The original sin of babies

Many years ago, I worked as a social worker in Scotland. I lived in a pleasant village in Clackmannanshire under the lea of the Ochils, and I worked in a miserable town in West Lothian. But in both places I heard several parents say the same thing about their babies: that when they cry, they should be left to do so because it helps ‘break their spirit’. I do not know how common this view is in Scotland or whether it is unique to Scotland, but it seemed to me then to incorporate a strange and harsh idea of the nature of children and how best to respond to their needs. It is harsh because it seemed to attribute a baby’s act of communicating distress or discomfort to a desire to manipulate and control its parents. It is, in other words, a belief in original sin.

This belief, as conventionally developed by Christian theologians from St. Augustine onwards, is that human beings inherit sin from Adam, who committed the original sin of disobedience (ie eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge) in the Garden of Eden. All human beings are therefore deemed to be depraved in their nature from birth, and to lack the freedom to do good or respond to the will of God unless they receive His grace. The idea of original sin was especially favoured by the first Protestant clerics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, but would seem to have little to do with the expressed statements of Christ or the Book of Genesis.

Three of the Christian gospels have similar texts in which Christ tells his disciples not to prevent children coming to see him, and saying that “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 1-6). He therefore regarded children as innocent beings, not as innately depraved.

The Book of Genesis reports that God punished Adam and Eve and their descendants for their disobedience, but the punishment comprised the pain and suffering of toil, childbirth, illness and death (Gen. 3: 16-19), with no mention of the inheritance of sin. According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden to prevent a challenge to God who said: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”. (Gen. 3:22-23).

Sin therefore arises because Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge provided them with the capacity to choose rather than act on instinct. This choice created the possibility of helping or harming others, and it is a choice we have all inherited because of our intellectual capacity as human beings. That we can choose evil is emphasised in the following chapter in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel.

The doctrine of original sin involves a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature - of children as well as adults. It leads some parents to see their children as innate sinners who must be disciplined from birth, rather than innocent and curious souls driven to respond to the attention and love of their parents.

See also: No sympathy for the devils

The dangerous mythology of computers

Last year, my aged laptop ceased to work and I so I went to the local PC World to buy a new one. I discovered that it had the new operating system called ‘Windows 8', in which the main screen resembles that on a mobile phone. I managed to find out how to make this work by trial-and-error, and eventually modified it so that it resembled the earlier version of Windows with which I was familiar. I do not use the programme Microsoft Word and prefer Corel Wordperfect, which I re-installed on the new computer. However, I do use PowerPoint , and so I decided to buy the Microsoft Office suite, which also includes Word and the Excel spreadsheet programme. Instead of getting an installation disk, PC World took my money and gave a product key on a card, so that I could download the Office suite from the Microsoft website. All went well until this week when I finally needed to use Microsoft Word. As soon as I loaded the programme, an error message informed me that it had ceased working and it closed down. The same thing happened, I discovered, with Excel.

So I phoned Microsoft technical support for help, and was told that they could solve the problem if I took out a support contract. In other words, Microsoft had sold me a product that did not work and wanted more money to make it work. My next step was therefore to contact PC World, who as the retailer have a legal obligation to sell goods that are ‘merchantable’ (a legal term meaning that goods should be reasonably fit for the ordinary purposes for which such products are manufactured and sold). Their technician told me that such principles could not apply to computers because of their complexity, and the possibility that different software applications can conflict with each other. However, they could sort it out for me if I paid them a £50 repair fee. Not being a complete mug, I went home and checked the Internet. It became clear that my problem was a common one, and occurred because Word and Excel are incompatible with a programme called ‘Finereader’. I have never used Finereader, and do not remember installing it, so it was probably supplied with the computer. Anyway, I deleted Finereader, solved the problem, and saved £50 plus whatever a Microsoft support contract costs.

All this illustrates an important part of the mythology of computers and their software: that they are complicated and that they are expected to be fallible, and that their failure is somehow not the responsibility of those who made them. Complexity and fallibility were once expected of cars. Up to the 1980s, brand new cars would often break down and old ones frequently so. Car-owners would expect to spend a lot of their time attempting to repair them or waiting for a roadside recovery service. All this ended when Japanese manufacturers began to make cars that were highly-reliable. A similar transition has yet to occur with computer systems and so there is still a common belief that computer systems are inherently unreliable. This suits the corporations that make and market them. They can continue to produce poorly-designed products like Windows 8 and expect supplementary payouts from customers when their products prove unworkable. The sum of repair fees and software support contracts from millions of customers must amount to a tidy sum.

Even better profits are generated by the failure of large contracts for public computer systems. This month, the National Audit Office has reported that the General Practitioner Extraction System (GPES) has utterly failed to operate. This is not failure in the sense that the system is unreliable or slow, rather it is failure in the sense that it has never managed to generate a single piece of data for general practitioners. The GPES failed to operate when it cost £19 million, which resulted in a further large input of public cash so that it now fails to operate having cost £40 million. But that is chickenfeed compared with some other public procurement systems like the NHS patient records system abandoned after costing at least £10 billion. In any rational economy, the companies responsible for wasting public money on this scale would be out of business and the civil servants responsible for procurement and management would be in prison or exile. I suspect, however, that they have retired with a good pension, a lucrative ‘consultancy’ post, and the award of a medal from the honours list.