"Pay It Forward" and the Conscience

Yesterday, I watched the movie "Pay It Forward," a drama starring Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt, and Kevin Spacey. It involves a young boy (Osment) who is given an unusual assignment by his social studies teacher (Spacey)-come up with an action to change the world. Unlike most of his classmates, he completes the assignment, "paying it forward" by helping out three people in an altruistic way, without payment in return or credit for what he has done. The movie focuses on the people he chooses to help-a drug addict living on the streets (James Caviezel), Spacey, by bringing he and his mother (Hunt) together, and a classmate continually tormented by bullies.

My first impression after watching the movie was, of course, that it has a positive message with which we could all agree. After all, how can you find fault with a desire to help out the people around you, become connected to others, and help make the world a better place? But the more I thought about what I had seen, and the dramatic ending, I wanted it to be something more, something deeper than it actually was. I wanted something beyond the typical melodramatic conclusion and an uplifting feeling that would die down a few minutes after I had changed the channel. I remembered that I had not felt this specific way about a film since after watching "The Matrix" with my friends in high school.

I then began to think about the rationale for this, why these shows evoked such a deep response when all they were meant as was two hours' worth of entertainment. And here it is: they are both an expression of conscience, the law that is written on our hearts.

We can begin to understand that there is a deeper undercurrent of meaning in these expressions of pop culture when we understand the connection between what we feel (we are uplifted when the boy's mother quits drinking and turns her life around, and when Neo realizes he is "The One" and defeats his enemies) and who we are (moral beings created in the image of God). Think back to the stories and legends we share. They reflect the same basic ethic in all times and cultures. Defending the poor against the rich stirs our hearts the same if Robin Hood fights in Sherwood Forest as if it is George Bailey in Bedford Falls. Bravery is celebrated in The Iliad and The Odyssey just as it is thousands of years later in "Glory" and "Hamburger Hill". What people implicitly know is that there is something at our core that makes us want to feel the way we do about these stories, even if we can't name what it is.

Skeptics claim we root for the one wearing the white hat because of "social conditioning" or some long-obsolete instinct handed down from our ancestors. Yet we intuitively know that these explanations are insufficient. For one thing, why even act in the "public interest" when it does not benefit us? The society might say that stealing is wrong, but why shouldn't I steal unless there is a higher law guiding me on how behave? Why should someone fight and die to set others free? Instinct cannot explain our moral intuitions either. For instance, if the instinct is to procreate, and there are no overarching moral laws, why not rape or commit adultery (or why even be monogamous at all)?

A better explanation starts with accepting that the "feelings" we get occur across times and cultures. If the feelings are there, and psychoanalysis can't explain them away, how did they get there? Why are they there? There must be something deeper that explains why we laud Superman and loathe Lex Luthor. It goes by different names-C.S. Lewis called it the Tao in "The Abolition of Man", gunslingers in saloons called it "the law of the West", but there it is-the natural law, expressed through the conscience.

I don't think that "Pay It Forward" is a bad movie, just that it could have been even better. It has a nice message. I just think the problem comes when our culture has come to such a point where objective moral pronouncements are frowned upon at every turn, except when the frowners consent to them. This means that any rationale for doing good is reduced to "I just feel like it", or as Osment's character puts it, "The world is screwed up." This leaves people with a less-than-satisfied feeling at the end of the movie, but more importantly, it denies people a chance to be fully human, not letting them have the freedom to be the morally bound individuals they were always meant to become. Ultimately, denying the conscience and objective moral standards enslaves us all to our emotions. This is why I wanted this movie to be about more-affirming the conscience, maybe even pointing toward the source of the light, rather than just the glow.

This is where we must live out our calling as Christians. Popular movies are never going to do more than express the world's values. They cannot do more than point out the imprint of the Lord we already know. But we can use the intuition people already have to begin to reach out and show them why we have hope.