\nIn the 2005 film Batman Begins<\/em>, the main character\u2014Bruce Wayne\u2014 receives a sobering message from his love interest during a charged interaction. \u201cIt\u2019s not who you are underneath, it\u2019s what you do that defines you,\u201d1<\/sup> Rachel Dawes proclaims. For the audience, and for Bruce, this moment is marked with painful irony: Rachel does not realize his true identity and activity in Gotham City. She is later stunned to find out who Bruce is\u2014or more importantly, what Bruce does as Batman.
\nThe notion that what people do defines them contrasts with what we are used to hearing, both in pop culture and in academic circles\u2014that identity is contained in some less concrete realm, independent of action in the world. This takes familiar forms such as, \u201cIt\u2019s who you are on the inside that matters most,\u201d or, in academics, what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the \u201ctrue self \u201d.2<\/sup> These ways of thinking seem to locate the essence of personhood in a place thought to be \u201cinternal\u201d and thus wholly independent of the external.
\nThere are obvious ways that this works toward good. For example, one\u2019s value and worth should not\u2028be assigned based on a phenotypical externality such as skin color. (Think of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s emphasis on the \u201ccontent of character\u201d in his\u2028\u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech.3<\/sup>) Similarly, there is good reason to think that a person\u2019s beauty is indeed more than skin deep. But Rachel was implicitly highlighting the cold, hard truth that gets overlooked when these other- wise good messages lose nuance and are applied too heavy-handedly: what one does speaks volumes in a way that what one says cannot. Rachel points out that what people believe about themselves is hardly as telling as how people actually live. In essence, she pathologizes the disjunction between thought and action.
\nMIND, BODY, AND WITNESS <\/strong>
\nThis disjunction is common in our sociocultural contexts. We find our- selves comfortably accepting of the thought that our true selves are morally intact and tucked away in their safe havens, untouched by the grim realities of our day-to-day happenings. It is comfortable to think that poor actions do not define us and that some inner self can persist and maintain an unblemished identity in spite of our missteps. This sort of disjunction is a luxury afforded by a type of dualism that pervades Western notions of personhood. When Descartes famously asserted \u201cCogito ergo sum<\/em>\u201d (\u201cI think, therefore I am\u201d), he effectively made it philosophically permissible for subsequent generations to split mind from body, thought from action,4<\/sup> mere beliefs from concrete ethics, and so on.
\nI submit that the luxury of viewing\u2028our lives through\u2028such dualistic lenses\u2028constitutes a maneu\u2028ver of power and\u2028privilege that we do\u2028well to work against. By orienting ourselves toward a deeper unity of thought and action, we may find ourselves living more faithfully in the practical sense while also becoming more holistically positioned to occupy the space of prophetic witness.
\nProphetic witness would necessitate the dismantling of our own power and privilege, averting our tendencies toward denial (which Anna Freud defined as \u201cgetting rid of unwelcome facts\u201d5<\/sup>), and speaking truthfully about that which we do repeatedly and unconsciously in our everyday lives. As cultural beings, we embody habits and meanings that define us and shape us into the people we are. This happens regardless of what we \u201cbelieve\u201d or say we believe.
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<\/a>\nMONEY TROUBLES <\/strong>
\nThe pervasive monetization of our daily lives, for example, potentiates the violent capacity for dehumanization.
\nThis occurs by virtue of the very nature\u2028of capital\u2014when it becomes so central\u2028to a culture, it engenders an ethic of expendability. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to this as commodification, noting that in capitalistic societies where human beings operate as means to ends (namely, instruments used to make money, or build more capital) rather than as ends in themselves, humanity becomes overshadowed as people are made \u201cinto machines.\u201d6<\/sup>
\nReducing human worth in such ways engenders perceptions of human beings as monetized, disposable, or usable. Take, for example, the tendency of politicians and non-politicians alike to speak of war through dollars and cents. Often, sociocultural attitudes of aversion to war are articulated in strictly economical terms that tend to sound more like, \u201cWe can\u2019t afford another war\u201d than, \u201cWe ought not\u2028kill our fellow human beings.\u201d It is important to notice that in this view, the obliteration of human life becomes blurred\u2014and even goes unnoticed\u2014 by virtue of conflating capital with humanity. Such views do not arise from out of thin\u2028air. They are shaped by our everyday cultural embodiments, of which the pervasive monetization and commodification of life is a prime example.
\nContrast this violent and dehumanizing reduction with the sort of ethic that French phi\u2028losopher Emmanuel \u2028L\u00e9vinas advanced that rested upon the refusal to reduce the other or deny the infinitude of the other.7<\/sup> When we encounter the world without a sense of mystery and radical openness, we commit the grave mistake of appropriating it and all it contains, including other human beings. Avoiding this mistake does not necessarily need to come in the form of full-scale, anarchistic revolution (though one could make the case that Jesus\u2019s prophetic witness constituted a theologically informed mode of anarchism). Rather, we can take moderate steps toward \u201cde-monetizing\u201d our perceptions of the world by simply being more mindful about the ways that our culture collapses capital and humanity into one another.
\nOne way to promote this mindfulness is through a more careful monitoring of our everyday use of language. When\u2028we catch ourselves speaking of others\u2028in financial terms, we do well to pause and reformulate our words. Rather than allowing ourselves\u2028to make utterances like, \u201cThat person is worth every penny,\u201d we should strive for statements like, \u201cThat person is so intrinsically valuable, a blessing.\u201d The way we speak goes a long way in not only reifying perceptions of reality, but in shaping ethics and ultimately illuminating our true identities.
\nThere is prophetic witness to be found in Rachel\u2019s admonition in Batman Begins<\/em>. Whether we like it or not, our everyday cultural embodiments say more about who we really are than we can or do try to say for ourselves. The moment we forget or deny that, we succumb to our power and privilege and lose our capacity for prophetic witness.
\n\u00a0
\nFootnotes<\/p>\n
\n
\u00a0 Does what we believe line up with what we do? BY BARBOD SALIMI, instructor of philosophical psychology, theological ethics & peace studies In the 2005 film Batman Begins, the main character\u2014Bruce Wayne\u2014 receives a sobering message from his love interest during a charged interaction. \u201cIt\u2019s not who you are underneath, it\u2019s what you do that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11514,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28893"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11514"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28893"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39105,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28893\/revisions\/39105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1. Batman Begins<\/em>. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Hollywood, CA: Warner Bros., 2005.
\n2. D. W. Winnicott (1960a), \u201cEgo Distortion in Terms of True and False Self \u201d in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development <\/em>(New York: International UP Inc., 1965), 140\u2013152.
\n3. Martin Luther King, Jr.,\u2028\u201cI Have a Dream\u201d (speech, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963), American Rhetoric, http:\/\/ www.americanrhetoric.com \/speeches\/mlkihaveadream.htm.
\n4. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes\u2019 Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain <\/em>(New York: Avon Books, 1994).
\n5. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense<\/em>, trans. Cecil Banes (London: Hogarth Press Collection, 1937).
\n6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto<\/em>, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 73.
\n7. Emmanuel L\u00e9vinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism<\/em>, trans. Se\u00e1n Hand (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"