If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.None of these "conservatives" bother to tell us why they so enthusiastically cite a remark disparaging the form of government they would have us believe they wish to conserve. It is notable that less than a century later, Disraeli's successor Winston Churchill gave similar faint praise, calling democracy the worst of all possible governments, except for everything else that has been tried.
Older movies often have better underlying morality than the modern trash, but Tarzan isn't one of them. There is a consistent -- and often incredible -- theme of revenge that would do 24 proud. Get real: animals do not seek revenge, it's a human depravity. But what struck me is the total ignorance the writer shows concerning religion. Obviously the screenwriters 80 years ago were just as irreligious (and clueless) as their modern counterparts. Maybe more so.
Religion is the most important aspect of any person's life -- and that includes atheistic screen writers. Of course their religion is that there is no God to answer to, so they try to ridicule people who know otherwise. Modern screen writers have learned that they are in a minority, that the American people pay more to see movies where God is given honor than when God is trashed, so they tend to be somewhat more respectful despite their own belief system. This respect is nowhere evident in Tarzan. A recurring subplot in the story is this "priestess of the flame" who is trying to appease her god by human sacrifice.
The moral problem with this system is not the idea of sacrifice so much as how they go about to obtain their sacrificial victims. If a person really believes in God or gods, and really believes in the efficacy of sacrifice, then they recognize the importance of offering to their deity the sacrifice of the highest value possible. Otherwise their god will be displeased and do them harm instead of the desired good. Pagans who offer human sacrifice understand that. That's why they offer humans, because everybody knows that humans are infinitely more valuable than mere animals. But by the same reasoning, the human sacrifice must be willing. Otherwise it's merely murder. If the priestess is trying to get rid of a person she doesn't want around, she obviously does not consider that person very valuable; how much more will the gods be offended?
The God of the Bible accepted a human sacrifice, but only of the highest
value possible: His own Son, and only because Jesus went to his death willingly.
Otherwise his sacrifice would have been worthless, not a "sacrifice" at
all, and as immoral as the screen writers depicted it in Tarzan.
Fortunately, the title hero rescued all the captives from time to time,
so nobody was burned in the story (not even the villains, who died by other
means), and everybody lived happily ever after.
Heroes is all about super-heroes with powers totally contrary to physics. Essentially each person has some unique fictional power that we all wish we had, superman-style flying and strength (above and beyond the ability of the physical properties of flesh and bone), instant healing, telekinesis, mind-reading and coercion, radio-active heat, going invisible or stopping time at will, even reprogramming computers by mental effort in ways that the actual programmer if he were plugged into the system could not. One of the characters has the unique ability to absorb the powers of the other heroes just by being near them.
I suppose it makes for interesting fiction to explore how the existence of such fantastical powers might impact society, and the interview with the creator suggests this as one of his objectives, but we need to recognize that their very existence has taken leave of science. The creator and writer of this TV series does not understand science enough to say so. Instead, he keeps inserting all this "evolution" mumbo-jumbo as if that explains what is going on. Of course it does not. Darwinistic evolution is about the gradual accumulation of minor but beneficial changes over many generations, until the result is a new organism that still obeys the laws of physics in its metabolism and behavior. It doesn't happen in the real world, but their excuse is that it takes millions of years, not a single generation as in Heroes.
There were, however, a couple of these "evolution" lines that were memorable in their own right:
Evolution comes down to one thing: survive or perish.and
What you have done is not evolution, it's murder.These two lines betray a total ignorance of the central theme of Darwinism. The first is a tautology, true without regard to the real world or any explanation of it. Everything either survives or perishes, even in a Creationist world it's still true. Classic Darwinism is about the survival of the fittest, specifically the mutations that lead to better survival rates.
The second line is much more subtle. Evolution can only work if these mutations give the organism a competitive edge over the other organisms, so it is more likely than they to live and pass on its (modified) genes to the next generation. One of the characters in this show is helping that along by actively getting rid of the less-fit competitors. That is morally offensive, and the writer recognizes as such -- without realizing that the idea is central to Darwinism. Morality, however, came to us from the Creator God, the contradiction of Darwinism. We recognize murder as Wrong because Darwinism is a lie.
Good fiction helps us grow morally by encouraging us to ask ourselves, "What would I do in that situation?" And then to answer it in morally acceptable ways. Several of the heroes in this program vocalize their duty to do Good and not Evil. This is good. There is a villain -- you need one with super-powers to act as a credible foil to the Good Guys -- and he does Bad Things. That's one of the things that makes this show watchable. The problem is that we humans have limitations determined in part by the laws of physics; in a fantasy story there are also limitations, but they are invented on the fly by the writer, so it's much harder to internalize them in seeing ourselves in a character's position. That's why I don't read fantasy novels.
My sister loaned me the DVDs from Season 1. I probably
would not have bothered to watch more than the first episode otherwise.
It wasn't until disc 6 (out of 7) that I began to see the somewhat limited
virtues of the story line. If she buys Season 2 and loans it to me, I'll
probably watch it, but not otherwise. The suspension of disbelief is just
too much effort.
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