Good Teams and Irredeemables: What Catherine Nichols Gets Right—and What She Misses

The Sentence That Lands Strangely

Catherine Nichols makes her sharpest observation almost in passing: the good-vs-evil paradigm, she says, encourages "simple partisan thinking" in which morality is reduced to who's on the good team and the irredeemables who must be stopped at any cost. It's a sentence worth sitting with. She isn't wrong. The Marvel cinematic universe, with its inexhaustible supply of civilizational threats, does seem to train audiences in a particular emotional habit. The habit of locating themselves effortlessly among the righteous, and projecting concentrated malice onto an other. Nichols traces this to the 19th-century rise of nation-states, which needed stories to generate social cohesion. Before that, she argues, Western folk tales were refreshingly small. Jack wanted the giant's gold. The Greeks wanted Helen back. Nobody was saving the cosmos.

The diagnosis is serious. But the essay treats this moral hunger as if it were purely a political artifact, a cognitive virus spread by states. The older tradition has long held something more uncomfortable: the hunger is real, the infection is real, and they are not the same thing.

Ideology and Myth Are Not the Same

Jordan Peterson's[^1] reading of mythology is useful here because it resists the reduction Nichols fears. The danger, Peterson argues, is not that stories feature a struggle between good and evil. It is that ideologies impersonate myth while amputating its complexity. A genuine myth holds the full weight of reality: the hero's capacity for cruelty, the villain's intelligible logic, the possibility that the saving force might itself become tyrannical. An ideology, by contrast, "tells part of the story as if it were complete," inviting every listener to identify with the creative and positive characters while denying their association with the negative.[^1] The superhero franchise is not myth gone wrong. It is ideology dressed as myth. That's an entirely different problem.

Robert McKee[^2] names the anthropological fact underneath this: every audience, immediately and instinctively, searches for what he calls the Center of Good. Not the nicest character. The one who seems to carry something worth protecting. This is not a manufactured response. It is what McKee describes as the emotional need for the positive values of life: justice, strength, survival, love, truth.[^2] Nichols sees this need being exploited by nation-states. She's right that it gets exploited. But the need itself precedes the exploitation.

The Crisis: What If She's Correct All the Way Down?

Take Nichols at her strongest. Suppose the good-vs-evil framework is entirely a modern political construction, a 19th-century overlay on stories that were, before, merely personal and particular. Then the Catholic argument collapses into nostalgia: the Church has simply absorbed nationalist narrative logic and dressed it in theological costume. The spiritual warfare of Ephesians 6, the cosmic drama of Revelation, the contest between City of God and City of Man — all of it becomes, on this reading, just another tool for producing social cohesion and demonizing the out-group.

This is the hardest form of the challenge, and it deserves a real answer rather than a pious retreat.

James Shea[^3] provides the beginning of one. The question, Shea argues, is not whether we live inside a narrative — we inevitably do — but which narrative is large enough to be true. The person whose assumed narrative is the cosmic battle for souls will answer the question "how is life going?" in terms of advance or retreat, fidelity or betrayal, redemption or loss.[^3] The person whose narrative is purely evolutionary will answer in terms of resource management. Neither can step outside narrative to check. The Catholic claim is not that good-vs-evil is a universal structure validated by its ubiquity. It is that the particular story Scripture tells — of a God who enters suffering rather than commanding it from outside — is the story that actually fits the shape of human experience.

What Beauty Reveals That Ideology Cannot

Here Balthasar becomes indispensable. The distinction he draws in Gloria — between beauty recognized and beauty manufactured — maps onto Nichols's problem. Ideological storytelling manufactures the sublime in rote repetition: the stakes are always existential, the villain always uniquely monstrous, the hero always uniquely chosen. Genuine narrative beauty, to the contrary, is recognized. It arrives with the force of something already known, something the audience did not invent.

The Iliad, which Nichols invokes as a pre-ideological story, is illuminating here. Achilles is not a good-team member. He is magnificent, murderous, grief-stricken, and finally capable of a gesture of almost unbearable tenderness toward Priam. The story does not flatten him or ask us to approve of him. It asks us to recognize something — the terrible weight of mortality, the way love and rage are sometimes the same feeling. That recognition is not politically manufactured. It is closer to what Augustine called the restless heart: a creature shaped for something it keeps missing, searching every story for the shape of what it was made for.

Peterson's[^4] reading of the biblical corpus as multi-dimensional characterization points the same direction: the hero aiming upward, the villain aiming downward, and the story teaching both how to act and how not to catastrophically fail.[^4] This is not the superhero franchise. It is the opposite.

What the Reader Can Sit With

Nichols is right that the dominant popular narrative is making us worse — more certain of our own righteousness, quicker to assign irredeemability to opponents. She is right that this has political origins and political uses. What she has not accounted for is why the hunger persists so stubbornly. No amount of ironic folk-tale simplicity or morally neutral survival drama seems to satisfy it.

The restless heart is not a bug in the human design that nineteenth-century propagandists discovered and exploited. It is the thing the propagandists were imitating, badly. Nichols has done the necessary work of exposing the imitation. The harder work — the work she leaves to the reader — is figuring out what the imitation was reaching for.

References

1. Peterson, J. (n.d.). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Ideology and mythology chapter. — "Ideologies only tell part of the story – and they tell that part as if it were complete."
2. McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. The Center of Good. — "the emotional need for the positive values of life: justice, strength, survival, love, truth, courage."
3. Shea, J. (n.d.). From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. Chapter 1. — "The one whose narrative involves a revelation of cosmic battle for souls between God and the devil will answer the question according to the advance or retreat of Christianity."
4. Peterson, J. (n.d.). The Sins of Adam (DMU video lecture). — "you're watching the movie to learn how not to fail catastrophically and land in Hell while taking everyone else along with you."

<p style="font-style:italic;">Disclaimer: The views and content of this post are the author's own. AI was used to help edit grammar and improve clarity.</p>