Decent Men In An Indecent Time

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

A real hero would've chosen an iPhone. 

Last week, I used the above quote in regards to The Circle, but it really stuck with me after writing that post. Not to get bleak here, but morality and its ramifications are some of the most fascinating psychologcal creations of humanity, and exploring such a topic basically writes a post by itself. So are my self-serving goals immoral? We'll see. 

Harvey Dent speaks those words several times throughout The Dark Knight, sounding more and more ominous as he completes his own tragic fall to villainy. Of course, the rascals of the Internet wasted no time in turning them into a meme, typically used when public figures suffer some embarrassing incident that disgraces them in peoples' eyes. 

Yikes... 

Most people have beliefs about what's right and wrong, many of them being universal across time and culture. Harvey, too, has a strong moral compass; he's viewed as so pure and incorruptible that even Batman considers retiring to let him carry on his good deeds. Harvey is also consistently referred to as a "white knight", heroic and untarnished, which makes his descent into evil all the more tragic. But the true tragedy is that Harvey represents all of us; we all try to live by a moral code, and show our "true" selves when that code is stripped away, leaving our actions uninhibited. Such is the impact that morality has on our daily lives. 

But even today, there's still no clear definition for such a powerful force. Some see morality in a communal way; actions that are regarded as right, good, etc. Others have proposed the view that morality is subjective, and that each person should follow their own personal code and live by their own rules. These two views clash, of course, because the judgement of one person may not be the same as most of society's. Generally, we see killing someone else as wrong. But if the person you killed had done something unspeakably horrible to you, are you justified in taking revenge? With circumstances like those, it's easy to see how important morality is in guiding our actions, great or small, 

Morality has effects on religion, too; in fact, it's why most people seek out religion in the first place. We seek a power and ethical law that is higher than ourselves, because we cannot be objective enough to judge each other in a way that is both "moral" and fair. So we live by laws set down by higher powers, and seek absolution when we break those laws because they tell us when we do wrong. 

In the end, though, true morality is an impossible goal. We're bound to screw up sometime, no matter how hard we try. Now, we may not go crazy like poor Harvey and kill a bunch of people, but the possibility of human error always looms. But what Harvey teaches us is that we cannot let morality be all-consuming; we should strive to act morally, whether for societal or private reasons, but not let it consume us until we end up getting lost in it. The point of Harvey's downfall is to force us to face our darker, ugly side, and to remind us that light and goodness can be found in that darkness too. 

In the movie, it's the man dressed all in black that represents that goodness, an ironic twist on the "white knight/dark knight" role. In our lives, it's ourselves and others that have to be that light. Morality isn't like Harvey's coin, flipped to make black and white decisions; it's subjective and personal, and I think it should be emulated without becoming an obsession. It should guide us against becoming evil, but we should be cautious that it doesn't guide us to do evil for good reasons. 

So the lesson is: be good, or your face will get burned off. 

Kidding. If that happens, you should probably see a doctor.