Green Lantern and Philosophy

Yep. Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape this Book [amazon] is a book. I can’t believe there is no mention of Matthew Yglesias. Not even a chapter on foreign policy.

Let’s be serious. Example: the entry on ‘serious’ from the Super Dictionary. A reference work that, of late, is slouching toward canonicity.

I think Green Lantern has just proposed Jonah Goldberg’s book for the JLA Watchtower reading group. Hence the wooden floor.

Did I mention that my daughter recently took the Super Dictionary down from the paternal shelf to look up ‘beautiful’, which she couldn’t spell well enough to Google or look up anywhere else. She prefaced her act with the angrily despairing remark: ‘I can’t believe I have to use the Super Dictionary.’ I couldn’t have been a prouder pop.

Speaking of despair, there are some other Super Dictionary entries that suggest Green Lantern-related philosophical topics. Something like: “Green Lantern, The Ethics of Suicide and the Ethics of Silence: The Transcendental Willing Subject and Tractatus 6.54″

Possibly this could be related to the later Wittgenstein in some duck-rabbit-y way.

Maybe “Green Lantern, Semantic Ambiguity and Natural Kinds”. I dunno.

Something Leibnizian-Lewisian to write here. Or maybe it’s a Swamp Man case.

Next, “The Greening of the Lantern: Environmental Philosophy and Particularist Theories of Value”:

Or “Green Lantern, Green Arrow and the Ethics and Tactics of Lying”:

By the way, is that David Broder, do you think?

But I digress. There are a lot of these philosophy and pop culture books coming out, just in this series. In principle, I’m in favor of this kind of thing, done well. (And if I really wanted to improve the field I should just haul off and answer the next call for papers, rather than grumbling from the sidelines.) But my distinct impression, having read a few of these titles and browsed several others, is that the contributors are erring on the side of sober-sided self-seriousness and, as a result, are starting to repeat themselves, among other minor disappointments.

Not that everyone needs to roll around on the floor laughing all the time, like Batman. Not that these authors fail to crack a joke, here and there. But the whole ‘comics and pop culture are dealing with serious issues, such as thinkers have thought about for centuries’ line, needs to go together with more careful address to the sorts of features that caused people to dismiss this stuff as crap for decades. Namely, the sorts of features that look like crap. Fun crap.

Too many of these articles seem to take the pop culture as occasions for taking up what look to an old hand like me like stock arguments, ideas and problems, presented in fairly stock ways – with just a little Green Lantern/Batman/Watchmen on top. This is fine for the kids, if it is just a matter of leveraging interest in pop culture into an interest in philosophy. But there doesn’t seem to be much here for anyone who is looking for a little more. (Perhaps there are some great papers in some of the pop culture and philosophy titles I haven’t read, and someone in comments can kindly inform me of their existence, and how they constitute counter-examples to my complaint.) It seems like we could do better. And the place to start is surely the place where Yglesias starts with his Green Lantern theory: namely, this is sort of a stupid power to have, as befits a B-list superhero, perhaps. And the whole thing is very suggestive of a really stupid philosophy of geopolitics.

Now, as an editor, naturally you want to avoid ‘the subject of my book is really stupid’, front and center. But that’s a mistake. Actually, you want to go there. Philosophy really is, substantially, about craziness and the peculiarly stable attraction of absurd and apparently stupid ideas and attitudes. You’ve got Green Lantern in the room. Run with it. You don’t have to advocate for stupidity. The way to connect Green Lantern with the Ring of Gyges – as I see one author has done, inevitably (not that there is anything wrong with doing inevitable things!) – is to highlight the fact that this classic Platonic myth or image is quite close to stuff that’s silly and/or the sweet sugar of really funny-dumb power fantasy. That’s the way (if any) to get the kids interested (assuming the film isn’t a bomb, which I trust it will be!) and the way to say something maybe actually new about Plato. Comics are so intensely pseudo-philosophical. It’s interesting. Because philosophy is that way, too, after all.

In fairness, I should read more than I can see in Amazon look-inside before passing judgment.