Watching the online reactions to the campus protests over Israel reveals a kind of spiritual poverty that passes as political analysis. On the one hand, I don’t think these protests will move the needle on a ceasefire; Biden could lose all his voters for the upcoming election over this issue and wouldn’t change his course. On the other hand, the only thing more depressing would be if there were no protests. Yes, the protestors are elite, often very annoying college students—widely regarded as the worst members of society—but to say that their actions don’t matter is to give up on morality entirely.

These protests have sharpened my feelings about the line you sometimes hear among the ‘heterodox’ literary scene that morality is the enemy of literature. We have to choose aesthetics or morality. Which is, historically speaking, a wild claim to make about literature (see: Dante). I think the steel-man version of this argument is that morality becomes aesthetic, which I agree is troubling. But that isn’t to say that morality isn’t aesthetically powerful and spiritually refreshing.

There’s something cathartic about moral courage, which isn’t wholesome but (self-)confrontational and earned, such as in Claire Keegan’s Small Things like These, where doing the right thing is a matter of character, of courage and necessity, even should the results of moral action have limited effect. Neither hope nor despair—just a good heart and moral strength.