For 35 years, I’ve puzzled over why the act of confession is not part of the regular order of Sunday worship at my church. To be sure, in the Protestant tradition it is perfectly acceptable for me to confess my mistakes on my own time. There is no doctrine requiring an intermediary or a congregational setting. And yet this is an unusual omission, even for a liberal Mainline Protestant Church. Maybe the congregation abandoned confession decades ago, coinciding with the self-esteem craze of the 1980’s. (Recalling screw-ups might make you feel bad about yourself. Feeling bad about yourself would be…bad.)
But recently I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, and I began to wonder. Is the omission of confession a symptom of something much deeper?
In 2007, Thomas Sowell, social theorist and economist, wrote this about the book he first published twenty years earlier. “(A Conflict of Visions) addresses a fundamental question that seldom gets the attention it deserves: What are the underlying assumptions behind the very different ideological visions of the world being contested in modern times?”1 Powell makes the case that people define and solve for equality, justice, and power differently depending on whether they consider human nature constrained or unconstrained.
In the constrained view, humans are egocentric with moral limitations. It has always been so; it will always be so. In the unconstrained perspective, human nature is malleable and perfectable, with untapped moral potential; the human species can become better. When we argue about social, political, or cultural issues, we usually don’t realize that we are operating from one of these two visions of human nature. And because our fundamental assumptions are opposite, we often talk right past each other.
The unconstrained vision asks why there is war, poverty and crime. The constrained vision searches for the special conditions that led to peace, wealth or a law-abiding society. Those with an unconstrained vision imagine humans in pre-history sharing milk and honey while telling stories around the campfire. Those with a constrained vision imagine those humans raiding each other’s camps and bashing each other over the head with clubs.
Both visions acknowledge that social processes—such as market economies, social traditions, and constitutional law—are complex. Those with the constrained vision don’t believe any elite group of people can comprehend the whole of the complexity, nor predict the often unintended outcomes that will result from various policy decisions. Trade-offs are the best we can hope for. Those with unconstrained visions believe that some people achieve a higher level of understanding. It’s just a matter of effort and time before everyone else comes to the same elevated moral plane, and then messy social conditions will improve.
In matters of equality and justice (to oversimplify considerably) the unconstrained vision seeks equal and just outcomes, while the constrained vision desires equal opportunities and just rules or laws. In matters of power, the two visions diverge as well. Those with a constrained vision think of power as a force that limits the choices or options of society. Those with the unconstrained vision see power as a force wielded to compel behavior or action.
To generalize, we can say that progressives advance arguments based on the unconstrained vision of humanity, while conservatives assume a constrained vision. As an example, affirmative action is a policy grounded in the idea that eventually the racial demographics of society’s professions will be identical to the racial demographics of our society-at-large if we set and enforce university admissions quotas until equilibrium is achieved. Progressives tacitly assume that with enough time and effort, malleable human nature can be shaped by the rule makers—by those who set the quotas. Conservatives caution that affirmative action will privilege one disadvantaged group at the expense of another. They don’t believe the rule makers can possibly take into account all the complexity driving racial disparity. They believe that human nature is imperfect, and a quota system designed with the best of intentions is likely to discriminate against, for example, Asian Americans in order to boost opportunities for Blacks. The Defund the Police movement is another public policy proposal built on the unspoken assumption that human nature is unconstrained. Those with a constrained vision take a dim view of the long term—or even short term—effectiveness of such an initiative.
Lest we despair of ever aligning these visions, I find comfort in remembering that the same conflict of visions has been playing out throughout our nation’s history: Hamilton and Jefferson; Wilson and Coolidge. I don’t think the world would be better if either vision was completely uncontested. I can sleep at night knowing that one vision is thwarting the second, while the second pushes back on the first. Let the conflict rage!
Which brings me back to the routine act of confession—and the lack thereof at my very progressive church. Does most of my congregation have an unconstrained vision of humanity? If so, it would make sense that emphasis would be placed on preaching to raise everyone to a higher plane, instead of soul-searching to acknowledge individual weaknesses. In the unconstrained view, the act of confession is immaterial.
Me? I take a constrained view of humans. I don’t think the inherent nature of people has changed much in thousands of years, and I don’t think it’s wise to build public policies on a foundation of speedy evolution. There’s an old joke: Every generation we are invaded by barbarians. We call them children. Exactly. Or, as Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius noted, “To have contemplated life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more will you see?”2
So I will continue to confess on my own time. There’s no constraint against that.
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1Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions, revised ed. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2007), preface
2Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Seven
