Are Superheroes Good Role Models?

Does competence and virtue set you above the law?

I know this essay is going to get me in all kinds of trouble, but I’ve never been a fan of superheroes. Superheroes are an American thing, and my formative years were spent in England. The heroes of my childhood were knights and sailors and soldiers. They were human beings. Bold and competent human beings, surely, but there was no reason why I shouldn’t have grown up to be just as bold and competent as they were. I didn’t. Not by a long chalk. But I could have. Their example lay at least in the realm of possibility. By the time I moved to North America and was introduced to superheroes, they left me cold.

I didn’t think much about them, however, until I read Caroline Furlong’s defence of them, in which she described superheroes as “good, healthy fun.” Context matters here. The purpose of Furlong’s article was not to defend superheroes in general, but to argue against one specific criticism of them, which is that they are written for ten-year-old boys. What’s wrong with that, Furlong argues. And on this, I am entirely in agreement with her. There is nothing wrong with stories written for ten-year-old boys. Some of the great works of the canon, such as The Wind in the Willows, Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book, and Swallows and Amazons, were written for ten-year-old boys. Appealing to the tastes of ten-year-old boys is, in itself, wholly laudable. I have been a ten-year-old boy for nearly sixty years, so I should know.

But among the literature written for ten-year-old boys, there is much that I think merits tolerance at best. And that would include superheroes. I certainly would not forbid them or campaign against them. No good ever comes of that. I would simply try to insert some variety into the mix. But healthy? The word was italicized in the original. Which, to my mind, is like calling a Mars bar a healthy snack. Tolerable in moderation, sure. Healthy? Not so much.

I made a comment on Furlong’s post outlining my issues with the superhero trope. What surprised me was that the people who disagreed with me didn’t argue that my analysis of the superhero trope was wrong. On the contrary, they argued that the feature of the genre that I found problematic was the very thing that they considered its main virtue, the thing that made it healthy. Not merely innocuous, but healthy. Healthy in italics. That, to me, is the interesting part, the part that says something about our attraction to particular genres, and the harm that reading one genre to the exclusion of others can do.

My reservation about the healthy nature of superheroes is twofold. First, the heroes of my youth had attainable skills and attainable virtues. Stretch goals, certainly. But a boy could really become a man of that kind if he chose to. No one can ever be a superhero. Perhaps most ten-year-olds can recognize that the super part of a superhero is a literary device and separate it from the heroic virtues it exemplifies. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this unattainable goal stalls their development, leaving them in perpetual adolescence. We are not without reasons to think this has happened to some.

But even if the boys all recognize that the super part of a superhero is a literary device, what does that device express? What does it encourage them to aspire to? In part, it is simply the will to power. Every ten-year-old boy dreams of being big and strong. Not just big and strong, but bigger and stronger than everyone else. But while fostering the will to power is not what I would call healthy, I think it is more than that. The regular hero is the best of ordinary men, but still an ordinary man. A superhero is set above ordinary men. He is a kind of god. He is set apart. He is special.

Back in the day, there were two ads in the back of just about every comic book: the 98-pound weakling who takes a muscle-building course so he can stand up to the bully who kicked sand in his face and sock him in the jaw, and the X-Ray specs that let you see through women’s clothing. Both these activities are, of course, crimes. The essence of the superhero appeal is the ability to commit such crimes with impunity.

Of course, Superman never took a peek through Lois Lane’s dress! He’s not only super strong, he’s super virtuous as well. No restraint can hold him. No fear of consequences constrains him. As the Crash Test Dummies put it, Superman could have bust through any bank in the United States, but he would not. His benevolence restrains him from doing evil.

The superhero is not bound by the law, which cannot touch him, but only by his own benevolence. He could obey the law, of course, but in practice, he never does. He commits forcible restraint and criminal assault on bad guys on a nightly basis, in clear violation of the law. He is, in other words, a vigilante. Every superhero essentially operates like Dirty Harry, outside the law, taking the law into their own hands, justifying themselves by their competence and their good intentions.

But when I pointed this out in the comments on Furlong’s article, the push back was not a denial that superheroes are vigilantes, but a fierce defence of vigilanteism. Indeed, some people seemed to see vigilanteism as part and parcel of helping people in need. One even accused me of suggesting that the Good Samaritan was wrong for helping the Jew lying beaten by the side of the road.

That’s absurd, of course, because the Good Samaritan did not violate the law. He cared for the injured man. He did not go hunting for the bandits who beat him and left him beside the road, executing extrajudicial revenge on them. Helping people in need is not vigilanteism. Hunting and killing the bad guys is vigilanteism.

But my interlocutors were seemingly quite comfortable with people hunting down the bad guys. The police aren’t always available, they argued, and the law isn’t always just. All that is required to justify vigilanteism, apparently, is that the competence and virtue of the vigilante exceed that of the police. The vigilante need not worry about due process or equality under the law; his competence and virtue set him above the law. The superhero becomes a law unto himself. His virtue does not subject him to the law; it exempts him from it. But that’s okay, because he is a good guy.

Robert Bolt’s play, A Man For All Seasons, contains this dialogue on the law.

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

But what Roper proposes is just what the vigilante and the superhero do. They cut down every law to get at the devil. That’s the trope. That’s the genre.

The danger here is not so much that it may encourage 10-year-old boys to grow up to be vigilantes. That probably won’t happen, if only because most of them will not grow up to be big enough or strong enough or brave enough to last five-minutes as a working vigilante. It is the toxic core of the vigilante ethic that is the real danger, the doctrine that the combination of competence and virtue places a person above the law.

This is a complete inversion of the old fairytale ethos that bound its heros most closely to the law. As Tolkien notes in On Fairy Stories, a fairytale is notable for the strength of its prohibitions. The princess is not exempted from her promise to marry the frog prince. Quite the contrary, her obedience to the law compels her to do it. Obedience to the law is the foundational virtue of the old stories. Somehow we have strayed from this understanding. Somehow we have come to believe that virtue exempts us from the law. Somehow we have come to teach this to our children.

It is not just superheroes, of course. We find the same pernicious idea in Harry Potter. The series lost me in book one when Harry disobeys an order not to fly his broom, does so, and, far from being punished for it, is rewarded with a place on the Quidditch team. Harry is special. He has competence and virtue. Therefore, the law does not apply to him. This pattern repeats (I am told) many times in the series. Harry Potter, like William Roper, is willing to cut down every law in England to get after Voldemort. Alas, none of his teachers displays the wisdom of Thomas More.

If we think a law is unjust, we may work to change the law. But unless it requires us to do a positive evil, we are not licensed to disobey the law while it remains in force. If anyone can disobey the law when they think they are acting in a good cause — by throwing orange paint on classic artworks and national monuments to try to bully people into boycotting oil, for instance — then there is no law at all. And then let’s see who can stand upright in the winds that blow!

But when people are arrested for these acts of vandalism, they seem astonished and offended that they are being accused of a crime. Their virtue, they seem to earnestly believe, exempts them from the law and therefore from its punishments. It was a protest, they argue, and people should be allowed to do anything they like if they are protesting for a righteous cause.

This doesn’t happen to superheroes, of course, because the law cannot touch them. And the comics have long mocked police, politicians, and journalists who criticise superhero lawbreaking. Perhaps this has something to do with why the paint tossers are so surprised at being arrested, charged, and convicted.

Is the secular state always right in the laws it makes? Is it always just and even-handed? Clearly not. But it is the entity to which the making and enforcement of laws is entrusted. States exist because it is enormously beneficial to peace and prosperity that we all live according to the same laws—man’s laws, not God’s laws—even if those laws are imperfect. Unless we are convinced that to obey a particular law would involve us in serious moral evil, we obey the laws as they are because they come from the authority entrusted with making and enforcing laws.

This is not a general critique of civil disobedience, by the way. If you consider a law to be so unjust that you feel in conscience bound to break it, by all means do so. But when you make your act of disobedience, expect and be willing to suffer the consequences of that disobedience. If your motive is to actually change the law, rather than to signal your virtue to the cameras, suffering those consequences is a far more effective strategy than dodging them. Would Nelson Mandela enjoy the quasi-sanctified status he has today without his long imprisonment? Would he have swayed world opinion the way he did if he had not shown the courage of his convictions by enduring the consequences of his disobedience?

But righteous acts of civil disobedience are not the tactic of the superhero. There’s not a lot of Biff! Pow! Smash! in peaceful civil disobedience. Far from refusing to obey an unjust law, superheroes take the law into their own hands, and, in some cases, take law-making into their own hands, justifying themselves only by their personal competence and virtue.

But why not side with competence and virtue? After all, the law, and the people who make and enforce it don’t always exemplify competence and virtue. Why shouldn’t those more competent and virtuous take law and law making into their own hands?

Well, for one thing, we tend to chronically overestimate both our competence and our virtue. If we license ourselves to break the law whenever we feel that our competence and virtue put us in the right, we are likely to make things worse rather than better because we are not nearly so competent or so virtuous as we imagine ourselves to be.

Secondly, if my competence and virtue exempt me from the law, surely the same is true of everyone else. Their competence and virtue (in which they are as confident as I am in my own) exempt them from the law too. Do you want everyone in the world acting on their own assessment of their personal competence and virtue? If that seems like a bad idea to you, then you should stand for the law, even if you sometimes chafe at its constraints or complain of its injustices.

But perhaps you don’t think this privilege should apply to others. Perhaps you feel it only applies to you. Perhaps you think that, like Harry Potter, you are special. The law applies to other people because they are ordinary. It does not apply to you, because you are special. You are the superhero, the boy who lived, the chosen one. You stand above the law. Indeed, that is the essence of what makes you special. You are special because you stand above the law, and you stand above the law because you are special. You are not a mere hero who must live by the law, but a superhero who stands above it. That is the suggestion that the superhero story makes, that Harry Potter makes: You are special, you are competent and virtuous and therefore the law does not apply to you.

Is this notion popular with ten year old boys (and girls). Of course it is. Is it healthy? Is it healthy in italics? I don’t think so.

Do I think that one Batman comic is going to turn every ten-year-old boy into a vigilante or a self-righteous paint-throwing anarchist? Do I think it is going to turn him into the sort of prig who thinks he is special and that the rules that apply to other people do not apply to him? Of course not. One candy bar won’t make you obese, and one Batman comic won’t make you a prig.

But because stories are received as experiences, the accumulated effect of many stories changes how we see the world and what we come to expect of life. Exposure to a wide variety of stories will give us a broad view of what life is like, and even if some of those stories are unhealthy in themselves, the broad perspective will not only show us that they are unhealthy, it will help us to spot and identify similarly unhealthy stories and know them for what they are: the literary equivalent of a candy bar.

But if our diet of stories becomes too narrow, we can easily be misled. A steady diet of a particular kind of story can normalize a view of life that is distinctly at odds with real life. This is not only a problem with superheroes, of course. Someone who reads nothing but romance novels may get a very warped view of human relationships, which may seriously harm their ability to form and maintain a successful marriage. Too narrow a diet of stories in any genre, from romance to literary fiction to horror, can normalize a warped view of life. Ushering readers into narrowly-defined genre ghettos may be a profitable strategy for the publishing industry, but it is not how you use stories to make people wise and brave.

Hollywood is masterful at this process of normalizing by repetition. It has changed many of our attitudes to things by the simple device of showing the same thing as normal over and over again in many shows and movies. A genre does not even have to be based on a false idea of human life to warp our view of life. Seeing only one part of life, even if true in itself, can warp our view of the whole. What is required, if we are to see life full and whole, if we are to allow stories to do their necessary work of making us wise and brave, is a varied diet of stories: something from each of the genres.

Of course, it is in the nature of children to find one thing and obsess about it for a while. This is not necessarilly a bad thing. It teaches them how to go into depth on a subject. In this sense, the notion that superheroes are written for ten-year-old boys is right on the money. That is just the age at which superheroes are likely to start appealing to a boy. And little harm will come to him if, for a while, he reads nothing else. But if he gets to twenty or thirty and has read nothing else, great harm may have been done to him and to his understanding of life by that too-narrow story diet.

Superheroes as occasional confections in a varied story diet are harmless enough, just as a healthy varied diet has room for a chocolate bar now and then. But let’s not overstate the case by calling them healthy, or imagining that they do anything to make us wise or brave.