The temptation of disappointment

The same test applies to other contexts, other situations, with the same grave danger and the same potentially toxic consequences should we fail it.

Consider, for example, when the big hurricane takes an unexpected turn and heads out to sea. “We dodged a bullet,” we say to one another. “What a relief!”

And, mostly, we mean that. We are relieved. The forecasters had warned that this was a powerful storm — the strongest hurricane headed in our direction since whatsitsname, that big one years ago that all the old-timers still tell stories about. The rest of us don’t have stories like that — tales of epic destruction and trauma, but also of heroic rescues, narrow escapes, and inspiring examples of ordinary people coming together in extraordinary circumstances to do extraordinary things.

We’ve heard those stories, but we’ve never been a part of them. They happened before we were born or before we moved around here. And since they aren’t our stories, our role in the telling of them is passive, receptive — that of outsiders looking in. The old-timers have something we don’t have. Something big. Something exciting.

And so some part of us can’t help but be a little bit jealous of that. Maybe jealous isn’t quite the right word. Check that. It would be foolish, after all, to envy anyone the experience of such an ordeal. We value our safety and we’re grateful for it. We don’t ever want to see our loved ones imperiled, or our homes damaged, or our livelihoods threatened in anything like the way the old-timers describe when they tell those epic stories of Hurricane Whatitsname.

So we really do mean it — sincerely, mostly — when we tell one another that we’re relieved, thank God, that the latest big storm turned out to sea. After days of nervously watching the news, we can all calm down again and get back to normal, back to our routines and our routine lives. We are relieved — mostly.

But we’re also maybe just a tiny bit disappointed. The days before had been an exciting interruption. It had been adrenalizing to tune into the news, hearing all those dire warnings of potential calamity that threatened to replace Hurricane Whatsitsname as the standard. For a few days there it seemed that we were about to get our own story that would at long last eclipse the stories of the old-timers. And even if that isn’t quite what we wholeheartedly wanted or what we hoped would happen, the sudden dissolution of that threat is still, on some level, a bit of a let-down.

Back to normal is good, but back to normal is also normal.

And so we can understand the test that C.S. Lewis describes — the temptation of disappointment. This is, Lewis says, the tell, and the fork in the road. Do we yield to disappointment when the storm turns out to sea, when the calamity is averted, or when the scary monsters turn out not to be real? Or are we relieved — as we reasonably should be?

Here, again, is what Lewis wrote in a perceptive and wise passage from Mere Christianity:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

To nurture disappointment, Lewis warns, is to be lost — to be damned — because it means coming to prefer an ever-worse and ever-stronger evil. It entails a denial of reality and a preference for an imaginary world that’s worse than the many real dangers and evils that we will, alas, encounter in the world.

The temptation of disappointment leads to a preference for imaginary evils, a turning away from the world as we really see it to seeing a world as we’d prefer to see it. And that’s based on turning away from ourselves as we really know ourselves to be and toward a kind of fantasy role-play in which we can imagine ourselves to be better — more heroic, more virtuous, more exciting versions of ourselves.

That’s dangerous even when it doesn’t initially involve the demonizing of enemies that Lewis describes. It may not start as a witch-hunt, but that’s still where it’s headed. The hurricane turns out to sea and we indulge the tiny pang of disappointment until it grows and crowds out the more reasonable relief. We begin to resent the excitement and the historical significance we convince ourselves we were unjustly denied, and so we begin to seek and to invent other sources for it, longing to see demons and monsters until we manage to convince ourselves that we do.

The tragic irony, of course, is that the world already contains more than enough monsters, calamities and evils. Real ones. But we wind up so preoccupied with our role-playing fantasies that we’re unable to address them. So when the plague comes to our village we wind up burning witches instead of washing our hands. The latter may be much more effective, but the former is much more exciting.