Natural Law and Sophistry in Storytelling

On Sophistry in Storytelling: "It's a Wonderful Life" - Atheist and Communist Propaganda?

YOUR STORIES REQUIRE VALID EVIDENCE AND ARGUMENTS

This post is primarily about appreciating valid evidence to back up your story's argument, or why some stories fail when their argument is false.

Second, it's about the perennial hit, "It's a Wonderful Life" (IAWL), and why many films never get a second "release" on life.

Third, I hope to encourage you to develop a story premise (i.e. the moral premise) that has a valid world view (i.e. a universal moral truth). If you don't the world will never connect with or view your story.

How do you know your moral premise is valid when you don't have the time for it to stand the test of time, as IAWL has done?  (1) There is prima facie evidence—first impressions by a third party. (2) There is, upon a test audience's reflection, an appreciation for the premise to contribute to social order—without social media depreciating your premise. (3) There is, upon further analysis, confirmation that your story's moral fabric does not fall apart at the seams.

Now, having said all that, there are obstructionists to such grand story schemes.

SOPHISTS

Sophists, you may remember from Greek history, were philosophers and teachers who bragged that they could teach anyone (esp. lawyers), to defend a false position as if it were true. Wikipedia puts it this way:

Sophist: A paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning.

Most politicians and all advertisers are sophists; and as you can readily observe that if the reasoning of an acquaintance is not sophist, then he or she is probably not an advertiser,  politician...or a lawyer.

AVOID A FALSE MORAL PREMISE -- OR A FALSE STORY YOU WILL TELL

Sophistry is what college debate teams learn to do in an effort to deconstruct what the other team claims to have learned. That is, debate teams are trained to argue either side of a position, even the immoral one -- as if the moral high ground is to use a false premise to win an invalid argument to defend a moral wrong, rather than use a true premise to win a valid argument to defend a moral good. This is what has crumbled the formerly firm foundation of our culture. Pundits, journalists, and politicians take pride in winning, regardless of the natural truth they lose in the process.

I heard a politician brag about how escalating and relentlessly repeating a lie about an opposing candidate was a "clever technique" her team used to convince the public of their "truth." The politician was resuscitating the heart beat of sophistry. To the sophist, alignment with nature matters less than the nature of alignment. "Truth" is the defeat of the opposition, whatever the cost.


SOPHISTRY WILL NOT WORK WHEN WRITING A STORY.

If we take this position in creating a story, however, we are guaranteed the loss of our audience that we have worked hard to keep.  Sophistry rings false with general audiences, because audiences subliminally know what is true. Although, if we choose a biased audience for the previews, we will believe the lie of their approval.

Case in point. Acquaintances of mine previewed their movie at the Toronto Film Festival, some years back. They won the audience award, and a major distributor, excited about its box office potential, picked up the movie. When they released the film, however, it hit the floor. No support. Why? Their premise did not align with the general audience's understanding of nature. The filmmakers traded natural truth for the sophist views of their supporters.  But what about the Toronto audience award, you ask? An investigation revealed that the audience in Toronto was anything but broad in constituency, but was rather stacked with the filmmaker's friends and supporters who had forced the filmmakers into the sophistic position.

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE MADE HORRIBLE

I just came across a text book example of this in the form of a sophistic essay about a true to nature movie. It's a 2015 Christmas review from the New York Post by a writer whose tripe is that "It's A Wonderful Life" is atheist, communist propaganda. I guess that's why IAWL is so popular every Christmas—it's anti-Christmas—which is both a Christian and capitalist holiday—and we all see no credibility in either, so we watch IAWL to reinforce our atheistic, communist values.

BEFORE I FORGET, MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

I've written previously about IAWL HERE, in two posts (one an interview and one a review). I'll try to add to the discussion.

First, the sophist at the New York Post (back in 2015) declared that IAWL is a salute to atheism because God is not present in the movie. This is the argument from ignorance, that if you can't see something it must not exist. This is the conclusion he sees because "God" is not seen in the film. This makes sense to the sophist, because what is present must be said to be absent, and what is clear must be revealed as muddy. Frank Capra, the director has made George Bailey's "thoughts," "dreams" and "angels" visible, so it's logical that the sophist is required to say they can't be seen, and therefore do not exist. George whispers a prayer, but the sophist can't hear it. God sends an angel (Clarence), but the sophist claims God is not represented.  That is the job of sophist pundits who are required by some obscure sophistry to argue that what is good, true and beautiful is really bad, false, and ugly.

Second, our sophist NYP writer tells us that IAWL is commie propaganda because the bad guy is a rich banker. Let me repeat that: the BAD guy is a RICH BANKER. Therefore every banker is bad. Never mind that our hero is a poor banker who is good, and becomes all the richer for not wanting to be. The greatest wealth is not wanting it. But good capitalism relies on generosity and fairness not greed and hoarding. The sophist communists among us will try to convince us that capitalism is not good. But they equivocate. They claim what can be good and generous is bad and greedy. And, if they say it loud enough, enough will believe it. But a true moral premise will reveal (in real life as well as in fictional movies) that generosity generates business, but greed will kill a business.

Third, our sophist pundit claims that IAWL is anti-Christmas and therefore anti-Christian. But let me cut this long blog short. At it's heart IAWL is a Christian film, because it's hero sacrifices his selfish dream to save others, and in the end discovers true happiness through sacrificial love, not greed. And that is what the real meaning of Christmas is, about giving one's life and resources to save others, as Christ came to do.

So, far from being atheist,  communist, or anti-Christian, IAWL's moral premise reinforces theism, benevolent capitalism, and sacrificial giving.

The New York Post would have the moral premise of IAWL be:

Theism and Capitalism leads to loss of one's dreams; butAtheism and Communism leads to happiness.

But in fact, as I've argued in my other posts about IAWL, the moral premise is:

Selfish hoarding leads to a miserable life; butSacrificial giving leads to a wonderful life.

So forgive the rant, but you're much better off if you write about what is naturally true, good and beautiful and give audiences something natural to appreciate.

As Solanus Casey said: Appreciation is as necessary for social order and harmony as are the laws of gravity for the physical world.

Learn more at Storycrafttraining.blogspot.com

Dr. Henry Russell On the Role of Cinema in The Great Conversation

An Interview with Henry Russell, Ph.D.
by Stanley D. Williams, Ph.D.

Henry Russell

Henry Russell, Ph.D. is a classics educator, headmaster of St. Augustine’s Homeschool Enrichment Program (founded with his wife Crystal), and president of the SS Peter and Paul Educational Foundation. He is known particularly for The Catholic Shakespeare Audio Series. His writings have been published in various journals.

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STAN WILLIAMS: What do you make of this idea that narrative cinema can participate in The Great Conversation.

HENRY RUSSELL: Well, film is primarily a visual and auditory medium. It can’t easily handle the complexity of philosophical ideas that words allow. So, film demands that the director and producers spend enough time with the ideas to understand them, and then pick which ideas to make the movie around. Filmmakers have to know which 10% of a book to make into a movie. The selection process probably needs to be more collaborative. Because what will happen is that one person, who knows the ideas really well, selects the book’s topic, and the director in exasperation says, “Good, God! How am I going to visualize that?” Consequently, directors default to the ideas that are easiest to visualize. And, as a result society experiences this discontinuity between a good book and an important film.

STAN WILLIAMS: Is there an example in modern cinema?

HENRY RUSSELL: Sure. Peter Jackson in THE LORD OF THE RINGS (TLOTR) had generally no idea what major ideas Tolkien was getting at, such as the patient certainty of Aragorn and his complete confidence in his destiny. The film’s portrayal of Aragorn is one of a man with an identity crisis. Another thing Jackson misses is the power of words. When said relatively slowly and cumulatively, words can change the human heart, and define eventually what is true.  Literature, unlike philosophy and theology, functions by the accumulation of words. Like chipping away at a stone, a little bit at a time. But a film functions by large scale visual declarations. In the TLOTR books the telling of tales to each other is a big deal. But that doesn’t communicate easily to film. When characters talk all the time you lose the line of action that drives the film.

STAN WILLIAMS: Because you’re telling not showing.

HENRY RUSSELL: Yes, but it’s the telling that is how people function.

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

The Real Meaning of Christmas in

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

(1946, Theatrical-Live Action, 72 min)

This is an example of the real meaning of Christmas being made implicit, without any mention of Jesus. It is the story of George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) who wants to leave the small town where he grew up, get a college education, and travel the world on great adventures. His father Peter Bailey (Samuel S. Hinds) is the president of a small mortgage and loan company. Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) wants to buy out Bailey's loan company and control it to the detriment of the entire town.

Each time George tries to leave town and pursue his adventurous dream, something happens to threaten the town or his dad's business, and good-hearted George sticks around to help out. Even his honeymoon with Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) is vetoed with a run on the bank and their loan company at the start of the Great Depression. To save the business, Mary offers up the $2,000 George has saved for their honeymoon, and George carefully gives it away as loans to save the company and the townspeople's homes.

But, Potter mercilessly keeps after George for control of the loan company. When one of George's partners looses $8,000 of the company's assets (into the sneaky hands of Potter) George falls into his own personal depression. He comes to think that life would be better if he had never been born, and tries to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge.

But God has other plans for George Bailey and sends Clarence (Henry Travers)—an angel, hoping to earn his wings—to rescue George and lead him out of his depression. Clarence lights on the idea of showing George what life would be like in the town if George had not been around. It's a fallback to Dickens' Christmas Carol and the three spirits who take Scourge on a similar journey. But here, rather than showing George what actually happened in the past (as in Dickens' tale) Clarence shows George what would have happened had George never been born.

The consequences would have been catastrophic with death, disease, corruption, and poverty the result. Clarence's what-would-have-been tour reveals to George and to the audience, that personal sacrifice for the greater good (which is what George's life had been about (a plot that is the opposite of Scrooge's tale) mattered a great deal, even if George didn't see it. George Bailey's lifetime of willing sacrifice had made life wonderful for everyone, compared to what would have happened had George Bailey never been born.

The Moral premise of this story can be stated like this:

Selfish hoarding leads to a miserable life; but
Sacrificial giving leads to a wonderful life.

How does that related to the real meaning of Christmas? In this way: The real purpose (or meaning) of why Jesus was born, was not so we'd talk about his birth, or the Three Wise Men, but so he would serve others, and literally sacrifice his life for the good of all mankind. That is what we see so clearly in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. George Bailey's life was on of utter selfless sacrifice for the good, and temporal salvation, of others.