Besetting Sins and Pseudo-Virtues

In a comment on this post, reader ThisIstheEnd said that he found it odd for me to say that post-modern Americans have little sense of personal sin, given that America as a whole seems to be a more moral place that in past eras. He pointed at slavery, the KKK, and suchlike banished demons as evidence that this is the case.

I had to think about that a bit. I continue to believe that people in our society have little sense of personal sin, at least by classic measures, because they have little notion of the virtues. It’s hard to have a strong sense of sin when you don’t know what the offenses are. But he’s right: there are man offenses that we as a people used to commit and commit no longer. Given that men are sinners in every age, how can one account for this sense that America is more moral than it used to be?

I’ve long thought that every place and time has its besetting sins: the sins to which people in that place and time are especially prone. It’s often hard for them to see their besetting sins as sins; rather, it’s simply the way things are. There will often be a few voices calling in the wilderness, but the mass of people disagree with these voices, or discount them. Fornication is one of the besetting sins of our day, even though everyone knows what “living in sin” means; adultery is still frowned on, but fornication is such a common thing that no one blinks at at it any more.

Some besetting sins are still thought of as sins, even if no one cares that they are sins. But some besetting sins go well beyond that, and become pseudo-virtues: behaviors that the culture (or a subculture) holds up as good and exemplary but which, in absolute terms, remain sinful. Pseudo-virtues often piggyback on true virtues. In some eras of the world, for example, the sense of honor that decreed that a man would never go back on his word would also lead him to challenge and perhaps kill anyone who accused him of being a liar. Honesty and integrity are virtues; killing a man in a duel in cold blood, not so much. Fornication is a pseudo-virtue in some subcultures in America today; and not getting enough sex is regarded as weird, almost a sin in itself. (I remember being shocked by a blog post by open source software guru Eric S. Raymond maybe ten years in which he suggested that being a skilled sexual partner was simple manners.)

Abortion is another example of a pseudo-virtue. It’s the taking of an innocent human life, and so is manifestly a sin; but proponents of abortion use words like bravery, and courage, and speak of the prudence of not bringing unwanted life into the world. (The answer to the latter point is to keep your trousers on, but see my comment on fornication, above.)

By the nature of things, the besetting sins and pseudo-virtues of bygone eras are often different than those of our own. And by the nature of things, they are going to be more obviously sinful to us than the besetting sins and pseudo-virtues of our own era, simply because they are different and we are not enslaved by them.

And given all of that: of course our own culture seems more moral to its members than what went before. By any objective measure, there will be sins obvious to us (if not to our forebears) that our forebears frequently committed, both individually and corporately, that we do not commit to anything like the same degree, and we recoil from these. The thing that we miss is that by any objective measure there are sins we frequently commit, both individually and corporately, that our forebears would rightfully respond to with shock and disgust.