Original Sin: Part 1, Human Biodegradability in a Malthusian World

I have always struggled with Augustinian and Calvinistic notions of Original Sin. These formulations tend to posit some sort of intrinsic defect within the human creature, a stain as it were. As a psychologist I spend a great deal of time thinking about human motivation and have gone on long searches for the psychological fingerprints of Original Sin. If humans are totally depraved then there should be some motivational or cognitive bias, some tilt of the mind, that produces the depravity.

What is the psychological source of sin? What, exactly, is wrong with us?

Generally, we tend to think of human self-interest, selfishness, as the root cause of human sin. In the language of Augustine we are "curved in on ourselves" (incurvatus in se). This self-focus contaminates even our best moral efforts. As Martin Luther said, "Every good work is a sin."

However, I've come to the conclusion that this self-focus isn't an intrinsic defect as is typically posited by Original Sin theories. More and more, I think Original Sin is an extrinsic force, it is situational rather than dispositional.

Basically, we are finite creatures living in a finite world. In short, our situation is Malthusian. You'll recall that Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was the English clergyman who wrote one of the fundamental essays of economics. It was entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population. In the Essay Malthus made the observation that reproduction tends to outstrip (or will eventually outstrip) resources. When this happens organisms must fight over the diminishing resources in order to survive (this was the key insight that triggered Darwin's thinking when he read the Essay). Taking the long view, Malthus applied this analysis to future human history and predicted that, given the logic of mathematics, population growth would soon outstrip food supply leading to catastrophic human death. From the Essay:

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."

Now, you might have noticed, the Malthusian catastrophe has yet to come to pass. Malthus was working with an agrarian model of economics, limiting his ability to foresee how division of labor (among other things) could create wealth (i.e., the pin factory from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations). To illustrate how we've been able escape Malthus's predictions, consider the recent analysis given in Gregory Clark's book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. As documented by Clark (and others), most of human history has been governed by Malthusian dynamics where birth and death rates, along with available food supplies, set strict limits upon human population. But with the onset of the Industrial revolution wealth began to be created at a rapid clip. And with it a population explosion. This rapid increase in wealth is strikingly illustrated by this chart of Clark's (p. 2):



As can be seen in Clark's graph, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution much of the world has been able to rocket out of the Malthusian trap. (How and why, and why some countries are still stuck in the trap, is the subject of Farewell to Alms.)

So it seems that we can shrug Malthus off. We've escaped his grim prediction.

But have we?

Despite the wealth-creating ability of modern economies, the ability that lifts us out of Malthusian economics, the Malthusian specter is always lingering in the background. It functions, as it were, as a center of gravity. Modern economies are like airplanes. They are high-powered machines that can lift us off the earth and get us into the clouds of prosperity. But as we all know, airplanes crash. And when they do we are back in the Malthusian situation. Only this time with billions of more mouths to feed.

People frequently speculate about these apocalyptic Malthusian crashes. Sometimes it appears in crazes like the Y2K hysteria. Remember how the global economy was going to crash when January 1, 2000 rolled in? How all the world computers and machines or appliances with computer chips would stop functioning? Planes falling out of the sky? Etc.?

But there are respectable Malthusian analyses regarding things such peak oil, the population explosion, and environmental collapse. Some of these are analyses are alarmist, but many are done soberly and with quantitative care. The point is always the same: We are finite creatures in a finite world. And we can't escape that fact.

I've gone into Malthus because my view of sin is largely informed by his Essay. I tend to reject theological notions that sin is a product of an intrinsic human defect. I tend to see sin as extrinsically caused. The problem isn't on the inside, it is, rather, on the outside. And the outside, at root, is governed by Malthusian dynamics. Modern economies tend to hide that fact from us, but Malthus' Essay is still in force.

We are, in short, vulnerable. And in times of economic downturn or times of war or during times of natural disaster when our electric grids and food supply lines get broken we face, again, the ghost of Malthus. He's always there.

We are selfish not because of a "fallen" nature. We are selfish because we live as physically vulnerable creatures in a Malthusian world. It is this situation that tilts the mind toward selfishness, makes us competitive, makes us hoard, or preemptively attack. It is our felt vulnerability that makes us sinful.

This vulnerability is nicely described by Marilyn McCord Adams in her book Christ and Horrors (p. 38):

"There is a metaphysical mismatch within human nature: tying psyche to biology and personality to a developmental life cycle exposes human personhood to dangers to which angels (as naturally incorruptible pure spirits) are immune...[this] makes our meaning-making capacities easy to twist, even ready to break, when inept caretakers and hostile surroundings force us to cope with problems off the syllabus and out of pedagogical order. Likewise, biology--by building both an instinct for life and the seeds of death into animal nature--makes human persons naturally biodegradable. Human psyche is so connected to biology that biochemistry can skew our mental states (as in schizophrenia and clinical depression) and cause mind-degenerating and personality-distorting diseases (such as Alzheimer's and some forms of Parkinson's), which make a mockery of Aristotelian ideals of building character and dying in a virtuous old age."

The Bible often links the powers of sin and death. Generally, we tend to spiritualize the connection between the two. I'd like to read the connection more concretely, economically, and biologically. Death and sin are linked by Malthus. The specter of death is what creates the sinful behavior. This is, interestingly, the view of sin and death in the Orthodox tradition. As the theologian S. Mark Heim describes the Eastern view:

Removed from Eden we are "[u]nourished by the divine energy, our existence fades into subjection to corruption and death. In such a state, our mortality becomes a source of anxiety. Futile attempts to defend ourselves from it lead us into active sin and estrange us from trust in God. Now sinfulness is more a result of mortality than mortality from sinfulness. To say that humans are 'conceived in sin' does not mean that some guilt or evil inclination is passed on to them in the act of their conception, but that what they inherit is a mortal human nature, which became mortal as a result of sin."

After the Fall, it is death that makes us paranoid and self-interested. But this is not, simply, some generalized or diffuse fear of death. It is a Malthusian fear, a fear that seeps into you because you are a biodegradable creature living in a Malthusian world.

Next Post: Part 2