In the genes?

In the final chapter of Original Sin: A Cultural History author Alan Jacobs looks at how genetics, and its evil cousin eugenics, have affected the debate over original sin. As an aside, I was surprised to learn that the first forced sterilization law in the U.S. was passed in 1907, in of all places, Indiana. More to the point of Jacobs narrative however is an experiment carried out by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in the 1970s. Zimbardo built a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology department, then recruited students who were randomly assigned the role of either prisoners or guards. The results of the study became the basis of a later book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. What were those results? By day two the students playing the role of guards had begun to mistreat the "prisoners." By day six the mistreatment had escalated into a reign of terror such that what was intended to be a two week study had to be cut short. Zimbardo concluded that "at the start of this experiment, there were no differences between the two groups, less than a week later, there were no similarities between them." To Zimbardo this was evidence of "situationism" -- place a "good" person in the right conditions and they could become a sadist. Abu Ghraib anyone?

Does the situationist thesis hold water? Well, yes and no. As Jacobs points out, it depends on a virtual emptying of meaning of the words "good" and "evil".

He [Zimbardo] presents his key question in this way: "What happens when you put good people in an evil place?" And notice his book's subtitle: "Understanding How Good People Turn Evil." But on what grounds does he say that the people were good? Simply because they had not—to his knowledge, which was extremely limited, if not nonexistent—done anything especially foul before being assigned the role of a prison guard? Long ago John Milton wrote, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." But Zimbardo does just that; he is happy to call people "good" who may simply have not had the opportunity to do noticeable evil. (p. 252)

A few years before The Lucifer Effect cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argued in his book The Blank Slate that the human propensity to violence makes perfect sense when viewed in evolutionary terms. Pinker: "violence is not a primitive, irrational urge. . . it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamic of self-interested, rational social organisms." For Pinker human nature is both the problem and the potential solution. Only time will tell which half of our divided self wins out. What Jacobs found most interesting was the tack taken by some of Pinker's critics. The worst thing they could say about his arguments were that they sounded suspiciously like the long-discredited doctrine of original sin. English author Richard Webster remarked that "instead of putting forward a new theory, Pinker ends by reaffirming an old one. Although the register in which he writes is very different from that of John Wesley . . . the underlying gospel which he preaches is in reality little different. . . . For what he too calls upon us to recognize is the bestial nature of mankind and the limitations which go with that bestial nature." (p. 257)

All this calls to mind G.K. Chesterton's aphorism about original sin being the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically proved. When avowed secularists come to views of human nature that sound more like John Wesley than Jean Rousseau one is reminded of the endurance of that ancient riddle: unde hoc malum "Where does all this evil come from?" But to grapple with the riddle—as the bloody 20th century forced serious men and women to do—indeed to accept the pessimistic anthropology of St. Paul and Augustine (as even someone like Richard Dawkins seems to do in naturalistic terms) without also accepting the accompanying doctrines of redemption and grace is to live—in Jacobs' words—"in a dark, dark place."

Thank God that we can say, with Paul, "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more!"