Holding out for a hero? Look no further
SONIA VERMA | SEPTEMBER 19, 2018
Travis Smith brings together two of his great loves — superheroes and political theory — in a smart, easy-to-read, fun book.
Travis Smith ’96 has a secret identity, albeit one his students have long suspected. Now, the mild-mannered associate professor of political science has written a book that blows his cover with all the force of a blockbuster superhero landing.
Smith is a comic book geek. A big one.
And in his new book, Superhero Ethics, he pulls off a superhuman feat of his own: Not only does he seamlessly combine his deep knowledge of comic books and his expertise in political theory, he makes it fun.
Smith’s book compares 10 top superheroes from an ethical standpoint. He pairs them off in brackets until only the worthiest one is left standing: The hero for our time.
As he walks the reader through his analyses to figure out which hero is the best, Smith makes a case for a choice based not on personality or resources or sheer might, but on their ethical strengths.
“The point of the book is to convince people that they should think critically about their society, and maybe even themselves, by looking at the kinds of characters that are offered up in popular media today as praiseworthy,” says Smith, who studied political science and philosophy at McMaster, got a PhD at Harvard, and now teaches political science at Concordia University.
“You can enjoy Batman stories, for example, without thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be Batman,’ ” Smith says. “After all, part of what’s fascinating about Batman is that he’s not altogether admirable.”
Smith systematically picked superheroes who are well-known not just from decades of comics and TV shows, but from recent blockbuster movies.
The book turned out to be challenging to write, Smith says, because fans love heroes for all kinds of reasons. But the heroes we love aren’t necessarily the ones we need: The Green Lantern wields the kind of absolute power that would be dangerous in the hands of a tyrant. Wolverine aims at being noble, but he is still a brutal killer with a history of animalistic violence. And so on.
“I tried to take a critical eye toward characters I love, whose stories I most enjoy,” Smith says. “I didn’t just want to root for my favorites.”
Of the 10 heroes in his book, Smith does have a clear personal favourite. “I’ve read every comic book that has his name on the cover,” Smith says. “So I had to engage in an exercise of self-assessment to figure out whether the kind of character I always thought was the coolest really deserves my admiration.”
(Spoiler alert: He doesn’t, leading Smith to reconsider his perspective and preferences.) Superhero Ethics is an extension of Smith’s regular classroom teaching techniques, where he routinely uses pop culture examples to illustrate complex political ideas and theories to his students, whose convictions often run deep on emotionally loaded subjects.
“I’m teaching old books and trying to look at politics philosophically and not merely ideologically,” he says. “For us to try to ascend from the everyday cares, and to try to get to the point where we’re thinking rather than simply reacting based on our feelings, I need to be able to lift the discussion out of the things that are making us angriest right now.”
That’s where the examples come in. And while Smith’s first love is superheroes, he’s just as likely to refer to the Netflix show Riverdale, pop music or sports.
“Instead of going to a real-world example of two rival nations, and my lecture turning into a heated argument over this country versus that country and who is right and who is wrong, I can say, well, let’s talk about Leafs fans and Habs fans,” Smith says. “They love their own teams so much that they don’t really respect each other. And my students get it. It’s still emotionally charged, but the stakes aren’t quite as high.”
“That’s not to say that I won’t occasionally get somebody who loves their Habs so much that they become furious,” he adds with a smile. “I do teach in Montreal.”
Fictional characters are also great for illustrating unambiguous archetypes, Smith says. Plato, for instance, talks about the man of perfect justice, who always does the right thing even though he always gets a reputation for doing the wrong thing. You’d be hard pressed to find such a person in the real world, Smith notes.
“But in fiction, that’s Peter Parker, with his Parker luck! When Spider-Man stops Dr. Octopus from robbing a bank, the next day’s Daily Bugle headline will read, ‘Spider-Man helps Dr. Octopus rob the bank!’ Right away, the concept becomes more familiar to my students and easier for them to grasp.”
Smith says his teaching style draws on his own experiences as an undergraduate at McMaster.
“What I remember most about the teachers who were most influential to me has less to do with the material we covered than the style in which it was taught. These are the teachers I try to emulate and to live up to: They had the ability to communicate in an accessible fashion, often extemporaneously, and they exhibited a spirit of generosity with respect to the ideas and the authors we were studying.”
And like his favourite profs from his time at McMaster, Smith teaches without a detailed script. He gets up and talks and takes questions, working without digital slides or video presentations.
“I’m old-school, for sure,” he says. And the comic book fan, never far from the surface, peeks out for a second.
“I always joke with my students that the only technology I would want in my classroom would be pyrotechnics and theme music.”
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