The Right Questions

“Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be clever. Some people are born clever, the way some people are born beautiful. I’m not one of those people. I’ve had to work at it. If there’s a question, I have to know the right answer.”

Starter for 10 (2006)

This little guy seemed vaguely adorable enough to merit a role as this post’s cover picture, considering that anything explicitly University-Challenge-related would definitely be copyrighted.

 This past week, my current flatmate and I, having realised that this year’s series of University Challenge started just a few weeks ago, have passed more than one thoroughly enjoyable half-hour catching up on it and keeping score of our own correct answers while eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that was coincidentally on offer in Sainsbury’s this week.¹ University Challenge is, hands down, the most fun to watch of any quiz show out there, because, while knowing the right answer is a pleasing enough moment when watching any quiz show, the fiendishly abstruse questions that populate University Challenge make distinctly more satisfying conquests, so much so that I tend to feel the satisfaction of said conquests easily outweighs their comparative rarity. After all, even understanding what Jeremy Paxman is actually asking is an achievement not to be sniffed at; being able to inform one’s television screen that the right answer is 2003 or Trimalchio or Antigua and Barbuda or a circumflex accent or the Borgias² or whatever it may happen to be, and then to have one’s declaration confirmed, is a pleasing victory indeed.

That said, University Challenge is far from the only setting in which it’s pleasing to know the right answer. It’s pleasing to come face to face, upon opening an exam paper, with the topic one managed to revise most thoroughly; it’s pleasing to inform a friend of the latest news about some matter of mutual interest; it’s pleasing to make a connection that has your Bible study leader nodding enthusiastically and telling the group to turn to the relevant pages of some obscure minor prophet. Everybody likes being right, especially when being right is particularly impressive.

And, for us academic types, I think being right can often become something in which we base no small part of our identity, even of our Christian identity. Being able to make that minor-prophet connection, or to correctly define some grand theological term almost certainly ending in ‘–tion’, or to compellingly explain a Biblically-informed perspective on a particular burning ethical issue of the moment, can easily become the basis on which I assure myself that I’m doing all right in spiritual matters. It’s one of a thousand subtle ways in which I drift into a salvation-by-means-of-my-own-deeds mindset – I say subtle because these genuinely are all very good and commendable things to be able to do, so it’s not the kind of wrongdoing one can immediately identify as such and run from accordingly. The place the trouble arises is when my pride causes me to believe that I can present my ability to know the right answer to God as a means of gaining his approval.

It’s a rookie mistake – pretty much the rookie mistake of the Christian faith – and yet we’re surely all still making it in one way or another. We always have been and always will be incapable through our own efforts of attaining to the level of perfection necessary for God to approve of us, regardless of the sphere in which those efforts are exerted. Think about it: God knows everything; we have, in our wrongdoing and rebellion, disdained knowledge of him; and it’s only by the work of his Spirit in us that we’re able to really understand anything about him at all. And in light of all that, I somehow still get it in my head that my knowledge of him will in some way impress him such that he will refrain from punishing me as my offences against him deserve. It’s mad. And, more to the point, it’s a staggeringly insecure foundation on which to base my being right with God. Even if I could gain access to him by knowing the right answers, nobody could possibly know the right answers all the time. Even last year’s Peterhouse Cambridge University Challenge team, who won the series with a phenomenal victory over St. John’s Oxford,³ once memorably forfeited an entire round of bonus questions by admitting they didn’t have the faintest idea.⁴ Our human brains are very limited: there’s only so much information they can take in, and even then they view it at a skewed angle.

Plus, even on those occasions when one does know the right answer, it isn’t necessarily enough. In Starter for 10, a film whose plot heavily features protagonist Brian fulfilling his childhood ambition of appearing on University Challenge, Brian at one point finds himself left alone with a list of answers for the final round in which he is about to compete. He only sneaks a peek at one before he stops himself, but he then gets over-excited when that particular question comes up and buzzes in so early that his having cheated is obvious, so that his team ends up disqualified. Clearly, there are circumstances under which merely knowing the right answer does one no good at all. It’s all very well, for instance, to be able to give a lovely dictionary definition of the doctrine of justification, but that doesn’t mean one necessarily has any substantial sense of the implications of that doctrine for one’s own life. The Bible calls such lack of putting into practice deceiving oneself, comparing it to staring at one’s face in a mirror and then immediately forgetting one’s appearance.⁵ The point is that a faith of mere words and knowledge – of merely knowing the right answer – is no faith at all; real faith reshapes who we are and so what we do in accordance with our convictions.

So if there’s no security to be found in my ability to give the right answer, where do I turn? Well, Brian’s conclusion was that sometimes, it’s not about knowing the right answer; sometimes, it’s about asking the right questions. That seems like a pretty solid claim. To be determined always to know the right answer is to set oneself up as the highest authority around, which doesn’t seem like a very good idea in light of those human limitations I mentioned a moment ago. Earnestly to ask a question of someone, on the other hand, is to recognise one’s limitations, and in some way to subordinate oneself to that person’s authority by requiring something of him or her.

So what, according to Brian, is the right question? “Do you think you could forgive me? for all the mistakes, all the wrong answers.” Well, look at that – he’s hit the nail on the head. I’d say that, or a variation thereupon, is just about the most important question any of us can ask. The only snag is that he’s asking the wrong person. While the forgiveness of his love interest Rebecca Epstein is certainly a nice thing for Brian to have, at the end of the day she’s just another human being. Her limitations are as constraining as his own, and it’s not to her authority that Brian really needs to subordinate himself. The person to whom we really need to admit that we don’t have all the answers, is the one person who does have all the answers; the person to whose authority we need to first and foremost submit, is the one person who has authority over everything else; and the person whose forgiveness we need most, is the one person able to forgive us for and absolve us of all our wrongdoing.

In short, it’s only by asking the right questions – and by asking them of the right person – that one can ever actually get to know the right answers. Ask God, “Do you think you could forgive me? For all the mistakes, all the wrong answers,” and he’ll not only reply with a resounding ‘yes’ – every mistake and every wrong answer has been paid for by the priceless sacrifice Jesus made of himself on the cross – but start reshaping you so that you become able to discern the right answers. Still, knowing the right answers – being able to make those connections and define those terms and explain those issues – is perhaps best seen as little more than a side effect. The greatest prize God offers us isn’t after all, the opportunity to get to know the right answers; it’s the opportunity to get to know him.

Footnotes

¹ If you fancy doing the same of an evening, all this series’ episodes are currently available on iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006t6l0?suggid=b006t6l0. As for the Ben & Jerry’s, I expect you’re a better authority than me on the location of your local Sainsbury’s.

² I don’t think the proper video for Horrible Histories’ Borgia Family song is available online, but here’s a lyric video some kind human has made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72wLS-C9Po0.

³ If you’d like to relive the moment (and the endless maths questions), you’re fortunate that some thoughtful human has uploaded the episode to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cakkI0uWXs.

⁴ I can’t remember when, so you’ll just have to take my word that it definitely happened. Or maybe it happened in that final episode linked to in the previous footnote; I didn’t rewatch to check…

⁵ That’s from towards the end of James 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+1&version=ESVUK. You really ought to check it out, or who knows? I might be interpreting it all wrong.

Recipe for a Super Superhero

Ms. Marvel:        You’re WOLVERINE! … My Wolverine-and-Storm-in-space fanfic was the third-most upvoted story on Freaking Awesome last month! I had you guys fighting this giant alien blob that farts wormholes!

Wolverine:         Sounds great, kid. Wait – so what was the most upvoted story?

Ms. Marvel:        Umm … Cyclops and Emma Frost’s romantic vacation in Paris?

Wolverine:         This is the worst day of my life.

Ms. Marvel #6 (2014)

 

This guy could do with putting a bit more effort into his costume, I reckon.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of superheroes. Some, however, as one might expect, I like more than others, and what’s more, I think I may have worked out some broad reasons why. This week, therefore, I present for your consideration the top three characteristics, in descending order of importance, that I like to see displayed in a superhuman protagonist when I settle down with a film or a comic book.

1) Virtue

Essentially what I mean by this is a determination to do the right thing, which, in a way, seems to me a component part of the superhero premise: if to be ‘super’ is to possess special abilities beyond those of any normal human, then to be a superhero is surely to use those extraordinary abilities for the benefit of others. Some characters within the genre, however – Deadpool would seem the most obvious example – seem to have basically no interest in using their powers for good, and frankly it leaves me wondering why exactly I’m supposed to be rooting for this guy. What satisfaction is there in a supposed good guy beating a supposed bad guy if there actually seems to be very little moral distance between the two? The potency of a given character’s ‘super’ component, moreover, increases the necessity of his or her ‘hero’ component. Consider Superman: his powers are so ludicrously great that, without some kind of moral restraint on his part to check them, he could destroy the earth in an afternoon if the fancy took him, which isn’t exactly a recipe for engaging reading. Take away a hero’s intent to save people, and there’s nothing at stake any more. Chaos reigns. The Joker has won.

The classic paragon of the kind of Virtue I’m talking about would have to be Captain America. Unlike a lot of people, I really enjoyed The First Avenger,¹ partly because it was great fun to see Marvel engaging with its own history – a real fictional World War II patriotic icon becomes a fictional real World World II patriotic icon, if you see what I mean – but partly because Steve Rogers is just heart-meltingly Virtuous in it. I’m a particular fan of the scene where a fake grenade is thrown at Steve’s military unit as part of a training exercise; everyone else flings himself as far away from it as possible, but Steve jumps right on top of it to protect the others, even though they’ve been mercilessly bullying him from day one.² Radical courage and chivalry and self-sacrifice – now there’s a guy I can root for. There’s a guy I’m pleased to see gain superpowers.³

That’s not to say I see no room for moral questions and uncertainties in superhero fiction; on the contrary, they’re one of my favourite features. The recent third instalment of the Captain America film franchise, enjoyable as it was, did nothing close to justice to the impossible moral dilemma presented in the Civil War story arc in the comic books. In the latter, the whole thing kicks off because a bunch of C-list superheroes nobody’s heard of accidentally blow up an elementary school; a law requiring anyone with superpowers to register with the government, the Superhuman Registration Act, is put in place, and the whole vast plethora of superhumans in the Marvel comics universe is split down the middle as they choose to obey or defy it.⁴ Moral questions abound: is it right for Spider-man to comply with the Act even though revealing his identity immediately puts his loved ones in danger? Is it wrong for Tony Stark to arrangement the imprisonment of unregistered superhumans without trial even though they won’t reveal their identities so that they can be put on trial? Similarly, a large part of the appeal of Batman – not technically a superhero, but let’s not split hairs – is the difficulty our hero faces concerning what the right thing even is in the dark and shady world of an incurably corrupt Gotham. The first series of the television programme Gotham, which follows a young Jim Gordon trying to maintain his integrity as the Gotham City Police Department’s newest recruit, is a particularly effective exploration of the issues surrounding that corruption.⁵ But such exploration only works because of the tension between Jim’s upright intentions and the murkiness of the situation he finds himself in. If our protagonist has no Virtue to be challenged or tested, there are no moral questions to be asked.

Granted, superheroes should sometimes get things wrong and make poor decisions, just like the rest of us – see my third point – but they should have enough of a will to do rightly that one really does want them to win. I felt rather wounded upon hearing that a recent Captain America storyline revealed him to have been a Hydra agent all along.⁶ (The theory that it’s actually that comic book’s writer who is the Hydra agent, although only invented to comfort a distraught child, is a pretty appealing one.⁷)

2) Wit

So Captain America comes out on top with respect to the most important of my three qualities, he does rather less well regarding the second, hence why I can only call him my third-favourite superhero. I want superhero fiction to entertain me; I want it to be funny, and that requires the protagonist to have a decent amount of Wit. Cap may get the occasional amusing one-liner, but he’s generally too (adorably) earnest and straightforward to maintain any level of hilarity worth mentioning.

My top example of a Witty superhero would be Spider-man. Think, for instance, of the “My weakness – it’s small knives!” scene in The Amazing Spider-man,⁸ or the airport fight scene in Civil War.⁹ Reasonably early Spider-man comics display our hero’s penchant for amusing badinage with his opponents particularly effectively, as said opponents frequently adopt a rather pretentious, semi-archaised tone – exclaiming, “Fool!” and the like – that provides an excellent foil for Spider-man’s sharp and down-to-earth Wit. And the nice thing about Spider-man is that he does rather well – if not quite as well as Cap – on the Virtue front as well; with great power comes great responsibility and all that jazz.

If Virtue is what makes me want a superhero to win, Wit is what makes me want to watch him or her doing it. There’s only so much amusement to be had purely from our hero punching people in the face, but if he or she can make entertaining remarks while punching people in the face, that takes the fun to a whole new level.

3) Relatability

This is another category in which Spider-man does very well, which, all taken together, explains why I normally cite him as my favourite superhero. Peter Parker is, for many of the storylines in which he features, a student who struggles to pay his rent, to arrive on time to class, to explain his mysterious absences to his friends and family. I remember one storyline in which his identity is almost exposed because someone steals his civilian clothes from where he had webbed them to a wall while engaging in some costumed crime-fighting. Peter Parker has to deal with all the practical issues thrown up by his double life, and that creates a real empathy for him as a character.

On the one hand, superheroes are very pointedly not like the rest of us. On the other, however, it’s more fun to follow the story of someone one can relate to on some level. Heroes without secret identities, who spend all their time in the world of their heroics, can sometimes feel too far removed from my own experiences for me to really care about what happens to them. They need something to temper their superness. I suppose it doesn’t have to similarity to my own experiences per se; anything that lends a hero vulnerability can be sufficient for the job in the right circumstances. Consider how much less fun the film Thor would have been had Thor not been stripped of his hammer, exiled, and forced to negotiate the trials of modern life on Earth as a total fish out of water.¹⁰ While that’s obviously not something that has ever actually happened to me, it brought this crazy high-powered alien somewhere closer to my level (as well as being very funny to watch).

The prize for Relatability, however, has to go to the newest Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, who comes a close second to Spider-man among my favourite superheroes. She’s only had a short run of comics so far, but I’m quietly hoping she’ll show up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some stage, unlikely as it seems. Kamala is essentially a teenage fangirl of the Avengers who finds herself suddenly bestowed with superhuman abilities of her own. Her idol Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers, asks her what she wants from life, and she replies, “I want to be you,” basically meaning she wants to be generally very impressive and attractive and kickass, for want of a better word – but then she has an opportunity to save a life and realises that, although she does want to be like Captain Marvel, the way in which she really wants to be like her is by saving people. So that’s a tick in the box for Virtue; Kamala doesn’t do too badly on the Wit front either; and she has the ultimate claim to Relatability, because she herself is, by virtue of being a huge superhero fan, definitively the exact same kind of person as her readers – and she encounters a whole string of entertaining Peter-Parker-esque practical problems as well, only intensified by the fact that she still lives with her parents.¹¹

Now, clearly this list isn’t definitive of desirable qualities in superheroes, and clearly there’s room within the whole vast world of superhero fiction for characters who do badly in one or more of the categories given – but it’s in these categories that a hero has to excel to stand a chance of snagging a spot on my favourites list (a coveted honour, I feel sure). With a whole batch of new superhero films scheduled for release in the next few years,¹² I’ll be interested to see whether any of their protagonists prove Virtuous, Witty, and Relatable enough to dislodge Captain America, Ms. Marvel, or even Spider-man from their positions in my top three...

Footnotes

¹ Although I won’t deny the Honest Trailer for it made some pretty sound (and amusing) points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ist0v3Xhqzk.

² Some thoughtful human has uploaded said scene to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2sPHpou98.

³ And if I go all melty at that, it’s really no surprise that the radical self-sacrifice that my Lord Jesus displayed by undergoing on my behalf the worst punishment possible, namely separation from his Father, leaves me not altogether infrequently a tear-stained emotional wreck (in the best possible way). I read Psalm 22 the other day – the one whose opening line Jesus quoted while on the cross – and was bowled over by the notion that even at that moment, he was concerned with giving his Father due praise: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+22&version=ESVUK. Hey, if you’re allowed to cry at films, you’re definitely allowed to cry at this jazz.

⁴ There are a few bits and pieces available to look at on the Marvel website to give you a flavour: http://marvel.com/comics/events/238/civil_war.

⁵ You can get it on Netflix, or it’s sometimes on on Channel 5, though I never seem to be able to figure out when: http://www.channel5.com/show/gotham.

⁶ No, really: http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/25/media/captain-america-marvel-comics-hydra/index.html. Granted, I have no idea how the storyline has progressed from then onwards. You can’t expect me to keep up with everything…

⁷ That one I heard by word of mouth, so no reference, I’m afraid.

⁸ Fancy a rewatch? Well, lucky for you, someone has thoughtfully uploaded the scene to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD6nxu8cNIA.

⁹ This compilation of particularly good Spider-man-featuring moments from the film should serve to remind you of how brilliantly the character lightened its tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iu5TnvEUs8.

¹⁰ One of my favourite scenes to that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VQPS7qOJ_A.

¹¹ Again, the odds and ends available on Marvel’s website should give you something of a flavour should you wish to peruse them: http://marvel.com/comics/series/18468/ms_marvel_2014_-_2015.

¹² A list of upcoming Marvel films has been helpfully compiled by Den of Geek: http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/marvel/237462/full-marvel-movie-release-calendar.