Guilty by Deborah Orr 

What a quaint little list the deadly sins make. In a western society in which religious belief is increasingly seen not only as irrelevant, but even as plain cranky, most of the people I asked struggled to recall all seven sins.

Pride. Envy. Anger. Avarice. Sloth. Gluttony. Lust. These are the traits which, from ancient times, human beings have been told to steer well clear of. The fact that history is littered with leaders and icons which are powerful embodiments of some, or occasionally all, of these dreadful shortcomings is testament to our longstanding ambivalence about sinfulness and our endless ability to push the idea of our own deaths to the backs of our minds.

Nowadays sin is a word bandied around only by lonely loonies with badly painted placards or unwelcome pairs of equally loopy visitors to unwary residents' doorsteps. Death, it seems, and even its forerunner ageing, has become an entirely avoidable inconvenience that the fit and healthy can somehow put off, at least until the time at which they're too bored with their exercise regime to go on living.

We're told by optimistic scientists that human beings will, in the very near future, live to around 120 years old. We're told by the less optimistic ones that the whole of humanity will be lucky indeed if it's around to celebrate the coming of another century. Oddly enough though, while the debate is never any longer couched in apocalyptic terms, except by the aforementioned cranks of middle-America's burgeoning millenarian cults and other religious extremists, it's surprising how much these two divergent futures are still mixed up with the manner in which people approach the deadly weaknesses of character we've been counselled against for such a very long time.

​Gluttony, for example, is an obvious winner in the modern pantheon of sin and, as is often the way, an obvious loser as well. Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, is said to have argued that "one can never be too rich or too thin", and indeed it is true that affluence is now closely bound to well-toned slenderness. The converse is true as well. It is now the poor who are fat, panting under the easy indulgence of cheap, fast, bad food, and despised for it. Anorexia, a disease that somewhat contradicts the flip ironies of Mrs Simpson, is more commonly the disease of middle-class young women and, occasionally nowadays, men.

Gluttony may be a sin but deliberate starvation is more frightening and just as deadly. While anorexia is understood as an obsessive compulsive disorder that has to be approached at a psychological level and with the utmost sensitivity, the plight of the glutton is looked upon with less sympathetic repulsion. In Britain alone eight million adults are already designated as clinically obese. The sin of undisciplined, indulgent eating has never been more widely advertised as straightforwardly deadly. Diabetes, hyper tension, heart disease, arthritis and cancer are just some of the life threatening conditions linked to being overweight. There is even a suggestion that the obese could be refused National Health Service treatment unless they enter into a written undertaking to adopt healthier eating habits and exercise. Gluttony remains a deadly sin, not that this stops more and more people from falling victim to it.

Closely associated with gluttony, as a sin against the modern cult of individualism and my-body-is-my-temple-self discipline, is sloth.
Britain is a country wedded to the idea of the work ethic. But even though this country walks the walk with a swagger, the truth is that it's not as keen as it might appear to talk the talk. Britons are more likely to work long hours, and less likely to take the holidays due to them, than the populations of any other nation in Europe. At the same time our productivity as a workforce is lower than that of any of the leading industrial nations. It seems clear that there is a correlation here. If Britons worked fewer hours they would almost certainly use those hours more efficiently. Instead British office culture dictates that being seen to be putting in the time is more important than what is being achieved in the hours that are worked.

Outside the office busy activity is hardly valued at all unless it can be developed into a career or, at least, harnessed for the benefit of charity. Full-time mothers complain of the lack of status their work, as householders and parental carers, affords them. Single mothers are reviled if they don't pay someone else to do what they wish to do - look after their child - and get on with some sort of paid activity. The benefit to the economy is clear; two wages instead of none. But the idea that looking after children is a form of idlenes - unless, of course, it's your profession - illustrates just how much our concept of useful activity is defined by its value in hard cash alone. The inefficient man in the office is considered much less slothful than the well-organised woman at home. If that seems like a sweeping and sexist generalisation, then that's because it is. Nevertheless, there's plenty of truth in there too.

If avarice is still considered to be a deadly sin then why is it that an inefficient man in an office, provided that he is on the board of a publicly quoted company, can expect to be removed via the persuasion of a multi-million-pound pay-off? And why is it that the people virtually forced off benefits and into poverty pay are, in the significant majority, women.

In a sense, the argument that avarice is a sin is long lost. The dominance of free-market capitalism as the ideology of our time confirms that avarice is now viewed as a natural human condition to be fully exploited as an economic engine, rather than a trait to be avoided. Nowadays, in every developed country, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. This is called polarity and it isn't just a glitch, it's what capitalism does. Avarice is part of the system. This sort of socialistic ranting, as embarrassing as picking your nose and eating it, in the modern mainstream of political and economic thought, has long been dubbed  the politics of envy. Which neatly brings us to another of those deadly sins.

While envy is still characterised as undesirable, the fetishisation of the wealthy, successful and beautiful is paraded before us like never before, with tableaux upon tableaux - in the form of media images - showing us the kind of lifestyles money can buy. To covet such lifestyles, as we are encouraged to do, is not to be envious but to be aspirational. Yet aspiration, sold as the motor of a healthy meritocracy, is simply envy with an inbuilt excuse. The idea is that, rather than simply feeling jealous of what others have, one instead hopes to be able, in some small way, to replicate the splendour on display.

What of the self-annointed among us - the celebrities who reveal their lovely homes or turn up at openings in their dazzling frocks
- who take it upon themselves to tantalise our aspiration? Might they themselves, so certain of their destiny as 'role models', be accused of the sin of pride? Not quite. Just as we have replaced envy with aspiration, so have we substituted arrogance for pride. Pride is all right. One has permission, in a meritocracy, to feel pride in one's achievements. One has permission too to feel national pride, or pride in any social structure we identify as bigger than ourselves; our family, our community, our employer. Arrogance, though, is a subtly different animal. Pride has become almost passive, as innocent as the feeling a mother has for her little wizened Winston of a babe. Arrogance is aggressive though, a state of mind which yells, not just that you've got something to feel good about, but also that you've compared yourself to others and found them wanting.

The arrogant person is also the angry person; the guy in first class who gets done for air rage, or whose servants or ex-partners rat on to the tabloids about their awful treatment. Anger remains an unpredictable and dangerous force, one that can now be 'managed' or pathologised more easily than it can be accepted as righteous if anything, there is now more stigma attached to showing anger than there has ever been. Anger is total, primal, loss of control and it can lead to the uttering of terrible accusations or the unleashing of physical force. The more we like to see ourselves as civilised, the more the explosion of anger is read as a battering ram that can damage the thin veneer of our sophistication. Yet still we crave the sight of anger, especially if it doesn't directly threaten us. Part of the attraction of shows such as Jerry Springer - perhaps almost all of it- is the shocking thrill of seeing people placed in public situations in which they are goaded into 'losing it' and resorting to physical abuse of others.

Anger, like so many other sins, is a passion we find exciting as long as it is a spectacle for us and we are passive consumers of it. What gets us really angry nowadays? Judging by Mr Springers formula it's sexual infidelity, the feeling that we've just been fucked over by someone else's lust. Good old lust is perhaps the most out-moded of all among the list of fatal human faws. During the second half of the 20th century we came to believe that sexual passion, of the most rarefied and perfect kind, is almost a human right. Sadly, as our expectations of sexual bliss have risen, our ability to be satisfied with our sex lives has plummeted.

Exactly fifty years ago, when the ground-breaking Kinsey report was published, the revelation that women enjoyed sex just as much as men shocked the world. Since that time, surveys have plotted an increasing lack of sexual satisfaction among women. Maybe we have come to expect too much from our own bodies and from the bodies of others. Maybe our expectation of total fulfilment through sex just sets us up for disappointment. Or maybe it is time for us to put sex and lust back in its place as an essential part of the fabric of life instead of some sort of compensation for the humdrum reality of the rest of those endless aspirations.

In a recent British court case a woman was found guilty of murder after she had gone to the workplace of her husband's lover and shot her dead at point blank range. The dead woman and her murderess both had children and the dead woman was pregnant at the time. None of the victims in this case, innocent or otherwise, deserved in any way the horror and tragedy which befell them. But what I found truly amazing was that the man involved in the case - whose lover was dead, leaving motherless children, whose wife was imprisoned leaving their own children to live with a terrible psychological legacy - claimed that he felt no guilt; not even over the fact that he'd left his shotgun and ammunition at the same time as he'd left his wife and family. How strange it must be to find your actions at the foundation of such a nightmare and be able to entirely shrug off any discomfort about the fact that you did so
much to set this awesome train of events in motion. There are plenty of people who'd agree with him too. Lust certainly isn't seen as sinful any more and nor should it be. But thinking with your genitals is, as much as ever, to be avoided.