Our built in tendancy to make excuses

Our in-built tendency to make excuses

We may well accept the fact that we are far from perfect, but it is an in-built tendency of human nature to blame others for our faults. We are masters at making excuses. We may blame our upbringing, our particular circumstances, or the way we have been treated by others. These days we can even blame our genes.

Anna Russell, a singer with a sense of humour, had a little song which goes:

I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalysed
To find out why I killed the cat and blackened my husband's eyes.
He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find,
And here is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind:
When I was one, my mommie hid my dolly in a trunk,
And so it follows naturally that I am always drunk.
When I was two, I saw my father kiss the maid one day,
And that is why I suffer now from kleptomania.
At three, I had the feeling of ambivalence towards my brothers,
And so it follows naturally I poison all my lovers.
But I am happy; now I've learned the lesson this has taught;
That everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault.

This does not mean that there are not many people who are more 'sinned against' than sinning, but even that does not let us off the hook entirely. To some degree we are all responsible for our own actions.

One acute observer of the human condition, who has noticed the disappearance of the word 'sin' from our vocabulary, is the American psyhiatrist Karl Menninger. In his book Whatever Became of Sin? he notes that "many former sins have become crimes", so that responsibility for dealing with them has passed from church to state, from priest to policeman. Others have dissipated into sicknesses, or at least the symptoms of sickness, so that in their case punishment has been replaced by treatment. A third convenient device called 'collective irresponsibility' has enabled us to transfer the blame for some of our deviant behaviour from ourselves as individuals to society as a whole or to one of its many groupings. He pleads for a reinstatement of the word 'sin' in our vocabulary, and also for a recognition of the reality which the world expresses. For sin is

an implicit aggressive quality—a ruthlessness, a hurting, a breaking away from God and from the rest of humanity, a partial alienation, or act of rebellion...sin has a wilful, defiant or disloyal quality: someone is defied or offended or hurt.

He says that to ignore this would be dishonest. To confess it would enable us to do something about it. Moreover, the reinstatement of sin would lead inevitably to 'the revival or reassertion of personal responsibility'. In fact the 'usefulness' of reviving sin is that responsibility would be revived with it.

The London Times once asked several eminent authors to write articles on the theme, "What's Wrong with the World?" The Christian writer and humourist, G. K. Chesterton, wrote this reply:

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton