Forgiveness

Eve Garrard, David McNaughton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317488293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Forgiveness usually gets a very good press in our culture: we are deluged with self-help books and television shows all delivering the same message, that forgiveness is good for everyone, and is always the right thing to do. But those who have suffered seriously at the hands of others often and rightly feel that this boosterism about forgiveness is glib and facile. Perhaps forgiveness is not always desirable, especially where the wrongdoing is terrible or the wrongdoer unrepentant. In this book, Garrard and McNaughton suggest that the whole debate suffers from a crippling lack of clarity about what forgiveness really amounts to. They argue that it is more difficult, complex and troubling than many of its advocates suppose. Nevertheless, they conclude, a proper understanding of forgiveness allows us to avoid cheap and shallow forms of it, and enables us to see why it is right and admirable to forgive even unrepentant wrongdoers.

1. The debate about forgiveness

A man lies in the rubble of a building that has been blown apart by a bomb. He will survive, but his daughter crushed there beside him will not. He holds her hand as she lies dying. Later, when he has been rescued, he says that he forgives the terrorists who have killed his daughter; he wishes them no ill.

Many people would regard the unconditional forgiveness that is offered in this case as absolutely admirable, even saintly, in its ability to rise above the hatred and enmity that would be a natural response to so terrible an event. (In fact, many people did so regard it, since this is the case of Gordon Wilson, who lost his daughter in the Enniskillen bombing in Northern Ireland). But some would not and did not find it admirable, thinking that forgiveness isn’t the right response, the appropriate response, to those who deliberately choose to murder innocent and helpless victims. Whether forgiveness is always appropriate and admirable is something that people disagree about, sometimes quite strongly, and often they find it hard to understand the position of those who don’t share their views on this troubling topic. On the one hand, some say, how can we fail to admire a person who rises above rancour and hatred and vengefulness, and offers goodwill to those who have injured him so badly? On the other hand, comes the rejoinder, how can we fail to be angry and outraged at the offender’s terrible crimes, and why should we pretend that they don’t matter and that a just punishment for them isn’t important?

This is an issue that matters in everybody’s life. Its importance ranges from the details of an individual’s life to geopolitical forces that impinge on whole nations and may make the difference between war and peace. We all have occasion to consider forgiving others, or to hope to be forgiven by them: certainly in our private affairs, often at the public level too. The debate about forgiveness touches on large questions about how we should stand towards all our fellow humans, and the view we take of it can colour our whole lives, for good or ill. People feel strongly about it, and rightly so; it does, after all, raise the question of how we should respond to human wrongdoing, which itself ranges from minor unkindness to horrific and sickening atrocities committed against thousands or even millions of human beings. But our strong feelings, although entirely appropriate, aren’t enough to settle the question about whether or when we should forgive wrongdoers. They aren’t enough to guide us on this issue, partly because they don’t speak with a single voice. People’s feelings about forgiveness differ from one culture to another; even within a single culture they differ from one individual to another; and sometimes even within the one individual feelings about forgiveness may fluctuate wildly from one occasion to another. Strength of feeling won’t settle the question of whether we should forgive wrongdoers and, if so, in what circumstances. Only a consideration of the arguments, both for and against forgiveness, will help us come to some more stable and well-supported position on this matter.

This book aims to provide those arguments, and to examine their strengths and weaknesses. In this chapter we’re going to give a broad outline of the nature of the debate about forgiveness, and indicate some of the main areas where people disagree. In Chapter 2 we’ll focus on the case against forgiveness: on arguments that claim forgiveness is not always desirable, and indeed is sometimes morally wrong. Chapter 3 will examine a third possibility, neither hatred nor forgiveness, and consider whether this provides a satisfactory response to human wrongdoing. In Chapter 4, we’ll look at some of the empirical research done by psychologists working in this area, and consider what we can learn from them. In Chapter 5, we’ll examine in some detail the nature of forgiveness, and see whether this more complex understanding can help to meet the criticisms that have been levelled at it. And finally, in Chapter 6 we’ll look at the positive arguments in favour of forgiveness, and try to assess their strength and persuasiveness.

Forgiveness and therapy

Forgiveness – the giving and withholding of it – is something we’re all involved in, one way or another. All of us have had the experience of being wronged by others, an experience that very naturally produces resentment and ill will towards the offender. And sooner or later we have to decide whether to maintain that resentment and ill will, or whether to abandon it and replace it with something different: perhaps indifference and forgetting, or perhaps something closer to goodwill and reconciliation – closer, in fact, to forgiveness. It’s also true that all of us have had the experience of wronging others (at least, if there is anyone who hasn’t had that experience, they don’t need to be reading this book, and can close it at once). A very normal feature of knowing that you’ve done something really wrong is wishing that you could go back and change things, and failing that (since changing the past is impossible) wishing that you could somehow change the meaning of your action, alter the significance of what you’ve done. Being forgiven by the person whom you’ve wronged does somehow or other seem to achieve that, at least to some extent, so it’s not surprising that people who acknowledge that they really have done serious wrong very often seek forgiveness from their victims.

That is what happened to Eric Lomax: he was a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War, working on the infamous Burma railway; and during his imprisonment he, along with many others, was hideously and disgustingly and mercilessly tortured. After the war was over, he experienced the terrible psychological disturbances common among those who have been tortured. (As Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz, said, a person who has been tortured remains tortured forever.) For decades afterwards, Lomax continued to suffer and to hate those who had deliberately and ingeniously inflicted so much pain on him and his comrades. He sought out no further contact with them, but was glad to learn that two had been executed as war criminals, and that his own testimony had contributed to their fate. However, after many years he heard news of one of his erstwhile tormentors who had survived the war, and who had spent the years thereafter in attempting to atone for his horrific activities. Now that he could identify this man, Lomax at first hoped to harm him, perhaps to kill him, to avenge some small part of the nightmare into which he had been plunged. But after contact was established, he found that in the light of his torturer’s remorse, “anger drained away; in its place came a welling of compassion for both Nagase and me, coupled with a deep sense of sadness and regret. … Forgiveness became more than an abstract idea: it was now a real possibility.”

Eric Lomax had every reason to hate and despise his terrible tormentor; in the end, however, he found forgiveness not only possible but actually welcome. But even in the light of that story of redemptive forgiveness, we might well wonder what exactly is so good about forgiving a fanatical torturer. Why should we forgive people who have done terrible things? Isn’t it preferable to hold on to our sense of how wrong they were, and continue to hate them for their evil acts, instead of pretending that somehow they didn’t happen or don’t really matter? When someone has enacted nightmarish atrocities, should their later apologies somehow wipe out the horror of what they did? Why should we think that it is in the end preferable, as Lomax found, to relinquish our hatred and vengefulness and turn towards reconciliation?

Those who favour forgiveness often claim that its value resides in the way in which it frees and strengthens both the forgiver and the forgiven one: it allows us to escape the shackles of the wrongful past and to move on to a future that isn’t dominated by bitterness and resentment. Forgiveness, they think, is a light shining in a dark world: it’s a gesture not only of kindness but also of generosity, and the free gift that it offers somehow benefits the forgiver as well as the wrongdoer – here, if anywhere, it is at least as good to give as to receive.

In support of this view, popular culture in the West has for quite some time been saturated with self-help books and television shows about forgiveness and reconciliation. And nearly all of them convey the same message: forgiveness is good for everyone. It’s good for you and it’s good for others; you need to let go of the anger and move on. A cursory glance at Google will bring up thousands of links to websites offering us various approaches to forgiveness: “Forgive and Forget With Our Make Your Peace Toolkit”; “Self-Help Techniques (For I Give)”; “Forgiveness – Free Self-Help Software for Inner Peace”; “Self Help Portal 4 U: Forgiveness and Empowerment”; and (a special favourite) “Institute for Radical Forgiveness Slashes Prices – Affordable Self-Help During Difficult Times”.

The desire to make a buck out of commending forgiveness to others may not be very admirable, but the prevalence of these offers suggests that there’s a ready market for them, that a great many people do think that there’s something very desirable about forgiveness. The central idea here seems to be that forgiveness is therapeutic, that people who have been wronged will feel better about themselves and about their lives if they forgive those who have wronged them, that the act of forgiveness will make them feel, and be, more powerful. There is certainly something to be said for this therapeutic view of forgiveness: the experience of forgiving a long-hated enemy can be absolutely cathartic, and when the burden of resentment slips off your shoulders it can feel thoroughly liberating.

But in truth much of this self-help advocacy is very shallow: it fails to address the realities of terrible wrongdoing and what it does, and means, to its victims. Think of a woman, a mother of young children, whose husband has an affair with her best friend. Her overwhelming sense of betrayal by the two people whom she had most reason to trust may be focused not exclusively on herself at all, but also and perhaps primarily on her children, and how they have been betrayed and damaged by those who should have cared for and protected them. To forgive her husband and her friend may seem like a further betrayal of those children, a further neglect and diminishing and glossing over of the harm done to them.

On a larger scale, consider the experience of the victims of the European wars in the middle of the twentieth century, and of too many elsewhere in the world today: attacked, tortured, their children raped and murdered, their whole way of life irrevocably destroyed. To tell them to forgive and to achieve closure is not just to tell them to adopt an attitude of goodwill towards those very murderers and torturers; it seems to amount to telling them to move on from the ruined and lost lives of their children, and to leave such things behind them. It’s not surprising that many such victims feel that forgiveness is not only emotionally beyond them, but would also amount to a failure to take their losses and, even more importantly, those who were lost with sufficient seriousness. Forgiveness in these circumstances can come to seem a way of dismissing the suffering of the victims, of failing to keep faith with them, especially with those who are dead and can no longer raise their voices against their tormentors.

So we need to see if there are other reasons for forgiving wrongdoers, apart from the therapeutic effects that are so often touted in its favour. And a good way to start the search for these reasons is to look at the broad historical context in which our ideas of forgiveness have developed.

The historical context

It’s not really surprising that forgiveness gets such a good press, at least in Western culture, shaped as it has been by the tremendous influence of Christianity and its focus upon wrongdoers and their need for forgiveness. In Christianity the sinner is a central figure, and his need for redemption from his sins is what drives the great core narrative of the incarnation of Christ and his sacrifice on the cross. The central texts of Christianity, the Gospels, are the bringing of good news to humanity, and the good news is that through Christ’s actions our sins are forgiven us. This picture of the world and its meaning is one that assumes we all realize how sinful we are, how much we fail to live up to our moral standards, how readily we harm and wrong others, and how much in need of rescue we are from this terrible condition of irremediable wrongdoing. According to Christianity such rescue is possible: forgiveness is the means of redemption from our sins. Since we are all sinners we are all in need of forgiveness; and crucially (according to Christianity) if we hope for forgiveness from God then first we must forgive others who have offended against us.

This picture of the human condition, with the wrongdoer at centre stage and forgiveness as the source of salvation for all of us, has in the past been enormously influential, at least at the level of rhetoric; what people, including Christians, say about the universal need for and desirability of forgiveness has often been very different from what they actually do about and towards those who they think have wronged them. Christian practice has often failed to live up to this elevated account of how we should treat our fellow sinners. But forgiveness as an ideal has been, and for many people remains, an intensely attractive moral commitment, and it’s easy to see why: if we feel ourselves burdened with the guilt of our wrongdoings, then the idea of forgiveness, both human and even more divine, offers relief from that weight of guilt, and perhaps even the possibility of escape from our enduring propensity to harm and wrong others. On this picture, when we forgive our enemies we imitate, insofar as we are able, the goodness and generosity and loving-kindness of God; we reach out beyond our desperately flawed condition to some better way of being.

Appeal to the Christian religious tradition may not, however, cut very much ice with those who are adherents of different religions, and may seem totally irrelevant to people who have no religious commitments at all. Nonetheless many people, of all religions and none, agree that human beings are morally imperfect in some very important ways. This agreement isn’t really surprising: the most cursory glance at human history, religious and irreligious alike, is enough to reveal the depths of moral degradation that human beings have been ready to plumb again and again throughout the centuries. The bloody and murderous record of the twentieth century alone is enough to show the persistent streak of evil running through human history. The mass murders, tortures and genocides of that terrible century (not to mention those already being clocked up in its successor), and the extent to which ordinary people were and are drawn into these pitiless activities, leaves it almost impossible for us to think of human nature as essentially innocent and good. Although there are, of course, many aspects of human nature and history that are benign and indeed admirable, it’s no longer plausible (if it ever was) to suppose that we are at heart entirely benevolent and sociable creatures; there’s a dark surd deep in our psychology that repeatedly leads almost all of us to do things that we know are wrong, and which in some cases amount to hideous atrocities.

In this view of human nature there’s the material for a secular analogue of the religious doctrine of original sin. We don’t have to believe in some primal act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden, tainting all future generations, in order to think that the human condition is one in which very few of us go through life without doing wrong, without sometimes harming others in ways that simply can’t be justified. The reasons for this may be buried deep in our evolutionary past, or alternatively they may be an inevitable outcome of our distinctively human ability to choose for ourselves between good and evil. But whatever explanation we want to give of human wrongdoing, its persistence means that forgiveness is going to be a significant issue for a secular outlook on the world, just as it is for a religious outlook. And anyone who has felt the weight of guilt, who has taken her own wrongdoing seriously and has accepted her own responsibility for it, will already know that the possibility of forgiveness, of making a new start, isn’t something to be lightly dismissed.

Before we go any further, there’s one view that we need to deal with, since if it’s correct, it may seem to make forgiveness unnecessary. This is the view that guilt is a bad thing, that it’s all just wasted energy, that it’s a pathological hangover from a puritanical past and that we’d all be much better off without it. And if guilt is unnecessary and undesirable, then it might be thought that forgiveness is likewise redundant.

Right enough, some guilt is pathological: some people are consumed with guilt for offences that are far too minor (if indeed they exist at all) to warrant such misery and angst. People would certainly be much better off without that kind of misplaced guilt. But the fact that guilt is sometimes misplaced doesn’t show that it’s always misplaced. The man who sexually abuses a child in his care, and thereby makes a horror of her childhood and perhaps damages all her future chances of happiness, may eventually come to see the nature of the wrong he has done to her. Are his feelings of guilt then misplaced? Would it be better if he regarded his behaviour as just part of the rich tapestry of human experience, and felt no regret or remorse about his actions? Would it be better if the woman who was a concentration camp guard, and who was instrumental in the torture and murder of other innocent women, looked on her past actions with an equable eye as being all right at the time? People who are serious about morality – that is, about the needs and rights of others – will inevitably and correctly feel guilty if they violate those rights and needs. It’s true that there are plenty of people, particularly in adolescence, who will say that they don’t care about morality, but they usually turn out to have remarkably definite views about oppression or injustice (which are essentially moral categories), especially when it’s committed against them or against groups about whom they feel strongly. People who really don’t take any aspect of morality seriously, who genuinely don’t care how much they hurt or exploit others, aren’t so much free spirits as psychopaths who are cut off from most of the relationships that illuminate and make valuable a human life,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Art of Living Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The debate about forgiveness
• 2. The case against forgiveness
• 3. A third way?
• 4. The case for forgiveness I: what the psychologists say
• 5. The case for forgiveness II: meeting the objections
• 6. The case for forgiveness III: the positive arguments
• Further reading
• Index