Marvel | Media
Bioethics In Popular Media: Avengers — Infinity War
Thanos was Wrong
No one can dispute the impact the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had on popular culture. Since 2008, they have built a universe that people wanted to go back to every few months. None of their movies were more unifying than the Avengers films. The first movie made over 1.2 billion. The last one became the second highest-grossing movie of all time, making 1.2 billion in its first week and 2.7 billion by the end of its run (Bean, 2021).
This ten-year-long saga was leading to a single man, a villain that became a pop culture icon due to his complexities, charisma, and the brilliance of Josh Brolin: the mad titan Thanos. It is through this villain that I will be analyzing the bioethics of Avengers: Infinity War.
Who is Thanos and what is his ideology? (SPOILER ALERT!!!)
Thanos was born on a planet named Titan where they lived just like humans, but their resources were depleting quickly. He proposed a solution, which one would call a population control plan, to kill half of the population so the rest could survive on the remaining resources. They called him a mad man and he watched as his planet died.
Seeing this tragedy, he decided to implement his solution on a universal scale by finding the Infinity Stones — artifacts that would grant him immense power. With a snap of his fingers, he would be able to eliminate half of all life. It would be dispassionate and random. Poor and rich alike, children and elders alike. No one would be favored for any reason.
In Infinity War, all the conditions are met for him to go after these stones; he collects them one by one, losing soldiers and making personal sacrifices. At the end of the movie, he wins and erases half of the universe. He then finally rests on a farm looking at the amazing sunset as a triumphant, yet calm melody plays in the background. And credits.
Bioethics: Overview
You might be saying, “Well yeah, we all watched the movie. What does Thanos' plan have to do with bioethics?” Well, it encompasses a huge part of environmental ethics. This is the category of bioethics that examines the moral relationship of human beings to that of the environment and its non-human contents (Brennan and Norva, 2022).
As a result of Thanos’ universal genocide, multiple layers of bioethics are broken, but one in particular springs to mind and should be discussed; this is known as Ecofascism. It was the underlying belief that led Thanos to mass murder and inspired those who maliciously claim that Thanos was right.
Bioethics explained
In simple terms, Ecofascism is the intrusion of fascism into the realm of environmentalism. But more specifically, it is an imaginary and cultural expression of mythical, anti-humanist romanticism vague enough to inspire political action on a smaller scale, like a lone shooter or full-blown parliamentary violence (Hughes et al, 2022).
It manifests in the rhetoric of population control, mostly in the global south, by advocating for specifically western family planning and contraception, or worse — genocide, imprisonment, and eugenics.
Climate change is real. Humanity’s overconsumption of the world’s resources is a leading cause of the crisis, from deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, over-reliance on fuel, mining, and so on.
There are solutions that scientists as well as policymakers, economists, and the like are trying to address. Still, just like Thanos, ecofascists emphasize overpopulation as the main source of climate change, and they frame the increase of the population of the third world as an existential threat to them (Dyett and Thomas, 2019).
Thanos cited the problem of overpopulation, the tragedy of the commons, explaining that individuals will eventually over-consume a group resource, leading to the collapse of the entire resource so nobody can use it anymore (Anderson, 2021).
This way of thinking is not only wrong because the global south is not the leading consumer of goods or emissions, but they are the ones who are the most afflicted by said climate change (Ritchie, 2019). Unlike Thanos, most plans to “reduce” or “manage” the population is full of bias, prejudice, racism, nationalism, and white supremacy (Dyett and Thomas, 2019)
Real-life implications
Ecofascism is on the rise all around the world (specifically in the global north). Its consequences will be the death or imprisonment of millions of people from the global south who will inevitably become climate refugees. We saw it happen with Syrian refugees (Mansharamani, 2016). It is happening right now with Haitian refugees who are absolutely demonized and even battered when trying to flee a country that is afflicted by a deadly earthquake (Plano, 2022; Sullivan & Kanno-youngs, 2021)
The number of climate refugees will continue to increase. By 2050, we could see millions more, if not billions. If the global north continues with its overt focus on overpopulation while ignoring more humane and complex solutions while hiding behind bigotry, nationalism, and white supremacy, a lot of people are going to die.
Work cited
Anderson, C. (2019, February 13). Climate change and eco-fascism in the dystopian genre. The Daily Utah Chronicle. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2021/02/13/climate-change-and-eco-fascism-in-the-dystopian-genre/
Dyett, Jordan, and Cassidy Thomas. “Overpopulation discourse: Patriarchy, racism, and the specter of ecofascism.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 18.1–2 (2019): 205–224.
Mansharamani, V. (2016, March 17). A major contributor to the Syrian conflict? climate change. PBS. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/a-major-contributor-to-the-syrian-conflict-climate-change
Plano, R. (2022, January 11). Haitian migrant treatment just the latest sign US is woefully unprepared for climate migration. Climate Refugees. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.climate-refugees.org/spotlight/haiti
Ritchie, H. (2019, October 4). Where in the world do people emit the most CO2? Our World in Data. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2
Sullivan, E., & Kanno-youngs, Z. (2021, September 22). Images of border patrol’s treatment of Haitian migrants prompt outrage. The New York Times. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/haitians-border-patrol-photos.html
Brennan, Andrew and Norva Y. S. Lo, “Environmental Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/ethics-environmental/>.
Hughes, Brian, Dave Jones, and Amarnath Amarasingam. “Ecofascism: An Examination of the Far-Right/Ecology Nexus in the Online Space.” Terrorism and Political Violence (2022): 1–27.
Bean, Travis. “All 24 Marvel Cinematic Universe Films Ranked at the Box Office-Including ‘Black Widow’.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 10 Dec. 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbean/2020/04/24/all-23-marvel-cinematic-universe-films-ranked-at-the-box-office-including-black-widow/?sh=4fc987cb494e.
Further reads and videos
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/janet-biehl-and-peter-staudenmaier-ecofascism-lessons-from-the-german-experience
How Fascists Are Taking Advantage of Climate Change https://youtu.be/aA1T_0pZHXk
