A Tale of Three Values

“Truth, justice, and the American way,” runs the classic Superman slogan. Even I know that, with next to no comic book exposure and never having watched one of the Superman movies (I have seen some of the 1940s cartoons, admittedly). The motto’s idea hits hard, in America and around the world; it communicates something.

Modern iterations of Superman, I hear, like to dispense with the third part of the formula. While the motto has been set aside or modified in that way for previous iterations throughout its lifetime, only recently has the removal of that third phrase been made the point of the modification, at least so far as I can see (then again, Hollywood Was Always Red). Regardless, the mainstream has grown hostile to the third part of this value, ‘The American way.’

In considering this, I’d now draw your attention to lines 1700-1 of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf: “A protector of his people, pledged to uphold truth and justice and to respect tradition….” (Incidentally, if you, like me, know no Old English but still want to check which parts of Heaney’s translation line up to which parts of the text (I have the bilingual version), this website is a wonderful resource). The first two terms here are clearly correspondent to the first two terms of Superman’s motto: truth and justice. The third seems different, but is it?

What is the American way? It is a tradition, a way of life and society. The tradition Hrothgar upholds in Beowulf is the Geatish tradition (with all its foibles); the tradition Superman upholds is the American tradition (ditto). Superman is more international, it is true, spreading the virtues of America’s tradition abroad (at least in the author’s mind), but the foundation is still the same. Truth, justice, and tradition.

Why do two heroic narratives share these values, considering they are conceived of a millennia and change apart from each other? Perhaps because the three values here listed correspond to the core worldview elements needed for a functional community.

Truth is factual reality, how the world actually is, from metaphysics to physics to psychology to common sense. Justice is moral reality, knowing how the world ought to be, how it isn’t what it ought to be, and the proper path to fixing it. Tradition is personal reality, understanding the people and their social-familial-historical-ecclesiastical context, having relationship with them both corporately and, at least in potential, individually. A firm grasp of these three, provided they be grasped rightly (coram deo), provides the toolbox for a civilizational leader and for his followers- at least when taken in light of the truth, justice, and tradition¹ of God.

Superman and Hrothgar (the speaker in Beowulf) both recognize the same point because both are dealing with humans. Further, both are connected to Christian cultures- whether slowly de-Christianizing, as with Superman, or rapidly (but imperfectly) converting, as with Beowulf (whose author was Christian but whose source material likely wasn’t). They both recognize the need for these foundational areas of understanding in order to set the world aright. Christians should heed the principles. We have a duty to sanctify the world (2 Cor. 10;5), and we must keep our eyes open to understand how to rightly and skillfully fulfil that duty, in His name (Psalm 2:10-12; 24:1).

God bless.

Footnotes

1. The ‘tradition’ we have with God is our personal, familial, ecclesiastical, governmental, historical, cultural, and societal relationship with Him, known in time and stretching back into time. The core of this relationship’s epistemology is Scripture, though, not the institutional church’s authority as ‘tradition,’ particularly when the institutional church is merely an element, not even a majority, of that relationship. ↩︎