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The Moral Compass of Watchmen

Some works inculcate by shining some light into the human character, even where this exposes failings we might prefer to remain concealed. While comics has not distinguished itself as a polemical medium, the possibility and opportunity nonetheless exist there for exploring angles of the failings of men and the philosophies they create (or accept by default) to guide them.

Such an approach can explore a current-events worldview, limiting its scope to the prevalent philosophies of the day, or it can reach to greater, broader meaning by examining (and, perhaps, implicating) viewpoints that expand beyond the factional ideologies of a specific time and place.

Though perhaps somewhat dulled by overanalysis - and we can expect as much from a piece that enters the canon of comics classics from the date of its original publication - Alan Moore's Watchmen approaches, as one of its various themes, the limitations of human philosophies and the manner in which they connect to the emotive profile of flawed human beings playing out messianic daydreams through the role of the costumed hero.

Character and Philosophy

For most people who have ever lived, a pure philosophy, completely detached from self-interest, represents a luxury beyond their means. Yet people of all eras have accepted the necessity of (at least occasional) abandonment of self-serving for the greater good of some higher principle. We select our ethics based on a variety of forces, including self-congratulation, peevishness, and, sometimes, even the obvious rightness of ideas.

Viewed from such a perspective, Watchmen seems less like a mystery story or a tragic tale of the ruination of men by their overreaching schemes and more of a conflict of philosophies and the kinds of emotionally-constrained personalities that support such worldviews. Events, if they seem to flow from a font of inevitability, do so not because of some overarching destiny that drags them, but because humans (and, by inclusion, superhumans) partake of a particular nature given to moral flaws.

Some human beings come to philosophy through a detached analysis which points to answers about moral questions. The greater number of us, however, seem to reach for notions that best explain the way we intend to behave anyway, inverting the proper relationship between morals and behavior: We tend to choose the morals that best absolve ourselves, pretending to rightness without having to do much in the way of personal growth. If we begin with a strong innate character inclined to right behavior, the two forces of character and philosophy can move in synch.

The players in Watchmen hover around certain moral poles, not intended to include every possible permutation but which do provide an adequate sampling of humanity in orbit around one or another. Each, furthermore, connects to an emotion or character flaw; thus, we have Rorschach driven by rage to a vengeful moralism, the Comedian inclined to the practice of hedonism by a nihilistic ethos; Dr. Manhattan trapped in a clueless epistemological state by his own defining aloofness; and Ozymandias inclined to a utopianism that excuses murder on genocidal scales by his own arrogance.

Rage and the Moralist

Rorschach provides object lessons on more than one point. We can view him as a warning about the dangers of action directed by rage, even of a righteously-targeted kind. We can also see him as a cautionary example about how a rigid or dogmatic morality untempered by wisdom or compassion can act as much as a destructive force as the evils it claims to condemn and oppose.

The moralist - a type which sometimes, but not typically, may take manifestations as extreme as Rorshach - may, with some credibility, infer the wrongness of actions from their consequences. For this troubled hero-turned-antihero, no mere theory, no simplistic ideology inclines him towards a prudish worldview. His own history demonstrates the consequences of multiple immoralities that warped his life from its very first years.

Rorshach condemns because he knows. To him, a concept like "free love" means not the carefree interaction of the sexually privileged in a world devoid of consequences, but instead the life of a child with a mother known to the world as a cheap prostitute; the life of a boy who never got to know a father who never really cared whether he had a son or not; of a thousand cruelties and laxities brought on by the application of the notion that desire justifies action without the necessary humane qualifier of "an it harm no one."

It means little or nothing to him that the occasional soul might enjoy irresponsible, yet pleasing-at-the-moment, activities without bringing others to ruin, because such special cases do not represent the pattern of his life.

The combination of a potent character flaw, furthermore, turns a virtue - the notion that people can and should behave in an upright manner, however defined - into a tremendous flaw. With Rorschach, his rage acts to convert him from a gallant and noble man to a cynical, hate-filled creature who expects the world to provide poison and, deep inside, rejoices when it does, since this provides him the opportunity and excuse to punish it for its crimes against himself as a boy (and, perhaps, against its crimes against everyone else as children).

The urge to punish belongs in a well-rounded moral character, but Rorshach, even at his most stable (in flashback scenes) never enjoyed a rounded personality. Mercy and common sense have perished in his desire to punish the world for his own ruination, and he no longer cares about the difference between the innocent, the nearly-innocent, and the guilty. He only knows the direction in which he intends to push the world, and when other forces work against this, he lacks the ability to compromise, even through dissimulation.

Rorshach would rather die than back down, even momentarily. Had he enjoyed more self-awareness, he would have found less real moral purity than moral posturing, and the issue of compromising his purportedly flawless character would never have deceived him in a manner that inclined him to throw his life away in an ultimately meaningless confrontation between himself and a personified force of nature (Dr. Manhattan).

And, in one of the nastier ironies of this complex work, Rorschach, steeped in blood and anger, stood for a rare moment on the moral high ground, standing against a murderous scheme to remake the world through a crass act of human sacrifice in the millions, and this one return of clear reasoning effected his destruction.

Hedonism and the Nihilist

Throughout the various decades touched upon by episodes recorded in Watchmen, one finds little to explain the Comedian as a hero. The terms "nihilist" and "sociopath" come to the tongue before any of the descriptors or epithets appropriate to a comic-book hero in the traditional model. If one uses the concise definition of a sociopath provided in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - paraphrased to equate a sociopath with someone who fornicates and fights too much - we have, indeed, a near-perfect specimen.

While to equate hedonism with nihilism does great disservice to the former (honorable forms have existed since before the term, or, indeed, codified philosophy existed), one might note that the fundamental tenets of nihilism - the defeatist contention that goodness and knowledge either do not exist or remain beyond human ability to recognize and achieve, therefore simulating non-existent things in their properties - leave little open for those afflicted with it as an epistemological and ethical syndrome beyond massively self-destructive acts or some kind of unenlightened hedonism, less than that proclaimed by an it harm no one, do as thou wilt... for the omission of the an it harm no one clause.

The Comedian seemed, from the very earliest episodes, to do things because of their entertainment value - busting the heads of some goons here, a rape here, killing some Viet Cong there, blowing away an unwanted pregnant girlfriend there - in a career better described as a spree sanctified by official sanction. Heroes of the textbook that the principals of Watchmen sought to supercede generally had some kind of special mission or at least a moral compass to point them in a direction on the smaller scales, but Comedian seemed to lack this; indeed, his name suggested he viewed life, ethics, and anything to which others might attach value as elements of a huge black joke.

This theme to his character helped contribute to the mystery of his murder, because his actions had begged for someone to end his life many decades previously, and because so many people had a motive. And, through casual murder, rape, and other crimes hinted at by his nature but not depicted on-panel, Comedian had, perhaps, earned his fate; nonetheless, he had some value in that his kind of spinal-cord cynicism tends to home in on the weak points in someone's moralistic image-armor. By deriding our own failings and hypocrisy (although in a bad-faith attempt to undermine the notion that human beings can behave rightly), his kind provides an opportunity that we can abuse by defending our failings or exploit by patching the holes in our ethos.

Nihilism thrives on meaninglessness and certain kinds of irony, so we need see a fitness to the nature of his murder in that, perhaps for the first time in the arcs of the story, Comedian stood on a moral principle. Some instinct inclined him, after discovering some ugly hints about what Ozymandias had planned, towards a fear that led him to resist (or at least object), and this ended up costing him what remained of his life.

Aloofness and the Empiricist

One panel in Watchmen neatly summarizes the essence and the problem of Dr. Manhattan. Standing in a room full of armed men, Manhattan seems to make one of their heads explode while a panel contains his own detached analysis of the goings-on: "The morality of my activities escapes me."

Moralists make much of the notion of knowledge untempered by wisdom. In a sense, pure empiricism, even filtered through the clearest senses we could ascribe to a human or superhuman sentient, might fail to provide insight or understanding, since facts and truth stand as different layers of knowledge. Facts can provide much forensic detail, such as what, where, who, and the like, but much of the why resides in the truth which human insight, rather than logic, must distill from facts.

This problem hounds Dr. Manhattan throughout Watchmen, from the beginning of his reconstruction as a superhuman being. He has an intelligence beyond human ken, but, seemingly, no particular wealth of wisdom through which to filter his knowledge. In this sense, Dr. Manhattan could, with interpretation that need not stretch particularly far to reach, show the problems with philosophy designated technically as "materialistic." Such materialism does not represent greed, as in the common usage (or, some might say, misusage) of the term; instead, the materialistic sciences assume that all salient properties of an object made of matter derive from that matter. In essence, materialistic philosophy and science deny the soul, and, perhaps, the lack of just such an abstract component as a soul afflicts Manhattan in his imperfect and sometimes-empty quest for knowledge.

The blind spot - or materialistic tunnel vision - generally absolves Dr. Manhattan from evil in a way not really available to his peers in this tale. The others can, but fail to, comprehend the evil inherent in their deeds. Manhattan tries to justify his actions, fails, and knows he has failed. He doesn't know things he should, things of a knowledge perhaps foreclosed to him owing to his unique nature; but he recognizes, acknowledges, understands and despises the gaps in his own practical and moral knowledge. Again, unlike others in this tale, he needs and perhaps deserves a redemption from ignorance (which fits a Classical notion of sin as hamartia, or "missing the mark") that, if nothing changes from the ending of the tale, he can't achieve.

Hubris and the Utopian

Moore seems to have, through the person of Ozymandias, connected the vices of classical literature to those of the twentieth century. The character's own self-definition tends to unify classical antiquity with a kind of enlightened futurism. His deeds, however, implicate the fraudulence of this claim. If he, in his own self-congratulatory biography, describes retracing the steps of Alexander, in Watchmen he retraces the steps of the figures of Greek tragedy. That he seems to get away with it implicates Watchmen as a comedy in the Aristotelean model; but this does nothing to ease the hubris that defines him. Ozymandias believes he knows the best for humanity, to the point that taking millions of lives seems an acceptable strategy. In such a light, his scheme for a better world seems of a piece with Hitler's Thousand-Year Empire rather than, say, a model derived from Gandhi-like philosophy.

Ozymandias takes his goodness for granted, a failing which allows him to commit to the murder of millions of his fellow men for some grand scheme. As with many who proclaim their own goodness, the obligation to do good tends to diminish to the degree that such folk believe in the impenetrability of their own moral superiority.

This posture of moral infallibility allows paradoxical combinations like Ozymandias' vegetarianism (a posture for public consumption) and his casual murder of the principals involved in helping him achieve his utopian scheme, through methods of poisoning (for his confederates at his Antarctic fortress), bombing (the artists and breeders of his monster on the island) and murder through technologies he had to invent for the purpose (his slaughter of New York City). Yet how can we take his poses seriously, watching him raise his arms in victory in front of a wall full of screens showing the corpses of millions?

One might argue that the success of his utopia justifies this self-styled Paragon's arrogance, with all its attendant lies and murder. However, this would run contrary to the central themes of Watchmen, including the notion that the function of policing does, itself, destroy the moral compass (as it did for Rorschach, its most obvious victim in the work). Furthermore, even where Moore might favor the occasional utopian theory himself, his work traditionally avoids the kind of naive assumption that the political experiments of the twentieth century did more than simply gamble and lose, with over 100 million human beings losing their lives in such games on most of the continents that harbor human life.

Where Everyman Fits into the Picture

The catastrophe Ozymandias engineers divides humanity into three categories: perpetrators (and their accomplices), victims, and survivors. The latter two classes, as we can observe from the unfolding of the story, draft members in a kind of blithe indifference to merit. Innocent and guilty die in the slaughter of New York; the wicked turn against Ozymandias' scheme and play out-of-character roles in the resistance of an evil even greater than what has swallowed them decades earlier, and receive only death as their rewards; and accessories-after-the-fact remain immune to a kind of Nuremberg trial that one might think fitting for Ozymandias and his kind.

Silk Spectre (the younger version, Laurie) and Nite Owl (Dan) play the role of Everyman in this piece. Though essential to threads of the plot, they play a role of ethically helpless figures battered about by the tides of the corruption of their fellows, both in the collective and the particular. Their deeds, it seems, matter little or not at all in a world where heroes on their scale have become irrelevant, a post-heroic age after the obsolescence of the individual. Thus, their virtues and their sins matter little. As enemies or accomplices to Ozymandias, their impact would have remained about the same, and this fundamental tininess of an ordinary (or even an extraordinary) human being confronting macropersonal powers and forces saves their lives, since the Golden Boy of utopian genocide decides to let them live.

They move in a gray area created by the limitations of human power and the obstacles to perfect moral insight, and, as such, represent the humanity of the kind the reader enjoys rather than the larger roles played by figures such as Rorschach, the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, or Ozymandias. For, if they lack the clarity of vision necessary to incline them to one of the moral poles represented by these four, we could attribute it to a moral abdication; however, more likely, human canniness inclines them to recognize that more powerful minds and personalities, in spite of their considerable gifts, have not truly found the answers they seek, even if in some cases (read:"Ozymandias and Rorschach") these players at polarity believe they have.

Their helplessness, perhaps, excuses their complicity, complicated by the awareness that exposing Ozymandias would result in their own deaths and, possibly, more on a scale of megadeaths, assuming the gimmicky scam of a phony alien invasion could actually revise geopolitics and revise human nature. And, as would Kingdom Come a decade later, the fundamental irrelevance of humans in the face of controlling superhumans becomes clear as an erosive force, here undermining human ethics even as the figures variously stand as embodiments of a menu of principles or philosophies.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 281. Completed 07-OCT-2001.