One of the most significant ideas to come out of Western civilization is the notion that spiritual vitality enters into the life of society through single individuals who care about goodness. Contrary to a common perception, Plato did not tell us to seek knowledge alone, but knowledge of the Good. Socrates and Jesus may be viewed as archetypes of those who show us how to do this. Socrates, for example, tells us we ought to seek “the most important things”, and Jesus tells us that if we live his way, we will be living the highest spiritual form of life. One of the specific claims repeatedly made by the archetypical representatives of such ways of living is that they are never to be identified with the dominant opinions about happiness or good citizenship. Socrates and Jesus indicate that if anyone desires to follow their “way”, that person cannot also continue to follow the beaten path. The suggestion that the common opinions about happiness and good citizenship can never by themselves lead me to what I really need and want is the most significant challenge to the citizens of modern societies. I take this challenge to be much needed by Americans in particular. American civilization has been highly functional in great part precisely because it has led even the most thoughtful among us to assume that there is only a difference of degree between those ways of life which make us happy and successful citizens and those “ways” which a Socrates or Jesus would tell us is needed in order to live a deeply good and meaningful life. One of the most unusual traits of American civilization is that its intellectual class tends on the whole to make this assumption as well.

While not many intellectuals in America seek to understand and impart insight about the “the most important things”of a moral-spiritual nature, somewhat surprisingly, an unexpected source of such insights has emerged: Hollywood. A variety of both TV shows and films have been portraying individuals seeking to live more deeply than is offered by American civilization’s ethos of radical individualism and civic religion. The first mitigates against moral depth or spiritual seeking, while the second by its essentially political nature must remain spiritually shallow. Perhaps partly in response to this problem, some TV and film makers are assisting us to see that we need to distinguish the dominant opinions about happiness from true happiness. I first noticed this trend with “Picket Fences” in the early ‘90's. Then came “Northern Exposure.” Even “The X-Files,” ostensibly a science fiction series about a Cartesian truth “out there” of which the protagonist only wants knowledge, showed us that the real meaning of life might be in the seeking and not the finding of some external object. More recently is the ABC show “Lost”, which is not so much about people unable to find their way off an island, but ultimately about us, in this culture, today. Among films of the same type I count “American Beauty,” the first two films in the “Matrix” series, “Big Fish,” “Pleasantville,” “The Truman Show”, “Donnie Darko,” “Spanglish”, “Romero,” and last year alone, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Little Children” and “Into the Wild”. While American critics and intellectuals continue to largely miss the spiritual meaning of these shows and films, there are some in our culture who are receptive and will benefit from them as “guideposts” along their way. If in turn these “guideposts” help a few among us to gain the what I call the “needed insights”, they might in turn reveal to others that seeking for and caring about the Good is not useless after all, but “the most important thing” any of us can do.