A hallmark of middle-brow entertainment is the good guys' reluctance to resort to winning tactics. While the bad guys rack up a body count, the heroes are preoccupied with stuff like "we can't become like them." They treat winning as optional and, when inevitably defeated, find a sick kind of solace in moral victory.
I was reminded of this while watching The Dark Knight, an otherwise great movie. Bruce Wayne mopes about "what I would have to become to stop men like him" (i.e., the Joker). When he has the Joker in his sights in the middle of one of the Joker's murder sprees, he goes out of his way to not kill him. The stupidity of this decision overshadows the rest of the movie.
I look at this as a symptom of the West's identity crisis. After two world wars drawn out over 30 years, emergent cultural trends ran strongly against the concepts of identity, particularly religious, ethnic, and national identity. We were no longer a people united by a shared history, but a people defined by nebulous ideals. The test of a people shifted from their cohesion and longevity to whether they live up to their ideals. At the tip of the spear it manifests as ostensible warriors making tactical decisions as if tactics were all that differentiated them from the enemy!
You'll sometimes hear this called the post-war liberal consensus. The catastrophe of this change became evident when the first generation to be raised in this culturally rudderless environment, the Boomers, rose up in the '60s. When you kill God and stunt a man's drive to fight for king and country, you end up with fewer heroes. (See CS Lewis's great book, The Abolition of Man.) But just because heroes are not in fashion doesn't mean we don't need them.
In a fight against evil, it is enough to know whose side you are on and what you are fighting for. The rest is details. In Bruce Wayne's case, he is defending his city. The Joker is sowing death and chaos. It's difficult to understand with any moral logic why Bruce Wayne is so resistant to killing in this context. He comes across as a navel-gazing dufus.
It's the kind of mistake that could only be made in the fog of the post-war liberal consensus. Under this rubric, the enemy isn't the barbarian killing innocent people, it's us in our inability to live up to our public ideals. But who does? And what sense does it make for the perfect to war against the good while evil runs rampant?
I'll add this caveat. There is a real battle against evil that should not be ignored. The ultimate battleground is in the spiritual realm, and in that sense we should guard our hearts from the devil. Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:12:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
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