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Captain Planet
"Captain Planet … he's our hero … gonna take pollution down to zero … gonna help him hmm hm hmmm hmmm bad guys how like to loot and plunder." (I didn't know all the words when I was 8… it turns out that it was "gonna help him put asunder". Honestly, who uses "asunder" in a kids' TV jingle?)
Captain Planet. What a guy. The hair, the skin, the groupie bling.
Before I go on, if you aren't quite up to speed on your early-nineties edutainment children's cartoons, you might want to watch an episode on YouTube before continuing.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers was one of the most formative cartoons of my youth. Like anything formative, often the ideas are absorbed into the meta of our minds and we are unaware of it. So, 13 years after the show's final airing, I thought I'd revisit Hope Island and have a think about some of the themes that I sponged up.
"The power is yours"
Probably the most pervasive of ideas in Captain Planet is optimism. The Planeteers (of which, we could be one too!) possessed the ability within themselves to undo the damage (both environmental and societal) that is caused to the world.
We are drenched in this optimism everyday. And that's a good thing right? I mean don't we want to empower people to do good? Well yes, and no.
The trouble with this kind of optimism is its source. The source is us, rather than in God. This kind of optimism finds its pedigree in the broad liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its emphasis was on the aptitude of the individual to make and remake the society we live in. Ironically, it was this very liberalism which fuelled the unchecked environmental destruction we slap our foreheads at today.
Christianity reminds us that the font of righteousness is our great God. Although he gives us with the great honour of tending to his world we do so under him. To revel in our ability to fix the world's ills without due acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus is like eating from the tree all over again.
The naturalistic world-view and the ethical basis for environmentalism
The clearest explicit message from Captain Planet is that we need to reverse the environmental destruction of the earth we've witnessed over the past three centuries. It pulls no punches even blaming rampant capitalism (personified in the baddie Looten Plunder). This is refreshing given the show was the brain child of Ted Turner, one of America’s greatest beneficiaries of rampant capitalism.
But why should we protect the environment? No seriously… why? The answers Captain Planet offers are all seated in the philosophical false-assumptions of naturalism.
The problem that naturalists have here is called "The Is–Ought" dilemma and it goes like this:
In front of me there stands a large tree. But, what ought I do to that tree? How do I know the right way to behave with it? Should I hug it? Should I chop it down? Should I marry it? Should I worship it? Should I shelter in its branches? Should I fertilise and nurture it? All these options are possibilities, but that the tree exists in front of me (it is) doesn't help me answer the question of how I ought to treat it.
This problem was articulated by David Hume and so far, no philosophically rigorous answer has been offered in rebuttal.
What is needed is someone outside the creation to offer dignity to it and to act as an absolute standard of rightness. It is only God who can connect us, the object (or for that matter the other person) and the right action associated with it. Far from being the religion for losers Ted Turner said Christianity is, it actually makes sense of the world and grounds environmental concern in a way that is truly defensible.
Gaia robs God of the honour that is due to him for creating and sustaining the world.
Coupled with this classical liberalism and naturalism is a splash of new age spiritualism in the person of Gaia. Gaia is described nonchalantly in the opening sequence as "the Spirit of the Earth", a message borrowed from Greek mythology and revived by neo-paganism.
I could be wrong, but I suspect this character is in the show because of a book by James Lovelock Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) where he argues that the earth's matter is part of a dynamic system that keeps itself a fit environment for life. In some way the earth has been knowingly keeping itself as a life-sustaining biosphere. This book gave a new language to those who wanted to infuse ecology with a new spiritualism.
I want to be measured here, because it appears the creators of Captain Planet have, like so many western attempts to homogenise religion, taken a complex spiritualism and made it bland and benign. But leaving my concern that this could be a tract for the new age movement to one side, the tacit message that anyone but God has authority enough to sustain creation, in my opinion, should upset us more than it probably does.
You may think I’m overreacting but Gaia is a false god and she is robbing God of his glory.
Finishing then, I want to say, there's heaps of good stuff I could say about Captain Planet. There’s no doubt that my lifelong love affair with composting and recycling are at least in part owing to my primary school afternoon jaunts with the Planeteers. But it is worth giving due consideration to even the seemingly helpful entertainment we ingest everyday and consider what messages are worth holding onto and what we must part with.
