In Praise of Sin

Dear readers,

This essay is a diversion from my usual fare. It is not about women but about submitting to a moral order that exists outside of us.

As always, thank you for reading! My posts are free for now, but that some of you have contributed financially means a great deal to me. Thank you.

Warmly,

Marilyn

In Praise of Sin

My question was a direct one: “Do you believe that your actions are good or bad?”

“My therapist says that we shouldn’t ask that question. Instead, she asks whether actions are productive or unproductive.”

"I can appreciate that, but I’m not your therapist, so I’m not going to treat you like my patient. And I am asking if they’re good or bad.”

“I cannot answer that,” she says.

“You mean you can’t discern the moral content of your actions?”

“No. I mean that I believe that doctors and therapists know best how to talk to me, and they don’t ask me that. Morals are irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant? Are you saying that you don’t believe in good or bad, or that you’re personally not capable of badness, or of goodness?”

“I am saying I find this conversation to be unproductive.”

Someone close to me has been wrestling with her mental health for years. In spite of interventions from psychologists, doctors, and therapists, things seem to be getting worse. There is no code of polite silence around her sickness. Her illness is discussed and rediscussed constantly, with new diagnoses, new trauma histories, new therapists, new meds and new treatment plans occurring with increasing frequency. In tragic form, the more interventions into her mental health, the worse things seem to become. L’s view is that as her condition is one of illness, the treatment is in the hands of doctors and therapists. They are professionals.

She is right, of course. They are professionals. The therapeutic treatments she receives are all administered from the hands of health professionals, and as such they treat her as their professions dictate, which is to say with clinical diagnoses. But from my front-seat view it feels as though her reliance on the medical-therapeutic establishment is a therapy of despair, for it treats her as only half-human. The medical system cannot treat her soul-sickness, for this suffering falls outside the parameters of science. Worse, she sees herself only as a patient, a walking illness, but not as a fully formed human. Without a sense of her own capacity for badness or goodness, the human being is viewed as a kind of neuro-plastic system that can be molded to better or worse health through chemical and cognitive adjustments. L sees herself as a set of symptoms, but not as a soul.

In saying this I don’t mean to diminish the work of psychiatrists and psychologists, nor the genuine suffering caused by mental illness. There is no question that physicians prescribe medications that can regulate chemical imbalances, and that therapists offer re-framing narratives that contribute towards healing. One’s brain can get as broken as any other part of one’s body, and very often good medicine is the cure. But a medical professional is bound within the duties of her profession, and as such any question of morals are, as L says, irrelevant. Morals are judgmental, not therapeutic. But to withhold moral agency from a person is in itself a form of judgement: one has judged them either incapable of full human action or has judged morals themselves to be irrelevant, not a real part of the world we inhabit.

Philosopher James Mumford, in his beautiful and thought-provoking essay, “Therapy Beyond Good and Evil,” writes of just this moral relativism that underpins contemporary psychiatric practice. “To say values are subjective is to say there is nothing independent of our own minds that answers to our talk of right and wrong,” Mumford writes. According to psychiatric practice, “values are determined, not discovered, and selfhood – what it means to be a person – is therefore fundamentally about choice, not vision. It is about picking a course of action arbitrarily, not about seeing a reality that transcends you – goodness – and integrating with it” (30).

Mumford’s essay has two main ideas: the first is that contemporary models of mental wellness programs are founded on a philosophy of profound moral relativism. As he says of psychologists:

I think they really believe they’ve got straight on what is and is not the case in the world, that they’ve really uncovered the truth of the matter, which is that there are no moral facts, that good and evil are not part of the fabric of the world. This is not just wariness on psychology’s part. It’s radical skepticism. The idea that ‘we as therapists shouldn’t talk about right and wrong’ has become very different idea that there is no right and wrong in the first place. (31)

His second point follows from the first: it is that in a world of moral relativism, where everyone chooses her or his own values, who is to say that the chosen values are good or bad? In the case of depression, he argues, an individual feels worthless. Wouldn’t it follow, then, that a psychiatrist must affirm that self-given value? Mumford points out the inconsistency of contemporary psychology and the cognitive dissonance that ironically underpins most therapies: practitioners say, and really do seem to believe, that only subjective values are relevant, yet what they do in practice is value the lives of individual patients, objectively and often in contradiction to their patients, as they help them to move towards something, again it would seem, objectively good. The words “productive” and “unproductive” are essentially cop-out words, words which have the veneer of therapeutic authority and truth without committing to any metaphysical reality.

This kind of practice, known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), writes Mumford, “whets patients’ appetite for meaning only to deprive them of real nourishment by extracting the very substance on which meaning depends: its orientation toward the absolute” (35). L, who insists that her actions have no moral content aside from “productive or unproductive,” might want to consider to what end her productivity is aimed. How can there be a good she is moving towards if the goal is not to be good, but productive? She has fallen into the trap set for her by the mental health professionals on which she places all her hope: her goal is to productively move towards the feeling that her self-fulfilling feelings are productive. If this seems both like circular reasoning and extreme solipsism, that is only because your thinking is unproductive, clearly.

Mumford’s essay makes a powerful case for the need for objective good. What I am going to attempt is to make a case for objective bad. Nobody sins anymore. Of course, I don’t mean that people don’t do bad, horrible, nasty, cruel things. We of course do. It’s just that we don’t like to call what we do a sin. Other people are bad. I am just emotionally traumatized, conditioned by my upbringing, stressed and anxious, and most of all, misunderstood. Why would I consider myself a sinner? It implies a failure on my part, which doesn’t accord well with the validation I feel I’m entitled to. Calling myself a sinner makes me feel shame. And besides, it sounds unsophisticated and religiousy, neither modern nor enlightened.

Without sin one is able to see oneself as blameless yet still be able to claim that one is being self-accountable, believing oneself to be “productive,” even if towards no certain end. This moral evasion is what Edmund terms “the excellent foppery of the world” in Shakespeare’s King Lear: 

That when we are sick in fortune – often the surfeit of our own behaviour – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treacherers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of stars! (2.110-119)

The foppery of the world, in other words, is to dress up ourselves as hapless dupes of the cosmos rather than to own up to the uncomfortable truth that usually one’s misfortune is directly correlated to one’s own wrongness, “the surfeit of our own behaviour.”

Edmund himself has every reason to blame his misfortune on fate and the operations of the moon and stars. To begin with, Edmund is a bastard and the second born, “some twelve or fourteen moonshines lag of a brother” (2.5). It’s easy to see why he might have an entirely justified resentment towards his marginalized social position. Shakespeare doesn’t stop there. Edmund was also born under the constellation Ursa Major and before that conceived “under the Dragon’s tail.” “It follows,” he says, “that I am rough and lecherous” (2.120-122). Astrology in the Elizabethan world would have had the same credibility as science does today. This is all to say that Shakespeare has given the unfortunate Edmund every excuse, both social and scientific, to evade responsibility for his own sins. He is the unhappy passive recipient of a “goatish disposition.” Edmund can hardly be blamed for his behaviour, poor bastard.

Yet Edmund himself denies that his rough nature is due to something outside of his will. He is the only one not to make excuses for himself. As far as he is concerned, he is bad because he chooses to be bad. Edmund wants to sin. It is the way for him to keep his dignity, to assert that he isn’t a hapless victim of the moon and stars nor of the “plague of custom” and the “curiosity of nations” which recognizes only the claims of legitimate and first-born sons. Excluded by social custom, disadvantaged by birth, Edmund takes his fate into his own hands. An anti-hero, he sins to be courageous and free.

Edmund swears his allegiance to nature, nature that stands as a contrast to the society which limits him. “Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law / My services are bound” (2.1-2). For Edmund, nature may be what is sincere and authentic, but not what is good; it is no Romantic pre-civilized state of gentle goodwill. Nature is the brutality of all-against-all, the violence that places self-interest above all others, the unrestrained machinations of human will. It is the customs of society which act precisely as a safeguard against nature. In ignoring the limits imposed upon him by his social position, Edmund’s cruelty is unleashed beyond good and evil. Edmund betrays his half-brother; he does nothing when his own father has his eyes gouged out and, bleeding, is cast out of his home into the storm; he contracts himself to marry two separate women – sisters – even while both of them are already married; and he orders the executions of the innocent and loving Cordelia as well as of her aged, confused father, King Lear. There is no law or form of social order that he does not transgress. If we think following what is natural might lead to concord and peace, Shakespeare asks us to think again. If we think that doing “what is productive” from our subjective point of view is morally irrelevant, Shakespeare scoffs at our fantasy of moral neutrality.

The beauty of identifying something as a sin, objectively, is that it removes judgmentalism rather than creates it. There is no judgement being offered, no subjective feelings involved, but rather simply a recognition of how an individual has fallen under the sway of one evil or another. It should inspire compassion for the sufferer, not condemnation, not least of all because no one can stand apart from sin. There is no expert position of neutrality, no professional bulwark which might shield one from self-blame – let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that. In his book Ressentiment, German philosopher Max Scheler writes of the goodness of the sinner. “The sinner who sins,” he writes, “is better than the sinner who does not sin, but whose sinful impulse turns inward and poisons his soul.” The sinner, Scheler continues, has a basic distrust of one’s inner goodness, a distrust “drawn from deep self-knowledge […] distrust even of him who decides only after ‘conscious self-scrutiny’ that he is ‘good’ and ‘just.’ (69-70). In short, better to be an honest to goodness sinner than a ‘just’ person who isn’t in fact honest or good. What might one expect to see within oneself, other than what she already wants to find there? A sinner who sins, says Scheler, is at least honest in her self-reckoning, and thus not prone to resentment. She knows how little she deserves.

The concept of sin graciously takes the onus off an individual for getting things back in order. That is, the need to be “productive,” whatever that might mean, is often itself the cause of anxiety. I need to make it work. The cure for sin isn’t an act of the will or the ego – that’s what got the sinner sinning in the first place – but humility and repentance. The cure for sin is not admitting one needs help. It is admitting one needs redemption.

It is precisely because Edmund embraces his own sinning that he can also embrace his own good. “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of my own nature” (24.239-240), says Edmund after he is vanquished and lies panting for breath in the play’s final scene. Here Edmund once again asserts his freedom. This time it is his freedom from his nature. He is free to do good because he was free to reject good. Edmund’s triumph is not that he chooses his own willfulness as an act of heroic defiance, but that he chooses good, in spite of a nature enslaves him. Paradoxically it is precisely his admission that he is a sinner that allows him not to be bad.

Shakespeare puts some weight on the word “nature”; he has Edmund repeat it here in order for us to connect his intentions now with his earlier vow to be “bound” to nature. Yet the word that should demand more of our attention is “despite.” This word has several meanings, all operable at once. On the one hand, of course, it means “notwithstanding.” Edmund will choose to do good even though his nature would have him do otherwise. But despite also means that he has been injured or offended by his nature, and that it is something to hold in contempt, with scorn. To serve one’s nature is, as Edmund says, to be “bound.” It is to be constrained, limited, restricted, tied, shackled, and compelled to serve oneself. It is a servitude unto one’s own nature, one’s own tyrannical will. “Only the added sin of insufficient lucidity with respect to his own motives distinguishes him [the ‘good’ and ‘just’ man] from the sinner who knows himself to be a sinner,” writes Scheler (70). As Edmund pants for life, he is able to unbind himself from nature’s subjugation precisely because he acknowledges it in the first place. That Edmund never turned himself into a hapless minion of nature’s sway but remained an open-eyed, lucid sinner is what enables him to be redeemed.

By contrast we have the mad king. “I am a man more sinned against than sinning” (9.60), cries Lear as the rain and wind pelt him. Lear speaks for all of us. Who does not feel the sting of life’s unfairness, the indifference of world, let alone its hostility. We so frequently feel as though if we were only understood, our side taken into account, our traumas and wounds made known, we’d be let off, given a pass, that things would go our way. It is more comforting to feel ourselves good, to indulge in self-pity, to provide for ourselves the balm we think we’re entitled to because we are more sinned against than sinning – if we are indeed sinning at all. As Scheler writes, if the sinner “represses his evil impulses, the poison will penetrate more and more deeply, and at the same time it will become ever more hidden from his knowledge and conscience” (68-9). And so we don’t admit to sin but to “unproductivity.” We tend to be like Lear, trapped within the excellent foppery of the world, driven mad by a universe that doesn’t seem to intervene on our behalf. But perhaps we should be more like Edmund who manages to do some good despite his nature.

The difference between Lear and Edmund is that Lear asks the gods for justice, while Edmund instead is moved to repentance. Lear expects the gods to open men’s hearts for them, to reveal others’ guilts and give them the punishment and him the justice he feels is right. He wants his persecutors to be opened-up and their sins laid bare – “Close pent-up guilts, rive your concealed centres,” that is, rend asunder the coverings of their guilts (9.58-59). But Lear does not want this for himself. The tragedy is set into motion by Lear’s inability to see himself as loved despite his own unloveliness. Desperate for love, Lear does not want to be loved because that would mean seeing that he is loved without deserving to be. Edmund instead sees that he is loved in spite of himself: “Yet Edmund was beloved,” he says (24.236). Edmund exhibits both surprise – “yet” – and a clear objective sense of himself. He refers to himself from the outside, in the third person. The effect of this is not self-distancing. It is rather a moment of deep recognition. Edmund can see more of himself because he does not live within his own solipsism.

“The wheel is come full circled. I am here” (24.170), Edmund says after he is defeated, justly, by his elder and legitimate brother. Again, Shakespeare is showing us two things at once: the wheel is Fortune’s wheel, the sway of cause and effect, chance and happenstance, the cogs and gears of events outside our control in which we are all caught up. But Edmund asserts his selfhood until the end. To say “I am here” might simply be a recognition of place, of seeing that one is where one has been placed by fortune. But to put the emphasis on the I could change the meaning to suggest more self-possession, more ownership of one’s path. “I am here. Me. I am me, here.” Because Edmund has always lived within the consciousness of his own sinful nature, he maintains his sense of dignity even – especially! – when he is humiliated because he has always known that he should be humiliated. “The wheel is come full circled.” There is a completion to who he is, and an integrity.

In King Lear there is no reason why one character is good and another evil. Lear’s three daughters are loved equally, yet two are cruel and one remains tender and loyal. The elder sisters’ husbands have each made a similar marriage with similar dowries, yet one of them is wicked and the other kind, even if weak and ineffective. Edmund is a bastard and the second born, yet he is loved as an equal by his brother Edgar and by his father, who admits that his firstborn legitimate son is “no dearer” to him than his bastard-born Edmund. Some noblemen turn on Lear, but Kent, though he is insulted and banished by the king, remains faithful to the end. Most servants quietly obey orders, but one, known only in the play as “servant,” defies his master to protect the aged Gloucester (Edmund’s father) from having his eyes gouged out, and is killed for his intervention. Other servants stand on and watch, inactive and mute. Who can say why one hates and another loves? Who can say why some who have reason for bitterness turn instead towards compassion? Who can say why someone treated with fairness still turns towards resentful cruelty, while another who is treated unjustly continues generous and hopeful? What, in the end, does the “charge of stars” – status, birth, fairness, love, justice – have to do with the inscrutable actions of a human heart?

I have no doubt that in L’s eyes, I am insensitive to the point of cruelty, arrogant, detached, and remorseless. And the fact is that she is – dear God – right. Demonstrably, nothing I have said or done has been “productive.” She continues to live in anguish, trapped within a paradigm of “productive health” that seems to be always out of her reach and out of her control, and our relationship continues to sour. My nature, she may again be right, is probably to be both imperious and petty, self-serving and self-impressed. I do not say these things in false humility – or if I do it is just another reason to condemn my own egotism. I haven’t a doubt that my nature would keep me small-hearted and bound. I feel guilt and shame, yet strangely, I feel a profound lack of anxiety. The need to have productive values simply aren’t present to me, and so I don’t feel the pressure to ignore or rationalize my wickedness, and consequently don’t feel the need to hide the cognitive dissonance from myself by layers and layers of productive self-talk, a kind of mental energy that may itself contribute to anxiety. This may be simply because, the nature of the world being what it is, unjust and unfair, my “charge of stars” has been auspicious and benevolent, and that through no merit of my own I have been blessed with an innate cheerfulness. No doubt this is true. But also, and I think that this is also true, it is because I look within with horror and shame, I feel free, joyful, and – dear God – redeemed.

Mumford, James. “Therapy Beyond Good and Evil.” The New Atlantis.68, Spring 2022. pp.28- 38.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Oxford UP, 2000.

Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Marquette UP, 2007.