Today, Explained - How to forgive

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

In this episode of Vox Conversations, the Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig shares forgiveness strategies built for unforgiving times. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from, but in a minute, it's going to be Vox Conversations with another Sean, Sean Illing. Other Sean, or old Sean as I used to call him around the office, took over at the old Ezra Klein show along with another one of our colleagues, Jameel Smith.

And I think you'll agree that the two of them are doing an interview show the way it's meant to be done. Honestly, openly, and with great curiosity. In the conversation we're bringing you today, Other Sean talks to The Atlantic's Elizabeth Brunig about how to forgive. It's pretty perennial subject matter, but it feels extra timely in this hyper-polarized moment of ours. Just a heads up, you're going to hear a few more F-bombs than you would typically on an episode of Today Explained. Vox Conversations begins now. If you haven't

subscribed or followed the show or whatever, maybe you'll reconsider after hearing this. Why is it so hard to forgive? I'm Sean Elling, and I write for Vox about politics and philosophy. And I'm your host for Vox Conversations intellectually I can make a good case for forgiveness and I know from experience that I feel better when I'm able to do it and And yet, more often than not, I don't. I hold on to anger. I hold on to resentment and it eats away at me. A lot of us, maybe even most of us are like this and it's not new. It's never been easy to forgive. But I do think there's something about this moment in history that makes forgiveness even harder or at least harder to talk

about. Social media is obviously part of the story, or at least harder to talk about. Social media is obviously part of the story, but it's more complicated than that. A tweet by Atlantic staff writer Elizabeth Brunick got me thinking about this in a different way. As a society, she wrote, we have absolutely no coherent story, none whatsoever about how a person who's done wrong can atone, make amends, and retain some continuity between their life before and after the mistake. I think she's right. That's a problem, and we don't talk about it enough. So I reached out to Brunig to do just that.

She's written powerfully about the death penalty in America, so she's thought a lot about forgiveness and non-forgiveness. We talk about what it means, why it's so damn hard to forgive, and how we can all maybe get a little better at it. Liz Brunig, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. I want to start with the death penalty, which is a heavy place to start, but I think it's a necessary place since killing a human being really is the ultimate expression of non-forgiveness. So, how has your work on capital punishment shaped how you think about forgiveness. I'm a Christian and being raised a Christian, we all know forgiveness is important. It's in the Lord's prayer, the Our Father, you know, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And that sentiment appears repeatedly in scripture, but it's very rare that one drills down into what it actually means to forgive someone and what is the cost of forgiveness and the necessity of it. And so, those were things that I knew I had not explored in a really complete fashion,

although I thought about them. And getting into covering capital punishment has certainly put a lot of that into very sharp focus. Because in talking about forgiveness, you've got to weigh a couple of things. You have the good of the offender for whom forgiveness is critical, and you also have the offense to society, and you have the fact of the crime itself, which can't be undone. And so, all of those things, I think, are brought forward in extremis in capital punishment cases. You know, a concept like exoneration is really simple, and we all know what it means. It means that someone was absolved, cleared of guilt, they were set free, as it were. But forgiveness is not absolution, even if it's confused with that quite often.

And it's not a stripping away of guilt. So, if that's what it isn't, what is it? Yeah, forgiveness doesn't undo the fact of the offense. Nor does forgiveness suggest that the offense wasn't really that bad. So, a lot of the time when you read people thinking through forgiveness, what you actually see them doing is trying to find ways to mitigate the offense. People will say, well, I wanted to forgive this person and so I took into account that they didn't really mean it, they were young, they were ill, etc., etc. And those are all important factors and they're important factors for mitigation and mitigation is its own important line of considerations when looking at how to respond

to an offense. But the matter of fact is that forgiveness pertains to a situation in which the person is guilty and culpable. They did it, and they're culpable for doing it. That is when the question of forgiveness actually opens. It does not open up when you have a situation where somebody is not culpable. And finding someone not culpable, not responsible for the offense is not the same as forgiving them, nor is exoneration, which is when, you know, you essentially find them innocent of it. You say, I'm sorry, I had the wrong person, something along those lines. That's not forgiveness. Forgiveness is when you decide to permanently forego seeking restitution or vengeance or however you want to think about it for an offense that someone really did commit that they really are culpable

for. That's what forgiveness is. Do you think of that as maybe the biggest misconception about forgiveness, that it's a stripping away of culpability? Yeah, I think people tend to focus on the after. They don't look at forgiveness as a process. They look at it as a sort of instantaneous termination of someone's right to be pissed off about something. And that's not what it is. Forgiveness does not, in fact, terminate what took place. It does not erase the offense. That will always have happened. And forgiving someone for offending

doesn't mean that we have to take up a denial of what took place. It just means we have to stop our quest to extract some kind of recompense from them, either in money or abject apology or humiliation or exile or pain and suffering. However you want to get that recompense, forgiveness is the point at which you say, I am no longer seeking that. And I am allowing this person to return to, you know, the community. That's a really hard thing to do in practice. Yes. I mean, we love accountability. We love consequences.

We love strength. But forgiveness is something very different and very strange. And it appears weak when, in fact, it requires enormous will and courage. And, I mean, maybe that's why it's so hard for us to get our arms around it. I mean, is it because in some ways it does cut against our instinctive understanding of justice? Absolutely. So, there's quite a bit of theology that's trying to come to terms with, in the Christian tradition, I mean, how is it possible that God is both just and merciful?

Because they seem to cut against each other. Christian theologians have done a pretty decent job, I think, of reconciling those two things over the, you know, last couple thousand years. But that doesn't mean that it's something that is very obvious to most people. And I think that when folks hear about forgiveness or they're counseled to forgive or forgiveness itself is praised as a virtue, they feel like, okay, so now what is the incentive for someone not to do a bad thing? Now, you know, if they know that they'll just get to walk away without any consequences. What prevents them from doing wrong? Pete Do you think justice and mercy are the same thing? A lot of people don't. Yeah, I think mercy has a paramount place in justice, yes. You know, the death penalty is this sort of apotheosis of an unmerciful kind of justice, so much so that I would say it's unjust. And I

think we have a tendency toward that kind of thing. And even if we were folks who say, oh, I don't like harsh punishment. I'm a prison abolitionist. I think we should decarcerate. When it comes to certain offenses, all of that falls away, which is not to mock anyone for hypocrisy, but just to say that's a very hard position to hold. Mercy and forgiveness are very hard. Who is forgiveness for? Because I've thought a lot about this, and I don't have a good answer. I mean, is it for the offender? Is it for the offendee? Is it for society? Is it better that we think of it as a social virtue as opposed to an individual practice? Yeah, I think that's a really important question as well, because I think quite a bit of resistance to the idea of forgiveness arises from the fact that it's often sold as a kind of self-help practice. Oh, someone hurt you and you're still traumatized by it or still harmed. All you need to do is forgive them and then you'll feel better about it and you can let

go and move on. That's just not true. And I don't think it takes much experience in that realm to realize that forgiving someone and letting go of your right to pursue some kind of recompense from them, it doesn't feel amazing. It can certainly not something you do for your own pleasure or your own health, right? That's not the case. The offendee, the person who was harmed, they're not getting the biggest bang for their buck out of forgiving someone in terms of pleasure, right? The person who really vastly benefits way out of proportion to what they've done is the offender, which raises another point I harp on, which is that forgiveness is not deserved by definition. It's not something somebody earns. It's something that's freely given. You give it to someone for a lot of reasons, for reasons of personal virtue, for reasons of mercy and concern for the offender, which is a strange thing to imagine in our day and age, and also for society. I do think forgiveness or having some kind of set point at which we terminate the cyclical seeking of recompense for harm is critically important to having a peaceful society. Otherwise, you just live in a feud culture where you go back and forth forever.

Do you think we should grant forgiveness to someone who doesn't ask for it or to someone who doesn't accept guilt? You know, obviously, it shouldn't be the case that we confuse forgiveness with a complete absence of restorative measures, right? So, if a person, let's say, commits a crime, categorically denies it, yet we know for a fact that they're guilty, or consider that they're just not very nice people, which isn't uncommon with death row criminals. You know, some people on death row are very sweet, very kind, easygoing people. And you can see that they've either vastly changed since the time of their offense or that, you know, there were circumstances that led to their conviction that didn't take into account what their actual role had been in the offense. This was the case with, say, Brandon Bernard, who was a very secondary figure in the offense for which he was convicted and sentenced to die. But then there are a lot of people on death row who

are not sweet, are not remorseful. They are people who have been through hard things in their lives, and that's hardened them. They're hardened people, and sometimes just jerks, just not very good, kind of broken moral compass, selfish, arrogant, egomaniacal. You see a lot of that. And the question is, well, what's the motive to extend forgiveness to a person like that? And again, it's about them, for instance, who is now behind bars. And nevertheless, you see people, victims, families ask for mediations. They want to forgive. Not for themselves, but for the offender, strictly out of care for the other. And that's really remarkable to me.

Does your theory of forgiveness, I'm trying to think of the best way to ask this, does your philosophy of forgiveness make any sense without your religious worldview to ground it in? I don't know. I mean, that's a difficult question for me personally to answer because I can't extract myself from my religion. So, the things that I believe as a result of being a Christian are the most true things to me. Those are the things I believe the very most, the foundational principles upon which everything else is built. So, you know, it would be similar to asking someone, well, does your theory of justice make sense if gravity doesn't exist? It's like, I don't know, that's a really kind of shattering proposition. I'll have to think through that. I do think, though, that many religions, and aside from that, many systems of principle that are not religious also have theories of forgiveness that are comparable

to Christianity. Pete We were talking about this offline, and I think a lot about the relatives of the people who were killed by Dylann Roof in Charleston and how they looked at this moral monster and they acknowledged what he did, they knew what he did, and they forgave him. And they forgave him in public. Yeah. And they did it with a Christ-like grace. And yet, and yet, people reacted to this both with admiration, but also with puzzlement, right? There's a part of us that stands in awe of those relatives, but there's also a part of us that feels very unsettled by it. And I wonder why you think that is. Yeah. I mean, you know, there was a similar situation with the fellow who murdered Amish schoolgirls. The families of those schoolgirls actually reached out to extend forgiveness to the individual's family, to the offender's family,

and made a pretty public point of having forgiven. And that's a very, very, very difficult thing to do. If it's one of my two daughters or both who are murdered by a crazed gunman while they try to go to school, I'm going to have a very hard time going the next day to try to extend an olive branch for the sake of peace, right? And the reason I think that we, at the same time that we are impressed by and humbled by expressions of selflessness, like those of the families of some of Dylann Roof's victims, but also on some level repulsed by it, is because there is a very natural drive to sort of purge the evil from among us, right? Evil is disgusting. It's revolting. You know, we all know it when we see

it and we hate it. And that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. The difficult fact, though, is that evil characterizes actions. It does not characterize people. People still have some good in them. They're still human beings even when they commit evil acts, atrocities, horrors, right? And that was exactly the point that the families of Dylann Roof's victims were making and the Amish parents who forgave the shooter of their daughters, right? That there is still some good in you and that good in you deserves preservation. It deserves dignity. It deserves forgiveness.

And so, I think that's a tension that exists in the very principle of forgiveness. I think it's a tension that exists even within Christianity. The Catholic novelist Graham Greene has this amazing line where he refers to the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God. How it's almost revolting on some level. Because it feels like somebody getting away with something. It's not that. It's something different. But it feels that way. Evil, it's also a cancer, though. And it multiplies. And I don't remember how I felt at the time when Ruth killed those people in the church. But thinking about it now, there's some part of me, I guess, that feels shame. Because I don't think I'd have the

strength to forgive him. In fact, I know I wouldn't forgive him and I still don't. And that inability says something about me that I'm not particularly proud of, but it's true. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that. And while I don't really believe in a hell, I wish there was one that he could go to. And I just have to live with the unease because I don't feel great about feeling that, but it's what I feel. Yeah. I mean, I have a million feelings a day that I find highly suspicious morally. I think a big part of, for instance, writing on the death penalty is saying, I have all kinds of desires and impulses and instincts that are flat out wrong. They are dark. They are not aligned with justice or mercy

or goodness. Some of them are even evil. And in some sense, that's one of those humbling realizations that makes me think, yeah, I mean, it's not that hard to have fellow feeling for unrepentant, very bad people, right? Because I could be that person. I don't think I could be Dylann Roof. I don't have impulses or instincts or desires that are that completely evil. But I could, you know, it's not difficult for me to imagine a world in which I'm a significantly different person than I am now. And a lot of it has to do with moral luck, being born into a situation in which my virtues could flourish and my vices could be contained. And there are other situations people

are born into in which that's not the case. And so, from there, from that grain of fellow feeling, you can kind of develop a sense of, you know, most of the time when you're looking at someone on death row, I interviewed a psychologist who worked on death row for a long time in Arizona. I said, is Arizona's death row, is that the scariest place you've ever been? And he said, no, it's the sorriest place I've ever been. It's sorry. And when you start thinking about human frailty, just straight up moral weakness that lives inside all of us as the foundation of the emotional place from which you can prepare to extend something like forgiveness, therefore bringing great strength out of great weakness. I think that makes it a little bit easier.

You know, these people, killers, criminals, a lot of the times you're not seeing Hannibal Lecter. This is not someone who's completely 100% in possession of all of their faculties and is a master manipulator and evil genius who exploited all of their superior capacities just to cause pain for pleasure. No, these are usually miserable fucks who had bad lives and made bad choices a long time before they found themselves convicted of capital murder and who in all likelihood are still making bad choices as they percolate through the legal system and on some level some of that weakness that's in them some of that darkness some of that evil is also in me and in all of us. And I think that's the kind of humility that makes the strength to forgive possible. Let's take a quick break. But when we're back, forgiveness is hard. It's always been hard. And yet, why does it seem like these days

it's harder than ever? That's after been hard. And yet, why does it seem like these days it's harder than ever? That's after the break. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it.

You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com

to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This. That's A-U-R-A frames dot com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling

you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the

next level this year with BetMGM. A basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Let's talk about today, because there are a lot of things about this moment that would suggest it's ripe for forgiveness. You know, you've pointed to all the energy around something like criminal justice reform, but instead the opposite seems to be true. There seems to be not much room

or interest in forgiveness. And do you have a theory of the case there? Do you have any ideas why that might be? Oh, yeah. I mean, people are very angry, especially when you have forms of sort of systematized oppression that have operated for a very long time, and you finally have an opportunity to reckon with those. It's very difficult, I think, for a lot of people to say, okay, so the first time we have the opportunity to deliver some kind of accountability here, you're asking us to just walk away and say, never mind, act like this was all okay. And no, that's not necessarily what forgiveness is or what I would suggest, but it is the case that it's asking an individual to decline to prosecute to the fullest extent of their right the offense.

And that's a hard pill to swallow. And it's also, I think, forgiveness gets confused with so many things. It gets confused with, as we talked about, mitigation or exoneration, that people can take the call to forgive as a kind of suggestion that they pretend that what took place wasn't that bad, which is also not correct in my view. But it's also, I think more critically, a very difficult moral practice. And so, when you get in a situation where you're asking someone, you know, do you think it's possible for you to forgive? The response often comes from a place of, look, I was victimized. I was doing nothing wrong. I was minding my own business and someone hurt me and I will never get back what they took from me in that this offense will always have happened. I will always have to live with it. I will never be what I was before, which is a person who hadn't suffered in this way. You know, I'm permanently changed. And now you're telling me that I have to do this

extra work. I have to add on a layer of emotional labor, psychological labor, moral labor here, where I am letting this person who caused this off the hook? And I think that, you know, fuck that is a not unreasonable feeling to have there. No, it's not. And even though forgiveness is really hard, it's also an act of mercy and an act of moderation. But extremism is what happens when moderation fails. And this does in many ways law just passed in Georgia, you know,mandering and enacting other voter suppression laws that they have sort of guaranteed themselves spots in many districts. And the new census data is going to come out soon. And that will probably allow them to redraw maps in their favor to an even greater extent. And so in that respect, you know,

undermining democracy, undermining democracy through voter suppression. And who do we turn to when our democratically elected government is, in fact, not particularly democratically elected and is unresponsive to, you know, majoritarian interests? Well, we call in the government's boss, capital, businesses. They threaten capital strike, and oftentimes the state will just instantly capitulate. All right, that's great, but capital is even less accountable and less democratically chosen than our barely democratically elected government. So I think it's completely fair that people feel like, look, I have no power. I have no control. I am completely at the mercy of forces beyond me. And the one thing that I do have is the capacity

to be pissed off about it. And you're asking me to give that up. And all I would say in response to that is, I don't think forgiving systems makes much sense. You don't have to forgive capital. You don't have to forgive the state. You don't have to forgive organized institutions, such as, you know, a political party. And you certainly don't have to forgive, nor is it even possible in my view, to forgive, you know, a political party. And you certainly don't have to forgive, nor is it even possible in my view, to forgive, you know, sort of corporate entities. Forgiveness is something that happens between persons, right? And so I would say you have to separate

interpersonal offenses involving people from offenses involving systems, institutions, corporate entities, and so forth. I think that forgiveness is inappropriate in those contexts. I'm really curious what you think about the role of the internet in either amplifying some of this or mitigating it. I mean, do you think that the internet and the culture that it has made has made us less forgiving people. I mean, has the digital world supercharged so many of our pathologies, like the will to punish and humiliate, that the act of forgiveness feels like some kind of fucking heroic effort? Well, I definitely think that the internet is very good at sort of inflaming our worst tendencies. And one of those is, you know, the tendency to discipline and punish and prosecute.

Not for safety, not for the preservation of community, but kind of just for fun. So someone who's already been totally raked for a bad tweet or something and has absolutely taken it on the chin. And then a year later, you see the shitty tweet again and you're like like, ha-ha, actually, I'm going to go back in on this. That's something that happens not infrequently, and that's a function of the internet's sort of capacity for preservation and the incentives for people to, you know, resurrect others' failings for their own purposes. At the same time, I don't think people have ever been

especially forgiving. I don't think we need to be too down on ourselves because I think it's just a perennially difficult thing. I mean, I look back at the late antiquity, the early medieval period, this is stuff I studied in grad school. These are not what I would call especially merciful or forgiving people. I mean, they knew it was important. They thought about it a lot. They wrote about it. It was a virtue that was on their minds. But in just looking how society played out, it was something that, you know, was to borrow from Updike.

It was on their minds much more than on their schedules. And I think that's basically been true of humankind in perpetuity. Well, there does. And look, I should just drop a caveat now and say that there's a risk in all these kinds of conversations to conflate political Twitter with the real world. And it is decidedly not that.

But I don't know how to navigate that. So I'm just going to put that out there and then just barrel ahead. But there does seem to be a class of people for whom the greatest imaginable joy is to discover someone else's mistake or folly and then publicly bludgeon them with it over and over again. And human beings are probably wired for vengeance. And I don't know, in my view, the ability to meet it out without real effort or real risk has just been a social catastrophe, in my opinion. Oh, I think that's exactly right. I think that there's a strong impulse in perhaps not all people,

but more than you might think, to just like exterminate all the brutes, right? And like you say, the fact that it's incentivized by the internet and the fact that it carries relatively few consequences. So, if you see someone online do something really stupid, maybe even evil, and you just rake them for it, right? I mean, you just cut them down. You're never going to see the consequences. They just disappear from the internet. And it's like a video game character. You never see that somebody, say, had a bad day. Maybe they went through something or they've been going through something. God knows we've all been going through something for the knows we've all been going through something

for the past year. And they maybe have a substance abuse issue. Maybe it's something they've struggled with. Maybe it's something that they've struggled with for a long time. They make a mistake. They do a really, really shitty post of some kind, Facebook, Twitter, whatever.

You find it, you catch them, you call them out, you rake them, it becomes a semi-big deal. They lose their job and that's it. You know, justice is done. The bad person has been punished, you forget about it. They don't. history, such that anytime they try to try again, get a new job, become a new person, do better, what they did and what happened to them is instantly Google-able. And it will continue to punish them for years and years. You never see that part of it. You just see the fun part. It's such an important point because forgiving is much easier if we can forget. And no one can forget anything anymore because so much of life is online.

It's tagged. It's documented. It's stamped. It's shared. It's published. Humiliation is always a Google search away. And so we can never achieve escape velocity from our own past. And that's a problem.

Absolutely. I mean, I think this is why, especially in Europe, so many people have sort of rallied around the right to be forgotten, which is the right to have information about yourself of one kind or another taken off the internet. That's just nearly impossible to achieve. There may be a right there, but it's a right that's going to be impossible at this point to exercise.

I think it's important not to confuse forgiving with forgetting, although, you know, they're natural partners in a lot of respects. But the fact that the internet sort of immerses us in a permanent present, right? You take a tweet that was shitty in 2014 and everyone laughed about it and you retweet it today in 2021, seven years later. And it doesn't matter that it was done seven years ago, that the person who did that is a different person now.

That doesn't matter because I'm reading that tweet right now, right here in the present. And so everything that someone has done wrong on the internet, they're constantly doing wrong in a certain way. They're never allowed to be someone different than the person they were. And that is a real barrier to forgiveness, I think. Well, we're sort of dancing around the elephant in the room, which is cancel culture. Ah, getting canceled, yeah. Yeah, let's just go ahead and lean right into it. Yeah, let's get canceled.

Yeah, but you know, seriously, there is a kind of paradox on the left right now that I've, I don't know, I feel like you more than most is uniquely positioned to reflect on. And, you know, like you would think that forgiveness would be a very natural outgrowth of progressivism, but that's not really the case today, or at least it's pretty complicated, right? On the one hand, progressives value forgiveness, and you can see that in their willingness to forgive people who have committed violent crimes, as you've pointed out. But on the other hand, they also seem very unwilling to forgive low stakes missteps like, you know, speech crimes or speech violations or whatever.

What do you make of that weird contradiction? Yeah. You know, I've thought about this a lot. I actually have a friend, Liam Coffey Bright, who's a philosopher who teaches in the UK at LSE, at the London School of Economics. And he said that, you know, when he notices folks on the left saying, well, you know, obviously we need to take it easy on folks who are in prison and we need to look at abolition and reintegrating them into society, all of which I agree with. But then they say, you know, if someone does a shitty tweet or a shitty podcast or something, it doesn't matter the degree to which they change or to which their current views no longer reflect their former views. They can't be forgiven because that stuff is poisonous and it causes all the problems in society, etc. He said it's very hard not to feel like they just don't

care that much about the harm that's caused by criminals. Because, you know, by and large, well-to-do professional managerial class folks, they're not affected by violent crime, right? Most of the victims of violent crime are poor people. And so, yeah, I mean, it's much easier to say, well, you know, if a person is 19 years old and they participate in a triple homicide related to a cocaine deal that went off the rails, I think it's very easy for a professional managerial class person whose major contact with that kind of individual and that kind of crime is like watching Law & Order to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, forgive them. But absolutely do not ever forgive someone who pissed me off on Twitter, because for them, being interpersonally offended and bothered by shitty views being expressed online by aggressive assholes is one of the major conflicts of their life. I think that's possible. I think it's maybe a mischievously uncharitable reading, but it's meant to prompt a real reflection, which is why can't we articulate a continuity between where we are on criminal justice reform and where we are on interpersonal offenses? upstream of those criminal offenses downstream. So when we allow these bad ideas to percolate in

society without punishment, it's eventually going to lead to some sort of expression, and it often has a violent expression. You know, I think that's possible, but I still think that it's pretty clear that not all of the offenses that people are, you know, quote unquote canceled for are actually related materially in any way to violent crime. So, and again, this is a human compulsion. There's always been cancellation. Everyone should read Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, right? That's a, you know, turn of the century cancel culture on display. Anna Karenina, she is canceled.

Tolstoy's Karenina. But I think the important thing to think about is these tools that we use to discipline people socially, they're going to exist in any society. I think that's pretty natural for human beings. Is there a way to make sure that we separate out what is necessary and what is helpful from what is just pleasurable for us? Well, I'd like to remind people all the time that Socrates was the first public cancellation. He was badly canceled. So, this is not fucking, it's not a new thing. It's been around. No. Ostracism goes back to the ancient Greeks. Absolutely. But you are, you're touching on a part of this that probably bugs me more than any of it. And it's the fact that so many of our, air quote, transgressions now are phony or contrived,

and the furor over them is so performative and so vacuous. There's so much bad faith, so much pile on, and there's very little genuine outrage over the offense because that would require actual contact with it. And so, a lot of it is just sport for our digital carnival, and that's it. Yeah. Blood sport. Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, Lindsay Ellis, who I had never even heard of before she was badly canceled, as far as I can tell, is a film TV critic who was canceled for tweeting about some kind of Disney or Pixar movie being similar to Avatar, either the Blue Alien movie or the other movie also called Avatar. Oh, hell no. No, I've been having children for the last five years,

so I have no clue what's been going on cinematically. But, you know, she compared two things, which I don't know, seems somewhat comparable to me, like just surface level. You're allowed to compare films. And the tweet wasn't excessively malicious. She was just saying, oh, there's a genre similarity. This is like this, which is, I'd say, somewhat common in film criticism. You know, she was like chased off

Twitter and raked over the coals. And I, again, had no dog in this fight, don't even understand it, have no idea who this person is. So, I just popped a tab open on Twitter and watched, you know, 5, 10, 20 tweets come in a minute about this woman, just tearing her down. And I was like, you know, this was out of proportion to the offense the minute it was more than someone replying, I don't think so. Like it was disproportionate at that point, but the way that it builds on itself as people have more and more fun and realize that this trending news event is a way that they can get attention for their account or be validated as a member of their end groups.

It's just a really, really vicious cycle. And it's uncomfortable to watch. And I am not immune to it. I'm absolutely certain I've participated in those kinds of things. And I feel bad about it. I try to catch myself, not do that. No, I can't count the number of times I've signed on to Twitter and allowed it to tell me what I should let my day get derailed by. Right. And what I should be pissed off about. And we've all fallen prey to that and at the risk of getting too abstract. But maybe there's a deeper issue here, right? Where I think a lot of people don't really exist in anything like a community anymore, right? This is a very atomized society. And to the extent that bonds exist,

they're very porous and ill-arranged. And maybe we filled this void by turning to the even more inhuman and loveless virtual world where the only excitement to be found consists in signaling disgust by trashing the right person or the right group, and that's it. Yeah, and I think, you know, over the past year, things have been especially difficult in terms of isolation. I also think there's an effect to being on the internet that's not unlike the road rage effect, where you're sort of alone in your own private little world, where you feel like you're supposed to have complete control. And then here's this asshole, screwing everything up, derailing your day online. And the anger that develops in that kind of isolation, where the only moral consideration you have is yourself and your feelings. Because again, you're not actually talking to or facing this individual, looking at their context. They're just, in the case of

road rage, they're just a car. They're just a machine. You don't even see a person there, much less know anything about them. Same thing online. They're just a text box or just an account. You don't see a person. You don't see what they're going through, you don't care. And I think that that can produce emotions that are way, way, way out of proportion to the actual offenses. And I think that's bad for us. And the fact that it's bad doesn't mean it never feels great. I mean, when all of your friends are dunking on someone and you're having just a whole hell of a time just absolutely dragging them and making jokes and watching all your friends be really funny and also you're right and you're righteous and you're doing a good thing. I think it can feel rapturous. It reminds me of being in the United Kingdom for Guy Fawkes Night, which is in the United Kingdom, a celebration that occurs in early November, the 5th of November, similar to, I suppose, our Halloween in the United States.

It's all about this sort of mirthful and gleeful celebration of the execution of this individual named Guy Fawkes, who was a Catholic terrorist, essentially, who had planned a significant attack on the parliament, the British government, and was caught and tortured and then finally executed. And this holiday developed around burning him in effigy. And it's a big carnival and everyone's having a great time. And you have to think, yeah, no, they actually used to, public executions

had a carnival-esque atmosphere right up until the turn of the century and later in the United States, you know, but is that who I want to be? Yeah, I mean, I think it's true, though, that there are a lot of people, and this is absolutely me, more than I care to admit, who are invested in holding on to bitterness to the sense of moral clarity you get from that. You know, we dwell on it, we cultivate it. It's poison. It disfigures our inner life, but we still clutch to it. And I think of myself as someone who is a forgiving person. I certainly believe in forgiveness in the abstract. I'm persuaded by the arguments I've heard for it. But the truth is that I'm really not all that forgiving a person in my real life. At least, I'm not forgiving consistently. And that's not just true in my private life, but

it's also true when it comes to someone like Dylann Roof or when I click on Twitter and see that Rush Limbaugh died, for instance. I mean, the reality is that my first thought is I'm glad he's dead, that the world is a better place without him. And I don't feel good about that, right? That doesn't make me morally whole. It makes me feel, I think, weak in base. And yet it's how I feel. And I think a lot of people probably feel like that. And maybe that just says something about who I am and who we are.

But it's there. It's real. It's absolutely real. It's one of the most real things there is. But I think that that realization of frailty is a really important thing. And I think that's something that without which you can't have a culture that embraces forgiveness at all. People have to be willing to say, I too am susceptible to and guilty of all kinds of darkness. And I know that to be true.

I mean, people ask me all the time, oh, you're a Christian. Do you think this person is going to hell, that person? I'm like, look, man, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to hell. That is my number one preoccupation. I'll see you there. Right, it's like trying to sort out my own soul. That is everyone's

battle in this life you know every single person is fighting the battle between good and evil and they're waging it

inside themselves all the time and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose you lose battles you hope you win the war you learn you get better at it

but that is the struggle going on with all of us But that is the struggle going on with all of us. And that is our purpose in this world, is to try to win that war for ourselves, for our own souls, for good. And I think focusing more on that and less on actually, I'm going to exterminate all the evil in the world and everyone else, although that's also important to limit the expressions of evil in the world. F else. Although that's also important to limit the expressions of evil in the world. Focusing on that inner struggle maybe allows us to empathize more with people who do wrong and make mistakes. You also can't have a liberal democracy without forgiveness. I mean,

a liberal democratic society is built on dissent and toleration, and people have to be allowed to make mistakes and to fuck up and to have to be allowed to make mistakes and to fuck up and to go too far and to transgress. And we can't bar them from public life because of it. It just, that will grind the whole thing to a halt. Right. And again, you know, you get into sort of a slipperiness here where you point out that liberal democracy relies on, you know, or has this expectation that there will be interpersonal forgiveness on the level of the citizenry. And you'll get a response along the lines of, sorry, I don't forgive the GOP for the war in Iraq, et cetera. But again, it's not about institutions.

It's not about corporate entities. It's about people. Teresa Bejan, a professor, I believe at Oxford, wrote a book called Mere Civility, which is about interpersonal language norms in liberal democracies. And her point, I think, is, you know, what's required is really fairly minimal, but it's harder than it seems. And that is, you just cannot permanently prosecute grudges or offenses in the most extreme manner you can conjure and have a liberal democracy. There has to be a principle of forbearance. And that's hard. It's really hard. How do you practice forgiveness in your own life? Unevenly? Consistently? What?

So I have people that I have forgiven for things they've done to me. And it's something that it's a decision. It's kind of like, I think of 12 steps. It's like quitting an addictive substance. It's a decision you remake every day and you do it day by day, right? Because it'll still come to you, that thing that happened. You'll be standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, watching the birds at the bird feeder, washing dishes, and it returns to you that that shaft of light you're staring at is quite like the one you saw the afternoon that, you know, someone did a severe act of physical violence on you. just explode in your own quiet and domestic suburban way with fury at that point. But you make that decision, you know? That was then. It's not happening anymore.

It happened. I wish it hadn't. God knows I would love for it to have been different. But all I have now is now, and I'm not going to pursue it. You know, and I think a lot of forgiveness, at least as it's manifested in my life, manifests as me reaching out and being there and being friendly and warm and open

for the restoration of a relationship to people who have hurt me really bad and saying, I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere. It's also really hard to be forgiven, which is maybe another discussion for another time. It's very hard to be forgiven. There's so many issues with respect to pride and ego and accepting fault and, you know, feelings of condescension, you know, or suspicions of having something lorded over you, those are all issues that make it difficult to be forgiven.

But part of forgiving is to just stand humbly and say, I'm not kidding, I'm serious. It's forgiven. When was the last time you failed to forgive someone when you know you should have? Oh, that's a good question. There was someone who was really mean to me who was contacting me to talk about death penalty and having this argument about it theologically. And I was saying

a lot of what I'm saying to you right now about forgiveness and mercy and the inherent value of human being. And I found out this person who was being extremely malicious in their response, and I don't mean just profane, but actually quite cutting, was posting all of this interaction on a forum and laughing about it. They weren't even invested. They're just a nihilist. And they thought it was funny. And it really hurt my feelings a lot. And I felt stupid for that, right? Because it's the internet, right? Like just turn it off, close your eyes, etc. But it really hurt my feelings. And I cried about it. You know, wait till my kids go to bed, take a bath, cry. And what hurt wasn't so much that I believed the things that they had been saying to me,

but that someone wanted to hurt me like that just to amuse themselves. Yeah. And I wrote back to the person and said, Hey, I got tipped off that you're posting this in this closed forum, that it's a joke. I guess the joke's on me. But I do forgive you. Go in peace, right? I know who the person is. I'm not going to say anything about it, though.

Just let it go. But it's hard. Yeah, it's hard. I just can't imagine anyone not being able to relate to that. I just don't know any way to have an honest conversation about forgiveness that doesn't involve admitting hypocrisy. Oh, of course. Frailty. Absolutely.

That's what it is. And that's what we are. There's no straight line to forgiveness. There's no doubt about that. And maybe this is a strange way to end, but I feel like it's important. And I want to ask if you think there is a line. I mean, is there anything

that is truly unforgivable i think you know by humankind yes i think there are things a person can do to another person to other people that essentially make the likelihood that they will ever be forgiven zero percent. A person cannot actually eliminate the value of their own life, in my view, no matter what they do. So, it'll always be the right thing to do to allow that person to live. But there are situations, I guess I would put it this way, it sort of a scale and at the very highest heights of that scale I think the likelihood of any person being able to forgive that individual is low and approaching zero for me as well so I do understand that feeling and there are some things that are just really, really, really, you know, they exceed the moral capacities of even the most morally heroic person. We're only human.

And I think we should keep in mind that those are very rare, very rare instances. But, you know, I try to remain open to those kinds of possibilities. And, you know, because as you point out, this whole conversation has to be premised on nuance and frailty. It's disingenuous if it's not. Well, I really appreciate you coming on to talk about this. This is a very difficult conversation to have, and it's not easy. And I really appreciate your time. I learned a lot and I thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Vox Conversations is produced by Eric Janikis. Our editor is Amy Drozdowska. Paul Robert Mouncey mixed and mastered this episode. Our theme music was dreamed up by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. And Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of audio at Vox. If you like the show, let us know.

Room for improvement. We want to hear that too. We're curious to know what you think, what you want more of, what we could improve. And if you have ideas for future guests or topics, send us your thoughts at voxconversations at vox.com. And hey, if you did like this episode, share it with your friends, rate and review. And join us on Thursday for a brand new episode.