6. Who’s to Blame?

Why does sin ricochet down the generations, and why does history echo? What accounts for the fact that combatant ethnic groups and feuding clans lock themselves into round after round of hostilities that neither mend nor end? Where do the patterns of dysfunction in family systems come from, and why are they so miserably hard to fix? Why do even grade school students commit sins in sequence, each touching off the others like firecrackers in a string?

Of course, nobody has full answers to such questions, and we should distrust people who pretend to have them. Still, we can learn something about the progress of sin if we inventory the answers we do have and describe the ones we lack.

What answers do we have? We know that where grievances are concerned people have long memories and short fuses. We know that injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful. We know that people who hate their lives often abuse those who incarnate what they hate and that the abused then abuse others. We know that nobody is more dangerous than a victim. We know that sin brings distress and that people often seek to relieve their distress with the same thing that brought it—a dynamic that sin shares with addiction.

At bottom, says Reinhold Niebuhr in renewing a famous old theory of sin, we human beings want security.¹⁹ We feel restless and anxious in the world because we are both finite and free, both limited and unlimited. We are persons of seemingly endless possibilities and of immense power, but we are also creatures utterly dependent on the good offices of our creator. So we live on the edge of our finitude and freedom, anxious lest we miss opportunities and anxious anew when we have exploited them. For suppose we lose our advantage? Suppose somebody usurps our power or defrauds us of our money or defeats us in our reelection bid for office? Persons of eminence fear obscurity just as tyrants fear the approach of justice.

Failing to trust in the infinite God, we live anxiously, restlessly, always trying to secure ourselves with finite goods that can’t take the weight we put on them. We climb social ladders, buy securities, try to make a name for ourselves or leave a legacy. We deliberately put others in our debt (name a federal dam after somebody, and he will listen with interest to your next request), or alternatively, we try to escape, calming our restlessness with flights into lust or drunkenness or gluttony. Unbelief, says Niebuhr, yields anxiety that yields alternating pride and sensuality.²⁰

But do the answers in our inventory, including Niebuhr’s, fully explain the evils we have been discussing? Hardly. To start with, let’s take a simple case. A fifth grader is caught in the act of trying to steal a classmate’s Nintendo DS and finds it easy to lie about what he’s up to (“I just wanted to look at it”) and then to lie about the lie (“I’m telling you the truth!”). Suppose we interrogate him about his misdemeanor, seeking to learn from him its cause and motive. Why did he try to steal someone else’s NDS? A candid answer might be that he wanted the NDS and concluded that theft was the fastest way to get it. But why was he willing to break a law, trouble a schoolmate with an annoying loss, and disappoint his elders? Presumably because he wanted the NDS more than he wanted shalom. But why? Because he is selfish in this respect: he would rather fulfill his personal desire than keep the peace. But if being selfish brings so much trouble to everybody, including oneself, why be that way? Because, as the filmmaker Woody Allen once said in trying to explain his controversial affair with the young daughter of Mia Farrow, Allen’s twelve-year companion and mother of some of Allen’s children—“the heart wants what it wants.”

But why doesn’t the heart want God, trust God, look childlike to God for life’s joys and securities? Why doesn’t the heart seek final good where it may actually be found? Why turn again and again, in small matters and large, to satisfactions that are damaging?

Because the heart wants what it wants. That’s as far as we get. That’s the conversation-stopper. The imperial self overrules all. Inquiring into the causes of sin takes us back, again and again, to the intractable human will and to the heart’s desire that stiffens the will against all competing considerations. Like a neurotic little god, the human heart keeps ending discussions by insisting that it wants what it wants.

The trouble is that this only re-describes human sin; it does not explain it, let alone defend it. Our core problem, says St. Augustine, is that the human heart, ignoring God, turns in on itself, tries to lift itself, wants to please itself, and ends up debasing itself. The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God’s gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the desires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting into a little wad. His desires are provincial. “There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.”²¹

Returning to our NDS thief, suppose we think of other possibilities in the attempt to find his motive. Maybe he isn’t merely covetous and willful; maybe, like characters in Russell Banks’ novels, his motives are mixed with blue collar resentments—resentment of his low-budget lifestyle, for example, and of the more prosperous NDS owner. Maybe, to imagine a very different motive, our thief thinks he is clever and wants to see if he is clever enough to get away with an NDS. Or maybe he and the NDS owner will compete in next week’s Middle Elementary Track and Field Day events, and the thief wants to upset the owner’s concentration. Maybe lots of things. The point is that motives may be elusive. The truth is that we cannot easily sift them.

Moreover, even when we have sorted and classified the motives of a sin, we still haven’t fully explained it. Why not? The reason is that to identify a motive is to discern only what pushes a person in the direction of some act, not why he actually commits it. We still do not know why a person succumbs to the motive. After all, lots of people feel motivated to steal other people’s possessions but do not give in to these motives. They “resist temptation.” Why doesn’t a thief resist it, too? Lots of people feel aggrieved by real injustice but do not act on their grievance in some way that creates new rounds of grievances. So why do terrorists act that way?

Everybody understands that we need great, patient statespersons who will inquire into the causes of grievances, ponder them, and seek to allay them. Still, to know the cause of a grievance is not yet to know the cause of all violence done by the aggrieved. Moreover, to know the cause of a grievance is not yet to know the cause of, let alone to justify, every specific means the aggrieved may employ to redress it. Indeed, we may dispute in some cases whether a violent person even has a grievance at all; maybe all he has is anger. At minimum, what we need here is a distinction between the context of an act and its cause. Writing at a time when violent crime in the United States had spiked, Jack Beatty said this:

Even poor youths, even poor, ill-educated youths, even poor, ill-educated youths who live in a society suffused by racism, must be responsible for their acts. To believe otherwise is to espouse an environmental determinism nearly as offensive to reason and morality as racism itself. Crime, arson, running amok in the streets, have social contexts, not social causes. The [media blare about] the contexts is an insidious distraction that rests on the presumption that society is responsible for the crimes against it. That is legal and moral nonsense.²²

Is it? Doesn’t society at least share in the responsibility for certain crimes against it? When society, via its legislatures, funds some of its schools twice as generously as others; when it provides poor schools for poor people; when its public schools clarify moral values instead of teaching them; when it invents gambling schemes and tries to entice its own citizens to wager money on them; when it constitutionally and judicially protects song lyrics that glamorize the killing of police officers and the terrorizing of women—when society does these things, can it completely wash its hands of crimes motivated by the very resentment, despair, and greed it has engendered?

To be fair-minded about sin—perhaps to be merely observant about it—is to concede that the forces within social and cultural contexts push and pull human beings in countless ways. Contexts strain and constrain people. In fact, social and cultural dynamics exert their pressure regularly and powerfully enough so as to make certain subsequent behaviors expectable. That is why, with a fair degree of confidence, social scientists call certain behaviors or experiences “predictors.” Abuse, for example, predicts abuse: the fact that a person has suffered abuse is one predictor that he will engage in it.

Nonetheless, these forces do not fully explain or justify human evil. That is why, even if he has sharpened it excessively, Beatty has a point. Contexts, and even predictors, of bad behavior are much easier to identify than causes, and we should not confuse them. Nor should we judge personal responsibility on the basis of this confusion.

Consider gang rape, a global horror. It is one thing to observe that a member of a wolf pack was himself sexually abused as a child or is poor and poorly educated or came from a messed up home. These are contextual factors for which other persons and society are at least partly answerable, and at least one is also a predictor. Together they weigh a lot. But it is another thing to assume that these significant burdens cause a wolf pack member to join in the rape of young girls and then boast about his role. And it is still another thing to offer the rapist “lite” absolution for his horrific act on the ground that he has pre-atoned for it (“You are not guilty, for you have suffered much”).

Environmental determinism and the no-fault morality that usually accompanies it are pretentious. Environmental determinists pretend to know what is almost always hidden from us, namely, the real causes of wrongdoing. The fact is that we know more contexts than motives of human evil, and we know more motives than causes, but we almost never know all three. A main reason is that although contexts, motives, and causes of evil certainly look as if they are linked, the linkage is hard to specify. In particular, even when we know the psychological or social context of someone’s evil deed, and even its motive, we still might not know exactly what caused her to do it. In general, we do not know to what extent evildoers are themselves, as agents, the main cause of their evil and to what extent they have fallen into a trap set by others. Only God knows the percentages in these matters. Only God knows the human heart. Only God knows how much of our evil is chargeable to us as sin. Only God knows when, for example, a psychological or social account of a particular evil stretches past context and motive to describe its cause.

Given our ignorance along these lines, what should we call malicious envy and gossip? What should we call date rape? How about the theft of your laptop?

I think we ought to call these things sins. We know they are moral evils. As a working hypothesis, we ought to assume that anybody who has committed them has sinned. Why? The reason is that with this assumption we treat people as grownups. We start them off with a full line of moral credit. We deal with them as people who can accept their debts.

Of course, the assumption that someone’s evil counts as sin may in particular cases have to be suspended or even abandoned—in the case of somebody innocently hooked on an addictive substance, for instance. In all cases the assumption must be held provisionally. But in the meantime, and in general, I think we ought to pay evildoers, including ourselves, the “intolerable compliment” of taking them seriously as moral agents, of holding them accountable for their wrongdoing. This is a mark of our respect for their dignity and weight as human beings. After all, what could be more arrogant than treating other persons as if they were no more responsible than tiny children or the mentally maimed? What could be more offensive than regarding others not as players, but only as spectators, in human affairs, including their own? What could be more condescending? What could be more patronizing than refusing to blame people for their wrongdoing and to praise them for their right-doing, and to ground this refusal in our assumption that these people have not caused their own acts or had a hand in forming their own character?

In his Lyman Beecher lectures, William Muehl recalls the humanist passions of Arthur Koestler, a one-time defender of communism who later became its critic. What began to distress Koestler was that in the Soviet communist system the concept of blame disappeared. Nobody blamed reluctant communists. Nobody blamed peasants who resented the loss of their freedoms or who resisted conversion to communism, for surely they had been corrupted by faulty social and economic conditions. Nobody blamed critics of the party line, for surely they had been brainwashed by capitalist propaganda. Instead of blame, party officials offered their opponents pity and reeducation. Of course, the cradle of such pity often turned out to be a mental hospital, and the school for such reeducation a concentration camp—places at least as confining and dehumanizing as any conventional prison. But at least none of the inmates was to blame for being there. Koestler found all this blamelessness progressively disturbing. “Before long it began to come clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. Those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience.”²³

Human rights and prerogatives depend on human responsibility, on citizenship in a community of responsibility. People in this community properly hold each other accountable. People who respect each other’s full humanity refuse to explain wrongdoing with reference to a psychological or social “root cause” or with appeal to the authority of some party official or Professor of Victimology. In other words, until they are moved by evidence to the contrary, respectful people assume that evildoers are responsible citizens like themselves and that they are answerable for their evil.