Confession is good for the soul. You could even say it’s become our national pastime.
Memoirs crowd the best seller list, all manner of revelation is told to Jenny Jones on national TV, or to Dr. Laura Schlesinger on national radio. We confess to our priests, our psychiatrists, our chat rooms, our lovers, our spouses. We watched President Clinton confess to what, by the end, everyone already knew.
Oscar Wilde claimed man’s brightest moment is “when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.” Yet at the same time we want confessions, we’re also suspicious of them. We know people confess falsely when they’re coerced or frightened, so laws exist to protect us — Miranda, our right to a lawyer, the Fifth Amendment. But the great confessional novels, The Brothers Karamazov, Lolita, or Albert Camus’s The Fall, seem to say we want to tell all – both the sins we committed and the sins we didn’t.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Peter Brooks, author of Troubling Confessions.