Essay
AI
Culture
14 min read

Dethroning creativity: why does AI art make us feel so icky inside?

Creative Artificial Intelligence generates a disquiet within. Daniel Kim explores why it confronts our humanity.

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

An AI-created painting of a scene comprising a lap top user holding their face, with candles in the foreground
AI confronts the creative.
Daniel Kim.

Some of you are going to hate this article.  

I want to start off by saying that a human wrote this article.  

That’s an important caveat nowadays because every month there’s yet another AI churning out music, images, videos, and essays that could go toe-to-toe with most humans in quality and originality. Making the news in the last few months has been the remarkable Chat GPT3 from OpenAI. A chatbot on steroids, Chat GPT3 is trained to produce conversational and competent language. You can ask it to write a children’s story, a trigonometry lesson plan, a 2-year strategy for a startup or even an inspiring Christmas sermon written in the style of a World War II speech. Here’s the thing… it won’t just do a ‘passable’ job, but it will do a pretty damn good job. 

Now, I am painfully aware that ‘AI vs human creativity’ is a topic more worn out than a marathon runner’s shorts - I certainly don’t want to unnecessarily add to the 117 million search results for ‘AI and creativity’. It’s the  sensation of our decade with equally sensational headlines, like Elon Musk saying that the use of AI is like “summoning a demon”. There are quite literally tens of thousands of articles about whether AI will surpass and replace us or whether they are simply another tool in our techno-creative arsenal. And rightly so! There are important discussions to be had about the economic implications in the creative industry as it increasingly looks as though junior copywriter and art director jobs could be fully automated. There are also pertinent legal questions being asked by the artists whose blood, sweat and carpel-tunnel syndrome have been scraped from massive public image databases to train these AI, rendering their hard-won technical skill into an effortless toy for the masses with no recognition or recompense. People far more qualified and more intelligent than me have written on these topics

'There’s a moment of confrontation that challenges our notion of human superiority over the machines.'

However, there’s one particular feeling that I don’t think has been addressed as much. It’s the feeling of ‘uncomfortable ickiness or angst many of us experience when confronted by these AI. Almost every person I’ve shown Chat GPT3 to have gawped at it - almost as if they couldn’t believe how good it really was. There’s a moment of confrontation that challenges our notion of human superiority over the machines. I certainly felt this even as the techno-optimist that I am. Playing with Chat GPT3 did something to me as a writer. My first reaction was, “Flip… I need to up my game”. My second reaction was the disquiet realisation that everything I thought was unique to human creative writing - rhetoric, rhyme and rhythm - were in fact sophisticated patterns that could be reproduced and even re-imagined by a soulless computer.  

What’s interesting about this reaction is that we’re generally fine with computers being better than us. Computer vs Human is not a new debate. After the world chess champion Kasparov “lost his fighting spirit” in 1997 against IBM’s’s Deep Blue Chess computer, it’s become an uncontested fact that humans will never beat a computer at chess. A quarter of a century later, it’s not uncommon to hear professional players or commentators saying ‘run it through the engine’, when they want to analyse the latest world-championship game. Despite this status quo, very few of us feel profoundly threatened by this. Nothing about the fact that a computer can do mass-calculations and pattern recognition better than humans feels threatening. That’s just what a computer is - a brute-force machine.

'Rarely have new technologies caused existential anxiety about our human value.' 

But when it comes to poetry, music, creative writing, design, imagery, composition, originality; nothing can replace that unique human spark! We desperately fight to maintain human superiority. Artist Steven Zapata critiques AI tools like Chat GPT3 saying that their creative offerings are ‘bland and mediocre’ devoid of originality and zest. That may be true, but if we’re really honest with ourselves, and spend enough time scrolling Instagram, most of our human offerings turn out to be bland and mediocre devoid of originality and zest. New technologies have always created anxiety about job security and unforeseen negative social consequences. Rarely have new technologies caused existential anxiety about our human value. 

For many of us, we intuitively feel that creativity and artistic expression are some of the most unique and sacred of human faculties. We probably couldn’t give a rational reason for it, but we feel it to be true. Here’s the thing though, there’s a reason why we feel this way. Our convictions about what makes humanity unique and valuable are not universal intuitions. They are shaped by our social and historic location. 

Throughout history, we’ve always tried to identify what makes us so special as humans, and in that pursuit, we’ve held different traits as sacrosanct. For a long time, it was the capacity to Reason - our rational mind. That’s Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for you - the bedrock thinkers of the classical and medieval Western world. In his Summa Theological, Aquinas wrote that ‘the human species is distinguished from all others by the fact that man alone has reason’. This reign of Reason continued as the status quo reaching its pinnacle in the 18th century with the so-called Enlightenment. This was when Descartes identified our ‘thinking’ as the core our humanity existence - “I think therefore I am”. The elevation of Reason even got slightly out of hand. Following the French Revolution in 1789, the revolutionary government even set up the ‘cult of Reason’ and converted churches into temples where the teenage daughters of rich patricians were worshipped as goddesses of Reason. The 1790s were a weird time in France.  

'2023’s sensibilities are not with the Enlightenment Rationalists, instead, I’d argue that we are more in line with the Romantics.'

We look back at this period of hyper-Reason and scoff. Silly us forever thinking that our Reason gave us ultimate value. What an archaic idea! We certainly don’t think or feel that problem-solving, logic, and reasoning is integral to our humanity. In fact, we can farm those out to computers now and really get to work in expressing our humanity in more meaningful ways. We no longer live in the Age of Reason, and we haven’t done for quite some time. In fact, 2023’s sensibilities are not with the Enlightenment Rationalists, instead, I’d argue that we are more in line with the Romantics.  

In the 19th century, whilst the Age of Reason was still trundling on, there was a community of thinkers reacting against the spirit of the age - these were the Romantics. The Romantics looked at the Modern world and were disgusted by the banal capitalist industrialism of it all. They lamented the loss of beauty in the world and a sense of spiritual unity. The Romantics described the people of their time as being ‘triply divided’ by ‘three alienations’. The first was within the individual between our thinking and our feeling being at odds with each other. Second was between the individual and other people due to the decline of traditional communities and the rise of the capitalist marketplace. Third was between the individual and Nature due to the rise of modern technology turning the natural world into something to be mastered rather than something we are a part of. We had lost who we were and needed to go on a journey to discover who we truly are. Sound familiar?  

The Romantics understood that the one thing that had previously remedied these alienations was the Christian religion and its God. A benevolent creator who provided morality, meaning, and value to the individual and her society. But ultimately, the Romantics were still people of their time and assumed that religion was on its way out and was an ancient superstitious system that needed to be done away with.  And so the Romantics had to find something else to hang everything on, a new centre of ultimate meaning. Religion is out, Reason was too narrow. What we need is a way for the individual to integrate and express the whole of their identity. Set the stage for the enthronement of Creativity.  

The sociologist Charles Taylor calls this the birth of the ‘Age of Authenticity’, where the most important task for the individual is to discover and express her most authentic self. In this way, artistic creation became an integral way in which a person could come to define themselves. So Schlegel, a 18th century Romantic, was fond of saying that the individual should make ‘his life into a novel, a beautiful whole’ aiming for 'the ideal of self-realisation and beauty’. This vision was so compelling that it spread outside Romantic circles. So 100 years later, the not-so-Romantic Nietzsche said that the most important task of the individual was to ‘give style to one’s character’. To make sense of all the incoherent combination of loves, desires, hatreds, and motives in our heart and make something beautiful out of it.  

Since then, we’ve continued to elevate the role of Creative expression as an essential part of our human identity. Taylor made this observation: 'The artist [has become] the paradigm case of the human being, as an agent of original self-definition. Since about 1800, there has been a tendency to heroise the artist, to see his or her life as the essence of the human condition, and to venerate him or her as a seer, the creator of cultural values.'  

'There is a magic to creative self-expression - it’s joyful, it’s play, it’s thrilling.'

He’s absolutely right. The heroes of our time are not kings or queens, nor war generals or religious messiahs. The heroes of our time are the Bob Dylans, the Virginia Woolfs, the Picassos, Beyoncés, the Jacob Colliers - the Artists. Our heroes reveal our aspirations. Today, the artist has become for us the “very paragon of humanity” and has taken on a pseudo-messianic role in Western culture. People who show us what we could be. They are the luminaries who have expressed the whole of their authentic self in a way that is beautiful and understood by other people. Those people who stood against cookie-cutter convention and carved a unique way of being themselves in a disenchanted world. Don’t we also want this? Isn’t this the longing of our hearts as 21st century individuals? Don’t we want to be understood and to create something with our lives? Don’t we want to self-actualise? It’s certainly a sticky idea and there’s good reason for it. There is a magic to creative self-expression - it’s joyful, it’s play, it’s thrilling when you make something out of nothing, and that thrill is even more electrifying when you take the terrifying step of sharing it with someone and they understand it. You feel known in a way that’s different to someone reading your CV or even having a conversation. 'I create therefore I am’ is the new dogma of the day.  

This is why I think we find Chat GPT3, or other art generating AI like Dall-E or Midjourney, so icky and disconcerting.  It’s hard to shake a deep conviction that has been encoded into us through 200 years of cultural indoctrination. We’re okay with AI and computers encroaching on technical tasks and labour efficiencies. We can even just about live with the fact that technology might make huge swathes of people jobless. But God forbid that the machines devalue or take away the ability of creative self-expression! That’s ours, we need it, it’s our source of ultimate meaning and human joy. I just don’t want to face the fact that a soulless, unloving, unsuffering machine can spit out something more compelling, emotive, and eloquent than most of us ever could. This is felt keenly by the creative community. Amidst the very serious economic and legal questions about being made redundant, or their work being sucked into the algorithm, there is an angst that taps into a deep belief about what makes our humanity beautiful and valuable.  

Here’s Zapata again.

“This is art making, for God’s sake, not some agitating manual process people hate. This is one of the things people enjoy doing… We should reserve art making for those who stand to gain something from it, for whom it can bring joy and reward, rather than dumbly bestow it on an unfeeling non-being”  

A YouTube comment under a video about the hopelessness many creatives feel in the face of these AI express it thus.

“I feel like we forget that expression, emotion is what makes us uniquely human, and when we deprive ourselves [of them] we’re just hollow… . I’m more or less saying that if there are no outlets that enable expression, then things WILL likely get darker within ourselves”  

Finally, here's Hayao Miyazaki, one of the most inspired and celebrated filmmakers in the last century with his work at Studio Ghibli. In a 2016 documentary he unequivocally called AI art an “insult to life itself” saying:

“I feel like we nearing the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves”.   

If you resonate with these statements, you’re probably a 21st Century Romantic. I certainly feel like one. We have elevated Creativity and artistic self-expression to a high pinnacle on which our hopes and fulfillments hang on. We have enthroned Creativity as the thing what constitutes the most essential and important part of our humanity. We thought it was the one thing that couldn’t be taken from us. Perhaps these AIs are forcing us to face the music that our dependence on Creativity as a source of ultimate value may be just as fragile as our dependence on Reason.

'Maybe it’s no bad thing for humans to lose faith in ourselves once in a while.'

Here’s a controversial and very unpopular statement - maybe it’s no bad thing for humans to lose faith in ourselves once in a while. It can be helpful for us to be confronted by our weakness and experience a sense of lack. It shows us that perhaps the foundations we’ve been standing on are not as solid as we presumed them to be and motivates us to go on a journey to discover something more solid. When push comes to shove, I would certainly rather have someone to point out to me that I’m standing on shaky ground than live in blissful ignorance. 

Reason was thoroughly dethroned as the centre of human experience. That has been a very good thing because it meant that we now take the heart more seriously. It’s also revealed the ways in which we have devalued and marginalised those with lower cognitive ability. By dethroning Reason, we’ve become more reflective about what makes us special and valuable. We put Reason in its proper place, as an important, beautiful, yet ultimately non-essential part of living a fulfilled life on planet Earth. We came to a better, fuller, and more inclusive understanding of human value.  

For the same reasons, maybe it’s high time Creativity needs a good dethroning. Your fulfilment and value does not lie in what you have written, sung, painted, or drawn. Your authentic and unique self is not intrinsically tied to how well you can express yourself. Your creative hobby does not need to be the thing that makes your life feel worthwhile. Artists, like scientists, are beautiful gifts to our society. They reveal insights about our universe and our psyche, providing beauty and meaning to what can feel like a very banal existence. But let’s not fall into the trap of elevating them as pseudo-messianic figures - dangerous things can happen when we hang our hopes and dreams on a certain class of humans.  

I don’t think this will have a thawing effect on our creative industry. Dethroning Reason certainly didn’t slow scientific research, I certainly don’t think putting Creativity in its proper place will slow down our innate desire to create and express ourselves. 

The idea of ‘dethroning Creativity’ will sound utterly impossible or even immoral to some. I get that. Ultimately, we are products of our times, and it might be the case that we can no sooner dethrone Creativity than imagine a world without electricity. We can’t imagine a sense of self without putting this premium on Creative self-expression. We can’t un-essentialise it. However, I certainly think that being aware of the historic forces that led us to become the people we are is a useful step towards a better understanding of ourselves.  

In Christian Theology, the ultimate source of human value is the concept of Imago Dei - The idea that every human is created in the ‘Image of God’. There have been times in history when Theologians have also made the mistake of trying to tie certain traits like Reason and Creativity to the ‘Imago Dei’ - making our value contingent on things that we do. That was a mistake because the most beautiful thing about the concept of Imago Dei is that there is nothing we can do or be or become that will diminish our value before God. Our level of Reason or Creativity cannot add or take away anything from our worth to God or make us any less ourselves. That’s something that I’d be more willing to hang everything on.  

I promised a human wrote this article. Well, let me end with a sonnet written by Chat GPT3. 

 

Prompt: Write me a sonnet about dethroning creativity and the need for the 21st century to find a better foundation for human value. 

In this age of technology and speed,
Creativity’s throne is overthrown, it seems.
For value, we no longer plant a seed
But rather chase the fleeting and extreme.

We worship at the altar of the new
And scorn the wisdom of the ages past, 
Forgetting that it is roots that make us true
and not the leaves that fade and never last.

But as the world keeps changing and evolving,
Perhaps its time to find a firmer ground
To build upon and find a way of solving, 
the problems that today’s world has found. 

For though creativity has its place, 
It cannot be the only source of grace.

Essay
Culture
Film & TV
Monsters
Politics
13 min read

In an age of nihilism it's time to revisit The Dark Knight

Batman, the Joker, and the disaffected

J.W. is a lecturer in the Study of Religions at the University of Oxford.

The Joker and Batman sit opposite each other in an interrogation room.
Warner Bros.

Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking film The Dark Knight (2008), the second installment of his Batman trilogy, was a summer blockbuster that changed the superhero genre forever. Nolan’s gritty, realistic depiction of the Caped Crusader, played by a stoical Christian Bale, pushed back against the then nascent resurgence of comic-book cinema. Nolan resisted flashy computer-generated fight scenes and digitized superpowers in favor of psychological thrills intensified by cinematic restraint. The film’s combined financial and critical success empowered Nolan to become the preeminent big-budget auteur of Hollywood, going on to make such mind-benders as Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014) and resurrecting the summer movie-going craze with the psychological biopic Oppenheimer (2023).  

The Dark Knight changed the way the superhero genre was perceived not only because of its realism and cinematic skill, but also—perhaps principally—because of the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, Batman’s premier antagonist and the main villain of the film. Ledger’s Joker was mythologized even before the film’s release, as the actor’s untimely death from a drug overdose in January 2008 was almost immediately credited by the media to the intensity of having inhabited the Joker’s personality. Of more lasting importance, Ledger’s Joker in many ways marked the first serious consideration of moral and political nihilism for a large audience. The villain put on the page by Nolan and brought to life by Ledger (in a posthumously Academy Award-winning performance) was at turns disturbing in its philosophical coherence and alluring in the authenticity with which the Joker lived his principles. Batman was the unambiguous “good guy,” but the Joker captivated the audience’s imagination. I can remember being a high schooler the year after the film’s release, and at every sporting event or dance party there were dozens of Joker faces in the crowd, with the signature white makeup and lipsticked smile. Never before had insanity been so attractive. For those of us raised in the suburban optimism of the 1990s, this was the first time that nihilism had become cool. 

In the wake of recent surges in political nihilism, though, ranging from online incel culture to a flurry of successful and attempted political assassinations to the January 6 capitol riots, it is perhaps worth revisiting the ideas considered by The Dark Knight nearly two decades after its release. Ours is a disaffected age, marked by despair at institutional incompetence and corruption on the one hand and a desire for a radical overhaul of justice on the other. As is often remarked, the predominant demographic of contemporary performative nihilism is millennial and Gen Z men, many of whom would have been old enough to see The Dark Knight in theaters but young enough to be profoundly impressionable to its ideas. It is not unreasonable to believe that the film acted as a foundational, if perhaps unconscious, philosophical education for whole generations coming of age in a cynical environment. Revisiting The Dark Knight today thus offers a potential lens on the sociopolitical challenges we face and the available philosophical and theological responses to them. 

Part of the Joker’s appeal comes from the audience’s upfront endorsement of extrajudicial justice. No one enjoys a superhero flick unless they are willing to suspend the state’s monopoly on righteous violence, at least for the duration of the film. The romance of the genre comes from getting to vicariously live the hero’s superseding of the limits of legality, which is legitimated by their superior sense of justice. We are meant to envy Batman’s vigilantism: even when the authorities come after him, he is always too crafty, too physically fit, and too technologically advanced for the bumbling police to handle. This contempt for the law is then assuaged for us by a vision of justice that actually effects the change for which we long. The vigilante movie depends on ends that clearly justify the means. 

Philosophical Joker 

Released in the summer of 2008, The Dark Knight would have spoken to a generation of youth raised on the cynicism of post-9/11 society and distrust of authority resulting from the interminable war in Iraq. Even as the film was entering theaters, the global financial crash was well underway, even if the majority of the public was as yet unaware of it, spurred on by government deregulation in favor of too-big-to-fail banks and their dubious financial exploitation of the middle class. The resulting economic downturn, amplified for millennials by ballooning student loan debt and the ineffectiveness of university degrees as a stepping-stone to quality employment, would in turn have elevated Batman’s appeal in the years after the film’s release. Unlike other superheroes whose power resides in abilities we can never possess, Batman’s fully human limitations and resourcefulness uniquely channel our anger into seemingly plausible solutions. (The film seems to recognize this, as a theme early on in the movie is Batman’s struggle to control less skilled copycats of his vigilante style.) Batman sanitizes our thirst for vengeance under the aegis of a higher justice.   

The effectiveness of the Joker as a philosophical villain, then, comes from the incisiveness with which he accurately diagnoses the inconsistencies in Batman’s arrangement with the law. In an early scene, the Joker attempts to make inroads with the mobsters of Gotham City. When their accountant flees to Hong Kong because it is beyond the jurisdiction of district attorney Harvey Dent, the Joker responds, “Batman has no jurisdiction. He’ll find him and make him squeal.” That Batman then predictably follows through on the Joker’s prediction—kidnapping the accountant with some spectacular escape artistry—is apparently no cause for the audience to question whether the Joker might be onto something.  

The Joker’s philosophy in many ways articulates Batman’s actions better than Batman’s own worldview. Batman wants to inspire the public to justice. But what he is in fact doing is undermining the legitimacy of the institutions charged with enforcing justice, implicitly endorsing anarchism as a necessary response to official corruption. Of course, the Joker doesn’t malign Batman for his contempt of corruption but only for his hypocrisy. In what amounts to his philosophical manifesto, toward the end of the film the Joker explains his worldview to a newly scarred and traumatized Dent, attempting to lure him into his orbit: 

They’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic they’re attempts to control things really are… It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. And look where that got you…  

You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little, old mayor will die, then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fear. 

The Joker’s worldview, in a nutshell, is that evil is baked into the state’s attempts at control. No matter how hard they try, official authorities (governments, police, even churches) will never be able to enact real justice but only a mediocre shade of it. The compensation they provide is little more than a narrative to justify our collective misery and, if we’re lucky, a series of spectacles to distract us from our malaise.  

Ahead of the curve 

The Joker is in many ways a firm believer in existential freedom. Despite his apparent flippancy, he is the most serious character in the film, completely committed to his philosophy. The laughter and joy with which he carries out his heinous crimes is as much evidence of the ecstasies of genuine freedom as it is an indication of psychological disturbance. Contrary to the views of some, the Joker of Nolan and Ledger is not mentally ill. He is completely rational. He knows the human capacity for transcendence and finds civilization wanting as a vehicle for true human flourishing. He recognizes that we all know this to some extent, and he further recognizes that our primary motivation for denying our freedom is fear and convenience.  

During what is probably the film’s philosophical climax, Batman conducts an extrajudicial interrogation of the Joker. In a profound twist, it is the Joker who is the more rational of the two characters in this scene, accurately diagnosing the unacknowledged dark side of Batman’s ideology while the ostensibly self-disciplined hero spirals into ever more erratic violence. Derisively comparing Batman to official law enforcement, often maligned throughout the film as variously corrupt or incompetent, the Joker says:  

Don’t talk like one of them—you’re not, even if you’d like to be. To them you’re just a freak. Like me. They need you right now. But when they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. See, their morals, their code: it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these ‘civilized’ people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve. 

In one fell swoop, the Joker has indicted both Batman and the establishment. If we side with the government, then we accept hypocrisy and ineffectiveness as the cost of a milquetoast justice. A grown adult fighting crime in a mask is freakish and absurd, nothing more than fantastical escapism. It is better to fall in line and get over your ideals. But if we instead take the side of Batman, then we have already cleared the greatest hurdle to embracing the Joker’s monstrosity. 

The righteous Batman 

Batman’s justice is derived from his single principle not to kill. He is constrained by neither ideological mercy nor legal precedent but only his own conscience. Yet as the Joker points out, once a vigilante has decided that their own justice is sufficient to discard the law, there is little to stop them from forsaking rules altogether: “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. And tonight you’re gonna break your one rule.” Batman understandably becomes more violent as the dialogue continues, exposing the dark side of his extralegal sense of justice. Pummeling the Joker in the interrogation room, Batman becomes a villain in his own right, enacting the Joker’s plan to perfection. The Joker wants Batman to kill him, if only because then the Joker’s triumph will be complete. One thinks here of Obi-Wan’s statement to Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977): “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Or the final scene in V for Vendetta (2005): “Behind this mask there is an idea. And ideas are bulletproof.” The Joker’s philosophy is not proved by the superiority of his own strength but by his ability to lure even the most righteous figures into the abyss. Once stated, his diagnosis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In his own words at the film’s finale, “Madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.” From the first time he donned the mask, Batman had entered the realm of nihilism. The Joker is simply pointing this out and trying to get him to follow through to vigilantism’s natural conclusion.  

In his ideological war with Batman, the Joker’s final trick is consequently to turn Gotham City into a madhouse. If the general public caves to fear and begins to tear itself apart, then the Joker’s assessment of human nature will be proved correct. In the film, Batman is justified, first by the civilians and prisoners who collectively choose not to blow up each other’s boats with the Joker’s explosives (perhaps more out of cowardice than idealism) and then by his decision to personally take the blame for Harvey Dent’s murderous rampage in order to preserve Dent’s inspiring figure for the public. Whether or not these constitute real victories is debatable, but the film ends by willing us to believe that Batman’s worldview is not inconceivable for average folks like us. In an obviously Christlike swap, Batman is so righteous that he is even willing to take the consequences of the corrupted sinner on himself in order to redeem both the sinner and the public who needs him as their hero. 

But with the contemporary proliferation of illiberal ideology, the dissemination of myriad conspiracy theories, and the surge in political violence in the years since The Dark Knight’s release, we may have cause to reassess the outcome of this ideological battle. Has Batman or the Joker more accurately grasped the modern public’s psyche? Is it the Joker or the film’s optimistic finale that is spinning a fantasy?  

Jesus and The Joker 

From the Christian perspective, the question is nuanced but not necessarily answered. The Jesus of the gospels is by turns vigilantist, nihilistic, and neither. He is at some moments indifferent to the state—as when he endorses paying taxes to Caesar while unambiguously discounting money as having any real value—and at other times openly hostile, as when he challenges King Herod as a schemer in the mode of the Joker’s own critique. He self-consciously transcends the law without abolishing it. The entire Sermon on the Mount endorses a view of justice that goes beyond what could ever be meted out by law or reasonably enforced by institutions. Jesus is even willing to engage in some raging guerilla theatre to expose corrupt institutional authorities, and he frequently lambasts legalist hypocrites for preaching an ideology inconsistent with their practice. 

If I had to stake my own interpretation, I would aver that the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament is closer to the Joker’s nihilism than to Batman’s vigilantism, both in his own behavior and the model he endorses for others. Of course, Jesus’ pacifism differs immensely from the murderous Joker. The Joker wants to make a point through the expense of human life. For Jesus, abundant human life is itself the point. Jesus forgives his persecutors from the cross and condemns violence as a response to injustice. But what Jesus and the Joker both fundamentally agree upon is the inadequacy of institutional channels for true justice. Batman might agree in principle, but his view of justice is plagued by internal contradictions: He abandons the law while seeking to uphold it; he forsakes legal constraint while encoding justice in specific principles.  

What the Joker gets right from the Christian perspective, even if he never says so, is that genuine flourishing is incompatible with legal framing. Spontaneity, play, and delight are essential to human freedom. The Joker exemplifies this, even if his joy is perversely tethered to violence. What the Joker desires is evil, but he effectively illustrates how law devoid of desire cannot amount to justice.  

For Jesus, true justice consistently comes down to love, which is nothing if not rooted in desire. The only motivation to turn the other cheek, pray for your enemies, or give all your possessions to the poor is because you truly desire to do so. Such extreme acts of charity are absurd by the standards of the social contract. Transcending social and legal expectations can have no motivation other than desire. Gratuity, in the sense of both an unmerited gift and ridiculous excess, is the defining feature of Jesus’ ethic. This comes through most profoundly in Jesus’ metaphors for the Kingdom of God: a weed that grows like crazy, a pound of yeast in fifty pounds of flour, an economy where everyone gets paid the same regardless of merit. We need to remember that Jesus attracted the kind of followers who walked off good-paying jobs and abandoned their boats on a whim. The Joker has just the right amount of insanity to be a Christian, even if he misses the key ingredient of love.  

This sketch of a classic film and the character of Jesus is not enough to provide a coherent ethical program. But that is precisely not the point. The attempt to narrowly codify justice is what Jesus and the Joker both call out for hypocrisy, and it’s the thing that sends Batman spiraling through contradictions. If we are to properly respond to the nihilism that surrounds us online and in our politics today, then we first need to appreciate the credibility of the nihilistic diagnosis of contemporary life. This does not mean conceding to the despair that leads to hatred and violence. If anything, the life and teachings of Jesus illustrate something akin to a post-nihilistic doctrine of love. Just as resurrection requires death, so answering nihilism might require passing through it rather than ignoring its existence. Like Batman, Jesus insists that true justice is realizable for all of us. Like the Joker, though, Jesus understands that this requires a leap into the absurd. We cannot love until we can play, when we burst the bounds of cultural norms and the status quo. We will be truly just only when we find the freedom to go beyond what is required and chart a new frontier, when we learn to jump out of the boat and wager our sanity on the absurd.  

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Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief