Last week, I began dissecting Simon Laham’s book “The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You).” Now, you might be surprised and disturbed to learn that I haven’t actually read his book (I mean, really, can you blame me? That does not sound like a good use of an afternoon. I’d much rather re-watch Iron Man). But if you are surprised, that only shows how little you know me. I am shamelessly craven in critiquing things about which I have only an embarrassingly bare minimum of knowledge.
All the same, I’m pretty confident in what I’m saying. I have been to his website which clearly describes the support for the positive nature of each sin. And I really don’t think I need to read it to attack his larger point, which he makes quite clear in the title and which I’m quite sure was, is, and will always be wrong.
My goal here isn’t to provide a rebuttal of each point, fun though that would be. Rather it is to paint only two large pictures with broad brushstrokes.
(1) One of Laham’s assumptions appears to be that human happiness is the highest good. I’m going to discuss that assumption in a second, but for the moment let’s grant it in order to make the following point: Even if one takes Laham’s assumption on its own terms, it’s far from clear whether or not it’s going to make you happy for very long if you willfully engage in the seven deadly sins.
A lot of the “cutting-edge” research he discusses on the cite happens to be from my own field, and putting it as nicely as I can, he doesn’t seem to have the slightest clue what he is talking about. (Ok, that wasn’t actually “putting it as nicely as I can.” Let me try again). Maybe he should re-think what he is saying a bit. (Getting nicer). I think he’s the voice of the devil himself. (Whoops! We went way less nice there. I’m going to quit while I’m way, way behind on the nice-o-meter).
This is a complicated issue and I’m not going to deal with all the complexities here. The simple facts are as follows: (a) Everyone knows that (some) sin has short-term positive benefits, but that doesn’t mean that long-term it’s going to make you happy. Those things that make you happy at the moment won’t necessarily lead to the happiest life. Drugs make most people happy temporarily; but when you use drugs, you are trading in your long-term happiness for short-term bursts of pleasure. Well, a lot of sin is like that – feels good now, but feels crummy in the big picture of my life.
It’s also worth noting that (b) a lot of research suggests that one of the main problems with our country is that we lack self-control. We’re not very good at restraining our impulses. Happy people – people most satisfied with their lives – know how to control their impulses towards sin. They know how to discipline themselves; how to resist temptation.
This has a lot of implications for Laham’s argument. Contrary to this general zeitgeist of his book, research suggests that happy people are actually those that can resist the 10th cookie (gluttony) and avoid the impulse for sex outside of marriage (lust). Happy people believe in hard work (sloth); and they are thankful for what they have rather than wanting more (greed). Resisting the temptation to give in to the seven deadly sins will often have short-term negative consequences, but long-term, it is more likely to make you satisfied with your life than not.
Roy Baumeister, who is perhaps the most famous social psychologist in the world – he’s been on Oprah and 20/20, for crying out loud! – started out as a self-esteem researcher. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think it’s fair to say that he used to believe that by making people feel good about themselves, they would live happier lives.
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If true, that might provide some small fodder for Laham’s claim that pride is good for us (though self-esteem and the sin of pride are really two different things…an issue for another day, perhaps). But watch what happened next. Baumeister (who by the way is not a Christian as far as I can tell) decided that he had been wrong about self-esteem. So what makes people happy, according to Baumeister? I’ll quote from his own words on 20/20:
“If we’re concerned about raising children to be successful and healthy and happy, forget about self-esteem. Concentrate on self-control. Studies show that self-control does predict success in life over a very long time.”
In other words, it is the ability to resist temptations of things we know that are bad for us that ultimately makes us happy. I’m very pleased that modern liberal psychology has finally caught up with us Christians…it only took them 1900 years. [Editor’s note: The Editorial Staff at the Apologetic Professor would like to note that, technically speaking, the field of psychology has only existed for 130 years, and thus logically could not have been “behind” Christianity for nearly two millennia. This kind of hyperbole is unfortunately typical of the pompous windbag who writes these articles. We’re thinking of firing him.]
(2) So even if we say that human happiness is the highest goal, then I don’t think the seven deadly sins will make you happy. But is human happiness the highest goal? I think it’s way, way up there, and Christianity teaches that humans are destined for pure joy. So far from being opposed to human happiness, Jesus taught rather that He would give it to us Himself. But…if happiness is placed in direct competition with some other things, most humans would agree that those other things are sometimes more important.
Consider: Would you be happy if your child was a mass murderer but was totally happy? Would you rather your child be bad and happy, or good and unhappy? Maybe it makes you totally happy to constantly engage in greedy behavior, and maybe everyone would be happy if they did that all the time. But would you really want all of your friends to care more about their own possessions than about their neighbors? I mean, even if it made them happy, do you want to live in a neighborhood where all the people were lazy, greedy, lustful, envious, and angry? I think these (intentionally extreme) sorts of questions bring into focus the fact that happiness and goodness may be frequent bedfellows, but they are not necessarily the same thing.
There is a clever Dilbert cartoon that highlights this point. In the cartoon, Dogbert (Dilbert’s evil alter ego) decides to start his own religion. This is what he says in the strip:
“I decided to start a discount religion. The tithing would only be 5% and I’d let people sin as much as they wanted. The only problem is that I don’t want to spend time with anyone who would join that sort of religion.”
No; and most other people don’t want to, either, because the things that make you happy aren’t necessarily the things that others would recognize as desirable traits. So when Laham says (and he says this right in the title), that sins are “good” for you, I’m not sure it is right to fully equate that only with personal happiness. I mean, it may make you “happy” to be a mass murderer (and research suggests that some violent offenders are in fact quite satisfied with themselves), but would it make you “good”?
On behalf of anyone who might otherwise have made the error of reading “The Science of Sin”: my heartfelt thanks to you for saving us from what would have been a huge, and annoying, waste of time (not that there’s anything wrong, or “sinful,” about wasting time). Professor Laham seems to have decided that a contrarian view of human behavior would sell nicely (especially when it’s bolstered by “research” and carries the weighty imprimatur of “science”) and he may be right; Lord knows, there are enough of us who want to rationalize our greed, vanity, and general self-centeredness, and now we’ve got “The Science of Sin” to justify our errant ways. “But honey, Professor Simon Laham has explained, and research shows, that lust is unavoidable; you want me to be happy, don’t you?”
I’d like to ask Professor Laham how he even managed to get his book written–did he struggle to deny his inclination toward sloth or was his envy of his better-known colleagues sufficient motivation? Did he feel free to plagiarize or to take liberties with the facts, or was he constrained by some odd sense of honesty and integrity (or maybe he was just afraid of getting caught?)? Is he proud of himself for having written this book, even though it’s transparent nonsense, or will he wait to find out how it sells and whether the royalties will (temporarily) sate his greed? And, perhaps most importantly, does he really believe a word of what he wrote?
In any case, having read your descriptions of the book’s assertions (and also having read a few excerpts from the book on Amazon and the Huffington Post), I’d have to be a glutton for punishment to waste my time (not that there’s anything wrong etc.) on Professor Laham’s preposterous thesis. Whether one believes that “sin” constitutes a violation of divine law and of the Will of God, or whether one thinks that “sinful” behaviors and attitudes are simply those that have been consistently found, over millennia, to be counter-productive at best and harmful at worst (both for societies and for individuals): from either a religious or a secular view, “sin” (and its harms) seems pretty well grounded in human experience. It seems highly unlikely that Simon Laham has suddenly discovered, and can conclusively prove, that the wisdom of the ages has been all wrong.
If I actually read his book, I guess I’d have more to say about it, but I’m too lazy.
Haven’t not read the book myself either and having not intention to either, I would probably agree with the two of in in saying that ‘sins’ of extremes like these would be things to avoid practicing ourselves. However, I must add, it is also sinful to do work on the Sabbath or wear mixed-fabric clothes (or at least it is punishable by someone…), so some inane prohibitions get mixed in with the more culturally universal ones. Can’t separate the baby from the bathwater so easily when it comes to sacred texts.
Anyway, I was pleased that you touched on Happiness as the end or goal of life, and began to at least question whether that is true or not. As Nietzsche put it, only pigs and Englishmen think happiness is the end of life (that being in reference to Utilitarianism, which basically is based on the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people – and a basic kind of morality most people accept without even knowing they do). But right when you were about to sink the argument that indeed the root of ethics ought to be something more potent than ‘happiness’, you went back to saying that YOUR ethics simply made MORE happiness over time!
Well, first of all ‘happiness’ is a tricky thing. Does it make you ‘happy’ to toil in the fields year after year, growing your own crops and just getting by as a poor farmer? You’ll eat, and you’ll probably be quite proud of being so self-sufficient, but are you happy in the act of dirt-farming itself? Probably not. Are you ‘happy’ when you lift the weights or when you see the results after? Probably after. Are you happier when you eat the cake or when you see it on you later? Probably during eating. What happiness ‘is’ seems too simple a question for a word that gets confused with satisfaction, pleasure, security, esteem, and all sorts of ‘good’ (don’t even get started on what ‘good’ is!) stuff.
So it’s slippery to start, and as other philosophers like Kant or Nietzsche observed, it would be a rather dull and base things for great Humanity to aspire to with their existence. Kant believed that it was his conception of Duty, which is close to properly respecting rationality and upholding rational dictates of ethics, which was closer to the point of life than happiness – because happiness is frequently obtained by simply beasts just lying around doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and mating, and humanity ought to aspire to something greater than that! Nietzsche had his Will to Power, power being akin to the creative power of humanity (not military force as people often think) in things like art, science, and literature, as well as creating and enforcing your own proper ethics – dangerous but cool stuff. Either way, those are far bigger than mere ‘happiness’, and so any argument using happiness as the goal of all ethics and life seems rather pale in comparison.
I think a good question of that in the Christian tradition is Job, which as we all know Job is basically the best a guy can get with God. And crap happens, and he gets utterly punished despite doing what is right. His friends tell him that ‘obviously’ he is getting punished for not being right with God saying he’s been sinning, but Job knows quite well he hasn’t been – yet is being punished. It doesn’t make sense, so then he has a chat with the Almighty or his Speaker and basically is told he’s right that he’s been on the side of good, but the workings of God are big beyond mortal understanding. Then he gets all his crap back, but in that moment before that it brings up the really important question: If being ethical and good will lead to the worst kind of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, what then is the reason for being ‘good’? I tend to think right now as my answer is that practicing goodness is its own reward despite what comes of it. But the question here is way more valuable than any answer given.
You were getting at it a bit, but then started to defend Christian ethics by claiming they’d make you happier. But you already recognized that happiness at least isn’t all there is to life, so perhaps it was a force of ethical habit to resort to a happiness-measuring contest. Service to goodness, in Christianity would be God or in secular thought could be considered Kant’s rational Duty or other working definitions, should usually trump ‘happiness’ as the major goal in human ethics. In that light then, I wonder what your argument would be discounting all the happiness-stuff of either the perpetrator or those around them in supporting against these particular sins in terms of Christianity besides simply saying they are simply prohibited.
A secular answer is that these sins or extremes destabilize societies, waste human potential, and/or make human relations rather messy. But one advantage of a secular morality is that one can easily look across societies and moralities cultivated therein and discover what ethical opinions are optimal for our own situation. Like in my other commentary, whether it is better to be properly High-Minded or to be Humble – Being High-Minded seems way more honest while potentially envy-inducing (as a good or bad thing…), while Humbleness tends to make others feel rather comfortable if not a bit superior to that person (whether or not it is true). Same with what constitutes wrongful Lust – whether pre-marriage copulation is wrong, or preventing sexual exploration before commitment is worse, or even in one argument if man was ever particularly made for monogamous marriage (some cultures don’t practice it, after all, and human biology obviously evolved with a fair amount of sperm competition in mind). And so on. The problem I see with a religious-set morality is that it cannot be easily altered – a great thing if you got it right the first time (which I am sure you do believe), but tough otherwise as even if it were proven in every way that a definition for a sinful act was in fact the optimal and best thing to do, one who believed still couldn’t accept it because ‘it is prohibited by God(s)’.
Jack, thanks for your kind and very clever comments!
Uh-Oh,
(Sorry for the delay; I’m under some serious academic deadlines at the moment). Very thoughtful comments! And very much appreciated. Actually, I mostly agree with you. I don’t have time to deal with all your excellent points, but only for a brief and hastily-written summary.
(1) Actually, I completely share your sentiment about the (for example) clothes-wearing aspects of religious morality. But that sentiment is, in actual fact, one of the reasons I am a Chistian. I have already written a piece (written long before your comment) which I am about to post on this topic. So maybe we can continue the discussion after that point.
(2) I agree with you that happiness isn’t (necessarily) the highest good, and I wasn’t trying to say that it was (actually, I think this is a more complicated question than it seems on the surface, but I don’t have time to elaborate — it depends what you mean by “highest.” That may be why you sense some hedging in this regard in my post). Psychologists typically consider happiness the highest good, so that’s probably why the post focused a lot on that. I’m used to talking to them.
My point is simply that, even if you assume that psychologists are right, Christianity still does better on those terms. But I’m not saying they are right. Point 2 in my post was designed to illustrate that happiness does not always equal goodness. But I really think it’s Laham and the secular psychologists you need to blame if you don’t think happiness is the highest good — not Christianity. (Though I’ve always thought that the whole “will to power” thing was incomprehensible; it still requires some discussion about what is good or bad to “will.” Kant’s view I can certainly understand).
(3) I think you raise very fair points about taking the larger picture and the advantages of getting outside of one specific book or tradition. (I made a similar argument in my fourth post on the “Knowing You are On to Something Real” series.) In the main, I don’t disagree with you, actually, but I’m not quite sure you have really captured the religious side of the debate (I’m not sure you haven’t, either — I’d have to parse it out a bit). At the moment, I don’t have time to deal with this complex issue in this comment. I just wanted to acknowledge that you made some fair and excellent points in that section. At some future point, I may post something on that topic. I’d add here only that it doesn’t affect my faith; indeed, one of my reasons for being a Christian is that Christianity captures what seem to me to be obviously universal moral truths and — unlike many other compromosing views of those truths — takes them completely seriously.
An unsatisfactory response, but alas! Time constraineth me. Keep those comments coming!
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