By Jim Denison
Had you heard of Anthony Weiner last month? The New York congressman has served in the House of Representatives since 1999, but most of us didn’t know his name before the lewd pictures he sent to at least six women made global headlines. At this writing, Rep. Weiner continues to resist calls to resign.
Now we can add him to the list of public figures making recent headlines for moral failures, alongside John Edwards, the former presidential candidate, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former California governor. And the list will grow.
We could discuss a variety of ethical issues raised by Weiner’s actions: Do they constitute adultery? Do they disqualify him to serve effectively in Congress? What does “sexting” say about moral guidelines for new technology?
My interest in the latest moral scandal in Washington is more systemic. The ethical failures we have witnessed in recent years illustrate a fundamental fault line in our culture, one which can be traced back in time 26 centuries to a wandering poet whose name you’ve probably never heard but whose ideas changed our world.
Six centuries before Christ, a philosopher-singer named Orpheus made the strange pronouncement that our souls existed in a pre-incarnate state. They “sinned,” as we would say, and were punished by being imprisoned in our physical bodies. The point of life as he saw it was to purify our souls in this life so they could escape from our bodies at death and return to their eternal home.
His worldview divided the soul from the body. In his view, the “spiritual” is good, the “secular” bad. This was just one idea among many in the generations before Socrates, but it came to influence a philosopher named Pythagoras. Remember the Pythagorean theorem in geometry? Music majors know something of Pythagorean music theory as well. Why focus on math and music? Because they are immaterial. How much does 7 weigh? What color is a C scale? By concentrating on the immaterial, Pythagoras believed, we cleanse our souls and prepare them to return to their pre-incarnate homes.
How does any of this relate to Rep. Weiner? Here’s the short version: Pythagoras influenced Plato, who influenced the Western world with his distinction between the immaterial world of ideas and the fallen world of “shadows” or forms. Platonic thought influenced Augustine, who divided life into the City of God and the City of the World. And Augustine’s Platonic worldview would shape Western culture from then to now.
As a result, it is conventional wisdom today to separate the spiritual from the secular, religion from the “real world,” Sunday from Monday. It is this thinking which enables us to do in private what we would never do in public. Hence the popularity of pornography, which made more money last year in America than Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Netflix—combined. During last year’s Super Bowl at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the material most commonly downloaded to mobile devices during the game was pornography.
Marriott International recently made news with its decision to pull access to adult movies from new hotel rooms it will open in coming years. While admirable, their decision actually reflects the fact that more travelers download porn to their laptop computers via the Internet than watch it on their in-room televisions.
“Sexting” is just another symptom of the belief that our personal behavior can be held to a different standard than our public actions. But as Rep. Weiner’s scandal proves, private sin never stays private.
Leaders from King David to President Clinton have discovered that their immense power could not hide their personal failings. Jesus’ warning was never more prescient or relevant than today: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28).
Our spiritual schizophrenia is as old as Orpheus and as contemporary as the next public scandal. Here’s the moral to the story: sin will always take you further than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost you more than you wanted to pay. Always.