Gladiator

Even though it may be tempting to summarize the virtues of ancient Rome as “might makes right” because of the emphasis, which is even in the Latin language, on fighting armies and repressing rebel populations, the virtues did not reduce to those of war. In fact, such virtues, as Nietzsche suggests in his texts, can serve as a refresher for our species as it has “progressed” through the centuries since the Roman Empire existed. Even though the film Gladiator (2000) contains much mortal combat albeit contained in coliseums rather than unrestrained on battle fields, at least three clusters of virtues can be gleamed and articulated as alternative “schools” of virtue ethics. This is not to say that all three are equally valid, however. The virtues cherished by the Emperor Commodus, for instance, are arguably inferior ethically to those of his father, Marcus Aurelius, and even those of the gladiators.

In the film, Commodus suffocates Marcus Aurelius just after the father has informed the son that Maximus, a renown general, will become the next emperor. As Marcus Aurelius has explained to Maximus, Commodus “is not a moral man” and therefore “should never hold power.” How true that is, and yet even in modern democracies very unethical people have succeeded in gaining immense power of public office. Marcus Aurelius should have made his announcement to the entire camp, which includes two visiting senators from the Roman Senate, before confiding in his malicious son, Commodus. It is in that very conversation that the father and son discuss different virtues, and thus present the film viewers with the notion that “virtue” is not a homogeneous category; people can hold different virtues, and even be deemed as immortal because the same virtue can be emphasized and left out by different people.

After being told that he would not be emperor when his father dies, Commodus admits that he has failed in the four virtues that Marcus Aurelius esteems: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Later in the film, the failure of Commodus to be just is clear when he secretly stabs Maximus, who is tied up after being captured by Emperor Commodus’s guards, so to have an unfair advantage in fighting Maximus in the Colosseum, and yet, fittingly, Maximus wins the match even though he quickly dies from the stab-wound. Back when Commodus is talking to Marcus Aurelius about succession, the latter says, “You go too far” in speech; in other words, even in a conversation involving virtues, Commodus demonstrates a lack of temperance.

But there are other virtues, Commodus tells his father. Ambition can be a virtue because with it a person can strive for excellence. Aristotle’s notion of virtue is closely associated with doing something well. Marcus Aurelius has lamented to Maximus that only four years of twenty as emperor have been in peace; ambition for territory (and plunder) can be inferred as another, less boast-worthy, virtue esteemed by Marcus. As for the virtues of Commodus, he lists loyalty to Rome and filial piety towards his father, Marcus, although the son shows a lack of sonly duty to his father in murdering him. Commodus adds bravery, but with an important—to Romans—caveat. Bravery does not necessarily have to be demonstrated on a battle field. This would be a hard sell to a Roman.

In fact, the virtues cherished by the gladiators are strength and honor, especially in physical combat. Physical strength, and being willing to constrain it to be exercised within the confines of honor, are not valued by Commodus, as demonstrated in his unfair fight with Maximus, and even Marcus Aurelius is not a showcase in physical strength, though he is quite old by the time he is planning for his successor.  

To be sure, virtues can be combined out of the three clusters. Honor, wisdom, and justice go well together, as do fortitude, ambition and loyalty (to Rome). “There was a dream that was Rome,” Lucilla, the daughter of Marcus Aurelius, says in the Coliseum as she cries over the body of Maximus. Ambition can indeed serve good ends, but throughout the film the substance of that dream eludes the Romans. What does “Rome” stand for? Which virtues? If only ambition, is that in itself really a virtue if it is by military conquest? This is a pitfall with virtue ethics. Leaving the content open can invite the sort of defense that someone as ethically sordid as Commodus can use—namely, that there are different virtues. It is not a matter for relativism that Maximus is ethically superior to Commodus; that they have different virtues does not equate the two men ethically.

When the film ends, we can expect that Senator Gracchus, whom Maximus has just set free from the imprisonment by Commodus, will do as Lucilla asks; Rome will again be a republic headed by the Senate and presumably two consuls. That Gracchus values the virtue of honor as a constraint on ambition is clear when he asks those gathered around Maximus’s dead body, “Who will help me carry him?” In utter contrast, Maximus has remarked to Commodus, "The time for honoring yourself will soon be at an end." The difference between people who value honor and those who do not is huge, and this can be seen in what other people say about a person. At the end of the film, no one wants to carry the dead, defeated body of the cheater-emperor, Commodus, whereas Maximus is already a hero because he fought for Rome as wanted by Marcus Aurelius, who directed Maximus to assume the reins of power in order to return Rome to the rule of the Senate.  

To be sustained again as a republic, Rome as an ideal to look up to and be proud of will depend on there being enough men of honor among the political and military elite. As nice as this sounds, the actual history of the Roman Republic and the ensuing Roman Empire demonstrate just how weak a reliance on a virtue can be in the face of raw ambition sans virtue, meaning ambition for its own sake, more territory for its own sake, and more power for its own sake. Choosing between alternative clusters of virtues may be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; as our species has evolved, we seem ill-equipped to give virtue its due when acting virtuously is no longer convenient.

Silent Night

The medium of film has an amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue, narrative, cinematography and sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved, renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured up even with another yet different emotion, such as joy, even in the same song. The medium is also capable of stimulating thought not only as viewers attempt to figure out unnecessarily convoluted plots, but also thinking more abstractly in philosophical or theological terms. Such abstractions, besides being implicitly or explicitly treated in the narrative, extend beyond the confines of a narrative and its story-world. “Life and death” is such a theme, as is whether the human soul is immortal. Less tantalizing, though arguably just as important for typically being overlooked, philosophy of mind (and philosophy of psychology), for which a strange, incomprehensible plotline is by no means requisite or even constructive, stands as a rich reservoir for filmmakers. Even though the question of life and death is central to the film, Silent Night (2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic—there is even a “Covid Supervisor” listed in the credits!—a seldom-recognized vulnerability innate to the human mind may deserve top billing in that film. The group-think evinced by the group of friends at the house on Christmas Eve and perhaps a wider mass-hysteria only touches the surface of the problem in terms of the human mind. I contend that the star-attraction in the Christmas film rightly goes to the human mind’s vulnerability to presumption to the assumption of infallibility (and susceptibility to group-think cognitively and as in terms of power).  In the context of a group’s suicide pact, critical thinking in the sense of critiquing whatever assumptions are being held is so very important, yet it is only evinced by Art, a young boy, who is under unrelenting pressure especially from his parents to take a fatal pill before a “cloud” of toxic, climate-changed gases hits.

As for the film’s plot, Nell and Simon, who have three boys, including Art, invite friends that they have known since school over for Christmas in Nell's mother's upscale house. Everyone is trying to celebrate Christmas, so they resist turning the subject to their impending self-inflicted, albeit presumably necessary, deaths. Death is assumed as certain and very painful for anyone who does not take the “exit” suicide pills that the government has made available to British citizens, but not to the homeless and illegal immigrants—a moral problem really only bothers Art. The assumption that suicide, or an “exit,” as in “Brexit,” is necessary presupposes that death from the toxic ground-level “cloud” is certain. Art’s mother, Nell, makes this assumption; so too does her husband, Simon. They are determined to force Art to take the pill rather than to allow their eldest son to hold out with James’ fiancée, Sophie, who is pregnant and does not want to kill her baby. James even tells Art that the scientists all agree with the government that failure to take the pill would result in intolerable suffering from inhaling the inevitable and long-lasting poisonous gases. As it turns out, Art is correct, and they are all wrong, because he wakes up the next morning, alive, after the “cloud” has passed by and snowfall has cleared the air. His parents had not given him a pill when they took theirs because they assumed that he was already dead merely because he had blood on his face. That Simon and Nell make this assumption without even checking for breathing or a pulse and yet somehow know that survival inside the house post-cloud will not be possible just because the scientists and governments say so belies the validity of the parents’ claim to be so confident in their reasoning and conclusion. That suicide is involved means that the stakes are high, and yet unchecked assumptions are allowed to preempt even holding off on the pill until such time as active poisoning is taking place.

Only Art insists on that strategy of wait-and-see, and his parents promptly veto it. Nell assumes that her son would be suffering alone—another unfounded assumption. Only Art questions the critical assumptions being made by the adults. He even subjects the adults’ suicide “pact” as well as a government policy of issuing suicide pills (only) to citizens to moral critique. He even points to his parents’ stupidity in giving him Christmas toys that night, which of course he will not be alive for long to use! “Your mom is a bit daft,” Simon admits to his son in a touching scene on the stairs. At least Nell recognizes that Art is intelligent, for at the Christmas dinner, she tells him, “You clever, clever boy!” He has just scolded all of the adults at the table, “You all should be ashamed of yourselves!”, for not having done enough politically—such as in voting Green rather than Conservative, as Bella and Sandra lament later—to reduce carbon emissions so the atmosphere would not throw air-borne toxins back and kill at least half of the human population (so far). Even during the dinner, a toxic brown “cloud” of poisonous gases and fierce winds traveling at ground-level is sweeping through the land and will hit the house sometime after midnight, hence on Christmas. Besides having taken climate toxicity too lightly for decades, the adults at the table are apparently unaware of the Christmas line, and a child shall lead them. Nell admits to everyone that Art is clever and yet she dismisses his very reasonable arguments in favor of “wait and see” rather than preemptively taking suicide pills under the assumption that doing so before the “cloud” arrives is necessary to obviate what is sure to be intolerable suffering. Instead of considering Art’s arguments, Simon and Nell, as well as James, their physician friend, are oriented to refuting Art’s objections to suicide as preventative rather than as a last resort in a worse case scenerio.

To the adults in the house, the government, scientists, and even the adults themselves could not be wrong, and yet no one except Art realizes that the toxins might pass with the passing “cloud” rather than stick around for, as Nell supposes without any evidence, a hundred years. She may be thinking of a thermo-nuclear winter, though for that a hundred years may be too optimistic. Such a mistake is indeed possible for Nell; after someone says at dinner that the Queen could be in a bunker with beans and dog food, Nell states how bad it would be to have to eat dog food for a hundred years even though it is obvious to everyone else at the table that Queen Elizabeth II had several small dogs throughout her life and would include them, and their food, in a bunker. Therefore, we can be skeptical of Nell’s explanation to Art that suicide is necessary beforehand because the airborne poisonous gases can go through water pipes and glass windows and thus reach throughout the house. In fact, the belief that the Queen is probably in a bunker implies that suicide as preventative rather than as a last resort is de facto refuted in action at a high station to which even the government is due loyalty. With so much on the line—literally life and death—it is significant that no one at the table suggested that they go to the basement when the “cloud” arrives and come out the next morning to see if the danger has passed or else whether there really is no alternative to suicide other than dying a painful death.

Moreover, the lack of questioning and debate regarding the assumptions being made is itself a red flag concerning the human mind. At one point, Sandra (whose beauty, I might say, steals the show) tells Bella in a hallway that the news reports of the gruesome deaths from around the world cannot be wrong. True enough, but it is possible that all such deaths took place in the “cloud” rather than after its passing, especially if rain or snow ensued. Even James’ medical assumption that no one can survive the gas is undone by Art ingesting some of it in a mini-twister outside that night and yet waking up the next morning. He has breathed in some of the toxin and yet survives it!  Not even what the physician is assuming medically is correct!

Not even Sophie, who initially does not want to commit suicide, questions the reigning assumption that the toxic gas will kill everyone in its path. Art’s willingness to stand by Sophie rather than take the pill is quickly shot down by his mother, Nell, and both of his parents go into hyperdrive in conveying to their eldest son that he will take the pill because, “We are your parents.” Who in growing up has not heard that line! With his life on the line, Art emotionally distances himself from his “protective” parents whom he says love him but are “trying to kill me.” It is not that Simon and Nell are bad people; in fact, they are trying to keep all of their boys from suffering extremely painful deaths. However, the eventuating of snow falling overnight, which likely cleanses the air of the poison, demonstrates that especially Simon, Nell, James, and Bella “leapt to conclusions” in supposing the inevitability of the worst-case scenario quite erroneously. At the very least, everyone should have been open to holding off from taking the pills until clear indications of poisoning could be seen either upon the “cloud’s” arrival or the next morning. Had Bella not stabbed Alex after she threw up the pill that Bella had stuffed in her sleeping mouth, Alex would wake up the next morning and presumably find Art lying in his parent’s bed alongside his dead family. Sophie would wake up and presumably go on to give birth had James not insisted that she take a pill with him. Generally speaking, were the group-think “pact” pushed less severely, more people could wake up in the house the next morning—Christmas morning—and be stunned and grateful for the falling, cleansing snow. Minds are closed to the possibility that the “cloud” could be like a passing thunderstorm in that people could safely wait out the passing storm deep inside the house, and it dawns on nobody that falling snow overnight could cleanse the morning air of the poison, so taking the pill would most prudently be at least held off.  When suicide is an option, it is dangerous to have a mind that does not counter its own values, beliefs, and “findings,” and thus assumptions and conclusions; such minds are particularly susceptible to group-think, in which a group of people hold a narrow view and fight off any challenges or objections to it; dissent, in other words, is subject to vitriol and exclusion.  

Art, a young boy, is the only person in the house who questions the “group-think” party-line and its assumptions. Only he survives, at least to the next morning, which the adults had insisted over and over again would not be possible. He wakes in a house whose beds are laid upon by the bodies of his brothers, parents, and their parents’ friends. As the credits roll, the closing instrumental version of the song, “Silent Night,” masterfully juxtaposes the holiness of Christmas Eve with the dread of impending mass suicide.

The film may lead audiences to question not only mankind's ignorance and culpability in having let climate change get so out of control, but also, from Art's questioning of the assumption of certain death, the human tendency not to question the assumptions that we make and to take precautions in case an assumption is wrong. We are too liable to assume that we are infallible creatures, even though the fact is, we are human, all too human. Having caused climate change to the extent that a toxic cloud circles the globe and then to needlessly commit suicide makes our species look very bad. We have done it to ourselves is the lesson from the film. In at least implicitly assuming that we know more than we actually do, and thus avoiding criticism of our assumptions and conclusions as unnecessary and even a waste of time, the vulnerability of the human mind is laid bare. It would be a profound human service of film if it would lay bare the vulnerability to a presumptuousness of de facto infallibility, which in turn preempts the activation of critical thinking in the sense of questioning one’s own beliefs, assumptions, values (and thus ideologies), and conclusions. The human mind is not as logical innately as we may perceive it to be; at least a semester of logic should be required of any college student. In the film, Nell’s reasoning is atrocious, and yet she comes down hard on Art’s very reasonable argument.

Nell thinks the Queen would be eating dog food in a bunker for 100 years. That the dog food would obviously be for the queen’s dogs is a more reasonable assumption than that the queen would eat dog food for a century, and yet in stating how bad that would be, Nell has no recognition of how faulty her reasoning is. This means that it is nothing short of dangerous for her to turn to Art and insist that he will take a pill rather than wait and see in case the gases are airborne only as the “cloud” is passing. Forget the queen and her pets; the emperor (and what parent is not an emperor?) is proverbially not wearing any clothes! That a power that is presumably clothed is actually bare is precisely the attitude toward one’s own mind—one’s own assumptions, theories, and conclusions—that I suggest the film implicitly advocates. This is done by showing just how damaging group-think, perhaps even a global hysteria, and especially a failure or refusal to critique one’s own thinking and assumptions can be.

Besides the distortive impact of its unconscious, the human mind does not ratiocinate nearly as well as we suppose. As the impact of our species on the planet increases, whether by igniting nuclear war or burning fossil fuels, questioning our own thinking and that of others becomes more crucial. The adults in the film may be in the midst of a suicide-pact doomsday hysteria that has gripped the world, or they could merely be too intolerant to dissent in a sort of group-think mentality within the house. Either way, they are not thinking clearly enough to warrant the assumption of infallibility, especially considering the myriad of factors that are involved in climate, including whether a heavy snowfall will clear the air.