Original Sin: A Cultural History Book

Last week I was riding home from work on the bus. Just after it started lurching down Canyon Blvd. away from the Edenic mountains on Boulder's west side, a girl in the seat behind me stood and, gripping the back of my seat and the one across the aisle, asked with no prelude, "Can I have a dollar?"

I didn't meet her eyes, but I remember that she was a thin girl, not much older than my 13-year-old twins. In the split second between her question and my answer, I felt a reaching for what that answer would be. Maybe you are familiar with this reaching. You can also characterize it as the algebra you do when you are faced with a moral choice, when what you know you should do confronts what you want to do: the "x" (my character) plus "y" (the choice before me) equals +/- some action taken or not taken.

"No," I said, having added it all up to zero and feeling affronted that she had broken what is definitely a bus rule and perhaps a law by soliciting money. The person across the aisle likewise refused. The girl didn't react. She moved down the aisle to the next people, who also didn't give her a thing, and finally to the bus driver. She must have worked something out with him because she came back to her seat and didn't leave the bus before I did, nearly 20 miles down the highway.

My feeling of annoyance was followed by guilt and shame almost as soon as she passed. Another day, I would have unzipped my wallet and pulled out that dollar. On still another day, I might have given more than she asked for. What was the difference? Her appearance? The fact that I'd been working all day at the library and was tired?

The truth is, it doesn't matter. What matters is that I did the ungenerous thing. And that choice wasn't forced on me by anyone or anything else. All on my own, I found an invisible glass shard of evil to toss at someone else'and I tossed it.

Where does this wrongdoing come from? This is the question that Alan Jacobs wants to answer and explain in this book.

I picked up "Original Sin" as part of my study of racism and anti-racism in this country because racism has been called the USA's original sin, whether outright (here's a BBC article that has it in the headline) or tacitly ("Between the World and Me" and "White Fragility"). Raised Roman Catholic, I thought I knew what "original sin" means, but given this new-to-me context, I wanted to make sure my understanding was true, and examine the concept's applicability to this moment of national reckoning.

Jacobs answered my question and more. He discusses where the idea came from (St. Paul and St. Augustine, generally) and how it has been invoked and condemned and used and abused over the ages, right up until now (Rousseau and Dawkins, among others, come up as players in this drama, along with a host of lesser-known but equally fascinating people). His explanations start with stories. You might know some of them, including the one where King David of ancient Israel sends Uriah, one of his own soldiers, to his death so he, the king, can steal Uriah's wife.

Jacobs also defines the idea of original sin: it is "sin that's already inside us, dwelling in us at our origin, at our very conception." It means we are all flawed at the core, prone to choose selfishly, prone to do evil in large and small ways. This is true even of the nicest people we all know. And if you look at world history, at crime, and, yes, at your own life, you see its consequences everywhere. I saw it in myself on that bus. To repeat: It's not that I didn't know what the generous'the good--choice was in that situation. It's that I did know it'and I willfully, knowingly made the other choice. There is something in me that makes total generosity impossible, that made what happened on the bus inevitable. It's not a lack of choice or ability to do good. It's the fact that I will sin in this and other ways because it's who I am.

Jacobs writes, "…the doctrine of original sin works with the feeling that most of us have, at least some of the time, of being divided against ourselves, falling short of the mark, inexplicably screwing up when we ought to know better. It takes relatively little imagination to look at another person and think that, though that person might not be all that he or she might be, neither am I."

Over the years, many have argued against the concept of original sin by saying, well, yes, no one's perfect. But isn't it important to note that people can and do choose generously sometimes too? Why believe our evil acts prove we all have an evil core, but not that good acts prove a good core? Jacobs' argument, and that of many thinkers before him, is that only original sin can explain our inability to always choose the good. It's why all utopian communities ultimately fail. It's why too many people are still abjectly poor. It's why war still occurs. One such thinker was the mathematician Blaise Pascal, who Jacobs quotes: "Certainly nothing jolts more rudely than this doctrine, and yet but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves."

How else can you explain the persistence of evil?

I'm Christian, so it's not too hard for me to accept this doctrine. But I didn't pick up the book to be affirmed in something I already believe. I picked it up to see if what's quickly becoming the metaphor of my generation, Christian or not'slavery and racism as an entire nation's original sin'makes any sense in the context of what original sin actually is.

Jacobs addresses the question directly in Chapter Nine, called "The Confraternity of the Human Type." That language comes from a letter written by a Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, reacting to seeing people of African origin for the first time: "I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type and the unique origin of species."

Despite the "pain" he felt stemming from this reaction, Agassiz ended up becoming a staunch white supremacist and apologist for institutional racism. He, therefore, Jacobs states, should be remembered not for being a creationist or a "scientist," but for his role in coming up with the ideas underlying so-called "scientific racism." This is the now-debunked but still insidious 19th-century theory that justified slavery on the grounds that there is not one human race, but many "races," and that those races must be distinguished from one another, ranked according to purported differences in intellectual capacity and then used to set up a social order reflected in law and policy.

So, what does a false biological distinction like race have to do with original sin? Original sin, Jacobs avers, is the one thing that serves as a "binding agent," an actual mark that indicates, despite differences in appearance and talent and character, the truth that all human beings are in fact a "confraternity." Again, he goes on, for many, this raises the question of why a uniting idea of innate goodness couldn't bind us together. Doesn't the also-very-Christian idea that we are all made in God's image "serve equally well, or even better, to bind us as members of a single family?"

Here is Jacobs himself in response:

The answer is that is should do so, but usually does not. Working against the force of that doctrine [of innate good] is the force of familiarity, of prevalent cultural norms of behavior and even appearance. A genuine commitment to the belief that we are all created equally in the image of God requires a certain imagination'imagination that Agassiz, try as he might, could not summon…..Instinctive revulsion against the alien will trump doctrinal commitments almost every time. Black people did not feel human to him, and this feeling he had no power to resist….

Just as I had no power to overcome my selfish impulse on the bus, Agassiz--a creationist who SHOULD have believed in the unity of the human race in its descent from Adam and, at least at the time of his letter, nominally did believe it--couldn't overcome his racism.

Nor could the Founding Fathers of this country and their early precursors. Again, Jacobs:

The rhetoric of American freedom, of this continent as a place to leave behind the corruption of the Old World and start over, is tainted, or poisoned, at its origin by the practice of slavery….In this new Garden of Eden there seems to have been no prelapsarian period at all…Is there a more sobering detail in American history than the fact that the first slaves came to this country, to Jamestown, in 1619?....The whole American experiment can be seen'and indeed has been seen by many'as a kind of referendum on the doctrine of original sin or a test case for its universal applicability. And it is the preexisting practice of slavery that, depending on your point of view, either makes a true test impossible or abundantly confirms the darkest Augustinian imaginings of our moral condition.

Is it a good metaphor to call racism America's original sin? I say after finishing this book YES, it is, though racism is a specific sin while the concept of individual original sin is more general. I would also qualify my acceptance of the metaphor by adding that if you are going to claim the idea of original sin, even one original sin, for an entire nation, you need to be ready to claim a similar idea of redemption'or there is no hope of ever improving the situation or of justifying any point-of-view but a nihilism that will lead at best to apathy and despair and at worst to an embrace of intentional selfishness and a giving over of oneself to one's pet sins. You've decided your innate nature is flawed, after all, and you've also decided there is nothing that can be done to ameliorate that. Why not be a glutton, an egomaniac, even a racist, a rapist or a dictator?

That's not a road that anyone with a conscience, religious or not, should resign themselves to. For secular thinkers who can't accept the idea of an explicitly Christian redemption, Jacobs' argument that recognizing original sin, whether the individual variety or the national kind, as a flaw that everyone shares might, at least some of the time, help us regard one another with sympathy and forgiveness rather than judgment. This jives somewhat with Ibram Kendi's argument in "How to Be An Anti-Racist" that even people of color are themselves often racist against their "own" people and need to re-frame their outlook.

Jacobs manages to conclude on a hopeful note, likening all of us in our self-importance to the denizens of a Shakespearean farce: "The truest excellence is to know that you deserve the 'comic exposure''to know that you need forgiveness….If there is a proper response, a truly wise response, to the narrative of this book, it surely begins with the recognition that if everyone is bad to the bone'if all of us strut and fret our hour upon the stage, filled with the consciousness of our injured merit, fairly glowing with self-praise'then our condition is, first and above all else, comical."

God, grant me humility and a sense of humor. God, free me from judgment of others. God, set me and this country free from our sins. And God, help me to give that girl on the bus a dollar the next time. Maybe she doesn't deserve it, but neither do I.