The Good People and The Bad People
Our moral confusion about ourselves and others
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About four or five years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Richard Beck’s book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. In this book, Beck explores how we view concepts like purity and contamination in our culture (and other cultures) and how that transfers to our view of people. Often, the people we tend to reject are those who move us to disgust. Our rejection of them is partly a reflection of that disgust. Beck asks us to imagine a glass of juice into which he drops a cockroach and stirs it around. After removing the bug, do we want the juice? Almost everyone would say no. But Beck, citing the work of Psychologists Paul Rozin and April Fallon, shares that after the juice is filtered in a way that ensures all traces of the cockroach have been removed - even if the juice is boiled after filtering - most people refuse to drink the juice. It has been contaminated for us, it has failed the purity test in a way that is permanent. It is an example of a kind of fear of contamination that comes from a reaction of disgust. Disgust and fear can be related - we fear coming into contact with what disgusts us. It is also an example of what is called negativity dominance. A small amount of the negative dominates and contaminates the larger amount. It doesn’t matter if it is a 12 ounce glass of juice or a gallon, or if it is a small or a large bug, the result is the same. The clean juice doesn’t counteract the bug, instead, it is contaminated in its entirety.
As I said, I read Beck’s book about four or five years ago but pulled it off my shelf to take another look after receiving a text from another friend. He sent me a link to an interview of comedian Tim Dillon by CNN’s Elle Reeve. In his text, he described as the hour and ten minute long interview as “one of the more painful interviews I’ve ever witnessed.” Of course I watched the whole thing. Painful is not a bad description, I thought it had a bit of a train-wreck quality. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I found it fascinating.
Dillon is a successful and popular comedian with a successful and popular podcast. He is a bit hard to pin down. I think that is a good thing, more of us should be a bit hard to pin down. I’ll come back to that. Dillon is gay, irreverent, irreligious (I believe), a liberal of sorts politically, but heterodox, eclectic in his thinking. As such, he has been critical of positions taken by the right and the left, politically and culturally. He has been critical of positions I hold. I forgive him this indiscretion because he is very funny.
I know nothing about Reeve aside from this interview. On the other hand, the interview was an hour and ten minutes long and I watched all of it. In my reading, Reeve represented a stance that is all too familiar in our culture - and I don’t just mean it is reflected in the media, though it is prominent there. It seems to be an assumption underlying many of our interactions, social media or conversations or whatever, regarding any number of topics related to the culture and politics.
Reeve’s assumption, underlying far more than half of her questions, is that there are good people and bad people. She repeatedly asked Dillon about trends in comedy, in the podcast universe, in politics that had a very similar theme. There are good people and bad people, Reeve clearly assumed herself to be one of the good people, and assumed it is the job of the good people - be they comedians, podcasters, journalists, or politicians, to expose the bad people as bad. She never attempted to make the case for this assumption, she never argued for it, it was, to her, unquestioned. This assumption manifested itself in many ways, but most prominently, Reeve considered some of Dillon’s podcast guests to be bad and wanted Dillon to do more to expose their badness. She also seemed to bemoan the reality of podcasters in general talking to politicians without asking them “are you bad?”
I don’t have an opinion about the podcasts that she asked about - I haven’t heard any of them. But I think this good people / bad people assumption is behind much of our cultural division and, quite frankly, makes us dumber. As Dillon was pushing back on her assumption, Reeve said, “these are not my ‘are you bad?’ questions”, to which Dillon replied, “we are all bad.” Reeve then attempted to make a soft case that Dillon was bad, in a ‘if I was going to make the case, it would look like this’ sort of way. I think she thought, and wanted it to be clear to us, that she thought Dillon was one of the bad people (and she was doing her good people duty by pointing it out).
Dillon’s response that we are all bad, though probably he is not aware of it, has a grounding in Christian theology. We are all flawed, we are all broken, we all need redemption. We should not sit in judgment, certainly not in condemnation, of others.
The good people / bad people assumption (again, it is not argued for, it is simply assumed) generally means that I assume the good people position. I am joined by the people who are “like me”, the other “good people.” I or we are in a position to judge, to condemn, the badness of others. But I don’t need to be too self-critical. I am one of the good people.
I’m not naive, I am aware that some people seem to do a higher percentage of bad things than others. However, the proposition that my own percentage is 0 or so low that it has no real effect in the world is worse than naive. Moreover, even people who allegedly fit into the bad category may be right in this or that particular case, they may say something true that I should hear. Which I won’t if I make it the hallmark of the good person never to listen to the bad people. Which I also won’t if I think any contact with the bad people contaminates me permanently. I must stay away, I must not platform, I must condemn - in order to maintain my purity as one of the good people. After all, the smallest exposure to the impurity of the bad people threatens to contaminate me entirely.
One of the results of this assumption, painfully obvious in the interview, is a lack of genuine curiosity about other people - especially if we have already classified them as good or bad. Reeve lacked curiosity about what Dillon would say in response to her and, therefore, seemed to miss much of what he was saying. Or she didn’t interact with it, choosing instead to pursue the good/bad dichotomy. As I said, Dillon is a bit hard to pin down, a bit of a contradiction or mystery that I find interesting, but that is lost on Reeve, or on anyone else who is only interested in the moral classification. When we put ourselves in this position, we stop listening, we stop being challenged, we stop refining our own thinking. We are far poorer for it and so is our culture. Just to be clear, I find myself agreeing with Dillon sometimes and disagreeing with him maybe a bit more of the time. But if I allow myself to listen, I get to know something about someone else, I learn something about what they think, and, with Dillon, I often laugh.
I feel the need here to point out that I am not making the case that Dillon is one of the good people and Reeve is one of the bad people. I am saying that stance in the world is a toxic one. Dillon certainly has beliefs I don’t have, holds positions I don’t hold, and does things I would not choose to do. He also has beliefs and positions and actions in common with me. The same, almost certainly, is true of Reeve. The are both image bearers. Both are flawed and fallen. Just like you and just like me.
When I was younger, the teaching of Jesus that had the most cultural purchase was “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1). While this does not forbid having discernment about people or situations, it does, rather specifically, forbid the condemnation (or moral classification) of others. We are constantly invited to look at ourselves, to be concerned with our own brokenness, and to have grace for the brokenness of others. It seems clear that this teaching of Jesus, so culturally popular in the 70’s and 80’s, has faded from cultural view. We classify, we judge, we condemn (while we give ourselves and those in our group a pass). We do the good people / bad people thing. We react with disgust to those we fear may contaminate us or our group or our thinking. This is an equal opportunity trend, happening from the right as much as the left, from the religious as much as the secular, liberal and conservative, nationalist and globalist, Marxists and free-marketers. Or, without reflecting on the actual philosophy, we go along with whatever crowd we want to identify with or against whatever crowd we want to oppose.
Richard Beck, in his book, contrasts this human reaction of contamination response with the life of Jesus and, in turn, to the mission of the church. Jesus pushed hard against this assumption. Jesus dined with “sinners” and was quite open about his friendship and acceptance of those the religious culture considered impure. To pick an arresting example, when Jesus healed a leper, he touched him - the man who actually had an impurity that contaminated. Jesus did not speak his healing, he touched him, physically welcoming him back into the community of the merely imperfect. Jesus was an example of a positive dominance that is part of our purpose and part of the mission of the church. A small ‘amount’ of loving, redemptive, gracious kindness can spread by the power of God’s Spirit - reversing the contamination in the process. That is not a bad picture of redemption.
I am at the end of this particular essay and I have more to say about our calling in following the example of Jesus. That will have to wait. In the meantime, let’s reject the good people / bad people assumption. Instead, through the power of God’s Spirit in us, let us love and give grace, let us listen and be curious, let us, by God’s grace, be used to reverse the contamination in us and all around us.
Links
Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality - Richard Beck - Cascade Books - 2011
Elle Reeve Interviews Tim Dillon - CNN - May 19, 2025
