It’s time to get a little more serious here.
If any of you are fans of Spiderman, you may know one of the most famous lines in all of comic-book lore. Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben delivers it – “with great power comes great responsibility” — then he goes off and gets killed to drive home the dire consequences of missing that point.
But we aren’t comic book superheroes. We live in real life. And as great as those words are for someone with superpowers, none of us will have to learn the lesson as Peter Parker did. The fact is though that we face something even more important, because in real life our greatest power comes from our freedom – and with that freedom, a great responsibility.
As I was looking up information for some of my writing, a headline about a recently-released song caught my eye. I won’t go into who wrote or performed it, and I certainly won’t repeat any of its content. I can only say that the article was speaking of how the music had achieved the distinction of being the filthiest song by mainstream artists that had ever played – how even after it was “toned down” for play on YouTube, it became even more so in its suggestiveness. What might be even worse, the article was without criticism of any kind, but simply to announce the music’s bold, cutting-edge existence.
The United States is a nation founded on the principles of freedom. We are the freest nation that has ever existed (and probably that ever will). But while the founders most certainly may have expected people to push the limits of that freedom, I’m sure they never envisioned that freedom being used to destroy the very people who enjoy it.
I know they understood the dangers. John Adams himself said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In other words, whomever enjoyed this freedom must also come from a moral position that allowed them to understand the responsibilities and obligations that came along with it. We cannot be an ignorant and immoral people who mistake a freedom that produces self-satisfaction and pleasure for a freedom that produces an environment that is for the betterment of humanity and encourages human flourishing.
What am I saying here? Am I saying we should muster the government to ban this music? Of course not. This could be as detrimental to our true freedom as I believe the music is itself. What I’m trying to do is point out that those who produce, consume, and gladly tolerate this music are not a serious people. They are a people content with producing a generation of men and women who disrespect and abuse the freedom they enjoy as much as they disrespect and abuse the people objectified by the music. They encourage the simplistic and base behavior that glorifies sex and treats the satisfaction of desire as a lifetime achievement and they apparently see no problem with the schizophrenic view that says we should not treat women as playthings while fostering an environment that does exactly that.
Please don’t misunderstand: this is not the talk of a crazy fundamentalist who wants to take away all of your fun. Having observed human nature, I absolutely expect this kind of behavior to some extent — that is just the reality in which we live. I’m trying to get the main point across here: I am committed to start with what I myself can do out of pure decency and respect for others to take the responsibility that goes with my freedom. In doing that, I am also making an appeal for everyone else to do the same. Of course this is meaningless on this blog, but there it is — I’m on the record.
I know a great book that addressed this two-thousand years ago. It said, “We can say we have the right to do anything, but not everything is beneficial. We have the right to do anything – but not everything is constructive.”
Then what is beneficial? What is constructive. Perhaps the answer comes in the very next line – “No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.” This is the key to a freedom that lasts. A freedom that is meaningful.
To do that also requires taking the responsibility to actually seek the good of others. Unfortunately it seems we are a society that prefers the opposite by seeking first the good of self. And any society that would rather forego its freedom to encourage its own growth for a pursuit of its own selfish pleasures is a society that will eventually get what it deserves as the end result.
The question is, are we there yet?
