Superhero Values (2021) By Lyn Cox Revised and Expanded for the Washington Ethical Society, February 21, 2021
Earlier, you gave some advice to “Human Person” (a fictional superhero who “visited” earlier in the Platform) about compassion, understanding, and commitment, which are easier words to say than to practice. It helps to have role models, even if their stories didn’t happen exactly in the way they are told. It seems to me that mythology, fiction, and maybe even history can supply us with examples of values we can agree on. Stories that have captured our imaginations in the past may remind us of the people we hope to become.
When I was a kid, Batman was the lead character in some of those stories. He showed up in comic books and Pez dispensers, but the most influential form of Batman from my childhood was the Adam West character on television. When I was six or seven years old, the other kids who went to my babysitter and I used to run around the yard chasing super villains, pretending the basement steps were the Bat Cave, and generally doing our part for the good of Gotham City. We all traded roles as the heroes, heroines, and the various arch-nemeses.
I learned a couple of things from the Bat-team. I learned that superheroes have origin stories, events that changed the direction of their lives. You might not be able to tell from looking at them, especially in their secret identities, but every superhero has a past. The Bat-team also taught me that superheroes struggle with power. Whether the super skills come from hard work, cool gadgets, or another planet, heroes have to figure out the most effective and responsible way to use those skills. Finally, I learned that superheroes form coalitions. Batman and Robin and Batgirl worked together, not to mention Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara. Even an independent vigilante needs other people for the toughest problems.
Come to think of it, those same things are true for all of us. Each of us has to decide how to respond to the past. Individually and as a group, we are faced with questions of power and responsibility. Teaming up with other people is a source of strength, in spite of and perhaps because of our differences. I think these characteristics of superheroes call attention to WES’s future as a community.
Heroes Have Origins
First, superheroes have origin stories. Some event from the past sparked the character’s discovery of talents and passions, leading to a new sense of identity and purpose. Those events might be associated with death or separation from a loved one, or with the loss of the character’s pre-heroic dreams.
Superman’s powers come from his extra-planetary birth, but his ideas about truth, justice, and the American way come from Martha and Jonathan Kent. There is some speculation that Superman’s creators (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) modeled him after Moses, a baby whose people faced destruction, and was carried in a small vessel to a land where his birth identity had to be concealed.
There is a category of stories in which the characters have qualities that were typical in their place of origin, but something called them to help people in a world similar to our own, where their profound difference turned out to be a gift. Wonder Woman, Black Panther, AquaMan, and Valkyrie fall into this category.
On the other hand, some superheroes start off with an event of pain or trauma, like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite to become Spiderman. Batman’s path is a response to trauma. In the Watchmen mini-series on HBO, one of the characters’ commitment to justice came from being a survivor of the 1921 white supremacist attack on Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan is mainly in this category, having gained her powers during an unusual event.
Whatever the story, most extra-human comic book characters have faced a life-changing event that seems to isolate them from important people in their lives. Often, the character will acquire or discover or place new value on a gift or a talent they have during that experience. Picking up these pieces of loss, loneliness, and strength, the character eventually forges a new sense of purpose.
Michael Servetus (Miguel Serveto) is someone from history whose story follows this pattern a bit. He wasn’t always brave, and he wasn’t known for being kind, but he did set himself apart and commit his life to the truth as he saw it. I wouldn’t necessarily call him a Humanist, but he was a free thinker in that he defied the orthodoxy of his time, and his sacrifices made it possible for the people who came after him to do even more questioning of creeds, dogmas, and oppressive religious organizations.
When Servetus read the Bible for himself for the first time as a young student in the 1520s, he was shocked to discover no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1531, he published a tract, De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity), seemingly convinced that people would see it his way if only they would listen. That’s not what happened. He was run out of town, his books were confiscated, and the Supreme Council of the Inquisition started looking for him.
This is where the secret identity comes in. Servetus fled to Paris and assumed the name of Michel de Villeneuve. He had a varied career as de Villeneuve, first as an editor and publisher, then as a doctor. He worked on a seven-volume edition of the Bible, adding insightful footnotes. He was the first European to publish about the link between the pulmonary and respiratory systems.
During his time as the personal physician for the Archbishop of Vienne, he secretly worked on his next theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). He also struck up a correspondence with his old classmate, John Calvin. Servetus was not diplomatic in his criticisms of Calvin’s writing, and Calvin broke off correspondence. Servetus seemed to think that their exchange was illuminating, because he included copies of the letters when he sent an advance copy of the Restitutio to Geneva.
The publication of the Restitutio in 1553 marked the end of Servetus’ secret identity. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities pursued him as a dangerous heretic. He was burned at the stake on October 27, 1553, by the order of The Council of Geneva. Reportedly, he maintained his beliefs until the end, shouting heretical prayers from the flames. The Catholic Inquisition in France burned Servetus in effigy a few months later. There were a lot of people who didn’t want his ideas to be heard. Luckily for us, a few copies of his books were preserved, and went on to generate new ideas among religious reformers for over 450 years.
Now, I’m not saying Michael Servetus was a superhero. It might be hard to identify with him in some ways. Though he had ideas that were called Unitarian at the time, Unitarian Universalists oday would disagree with most of what he wrote, as would most Ethical Culturists. His creeds don’t match most of our beliefs; though some of his deeds, such as challenging authority and being a medical provider, might resonate. Nevertheless, we can see how a turning point in someone’s life can bring isolation, energy, purpose, abilities, and vulnerabilities, all at the same time. His origins were more like Spiderman than Superman: Being in the right place at the right time, Servetus was bitten by the free thinking bug. He had to adopt an alter ego, but the bug also afforded him the drive and the insight to make great contributions to scholarship and religious freedom.
How often is it the same for those of us who are regular folks? The events that make us who we are may bring a sense of loss or loneliness. These same events may bring a chance for us to develop new talents, or personal connection to the work we aspire to do. Passion and vulnerability can come from a single point in time.
The thing that sets a superhero origin story apart from a villain origin story is how the character translates their past into a future of meaning and purpose. Most of us are not consistently villains or heroes; we have to choose in every moment how to draw from our past to make choices in the present. We can’t control the historical facts of our origin stories. Even if our own choices led to the turning points in our lives, they are in the past now. What we can do is bring our values to the way we understand those turning points, and to our decisions about what to do with the gifts we have now. Let’s do our best to choose to use our origins well.
Heroes Form Coalitions
The very first appearance of Spiderman (in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962) saw the teenage Peter Parker misusing his new powers, only to have his negligence contribute to the death of his Uncle Ben, one of his adoptive parents. Peter’s understanding of Ben’s teaching that “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” shaped his character from then on. The spider counterparts from other universes, heroes like Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales, also have turning points on that theme.
Superhero characters struggling with power and responsibility would have benefitted from reading about James Luther Adams, who was a professor at Harvard during the 1950s and 1960s. Adams had a great deal to say about power and what that meant for the responsibilities of movements for liberation.
Between 1927 and the late 1930s, Adams made several trips to Germany, a country that was renowned for philosophical scholarship. He spoke with religious and academic leaders, was detained for questioning by the Gestapo, and developed a sense of urgency about the political, cultural, moral, and spiritual crisis that went along with the rise of the Nazi party. While Adams developed great respect for the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement, he noticed that Germany’s churches as a whole were not pushing back against the crisis.
Adams said that individual and organized philosophy should be “examined.” There must be a path for critique, self-correction, and development. Adams wrote, “the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power.”
In that same period when Adams was noticing trends of power, organization, and responsibility in Germany, Humanists in the United States were also teaming up. The roots of some of these relationships went back to the Free Religious Association, which was the group where Felix Adler hung around with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. The FRA led to another trend called the “Ethical Basis” group within Unitarianism.
I’m drawing here from The Humanist Way: An Introduction to Ethical Humanist Religion, a book by former WES Senior Leader Ed Ericson. Ericson writes that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethical Basis bloc had successfully advocated that inclusion as either a member or a clergy person in Unitarian congregations be purely on an ethical basis rather than having any doctrinal basis. Ericson continues:
They resisted all attempts to impose any theological requirement, however broadly such a test might be construed. Like Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture, the Ethical Basis Unitarians regarded the dedicated ethical life to be inherently religious without any necessary underpinning of theological belief. This concurrence of views resulted in a close working relationship between the leaders of the Ethical Societies of Chicago and St. Louis and their ministerial counterparts in the Western Unitarian Conference.
(Ericson, The Humanist Way, p. 46-47)
Ericson goes on to say that, while this cohort was concentrated in the midwest, Octavius Brooks Frothingham in New York also largely shared Adler’s philosophy. Ericson also points out that the Ethical Basis cohort provided “a seedbed where organized religious Humanism, under that name, would first put down roots in American soil,” making this development of interest to Ethical Humanism. So, already at the turn of the century, there is some superhero teaming up going on. It gets better!
In 1913, the Unitarian minister John H. Dietrich began using the term “Humanism” to identify his non-theistic philosophy of religion. Dietrich said that he first encountered the term as a religious designation in the text of a lecture delivered to the London Ethical Society (Ericson, p. 61). Ericson writes that “the Ethical Union in Britain had described their movement by the turn of the century.” Ethical Culture in the United States started identifying more closely as a unique expression within the broader Humanist movement a little later, not until after Adler’s death in 1933. At that point, they found a whole league’s worth of Humanists to team up with.
But back to Dietrich, who discovered that his colleague Curtis Reese in Chicago was writing about the same kind of philosophy. Having found each other, they attracted others to the growing Humanist movement. By 1927, they had connected with scientists, philosophers, and journalists, who collectively were turning out what Ericson describes as “a torrent of books, articles, sermons and lectures” (p. 67) that established Humanism as a significant force in American society. In 1933, thirty-four of these prominent figures signed on to The Humanist Manifesto.
Later groups wrote the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973 and the Humanist Manifesto III of 2003. The original 1933 document set a historic precedent, bringing together people from a variety of perspectives and settings. Unitarian and Universalist ministers were well represented, along with V.T. Thayer, Director of the Ethical Culture Schools of New York, plus A. Eustace Haydon and Lester Mondale, who later became Ethical leaders (Ericson, p. 70).
I would suggest that the Washington Ethical Society, by affiliating with both the Unitarian Universalist Association and the American Ethical Union, is living out the spirit of cooperation that has powered the Humanist movement in the United States from its inception. Ethical Humanism is a unique expression and tradition within the larger Humanist movement, and yet that larger movement remains important for understanding who we are and what we are here to do. We come to a deeper understanding of identity and mission when we team up.
In fiction, superheroes seem to gravitate to one another. From the X-Men to the Avengers to the Teen Titans, collections of lead characters become ensembles. They have very different abilities and outlooks. Teaming up isn’t always easy, and it can be risky. Household squabbles may become epic battles if super abilities get out of hand. However, when they combine their gifts in the same direction, they can tackle complex problems that none of them would be able to handle alone.
This is why we form coalitions, too. WES is a community of people who have many differences in your individual lives. Diversity in creed and unity in deed, WES members are able to learn together, make music together, serve the community, and witness for justice, without worrying too much about who is an atheist or an agnostic or a theist or a polytheist. Whether among members, or in coalition with our neighbors across religious or geographic lines, we are able to put differences aside as we work for the benefit of our shared community. It does happen, though, that human beings forget, or retreat into what we think is a bubble of sameness, or narrow our scope of what seems possible.
Let’s build on what is already going well as we resist the shrinking of our horizons. There may be partners in our community that we have yet to meet. There may be institutes for exceptional heroes, or halls of justice, that we have to overcome our internalized hurdles of classism and racism before we can join.
At the very least, we can ensure that we’re making the most of our super team here at WES. Like the superheroes, we can do more and support each other when we come together.
Conclusion
There is a lot that WES has in common with an assembly of superheroes. Each one of us has an origin story, a set of events that shaped our talents, passions, and vulnerabilities. Each one of us has the opportunity to shape that story into a life of meaning and purpose. Like superheroes, it is incumbent on us to come to terms with power. Our collective abilities and assets make us a force to be reckoned with, and it is up to us to do the moral discernment to make sure we’re doing a good job wielding that power. Our honesty with each other and practicing all of our shared values and commitments will help. Like the best superheroes, we form alliances. Within the WES community, we share our specialized powers and support one another to accomplish goals none of us could handle alone. In our coalitions with other groups, we build bridges that support compassion. May all that has been divided be made whole.
May it be so.