Part III: Being wrong, being wronged, and forgiving
Read Part I · Part II
My Friends,
I’m grateful to you for demonstrating the initial success of this project! The response has been positive and among the feedback I’ve received have been invitations to elaborate specific points as well as requests for more information about the philosophical tools I use in practice as a counselor and those I see myself using in this essay. Additionally, throughout the development of this work, conversations with my partner have encouraged me to pay vigilant attention to my attachment to the ideas I aim to convey. How ever present the danger of thinking we know more than we do? All of this has encouraged this brief editorial to acknowledge and thank you for your reflections.
So, while many of the topics left wanting elaboration will be treated in due course, the enormous scope of this first multi-part essay and the weight of its subject’s import warrant a few specific comments now. Primarily, I wish to assure you that I am aware that the essay’s abstract perspective disregards ethically relevant nuances between the different ways in which we can be wronged and how these details relate to an ongoing process of healing, forgiveness being an important component of which. My hope is that this high altitude perspective will let us see some patterns that are so fundamental we’ve largely failed to notice them. This acknowledgement of my approach’s limitation is especially relevant, however, under the vast shadow of racial and sexual violence that hangs so heavily over human culture. Countless injustices have encouraged, now more than ever, a proliferation of critical perspectives on concepts of race, gender, and identity, only a few of which I feel qualified to comment on. Suffice it to say that it is my wholehearted intention that this project be guided by the same philosophic impulse as many of these positions. My aim is to further a practice that has been field tested to remedy all manner of human problems, personal and social: on-going, self-reflective, critical inquiry.
I dedicate this effort to the well-being of all sentient beings.
Let’s consider what is perhaps our culture’s most widely accepted moral teaching: the golden rule. We’re taught to love our neighbors as ourselves, to treat others as we wish to be treated. And it appears we’ve collectively assumed that we understand the imperative; its simple structure seems easy enough to put into practice. But how few of us have really contemplated its philosophical depth and the implications that follow from it? What if your neighbor were you? What if you were your neighbor? The two: not separate independent entities as much as relations of the same moral and existential significance, interchangeable in every way that matters. The instruction to follow the golden rule requires us to consider what it means to follow it as well as how we will follow it—that is, if we want to love our neighbors as ourselves, we’ll have to consider how we love ourselves. Or do we even? And what does this have to do with forgiveness?
We evidently struggle to follow the golden rule sometimes. In some general sense, it is due to a lack of trust. When we don’t trust that our neighbors have any of our interests in mind, we form the belief—encouraged by this culture of competition and resource scarcity already alluded to—that we are not likely to be well served to slacken our defenses and treat them well anyway. On the other hand, when we become convinced our care will be reciprocated, we feel more ease in our affection for one another in the first place. And all of us desperately seek feelings of trust and affection from one another—this is true even (perhaps in a perverse way especially) in those who unite in violence toward a common enemy. Regarding our neighbor as ourselves offers them our trust and affection and thereby encourages them to do the same, since we tend to like those who we feel trust and appreciate us.
The second verse of the Dhammapadda, one of the earliest Buddhist texts, envisions a similar relationship between ourselves and the world. It brings to bear Buddhism’s characteristic skepticism as a prescription for lessening our suffering. If we blame and harbor bad feelings toward someone we feel wronged by, our suffering continues. But, if we don’t harbor bad feelings toward them and thus don’t feel as if they’ve wronged us, then we will know freedom. This is clearly no easy matter, and we may even bristle at the idea of releasing blame for the wrongdoing, especially when holding a person accountable would ultimately prevent subsequent wrongdoing. But that’s not really what this verse is about. Notice that the difference between the two options described doesn’t have anything to do with the neighbor who has wronged us. The relevant transformation comes from us actively resisting having any attitude at all toward the neighbor’s actions or the neighbor themself, not by having a different, more favorable attitude. The secret of both of these core ethical teachings—attributed to Jesus and Buddha—is that it is by merely following the golden rule as a way of life that one exists in heaven—it is not by being treated well by others and life itself, it is by living with dignity and self-respect (which involves treating others well) in spite of everything that happens to us. It means forgiving one another in spite of everything. Nirvana does not negate the feelings of pain and suffering we experience in the world, but it frees us from its weight and empowers us to inspire this realization in others.
To really forgive in a way that feels liberating likely requires some effort to understand why some person or party would have wronged us. But for this understanding, Buddhists go deeper than guessing about what someone’s motivation might have been. This impulse is sharply compared to needing to know who shot us before we allow the physician to heal our arrow wound. Buddha’s skeptical teaching is for us to see that we are fundamentally ignorant of the true nature of reality. One of the only things we can be sure of is that we experience suffering as a part of it. In the same way, understanding suffering in a way that releases us of its heaviness means directly facing the obvious fact that we don’t have the whole story (about anything) and not wavering in this awareness.
Our neighbors, states the golden rule, are to be considered as deserving of the same moral consideration we afford ourselves, deserving of the provisional assumption that their wrongdoing is probably a result of an incomprehensibly complex series of causes beyond anyone’s control. This causal process leads to a scenario in which we may be inadvertently harmed by someone who is also experiencing the suffering of life to the same degree that we are. This is to recognize that if we experienced truly identical circumstances to someone else, actually identical, we would both behave the exact same exact way. The imaginative exercise of placing ourselves in someone’s shoes is useless if we do not replicate the exact details by which the person erred. Our collective failure to recognize our own moral imperfection makes us all struggle to forgive. We are all alike in our desire for safety, peace, and love. And we might, in some way, therefore, be capable of wrongdoing too—we are perhaps even capable of similarly bad wrongs to the ones we most abhor.
This is ultimately to say that our unwillingness or inability to forgive others is in some sense rooted in an unwillingness or inability to forgive ourselves. To thoroughly admit to ourselves that we are imperfect, human.
If we feel a genuine desire to forgive but imagine we cannot succeed, then perhaps, silly and self-indulgent as it may seem, we might try forgiving ourselves for this—we might forgive our inability to forgive. While this might encourage a kind of lazy fatalism that could stagnate our growth, we can also, incrementally by this method, directly experience that the point of forgiveness is not to absolve someone of moral culpability, but rather to alleviate ourselves of the bad feelings we’re holding about our neighbor, who we are to regard as ourselves after all. Forgiving ourselves for not being forgiving enough admits to ourselves our humanity. We are imperfect and it feels good to accept rather than resent this fact about ourselves. Forgiving our neighbor and forgiving ourselves are morally equivalent. Appreciating this augments our desire to be forgiven. Rather than wanting to be forgiven because we feel we deserve understanding and leniency, we also see that it is good for our neighbors to forgive us.
Since the main beneficiary of forgiveness is the one who forgives, we’d clearly be making a mistake to not forgive on the grounds that the wrongdoer doesn’t deserve our forgiveness or that our good will wouldn’t be reciprocated. When we understand forgiveness as being for the forgiver, then rather than feeling resentful of our neighbor who won’t forgive us, we get why they won’t. Namely, when we don’t realize that forgiveness is about dropping our own bad feelings and realigning with heaven, Nirvana, etc., not believing that it’s our way to safety, peace, and love, then we are inclined to be unforgiving, and being unforgiving makes us unhappy. And from an unhappy position we tend to be less forgiving of others and this in turn makes us even less happy. And around and around we go. And many of us caught in this vortex even have the nerve to call ourselves Christian, or Buddhist, or open-minded!
Under this treatment the golden rule is our guide to reverse this pattern, to invert the feedback loop. That is, we shed our own unhappiness by understanding our world more carefully and less rigidly, and we thereby show others why they should do the same. Our sense of peace shows through our activities in the world, it shows others the way. Was this not Jesus’s purported message for us?
Each of us must make the decision whether to forgive and thus serve as an exemplar of the way of Heaven, Nirvana, epistemic humility. This is centrally a decision about whether to seek greater understanding than we currently possess. We begin by recognizing the limits of our own thinking and proceed by deepening that recognition, not obviating it, nor even seeking to.
To take love one another as yourself as a moral doctrine implies that Jesus considered us all to be moral equivalents, and we are taught to follow his example, and so we are being told, rather directly, to regard our moral worth and potential to do good as identical to Jesus, which is to say regard ourselves as an exemplar for love and forgiveness. This interpretation of Jesus’s teaching shares much in common with the eighth century Buddhist text the Bodhisattvacaryavatara, in which the epitome of enlightened activity is described by Shantideva as serving as an exemplar loving kindness, a living hero of wisdom and compassion—a beacon. The two traditions offer powerful tools for the philosophic practice of furthering the way of love and forgiveness, compassion and wisdom in our relations with others. In so doing, a practitioner of either lineage lives a life of profound peace—they must, for this is the practice. When every situation is regarded principally as an opportunity to cultivate virtue for the benefit of others, then everything is equally valuable.
There is no situation which cannot further the work of exemplifying radical love and wisdom. Believing this takes practice.
Through philosophical examination of our worldview, other neighbors’ worldviews, and the relationships between them, we learn to appreciate the similarities in diverse teachings, but also the beauty of the differences. We learn to create faithful interpretations of one another and develop new ways of communicating. Better communication leads to a sense of well-being for both parties, which reduces our fear of each other and increases our openness, which encourages further communication.
Larger-scale cultural healing would result through a collective sense of connection with one another and the world we’re co-creating. It sounds utopian, but it is not a fixed state. Rather, it’s an active method by which we learn to think and relate with one another so that we don’t stagnate and decay, become rigid, brittle from atrophy. The process itself is the fruit of our effort.
There is no question that certain ideas we’ve held over time, often habitually perhaps, make it difficult to forgive, love, receive love, etc. Other ideas make it difficult to break our habits even when we appreciate how bad they are for us overall (these patterns characterize trauma and addiction, respectively). Connections we form between ideas can lead us to forcefully resist changing our minds and this can lead to a life mired with fear and shame, the kind that makes us inclined to mistreat our neighbors. We reinforce our ideas and the connections between them whenever we think about them. So, it is crucial that we learn about them. Once we become aware that something we think is harming us every time we think it—and part of that harm is that every time we think this thing, we make it even more likely that we will think it again—we should take great care of our minds, they truly are our temples. Examining our lives this way requires some time and effort, but above all, it takes humility and courage. There is, perhaps, no way of life more worthy of our effort because there is no aspect of our lives more important than the way we think—it determines everything for us. It shapes our whole world.
That is the great moral teaching somehow obscured in effectively all systems of philosophy, that we have an obligation to our own well-being to develop our minds. This requires pursuing wisdom together, learning from one another. There is no self and other, us and them in this way; cultivating wisdom through openness to one another creates a mutually healing relationship of care and total respect—a life devoted to wisdom is a life devoted to love.
Perhaps it’s from this love or gratitude we experience for our teachers and the universe that the obligation to learn about ourselves, each other, and our world is something we feel. This feeling serves as motivation for us to do what we can to connect with one another; this is the way we most easily amplify our efforts. Of course there are many ways we raise our voices to catalyze change. And we must be aware that many attempts throughout history to “raise consciousness” have involved unfathomable violence and despair. In light of this, we must always consider whether our efforts are toward relationship or domination. That is, we are not simply forcing our way of doing things upon other people. Conviction for the philosophic way of life requires that we do not overstate its merit, but rather demonstrate it through action. The irony is, of course, that when we learn how not to take our own ideas too seriously, we become more and more convinced that not taking ideas too seriously is a seriously good idea.
To maintain our facility with the tools we know, fine-tune our techniques, develop practical wisdom for more effective application, and continue adding to our toolbox, we need simply to operate with the understanding that we may not even know what we don’t know. We should then recognize, too, that the more convinced we are that we are already sufficiently epistemically humble, the more we need to deepen our practice of doubt.