One of the most significant ideas to come out of Western civilization is the notion that spiritual vitality enters into the life of society through single individuals who care about goodness. Contrary to a common perception, Plato did not tell us to seek knowledge alone, but knowledge of the Good.
Socrates and Jesus may be viewed as archetypes of those who show us how to do this. Socrates, for example, tells us we ought to seek “the most important things,” and Jesus tells us that if we live his way, we will be living the highest form of spiritual life.
One of the specific claims repeatedly made by the archetypical representatives of such ways of living is that they are never to be identified with the dominant opinions about happiness or good citizenship.
Socrates and Jesus indicate that if anyone desires to follow their “way”, that person cannot also continue to simply follow the beaten path.
The suggestion that the common opinions about happiness and good citizenship alone can never lead me to what I really need and want is the most significant challenge to the citizens of modern Western societies.
I take this challenge to be much needed by Americans in particular. American civilization has been highly functional largely because it has led even the most thoughtful among us to assume that there is only a difference of degree between those ways of life which make us happy and successful citizens and the “way” a Socrates or Jesus would tell us is needed in order to live a deeply good and meaningful life.
One of the most unusual traits of American civilization is that its intellectual class tends to, on the whole, make this assumption as well. While not many intellectuals in America seek to understand and impart insight about “the most important things” which are of a moral-spiritual nature, somewhat surprisingly, an unexpected source of such insights has emerged: Hollywood.
A variety of both TV shows and films have been portraying individuals seeking to live a deeper life than is offered by American civilization’s ethos of radical individualism and civic religion.
The first mitigates against moral depth or spiritual seeking, while the second by its essentially political nature must remain spiritually shallow. It may be that in response to this problem, some TV and filmmakers have taken to assisting us in seeing that we need to seriously reflect on our ways of living.
I first noticed this trend with “Picket Fences” in the early ’90s. Then came “Northern Exposure.” Even “The X-Files,” ostensibly a science-fiction series about a Cartesian “truth out there” of which the protagonist only wants knowledge, showed us that life is in the seeking and not the finding of some external reality.
Next came the series, “Six Feet Under,” whose finale left me in awe. Among films of the same type I count “American Beauty,” the first two films in the “Matrix” series, “Big Fish,” “Pleasantville,” “The Truman Show,” “Magnolia,” “Mind the Gap,” “Donnie Darko,” “Spanglish,” “Romero” and last year alone, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Little Children” and “Into the Wild.”
While American critics and intellectuals largely miss the spiritual aspect of these shows and films, some among us are receptive and will benefit from them as guideposts along their way.
If these guideposts help a few to gain what I call the “needed insights,” they might in turn reveal to others in our society that seeking for and caring about the Good is not useless after all, but the most important thing we can do.
Terence Hoyt is a professor in the philosophy department and can be reached at [email protected].
