So wrote the Psalmist. And what an impact on our culture that has had!
At its worst "wicked from birth" has fostered a miserable worm mentality. "I'm a mess, I'm bad, I keep screwing up ... but there's nothing I can do about it. Fate has made me wicked."
Socially, "wicked from birth" helped generate the most egregious forms of punishment, laced with vengeance and retribution. On recent talk radio—LBC, Leading Britain's Conversation, for the interested—an expert on sexual predation asserted that sex offenders will always return to their ways. Nothing will ever change the perpetrator, so the sexual predator must be removed from society. They are "wicked from birth," with no hope of reform. Lock them up and throw away the key!
In terms of child care, "wicked from birth" required that the devil be beaten out of children, and their sinful spirit broken—the most effective means being painful physical punishment. "Spare the rod and spoil the child," as the adage has it. Nineteen states in the USA still insist that corporal punishment with a paddle is the most effective way to control wicked children in public schools.
I wonder, too, if our whole litigious society—requiring strictly enforceable rules and consequent punishments—is rooted in the view of human nature as sinful and wicked. If you can't lock the wicked up, at least you can sue the pants off them.
But let's give the Psalmist some poetic license. Wicked from birth? Conceived a sinner? Perhaps he had had a rough day, left himself and others down, and was feeling generally miserable. Perhaps we ought to read him as meaning that every one of us has moral imperfections. We do hurt each other, and that too often. We do let ourselves down and we fail to live up to our higher expectations. If that is what "wicked from birth" means, then fair enough.
And doubtless, besides its negative, sometimes incapacitating reading, "wicked from birth" has led many to positive self-examination leading to self-improvement. Scottish philosopher W. David Ross spoke of prima facie moral obligations—obligations that one must abide by, unless other very good reasons can be provided for not doing so. These obligations are things like, "don't do harm." The obligations also have a more or less universal application. You find them in most cultures in most of human history. He listed six or seven, and among them was self-improvement. We are not as yet what we might become, and so through self-reflection we discover our imperfections and through practice we work to improve.
The polar opposites of "sinful and always will be," and "you are your perfect you" both tend toward inaction and resignation to fate. If we take a soft view of "wicked from birth," as a spur to self-improvement, then all to the good.
Be you better self today,
+Ab.Andy