I've been sorta sitting outside the culture war thing for awhile now, watching it in a rather clinical way, taking notes, making snide comments, and usually finding the whole matter more and more ridiculous. At this point I don't find myself comfortable with any of the sides, and the alienation only runs deeper and deeper the older I get. We will get to the leftists and their fundamental mistakes, but I'm going to pick on my former camp first; call it pride of place, conservatives.
Conservatives really don't understand heroes.
See, when I was growing up I read a lot as a child. I know that makes me stand out amongst all the bloggers and all that, but it's true. One of the things that I found as a child was that none of my ostensibly "conserving the culture" superiors seemed to be doing was actually conserving what made Christianity, or the West in general, special. They talked about conserving Christian values, preserving good families, keeping it in your pants until married or you'd go to Hell (boy someday I'm going to have a rant about that one), and generally being some milqetoast goody-two-shoes that would carry on their idea of Western civilization.
And everytime they said this I scratched my head, because none of the stories they were claiming to be defending were like that, at all.
Yeah, I know who I put up in the picture up top. I know some folks clicked on this because I laid the bait. But you're going to have to wait.
We're going to have to start with Samuel the Prophet.
I read most of the Old Testament from nine (when I actually started reading) to thirteen. Since then I've lapped it a few times. There are few things more important to me than reading the Old Testament, because it's here you find the most honest take on human nature you'll ever find. I get the New Testament is nice with all the cuddly "look Jesus is here and healing people" stuff, but honestly it doesn't really mean much without seeing people for what they really are. If you are not rooted in the Old Testament Christ isn't the fearsome conqueror of sin and death, but just some sweet nice dude who might be able to claim to be God because He was so fluffy. God stared men's nature down until it blinked, and it cost Him His life.
Samuel's story was the moment that started a watershed for me, that has lasted until this present day. Most of us know Samuel as the prophet who was told to say to God "Speak Lord, your servant is listening" when he heard someone calling for him at night. At nine I heard someone trying to teach a CCD class that the lesson of Samuel was that it was so very important to listen for the voice of God. Listen, and God will talk to you!
I was pissed.
I went up to the teacher afterwards and asked why she didn't tell the rest of the freaking story.
For those who don't know: Eli, Sameul's foster-father, was one of the priests at Shiloh. In those days the priesthood was an unabashedly family business. If you were a priest it was because your father was a priest, and you were going to go marry some other priest's daughter and have as many kids as you could so that way the priesthood could go on. So Eli's sons were priests. And they were not good people. Eli's sons stole from the sacrifices, very deliberately making sure God did not get His due. Connected (as in, God viewed them as two halves of the same sin) to this, Eli's sons were also sleeping with the temple virgins. Now, us Catholics and Orthodox teach that such virgins were younger; Mary the Theotokos was being sent away from the Temple at twelve. Now, I don't know if that's historically accurate, given we don't know much about temple virgins, but um.... twelve is a legit number.
So's ten.
I mean, technically so could five.
Sick yet? If not, we at least know where you stand on the priest/bishop sex scandals.
If you have information to the contrary I'd love to hear it (yes, there were temple virgins, they were a thing, so no, nothing on how they didn't "akshually" exist), but honestly the essence is that Eli's sons were either pedophiles and/or taking advantage of women who had nowhere else to go, and thus how much could they really say no? So God's message to Samuel? Y'know, the one that everyone so sweetly says "Listen to God", what did poor Samuel hear? To tell Eli, that foster-father of his, the one who told him to listen to God in the first place, that the entirety of his family was to die because he hadn't stopped his sons from either outright child rape or taking advantage of those who couldn't really resist them, and stealing from sacrifices, even though all priests got a share of all sacrifices. Eli had allowed his sons to become such monsters that God swore to Samuel that none of their descendants would live, and the books of Samuel actually keep track of this promise, coz it takes awhile to unfold, but when it does the book actualy says "That was the last descendant of Eli". And God told Samuel to say this to the man who had adopted him and raised him as one of his own.
Yes, listen to God.
It might scare the shit out of you though.
Samuel didn't want to say anything, of course, and actually had resolved to disobey God, because as it turns out telling your foster-father that his entire family had a deathmark on them for being child rapists is a bit much for a child. But Eli knew something was up, and forced Samuel to tell him the truth.
That's Samuel's origin story as a prophet.
Gnarly shit, ain't it?
Samuel went on to anoint two kings, Saul and David, and judged Israel until the kings were set up... after failing to stop the Israelites from installing said kings. He also had sons who were of great embarrassment to him, although it's not said in the Bible how Samuel dealt with them, only that he wasn't the best dad around. Every moment of Samuel's recorded life was filled with failure and regret. He couldn't stop Israel from wanting a king, something that he stomped and screamed and outright refused to do, until God specifically told him to shut up and do it anyways. Samuel couldn't stop the first king, Saul, from letting the power get to his head, and grieved over Saul, a man who formerly had a genuinely good heart, for years. He wasn't a good dad, and his own sons turned out to be an embarrassment, even if they weren't child rapists like Eli's. Samuel was not a terribly exceptional person in the way conservatives understand it. It's not that Samuel was some sexual deviant, it's that his story is one of constant hope amidst complete and utter existential failure. What made Samuel special wasn't that he succeeded, or even if he was a particularly special person... he just kept trying as it all fell apart. And that one thing is what he sorta got right.
And that's easily one of the squeakiest cleanest of the OT stories.
David is much worse. The instant the defender of the poor and the downtrodden became king he became a murderer, adulterer, and allowed incestual rape to rip his family, and thus his country, apart. The courageous fighter for the common man became a weak and inept ruler. He also allowed a plague to strike his own country, knowing that his actions would lead to many of his people dying. And God calls David one of the best men to ever live. Which means if you got the job of monarch of Israel you'd do a considerably worse job than David.
Yes, you.
Don't get me started on the rest of them, particularly Moses, who had a habit of acting rashly that actually got him locked out of the Promised Land. Humans act out of character, and even when they do act in character it's usually a bad thing to do.
And that's just the Bible, folks.
You look at actual mythology and it gets much worse. Humans are, to a one, the playthings of the gods, who treat them like pets. Humans are at the mercy of the world, and their moral strength doesn't come from rising up and standing up for themselves, but in figuring out which god likes them and doing whatever the fuck that god tells them to do, no matter what it is. Odysseus, the man who loved his wife Penelope so much that he fought like hell to get back home to her over the course of twenty years, didn't even flinch when Calypso demanded him into her bed and body. A god demanded. He got up in the bed and did what had to be done. Hell, we know there's a third act to the trilogy of the Iliad and Odyssey, where his son by that fateful night accidentally kills him on the road!
Yup, that's how Odysseus, the most cunning man alive, slayer of men, and the favorite of Athena, dies.
In a tragic highway manslaughter accident.
It gets worse once you actually start looking at Chrtistian medieval stories, like La Morte D'Arthur or the Medieval Romances. People are constantly fucking in those stories, married or not. Arthur alone sleeps with at least three women, one of them his own sister, upon becoming king. Gawain, the best knight of the Round Table, second only to Galahad (and does he even truly count???), is the one who destroys Camelot because of his inability to forgive Lancelot. And these are the good guys! These are the ones who manage to actually get something done that's worthwhile. They're the ones who face down the entropy of the world and actually try not to blink.
They try. And fail, but what makes a man good in classical and Christian thought isn't whether or not they succeed, for no man can, but their willingness to face their interior and exterior entropy and try to do the best they can with what they have, even knowing they'll fail. Because it's not about results, it's about what they can do right now. And yes, some of these heroes blink and do actually give up in total despair, and some of them stay that way, and some of them manage to come back. It depends. The idea of a hero never giving up is so inaccurate to the lore that it's actually hilarious.
Y'know what actually makes someone a hero? Get a pen and paper, coz here it is: they're the scapegoats of their people. Their life and suffering and joys (but usually their suffering) make majorly impacts society.
That's it.
Whatever they're going through personally, it hits their society at large. Call it chance, call it fate, call it being a half-god or whatever, whatever their own personal struggles and cares, they have a large societal impact.
Don't pretend you know, you fucking liar. There is a reason why theodicy exists: if the fate of a good man looks so similar to that of a bad one who gives a shit about being good? And to pretend this is not a question that is frequently asked by heroes is to ignore the Psalms and the Wisdom literature, where that question has entire books dedicated to it.
Now we get to the bait I laid at the front of the article.
Do you see the core issue I have with those who dislike Luke in TLJ? Luke's central issue, as detailed quite thoroughly in the classic The Empire Strikes Back, is his fear that his desire to do good will make him into Vader, a fear given major credence by the revelation at the end of the movie. Luke wants to do good, but is afraid that his instincts will trip him up. No, you don't get to grow beyond problems this elemental, sorry. Luke's utter recklessness in the pursuit of what he thinks is good is his defining trait, and it is both his strength and his weakness, like for anybody else. Those who say "he should have grown beyond being so rash" misunderstand how humanity works so fundamentally it's funny: Luke's vritue is also his flaw. You can't get the virtue without the vice to trip you up.
And yes, losing 13 of your foster children to your core motivation as a human being may break you and make you into a bitter asshole. That may be how humans work.
A lot of emotion is spent by leftists on how conservatives view people as cogs in a machine, and they're not entirely... wrong. If your supposed heroes are just there to serve the whole, as opposed to the individual affecting the whole at large (and all of them being some form of cautionary tale), then yes, that's essentially just cogs in the machine. As much as I dislike leftist ideology, even I have to admit when they're right they're right. I have always found the conservative faux-stoicism to be disingenuous, when elves in Tolkien's literature can literally cry themselves to death, or Ajax can be driven mad by the gods and commit suicide, or Achilles avenges his friend by committing actual war crimes...
Now, granted, some will read the above and go "Yeah, but what about Christian stories? Stories about good guys fighting bad guys and being good and my goodness isn't all the virtue so nice?
Look, at some point enough is enough. The absurdity is obvious, one way or another.
Go read even a page of La Morte D'Arthur to see what an actual Christian story and heroes look like. Where people are incredibly flawed creatures, who can't seem to hack it no matter what they try, where even if they win they lose, just like you and me, and at the end have to stare the death of all they know and love right in the face, knowing they had a hand in it... but still begging for a chance to do the right thing, even if it's just at the end.. if they're lucky.
It actually looks an awful lot like this, and all the moments leading up to it, green milk especially:
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