If the news reports are to be believed, Tiger Woods has feet of clay. The eminently likable and admirable golf wonder says he has let his family down in unspecified ways.
Here at Mead GHQ there is no joy in this news and no desire to poke around into the private life of Mr. Woods or anybody else. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” and while the physical walls of the stately Mead manor in beautiful Queens are solid and strong, metaphysically and morally my home has its fair share of glass walls. No stones will be thrown on this blog, and I wish Mr. Woods and his family the best as they work their way through whatever this turns out to be. And while I don’t believe in restraining the press, it does sometimes pass across my mind that in cases like this a little self-restraint by writers and editors would not be a bad thing.
So without further speculating on what may or may not be going on in the Woods household, I’m struck that this episode like so many others seems to point conclusively to the inescapable truth of one of those Christian doctrines that so many people like to dismiss out of hand. I refer, of course, to the doctrine of Original Sin, the idea that while human beings are pretty wonderful in most respects, something in all of us is badly awry. It always surprises me that so many people find this doctrine hard to take; it’s a bit gloomy to be sure but nothing seems more obvious or more thoroughly demonstrated than this truth about the way people work.
We find it satisfying when the self-righteous get their comeuppance: when the crusading attorney general turned governor gets caught with a call girl, when the televangelist is filmed in a sleazy motel with a woman (or a man) not his wife, or when ‘family values’ candidates from either the left or the right turn out to have values more like the Borgia and the Soprano families than like those nice TV people on Walden’s Mountain. It’s sadder when someone we like and admire lets the ‘dark side’ show; I was one devastated liberal teenager after Chappaquiddick taught me that not even liberal senators named Kennedy are pure angels of light. The media and sales-hungry biographers are salaciously excited by new ‘revelations’ about the complex private lives of public figures, but how much revelation is this really?
I’m not asking my readers to take lie-detector tests or make public confessions, but don’t we all have complex lives, one way or another? Don’t we all have ideals that we fail to live up to? Some people crash and burn in spectacular moral collapses — but many others mush along in routines that fall very short of what we all believe to be our minimum duties toward one another — to say nothing of any duties owed our creator.
This isn’t just about sex, though we should never forget that our world holds a million or more enslaved ‘sex-workers.’ Sex might be in some ways the least of our worries. Government officials steal something like $1.6 trillion per year. (And don’t forget, for everyone who takes a bribe, somebody pays one.) Bankers sell mortgages to people they know can’t make the payments. As a society we do almost nothing to protect the people in our prisons from brutal assault. Climate scientists write emails that do not bear the light of day. Most people in rich countries pay only occasional attention to the plight of the poor — billions of people live at or near the edge of starvation, hundreds of millions of children lack even the most basic medical care and education, brutal wars smolder endlessly and hopelessly in places like the Congo: I could go on– most of us do go on without stopping, without doing anything serious about the horrors with which our world is filled.
With all this happening, what amazes me is how surprised and indignant we all seem to be when, yet again, it turns out that in the midst of this cesspool and butcher’s shop that we call history some individual human being falls short.
Original Sin, the idea that all human beings going back into the invisible past are deeply flawed, seems the most obvious thing in the world. There is nothing that is more obvious in daily life, no truth more strongly attested by all the news we get from all the corners of the earth. Yet it is an idea that we turn away from in disgust over and over. Surely with the right schools, the right social programs, the right economic arrangements, we can put all this behind us! Surely the free market will bring about universal utopia — or, on the other side of the political spectrum, surely wise regulators and government planners can and will build a noble and just society if we just give them the power.
Reinhold Niebuhr had this right. In our individual lives and in our understanding of politics, the idea of Original Sin has to be the foundation of our thinking and our policy. Human society is not perfect and never will be; the reformers need to be watched as closely as the crooks. Great powers go too far; small powers cheat.
Much of the Christian religion needs to be taken on faith. But this part, the idea that “we have all gone astray,” that just seems like simple common sense.
And so endeth the daily lesson.