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Tuesday::Feb 06, 2024

Fictional Virtue

T

he excellent movie Galaxy Quest concerns the hijinks of a civilization of aliens that intercept a Star Trek-like show beamed across the universe, and attempt to copy every facet of the show using their highly advanced technology, inviting the cast of the television show to command the space craft, to much hilarity, as the aliens have no concept of fiction. The alien crew explains in the beginning that their civilization was rent by infighting and chaos before being inspired and united by the heroic virtues of the crewmembers in the "historical documents", as they call the intercepted TV show.

This trope of an innocent party taking something fictional, and turning the inspiration of that fictional object into real virtue, is one I find delightful. In Galaxy Quest, it is most prominently lived out by a particular alien who strives to live by the martial code of Alan Rickman's character's fictional race, and is driven to heroic acts of valor by this code. Similarly, in the film Ghost Dog, Forrest Whittaker's character accomplishes great (if terrible and violent) things by means of his internalizing of the Hagakure, a post-samurai text of nostalgia for a vanished era of heroes and strength. I myself recall taking courage as a young man from the Litany Against Fear, as written in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Things are purer, and easier to understand in fiction. I think it is wonderful when we can sift out virtue from examples drawn from fiction, or from distant cultures, even if badly misunderstood. The act of imagination required to desire to be more like a person-not-present sets the stage for imagining a virtue of higher calibre than that embodied by closer people. Often, these attempts at acquiring virtues fail in the long run, but -- I hate to break it to you -- so do most any attempts to acquire virtue. As far as I'm concerned, we should take it where we can get it, accusations of nostalgia or naivete or cultural appropriation be damned.



2024 01 20 :: Moral Characters