When I hear pop psychology taught via viral TED Talks and popular podcasts, I think of the warning in Proverbs 3: “Lean not on your own understanding.” One such podcast is No Stupid Questions (NSQ) presented by Freakonomics Radio.
Hosts Stephen Dubner, economics author and journalist, and Angela Duckworth, Ivy League academic and author, answer listener questions like “Why Do We Cry?”, “Is Having Kids Worth It?”, and “How Does Facing Death Change Your Life?” Their answers are guided by doggedly academic data and confirmed by Dubner and Duckworth’s armchair philosophies. Each episode is brimmed with high-brow humor and multiple citations of scholarly journal articles and psychological studies. Listeners walk away more enlightened, ostensibly.
Hypothesis
When answering “Why Is It So Hard to Resist Temptation?” Dubner proposed they do a series on the Seven Deadly Sins (7DS). It was outside their repertoire; Dubner is Jewish, which lent credence to having the conversation–useful in light of Duckworth’s apparent inexperience in many things religious. Still, they committed to the topic, and in April posted their ninth and final episode, taking the last two episodes to reflect on the series.
The working history listeners were given of the 7DS is that the concept was created by the Catholic Church to help keep monks on mission. Also, some sins may have been used to justify slave labor, but that’s only the hosts’ speculation. The items in the list changed over time, but the list NSQ worked from was the contemporary consensus: sloth, gluttony, lust, wrath, envy, greed, and pride.
Duckworth is writing a book exploring impulse control to study why people like Tiger Woods or Eliot Spitzer (her examples) were so faithful to their careers but so unfaithful to their spouses. Why couldn’t they have applied their drive for excellence in golf and politics, respectively, to pursuing healthy sexuality in their marriages? She is baffled by this inconsistency, and hopes to prove that humanity could improve if only we practice greater self-control.
“All truth is God’s truth,” it’s said, and though that’s often misapplied, we can find comfort in knowing that scientific studies, even on sin, will not contradict God’s design, except when it’s done deliberately or the conclusion rests on an errant beginning. NSQ does both.
Research
In the spirit of pop psychology, and to their own confusion, NSQ remained unconcerned with the ecclesiastical definitions of the deadly sins. Their expressed interest for the series is in how we each view our own sinfulness in 2023. However, the topic of sin is saturated with religious attachment. After all, the 7DS came from the Catholic Church. Nobody can know how greedy they are without involving the scriptures and centuries of ecumenical teachings on greed. As Paul said in Romans 7, “I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law.”
Still, to make a podcast series out of Duckworth’s research and avoid the religious connotations of the 7DS, NSQ spoke on adjacent topics. For example, the episode on gluttony discussed addictions to over-processed foods, drugs, and impulse shopping. And instead of greed, they talked about gambling. When they did stay on topic, it was to rationalize the sin.
In each episode, listeners or the hosts found ways to update the sin by discussing its positive applications. Non-hubristic pride is healthy, right? And we could gamble for a good cause, like in a community raffle or silent auction. Surely that’s not greed. Envy of another’s achievements may lead you to improve yourself, couldn’t it? Similarly for wrath; couldn’t you redirect your anger into seeking justice? And isn’t there a time to relax, perhaps to the point of sloth?
Yet, with the strictures of #MeToo and the contemporary virtue of non-judgmentalism, the episode on lust evaded their refrain that each sin has a beneficial component. I can’t think of a way to spin lust either but I won’t say, as Duckworth did, that porn use, masturbation, and one-night stands “[aren’t] so bad.”
Data Analysis
The research and armchair conversations proved Woods and Spitzer are not outliers in their lack of integrity. Subjects in Duckworth’s focus groups admitted ways they do or don’t practice self-control in parts of their life. She found that there is greater variety in one person’s indulgences than there is variety of the same across demographics. That is, when a subject scored high in one sin and thus has a higher probability they’d rate similarly in another sin, she can’t predict the correlating sins. But she found she could predict the scores for certain groups. For instance, men outpace women in terms of struggling with lust and women edge above men as regards gluttony.
What Duckworth sees as a lack of self-control, Christians call sin. But she is committed to her rephrasing; her chorus throughout the series is that “Sin is an archaic term.” With that perspective, her research seems novel and the episodes useful. Dressed in esoteric and detached vocabulary, NSQ concluded what the Bible says about sin nature: everyone has sinned (Romans 3:23) and is tempted by their own desires (James 1:14). Or, in Duckworth’s words, “there’s both variation across [sins] within a person and also a kind of central tendency.”
But the decision to sin is not merely inconsistent self-control. Neither is temptation simply the “want/should conflict”: the tension between “what you want to do in the moment” and “what your future self knows you should do for the benefit of you.” Even less so are sins bad habits that if we squint our eyes and see them as virtuous, they will become healthy for us. Sin is a disease of the heart. For the non-Christian it is a compulsive choice that white-knuckling can never eliminate. For the Christian, it is an act of rebellion against the Lord, and a call to once again accept his forgiveness for our crimes.
The solutions Dubner and Duckworth offer are, therefore, ineffectual. When sin is merely lack of self-control, you can “trick yourself” by throwing away cigarettes when you don’t have the urge to smoke or meal plan so you don’t default to fast food. These are great practical tools, but the Christian with insider knowledge of why the human heart does what it does knows that sin struggles are not character flaws that can be life-hacked away.
It's foolish to talk about sin at a distance. And evil to call it good (Isaiah 5:20). Even NSQ acknowledges the existence of some sins implicitly. At the end of every episode the producer lists a fact check wherein she clarifies some of the hosts’ statements. Sometimes it’s misattributed or incorrect data that Dubner or Duckworth recited from memory. But it’s also correcting mispronunciations or extending trivial knowledge the hosts didn’t finalize in the moment. The fact check is an overabundance of caution against plagiarism—a recognition that they are responsible to tell the truth.
After the warning, Proverbs 3 continues, “In all your ways, acknowledge him.” If we were to acknowledge the way God works in the world rather than make armchair conjectures without doing so, we’d have keener answers to any question.
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