Viewpoint Forgiveness makes future possible
By WILLIAM BOLE
When word came of jets crashing into
the twin towers, I was at my desk at home drafting a report about forgiveness
and international conflict resolution, a notion that would seem precarious even
in less dangerous times. Oblivious to the scale of the catastrophe and the
cascading irony of my theme, I kept my head down and dug into case studies of
political forgiveness around the world. That I might be onto an idea whose time
had passed almost as soon as it arrived did not set in until I heard the next
day from two friends and a cousin who had seen the horror in Lower Manhattan.
They were not forgiving.
Is it purely imaginary to think of an international strategy that
deploys forgiveness in the post-World Trade Center era? Forgiveness is by no
means a traditional value in world affairs. The concept is foreign to most
secular political philosophies and peripheral at best to Christian theories of
the common good and a just war. Among 20th-century philosophers, the
German-Jewish refugee Hanna Arendt stood out. Writing after the Holocaust, she
saw forgiveness as one of two human capacities that make it possible to alter
the political future. The other is the ability to enter into covenants.
It is not that forgiveness has been a no-show in the wide world.
It surfaced after the grisly nightmare of apartheid in South Africa, when
then-president Nelson Mandela awakened many to a reality expressed later in the
title of Archbishop Desmond Tutus 1999 book, No Future Without
Forgiveness. In Northern Ireland, many Catholics and Protestants have been
able to imagine a different future through public acts of mutual repentance and
forgiveness. In Cambodia, Buddhist primate Moha Ghosananda has struggled to
release people from a paralyzing past by envisioning a future of forgiveness.
He calls for selectively forgiving Khmer Rouge leaders who have repented and
renounced violence after perpetrating that nations unspeakable genocide.
Many Cambodians need more time. As these illustrate, forgiveness is not
necessarily a discrete transaction between two individuals. It is also a social
process that blends elements such as forbearance from revenge and the will to
eventually reconcile, according to a definition by the contemporary social
ethicist Donald W. Shriver Jr.
Nevertheless, there is scant place for such sentiment in the
reigning doctrines of statecraft. So-called realists normally scoff
at the idea of fractious peoples reaching beyond their group interests and
horizons, which is the transcendent quality of social forgiveness. Realism
seeks to rationally negotiate these interests or strike directly with
political-economic pressure and armed force.
The problem with that strategy today is that realism is
unrealistic. Given the changing nature of conflict in the post-Cold War period,
the most intractable conflicts today are rooted not in political ideologies and
palpable interests, but in ethnicity, religion and other intangibles of
communal identity. These clashes are highly resistant to the standard remedies
of realism. Often it is hard to see such strife ending without the introduction
of a radical new factor, such as forgiveness.
Some former disciples of realism, such as Douglas Johnston, who
was the youngest-ever commander of a nuclear submarine, have gone in search of
this missing dimension of statecraft. Now a practitioner of faith-based
conflict resolution, he sees the building of trust and relationships across
communal fault lines as an inescapable route to security in the long run. It is
another kind of realism.
Even Henry Kissinger, the avatar of realpolitik, has given
a faint nod in that direction. Earlier this year he headed a UNESCO panel that
awarded an annual peace prize to the Community of St. Egidio, a Rome-based
Catholic lay organization that serves the poor and pursues alternative
diplomacy in the spirit of forgiveness. Most remarkable, the community mediated
an end to the Mozambique civil war in 1992.
For us in the United States, forgiving those responsible for the
slaughter of Sept. 11 is nearly unthinkable. But what of the wider populations
from which these terrorists came with their desperate hatred of the United
States? Could we afford not to embark on a journey of forgiveness and
reconciliation with these communities?
To start with, we may have to lay aside some conventional wisdom.
Forgiveness in politics is never about forgetting, but about remembering in a
certain way, as the South Africans chose to do in establishing a truth
commission after apartheid. Forgiveness is not a denial of human
responsibility: Rather it rests on the moral judgment that an act was wrong.
Forgiveness is compatible with justice, never with vengeance.
Some theorists and practitioners have reintroduced forgiveness in
this textured, political sense. In his unequaled work, An Ethic for
Enemies, Shriver defines forgiveness as an act that joins moral
truth, forbearance, empathy and commitment to repair a fractured human
relation. These elements represent a turn toward the political
future.
Perhaps in our period of grief we have seen subtle openings to
forgiveness. Some Islamic leaders in the United States have acknowledged they
need to ask how some Muslims are getting the message that taking thousands of
innocent lives is not only justifiable but the path to Paradise. President Bush
asked early on why people anywhere would want to see such a thing happen to the
United States.
Questions like that could give a closer view of why untold
millions resent Americas overpowering world presence. This might not seem
the moment for introspection, but somehow we need to reflect even as we resist.
A forgiveness strategy is not incompatible with bringing terrorists and their
sponsors to justice or perhaps even smoking them out of their havens. But it
defies the illusion that we could be delivered from this crisis by soldiers and
spies above all. After some personal reflection, I am back writing that report
about forgiveness and conflict resolution, convinced once more that there
really is no future without forgiveness.
William Bole is a journalist in Lowell, Mass., and an associate
fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in
Washington. The center sponsors the project Forgiveness in Conflict
Resolution: Reality and Utility.
National Catholic Reporter, October 12,
2001
|