Emo Peter Parker and the Still, Small Voice

By guest author Quincy Mix

This morning I’d like to weave our merry band of Humble Bragg readers through three (seemingly) disparate pieces of media: A recentish NYT guest essay on medical abuse; Donna Tartt’s Bougie-New-England-Murder novel The Secret History (1992), and the infamous Spider-Man 3 (2007) film starring emo Tobey Maguire. 

What could these pieces, separated across medium, time, and genre possibly have in common, you ask? 

Well, to my reckoning, all three grapple with the gravity—and fragility—of the human conscience, and that’s the kind of (ehem) pretentious abstraction that I want to focus my energies on this morning. 

Bear with me.

The more I am propelled (dragged) into adulthood, the more I realize how precious and elusive a “clean conscience” really is. 

We face brokenness, hardship, and imperfect choices in every conceivable realm of life. Our families, career goals, political affinities, social spheres—even church lives—all stretch our sensibilities in different directions, with many asking, or demanding, that we compromise or bend against our better judgment. 

Yet resigning ourselves to whatever we have to do to “get by,” “get on with life,” or “get ahead” (after all, “pretty much everyone else does it”) can—imperceptibly at first, but more and more profoundly over time—sear our consciences, muffling the still, small voice that reminds us there is a “Big-T” Truth and a Telos far surpassing the pressures of our immediate circumstances. 

Ancient wisdom literature explores the sorrows of stifling, and deliberately rejecting, our consciences (the Pauline image of “making shipwreck” of one’s faith and life always leaves a lump in my throat), but the above NYT essay by Dr. Carl Elliott brought that age-old warning into stark relief for me when I first read it back in May. It continues to stick with me. 

Be warned, the piece is graphic and disturbing, but it crucially, heartbreakingly, explores “one of the great mysteries of human behavior,” i.e., "how institutions create social worlds where unthinkable practices come to seem normal.” 

The story is common and tragic: by burying their misgivings, following the lead of more experienced practitioners, and simply “doing as they were told,” the budding physicians in this piece eventually inured themselves to great evils and flagrant abuses. 

In the medical profession, Dr. Elliott writes, “you are taught to steel yourself against your natural emotional reactions…One danger of this transformation is that you will see your colleagues and superiors do horrible things and be afraid to speak up. But the more subtle danger is that you will no longer see what they are doing as horrible. You will just think: This is the way it is done” (emphasis added). 

If we’re not careful, little deaths of the conscience can one day make the “unthinkable” banal. 

Tartt’s Secret History, a favorite novel that came to mind after reading Elliott’s piece, explores this same moral erosion, but this time within a fictional 1980s liberal arts campus milieu. There, a group of Classics students conspires to murder one of their closest friends. The murder is on page one; the explanation for why they did it takes up the rest. Through the eyes of Richard Papen—a poor kid yearning for the approval and acceptance of his rich, clever, and cultured friends—the reader witnesses how anyone can gradually whittle away his conscience to excuse, even justify, something as wicked as murder.

For Richard, the heinous gradually begins to look like a reasonable, understandable act. The horror of his treachery, and his moral despair, brim up only briefly, at the victim’s wake (‘Suddenly, and for the first time, really, I was struck by the bitter, irrevocable truth of it; the evil of what we had done. It was like running full speed into a brick wall…I wanted to die. “Oh, God,” I mumbled, “God help me, I’m sorry—”’). But Richard’s conscience, and with it his very sense of self and his integrity as a moral being, is razed, and he is left without hope or comfort.

I would be tempted to despair along with Richard, except I’m reminded, conversely, of Tobey Maguire’s character in Spider-Man 3. In case you didn’t know, the Tobey-Spidey films were re-released in theaters a couple of months back, so, naturally, I went to see all of them on the big screen with a trusty Brazilian pal. 

The undeniable cringe of dancing/shaggy bangs Peter Parker in this film notwithstanding, I saw a powerful beam of moral philosophy shine over his arc, and I was jolted awake by the plain truth of its message. Throughout the story, Peter’s personal life is a total wreck; his heroic actions feel futile and unappreciated; he’s tempted towards cruelty and vengeance, and he’s literally being leached by an alien symbiote that makes him ‘roid rage (you know, just like us). 

Ultimately, though, amid his own oppression and personal hell—one not entirely of his own making—he lands firmly on the side of obeying his conscience, despite the cost: “Whatever comes our way,” he tells the audience in voice-over, “whatever battle we have raging inside of us, we always have a choice. It is our choices that make us who we are, and we always have a choice to do what's right.”

Few of us, in the humdrum of our busy, messy lives (and an unjust world) feel like it’s that simple. What is a “right” choice when we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, or when no choice is “good,” or when it’s “not my fault, but I gotta do what I gotta do”?

And yet, through all this equivocation and the muck of life, we must still return to this simple, Life-giving imperative, one that I personally struggle with every single day, now more than ever: Friend, at all costs, honor your conscience. Do not violate it, even on the small stuff. Heed the small voice, ask the hard questions, and have the courage to lose something, perhaps something you hold especially dear, if necessary.

And when you inevitably err against your conscience (for we all do), trust that He gives grace and forgiveness to change. Never surrender to the idea that it is “too late” to turn from a wrong path—for you will, to use a Lewisian turn of phrase, only be locking the doors from the inside.

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”