The 18th-century firebrand American preacher Jonathan Edwards, alarm clock in chief of the Great Awakening, once characterized original sin as “the innate sinful depravity of the heart”— hereditary, biological, inescapable, and worthy of damnation.
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While few members of contemporary liberal societies adhere to Edwards’s intense theological approach, many of us moderns have adopted an analogical scientific understanding of sin rooted in human biology: Human nature inheres in our genetic material in ways that are essentially as irreversible as Edwards’s innate sinful depravity. Murderers are often the children of killers and are fated to slay others. Addicts struggle to overcome their heredity of dependency. Madmen descend from other madmen and cannot fairly be blamed for their actions.
Such, anyway, represents the conventional wisdom in many circles, but in Original Sin, the polymathic University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Kathryn Paige Harden takes a scalpel to the prevailing pieties of genetics and the philosophy of blame, arguing persuasively for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how vice, virtue, and heredity interact.
“We like to believe,” she asserts, “that we will be blamed for our choices, that we won’t be found guilty unless we have had the opportunity to make different choices, that we can avoid damnation by making better choices.” In chapters that include “Sin,” “Luck,” “Choice,” “Essence,” and “Retribution,” she contends that, while genetics deeply influence our actions and we naturally accord blame and impose punishment even for “innate” wrongdoing, “guilt does not mean damnation, and the hooks of responsibility can be a tool for weaving, and reweaving, us together.”
Harden begins by situating today’s debate in the past, between Augustine, who proclaimed that “infants arrive polluted by sin; since they have committed no actual sin, remission must be for the guilt attaching to a fault in their nature,” and Pelagius, a fourth-century Middle Eastern monk who insisted that “what is natural cannot be called evil” because, “if you say it is a matter of will, it does not belong to nature, and if it is a matter of nature, it has nothing to do with guilt.”
At the time, Augustine prevailed — decisively: Pelagius was declared a heretic and expelled from Jerusalem. Perhaps their contemporaries simply, instinctively found abiding by the Pelagian approach morally and practically intolerable. As Harden puts it, Augustine “rationalized that it was better for humanity to be guilty than godless … better for our suffering to be deserved than meaningless.”
But while theological debates such as these have raged for decades, modern science has largely resolved them in Augustine’s deterministic favor, as unsettling as we may find it. Specifically, evidence of genetic predispositions to violence has become too comprehensive to deny. Harden exhibits the latest research on the relationship between antisocial behavior, from bullying to mass murder, and a range of hereditary traits, including minor physical anomalies, deficiencies in the monoamine oxidase type-A gene, and irregularities in the CADM2 gene. “Scientific results,” Harden concludes, “refuse to abide by the Pelagian antithesis.”
Of course, if genes determine our actions, and we now possess techniques to alter our genes, perhaps we can retake ownership over our behavior. “My work in the lab,” Harden explains, “suggests that avoiding vice and recovering virtue might be found not in transcending one’s animal body but in changing it.” Techniques like CRISPR and medications like GLP-1 agonists offer great promise to countermand and even reverse our most vicious inclinations.
So pervasive is our biological programming that we often fail even to notice it. Harden describes a neuroscience experiment from the 1980s in which participants, hooked to an EEG monitor, stared at a clock and randomly decided when to wiggle their fingers, taking care to document their intention to do so. “The blockbuster result,” she recounts, “was that spikes of brain activity in the motor planning area, which predicted that people would move their fingers, preceded people’s conscious awareness of the intention to move by a fraction of a second.” In other words, the participants’ brains unconsciously primed their fingers for movement even before they sensed their intention to wiggle.
Yet, not every genetic predisposition can be undone, not now, and possibly not ever, and undue emphasis on the immutability of our nature can have perverse effects as well. “One danger of genetic essentialism,” Harden posits, “is that it can estrange us from others.” When we perceive others as comprising genetic material that differs fundamentally from ours, “empathic connection” becomes much more difficult. She cites studies showing participants assigning a higher degree of blame to wrongdoers whose evil actions were traceable to hereditary causes.
In addition, even if we could stamp out aggressiveness through genetic engineering, would we really want to? Harden cites evidence that some of America’s most impressive innovators, by and large, engaged in antisocial behavior during their adolescence, including vandalism, drug-dealing, and assault. As the founder of Patagonia once observed, “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.” Instead, she argues, vaguely, for “eclipsing” vice through compassion — essentially, blotting out the bad with a robust communal notion of the good.
For many readers, Harden’s account of her own personal conduct will come across as gross oversharing. It’s not exactly for us to judge whether she and her boyfriend should embark on an LSD trip in the Texas desert at the height of COVID-19, nor whether her dalliances while her divorce was pending constitute adultery, nor whether her abjuration of her evangelical faith deserves criticism, but Harden sure seems interested in provoking our views. At times, it seems that Original Sin represents the author’s own book-length plea for absolution for what she regards as her own sins.
And those with an allergy to progressive bromides are likely to find themselves afflicted by certain passages, including Harden’s contention that American incarceration practices are “unconsciously motivated” not by prudential judgment but “by the same reasons that some parents want to hit their children — not because it ‘works’ to reduce an unwanted behavior but because it satisfies our feelings of rage and powerlessness.” Nor will such readers find congenial her confession of deriving pleasure from a movie where a woman exacts revenge on would-be sexual assault perpetrators: “the dopamine kick of seeing ordinary white men, in their khakis and button-ups, look panicked, scared, helpless.”
Still, these flaws must be contextualized against a broader backdrop of a highly credentialed liberal academic like Harden actually seeking to buck the stale woke tropes stifling her world. As in The Genetic Lottery, her 2021 book seeking to restore the importance of heredity to its appropriate place in a skeptical Ivory Tower, her exploration in Original Sin of genetics, responsibility, and their limitations merits kudos.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
