The Judaeo-Christian teaching that within every human being there exists tendencies to anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth.
“We have conjured up all manner of devils responsible for our present discontent. It is the unchecked bureaucracy in government, it is the selfishness of multinational corporate giants, it is the failure of the schools to teach and the students to learn, it is overpopulation, it is wasteful extravagance, it is squandering our national resources, it is racism, it is capitalism, it is our material affluence, or if we want a convenient foreign devil, we can say it is communism. But when we scrape away the varnish of wealth, education, class, ethnic origin, parochial loyalties, we discover that however much we've changed the shape of man's physical environment, man himself is still sinful, vain, greedy, ambitious, lustful, self-centered, unrepentant, and requiring of restraint.”
- Barry Goldwater, the conservative-turned-libertarian US politician.
Fallenness – otherwise known as original sin - is one of the principal teachings of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Throughout history conservatives have accepted this doctrine and it has informed their scepticism and their anti-utopianism.
Few doctrines have been more thoroughly proven by history than what Ronald Reagan called the ‘phenomenology of evil’. In the last century the worst forms of evil were evident in Stalin’s Gulag, Hitler’s gas chambers, the killing fields of Cambodia and in the Rwandan genocide. More recently evil struck on 9/11 and in Darfur.
But man’s fallen nature doesn’t just operate on a large-scale – it is evident when a father abandons his offspring or when a politician breaks a promise. The tendency to err is catalogued in the Bible’s seven deadly sins.
The seven deadly sins
Each of the deadly sins corrupt individuals but they also feed the decline of human institutions:
- Anger can lead to violence;
- Envy can produce social fragmentation;
- Gluttony produces excess and a tendency to consume beyond levels that are healthy;
- Greed - or avarice - crowd outs charity;
- Lust destroys marriage and families;
- Pride closes the mind to the constant need for reform and improvement; and
- Sloth overwhelms the spirit of enterprise and renewal upon which civilisation depends.
Most civilisations have always recognised sin – in the same way that they have recognised universal virtues.
Government and sin
George Stephanopoulos (a liberal-left commentator) has written:
“Because I believe in original sin, because I know that I'm capable of craving a cold beer in a village of starving kids, because I know that selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion, I believe we need government. A government that forces us to care about the common good even when we don't feel like it, a government that helps channel our better instincts and check our bad ones. I don't think government is good, just necessary.”
Conservatives would agree that government has a duty to contain the worst public consequences of sin – notably violence and theft. But, unlike many liberals, they see government as capable of sin. Conservatives also reject gluttonous ideologies like social Darwinism and market fundamentalism. Their solution is support for fully-empowered subsidiary institutions.
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