Forgiveness

I am forced to hold my grudge & acknowledge its absurdity at the same time.

The second worst grudge is the grudge where the other person doesn’t remember the harm they did to you. Or at least they’d pretend not to remember. The only evidence I have that they knew what they did is a later gesture at a matching grudge. (I suppose we were bordering on a feud.) They intuited my grudge then matched it with a faux grudge of their own. Had I been imagining the whole thing, they’d never have signaled an intent at a return grudge (which they later undermined by a conciliatory email thereby confirming my initial assessment that the event causing the grudge was not benign).

It makes sense to me that–after the humiliation of the initial grudge-producing incident–one forever after must wonder if the object of the grudge has plausible deniability about the incident leading to the grudge. That would make acknowledgement of the grudge itself humiliating, i.e., a self-reinforcing grudge.

The worst grudge of all is the grudge against the person who is possibly non-malevolent, i.e., a self-undermining grudge.

The easiest grudge to justify is the grudge you hold so they can’t pull that shit on you again. According to the NYT, mine is a 10 carat grudge. This may be why I hold onto at least one grudge–because the object isn’t an wholly terrible person. Thus, I need the grudge so I remember to avoid this stupid situation in the future given that non-malevolence gets one’s guard down.

My grudge does the work for me. There’s no need to nurse it. It’s like those organisms at the hydrothermal vents. It feeds on the environment around itself.

Grudges uphold moral standards, and this indicates that the happy grudge-free people are free-riders on the misery of those maintaining the line by our refusal to forgive.

They can’t handle the hard stuff. Pop psychology sucks.

Another thing I think the forgiveness shills miss is that little to none of this happens cognitively. It’s an emotional process happening in your body and the conscious mind doesn’t come into it. Except to post-hoc rationalize, which may be about all it ever does.

I’ve got someone I cannot blame, because the behavior was a symptom of an illness, but I haven’t forgiven. I was gonna say “because . . .” but there’s nothing to fill in after “because.” My body informs me, via PTSD symptoms, that it has not forgiven the person. If I do well enough dealing with my own symptoms, I’ll see whether or not I have forgiven the person who harmed me. I’ll know by monitoring stuff like heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, dissociation.

It seems to me you can hold a grudge without active anger, as in “that person injured me and demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness and dependability, I’ll have nothing to do with them from now on,” or “that person has demonstrated an insidious capacity to manipulate and mislead: rather than be subject to more of this I’ll have nothing to do with them.” Is this holding a grudge? I suppose it is, but it’s not an actively angry grudge, more of a “don’t touch a hot stove” thing.

Forgivers are stealing the jouissance of grudgeholders.

Forgiveness fetishism*, as I have observed it, seems to be a very western/white person thing.

No, but it depends on who you are suggesting “fetishizes” forgiveness, why, and in what direction. Recipients of regular oppression aimed at them systematically, as a member of a group or cohort, seem to me to be saintly, unassuming, and unselfish in their performance of patience and understanding, resigned to never gaining full and unequivocal access to true justice but nonetheless pursuing it, often forced to give public thanks for scraps and crumbs instead of a seat at the table of the Just World. White people do seem to be overrepresented in the Anything Less Than My Total Rehabilitation in the Eyes of Everyone Or I Have Been Virtually Lynched set, though.

Notice how in discussions of the death penalty, a lot of supposed atheists seem to wax christian when they say things like “vengeance is not justice”. This could only make sense in a christian context.

No? That just sounds like you lack contact with a world outside a certain locale of Christendom and its adjacent secular culture.

”in principle if you are nursing a rather trivial grudge which is bothering you, it would be better to let it go”.

Just did – as who can’t watch a sister cry – even if she is Theresa May… ?
-(and as we will be in London next week – visiting Queen Anne – we need a thread about forgiving Mrs. May)

Forgiveness*, I suppose, is for people who can’t handle their anger and resentment and are likely to go half cocked on some violent rampage at the drop of a hat. Otherwise, forgiving a wrong-doer fails to respect the victims of the wrong-doer.

*Specifically forgiveness of those who have not made amends

Forgiveness for me consists of understanding how another person’s background and circumstances caused them to behave in the disrespectful, inconsiderate, and unjust way that offended me. Especially if I can look back over my imperfect life and remember acting similarly at some time. This works for a lot of people, but not for everyone. I need some justification for the forgiveness.

Solzhenitsyn has had a lot to say about this. There is a quote from “The First Circle” which I can’t quite remember, something like, “The wolfhound is forgivable, the cannibal is not.” More topically, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

To echo Murali and KC a bit, there are some people who nurse bitter grudges over injuries that are completely imaginary. Paranoia and delusional thinking are things that happen. One function of forgiveness is to prevent those traits from growing.

Looking clearly at the facts seems important — reality testing in case the grudge is all or mostly perceived. And if the injury is real, forgiveness can be a tool for looking at it clearly. But it ain’t an obligation of the injured party.

I fundamentally disagree with this:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I am willing to destroy, or defer acting on, many pieces of my own heart; I do it daily. Those who do not, regularly and over time, are the ones I call evil. I would guess that something like half of all human suffering would be avoidable if contra Solzhenitzin we did separate ourselves from those who are “insidiously committing evil deeds” and destroy them. Humanity suffers every day from its strange reluctance to challenge evil-doers, bullies, and a**holes. There is some odd cooperation between the virtuous and the wicked which enables huge swathes of damage to be inflicted each and every day. Someday, perhaps, the mass of people who are willing to discipline themselves for the sake of a decent society will gain the courage to do what is necessary. Forgiveness is mostly cowardice.

My thinking on forgiveness is confused, because “forgiveness” means so many different things, and moving from Anabaptist Christianity (non-resistant, with heroes like Dirk Willems) to Catholic Christianity (with much more emphasis on justice) makes me even more confused.

The first two comments that come to mind are from the Making Light sidebar. “Forgiveness is giving up on the possibility of a better past” and “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, and waiting for the rat to die.” In that sense–forgiveness as accepting that the past happened and can’t be changed–I think it’s always healthy.

But “forgiveness” can also mean “reconciliation”; that, I think is sometimes unhealthy hell, no. Some people behaved badly, because they are bad people, and remembering that and making sure others know about it is important.

Echoing a couple earlier comments, I would concur that although Christianity may have a particular preoccupation with forgiveness, my understanding is that there are definitely nonChristian traditions which emphasize tranquility and non-attachment as components of personal wellbeing and spiritual success.

For my own part, I’ve found forgiveness healthier than nursing grudges. I also have found that the people around me who carry a lot of anger are both scary and usually very unreasonable in how that anger ends up getting taken out on themselves and the people around them. However, I have never been subject to serious violence and do not pretend to understand that.

Contra Belle@3, I think there’s nothing wrong with Dr. Forgiveness bracketing off PTSD, victims of sexual assault and serious violence, addicts and depressed people, etc., in his investigations. Of course, what is healthy self-care for people in those situations is very important! But it is also worth asking about healthy self-care for people who are not in those situations, and there is no guarantee the answers will be the same. There’s room for a lot of important projects in the world. I do think it’s kind of misleading, though, if they present the results which speak toward one question as if they spoke to both.

From age 7, up until my 14th year, I was the victim of a pair of bullies–neighbours’ children, brothers: one a year older than me, the other a year younger. From my current vantage-point (comfortably retired), I can see that my reaction to that childhood situation has conditioned major aspects of my entire life. This is a very new realisation for me. I had not given over much conscious thought to my antagonists in the intervening half-century. I put the severity of my childhood suffering away, like a Veronica, only for it to emerge when my frenzied professional life was no longer there to blow it off the washing-line, constantly.
A supernormal experience, really; psychotic, some may say; there I was, sitting in the sunshine, reading Finnegans Wake; whatever that does to the brain was combined, perhaps, with a mildly heightened THC level. If you’ve read the Wake you may know that its constituent words are sentenced to cavort like actors and dancers in a spectacular travesty, part mockery, part exuberant liberation from the imposition of meaning. So the mind potters off to join whatever it is that forever watches from the wings. The Veronica, I choose to call it; Arthur Janov described it as the laminations of pain–imposed by others, and become a personal imprint. Whatever; it felt real to me, and personal; years of bullying by those evil brothers. I am lucky to have survived physically intact, unlike a younger brother of theirs, whose eye they shot through with a crossbow arrow on xmas day. It could have been me. Lucky, that’s me! At least I didn’t have to spend every 24/7/365 with them. I am lucky too, that I had a good enough 7 years before their wave crashed down on me. When the initial pain of that subsided, I recalled some shining memories of the time before they despoiled the scene.
So, I left the Wake on the chair and searched for the brothers on facebook. The younger brother died young, twenty years ago (HIV, maybe). His elder is thriving and married to a Thai bride. The younger brother who was shot through the eye (possibly, in my stead) was, a few years later, hit by a car; and today imbibes oxygen, largely immobile in a chair. A still younger brother of theirs lost one foot to sepsis whilst in Thailand, and 2 years later ( at home) so badly scalded the other foot that that one was amputated too. The youngest brother, of the whole of this crew, has been a very successful poker-player, but is now terminally ill. Good old facebook, eh? Hours of schadenfreude. And I instantly perceived myself as being well-placed to enact anonymous and exquisite revenge on my older tormentor–who fate seems to have treated more leniently than the others. Licking my lips at the prospect of that, I noted my stomach making a case for some attention too. So, I set off to a nearby shawarma kitchen.
Standing there, as the Kurdish guy folded the flat bread, I glanced to my left and saw my old antagonist opening the car door for his Thai bride, then both walking into the shop. I felt no astonishment at the coincidence–only the dulling touch of a Palmer Eldritch in the bright. He was astonished: firstly, at the immediacy of me recognising him after 50 years; secondly, because, he said, he had been thinking of me ‘only last week’. Mellowed by THC, perhaps, I shook his hand; and sent my best wishes to the rest of the family.
Later, when my orneriness returned to normal levels, I felt a pang of regret at having jumped out of the deck and into his hand, so to speak. I forgive myself for that though; and I am pleased to have reconnected to bright times that he and his brother had barred for so long.

“For children are innocent and love justice: but the rest of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” G.K. Chesterton

Resorting to wikipedia for a brisk trot through religious ideas:

I like best the Judaic idea – “we believe that just as only God can forgive sins against God, so only human beings can forgive sins against human beings.”
Forgiveness is up to the victim alone. It need not begin until the sinner admits fault, apologizes, and tries to make amends. Seems fair.

The Christian approach is more that since God forgives us all our sins, we need to go and do likewise, seventy times seven and then again. The idea that forgiveness is necessary for our own mental health seems to me to owe more to Buddhism and similar mystic practices, than Christianity. See link from my name, above.

Islam has a primitive eye-for-an-eye approach,
The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto (in degree): but if a person forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from Allah.
Quoran 42.40.
Not sure that is sustainable, though possibly briefly satisfying.

The best fit for grain silo is the older Hindu texts it seems,
“certain sins and intentional acts are debated as naturally unforgivable; for example, murder and rape; these ancient scholars argue whether blanket forgiveness is morally justifiable in every circumstance, and whether forgiveness encourages crime, disrespect, social disorder and people not taking you seriously.”

With the current US administration it certainly seems to be true that forgiveness (or at least the failure to provide effective opposition) has encouraged crime and social disorder..

Just dropping by to second @Aardvark Cheeselog 20. I’m a firm believer that letting go of anger is beneficial. But that’s not the same thing as forgiveness, about which I share some of the skepticism in the OP. (Though I suspect that Belle Waring might disagree with AC and I about letting go of anger.)

“Everyone always”

It’s not common that you can dismiss an argument in the first two words, but it happens.

Looking back on my 35 years makes me think that I have forgiven people way too easily resulting in them hurting me over and over again. This is probably a result of my chronic need to be liked by everyone. The idea of conflict with people I care about is literally enough to make me physically ill.

Don’t be like me. Hold on to legitimate grudges. Cut bad people out of your life and if you get the chance for a little revenge on a real bastard by all means take it.

35.2: The Case Against Punishment Dierdre Golash, 2006

I will add to the folks who think you can let go of things without forgiveness. In my case, it is strictly impossible for me to forgive my dad for what he did to me growing up, as that would somehow imply I’m ok with it, or with him, even though he shows no sign of remorse or even awareness that it was not ok.

But since I’ve written him out of my life, I don’t need to care. I don’t think about him much (though more recently, since he shares a personality disorder with the president).

And unless he ends up leaving me some money or something (ha! fat chance!) I may not even find out I could throw a party if I wanted to. And I’m ok with that.

Chris @7,

Your explanation largely matches my understanding, but I find Rabbi Ruttenberg’s terminology somewhat confusing.

What she calls “repentance” is, to my mind, “atonement,” making one’s victims whole as much as is possible, among other things. That said, it has never made sense to me that one can be forgiven by some divine authority without that. I think Judaism is exactly right in assigning the right to forgive to the victim, though my understanding is that once atonement (or repentance, if you prefer) has taken place, and the offender has asked for forgiveness, the victim is required to grant it.

I claim no expertise here, and could easily be wrong, but that is my understanding.

There is a huge gendered component to this discussion that needs more emphasis.

First: Women are expected to forgive. Men feel entitled to demand recompense.

Second: Men are more likely to commit crimes and aggressions in the first place. So a policy of blanket forgiveness means, “hey guys! You can keep your ill-gotten gains!”

If someone wants to forgive somebody, I won’t stop them. But if someone goes around preaching forgiveness, I wonder what they are trying to get away with. Why do they not want people to hold each other responsible for their past deeds. Why do they not want to be held accountable.

Contra the Making Light adage, refusing to forgive does not mean kidding yourself that you can change the past. Refusing to forgive means insisting that the future be different from the past, and that past misdeeds and misdoers be held responsible and brought to justice in the future.

There’s a reason why corporations force arbitration on employees, but reserve the right to sue others. People in power want to be able to exact full compensation. And they want to force others to be more forgiving. “Alternative dispute resolution” for thee, but not for me.

Belle@42

Separately, one of the studies is about how anger can reduce your ability to empathize with others and see things from their perspective. This seems like a huge ask as well; “why would this person think that was OK?” I mean, who knows, and possibly who cares.

Having started to read the paper in question, I quickly realized this comment confuses me. I’m not sure I see the huge ask you’re referring to. The only way this passage makes sense to me is if you’re implying the paper is suggesting that perspective-taking with the people that wronged you is beneficial, or that its results combined with the other papers would lead to that conclusion. Perhaps I’m just wildly misreading the comment, but if I’m not, that’s fairly starkly at odds with the paper; its finding was that both incidental (ie, background) anger and integral (foreground) anger reduce empathy and increase hostility levels. The comment would make sense if the paper strictly focused on integral anger, but its findings were also that there is a significant effect from anger unrelated to the current circumstances WRT perspective-taking; if you’re generally angry, you’ll be less empathetic, more vindictive, and more prone to rush judgement and stereotypes on others. That doesn’t imply to me any sort of huge ask; it points rather to holding onto anger making you more likely to act in a manner that will lead to unrelated future conflicts and possibly engender transmission of lingering anger to others.

Again, I freely admit I may have misunderstood the above comment.

Or:

”God ‘’vergibt’’, people ‘’verzeihen’’.

‘’Verzeihen’’ is only possible if there is a debt.
‘’Verzeihen’’ is the renunciation of retribution.
‘’Verzeihen’’ happens without conditions to the offender, whether present or absent, alive or dead.
‘’Vergeben’’ comes from the term ‘’gift’’.
Wer ‘’vergibt’’ makes a gift to the guilty party.
In the Old Testament context ‘’vergeben’’ follows repentance.

And one could note that the religious aspects of [forgiveness] concepts in Islam and Judaism are the same and different from the Christian concepts. The right of the victim, especially if it is powerless, is just as important in Islam as it is in Judaism, and again only the victim can decide for himself if it accepts the perpetrator’s request for forgiveness”.

@Orange Watch 30

I agree with you. I would like to point out that MisterMr and MRmister are two different commenters, both present in this thread.

I have never suffered serious harm from someone else, so I have no comment on that subject. I nurse petty resentments sometimes— that is a bad practice.

The majority of the people here are either American or British, so we are part of a collective that either kills or helps kill innocent people for no morally justifiable reason. Currently Yemen is the most obvious example.

Should this be forgiven? Who decides? In practice, we do and collectively, as a society the best you can hope for is that eventually, at some point, we will stop committing our current atrocities and move on to commit some new ones. There is nothing even remotely resembling real repentance. Most Americans only pay attention to such things if they can be used to attack the other party, which is one reason why Yemen was largely ignored by most liberals when Obama was in power. But even when Trump is in power the fact that he is willfully continuing to support the Saudis is usually very far down the list of things for which he is condemned, despite the fact that tens of thousands of children have died.

Should Western politicians be forgiven for supporting terrorism or war crimes? In practice the issue doesn’t come up. It’s some boutique issue that serious people ignore.

‘Forgive’ must come from ‘vergeben’, and so has the ‘gift’ root, but in English it doesn’t (any longer?) have the sense of a two-sided interaction. I can’t really make a gift to you without you knowing about it- at least enough to take posession of it-, and so we both participate in some way in the gifting. But (to my ear) I can forgive you without you knowing it. ‘Forgive’ for us is like ‘excuse’ (entschuldigen). ‘Pardon’ also has a ‘gift’ root, but like in English, I think it can be pretty one-sided.

To get the two-sided notion in English, you have to say ‘reconcile.’ But that verb doesn’t distinguish between the different reciprocal acts of the wronged (the forgiver) and the wrong (the forgiven).

If the recommendation to forgive means to excuse, then I suppose one could do that on one’s own. It’s both easy and morally suspect. But if it means to reconcile, then it’s impossible to do on one’s own. It’s much more difficult, since it depends on the activity of the other (confession and atonement), but maybe it would be a worthy accomplishment.

Thank you all for a great thread! Stuff happens. As one in need of forgiveness, I am a forgiving person by nature, I think, but I have been made a liar several times by a workplace “on the make” that is downright perfidious in the usual neoliberal practice on occasion. The damages done to those I have lied to have been serious and long lasting. Those grudges will not abate, and I do sometimes wonder what I will do if I ever get the chance to return the “favor”…

Belle—

I wasn’t clear, but part of my point was that we are guilty for having a political culture where politicians (in both parties) can be guilty of war crimes and pay no price. They might even be praised for their foreign policy experience. Should people in Yemen forgive us?

Trump is an easy target because in my untutored opinion he is a sociopath. I doubt he knows what a sense of guilt feels like. But our more normal politicians and our pundits don’t really seem to be that much better on this issue. It took years for most Democrats and some Republicans to turn against the war in Yemen, but it was clearly going to be a war against civilians from literally the first week it started. (I could google for an article by Zenko written back in 2015 that makes that clear, but I am feeling lazy). Trump violates every conceivable norm, but in supporting a brutal war for no good reason he has been well within Western standards of behavior.

… it’s always dudes …

Is the question just about particularly anatomical forms of abuse? Mme Lafarge is still writing op-eds for the NYT, supporting war crimes and whatnot. PS. don’t much like dudes in general either, but.

My experience has largely been that the quandary is more theoretical than real, because “awarenesss that you were doing bad things” and “willingness to stop doing bad things” and “willingness to take reasonable steps to fix the consequences of your past actions” all tend to come together in a big bundle. People are largely either forgivable on all metrics or on none, so moral conflicts on “they did X but not Y; should I forgive?” rarely arise.

But I’m by instinct a non-forgiver, so that probably shapes the above [and my non-forgiveness is in turn shaped; much like photons, we exist by changing and in so doing inducing ourselves to change]

@62
”I will never, ever forgive people who should have known better for cavalierly voting for Trump as some knee-jerk reaction to Clinton. They have at the very least set back this country for generations, if not laying the groundwork for its and possibly the world’s destruction. How can I forgive people who have taken away hope for real progress?”

An in-law of mine was jailed for sexual abuse of his daughter and grandaughter. He served 5 years. Not long after his release he died in a Salvation Army hostel. He is gone, scot free into oblivion. It would be nice to believe that he was turning on a spit forever; it is his victims though who are serving time in hell. Hanging being too good for him, would it have done them some good to watch their abuser being broken on the wheel? Who knows? Not me, but I suspect that the ghastliness of such a spectacle would add to the victims’ trauma. I understand that some US states allow relatives of murder victims to observe the execution of perpetrators. Are their any studies of the effects— beneficial or otherwise— on observers of capital punishment?

63, 67: Well, regarding Trump, I will never forgive a Democratic Party that made him inevitable. Ever. My first vote was in 1974. In all the time since I have voted Democrat, following the late, great Michael Harrington, as “the left wing of the possible.” Hasn’t helped one little bit. The two parties are now simply opposite wings of the same bird of prey. And no, I didn’t vote for Trump, but living in a red but trending purple state where Trump won by 6 percentage points, I certainly didn’t feel compelled to vote for Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton. Anyway, in response to my friends of somewhat similar, if mushy, political persuasion, I predicted in April 2016 that Trump would win the EC while losing the popular vote due to California, Illinois, and New York. The only state I got wrong was Virginia; they thought I was nuts. Ha! Most of them are still consumed with “Russia did it!” bullshit and think Rachel Maddow hung the moon. If the Democrats come up with Joe Biden next year…Trump will win. Again. If he runs, and what the hell else does he have to do?

Just want to point out, contra KC, that mercy and forgiveness are not quite the same thing. Portia isn’t asking Shylock to forgive Antonio; she’s only asking him not to exact the pound of flesh he’s owed.

Jim Buck: Your point exactly is made by Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking.

KLG I get your point of view, but the fact is we would have a SCOTUS under Hilary that actually might steer this country away from Executive authoritarianism. Oh, I just saw that Belle essentially said this, but of course with her usual colorful flair. Whatever happens in 2020, Trump’s selfish pandering to the religious right will plague us for decades to come–anyone should have seen this coming before voting by chiming in with the “Crooked Hilary” misogynistic mantra.

@70
”I will never forgive a Democratic Party that made him inevitable”.

And where did that come from? – that there are people (mainly Americans?) who really seem to think that a so called Loser of an election made the so called Winner ”inevitable”?

It’s like me hitting FF von Clownstick with a pie and then writing on CT that his face made it ”inevitable”?

Would @70 ever believe me and forgive me?

For lesser offenses, I think repentance, apology, and forgiveness make life better for everyone. I’ve been hurtful, thoughtlessly or in the heat of the moment, or just plain rude, or lost my temper, felt overwhelming urge to say something better left unsaid, and on and on. Apologizing is the least I can do, sometimes the most I can do, and sometimes it’s enough. I feel better when I apologize, better still when the apology is accepted. When I accept someone’s sincere apology, I feel better about them, and about myself.

Some things are *relatively* minor, but still beyond apologies and forgiveness. I was sometimes the victim of bullies in childhood, and to this day occasionally fantasize about wreaking vengeance on them. I think their cruelty has had some consequences throughout my life, but nothing I could pinpoint (beyond those occasional fantasies). Someone, by stealing credit for my work, in effect stole many years of my life. I will never forgive that, but there is nothing to be done, and I’ve managed to let it go: it no longer wakes me up in the middle of the night, seething with anger. In a few bad breakups, I don’t see myself as entirely to blame, but certainly not blameless either. Would it make any difference, with many years passed, to apologize for my own part? I doubt it; it might even hurt more than help.

As to the horrific acts the OP etc. is concerned with, it’s hard to imagine any measure of forgiveness, or letting go, unless justice is done. Here though I agree with those who believe justice should be rendered by third parties, that is, the legal system, with due process, proper legal representation, and presumption of innocence. This is the least worst course, and the should be the right of all accused. Even so, it’s hard to know what to make of those who have been convicted and served. I couldn’t ask Desiree Washington to forgive Mike Tyson. But he served his term in prison, and is now a registered sex offender. What should become of him? Would it have been better to kill him?

I sometimes have the dark fantasy (daymare?): I’m driving, fiddle a bit with something in my car, and lose attention to the road. Just then, a child jumps out, and I run them down and kill them. It’s not *entirely* my fault, but some of it is. Would my *regret*, my *apology*, mean anything to the parents? It can’t. In their place, it would mean nothing. There’s plenty of repentance, but there’s no way to make amends. It might help me if they forgave me. Would it help them? I don’t know.

Most of the discussion seems to be based on the assumption that the possibility of forgiveness depends on the seriousness of the wrong. That seems to lead directly to the public competitions you see every day in America and throughout the internet: only by being more angry than you can I demonstrate that the harm that was done to me was more serious. I think I prefer the thinking of the ex- Viet Cong tour guide I met years ago: ‘we can forgive but we can never forget’.

There seem to be several elements to this:

– anger. It’s possible to think that someone is doing bad things, and be taking steps to stop them continuing to do the bad thing (whatever it is), without being *angry*. One possible criticism of political discussion on the Internet is that anger is substituting for effective action: that people should be doing something about the issue, not just writing angry blog posts.

It’s an interesting question: is getting angry a motivating force that enables action, or is it just what happens when no effective action appears possible?

(A darker thought: anger is a useful mechanism in humans because it allows us to anticipate when things are going to turn murderous, and take some ameliorating action before people are killed. Its evolutionary function is that we die less often than we would if people when straight to murder with zero warning.)

– Giving someone another chance. There’s a difference between thinking that someone does bad stuff repeatedly, and needs to be not given an opportunity to do it again, versus holding a grudge against a one-off action a long time ago, that is unlikely to be repeated.

@83
”I do seem to have stepped on a few nerves”,

Indeed you did – as your response to:
”I will never, ever forgive people who should have known better for cavalierly voting for Trump as some knee-jerk reaction to Clinton” – proved – that you believe that ” a Democratic Party made Trump inevitable”.

And that’s ”the thing” – which a lot of Americans seem to believe? – and okay let’s not call them ”idiotic” let’s call the ”confused”? as it is a fact that there are so many different ”things” – which made Trump ”inevitable”.

Like for example my 93 year old CA grandfather -(a so called ”Reagan Republican”) who hated Trump soo much that he – the first time in his life – didn’t vote for ”the Republican candidate”. And so – thank’s god – as I loved my grandfather very much – I never had any reason to forgive him for voting for Clownstick.

But – wait?!
Perhaps I’m confused now? –
as I just have realised – if my grandfather -(and supposedly a lot of his old CA Republican friends too) – didn’t vote for Trump -(as some kind of knee-jerk reaction to…? to Trump) – why wasn’t Hillary ”inevitable”?

Could it be – that there were so many voters who voted for Trump -(NOT as ”kind of knee jerk reaction to Clinton) BUT because they really… liked? Trump?
And so I should NEVER EVER FORGIVE ANYBODY who voted for Trump BE-cause he or she ”liked him” -(and the voting for Trump as ”a knee jerk reaction to Clinton” is kind of… ”forgivable”? because it’s just so ”confused”?)

Now – I think I could live with that an from now on always will write.

I NEVER EVER CAN FORGIVE ANYBODY WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP!

and if I may – another one for @83 I woke some time ago:

…”as this really ”confused”… issue about voting for ”some lesser evil” – AGAIN comes up and up in these discussion about the new D Candidate – let’s solve this issue – once and for all!

Who ever came up with this idea – that in an election you don’t vote for ”the best available candidate” – BUT for ”the least evil one” – never understood the concept of ”voting in a democracy”.
In a (well working democrat) the voters vote for ”the best available candidate”
And the completely confused idea that:
”Centrist pukes like Biden are why we have Trump”
or
”Hillary is responsible for the erection of Baron von Clownstick” – is (probably) as delusional as believing that some Russians – or Assange – or Glenn Greenwald – are responsible for ”Clownstick”.

All of the above did everything they could to influence the US election – some with more and some with lesser success – and the truly beautiful story is – that in US elections – every Party – every group or actually every individual can pride him- or herself that it was ”US” or ”them” which tipped the scale for the final result.

Belle Waring 05.24.19 at 8:11 am
“W00t, these are the comments I wanted! Let’s reject forgiveness in a triumphant, Nietzschean spirit!”

This is the “Nietzschean spirit” I’m familiar with:

“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture ‘the enemy’ as the man of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived ‘the evil enemy,’ ‘the Evil One,’ and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a ‘good one’—himself!”

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

“Today, we immoralists have embarked on a counter movement and are trying with all our strength to take the concepts of guilt and punishment out of the world — to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of these ideas. And there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming by means of the concepts of a “moral world-order,” “guilt,” and “punishment.” Christianity is religion for the executioner.”

“That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as “spirit” — that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of “God” was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.”

Murali 05.24.19 at 6:25 am
“Forgiveness fetishism*, as I have observed it, seems to be a very western/white person thing. It seems like a holdover from a christian past and people who advocate it seem to be finding any sort of excuse to preach what they learned when they were young even if they currently profess to no longer being christian.”

If one takes Christianity’s own self-assessment at its word, this may seem plausible. But I recommend reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality for a strong case for the opposite view: Christianity is based in and promoted, under a false guise, a fetishism of resentment, of non-forgiveness.

The secret ballot exists to avoid grudges. It doesn’t work because a voter cannot get around voting for a politician who steals.

OW what exactly is your point? That Trump has made no difference to SCOTUS? Of course McConnell makes ass-wipe look like newly fallen snow–but seriously–Trump’s egoistic pandering has made no difference whatever? Under Clinton we would not have the SCOTUS embarrassments we’ve had, even if you think that counterfactually Clinton might have drastically altered the 2018 elections to deeply redden the Senate. I think Fox News has some positions to fill–you might use these postings in your application.