It went over well, I think. I need to try to arrange a formal Better Angels workshop soon.
One illustration that isn't Better Angels but that I find endlessly useful concerns the Infinity Gauntlet created and wielded by the supervillain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. I really loved those movies. In particular, I liked how they gave Josh Brolin's Thanos a relatively rational, sensible motivation. In contrast to the 1990s comic book Thanos (who is in love with Death), the movies' Thanos believes that suffering comes from universal overpopulation. His solution involves creating a weapon hat combines the power of the "infinity stones," ancient artifacts of immense power. The result is the Infinity Gauntlet, which I described to my mainly non-superhero-savvy Sunday Schoolers as "a kind of magic glove that lets you destroy your enemies with a snap."
I simplify. But, essentially, that's what it is.
SPOILER FOR THE MOVIES--
At the end of Infinity War, Thanos achieves his goal, snaps his fingers--and half of all living things disintegrate into dust. It's pretty shocking, especially watching Tom Holland's Spider Man jabber in terror to Robert Downy, Jr.'s Tony Stark, who watches the young man vanish. Fast-forward to the sequel, and (long story short), Tony Stark makes his own gauntlet, snaps his fingers, and Thanos and his minions vanish.
I'm a sucker for superhero movies, and these are done especially well. (How I wish I could send a message back in time to young, nerdy me in the 80s and 90s: Just wait! All the stuff you're a nerd for liking becomes mainstream and cool in 25 years!)
But the Infinity Gauntlet is an especially cool metaphor for my work. Specifically, it's a fantasy of perfect victory--and perfect threat. You defeat your opponents, and they disappear. OR your opponents win--and you disappear.
In class today, I explained the "magic glove that destroys your foes."
"I gotta say," I admitted, "I'd be awfully tempted, especially after reading the latest newsfeeds. I held up my hand, poising my fingers to snap. "Uh-uh!" someone said.
I nearly snapped, and nearly snapped, sorely tempted.
But I didn't.
"But see," I said, "what if I'm certain that 'they'--the other team--wouldn't hesitate to use the gauntlet if they got their hands on one? What if they're very close to having one even now?"
That feeling underlies a lot of affective polarization: a zero-sum contest with existential stakes. We must destroy them before they destroy us.
But it is fantasy. Within liberal democracies, at least, political defeats never result in the losing side's mass evaporation. They persist, stubbornly, to return and fight again. The best we can hope for is that the force of our side's ideas eventually wins over a stable majority and the contestable becomes common sense. Only then are political battles fully won (and even then, the potential for re-politicizing issues exists). We don't get the tidy victory of a superhero movie.
Nor would we want that to be the case. In Endgame, it's a high-point, a cheer-moment, when Tony Stark snaps his fingers and Thanos sighs in defeat before blowing away to so much ash.
But Thanos's forces were inhuman monsters. We're dramaturgically primed not to see their existence as mattering. In real life, we face actual human beings. They may do monstrous things and act in inhuman ways. But they are nevertheless human. Destroying them all as a group--well, that's something a Thanos would do.
I loved the Avengers movies. But I wonder what would have been different had Stark and the other Avengers had a conversation about the Gauntlet similar to Gandalf's warnings about the Ring of Power. The Ring cannot be used for good, he says. IT would do too much evil through the desire for good.
Endgame skirts around this by having an unimpeachable character--Captain America--dispose of the gauntlet. But Captain America is as fictional as Thanos. I do not have an unimpeachable character. And the other side can sometimes look to me very much like monsters, my struggle against them very much like, well, an endgame, an infinity war.
I'm glad there's no gauntlet.
More tomorrow,
JF
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