How To Be Good

Yes, habit is stronger than reason, something Aristotle understood 2,300 years ago.

When Plato claimed that moral wrongdoing was the result of ignorance, that no one would knowingly do wrong, Aristotle replied that people often know what they’re doing is wrong, but do it anyway. Think of drug addicts or wife beaters, for example.

Ethics depend on character, and Aristotle understood that character is the result of repeated actions, of habit.

Recognizing that fact, I would therefore suggest that the school of thought called “virtue ethics” has a lot to recommend it. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that virtue ethics “…emphasize the role of character and virtue in moral philosophy rather than either doing one’s duty or acting in order to bring about good consequences. A virtue ethicist is likely to give you this kind of moral advice: ‘Act as a virtuous person would act in your situation.’”

What this means, as a practical matter, is that to increase the odds that you will behave like a good person, you should practice being one.

If you regularly act with honesty, with courage, with kindness, with forethought and forbearance — even when, or especially when, you may find it difficult to do so — those qualities will finally be habitual. They will form your character. They will become you, in more ways than one.

Pray That You Become Rational

Do automobiles move? Do airplanes fly? Do lights illuminate the night? Do you instantly communicate worldwide on a handheld device? 

And HOW are all these marvels accomplished — by prayer, or by technology created through the scientific method?

So take your Bibles to church with you, friends, and leave them right OUT of the classroom. For pity’s sake, the fundamentalists must rely on the achievements of science even to broadcast their idiot message that science is a lie! 

Batman Battles the Sputnik

I always say that popular culture is a funhouse mirror view of society — what’s reflected in it is really there, but exaggerated and distorted. Take Sputnik, for example — the first artificial satellite, launched in April 1957 by the Russians. The idea that it was somewhere up there overhead, circling the Earth invisible, spooked the hell of Americans, sparking what President Eisenhower called the “Sputnik crisis.” And here, in early 1959, this satellite fear invades even Gotham City.

A Job for the Thinking Man's Superhero

Adam Strange was the thinking man’s superhero of the late 1950s, rendered with a sleek, space-age elegance by Carmine Infantino and written with reassuring intelligence by Gardner Fox.

I always liked him, but I was an adult before it suddenly dawned on me that Adam Strange was conceived as an exact mirror-reversal of the same company’s flagship character, Superman.

Instead of a man sent to Earth from an exotic planet to act as a savior with his superhuman powers, we have a man sent to an exotic planet from Earth to act as a savior with his human powers.

Superman overcomes all obstacles with his superior physical powers, but Adam Strange has none. Thanks to his access to alien technology, he does have a rocket belt and a ray gun, but they provide little or no help to Strange in fending off the overwhelming alien menaces that appear whenever he returns to visit his sweetheart on the planet Rann.

Lacking Superman’s brawn, Adam Strange relies solely on his brain, reasoning his way out of every dilemma, no matter how difficult. Here, you see him explaining his deductive reasoning about how to defeat alien invaders’ vacuumizer weapons to the much-rescued citizens of Rann (Mystery in Space 63, Nov. 1960).

This celebration of reason and critical thinking is sorely needed today, in dumbed-down, shoot-first, rant-and-rave 21st century America. But for that reason, nobody is now much interested in Adam Strange. And that’s too bad for us all.

Super Heroines, But Still in the Shadow

Mary Marvel, Bulletgirl, Miss America, Namora, Golden Girl, Doll Girl, Batwoman, Batgirl, Supergirl, Fly Girl, Hawkgirl, Power Girl, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Woman, even She-Hulk … the female knock-off version of the dominant male superhero is a venerable tradition, one that paradoxically paralleled American society’s growing recognition of female power even as it condescended to the idea. The trend even continued outside comics, with Six Million Dollar Men inevitably spawning Bionic Women.

Why People Prefer to Be Conned

 Sagan nailed it — a fool's blind pride trumps reason, critical thinking and even the factual truth he needs to survive.

Lightning in Winter

The line is mine; the painting is by Rachel Klecker Clegg.

The naked limbs of a sycamore tree are the frozen lightning of winter.