Bold Sin and False Virtue

Screwtape and the True Face of Evil

The Wisdom of Whores

“Sex worker.”

What a bloodless, cowardly, mealy-mouthed term! Whores are “sex workers” in the same way that chefs are “food workers” and makers are “material workers.” The term brings nothing new to the table—even the term’s intent (to emphasize the fact that it’s a job, so as to make collective bargaining and cultural action seem more likely) is ridiculous, as successfully unionizing (or forming a lobby group from) all the various sorts of “sex workers” is about as feasible as unionizing novelists (just take a look at the Author’s Guild and SFWA for a picture of exactly how futile and useless this kind of endeavor is in the modern world).

It’s a clunky, ugly term, lacking in the glorious texture of the English language that manages to rob all the honor from the world’s oldest profession.

Yeah, that’s right. Honor.¹

If your chosen profession involves putting your life and body at risk for the benefit of your customers, you’re doing an honorable thing, by definition (I have written about this before—I won’t bore you with the whole argument here).

I have a lot of respect for whores, hookers, prostitutes, escorts, whatever you want to call them.

Anything but “sex workers.”

Because, in addition to the things I just mentioned, the ones among them who choose the profession² are exemplars of some of the wisest words I’ve ever heard:

“Sin boldly, or not at all.”

Bold Sins and Petty Corruptions

Those of you familiar with Martin Luther will have heard the exhortation to “sin boldly” before. It originally comes from a letter by the German reformer in which he uses the term for rhetorical effect to simultaneously discourage neurotic self-consciousness and to emphasize the strength of divine grace under his reading of Christian theology.

That is not where I’m pulling the exhortation I’m talking about here.

This one came to me extemporaneously from the lips of a friend during an argument about the theme of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, lo these many years ago.

The book is a collection of essays from a senior demon to a junior tempter on his first assignment, coaching the tempter on how best to ensure that the human to whom he’s been assigned finds his way to hell upon his death. Though the essays cover a number of topics, all center around a single theme: getting the human to actively-but-unwittingly deceive himself into becoming the kind of person who would not want heaven even if it were given to him.

This is accomplished by, at every juncture, offering “the patient” a path of expedience and comfort that is maximally cruel, selfish, capricious, and mean-spirited while all the while maintaining a self-narrative that seems plausibly holy, noble, and justified. The goal is to induce a state of terminal self-righteousness and self-obsession that poisons the patient’s life and leaves him, in the afterlife, to say to himself “I now realize that I spent the whole of my life doing neither what I liked, nor what I ought.”

What Screwtape is aiming for, in other words, is not sin, nor is it evil, but instead corruption.

For the program to work, though, it is vitally important that the subject not notice the extent to which his being is corrupted by the habits of venality that the tempter is building within him. Screwtape’s goal is to provide for the subject an appealing and well-lubricated chute down which to slip.

The Nature of Corruption

As a fiction writer, corruption is my stock-in-trade on two fronts.

On the first front, the little moment-by-moment moral decisions faced by the characters in a drama are often meaningless when considered in a vacuum. But those small obstacles that are, by themselves, unimportant, reveal not only the nature of a character, but also the direction of their arc. By small steps, you can move a character of virtue and sympathy into a position of astonishing monstrosity. Some examples from the work of other, much more famous writers include Londo Molari in Babylon 5, Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Hamlet (from the eponymous Shakespeare play), and Eliott Ness in David Mamet’s version of The Untouchables.

“I have broken every law I swore to uphold, I have become what I beheld, and I believe I have done right.”
—Elliot Ness, The Untouchables

Each of these characters, in pursuit of a noble goal, moves from sympathetic and hopeful to villainous and nihilistic—and the audience sympathies (to a greater-or-lesser extent) move with them.

Such characters appear throughout history as well—you can see it in the biographies of some of history’s great villains, including the big H that everyone in politics and on the Internet is perpetually fixated upon (ironic that they never seem to recognize the similarity between themselves and their pet Big Bad).

This sort of character slide is enjoyable for the audience because it’s identifiable. We all recognize the tendency of our own characters (or at least the characters of the benighted fools we’re forced to deal with every day) to bend towards corruption.

On the second front, corruption is a primary weapon in the author’s arsenal. By turning the audience’s empathy against them, we can (and do) trick them into buying into the villainous slide—even when they find themselves horrified by the actions of their hero, they can’t help but root for him, recapitulating the hero’s corruption in their own emotional journey.

Why would an author do this?

There is, of course, the always-popular moralist theory:

And yes, sometimes that’s the case. It’s always possible that a given work of fiction is an actual piece of propagandistic seduction (meant to bring the audience onto the author’s personal moral team), but even when that’s true, it’s almost irrelevant—unless you already share the author’s fetish, the seduction isn’t going to work on you.

The deeper reason that fiction works this way is because drama depends on conflict, and there is no conflict more reliable and meaningful than the conflict between values within the hearts and minds of the audience.

By corrupting the audience through the fictional dream-state, an author forces the audience to practice hypocrisy, and to do so in a way that creates an existential crisis that will reveal to the reader/viewer the depth of their own corruption.

Corruption, you see, isn’t an “interesting” kind of evil. It’s banal. It’s normal. All it takes to become corrupt it a bit of cowardice and low-level opportunism.

And yet, it is the singular evil that makes most other evil possible.

The pain of heartbreak is horrible. The humiliation of rejection can make you literally want to curl up and die (especially if you’ve never experienced it before). But booze is easy—it’s an anesthetic, and your brain doesn’t know the difference between physical pain and emotional pain. And if you’ve got an easy way to numb the pain, why not take it?

Talking out relational problems and irritations is bothersome, emotionally fraught, and just damn hard. Being quietly cruel to your partner, manipulating them to bend them to your will, and counting yourself morally superior for doing so? That’s a lot easier.

Having sex with someone you might actually care about opens you up to a world of pain when the relationship ends (and all relationships end, at least in death). Finding ways to mentally absent yourself during the experience, to callous your heart towards your lovers, or otherwise reduce your need for a partner, or for sex at all, is easier.

Facing your own failures, and growing strong as a result, is hard and risky. Blaming the world around you, your parents, or the Jews, feels a lot better, and it gives you a reason to take pleasure in revenge fantasies to console your wounded sense of pride.

And, of course, all of these “easy paths”—alcohol and other drugs, conflict avoidance, short-term sexual relationships and masturbation and/or pornography, and revenge and self-defense—are easy to justify to oneself because they all exist in healthy forms.

We tell ourselves: “These can be good things…”

But we then tell on ourselves with the follow-up statement: “…so it’s not that bad. I'm probably okay.”

This is the nature of corruption: it is a progressive form of self-brainwashing by which one’s own desires are warped into mere rationalizations to justify one’s own destructive behavior.

It’s just a little lie, it doesn’t make me a liar. It’s just a quick drink to help me get through the day, it doesn’t mean I’m a drunk. It’s just a fund-raising dinner, not a bribe.

In fiction, there is no clearer exemplar of corruption that Gollum, who gave himself, by steps, completely over to the Ring because it offered him the protection of invisibility for his private sins of thievery, eavesdropping, blackmail, and the occasional murder. The price for his corruption was thousands of years of a miserable half-life, ending in the destruction of the only thing in the world he was capable of loving—the very thing that had robbed his life of everything worth valuing, including his very soul.

The price of private sin is corruption—which, eventually, means the destruction of one’s sense of self.

False Virtue

Corruption has its consolations, of course.

The corrupt soul, secure in its own rationalizations of its motives, having slid down the path of hypocrisy, often finds it has an easy time rallying others to its cause.

Consider the wanton cruelty of the censorious dip shits that attempt to control our culture with shame and other forms of emotional blackmail.

In my youth, these characters were most publicly epitomized by infamous hypocrites such as James Dobson (whose child-rearing advice is laced with sexual sadism, and whose own family is something of a wreck), Jerry Fallwell, Bill Gothard, the pornographers of the False Memories panic, and other characters on the religious and cultural right.

In more recent years, the same self-righteousness shifted distinctly to the political and cultural left (for complex reasons I may get into in another article). One need not look very far to find public demonstrations of compassion giving cover for profit-and-kink driven glee at the chemical and surgical disfigurement of children (I’m not talking just about the reported cases of gender-reassignment surgeries in young teens—this has been going on for much longer than that particular fad), for the destruction of downtrodden ethnic communities in the name of “social justice,” and for defending the theft, murder, and rape of children in cities like Rotheham and Rotterdam.

And, of course, as my friend HollyMathNerd pointed out recently, as power is shifting back towards the cultural right, these tendencies are re-emerging on that side of the cultural fight with a vengeance.

In fiction, we see this kind of cruelty in Dolores Umbridge of the Harry Potter novels, in most of the compassionate-seeming characters in Game of Thrones, and, in a less grandiose form, in the bluenosed gossips in every Jane Austen novel.

Sin Boldy!

Something different happens when one sins boldly—but I suppose before I get to that, I should define “sin.”

For our purposes here, “sinning” is a transgression against taboo. That taboo might be one’s internal sense of propriety, the laws of one’s civilization, or the standards of one’s community.

Boldly sinning means choosing to do the taboo or risky thing on purpose. When one does so, one consciously assumes responsibility for one’s actions, rather than giving oneself an out under the cloak of self-righteousness (or the excuse of “it’s not really important”).

To put it another way, you can destroy a person by undermining their consciousness by quiet abuse, or by shooting them in the face. When you do the former, you’re creating for yourself plausible deniability—the fount of all corruption—but when you do the latter, you’re unable to hide the truth of your conduct from yourself.

Most things in the world, when done with full and intentional consciousness, can be done in a healthy, courageous, and/or honorable manner. And those few things that can’t be…well, it’s better to be aware of those things up front, so they do not destroy you unawares.

Sinning boldly doesn’t, of course, guarantee you will be a good person. There are plenty of things you might do where the difference between “good” and “evil” is not “courage.” Nobody in their right mind would hold up Genghis Khan as a “good guy.”

But it does mean that you will own yourself. By sinning boldly, or not at all, you can be or do evil, you can be wrong, you can be mistaken, you can be foolish, but you cannot be corrupt.

And, when it comes to the development and maintenance of one’s individual character, corruption is, above all others, the fate most worth avoiding.

The corrupt soul is the slave to his cowardice. He is the Gollum of his personal universe.

But the destructive, the foolish, the transgressive, the resentful, and the ruthless, if they are not also corrupt, yet have hope of finding within themselves the wisdom to learn from their missteps—because they already have demonstrated the courage it takes to face themselves.

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1. Just because a profession is “honorable” doesn’t mean it’s necessarily “moral.” Morality where prostitution is concerned gets very thorny and multifaceted indeed, so to understand the distinction, consider another, equally ancient profession: soldiering. The profession of the warrior is a categorically honorable one. Going to foreign countries to kill women and children in order to advance the interests of corporate powers in your home country is not, however, a moral activity. The world is complicated.

2. As opposed to backing into it to support a drug habit or as the end result of a series of other poor choices, or via enslavement.