No, really, was Thanos right? This is a question that’s been popping up in pop philosophy circles and among film goers the last year. Much of the commentary I’ve read revolves around Thanos’s dilemma, something of a comic book version of Sophie’s Choice. A big chunk of the pop philosophy has been a resounding backlash against those who think Thanos has a pretty good point. Vlogger Renegade Cut is among those who think Thanos is wrong, dangerous, and deserving of the villainous role because he thinks Thanos basically represents an ethos of eugenics. This is, however, a misreading of Thanos’s philosophy. Nowhere does the Mad Titan espouse a supremacist ethic, racial or otherwise. Nowhere does he suggest culling the weakest of society. The snap didn’t take the weakest. It took half of people at random, including half the Avengers – the super beings that think they are heroes.
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-Spoilers ahead for the last two Avengers movies and Star Trek II & III.-
To purport that Thanos is a eugenicist is to deliberately ignore the character’s own professed rationale for the snap, that it’s a neo-Malthusian move. Believing that there is an immanent ecological catastrophe due to overpopulation. The idea being that population grows exponentially, and resources are finite, that population will outstrip resources, leading to a painful social and ecological collapse. Renegade Cut thinks that Malthusian ideas are mistaken and that since Wyoming isn’t over-populated, it means there are plenty of remaining resources for an even larger civilization. Sure, Siberia and Canada and Australia are sparsely populated and it would make sense if you thought of the planet like the board game Risk and you thought of land in pure utilitarian terms. It’s this sort of flat thinking that critics poo-pooed Paul Erlich’s thesis in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he proposed a pending collapse by the 1970s and 1980s due to fears of the limitation of crop yields to support a doubling population. While it’s true that the so-called Green Revolution and chemical advances exploded crop yields, enabling population to explode, we were saved from a Malthusian crunch. But it doesn’t mean that there were not further costs to the population bomb. Costs that were externalized. Costs that weren’t tallied by the capitalists and technocrats thinking of the world in terms of a board game, the earth as a starship. Reality doesn’t work that way.
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As I write today, in 2019, world population has doubled what it was in 1968. You will not be surprised to learn that in the exact same amount of time, the other species of the planet – you know, the others – have halved in population. You would not be surprised to see the absolute skyrocketing of greenhouse gas emissions since 1968. You would not be surprised to see that jellyfish are replacing edible species of fish. You would not be surprised to note that coral reefs are dying at the same rate the ice caps are melting and Louisiana is sinking and the Amazon is shrinking and the Sahara is spreading. But if you are a technocrat who lives in a bubble of anthropocentrism and numbers, these real costs don’t figure in your tally sheet. We live today in the middle of one of earth’s greatest mass extinction events. And it’s caused by civilization.
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So for eugenics – it turns out the status quo is eugenics. It’s the eugenics of the anthropocentric world, the replacement of the natural world with a human order. It’s the genocide of the ecosystem and the triumph of Lord Man. It’s such an obvious conceit that the topic doesn’t even come up for conversation.
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But back to the Avengers – which given the gravity of this subject, now seems absurd to deal with in a mere blockbuster movie – but hey, we get the society we deserve. Thanos’s decisions are better understood not only in his own decisions but in the context of the moral decisions of the other characters.
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There are these repeated scenes in Avengers: Endgame where the heroes get caught up in a moment where they have to make a choice to do the greater good or perform an act in their own interest. This moral problem becomes a constant trap for the characters in Infinity War as per superhero duty they come to rescue their friends. It’s standard comic book fare in superhero battles as heroes team up to help one another. Banner tries and fails to bring up Hulk. Iron Man steps in to save Spider-Man. Spider-Man returns to help Iron Man. Doctor Strange creates a spell to augment the powers of the others, and so on. They think they are saving the world, but their actions don’t show a concern for saving universe as a whole, but they are focused in far more specific ways on saving each other. There are particular others, particular relationships they are grieving.
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All along though, the real character arc that gives the story its pull is the villain, Thanos. Thanos, whose name smacks of Thanatos, the Greek god of death, isn’t motivated by hate, but by compassion. His culling is done out of compassion. And he suffers for his mission, having to sacrifice Gamora to the underworld for the soul stone. He’s no tyrant, doesn’t seek to rule with his power. And in fact, by Endgame, he destroyed the stones to both assure his work would not be undone and prevent abuses of power the gauntlet might have created. His motivations are, in many respects, virtuous in some way.
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Let’s compare how the choices of the other heroes turn out. With their myopic save-the-next-guy over ethic, their private acts of heroism turn into some pretty dumb choices that get each of them into trouble. This is most notable when Star-Lord finds out about Gamora, loses his shit, and ruins a complicated plan to pry the gauntlet from Thanos. In a word, he ruins the larger noble goal for the weakness of a more personal impassioned one.
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This personal level of morality turns out to be an Achilles heal for many a hero. Comic book villains know this when they can exploit a hero’s personal relationship. For instance, kidnapping Lois Lane would be a bargaining chip. You can save your love or you can save the city – this is the ethical dilemma at hand.
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In the Star Trek movies, they do both of these narrative possibilities. In fact, Star Trek II and III oddly mirror Infinity War and Endgame, and feature Star Trek’s greatest villain, the actual product of eugenics wars, Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban – who didn’t need special effects for his pecs.) But Khan is motivated by revenge, a kind of Captain Ahab in the stars. His ethic doesn’t align with Thanos. Rather Thanos aligns more closely with the hero of Star Trek II – Mr. Spock, who saves the Enterprise by sacrificing himself in a radioactive chamber in the engine room. He chalks this up not to love but to logic, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.”
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Star Trek III: The Search for Spock reverses the polarity of this decision as the key crew return to restore Spock’s soul, stowed somewhere in the mind of McCoy. After some long dissolves, spooky music, and the Vulcan high priestess transfers the souls back to Spock’s body. Once restored, Mr. Spock wants to know why Kirk and company would do this, sacrificing their careers, their ship and David Marcus, Kirk’s only son. Kirk’s highly illogical response becomes both a joke and a test to Spock, “The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.” The newly restored Spock notices the illogic of Kirk, but the message is clear that humans do make heroic choices sometimes fool heartedly, no matter the specific outcome of that choice.
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Endgame is sort of like Star Trek III. It’s about the restoration of souls in three acts. Act one: assemble the heroes, Act two: a multi-timeline caper to find the stones, Act three: restore those lost in the dust and run it back on Thanos. But why? What is the moral imperative of these heroes? I think it is interesting that none of the Avengers questions the need to do this mission. None of them have gone on to acceptance of the event after five years. None have grasped the moral choices or sacrifices of Thanos. Thanos has picked up no new converts – which would have been really interesting to say the least. None of these heroes thought Thanos was right. Why? Because of the Achilles heel. They didn’t want half of all people back, they wanted specific people back. They wanted specific friends, lovers, family back. And they only wanted back the ones snapped out by Thanos. Not ones taken before, or since, or by natural causes. It’s a personal vendetta essentially about the snap itself.
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So here is the kicker. We recognize these private decisions as graspable. The needs of the few or the one are somehow more human, more immediate. The needs of the many are abstract, philosophical. That’s the realm of sages, saints and those who treat strangers with kindness. Spock and Thanos chose the greater good at great personal cost. The other heroes are more personally motivated defiers of the long scythe of death. In the real world, this is a constant dilemma when global culture faces a global catastrophic event like climate change. When we think of the prospects of a changing world, we think about how it affects us. How it impacts our family, our children, our home. We have private investments, private hopes and dreams. Of responsibilities for the environment, we have only personal incremental ones. And most people have stark limits on what lengths of carbon and plastic reduction and so forth they’ll do. In private decisions, we have thresholds we won’t cross, personal sacrifices we won’t make. How many chose not to have children to reduce their impact?
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It’s clear how difficult some of these choices are and how a figure like Thanos exposes our private egocentric – and anthropocentric – lives. Fact of the matter is the number one cause of ecological collapse and mass extinction is human overpopulation. The planet would have actually begun to thrive in terms of ecological diversity and health with a drop off of humans. But normal egocentric humans, like normal egocentric superheroes, can’t appreciate this and are unwilling to duplicate the moral choices of the Mad Titan.
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You’re probably wondering that I’m proposing something, some solution. And you probably wonder this because the rules of rhetoric and the structure of writing persuasive essays are built for making cases for something, endorsing something particular, not just provoking questions in some roundabout way. A knee-jerk reaction might think that I’m proposing eugenics. To that, I say read this again. There is already eugenics going on right now in the service of human supremacy. And it’s ultimately suicidal to the planet. Secondly, eugenics are not the same as having basic limits on growth. But again, this takes big-picture, Spock-like thinking. The needs of the ecological many outweigh the needs of the few. What if Earth was populated by Vulcans rather than Humans? Isn’t sustainability logical? Isn’t is much more logical and preferable to have more of a livable world if civilization created its own limits to growth rather than the much, much harsher limited opposed on them by nature?
A Fragile Dignity 