Reverse psychology: understand goodness then sin

Psychologist Roger Bretherton concludes our series on the seven deadly sins with a subversive proposition: we don’t understand sin because we don’t understand goodness.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

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Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Over the last month or so, here at Seen & Unseen, we have been writing together about the seven deadly sins: greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, anger, envy. If you have seen the David Fincher film, you probably have the grisly murders that illustrate them etched on your retina. But if there is one theme that comes up in all our articles on the subject, it is the fact that sin as a concept no longer carries any weight in our culture. A word that once bore all the heft of heaven and hell, is now the branding for a mildly indulgent discount day at the local health spa.

One way of responding to the downgrading of sin as a meaningful and useful term, is to argue that we need a return to sin. Sin needs a come-back tour, a conceptual rehabilitation. We need to re-populate the word with meaning to make it current and plausible again. Without a consistent shared language of moral failure, of falling short, of ethical deficiency, it is difficult to imagine how responsible human community can be viable. Alasdair MacIntyre, the virtue ethicist, suggested that the problem with our culture is that multiple ethical games are being played. We are not just disagreeing about what the rules should be, but moreover what game it is we are meant to be playing. Our culture is a babel of voices, proposing conflicting versions of what a good life looks like. Consequently, in moral dialogue, we often fail to understand one another. As MacIntyre puts it: ‘my move to queen-bishop-three, is countered by your lob over the net.’

The etymology of the word sin is that it is an old English word originally derived from archery, meaning to miss the mark.

I am no etymologist. Very occasionally I dabble in a bit of New Testament Greek. But to be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing, and whenever I pronounce Greek root words they sound like items from the IKEA stocklist. And, given my tendency to talk to myself when I write, it’s almost inevitable that sooner or later the ever-attentive Alexa will accidentally order me a bedside lamp in response to what I thought was the Greek for bowels. That said, my understanding of the etymology of the word sin is that it is an old English word originally derived from archery, meaning to miss the mark. Miss by an inch, a foot, a mile – it’s all called sin (assuming archers in Old England preferred imperial units of measurement). Shoot the entire quiver in the opposite direction – that’s sin too. Linguists may tell us that this is an apocryphal origin myth, but it doesn’t matter. Whether in archery or ethics, the point remains the same. Sin is a relative term. It is relative to whatever it is we wanted to do, or aspired to become, but missed.

Could it be then, that the root of our current cultural anomie is not so much that sin as a concept has been emptied of meaning (though it has), but that we no longer have any consensual agreement on what a good person should look like? We have no shortage of imagination when it comes to inventing new contents for the empty container of sin, but our thinking about goodness is woefully uninspired. Without a target to aim at, sin becomes vacuous. To illustrate this point, I’d like to tell you about two of the most eminent psychologists of the last hundred years.

Hobart Mowrer and the psychology of sin

Let’s start with a history lesson. O. Hobart Mowrer (1907-1982) is perhaps one of the most eminent, innovative and bemusing contributors to the short history of academic psychology. At the pinnacle of his career in 1953, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest and most esteemed society of psychologists in the world. But as a life-long sufferer of recurrent depression, the announcement sent him into a deep psychological crisis that left him incapacitated for nearly four months. In 1959, he addressed the APA convention in Cincinnati with one of the most unusual and controversial papers of the decade, Constructive Aspects of the Concept of Sin in Psychotherapy, in which he argued that the euphemisms for sin preferred by psychologists (wrongdoing, immorality, irresponsibility etc.) were not sufficiently powerful to convey the distress of a guilty conscience. He had an ambivalent off-again/on-again relationship with institutional religion, but he was nevertheless impressed with the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that we should do our good deeds in secret. This principle – you are your secrets – became central to his development of Integrity Therapy, a group approach to psychological distress through confession. In the 1970s, the tide of cultural opinion turned against Mowrer, his Integrity Groups were accused of brainwashing their participants, and their popularity waned. Some say he subsequently retracted his views on sin. His episodes of depression continued to dog him, and in 1982, at the age of 75, he died of suicide, having long advocated this as a reasonable course of action in certain circumstances.

This thumbnail sketch hardly does justice to the sensitive suffering genius of O. Hobart Mowrer. There is no space to recount the academic innovations that make him still one of the most cited psychologists in history. He coined the term ‘pathogenic secret’, the idea that sin – by which he meant the things that secretly bother our consciences – makes us sick. I think he was probably right about that. Take for example a freely available open-access list of what might be considered sin. It includes sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, intoxication, orgies, and things like that. It is not a particularly systematic or comprehensive list. It just happens to be the list of examples that Paul the apostle came up with in a first-century letter to residents of what is now central Turkey. They hardly make pleasant reading, but they make a great episode of Succession.

Paul called these ‘works of the flesh’. Works, because they are things we do, situations we manufacture. Flesh, not in opposition to physical pleasure, but because these kinds of responses (strife, envy, rage etc.) seem to be patterned bodily reactions, part of our conditioning, written into our muscle. The fact that Paul refers to them in plural (works of the flesh) is more significant than it initially appears. For him the unethical life is an incoherent ragbag of reactions, a series of plays and tactics designed to gain immediate personal gratification. As long as we come out on top, or at least think we have, they have done their job. But if we live by them, if we hand ourselves over to the universe of their self-centred cynical logic, our identity fragments, our sense of coherence shatters. We can no longer imagine who we would be if our greed, pride, lust or whatever, was taken away from us. Our appetites become our identity.

This is why I tend to think that the instincts that led Mowrer to develop a therapy emphasising integrity was right. Provided of course, that we embrace the full definition of integrity, rather than simply taking it as a synonym for honesty. The integrity to which Mowrer’s groups aspired was not just the truthfulness that comes from the disclosure of secrets, but the inner harmony that comes from the restoration of wholeness. What looked superficially like an unhealthy preoccupation with sin, was in fact Mowrer’s pursuit of the unified state of self that accompanies goodness. A sentiment that leads us to psychologist number two.

Martin Seligman and the psychology of goodness

Fast forward four and half decades from Mowrer’s election as APA president. It is 1998 and another newly-minted APA president, Martin Seligman – arguably the most famous clinical psychologist in the world – is making his inaugural address. Seligman is unique among world-famous psychologists in many ways, not least of which being his claim that he was ‘called’ to be a clinical psychologist. He later told a conference at Lambeth Palace that as a young research scientist, during his deliberations on whether to follow the path into clinical practice, he woke one night from a dream of visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. As he admired the architecture of the iconic building, God himself – a giant bearded old man – lifted the roof and boomed: I want you to be a clinical psychologist. Of course, as a secular Jewish academic, Seligman doesn’t believe in God, but this doesn’t deter him from openly admitting that his vocation in clinical psychology was not wholly chosen but issued from the unspoken depths of his being.

This deep-seated sense of vocation may go some way to explaining why his 1998 inaugural address has gone down as a turning point in the history of psychology. His central assertion was that up until then psychology had been obsessed with the negative (what’s wrong with us) and that it was time to rebalance the discipline with a refocus on human flourishing, which at the time he formulated as the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life. This is viewed by some as the birth of Positive Psychology, which according to Seligman was a corrective to the ‘rotten to the core’ view of human beings that had dominated the discipline since Freud. It is difficult to imagine a proposal more diametrically opposed to that of Mowrer. While Mowrer argued for a renewed awareness of ‘sin’, Seligman asserted to the contrary that it was the vast ignorance of goodness that bedevilled contemporary psychology. We already had a rich, ever-expanding science of what was wrong with people, what we needed was an equally detailed, every bit as expansive science of what was right with us. The explosive growth of positive psychology over the last few decades has been a response to that call, to develop a full-blown science of goodness.

In the years that followed, Seligman revised his idea of the good life multiple times, perhaps his most ambitious proposal being the concept of Prospective Psychology; the idea that we as a species are best defined not by our past but by our future. He held this future-orientation to be so characteristic of human nature that we could name the species after it- homo prospectus. We are defined not by what we have been, but by what we are yet to be. It is an insight he shares with many of the thoughtful people who have pondered ethics over the years. Take for example a freely available open-access list of what might be considered virtue. It includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. It is not a particularly systematic or comprehensive list. It just happens to be the list of examples that Paul the apostle came up with in a first-century letter to residents of what is now central Turkey. I often feel better about life, just reading it.

Paul called these beautiful qualities, ‘fruit of the Spirit’. It is significant that in the original New Testament Greek, the word fruit is singular: καρπὸς (No! Alexa! I don’t need garden furniture!) He doesn’t write fruits, but fruit of the Spirit. He points toward some kind of unity, harmony, consistency in these qualities. Mowrer no doubt would have called it integrity. Goodness is much more than the avoidance of naughtiness; it is the restoration of wholeness to our shattered and divided selves. Sin is much more than the cheeky indulgences we succumb to at the end of a bruising day at work; it is the misdirection and derailment of all we could become. And this is where the tale of two psychologists terminates. Contrary to what the marketing executives may have conspired to tell you, sin is not your friend; it is the enemy of your genuine divine magnificence. That’s what makes deadly sin so deadly.

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Creed

Virtues

15 March 2024

6 min read

Temperance: neurotic vice or self-control for future benefit?

We’re better at bravery than temperance, just when we need that self-control more than ever.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

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Jed Villejo on Unsplash.

The 21st century is witnessing a crisis of temperance, self-discipline, and self-control. Lent is one way to combat this.

According to the international Leader Character framework, there are eleven “character strengths” important for human wellbeing and good leadership. These include virtues like justice, accountability, courage, and good judgment. Researchers have used this framework to perform thousands of studies on teams and groups of people around the world. These studies show that, almost without exception, temperance is the weakest virtue in every team everywhere. (Not quite every person – each team has one or two members with strong temperance, but temperance is still weakest on average for a group).

The modern world is not only intemperate: it actively encourages the opposite: immediate gratification of desires. Every day we are bombarded with online ads, posters, and TV commercials that tell us to ‘Indulge yourself’; ‘treat yourself’, ‘look after yourself’, along with images of sensually pleasing people and objects. It is a rare advert that appeals to your calm rationality and long-term thinking. The advertising industry knows that it can make much more money from people who lack self-control. If it targets your basic animal impulses, then you are more likely to buy things you don’t need and wouldn’t have thought of without ad’s enticing promise.

Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on.

Worse still, there are elements of Western thought that praise intemperance as a virtue and pathologize restraint as a psychological disorder. Elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, popularised in the media, suggest that you do damage to your mental health if you suppress your desires or try to hide them. It is far healthier to give free rein – to sexual desire first of all, but to all desires in the end. Temperance is no longer a virtue to be admired, but a neurotic vice that fills your subconscious with envy, bitterness, and psychological problems.

What is temperance anyway and why is it a problem if we lack it?

Temperance is self-control. It is acquired by self-discipline. Its purpose is to organise and order your many desires, giving priority to the ones that matter most to you. Let’s say you want to lose weight, and you also want to eat that doughnut you can see in the shop window. Or you want to save money to buy a house, but you also want that new and larger TV screen. Those are competing desires. Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to choose: it simply gives you control over your desires so you rule over them instead of them ruling you.

What does lack of temperance look like? Whenever you keep doing something you wish you didn’t keep doing, you are being intemperate. I don’t mean one-time actions that you later regret. I mean things you know you’ll regret even before you do them, yet you still do them. Things like: smoking (for most people), eating too much, browsing Instagram or TikTok instead of working, failing to show up for gym class. It can also mean any kind of procrastination: avoiding doing a task you know you have to do but don’t want to do ‘now’. In sum, it reveals a disorganisation in your priorities and goals, so a lesser priority subverts a higher priority because it’s more immediately available and enjoyable.

We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going

The problem with lacking temperance is that it undermines your own goals for your life and makes your future self a helpless victim of your present self. It leads to a downward spiral of the heart of intemperance is that some desire, some pleasure, some indulgence, has gained so much power over our life that we no longer have control over it. It is in the driving seat, not us. Intemperance is also a cause of self-hatred and low self-esteem. One of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to set long term goals and stick to them. It makes you feel like you’re heading somewhere good.

By contrast, the heart of temperance is to subordinate everything we think, feel, and enjoy to our will, our clear-headed decisions about the kind of person we want to be in the long-term. We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going. Temperance is even needed for worldly success. Warren Buffett once said, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”

Why is temperance so lacking in our own time? I can think of at least two reasons.

First, we are one of the wealthiest societies ever to exist. Wealth may have benefits, but it also enables us to get what we want, when we want it. Wealthy people are less used to having their desires unsatisfied than poor people. Unfulfilled longing is a less common occurrence for the rich, so there is little natural opportunity to exercise the muscle of self-denial.

Secondly, we are one of the least religious societies ever to have existed. In contrast to secularism, religion has always had practical tools to cultivate temperance. All major world religions have ritual practices of fasting and feasting designed to exercise and strengthen self-discipline. Every year Muslims endure the gruelling discipline of Ramadan. Orthodox Christians restrict themselves to a vegan diet during the forty days of lent, and many other Christians give up some indulgence. Both rich and poor share alike in this voluntary self-denial. Now that these practices are eroding away, they are being replaced not by other self-discipline practices, but by the worship of I-want-it-here-and-now. This is shown most poignantly in the 2000 movie Chocolat, which explicitly puts up sensual indulgence in competition to traditional religion and abstinence – and indulgence wins.

But the decline of religion has done more than this: it has also undermined the sense of transcendent purpose in many people’s lives – which was what motivated them to look beyond their physical desires. Without hope and without a larger sense of meaning to life, people have less reason to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the sake of longer-term goals.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance.

I don’t mean that short-term pleasures are always bad, or that sensual desire is evil in itself. The whole point of temperance is that it involves the right amount, and not too much, of something good. That is what makes it so tricky. If eating a doughnut was like stealing or violence, we would have a stronger voice telling us not to do it. But because it’s not bad in itself, we find it harder to resist. We need temperance to say no to something good when we’ve already taken enough of it, so we don’t take too much.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance. A father who spends too long in the office and not enough time with his children is being intemperate. He is sacrificing the long-term goal of healthy family relationships for the short-term goal of career success. We lack the self-control to express our anger in the right place at the right time.

Temperance is needed for so many of the other virtues to function. If you’re not temperate, then you will be late for meetings, fail to deliver work on time, or makes too many commitments that you can’t keep. You’ll be a liability to your friends and colleagues.

Temperance doesn’t tell you what you should aim for in life. But no matter what you aim for, you won’t get it without temperance. So, what are you giving up for lent?