Good News/Bad News: We Invent Iron Man — But Other Stuff, Too

The pattern rings bracingly through history’s march: a people group confronts insistent needs or snarling crises. These force responses which generate resourceful solutions. Their repercussions linger beneficently, generation-spanningly across the ages. 

Think the remorseless, life-and-death demands of the military and national security playing a significant role in birthing the internet, without which few of us could imagine day-to-day  existence. Think NASA and six decades of  space exploration yielding contributions to the comings and goings of quotidian modern life. Think the titans of industry whose drive to succeed, to provide, to find a better way fathered boons we now take for granted. 

Nonetheless, “evil lurks in the hearts of men” (hat tip: the Shadow ); individuals, nations, governments. People’s  imaginative capacities and potentials frequently go awry. They can be applied in the causes of good or ill, blessing or wickedness; and they are, everyday, all around us. On a purely human level, folks perform prodigies of decency, benevolence, uprightness. Others, or perhaps even the same ones, carry out acts of ambitious, self-serving destruction.

Note: the Creator Himself, analyzing one of the earliest, high-rise building projects, teeth-clenchingly acknowledged humankind’s gigantic abilities — and the harrowing risks accompanying them. At a “plain in the land of Shinar” – today better known as “Babel” – He remarked, “[T]his is what they begin to do”, then adding ominously,  “Now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” (See Genesis, chapter 11).

The Architect of the Universe has invested massive possibilities in every individual. It’s a  deeply sobering stewardship, echoing the Creator. Literally, a sacred responsibility – which too many, too often, deplorably misemploy.

From the first, and finest, Iron Man film I’m haunted by Yinsen’s dying charge to playboy Stark. In a far-flung, terrorist-ridden redoubt he gasps: “Tony, don’t waste your life; don’t waste your life“; followed, a bit later in the story, by the tycoon’s jut-jawed pledge to Pepper Potts that, hereafter, he was resolved to use abilities, which formerly had hurt so many people, to help the helpless, instead. 

The bottom line — both soul-rocking and soul-chilling — is that while people have been fashioned for greatness, it can be turned toward great good or great evil. One innovator devotes his talents to crafting implements of injury and death, and multitudes in uniform have limbs rent from their bodies. Another dedicates his inventiveness toward  developing  treatments which restore functionality to those same men and women.

Or, say, a state’s intelligence agencies, applying their dizzying capacities to quashing terror plots; or snooping where they shouldn’t. Either one is conceivable.

While the imago Dei — mankind — traverses this planet in this fallen age, the days ahead hold vast promise.

Also, vast peril.