It has been said that a disillusionment with human nature most often turns the mind toward Christianity. I know that, in my period of jejune optimism, the concept of original sin seemed something archaically funny. Now, twenty years later, and after the experience of a world war, there is no concept that I regard as expressing a deeper insight into the enigma that is man. Original sin is a parabolic expression of the immemorial tendency of man to do the wrong thing when he knows the right thing. The fact of this tendency everyone should be able to testify to, not only from his observation, but also from his personal history. And, it is the rock upon which nine-tenths of the socialist formula for universal happiness splits. The socialists propose to offer man peace and plenty, and they seem not to realize that he may reject both for crime and aggrandizement. He has done so before in both the individual and the national units. It would be more realistic for the reformers to start with the old assumption that the heart of man is desperately wicked and that he needs external help, in the form of grace. At least, we cannot build on the quicksand that he is, by nature, good, for he is not. Whether he has inherited his sin from Adam is, perhaps, a question for another level of discussion. The plain situation is that he has inherited it, and that it will sink any scheme which is founded on a complacent faith in man’s desire always to do the good thing. Nothing can be done if the will is wrong, and the correction of the will is precisely the task which modern radicalism fails to recognize.
From: “Up from Liberalism,” by Richard M. Weaver, in Modern Age, Volume 3, Number 1 (Winter, 1958-1959), pp. 21-32. Reprinted in In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963, edited by Ted J. Smith III (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), pp. 33-50. Quotation from p. 44.
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr. (1910-1963) taught at the University of Chicago from 1944 until his death. He, along with William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) and others, was an important person in the rise of the modern conservative movement after World War II. He was a prolific author.
