These Scars, Part Three: Responsibility

With The Dark Knight pinned beneath a steel rail, stories above the pavement, and with the weight of The Joker compounding the existing encumbrance, Batman remains on his back immobile. When The Joker mentions that “It’s a funny world we live in,” The Joker stops and looks at his incapacitated foe.

Continuing, he says, “Speaking of which, know how I got these scars?” Batman, drawing from an earlier scene in which he receives from Lucius Fox a new batsuit, responds, “No, but I know how you get these…” With his spiked vambraces now equipped to propel the spikes forth, he does so, striking The Joker and giving himself the ability to become free.

As we have learned from The Joker’s two differing tales of the origin of his scars, scars originate and manifest in equally different manners, nevertheless, leaving the same result--a scarred individual.

In the past two weeks, The Joker, as we have come to understand, actually, highlights within his own unique allegoric pedagogy and acute blend of postmodernist surveys of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and the neurosciences.

First, we discover that high stress experienced in the early developing years of childhood can alter the essential structural hardware of the brain, having a direct effect on the mind’s software. One cannot simply delete or erase these neurochemical scars.

As English poet and polemicist John Milton penned in Paradise Regained, “The childhood shows the man / As morning shows the day.” More often never does it seem that a bad morning extends into a good day.

Second, we find that empathy, one of the key elements to our very humanity, can be what initiates the trauma that separates us from our fellow man, leaving each to mirror the scars of the other.

As economist and ethicist Adam Smith observed, to merely draw into one’s mind the plight of “our brother upon the rack” was enough for one to “enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” As keen as this notion of “fellow-feeling” is, he ends before mentioning how the “brother upon the rack” sees his fellow man, and in that, comes the “personal distress” and the separation.

Yet, how far can society go in addressing these types of issues and the actors that propagate forth from such?

The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope states, “No man is hurt but by himself.” If seeking a more modern translation of this concept, one need look no further than a recent Country song, in which one will hear, “[W]e all live with the scars we choose.”

One should question if a contradiction exists between the science and the philosophy. However, no contradiction does.

When examined further we come to find that trauma, and thusly, its scars, can be navigated through in time and with fortitude. The mind can never be swiped clean, yet it can learn to augment itself with new software to assist in the participation of the traumatized with the societally functional.

Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, notes, “One way to regulate emotion is to get more information.” From this, he continues, “[I]f you are able to separate yourself, then the non-overlap in the neural response frees up processing capacity in the brain for formulating an appropriate action.”

We have the choice in how we approach our trauma;--that is, to let it affect us, or for us to control it, to funnel it into something productive or just something that does not obstruct our progress.

Take Bruce Wayne--a child left in a damp alleyway alone holding the hand of his dying father, after witnessing both his parents being shot--he made a choice about his trauma, he learned through information and the acquisition of knowledge how to understand his trauma, and he focused his mental and physical being around these scars.

Batman comprehends that each individual--no matter his chaotic childhood, no matter his emotional trauma, no matter his past, in general--is responsible solely for his actions and must bear the consequences thereof.

To understand why and how one does as one does is to only prevent future traumatic experiences, and therefore, similar situations, yet negates naught of the actions that have already befallen.

This finishes this thought on The Joker's Scars and the society. It was not the most actively received of columns, yet life goes on.