Learning is fun

A while ago I picked up the biography about Steve Ditko "Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko". It's an amazing coffee table style book (you know, if I believed in coffee tables), it's over sized, and chock full of Ditko's work. It does an excellent job of illustrating the difficulties of getting into the comic biz, and really just the entire comic environment during the era.

But I hardly needed a Ditko biography to learn about that, the fiction story "The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay" by Michael Chabon does that just as well, if not better. Actually, I don't really know where I first learned about that era, it's just something that I've naturally absorbed over time from various sources. Still, you could do much worse than checking out that Chabon book.

Anyways, back to Ditko's book: what I actually learned from it was some of the history of Ayn Rand, as well as some of the concepts and precepts of objectivism- a philosophy that quickly became wholly intertwined with Ditko's life.

Now while I'm not particularly a fan of objectivism, at the time I sounded pretty excited about it- why? Well, I just liked the idea of sitting back, reading something, and coming away with a few tangible facts that just stuck in my head. Often times when I read, well, I know the story, but very often it isn't particularly didactic about anything. Or if it is, it's something that I already learned in the past from a show or something. Maybe I learned it from Rocky and Bullwinkle? It's pretty likely.

So I returned home from the library yesterday with the books "Batman: Anarchy" and "Batman and Philosophy". The former is a collection of comics ranging from the 80's to a couple of years ago, while the latter is a collection of philosophical essays discussing topics relevant to a Batman style world "Is it right to make a Robin?", "Is the Joker morally acountable for his actions?" that kind of thing.

After being presented with the ideas in both books, I tried to remember what I'd learned about objectivism, as a sort of excercise to make sure I could still count that as information within my power, and though it took a bit longer to jog my memory than I'd care to admit, it did all come back. Yeah, that's pretty much the only reason I wanted to bring up Ditko and objectivism- so now let's talk about this new stuff I've been reading! (oh, what, you wanted to hear my understanding of objectivism? eeeeh, maybe later. I'm more interested in this newer info)

SO with Batman: Anarchy we chiefly follow the character (of course) named Anarchy, created by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, with all of the stories written by Alan Grant.
I think the chief difficulty in selling the character Anarchy is that what "anarchy" means to Grant and Breyfogle (and as a result Anarchy himself) is different from the generally accepted definition of the word.
Let me just use the definition found on dictionary.com for reference

Anarchy:
1. a state of society without government or law.

2. political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control: The death of the king was followed by a year of anarchy.

3. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.

4. confusion; chaos; disorder: Intellectual and moral anarchy followed his loss of faith.

Okay, so none of these definitons really surprise me, because that is the definition I think most people have been inculcated to accept as correct, with the greatest emphasis on the fourth definition. For the character Anarchy, however, he would only accept the first and third definitions as accurate.
So right off the bat we're dealing with a communications barrier to understanding what Alan Grant is trying to get across. It would be far more palatable to call it something like, I don't know, demarchy, and then propose your ideals.

Now, as much as I enjoyed Anarchy's ideas, my thinking is more along the lines of Plato and Hobbes- that people (in general) do need governance, otherwise they'd fall into "confusion; chaos; disorder", that fourth accepted definition of anarchy. There are a lot of people who could self govern, that would fully live up to the ideals Alan Grant is espousing- they are amazing people, but I think they're outnumbered. And it totally sucks that I think that. It's very negative.

Then I started reading "Batman and Philosophy" and I was pretty excited to see one essay make reference to "Batman: Anarchy" right after I'd just read it.

Frankly, I'm pretty sure after reading these pop-philosophy books I will have learned more about philosophy than I was taught from an entire intro to philosophy class.

Boy, I've sure typed "philosophy" a lot just now, didn't I?

Anyway, it's all very interesting to me, that's what I'm trying to say.