The End of Inspiration: How Good News Stories Are Stopping Us From Being Good
Further Thoughts on Inspiration, Aspiration, and the Moral Life
The gift of inspiring stories is that it lifts our chins in depressing times, giving us vision when all seems lost. But the cost is that inspiring stories that lead us nowhere, by definition. Absent an account of how goodness happens, inspiring stories work against the moral life. This is the follow-up to last week’s post on the limits of “being inspiring”.
The Rise of Inspiration in a Joyless World
Since 2020, the world has been a torrent of bad news, and when you’ve had 40 days and 40 nights of rain, all you want to see is an olive branch. Ours is a fairly joyless world: even if there is an olive branch, it wants to know what olive tree had to sacrifice for that olive branch to happen. Part of this is a merciless refusal to enjoy even good things, but part of this is, I think, the inability to think it’ll ever stop raining.
This persistent joylessness has led to a different phenomenon: the Good News circuit. It’s John Krasinski’s ad hoc web show highlighting human successes turned into an overnight hit. It’s Instagram accounts highlighting parents surprising their children home from war. It’s book deals where people tell us their rags to riches story, of sleeping on their bikes and the side hustles that built them a yacht. In response to the cascade of traumatic stories of viruses and gas prices and economic collapse, inspiration came rising up out of the cracks in various and sundry forms: little hits of black joy, of teachers doing well, of neighbors helping one another, of the grasses of happiness budding up through the toughest of concrete.
To be clear, I am not against a happy ending: I’m a Christian, and Christians are obligated—against all of our sight—to hope for the resurrection of the dead. But inspiration? When we encounter the pervasive Good News Machine, one of two things happen, two different vices.
The first version is something that I’ll call the suppressive temptation. For every positive glimmer of inspiring light, the suppressive temptation comes along to say “NOT SO FAST REMEMBER THIS THING?”, pointing out some true and right limitation of the good thing that’s not quite what it should be. Jon Krasinski? Maybe his character Jim cheated on Pam.1 That video of the vet returning home from war? Domestic abuse runs higher among combat vets than almost any other population.2 Pointing out the dark spots to good moments isn’t always so much “being realistic” as taking moments of joy and diminishing them. It’s a vice because, while it rightly points out the limits of all goodness, it does so in order to diminish the joy we find in good things.
Nobody likes ethicists for this reason: we categorically exist to remind you that a well-cooked fish probably comes from a dying ocean, or that the sunshine you’re enjoying indicates that ways in which our ecology is rapidly changing. It’s true, but saying these things in order to dampen good joys is a vice.
But that’s not the vice most people are tempted toward: in a world which overflows with reasons to despair, most are tempted toward the suppressive mode’s shadow: the temptation of inspiration.
If the character of the suppressive temptation is to focus only on the process of things, and never on the good object out in front, the temptation of the Inspiring is to only see the good in front, and never the process: to lose oneself in the moment, and blinker out the very real processes and deliberations and habits which enable good things to be good. This truncation allows us to spectate the goodness, but never to participate in the goodness on display.
An example: consider any of the inspirational books, social media accounts, personalities, etc whose book-in-trade is to inspire you, to give a good fuzzy story. In presenting you the final product, independent of both the journey there and the mundane aspects by which the good virtues of the thing are sustained, two things have happened.
First, all good things are narrating as “just happening”: the overnight success or the luxury athlete appear ex nihilo, as opposed to having come into being in very boring ways. All boredom and duration is eliminated in favor of “the moment”. Second, in omitting the boring and endurable, it becomes a spectacle for us to behold, not that which we might participate in.
In this way, Inspiration kills the moral life entirely, equating the moral life with its present appearance. There is no process, no endurance, no patience, no learning in wisdom, no increase in favor with God or men. But reader, this is the moral life: a journey from death to life, that we were once dead and now we are en route to being made alive. Inspiration gives us only the good vision, as a moment which has no past or way in.
The Spectacle and the Death of Moral Growth
The spectacle of Inspiration finds its malicious mirror in the cancel culture videos, enumerating the reasons why your favorite band is toxic now for the past. It is right and just to name when an injustice has been done: to say that Metallica engaged in racist and boorish behavior in their heyday is just, but to ignore the ways in which, as grown men, they have embraced sobriety, counseling, and moderate living is to do them an injustice.3
Inspiration shows up because the world has become simultaneously joyless (demanding perfection now) and impossible to bear (with too many bad things to name). But what inspiration gives us is not a way through the difficult things, no way for us mere mortals to ascend: it gives us illumination, but at the steep cost of sheering off the perfected Good Thing from the process of their becoming. No good thing comes immediately, or easily, and to demand a good thing immediately is to misunderstand how they come to be at all.
The Place for Inspiration:
All of this is not to say that there is no place for inspiring stories, but that any inspiration needs to be chastened (as I suggested last time) as “aspiration”, for two reasons.
By offering only a vision, but no process, people become chained to the image, unable to do anything other than behold the image or repeat it. Either you watch the inspiring vision, knowing you will never do this, or you convince yourself into thinking that you will be that, but without a way to be that. The inspiring story, visage, person becomes a tyrant. Inspiration can summon us to lift our heads up, but by itself, it becomes the occasion for despair: we are not like that vision.
By offering only a vision, but no process, we become bound to repeat the image, instead of being freed to become ourselves. In aspiration, we yearn to be like something, but do not know yet what it will look like, and so, we enter into a journey of transformation while the end is a mystery. Inspiration can give us one version of that final end, but alone, it blinds us to the goodness that our lives might yet be if transfigured.
The joy of entering into a moral life by the power of the Spirit is that we are led by the hands, and become those things over time that we will only recognize in reverse. We will not be in the image of idols in the end, but in the image of God, words of the Word, spoken into being over time. Inspiration must give way to the mundane process, the gloss and sheen of the image made into a real and loved life.
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Reading: Ivan Illich’s H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness was weird, even for Illich. Charlie Camosy and Alisha N. Mack’s Bioethics for Nurses was helpful and illuminating, as I continue to read for this semester’s bioethics course. I have Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House on deck this month, as a long-dormant book club roars back to life.
Paying Attention: To my kids going back to school, if I’m honest. But a few other stories worth noting:
Texas Schools Filling Up With “In God We Trust” Signs: my kids are homeschooled, for partly reasons I talked about with Illich, and I feel ambivalent about this. On the one hand, a historical referent on our coinage, but the motives behind their placement by private groups is very much not to counteract the fact that most folks don’t carry cash.
The End of Baptist Churches in Ukraine: I was once invited to speak at the Baptist seminary in Ukraine, which I wasn’t able to do, but this story is pretty apocalpytic, and calls for a lot of reflection on how moral formation happens in the midst of cultural devastation.
There was actually a plotline written in The Office for this, but even apart from this, speculation remained that maybe Jim did anyway off camera.
I have no stakes in rehabilitating Metallica per se. The Black Album and everything before are classics, but I’m more of a Wilco guy at heart. But my Lord: the video linked above is the very definition of joyless.