David Brooks on Admitting Our Sinfulness  

Justin RuddyNovember 15, 2011 

A recent op-ed from David Brooks over at the New York Times points up the foolishness of denying human sinfulness and corruptibility, and would seem to suggest that coming to terms with it may be a key to living well, or at least honestly with ourselves and one another. He uses the recent scandal at Penn State University, along with the media's reaction to said scandal, to ask his readers if we really have the right to feel superior to the morally fallen. His answer? 

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. ...In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?” The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

Brooks' question, "How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive," is almost a set-up for the gospel, which both forces us to face the ugly realities of our sin (non-evasive), consider them truthfully (non-self-deceptive), and offers hope for overcoming these twisted "natural tendencies" through the power of Christ's death and resurrection, along with his continuing work in our lives through his Spirit.

Sure, the gospel is an answer to Brooks' question that requires the introduction of faith into the conversation, but dismissing outrightly its legitimacy as an explanation for human sinfulness, and an instrument for real change and renewal in an individual's life, seems disingenuous. When the unfounded moral superiority that Brooks decries is backed up by a kind of uncritical, worldview-superiority that is unwilling to admit any alternatives, we will soon find ourselves with no grounds from which to address corruption and injustice that we so readily see in others, but appear unable to see in ourselves.

(Another interesting piece that approaches what we might call "sin," which is based on more definite research, recently appeared in New Scientist: "The Underhand Ape: Why Corruption is Normal"). 

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