Fantasia and the Narrative Fallacy

As a new parent, I introspect constantly about the impact various media will have on my ten-month-old daughter's neural and moral development.  I seem to find major problems with nearly everything we try watching together, whether it's a disappointment with the Euclidean oversimplifications and anthropomorphism of everything in Inai Inai Baa, or a skeptical wariness of preachy Sesame Street.  While I certainly don't think it's healthy to be obsessed with a particular, fictitious, red monster, I usually convince myself that my criticisms are slightly overbearing, and that, as important as the first year of neurodevelopment is, thirty seconds a week of three triangles and a rectangle suddenly becoming a penguin is not going to force my daughter into a compartmentalized world-view or stymie an appreciation of the profound, true complexity of the cosmos.

When my daughter and I discovered Fantasia, I initially could not find any problems: classical music is variously reported to stimulate the mathematical parts of the brain, the artistic presentation of Fantasia is complex and beautiful, themes are drawn from the deepest realms of culture, history, and mythology, my daughter likes Fantasia, she watches attentively, and she usually falls asleep quickly and quietly (although The Sorcerer's Apprentice made her cry).  However, we recently watched one particular vignette on YouTube set to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" which chronicles the history of dinosaur existence, from the volcanic, predevelopmental phase, through efficacious rise and decadent fall.  As meteors come crashing down and the earth shakes, the remaining brontosauri fight over the last few leaves, pterodactyls steal from kin, and duckbilled hadrosaurs greedily consume their food supply to exhaustion.  The effect is to show that the dinosaurs were morally reprehensible and deserved their fate, which is just ridiculous, yet somehow seems normal to us!

In his classic work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell chronicled the tendency of all human societies to retell the same story over and over again, while changing the names and circumstances slightly to fit the times.  The success metrics of Hollywood films and mainstream journalism suggest this imposition of narrative structure to even uncompelling events is an inevitability of convention, but I wonder if we can all agree that such oversimplifications are not welcome in an enlightened world.  A didactive, narrative version of history may keep members of a particular society in line, encourage organized violence, or make cultures feel better about original sins, but isn't it actually morally reprehensible to suggest the dinosaurs, Carthaginians, or Mayans deserved their fates?  Shouldn't we see evil as an effect representing the sum of all human suffering rather than a just redemption?  Or shouldn't we at least be exposed to art which causes us to ask these questions, rather than art which assumes their answers?  Good art does not make moral assumptions; it does not preach - instead it is thought-provoking.  This is why Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy have enjoyed popularity throughout the ages and we'll forget all about Avatar in five years.    

Rather than report facts and allow for readers to make their own inference, the way our media goes about its business - especially more unscrupulous elements like the Huffington Post and Fox News - is to infer then report, crafting a misleading, ideology-based mythology along the way.  It's a lot easier for us to cope with emotional events such as September 11th if we see ourselves as innocent victims of an evil plot: the terrorists hate freedom.  What we should be doing is looking at the facts and trying to minimize suffering and weighing the potential consequences of our actions against their potential benefits.  In the case of September 11th, radical Islamicists, whose own worldviews account for clear good guys and clear bad guys, were responding to what they perceived as evil American infidels defiling the Holy Land with their military presence.  The Arabian Peninsula was occupied by an invading army.  For the Islamicists involved, September 11th was an act of just war.  

When Ron Paul famously brought up this prevailing motivation at the 2007 Republican Primary Debate, referencing our own CIA's analysis, he was childishly shouted down by Rudy Giuliani, who was simply reinforcing the cultural myth of American moral infallibility, and made into a straw man by moderators.  The truth is that our presence in the Arabian peninsula is an effect of the Cold War, where the two world superpowers competed for the hearts, minds, and governments of the non-aligned.  U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere is certainly understandable if not altogether justified by these realities, and the events of September 11th are an unfortunate and tragic consequence, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ask the hard questions that need to be asked and construct a compelling critique of the causes and motivations of all parties involved rather than fit the events into a pre-existing, template narrative structure.  I prefer to engage with something resembling reality.