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| Excerpted from a cease and desist letter. |
Clichéd clichés, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. As a lower-middle class White male growing up with a single-parent mother in South-Western Ontario (with a genealogy of significant mental illness), I experienced oppression, but orders of magnitudes less than those of many of my current colleagues and friends. This origin seems to have nurtured my empathy with those who have experienced or especially continue to experience absolute poverty—true desperation. More than most of the people whom I've encountered in the academy, especially in its upper echelons, we often had to choose, deliberately and consistently from relatively young ages, to become the ways that we are now. We didn't have the external pressures from our immediate communities (let alone families) to search for better lots in life; if anything, we faced opposite pressures.
However, I don't write this from self-pity. This context is necessary to situate the subject of this post.
Why I—like those others—often confront the problem of protagony.
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Sidebar. I'm an English teacher. Narrativization is an essential composite of both the learning and teaching processes of disciplinary English. In some ways, we've never finished or transcended the Ancient Greeks' "agon". The great contest continues unabated—among tragedians in fifth century BC Greece and among players of roles of all recreational, intellectual, and political stripes today. However, arguably the self-consciousness of this role play and of the impulses to interpret, to retell, and to witness lived experiences through narrative has a history and developmental arc traceable to prehistory. In other words, in some ways, the narrativization of these impulses to story can be traced to and reaffirming of the essentially human and therefore humanizing—ascriptions of prot-agon-y and antagony offering signs and signifiers of people attempting to interpret meaning from the human experience. I don't know that we need Thomas King to confirm this, but he's still an awesome read.
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During a seminar at that academic conference, one of my department's professors contributed an interesting point regarding the liberation of inter-generationally oppressed peoples in systemically violent conflict zones. The professor noted the importance of nurturing progatony among the oppressed. On the surface, this object may seem rather benign and even benevolent. However, like so many other tools of the human experience—empathy, charisma, sophistry, etc.—protagony is only as Good as the agent (self-)actualizing it.
I don't think I need to belabour societal obsession with heroes and heroism. It's popcorn fare for the looking-glass self's validation. These heroic narratives and narrativizations present elevated forms of protagony, appealing to their audiences' ideals. As a gamer since toddlerhood, I grew up immersed in the protagonies of Japanese role-playing games. It's terribly easy to inhabit these stories, since generally, people tend to find solace in the un(der)examined assumption that they may inhabit their own RPG.
But take two seconds to stare into the stars, and our collective cosmic insignificance is once again rendered obvious. The universe probably doesn't care about us, falsifiably, and even if it did, we don't yet have the (observable) evidence necessary to validate thus.
Needless to say, we're probably not the heroes of our narratives; we might not even be Fifth Business.
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And yet, it's 2022, and people continue to heroize their choices and actions. But who among us are most predisposed to protagonization? Our political leaders? Sure. Celebrities? —I'm sure at least one or two people come to mind. What do these folks have in common?
Let me guess. Do the germane characteristics validating their protagonistic candidacies involve (under-)philosophizing, a (lack of) truthfulness to their lived experiences, or a (repudiation of) the "conscientization" that this blog has alluded to since its inception? Right. As a virtue-ethicist, I make a point to avoid the skulljacking of virtue ethics, but the omnipresence of vice seeking validation (and most often exoneration) through protagonization has become comically conspicuous.
Implicitly, an agent's protagonization of their actions requires an under-examination or self-deception. Today, we endure the great irony that the people most inclined to narrativize themselves as protagonists tend to be the last to self-examine, if they ever bother to do so. It's "those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness," as Sophie Scholl would say, who seem to be most predisposed to protagonize their actions and existences, if only as a last resort.
Crucially, this trend becomes especially worrisome among our intellectuals. After all, our "Doctors of Philosophy" have (allegedly) exhibited a threshold of love of wisdom, communicated a threshold of trustworthy truth value, and have (allegedly) habituated a threshold of consciousness and of conscientiousness critical of the former. Intellectuals tend to be the most vulnerable to protagonizing their triumphs over adversity—as those among the most self-conscious of the gravity and magnitudes of their struggles and positionalities.
Make no mistake: A commitment to virtue can threaten the very existence of anyone protagonizing vice. Those protagonizing vice will almost certainly experience harm in your presence, although necessarily self-inflicted. Virtue is the villainy of vice. Moreover, the people aspiring to virtue tend to be the last people to self-identify as the protagonists of their own narratives. Unadulterated self-examination tends to bar said individuals from the necessary myopia.
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When V for Vendetta reached theatrical release in Ontario, I paid to see it in theatres four times in just over a week (a substantial feat for a teenager pumping gas on weekends). I knew nothing of the graphic novel at that time; I knew only that the Wachowski sisters had a hand in its production, and after ruminating over The Matrix for years, I knew that I needed to see this film—to attempt to understand it. After my first viewing, I would have rewatched it in its entirety on the spot. The film's cultural legacy and co-opting aside, it still communicates the importance of fearlessness and of determination in the face of oppressors, of authoritarians, and of their contemporary iterations.
With few exceptions, we have almost no Disney-villain level antagonists today. Most of the people who have been villainized have been ascribed such villainy for political purposes, usually through some collaborative gaslighting. But this follows logically; if one has already protagonized vice, (let's call it an "hamartia" to keep my English colleagues satiated), the various varieties of prevarications tend to be one concentric circle deeper.
To conclude, the vile yet vociferous villains to virtue violate with vengeance the vocations of valor and veracity; yet, the virtuous vicars of vigorous vantage vacillate voicelessly, vetting varieties of ventures to venerably vanquish the vacuous villainy. Voilà! The vanishing vanguard vie the vogue vignette: that the protagony of vice villainizes virtue.
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