Philosophy is where you find it

Philosophy is where you find it. I recently saw the film 'Invictus' (on dvd). It's a great story, very uplifting. The film Invictus makes great use of a nineteenth century poem, with the challenging but ultimately powerful conclusion:

I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.

Clint Eastwood was the director, and he also directed 'Gran Torino' which is another meditation on how one individual can change the world for the better. I don't necessarily agree with how the lead goes about it, but that's kind of beside the point.

Both films are only bettered by 'Amazing Grace': if Wilberforce could be an agent to change eighteenth century Britain and get slavery made illegal, almost anything is possible.

These films should perhaps make us feel intimidated and overawed, but I find I leave feeling the need to hold to that spirit, stop wasting my life and get out and make a difference. (It often takes a glass of wine, some cake, and a good nights sleep before I'm restored to respectable, self-involved apathy again, with these films trailing ragged streamers of possibility for weeks afterward!)

A completely fictional, but equally inspiring tale along the same lines is Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. The honourable hero, Cazaril, saves the day by following the advice:

Hold to virtue—if you can identify it—and trust that the duty set before you is the duty desired of you. And that the talents given to you are the talents you should place in the gods’ service. Believe that the gods ask for nothing back that they have not first lent to you. Not even your life.

Or the 'Johnny' series for young readers by Terry Pratchett, the first of which is provocatively titled: Only You Can Save Mankind, and asks the question:

if not you, who else?

I am indebted to Pratchett also for another book - Nightwatch - with a time paradox in which the hero goes back to his own past, and although warned that he risks his own (happy) future if anything changes, he cannot help interfering:

He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew... then it was too high. It wasn't a decision that he was making, he knew. It was happening far below the areas of his brain that made decisions. It was something built in. There was no universe, anywhere, where a Sam Vimes could give in on this, because if he did then he wouldn't be Sam Vimes any more.

Philosophy is where you find it, even in genre books and films. We have the capacity to be the change we want to see in the world.

This is post 82 of 100 posts in 100 days.