaphysical power exists beyond what we experience ourselves each day, that people walking the earth can be in possession of that power, and that perhaps somewhere, someone is watching, someone with both the power to create and the power to destroy. We cannot escape the world in which we live, and the ideas swirl around us every moment of every day as our imaginations digest and synthesize this vortex of belief.

Most of the last thousand years of Western civilization revolved around the Church, and around the idea of our lives were lived in service to God, with Jesus our role model and savior. The Church provided for people, and the constant eye of God upon us simultaneously gave us hope for something better, though what were truly horrible conditions for life, and instilled fear of stepping out of line and incurring His wrath. Slowly, as society began to become independent of the Church, with the rise of industrialization, personal wealth, and the Church's failing ability to punish those that stepped outside its rules (for certainly in the end it was the wrath of the Church and not God that was ever incurred) people began to move away from their subservient roll in the world, began to see themselves as individuals interacting in the world around them, instead of secondary creatures being acted upon by God and the world He created.

The Ego began to grow, we began to become autonomous. But the influence of the concept of God, in all its forms and with its many centuries of social influence, did not disappear with our growing sense of self. It was sublimated and made to fit in with the lifestyle we were beginning to adopt; a lifestyle of self sufficiency, of human-centric society, of self rule. We ourselves started to become the focus of our own worship, for the first time in many thousands of years (the Greeks had gone down the same path in ancient history). Nationalism began to flourish, groups of people decided they were superior, that others were inferior, and not because God had decided it was so but because good and evil were perhaps something inherent in the human traits of individuals, God given or not. Good and evil were no longer necessarily the dictate of God, but could be determined by an individual’s abilities and powers as well. A shift from a paradigm centered on deistic strength to one centered on human abilities, strengths and weaknesses had begun.

Even a cursory look at Western history over the last few centuries will throw one into a world of equally spectacular achievements and atrocities, from profound scientific discoveries and invention to mass genocides and complete breakdowns of shared empathetic humanity. It was clear that we were capable of ever new heights of wonder and horror. While acts of great discovery and brutality were nothing new to recent centuries, there are unique qualities to these last few, aspects that had not existed before, mainly in the form of technological advances, though ideological shifts played a decisive role as well. The mass scale of the operations is one new aspect, furthered to a large degree by technological advances making it possible to effect invention and power over a larger area of the world. Technological advances also made it possible to make mass numbers of people aware and conscious of the events of the world, both good and bad. Everyone was made aware through the spread of mass media, ideas could spread like wild fire. Perhaps even more importantly these ideas could linger well beyond the events that had unfolded, in archives and books, where they could be studied and become a part of the social consciousness.

What was growing was a world populated by a strengthening sense of the individual’s power, while the power of religion over people was diminishing, or was at least taking a more subconscious roll in every day life. Interconnectivity was rising with the spread of technology, technologies that combined with various ideologies were creating humanitarian offenses of unprecedented scope. The social consciousness was consistently immersed in the entire affair, gathering and disseminating information around the globe. While word of the grand achievements of man and science certainly grabbed the attention and imagination, there was another force at work pulling us away from the grand and would focus our attention on the abhorrent.

Every idea must have its foil, its logical opposite, for its very definition to make sense. For up must have down, light must have dark, white must have black, and good must have evil. Monotheistic religion has always embraced this fact, with most deistic traditions creating not only a God of infinite good, but some entity of infinite evil. Sublimated just as deeply in the minds of all Christian society as the notion of God and Jesus’ goodness is the notion of Satan’s evil. This was evil as an inherent trait, as a trait known of, accepted and embraced by the evil party. This concept of inherent recognized evil is one profoundly familiar to all in Western culture, despite the ironic fact that most people deemed to be evil would not claim the title if asked. Did Tomas de Torquemada think he was evil, or that he was in fact ridding Europe of evil? Did Mao Tse-tung think of himself as evil, or did he believe he was doing right in the world by killing off tens of millions of Chinese in his bid to bring Communism to China? Of course the grand case of all is Hitler. Did he think of himself as evil? No, like all people we deem evil he had reasons for his actions that he believed were good, however irrational and destructive those beliefs were. While evil may exist, it rarely exists in the minds of the wicked, but resides instead in the minds of their victims.

But this distinction is rarely if ever made, if but because we accept so fully the idea that evil can be an innate trait, that the evil doer can and does know that he is evil, relishes the fact, and acts accordingly. Just as one concept of God is of an unseen, all present force of good in the world, the collective imagination envisions entities of vast evil, waiting to pounce and prey upon us, to harm us and take whatever happiness we may posses away. These visions inspire fear in each of us and in our societies, and for most of history they were completely imaginary creatures like demons, monsters, Satan himself or those he controlled (for example witches). As wars of increasingly heinous duration and carnage or individuals of exceptional brutality increased in the world, and as people’s awareness of their atrocities grew, the faces of evil began to move from the mythic realm and took on human faces, real human faces. Evil was real, there were real people doing horrible things, and our lives could be and were impacted by their evil. A culture of fear was on the rise right along side rise of the culture of the individual, the culture of technology, and the culture of secularism.

We bathe in this world of swirling notions of God, holy power, evil power, human power, and all that these things imply, along with news and information of world events spread in text and later along the airwaves. Our imaginations cannot help but process these factors, to sublimate and recreate our experiences, our desires, our dreams into the world around us. It is our nature to create, and what would we create in this rapidly changing new world?

From a combination of ideas of metaphysical deistic power, scientific power, power of the individual, and a need to face the evils in an ever more fearful world we created Super Heroes. People imbued with powers greater than reality dictated could exist, who could battle forces of fear and evil where we could not. They were something different than previous heroes, people like Sherlock Holmes, the Scarlet Pimpernel or even Tarzan, all of who possessed great skill, but nothing that would quality as a “super power”. Even mythological heroes who possessed abilities akin to the modern Super Hero all derived their powers from some divine source, be they sons or daughters of gods, vessels for the powers of gods, or working magics stemming from divine or demonic sources. The super abilities did not originate from within these individuals, it came from some source outside themselves. Super Heroes have powers intrinsic to their very beings, deriving either from within themselves or from some man-made event.

In the 20^th century, we found ourselves often powerless in the face of the events around the world. In past centuries we had looked to the power of God to help us through the times we felt powerless, but God had moved farther and farther from the social consciousness, pushed away from real world events into a metaphysical realm of religiosity. There he dealt with biblical evils, while we were left to deal with the human evils of nuclear bombs, genocide, Communists, and curiously, as we looked toward the vastness of space, space invaders. While these things might have been said to be “Godless”, they were hardly “of the Devil” and for that reason hardly up to God to come down and fix. Especially in the case of space invaders, who have been relatively devoid of links to religion, though their links to Communists are interestingly many.

In the face of these terrifying events and the people behind them, our imaginations ran wild. Just as we created Super Heroes to battle the evils of the world, we also went to work creating foes equally as compelling and powerful for our new gods to do battle with. The Super Villain became as integral to the idea of Super Heroes as the heroes themselves, at times taking on personas larger and even more lasting. If asked to name one character from the Star Wars movies, can we guess who would most often be named? Darth Vader looms far more pervasively in our public consciousness than the whiney Luke Skywalker ever will, certainly more than the suave (but superpower-less) Hans Solo. Other Super Villains of note who nearly eclipse their Super Hero counterparts include Magneto of the X-Men, the Joker (at least in the first Batman movie), and comically, Dr. Evil from Austin powers. The Super Villain gives a face to the unseen evil in the world, an evil that knows itself and revels in its own heinousness.

Our sense of powerlessness leads us to create those that are powerful, just as thousands of years ago we created the notion of God, Jesus and Satan when faced with a world we did not understand and which we had little to no power over. We created Super Heroes, once again as reflections of ourselves, with power to defend and defeat the evil we faced in the world. These individuals had replaced God, and even Jesus, in our minds as forces of good that acted upon the earth to fight the forces of evil. For matters of spiritual crisis, Jesus was your go to man, but if a nuclear irradiated super bug being controlled by a sociopathic mad man were your trouble, Jesus was hardly who you called.

Adding to the appeal of the Super Hero was something that neither God nor even Jesus had; Super Heroes are us, they are human. While Jesus may be the prototypical Man With Super Power, even Jesus is seen to be a manifestation of God, or at best a human being who was begot by God. He is removed from us, he resides on another plain, he is divine and we are not. Super heroes may have a multitude of sources for their power, but none of those sources are divine. In the end they are human beings like the rest of us*, and this adds an interesting new twist to the story; we want to be them.

(*This I believe is one of the reasons we have seen a falling off in the popularity of Superman; he is an alien. He is not human, no matter how much he may look like us and act like us, in the end he is an alien. He is distanced from us, we can never be like him. But the X-Men? Spiderman? Batman? The TV show Heroes? They are all us, we can be them.)

We all want to be super, to possess power over the world in which we reside, and with the idea of the Super Hero suddenly we can be. No longer do we need divine intervention, which was becoming less and less desirable as God became more and more removed from our sense of reality. We no longer believed in the divine as real and tangible, so why should be put the hopes of our own ascension to greatness in it? A simple radiation experiment gone wrong, cellular mutations, spider bites, genetic manipulation; all these things could now lead to our becoming super, to our having power over our world, power that we do not currently posses. These causes were things we experienced, tangibly and physically in our every day lives, we could believe in them because we knew they were real, whether the imagined fantastic results of these things were realistic or not. Instead of some unseen “god”, we had science on our side.

Any religious person reading this would have by now certainly been overcome with anxiety over the idea that we as a people are moving away from a God-centric society, only to replace our supreme roll models with mere humans with laser beams zipping from their eyeballs. So for their sake it will be asked; what are the ramifications of replacing the Divine with the Human?

By its nature the divine (setting the Christian paradigm of the divine as our own here) is separate from us, it is beyond us, it is something that while me may aspire to reach, it will never be us and we can never hope to become divine ourselves. This has both negative and positive influences. On the negative side, since it is removed from our humanity we ultimately cannot relate to it on a human level. It will always be something other than we are, always separate always distant, always out of reach. Instead we relate ourselves to the divine through our imagination, through or drives and desires for comfort, power, and answers, not through any shared common humanity. Combine our inherent separation from the divine with its intrinsic and pervasive power structure and you have breeding ground rife with instability. Here is an institution with vast power over our imaginations, yet it is always beyond our grasp. This instability often leads to forms of delusions, like religious fundamentalism and beliefs of an individual or a group’s own divinity. Also, as with any removed and dominating power source, there is the possibility of simple rebellion, like a child acting out against an overly domineering parent, an act which quite often takes an unhealthy bend.

There is an interesting benefit to this separation we have from the divine though, especially in the context of hero worship. Since the divine is something beyond the scope of our own humanity, we don’t often feel real pressure to BE a god. We may be pressured to act in a way “pleasing to God”, much like pleasing a parent, but not often are we asked to walk on water, rain lightening bolts down on wrong doers, or create existence. These things are clearly beyond our powers, and while flights of whimsy and imagination may make us wonder about having those powers (and occasionally the insane think they do), we don’t usually have to deliver on the goods.

Is this case the same when it comes to super human powers, as opposed to super divine powers? We all feel today the pressure to be more than we are, to run ever faster, to jump higher, to know more, to read faster, to program more code, to make more, more and then more. We are being pushed to ever higher standards. Our base knowledge of subjects across the board is expected to be higher than ever before in human history, and to compete in the workplace we must face off against those who have elevated their skills often to near super human levels. We are often told that there will “always be someone better than we are”, but now that someone is sitting in the cubical next to ours, and we are being compared to them.

Those that do seem to possess super human gifts (prodigy musicians, spelling bee winners, kids graduating at 14 and going to Harvard) are often worshiped in a way quite similar to the way we worship our Super Heroes; we marvel at them, we wish we could do what they do. But since these people are actual human beings and not fictional characters we also envy them, and often despise them. It is the fiction in Super Heroes, like the fiction in God, that keeps envy at bay. Certainly if God were sitting next to us in class or at work, we would not feel so reverent about Him, but may be filled the opposite emotion when he waves his hands over his SAT’s and gets a perfect score while we struggle our way through our 14^th syllogism. We can’t help but compare ourselves to those with abilities greater than our own. As we compare ourselves to other people with great skill we often find ourselves lacking, since they are human just like us and we should be able to do what they can do.

Do we in fact do the same with the fictional characters though?

If fact yes, we find ourselves lacking in the face of Super Heroes as well. We think “if only I was like that, then I could effect change. But I am not like that, and so I can’t.” We feel powerless and helpless in the face of the world’s greater problems, wishing we had more influence and power than we have, looking at characters that do, and imagining ourselves as sub par. We have sublimated both the “super” and the “sub” into ourselves, believing ourselves simultaneously capable of super powers and wildly inferior since we fail to have them.

How powerful are we though? What are the limits of human ability? Does our desire for super human powers make us over look those powers we can actually posses? We will never fly, we will never shoot lasers from our eyes, we will never control the weather with our minds let alone lift an object with it, we will never have a prehensile tail, we will not shoot webs from our hands. We will not even have a utility belt that allows us to swing from roof tops and battle the forces of evil with our amazing karate skills. These things are works of fiction, our imaginations at their best. We created God and we created Superheroes, out of a desire to ourselves be something more.

Take for example a woman interviewed on an episode of the radio show This American Life, who set as her goal learning all the skills she would need to be a super hero; martial arts, flight training, survival training, gymnastics, etc.etc. She spent most of her teens and twenties marking things off the long list of abilities she had compiled. She achieved nearly all of them too, and then set out to apply for the job she thought would most allow her to use those abilities; a job with the CIA. Despite all her considerable skills and abilities, she was turned down, twice, with no reason given either time. She ended up going to work with a private investigation firm, traveling the globe pulling off risky missions of investigation and manipulation. During her interview with the radio producer, as she was about to leave for another trip to Central America, a potentially dangerous trip, she sat down in the airport and had a small breakdown. Because she was afraid of the possible danger? No, because she was afraid the people she met there would not like her.

The interviewer did not dive any deeper into the psyche of the woman, but instead let the story speak for itself. While any human’s drives and desires are more often than not complex beyond measure, one thing was clear here; despite her near “super powers”, in the end what she feared most was not being liked. In the end, despite all our desires for super powers for the protection of the world, it is ourselves we wish to protect and save.

We desire something to look up to, something we see as bigger and better than ourselves. This may be merely a byproduct of the Judeo-Christian tradition we are raised in, but it seems to be more of an innate trait we possess, part of the social bonding process we are genetically encoded for. Through much of Western culture’s history it was God and Jesus that we looked up to most, these divine and amazing creations of our imaginations that made us feel safe and powerful, and who we could try to emulate and aspire to become, even if it was only in our imaginations.

With the rise of a more secular population, and even more importantly a more inherently secular view of the world held by even religious people, the supremacy of religious models has fallen away, deposed by our latest creations, our heroes and villains. We desired something new, something closer to ourselves, something tangible yet still greater than us and equally able to protect or terrify. More like us, more human, more attainable, more rooted in our current real world, they capture our imaginations and our emotions more than even God can at this point. Our hero worship is based on our desire to be something more than we are and to have power over a world in which our power is seemingly little. We emulate them, we imagine what our own super powers would be, how we would effect our worlds with that power, and how we would be safer and better liked if we had them.

We have more power than we give ourselves credit for though. We may never fly by ourselves, but we have created machines that take us to the skies and beyond. We can’t stop bullets with our chests, but we can stop them from being fired with some empathy and some intelligent diplomacy. The powers that we do posses in our lives may not capture our imaginations quite the way shape shifting, telekinesis, space/time continuum manipulation, or unfettered physical strength do, but we are not powerless over our worlds. Will we take part in the world around us? Will we effect change through the powers we do posses; the power to communicate, to empathize, to imagine, to love.

We can choose to be super if we wish to be, the question is; will we choose to be a super hero or choose to be a super villain? The world is in our hands, no Gods or Super Heroes will appear to bail us out, and the only villains out there are ourselves. The choices we will make will save us or destroy us, and it is our imaginations that will shape our choices and tell the story.