is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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Philosophy Break: Public/Private Forgiveness.

Philosophy Break: Public/Private Forgiveness.

You know, Salt Lake City makes me think about forgiveness, but not because I think Mormonism is a particularly forgiving religion (I know next to nothing about what it means to be Mormon!). No, I think this because the only other time I’ve ever been to Salt Lake City was to give a paper at an academic conference on Forgiveness. My paper was on the difference between personal and political forgiveness, and how the word “forgiveness” is sometimes asked to carry much too heavy a load.

I’m still thinking about it today because it strikes me that this has to do with the public/private thing. Forgiveness is related to letting the past be past so that the future can be different from it. Sometimes if I forgive someone, it is for his or her sake, because I care about him or her. But often I forgive someone because holding on to some kinds of anger or resentment is more of a punishment for me than it would be for the person against whom the resentment is harbored. So, in that context, forgiving sets me free from what would have been an utterly predictable revenge cycle, where my resentment about what can’t be changed (the past) sets me in a mindframe or situation where what can’t be changed (the past) infects what can be changed (the future) with its resentful contagion. That is a role that personal or private forgiveness can play in a life: let me get on with what I can change, letting go of what I can’t.

Now, some people would say that this “letting go” is too close to forgetting. The phrase “forgive and forget” speaks to that concern. And it would be wrong, people so concerned might say, to forget about a wrong done to oneself. About that I have two things to say. 1) Sometimes it is entirely right to forget about a wrong done to oneself. As Nietzsche might point out, someone strong enough to be left unbothered by someone else’s attack or slight has already won in a battle much larger than the one that ends with a slight or injury. But there is also this: 2) Of course no one ever really forgets a truly grave harm done to oneself. There are some things that cannot and should not be forgotten. And so to equate forgiving with forgetting seems to me to be simple-minded. If I can only forgive what I can afford to forget, then I will have to spend the rest of my life being defined or determined by (even if I can't escape being haunted by) something over which I, by definition, have no control (the past).

Forgiving is not the same as forgetting!

I’ve written many many words about this, some of which some of you may have read. I’m working my way up to a book about how certain habits of thought are much graver enemies than most conventional enemies could ever be.

But what about political forgiveness? And what does it all have to do with the public/private thing? There is such a thing as political forgiveness, as when the leader of a country forgives an enemy for the sake of peace (the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission emphasized this form of forgiveness), or when a leader apologizes for an injustice imposed (as Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, retroactively on behalf of the U.S., for having interned Japanese Americans during WWII).

What must be apparent right away is that what sometimes gets called political forgiveness is not forgiveness at all, but rather is politics. Or, it is a kind of forgiveness, but of such a different order from what forgiveness is on the personal level that it is at best un-useful and in the worst-case scenario damaging to possibilities of human communication to have them both named the same thing.

Forgiveness is certainly one way to think about how a society like South Africa’s could possibly ever be peaceful after decades of institutionalized injustice and oppression. How can people who have hated each other for as long as they can remember live together? On what bond of trust could such a society be based? The South African TRC tried to use forgiveness—and amnesty for perpetrators who could demonstrate that their acts were politically motivated—as a basis on which to put all South Africans on an equal footing with each other. The past had to be dealt with, but it also had to be left in the past in some way, though it couldn’t just be forgotten or swept under the rug, if the future was ever to be something better.

So in that way political forgiveness can resemble personal forgiveness—it frees the future from the past without forgetting the past altogether. But the thing that is meaningful about forgiveness on a personal level is that it is a power no one can ever take from the individual. I will forgive you when and if I choose to do so. So it doesn’t matter what Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Tutu say, it is up to an individual to, for instance, forgive the men who tortured and killed her son for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The danger of political forgiveness, then, is that it ignores and possibly subverts what is meaningful about personal forgiveness: there are some powers that no person and no institution can take away from the human individual. Personal forgiveness is one of these. If The South African TRC pardons someone, is that forgiveness? And what if relatives of the pardoned person’s victim(s) have not forgiven? Has that power been taken from them? And will the act of official forgiveness lead to a forgetting of the crime that now haunts the lives of individuals who have lost loved ones? These are hard questions!

I don’t have the heart or stomach right now to go into any detail about the internment of Japanese Americans, the failure of the Supreme Court to declare the internment unlawful, and the amount of time it took for an official apology (and reparations) to be issued. It leads in a downward spiral with questions about Native Americans and cultural destruction and slavery and Jim Crow laws and what justice has meant historically in the U.S. and elsewhere and, oh, NOT RIGHT NOW.

But, in closing, I pose this overly complicated question: should the word that reminds the human individual of one of the powers that is hers and hers only, and which cannot be taken away, be the same word that points us toward impossible political questions that somehow have to be posed and dealt with even though they are impossible, and which, because they are impossible, always demand compromise, most often from those already victimized? In other words, should a word denoting the power of the individual also be a word that smacks of the opposite of that? I don’t think so.

There's more on this but I haven't worked it through yet.

In other news, on the keyboard of my ibook, the letters S, E and L have turned into plain white keys. N will join them soon.

Stats:

Still in Yellowstone!

10:25 p.m. - August 28, 2004

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