Mike Brotherton March 14th 2008

The Thinking Person’s Seven Deadly Sins

Recently the Catholic Church has been talking about updates to their original list of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. The updates stress communal rather than individual sins, and specifically target scientific endeavors, including “genetic manipulation.” I guess we’re back to the theme of Frankenstein: Man is not meant to play god, at least according to the Catholic Church.

Bullshit.

Nature manipulates our genes all the time, and not always for the better. If you’ve got a predisposition to breast cancer, say, or a likelihood of passing on some really horrendous genetic disease rather than a mere predisposition, is it really a sin to prevent it? Why should that be considered any more sinful than passing on a good habit to your kids, like brushing your teeth?

The answer is that it shouldn’t be. Fiddling with ourselves is certainly risky and should be approached with caution, but I don’t see from any rational perspective that it can be considered sinful. It would be sinful to be able to help people in such an overwhelming manner and refuse to do it.

If you’re Catholic, realize I’m not attacking you directly, but I’m very much criticizing your leadership. If you’re a good rational person, you should, too. When the Church has a recent history of protecting child molesters, working to restrict condoms and sex education in the fight against AIDS, and publicly questioning if Harry Potter is evil (three easy communal sins to identify among a long list that extends back a long time), I don’t think anyone should be taking their ideas seriously until they clean up their act.

Enough bashing on an easy target. Let’s move on to something more creative and productive. What should be sinful in this modern age where there are rational, thinking people who are not rare in this world? I’m talking about you, science fiction readers!

Here’s my list of the thinking person’s seven deadly sins:

1. Succumbing to fear. US politics, and US news, has become dominated by fear mongering. Violent crime, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, immigration. Just because you see a story about a violent crime doesn’t mean you’re likely to be the target of a carjacking or that tougher penalties are the smart thing to vote for. Related to this issue is how some thoughtful people imagine the bad things that can happen in response to a given action, and therefore take no action at all. I’m talking to you, forlorn nerd boy. Tell her you like her, and if she doesn’t reciprocate, move on. Don’t waste years pining. Start that company, make that move. Don’t let your base emotions conquer your reason.

2. Willful ignorance. Smart people, and I’m around them 24/7 in academic environments, hate to admit they’re wrong. They may be clueless about why the moon shows phases (see Harvard grads in “A Private Universe”), but rather than admit that they’ll invent a theory on the spot and defend it to silly lengths. Suck it up, do a little research, and change your mind if necessary and tell people so. Not everyone is right every time. The smartest among us change our ideas and learn, continuously, through life.

3. Failure to learn. In some instances, this sin is a combination of the above. For instance, some smart people have limited vision and fear of new circumstances. They don’t go to college, or grad school, or pick colleges and majors below what they could handle. They fail once, and instead of trying again a different way, settle for that failure or repeat it. Or they simply fail to realize that even if they’re the smartest person in the world, they can still learn something from the generations of smart people who have come before.

4. Acceptance of dogma without question. No one can learn or check every fact out there, and it is useful that we have authorities and experts we can go to. Facts and understanding should be questioned, however, especially when bias is present or contradictory evidence emerges. In science, there’s no such thing as dogma or unquestioned belief. Anything and everything is subject to checking, and double-checking. Other claims to knowledge should have similar checks. If they don’t, I don’t see how someone with intellectual integrity can accept them, at least not absolutely. Too often positions are held based on some underlying philosophical or political position and are not sufficiently examined regularly. Maybe school vouchers are a good idea, maybe not, but instead of maintaining the same positions for decades, take a look at places where the experiment has been run and how well it has worked or hasn’t with predetermined measures. Or abstinence-only sex education. Or a million things that could actually be empirically tested.

5. Failure to produce, AKA intellectual masturbation. This is a particular case of how the thinking person may not be productive, and so seductive and common that it deserves it’s own slot. I’ve had friends skip their college classes for semesters at a time to become the world expert on a video game. Marilyn vos Savant, “smartest person in the world,” writes an insipid column for Parade magazine. Some mensa members obsess unhealthily over their IQs or logic puzzles rather than actually doing something constructive. Being able to win 300 games in a row at Freecell demonstrates something, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but if that’s the only accomplishment you have, you need to wake up and try harder to make a difference in the world.

6. Use of intellect for malfeasance or misdirection. I see people out there in the world that would appear to be smart people: articulate, well educated, reasoned. And then I see them putting forward totally outrageous positions with such deadly seriousness I can only ask myself, “Evil or Stupid?” There are scientists that can be bought by tobacco and oil companies to promote particular unsupportable positions for short-term economic gain. There are pundits and columnists who accept government money to promote political positions, without always telling anyone. There are gays who lie about their orientation and promote discrimination against gays, sometimes from positions of political power. Anyone writing a book to exploit the gullible on some issue they should know better about are just plain evil. Fox News and Anne Coulter come to mind.

7. Silence. Tolerance of the beliefs of others in society is a good thing, but only up to a point. When those beliefs threaten medical research, world health, who you can publicly love, what books you’re allowed to read, what cartoons you can draw, what science you can teach, those beliefs are in conflict with what I consider basic human rights and become intolerable. Don’t be politically correct and give them a pass. Question the foundations and reasoning of those positions. If they’re shaky, don’t be shy about kicking them over. The human enterprise at this point is too big, too complicated, and too shaky itself to rely on anything less than thoughtful reason.

I actually have a few more that didn’t make the cut (e.g. analysis paralysis), but I’m sticking with seven. There are an infinite number of ways to fail in life, but there are also an infinite number of ways to succeed. One way of succeeding is by learning from the failures. Give it a try. It only took the Catholic Church some 350 years or so to forgive Galileo for being right, so even they can do it if given enough time. It’s a faster world today. Give them and others some help and don’t be silent when important policies require thoughtful input. Enough people have died and suffered.

Sorry if I’ve offended anyone, but tough. Convince me I’m wrong, using reason. I could have picked any number of individuals or organizations as a starting point, but the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church is pretty egregious at the moment and in particular I’m offended by their unwarranted attacks on science. Science is our best way of generating reliable knowledge and is very well tested. I’ll take it over alternatives, and believe it should be used to shape policy over ancient superstitious dogma. If you don’t, you can just turn off your computer right now, or accept my point.

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