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Christianity, the
religion with which I am most familiar, preaches that we are all
born sinners. It really doesn’t seem fair, but we purportedly
inherit guilt, or at least a sinful nature, from our first
forefather, Adam. Adam disobeyed God and ate from the tree of
knowledge. As punishment for this sin, God expelled Adam and Eve
from paradise.
Christian theologians eventually compiled a list of the worst
transgressions, and called them the Seven Deadly Sins. If you
are wealthy and go out for a nice expensive dinner and later
head home for a little hanky-panky, you are guilty of three of
the seven right there (greed, gluttony, and lust). If you’re
hung over the next day and you sit around watching television,
wishing you had soap-opera good looks and cursing your satellite
provider when the signal kicks out, you’ve committed three more
(sloth, envy, and wrath). I hope you’re proud of yourself. (Oops,
that’s all seven.)
Modernity has brought
with it new sins. Last year, a Vatican Bishop made headlines by
listing
another set of seven. Among these is causing poverty through
social injustice. “Social justice” is, of course, code for
egalitarian results. If this is a sin, you should not merely
feel compassion and a desire to help the poor; you should feel
guilty as well. In some vague way, it is your fault that the
squeegee punk is living in squalor. Society made him that way,
and you are a part of society. It is your fault, too, that the
multitudes in Zimbabwe are starving. You inherited that guilt,
you see, from your colonialist ancestors. You also perpetuate it
by exploiting them through the evil of globalization.
Environmental degradation
also made the Bishop’s new list. This is no surprise, as
environmentalism is replete with religious symbolism. It
imagines an idealized natural world in which humanity resided
before industrialization, or even before agriculture. Humankind
is seen as fallen, and the source of this fall is our audacious
quest for control of our surroundings through the accumulation
of knowledge. Pollution and resource depletion are seen not as
problems to be solved but as wicked behaviour for which we
should feel shame. There is a deity, Mother Earth, who punishes
us for our sins. There are even warnings of apocalypse.
All of these religious myths distort certain basic truths.
Christianity ignores the fact that pleasure is a biological
signal that you are doing something right. The things at which
the Seven Deadlies aim—money, food, sex, leisure, and perhaps
less obviously, competition, justice, and self-esteem—are by and
large good things, if pursued rationally, with a sense of
proportion. Colonialism was unjust and wrongheaded, sure, but it
is a myth to pretend that developed nations are wealthy
primarily because of conquest. In reality, we have our (relatively)
liberal institutions and cultures to thank—and poor countries
that embrace globalization do far better than those that reject
it. Radical environmentalism, for its part, confounds a healthy
desire for conservation with an all-encompassing creed that
trumps all other considerations.
In the old list, pride,
which in one sense is a virtue (see “Ayn
Rand, Human Flourishing, and Virtue Ethics” elsewhere in
this issue of QL), is supposedly the worst of the sins.
This is because it is the mother of all sins. In order to commit
any of the other sins, and thus disobey God, one must first be
proud enough to disobey.
This gets at the heart of
the matter, the purpose of all this talk of sin: obedience.
People who feel guilty are more easily controlled. Who am I to
question authority when I have lust in my heart? Who am I to
stand up for myself when there are some people in the world who
are too weak from malnutrition to stand? Who am I to rise up
against an encroaching government when I use (gasp!) plastic
bags?
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Abandon All Guilt, Ye Who Enter
Here |
Let me make it clear, if it isn’t already, that I am not
advocating disregard for the world’s poor, or dumping toxic
waste in playgrounds, or letting your anger run roughshod over
every passerby who looks at you funny. I am saying rather that
needless, unearned guilt only helps those in power manipulate
you more effectively. You should feel guilt (and try to make
amends) only if you personally have used force, fraud, or
coercion against another human being. Otherwise, you should get
over it.
Indulging in unearned
guilt will not help you figure out the best ways to help others
escape poverty. (Declaring war on modernity, as radical
environmentalists do, is certainly not the way.) Feeling guilty
will not help you carry out a rational cost-benefit analysis of
the trade-offs between pollution and production. And it will not
help you incorporate pleasure into the best, most meaningful,
most fulfilling life you can imagine. Feeling duty-bound to
devote all of your energies to others will only breed resentment
in the end.
In contrast, if you are a
happy, rational, productive person, you will contribute more to
the world than any number of misguided bleeding hearts. You will
work for your livelihood, providing society with products or
services it requires. Secure in your ability to provide for your
own, you will naturally feel generous toward others. You will
challenge irrational beliefs, at least among your friends and
family in the regular course of your days. A builder of cities,
a destroyer of myths, you will also infect others with your
contagious happiness, inspiring them to be happy, rational, and
productive in turn. And, unwilling to accept unearned guilt, you
will be a bulwark for the liberty of all.
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