My husband and I joined the clergymen of God and Comics to discuss the latest MCU movie: Avengers: Infinity War. The full episode is available to stream on the God and Comics site, but I thought I’d type up this teaser for you.
Alexi: So if Killmonger is the shadow self of Black Panther, who is Thanos the shadow of?
Me (Leah): I do see a resemblance between him and another Marvel villain: Iron Man. In that Iron Man and Thanos both present an inhumane solution to what they see as the problem of humanity.
Where Thanos’s answer is simply DEATH—that the only way people can flourish is if there’s fewer of them. Iron Man in Age of Ultron also struggles with “people have difficulty living with each other” so I’ll just build a BIG ROBOT so that people won’t have to be responsible for each other, and I won’t have to be responsible for them anymore. This robot will be able to keep everyone safe and contained.
And I think it’s that idea of containment that’s common both to Iron Man and Thanos. That their ways of dealing with the riotous fecundity that can spill over, that’s human nature/human life, is to in some way slow it down, box it in.
If you want the light side, the opposite to the shadow self of Thanos or Ultron, the opposite of all that is marital sex, which is always, when open to life, a pledge of faith in the goodness of creation.
[…] Thanos loses to “Riotous Fecundity” […]
One guy Thanos reminded me of was Karl Marx. Marx thought that economic injustice was at the core of mankind’s problems. If you share resources fairly then everyone will do good. He did not realize the problem is inside the human heart. We are sinners and we need a saviour. No external manipulation of our circumstances will make us good.
Thanos echoes some of this. He tries to fix the ratio of people to resources. Because this is fiction it actually works. Killing half the population makes world hunger go away. But in reality that will not work. The problem is not a lack of food but a lack of sharing. Now maybe killing half the population would motivate the survivors to share for fear of a repeat. The thing is even strong motivation is not going to do it. People don’t need to try harder to be good. They need the grace of God and the humility to cooperate with that grace.
So Thanos like Marx moves to a radical solution based on a poor understanding of the problem. The solution ends up being worse than the problem.
Riotous fecundity has a chance to work because both sex and procreation impact a person deep inside their heart. The grace of God comes through these channels big time. So there us at least a chance of cooperating with that grace and building a family that is truly good. It is still a struggle.