Iron Man and the Quandary of Self-Love

"You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut."

Tony Stark (Iron Man) to Bruce Banner (Hulk)


Rewatching The Avengers the other day, this snippet of a conversation caught my eye.  When I first encountered Tony Stark and the Iron Man movies, I wasn't a terribly huge fan of Stark's "text-book narcissism" as Black Widow put it in her report to Nick Fury.  But he's starting to grow on me.  One of the reasons he's starting to grow on me is because his very narcissism presents a challenge and a question to the audience: what exactly is the difference between narcissism and proper self-love?  And given a good definition, how do we actually go about recognizing that difference in the field, per se?   

One of the challenges of Tony Stark's case is that he is an exceptionally skilled individual who believes that he is an exceptionally skilled individual.  That's not the problem, and it certainly isn't the part that makes him vulnerable to the charge of narcissism.  In recognizing his own genius and achievement, he's just being honest.  Being honest--at least in good moral psychology, Christian and pagan--is one of the things that leads you to self-knowledge.  In acknowledging that, Stark is just being a realist.

The real reason people say Stark is a narcissist is because he is a) thoroughly devoted to self-pleasure and feeding his own interests without proper courtesy and attention to others and b) because "the rules don't apply to him."  But that isn't the thing I'm most interested in.  The thing I am interested in is the way in which Stark's advice to Banner was actually hitting on something good.  The following conversation gets at the heart of things a bit more.  When Tony Stark suggests that Banner will be "suiting up" with the rest of the Avengers, Banner replies:

"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart.  This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."

Banner responds: "But you can control it."

"Because I learned how."

"It's different."

Stark says, "Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."

Banner replies: "So you're saying that the Hulk, the other guy, saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"

Stark: "I guess we'll find out."

With a wry smile from the resident Hulk, "You may not enjoy that."

Tony Stark: "You just might."

It may be true that Stark's enjoyment of the Hulk's destructive tendencies isn't terribly wise or constructive.  But the movie goes on to prove his perspective to be the right one.  Whatever burden the Hulk side of Banner might be, he's also a terribly effective asset equal to the task of taking on Loki single-handedly and dealing some serious damage to the Leviathans.  

What struck me, however, was more the enjoyment side of Stark's remarks.  Stark's not just egging Banner on to higher heights of self-esteem--he wants Banner to let go and enjoy himself.  He wants him to enjoy the destructive power of the Hulk, and see the power and hope for a more constructive use of the Hulk, even if it seems unlikely that the Hulk be fully trained to saddle.

Aside from the exaggerations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's some very good advice there.  We spend a lot of time not enjoying ourselves.  We spend a lot of time berating, criticizing, and finding fault with ourselves.  We spend a lot of time in self-hatred and we don't spend a lot of time in appreciation and delight and even in glorying in ourselves.  But proper self-love is difficult to think about well.  How do I love and really celebrate and enjoy and even glory in the part of me that is good and wonderful and fearfully made by God without being a narcissist?  How do I love myself because God has loved me and wonderfully made me and destined me for glory rather than loving myself simply out of a false sense of ownership?  How do I balance the call for self-denial and proper abandonment of one's self and the call to the celebrate one's own goodness?

We are all faced with the quandary of reconciling loves--love for self, love for God, love for other created things, and we only succeed in reconciling loves when we know, understand and have been converted to the true purposes for which we love.  When I love myself and God for my own sake, I may not do wrong, but I haven't done much good either.  Self love, when it is the beginning of loves, is not a bad beginning.  It, however, is a terrible end for love--love of self and God for one's own sake must mature into something else or it will turn into narcissism.  (Narcissism is real life is much less attractive than narcissism enacted by Robert Downey, Jr.)  

When the world becomes contracted such that I--myself--am the only reason and purpose for which I love, my world becomes a false and ugly alternate reality.  Self-love is meant to be a natural tutor and example which shows us how it is we might love others.  The instinct for self-love does not have to be taught, though the maturation of it does, and self-love matures as the love of self is submitted to the love of God and the love of others.  It requires having our ideas about love submitted, transformed, and joined to the will, wisdom, and love of God.  And it requires a lot of obedience and renunciation and suffering--in many ways, we seem to lose much of ourselves before we find ourselves again, secure in God.

But during and after all of this transformation, when our loves change and are matured into ripeness--when we begin to see ourselves in God's light, purpose, and love, a wonderful thing happens.  We are freed, as Teresa of Avila told us so many years ago, to love ourselves for God's sake.  Having learned already to love God for his own sake, having seen God at the center of the cosmos and not ourselves, we begin to see ourselves again.  We perhaps catch a glimpse of ourselves out of the corner of our eyes and find that we are wonderfully and beautifully made.  And we begin to find out why God was so interested in the first place--we see what he sees, we find beautiful what he finds beautiful, and we find those things in ourselves.

As Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac taught me, the first and most precious gift that God gives to us is ourselves.  We are meant to accept our lives as occassions for joy and goodness and to understand that there is more to the Creation than what is broken and damaged and harmful.  For some of us skeptics, joy and delight and acceptance of what is good in ourselves is most difficult because we think the most honest or the most rigorous or the most intellectual thing to do is to identify what is wrong rather than what is right.  But no matter what darkness exists in the human soul, it cannot overcome the brightness of creation, for the beauty of Creation is upheld by the hand of God, redeemed in the Resurrection of the Son, and preserved and guarded until the end by the work of the Spirit.

But we are called to a holy joy in ourselves.  We are called to take the same joy in ourselves that God does.  It isn't the only joy we have, and it isn't the most important joy we have.  But it is the very first gift God gives us and we are meant to come full circle in loving ourselves for his sake.

Star Trek: "A Piece of the Action"

I love Star Trek for all sorts of reasons.  One day I'll write a post about what is probably my most favorite episode of the entire Trek franchise, and why it's my favorite, but "A Piece of the Action" makes the cut as certainly being one of the most fun episodes ever.  Who doesn't want to see Kirk and Spock running about an extraterrestrial version of 1920s gangsta Chicago with tommy guns and fedoras?  And really rockin' the fedoras, too?  Who doesn't want to contemplate the deliciously absurd notion that descendants of a human colony might appropriate a 1990s history of 1920s Chicago mob life as a sort of biblical code of conduct? 

It doesn't really get much better than this.  Normally, I love Star Trek because it does such a good job communicating things like adventure and wonder and delight in what is beautiful and noble and good.  Most of the time, it also depicts characters who are adults with fairly advanced personal integrity, lots of self-respect, and a lot of love both for what they do and for other people.  It is a depiction of humanity's "golden-age" so to speak in which people are wise, intelligent, noble, and generous--the sort of people with whom you'd want to have adventures.  But other times, Star Trek is just fun.  And "A Piece of the Action" is one of those times.

Creative Writing and the Spirit of Celebration

I suppose that many writers write for many reasons and out of many motivations.  I imagine one could spend a great deal of time cataloging those reasons, and could come up with a fantastic array of vices and virtues, healthy and abnormal psychological conditions.  I used to wonder what sort of mood fed my times of most intense creative writing--especially the reams and reams of ink on works of fiction (each ream having 500 or so pages, quite literally).  At some point in time, I called it "joy", but I think it is more verbal than that--I think I write fiction especially when I am in times of celebration, and find it difficult to write when I lose touch with that sense of celebration.

I originally entitled my blog "sublimation" because the bits of non-fiction writing I've been most happy with lately (because they've been the most creative) have been bits of sublimation: things I have written to process that have been caught up in something a little bit better than my confusing whirl of thought and emotion about them.  In the past, my fiction creative writing has been much different--it has been an almost aggressive pursuit and delight in aspects of God's creation (all of it--physical, spiritual, personal), God's own self, and God's interaction with us.  There's something about writing fiction and I think fantasy/science-fiction in particular that lets one really grasp creation--createdness--by two hands and shake it in joyous enthusiasm.  Tolkien and Lewis had their conception of "sub-creation" by which an artist of some kind enters into the similar (analogously so) kind of work that God does in creation.  In writing a story, I get to celebrate all of God's marvelous creativity by demonstrating the creation's awesome contingency: the fact that it could be, it has been, and it will be other than it is right now, and that is a good thing!  No where else is God's generosity and plenitude on display than in the vastness of the cosmos . . . and the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes and Nobles!  This is a part of God's own mind and character that we get to see and imitate whenever we do art, and especially when we imagine alternate worlds and histories and species and persons.  Paradoxically, we illuminate what is and call to mind what could be by celebrating what is not.

Question 44 of the Summa Theologica is the first "question" that Thomas Aquinas puts to exploring the creation and it goes like this: "The procession of creatures from God, and of the first cause of all things."  (As you can see, the question isn't exactly in question form . . . this probably isn't a case of allofunctional implicature, but I will bring it up anyway.)  I love this "question" and especially the grand use of the term "procession" almost as much as I love Boethius' definition of eternity.  Aquinas uses the term "procession" somewhat loosely.  God has both internal processions and external processions.  The internal ones are nothing less than the Personal processions of Son and Spirit and the external procession is the creation as a whole.  Procession simply refers to God as source, but it gives such a richness to the imagery!  When I think of the creation "processing" from God (though not from his being and substance, of course), I think of everything God has made marching before his throne in humble but joyous celebration of the goodness of God and the goodness of the gift of their own creation and existence.  That, perhaps, is why celebration is the key to my creative writing.  When I write, I celebrate the goodness of the created order and my own creation: I celebrate everything particular to that order, it's richness, its giftedness, its contingency, its fleetingness, the fact that it must begin and end.

Which is also why I'm not always in the mood to celebrate the createdness of the creation.  Oftentimes, I am more frightened than joyous at the fact that neither creation nor myself are necessary beings.  Oftentimes, I want to be a determinist because I want to be able to figure out all things before hand.  Or, I want to be a panentheist and be merged with God such that I am just as necessary to exist as God.  In short, I often either want to make an idol of myself or of the world in order to bring false comfort to myself that all is safe and sturdy and secure.  Contingency and giftedness displace us from occupying a too central role even in our own estimation because it displaces us ontologically, at the very root of our existence and our being.  But all false comfort is ultimately poison, and when I try to make myself too necessary (logically, ontologically, relationally) I end up making a burden for myself that I cannot possibly bear and web myself in with anxieties.    When I really trust God enough to relinquish control to him and accept my existence and my life and my being as the contingent, unneccesary, but beloved gift that I am, I can start opening my heart and hands to embrace createdness and creation again.  Otherwise, I close my heart and resent everything I don't know and don't understand.  I would rather have the spirit of adventure, but the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.

There's something that happens in the transition from childhood to adulthood that makes most of us have to learn how to accept again.  (In many childhoods, anyway.)  Both my childhood and adolescence were fairly undisturbed and thus free to be filled with wonder. But when I ran off to college I found myself confronted with crises after crises of different sorts (some personal, some epistemological, some in matters of faith) that made trusting God and myself and the basic goodness of the world quite a bit more of a challenge!  I imagine some people never experience basic trust of the world in that way, and some people never have that trust shaken.  But I wonder whether the majority of people have a hiccup or two at the beginning or end of adolescence and have to learn again what it means to be a child.  I also imagine that many of us spend a great deal of time flubbing this lesson and having to be taken through it again and again until we really learn how to be led to Jesus like little children.

There's something childlike about joy and celebration--which makes it harder for those of us who feel the need to be sober-minded adults much of the time.  I don't have anything against genuine adulthood--in fact, praise Jesus if you actually manage to become a self-respecting, contributing adult.  But not if it makes you boring and self-protective and think you are the one who must be in control and in charge of your life.  That pose sometimes makes me feel more secure or more adult, but it also makes me curl up in on myself and have less to give and less to celebrate.

Art is one of the closest things we have to pure gift on this side of the veil.  Ultimately we engage in art for the sake of beauty and not for the sake of utility.  We know that beauty makes life better, but only because it appears that human beings are made for beauty, not because of any "practical" gain or reason.  The thing that refreshes us about the imagination-in-act is that it awakens us to our true nature--to our true identity as beings given an identity for no other reason that we were thought by One to be lovely, to be worthy, to be gift.  In life we are receivers before we are ever givers, and what we receive is as deep as our own bodies, souls, and minds.

Gamechangers: IDIC—Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, the motto of the Vulcan Science Academy, and one of the tenets of the Vulcan philosopher Surak (who’s something between Buddha and Jesus to the Vulcans, but heavy on the Buddha side of the equation).  IDIC to me is brilliant because it isn’t so much about cultural or ethical pluralism or relatively, but more about the sheer, massive diversity in the universe.  It is the universe, the physical, the biological, the astronomical, the chemical that is infinitely diverse.  (Or, perhaps, that we hope is infinitely diverse—though one could say of the Star Trek universe with all of its forays into multiple universes, etc., that the IDIC has in fact been demonstrated to be an accurate statement about reality.)  It is this ontological reality and diversity—all of the physics, the biology, the astronomy, the chemistry--that gives rise to all different races and beings that populate the universe.  And there are certainly different ways of existing—carbon-based life isn’t the only way to go.  But the ontological reality grounds the claims of the IDIC and keeps it from being superficial.

I remember going to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History not too long ago and looking at all the dinosaurs, some of the stuff they have from before the time of dinosaurs, and the more contemporary (relatively speaking) ice age exhibit.  My feelings were of intense relief and gratitude and eventually joy.   I was really happy and quite thrilled to death that the earth had once, both in the distant past and in the not-so-distant past, been entirely different than it is today.  One of the most important tenets of Christian theology is the contingency of the world.  The world does not have to exist.  The world does not have to exist the way it currently exists.  We don't know what really does exist in all the vast-flung regions of interstellar space, and we don't know what has existed in the past, and we don't know what has existed in the future, and this is good.  Belief in contingency creates the spirit of exploration.  God created the universe out of his own fullness and infinite creativity, and we can't guess what will be in the universe anymore we can guess the life and character of God aside from his revelation of it to us.  If there’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations, it exists as created mirror of God’s own plentitude.  (It’s all in Aquinas, folks.)  

That's why I love the IDIC.  I think it's hopeful and I think it's true, and I think keeping a firm grip on the contingency of all things is one of the ways (and one of the best ways for me personally) to keep a firm on wonder, and thence, gratitude.  In a different way, I also love the kind of pluralism I see in Trek, and especially in DS9 because it seeks to be true to that diversity, and if Christianity isn't the answer, that's not a terrible way to go.

DS9 showcases this more than the other series because that series--more than any other one--is genuinely interested in religion and faith and not giving pat answers and explanations to the mysteries thereof.  But in that series, we see the Bajoran faith depicted more than any other.  They believe in the Prophets, their own celestial guardians, who occasionally send them messengers and help in various forms through the Orbs.  In other words, DS9 takes for granted that the Prophets exist and there is some part of Bajoran religion that is genuinely true.  In the first few episodes its fairly obvious that there's some scorn from the mostly secular Federation about the notion that these "wormhole aliens" might actually be of genuine religious significance.  Throughout the series, it seems somewhat unlikely that the Prophets desire to be worshiped, but genuinely true that they are beings not quite limited by the temporal order who are genuinely interested in helping and intervening in Bajoran life.  Not too bad.  They aren't all-powerful, but they are certainly beneficent.

But the Bajoran way isn't the only way.  The Ferengi "Divine Treasury" (Ferengi heaven) is an object of real concern and apparently a real object, as is the Klingon Sto-vo-kor.  Worf, a Klingon, is unable to grieve the death of his wife Jadzia (even though she's Trill, not Klingon) because she was murdered and thus unable to enter Sto-vo-kor.  In a 7th season story arc Worf is assisted by three non-Klingons to help complete a quest to get Jadzia into Sto-vo-kor.  And the characters all risk their lives to do it, either out of their own personal faith (as in Worf's case), or out of loyalty and love for Worf or Jadzia.

Many of the human characters spend their time puzzling at or shaking their heads at the faiths of their non-human companions, but the series itself takes that faith seriously.  Faith requires real effort and sacrifice and has real demands on people's lives.  The differences in cultures often causes problems wherein characters have to decide whether to be true to their own tradition, or their personal code of honor, or do what seems "sensible" to other characters.  Oftentimes there are clashes between civilizations, and oftentimes friendships, but the civilizations do not surrender either their diversity or their integrity to form that friendship (though it is sometimes a question whether cross-species friendship implies a loss of cultural or personal identity).  There are many hard decisions and sometimes characters (especially Worf or other Klingon characters) do things that human beings would find repellent.  One could say of the pluralism is Star Trek--"There is more than one right way, but any good way is difficult to find, and many people choose bad paths regardless of their culture's philosophy."  In other words, there may be cultural pluralism and some degree of cultural relativism, but there's not moral relativism and "anything goes" is not a feasible answer to any problem.

I need to wrap this up.  But I suppose what I would like to say is that I wish politicians and teenagers alike would think about this kind of pluralism as they try to juggle multiculturalism in the public life.  Everyone needs a tradition to help guide them to discover how to be a person of integrity, even if we decide that there are multiple ways to reach that integrity or that there are things that good people can decide to disagree on.  But to have no tradition, to have no guide, to have no reference point, to have no real deep abiding notion of integrity, humanity, or honor is just disastrous for everyone and creates a polis which is incapable of doing what is difficult in order to do what is right.  If I were going to fight any idea in the public sphere right now, I would put all my energies into fighting the notion that it is easy to do what is right, to create something good, and to solve any problems that concern whole communities.

Wonder, Worship, and the Imagination . . . and Dr. Who

I made a sketchy deal with my good friend Rebbiejaye the other night. I think there might have been whiskey involved on her end, but I have no such excuse--I don't drink and never have. At a friend's birthday party we somehow got on the topic of the wonderfulness of fiction and the imagination and how essential fantasy and science-fiction are to forming one's conception of God, blah, blah, blah, and she looks at me expectantly and says, "That's why we have to agree to write one fiction book for every non-fiction book. Deal?" I opened my mouth and stuck out my hand to seal the deal before my brain caught up to my excitement about the conversation. I ended up hemming and hawing and dithering a bit about how I tend to have extremely long fiction projects and how I didn't know if I could keep up with that production speed. But I found I believed in what she said so much that with a gasped, "with the Lord's help" (I think I was cringing and gritting my teeth at the same time) I sealed the deal. "Deal," I said firmly. "You know what that means, don't you?"

"What does that mean?" she replied.

"It means we'll really be like the Inklings." I say "really" because Rebecca and I have been in love with the life of the "Inklings"--C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others--since we were in undergraduate together. I read the biographical book The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter back in high school and went green with envy at reading about the life of people who spent much of their time in "imaginative academia." I dreamed of cozy philosophical conversations around a fireplace before I had ever studied philosophy and of writing stories that really mattered before I really understood what was important about stories. (One is always learning more about such things.) But it certainly is amusing when life catches up with dreams. In high school I really had no idea what the life of a writer or an academician might look like--PhDs don't exactly run in my family--but something about it fired my imagination.

Fast forward about ten years and I find myself in my last year of a master's of divinity program after having studied philosophy and theology in my undergraduate degree pondering PhD programs and making deals with my friends about writing fiction. How some things do stay the same! One thing that has remained constant in my life is the need I have to retain a sense of wonder about the cosmos in which I find myself living and a sense of how imagination influences my ability to think philosophically and theologically and my ability to relate to God at all.

Mystery is a key concept in Christianity. If you cannot understand mystery--the mystery of God, the mystery of salvation, the mystery of sin, even--you will have no room for the Trinitarian God of Christianity or anything he's up to either in the Scriptures or in your own life. And "mystery" does not mean theologically what it means in common parlance. Usually when modern Westerners use the term "mystery" they mean something that has yet to be explained but that undoubtedly will be explained by someone who is very clever.  People read mystery novels or watch movies or television or even go to dinner plays. But this is not at all what the word means in the context of God, the church, sin, and the world. Here, "mystery" means the ineffable--something that is in fact intelligible, inherently logical or able to be understood, but also inherently incommunicable or incomprehensible to human beings, i.e., possible to be understood, but not by us homo sapiens. Thus theologians will say that God is "intelligible" but incomprehensible and this isn't simple nonsense. One could sum up the book of Job by saying that it is a book devoted to capturing a good man's very real struggle with the mysteries of human life--both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. Job was found to be more righteous with his friends because he could name the mystery and wasn't afraid to be angry about all the apparent contradictions of human experience. His friends were rebuked because they tried to pretend that the mysterious was comprehensible and easily managed.

Heretics in the early church provide us especially great examples of people who sought to explain too much, to have everything figured out, neatly categorized and easily referenced, to have God in control and nicely inside their philosophical systems--they were people who lost sight of the mystery of God: of God's everlasting capacity to surprise us, to go beyond our imagination, to exceed everything we could ask or imagine. What's more, when humans beings lose the ability to accept and respond to mystery, they lose the ability to be flexible and to cope with the depths of goodness and the depths of tragedy in their own lives and the lives of others.  Wonder, I think, is our response to the presence of the ineffable, the mysterious.  Wonder, I think tends to move in one of two directions: when the thing of mystery is seen as beautiful or good, we respond to mystery with love and adoration and extreme attentiveness.  When the thing of mystery is seen as something bad, we respond with horror or hatred.  In either case, wonder and mystery take us beyond the every-day and the humdrum and into something deeper.

On a more personal note, I wither and die when I lose touch with wonder. I fall out of touch with the world, my calling, my happiness. Things become dull and grey and I can't really function all that well. The petals of my flower come to bits and fall off and I conclude of the universe, "it loves me not." I imagine that many people do not have such a dramatic reaction to losing their sense of wonder, but it is nonetheless a discouraging thing.

But what does one do when the world suddenly contracts into something explainable, predictable and entirely two-dimensional?  How does one recapture a sense of wonder that has flitted away or get back  to seeing what is more than the eye can see?  There are many things one could do or say about this, no doubt. I will relate to you a story of a couple of different ways in which God jump-started my imagination in the past year and dwell for a bit on the second of those encounters.

The first part of my saga began last fall when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out in theaters. There are many things to say about this movie, perhaps, some good, some critical--one could note the insertion of a completely extraneous "video game" style plot, for instance--and spend some time grumbling about how "Jack" would not be pleased. However, the thing that struck me the most, the thing that they got absolutely right was the sense of wonder at being in Narnia, especially seen through the eyes of Lucy Pevensie. The movie is visually stunning like her predecessors and very nicely captures the magic and beauty of life in Narnia--which is fully half the charm of Lewis' stories in the first place. Watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader reminded me that all of life was supposed to be beautiful and mysterious and imaginative and more than meets the eye. It started me questing to recover an attitude of wonder that I had lost.

But the thing that has truly inspired me over the last few months is the unexpected acquisition of another beloved science-fiction show, that is, the long-time British favourite: Dr. Who.

I have to make a few caveats. One, I gave up on science-fiction television after The X-Files went off the air in 2002. Little did I know about what was happening on the Sci-Fi channel--I had no idea about Stargate and I somehow missed Farscape and Firefly. (I also had a grudge against Joss Whedon for many reasons.  I have more or less repented.  Mostly.) It wasn't until I started seminary--ironically--that I picked up Stargate and with it some of the more recent sci-fi shows. Second, I was prejudiced against Dr. Who since high school: one of my friends who had notoriously bad taste in movies and television absolutely adored Dr. Who and I knew that meant I needed to avoid it.

Third caveat: when I saw the pilot of the reboot "Rose" I was not impressed. Evil plastic creatures enlivened by an evil plastic monster bent on enslaving humankind was not conversion material. I was fully prepared to be only "tolerant" of Dr. Who, but I been introduced to it with a group of fellow sci-fi nerds, so we ended up watching the second episode "The End of the World" which in which the principle characters of the show, the Doctor and Rose, are transported 5,000,000,000 years in the future to the day the sun goes nova and destroys the earth.

Just from watching the trailer I knew I was in completely new science-fiction territory. No other show has done this, I said to myself. In fact, no other show would do this. Its too risky--if you do something this dramatic and important and absolutely insane you feel you have to reduplicate your success. With few exceptions (Joss Whedon I now recognize as exceptional in this regard), science-fiction/fantasy shows tend to hoard their creative energy for the grand finale. There is reservation and moderation about the futures or possibilities that writers envision in order to maintain suspension of belief. You don't want to ruin something by doing something completely unbelievable.

But somehow through some magic charm or muse Dr. Who manages to break every single "rule" of the industry and get away with it. Dr. Who is a show whose creative potential seems absolutely limitless--they will tell a story about absolutely anything they can think of and somehow it always seems plausible. Somehow at the beginning of the episode and at the end of the episode I find myself saying, "Why not? Why not? How would I know? Why couldn't that be true?" And then, as the 9th Doctor likes to say, "Fantastic!"

Part of the reason why Dr. Who works so well is because of the attitude of the principle characters--especially the Doctor, but also Rose--in the first couple seasons of the reboot. The characters know the world they live in is absolutely mad and full of every kind of possibility and they are bursting at the seems with excitement that they have a chance to encounter it all. No one pretends like the things that happen aren't insane--they are insane, delightfully and sometimes dangerously so--and that's the whole point of being happy about the adventure in the first place.  And they understand the value of a "relative good".  Aristotle thought that shame was a relatively good thing in a world of people whose behavior was oftentimes blameworthy--feeling shame in certain contexts is better than not feeling shame.  C. S. Lewis once said something similar about "pain"--pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world" and thus is sometimes good.  I think he would agree that adventure and especially danger share that same status--in this mad world, its absolutely insane to encounter no danger.  Thus the Doctor and Rose are absolutely right to pursue such adventure in the face of many dangers. 

I think this taps into something we are sometimes hesitant to believe about what it means to be human. Being human involves being a part of a world in which absolutely anything could happen at any time. It involves living in a cosmos that we are hardly on the cusp of understanding the least detail of and it involves facing the unknown at every moment. We struggle mightily but labor in vain to form a construct of the universe in which everything is easily understandable and nicely under our control, but deep down inside we know that even if the cosmos is not a chaos, it is certainly not under our control and we really don't know what's going on in most of it. Modern life with all of its industrial abstraction sometimes provides for us an illusion of a life as a contained system capable of mastery . . . but that's really just boring. Life gets really interesting and really beautiful when we see the mystery and the unknown as beautiful and get excited about it.

This is why Dr. Who is such good stuff and such food for the imagination and for the soul. My current favorite set of characters are (cliche, I know) Rose and the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant). What is absolutely riveting about these two is their mutual joy in seeing what the universe has to offer. They are constantly beset by danger and adventure as they roam about time and relative dimensions in space, but somehow they have a sense that in spite of the danger it is worth it to see what life has to offer. The Doctor is a person who has spent hundreds of years roaming the cosmos and he is still thrilled to death with the newness of it all, and his friendship with Rose consists in the fact that they love it in the same way.

There is one scene that sum up nicely the sort of spirit of adventure that is at the soul of Dr. Who. One is a conversation at the end of the episode, "the Christmas Invasion" between Rose and the Doctor.  Right at the end of the episode Rose, her mother, Mickey, and the Doctor have settled down to eat Christmas Dinner only to discover that its snowing outside.  They all go out to look.


Rose: It's beautiful! What are they, meteors?

The Doctor: It's the spaceship breaking up in the atmosphere. This isn't snow. It's ash.
Rose: Okay, not so beautiful.
The Doctor: This is a brand new planet Earth. No denying the existence of aliens now. Everyone saw it. Everything's new.
Rose: And what about you? What are you going to do next?
The Doctor: Well... back to the TARDIS. Same old life.
Rose: On your own?
The Doctor: Why? Don't you want to come?
Rose: Well yeah.
The Doctor: Do you though?
Rose: Yeah.
The Doctor: Well I just thought... 'cause I changed.
Rose: Yeah, I thought 'cause you changed you might not want me anymore.
The Doctor: Oh I'd love you to come.
Rose: Okay!
Mickey: You're never going to stay, are you?
Rose: There's just so much out there. So much to see. I've got to.
Mickey: Yeah.
Jackie: Well I reckon you're mad, the pair of ya. It's like you go lookin' for trouble.
The Doctor: Trouble's just the bits in between! It's all waiting out there, Jackie. And it's brand new to me. All those planets, creatures and horizons—I haven't seen them yet. Not with these eyes. And it is gonna be... fantastic.**

(Quotations Courtesy of http://www.planetclaire.org/quotes/doctorwho/christmas-specials/christmas-invasion.php)