This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read.
Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?
She was raised as a churchgoer, but she alienated her parents by abandoning the church, never to return. She remains, however, very close to Christian wisdom in her thinking. It is this that gives her book moral force. Religious insight steers her away from simple scientistic essentialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. ‘I don’t think any child – anyone – is bad,’ she writes. ‘Neither do I think everyone is essentially good.’
Now we all know we have genes and these have been identified as the code that makes us who we are. Harden and a collaborator put together data from the DNA of 1.5 million people and gave each of them a genetic ‘score’, taking in factors such as drinking, smoking and frequency of sex. For low scorers, fewer than 20 per cent had been arrested for a crime; for high scorers, the figure rose to 40 per cent. This suggested some genetic effect – but that is not scientistic determinism. People are still free to choose.
Harden found evidence of this in the red-hot issue of obesity. One journalist stated that the weight-loss drug Ozempic ‘will help us to see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices’ – which would obliterate the idea of freedom. Harden points out that ‘real moral choices are the ones that can’t be understood biologically’ – a crucial insight that defines the theme of Original Sin and grants us freedom.
The stories she tells are often brutal, especially in the realm of law. In Tennessee, in 2006, a man named Bradley Waldroup informed his four children that he was going to kill their mother, Penny. In the event, he shot her best friend eight times and slashed Penny with a machete – but she survived. The case came to trial and the prosecution used an academic paper to argue that one particular gene had driven Waldroup mad. The defence, also with academic back-up, asserted the exact opposite. The judge, reasonably confused, found Waldroup guilty of manslaughter and second-degree murder. This sparked considerable outrage, since most people thought Waldroup should have been executed.
Another violent story ends surprisingly. The 20-year-old Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and shot and killed 26 people, of whom 20 were children. Their parents, Harden writes, acted with ‘a fortitude I can only describe as holy’. They did not condemn Lanza or his family; they condemned the ‘demonic’ US gun laws that had made the atrocity possible. Again, real moral choices are the ones that can’t be understood biologically; they take place in the realm of the soul and, says Harden, ‘we should strive for forgiveness for the sake of the wrongdoer and for our own sake.’
At a more domestic level, she writes:
The effect of spanking on kids is one of the most thoroughly investigated topics in all of child psychology and the evidence is clear that spanking does nothing but hurt children. Spanking is closely associated with bad outcomes for the child in later life.
The first problem with this is that the idea that we are all gene-powered robots is no longer credible. But, in fairness, Harden goes well beyond this to discover more of what we actually are. The second is politics. The Nazis sought justification for their murderous racism and found it in a 1912 book by Henry Goddard, a psychologist who ‘aimed to show that criminalised and immoral behaviour was co-inherited, along with poverty and feeble-mindedness’. He was a fraud, who twisted the evidence to support his hard-right racism. He also promoted the concept of genetic purity – precisely the idea that drove Hitler.
Original Sin is a book without an ending. Harden admits she has defined a puzzle, but so be it: ‘We have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and our eyes of self-consciousness are open. We are the object and the subject of the puzzle.’ There are no easy answers – or, rather, there are no answers. Just live with it.
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