the New Pantagruel

Plastic Sinners, Plastic Sins

by Caleb Stegall

ast year, following the revelation that William Bennett—America’s Jiminy Cricket—had squandered millions of dollars gambling in casinos, there was a renewed wave of hand-wringing over the state of public virtue. First Clinton’s peccadilloes and now Bennett. Some on the right despaired while many on the left gleefully recorded further proof of their theory that “everybody does it.” Both sides seemed to concede the underlying fact: we just can’t be good.

To me, this is an unremarkable truth, something we have known about ourselves for a very long time. Instead of being surprised to learn from these public failures that we haven’t yet figured out how to be good, we ought to ask ourselves why it is we so easily forget this fact. This forgetting, after all, is the more recent development, not the fact of vice. A closer look at the manner in which both Bennett and Clinton acted can, I think, provide an answer to this more important question.

Plastic Sinners

More troubling to me than the fact that the author of The Book of Virtues participated heavily in an industry that exploits a lack of virtue was the way Bennett pursued his habit. Somehow, the image of a robotic Bennett dropping $500 chips into a slot machine at 3 a.m. seemed far less forgivable than the image I would have preferred: that of Bennett, cigar planted firmly in the corner of his mouth, sweating under the dim lights of a high-stakes poker game, or indulging in the glitz of a high-rolling craps game, or holding onto his hat while he urged his horse on at the racetrack. Similarly, why does the image of John F. Kennedy seducing Marilyn Monroe into a full-fledged affair conducted in exotic locations bother me so much less than that of President Clinton convincing his intern to service him in a hallway outside the Oval Office?

Most commentators have made the mistake of wondering whether the Bennett and Clinton (and other) episodes mark the disappearance of the virtue. Rather, we ought to wonder whether we are losing something just as important to a healthy society: the existence of “virtuous vice.” The practitioners of virtuous vice are more forgivable because their sins are human sins, pursued with human passions. They approach life with the attitude of “real vice or no vice at all.” As such, their vices remain on a human scale. Retaining a high level of skill and daring, these sinners celebrate their humanity by consciously risking annihilation. The virtuous vices are virtuous because they carry within them the seed of redemption: a recognition of the truth that human beings are not merely materialistic beings, not just a collection of elements, but spiritual beings capable of a meaningful annihilation. In George Santayana’s memorable phrase, those who practice virtuous vice are “moral, though fugitive.” As G.K. Chesterton put it, “they accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly.”

Bennett at his slots and Clinton in his hallway leave us cold precisely because by pursuing the pay-off with nothing but mechanical efficiency, they have dehumanized vice. The real lesson to be learned here is that playing slot machines is the gambling equivalent of receiving oral sex from an office intern. Both of these acts represent within our culture the corrosive effect of modernity; both acts bear the unmistakable marks of pornography.

The success of enlightened democracy is also its greatest bane: it imposes onto every area of human life the calculus of utilitarian efficiency. Pornography—I am using the term in its most general sense—is simply the imposition of this calculus on the fact of human sin. It is sin carefully processed, packaged, marketed, shopped for, and stored away in the cupboard, ready to satisfy any late night craving we may have. The attraction of the midnight snack is that it perpetuates the illusion of free and responsible adulthood while all the while allowing us to submit completely to the slavery of desire. The culture of porn is modernity’s answer to a Puritan inheritance which declares all men sinners and demands that no man should sin.

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