When things go wrong, there are two contemporary reactions: you can "take responsibility", which means you shrug off the failure onto some other loser, or you can go into rehab, which might, just sometimes, mean that you take responsibility for your actions. Anthony Weiner has announced that he is taking time off for rehab after his squirm-inducing texts with strangers were revealed, along with the photographs of his underpants he used to illustrate what he was talking about.
While the natural reaction is entirely cynical, I think that there is something noble about what he is doing now. He may be trying only to rehabilitate his career rather than his personality, his marriage and so forth, but there is an instructive comparison with Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Strauss-Kahn is not, of course, guilty of anything unless a court finds him so. But at the very least, he seems to have done or said something that caused a chambermaid to misunderstand his intentions, and might apologise for this failure in communications. So far, everything he has done or said suggests that he supposes there is nothing whatever to apologise for.
That may have been Weiner's original position: it is normally the view of any powerful person caught out. But now he has been forced to recognise that he did something wrong, and not just stupid, rehab rather than "responsibility" suggests the right kind of answer.
His spokeswoman said that he had gone "to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person". This at least admits that he has been a bad husband and a morally, perhaps spiritually, unhealthy person. It may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue. But that's surely how vice ought to relate to virtue, rather than just raising two fingers at it.
In fact, the idea that there is professional treatment available for people who want to become morally better and spiritually healthier seems to me one of the great divides between the contemporary US and Europe. Such people still exist here: they are usually called priests. They don't have to be. I have known some admirable secular psychiatrists or counsellors who believed that human life was an essentially moral activity.
For the most part, the assumption in questions of personal morality in Europe is that the only good that matters is doing good by yourself: others will in some mysterious way benefit from this. The suggestion in Weiner's statement seems to me that we can only approach our own health by treating others well. And that's not a view that's taken terribly seriously in public life here, especially when it applies to public figures.
Weiner's humiliation is a sign that even rich and famous men are ultimately subject to the same moral standards as the rest of us. Of course, that's only occasionally and intermittently true. But it is better that it should be held up as an ideal than no one take it seriously at all.
Perhaps the bad name of rehab derives, in any case, not from the politicians or even sex addicts – a peculiarly loathsome and humiliating thing to confess to – but from rock stars. In their case it is so often just something forced on them not by public opinion – their public rather likes them interestingly half-dead – but by their record companies. And it is reasonably certain that they will fall into another addiction six months later. Rehab is hard. Repentance isn't a moment, but a life-long process. And this, I think, is the most truthful part of the 12-step programme. It says that being a decent human being requires a life-long continuous effort. That's a good lesson for any politician to learn and to teach.