Forgiveness

Probably my favourite description of forgiveness is attributed to the American author Mark Twain, who supposedly said, ‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.’ I like this because it shows forgiveness to be messy, that it grows out of damage, but that it is also potentially a healing balm. Some advocates of forgiveness don’t see this complexity, promoting instead forgiveness as a tidy, almost foolproof remedy with which to heal both individual and societal wounds. This is the kind of positioning that can understandably give people the wrong impression.

The pull to forgive is flexible and changeable; not a one-size-fits-all, nor a single magnanimous gesture in response to an isolated offence, but rather part of a continuum of human engagement in healing our own brokenness. Forgiving is something that one day may come easily and the next day evade you altogether. It is fluid and forever changing, just like the definitions endeavouring to describe it. From all the stories that I’ve collected, forgiveness can be distilled into an energy that can both transform and disturb, soothe and upset. It has the power to alleviate pain, but it can provoke it too. It can bring meaning to sorrow, but also it can confuse. It’s a place of contradiction as well as clarity.

Anger and justification come from believing we are right, staking our positions and creating competing narratives. Trust is built when we accept that we don’t know everything and where our motivation is no longer to ‘win’ at all costs. I see a profound connection between forgiveness and ‘not knowing’, in the sense of embracing ambiguity and uncertainty.

We live in contradictory and conflicting times. Culture wars have spawned tribalism, hardening positions into ideology overreach, giving free rein to intolerance and leaving little room for apology and redemption. For some, cancel culture (although the terms ‘consequence’ or ‘call-out culture’ might be preferred) is an exhilarating new form of mass democracy in which misdemeanours can be quickly and effectively held to account and those responsible punished by being stripped of status. For others, by refusing to give a platform to views deemed dangerous distasteful, cancel culture is a threat to free speech and therefore puts at risk the very fabric of our democracy. Some debates have become so pernicious that people do not dare speak out for fear of being ridiculed or attacked. In a world so full of outrage, faux hashtags and toxic truth, it is increasingly hard to find a middle path for those yearning for nuance and proportionality. Culture writer and novelist Kat Rosenfield speculated on a BBC documentary hosted by David Baddiel that cancel culture also cancels out conversation by allowing us ‘to indulge the desire to savage someone but never with the possibility of forgiveness because we have no stake in this, it’s nothing to us, it’s just like a spectator sport.’¹⁷

Perhaps because, as the British prison psychiatrist Dr Bob Johnson said, ‘The antidote to trauma is trust.’ It’s worth remembering that one of the more arresting ideas to emerge from evolutionary psychology is that forgiveness – just like vengeance – has evolved as a tactic to decrease the risk of future harm in the face of past injury.¹¹ Our justice system is a punitive one rooted in blame and retribution. It is also extremely expensive and fails in one of its key objectives – to reduce crime. It may be a radical hypothesis, but imagine a more humane society, where the state’s forgiveness – if it were to work properly – might change an offender’s motivation as well as their attitude towards their victim, which in turn would reduce crime, minimise costs, and most importantly break the never-ceasing cycle of vengeance.