EVERYONE WANTS FORGIVENESS, BUT NO ONE IS BEING FORGIVEN

The state of modern outrage is a cycle: We wake up mad, we go to bed mad, and in between, the only thing that might change is what’s making us angry. The one gesture that could offer substantive change, or at least provide a way forward — forgiveness — seems perpetually beyond our reach.

In the public sphere, we’re constantly being asked to weigh in on the question of forgiveness as a cultural process. The consensus thus far has largely been that 21st century society has no room for the concept. In a tweet from March 2021, Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, “as a society we have absolutely no coherent story about how a person who’s done wrong can atone, make amends, and retain some continuity between their life/ identity before and after the mistake.”

In other words, everyone wants forgiveness, but no one is being forgiven, and no one knows how to negotiate forgiveness at a cultural level. In an era of polarized politics, cancel culture, and the obsession of social media users to conduct informal modern tribunals without due process, seeking and granting forgiveness – public or private - is increasingly complicated.

The questions involved get harder by the day: What use is an apology if people are unwilling to hear it? Whose forgiveness matters most? Why do we as a society feel that the wrongdoers owe an apology to us, and not to the victim alone? And what’s the point of agreeing on answers to any of the other questions if all we really want is to hang onto our moral high ground, scoring points online rather than moving on?

Bound up in the handwringing over cancel culture is the idea that lurking on the internet is a potential vigilante justice mob, out to insist that a score must be settled. In this messy context, on such a public stage, there’s little room for humanization between offence and vengeance.

The idea of “cancelling” turns every potential interaction into a bad-faith nightmare, reframing earnest calls for accountability as witch hunts and often derailing the possibility of penitence before the question of forgiveness can ever arise.

Those who sound the cancel culture alarm do have some significant concerns, namely: How is anyone supposed to attain lasting forgiveness at a cultural, societal level without having their past offenses permanently held against them?

To which there is the valid response: does every offence require forgiveness at a cultural, societal level?

What if the offender privately seeks and attains forgiveness from their victim — do the rest of us have the right to insist that the offender be named and shamed in public? What is the ultimate aim of this, and what does it say about our collective sense of entitlement? When has a wrongdoer been sufficiently “punished” by society through being publicly called out? Is public atonement for a private offence necessary or even morally sound? When is it okay for the offender, the offended and the rest of us, to “move on”?

If things are at such an impasse, is public forgiveness even a worthy goal? Perhaps not, but surely it is preferable to either a public figure’s summary cancellation or a furious, endless standoff between offender and offended. In practice, rather than becoming an alternative to outrage and wariness, the idea of forgiveness can fuel just as much outrage and wariness as anything else these days.

That’s all thanks to the nature of modern outrage itself — the self-perpetuating cycle thrives on never letting go and turning every attempt at moving past it into another source of anger, another element to distrust: the hysterical belief that a wrongdoer does not ever deserve redemption, forgiveness, a second chance, the opportunity to atone, the freedom to live the rest of their life in the pursuit of peace, happiness and success.

If we applied a positive road map to a typical outrage cycle, what we would hope to find after that initial period of outrage is discussion, apology, atonement, and forgiveness. That process almost never happens on the modern public stage.

Instead, far too often, a single offence becomes part of a litany of wrongs that follow the offender around, with the long tail of their sins — imagined, real, or alleged — trailing behind them forever, ready to be brought up the next time they draw attention, leading them to look over their shoulder for the rest of their lives, and endure still more damnation every time they make new mistakes, or a public reminder of their sin if they have the audacity to find contentment.

Internet researcher Alice Marwick’s investigations into morally motivated networked harassment found that when groups of people on social media believed their moral code had been somehow collectively violated by an offence to one individual, they felt so justified in their harassment of their targets that they refused to acknowledge it as harassment.

“When you think of somebody as being immoral, that shuts down the ability to have a conversation,” Marwick said in a 2021 interview. “It really does encourage dehumanization and seeing other people as the other, rather than as actual people. There are places where our sense of morality is so strong that we don’t believe the other person can be redeemed.”

Fundamentally, this means that a group’s sense of “justice” becomes more about punishing the offender than it is about the real needs of the offended party. As far as they are concerned, even if the offender has been privately made accountable, justice is not seen to be done until the he/she is publicly “taken down”, not ever again deserving any good in their lives.

Imagine facing down this kind of collective movement. A person who starts out willing to listen and learn from their critics can become so badly burned by toxic harassment that they lash out at their critics and dig in their heels instead. That has a bunch of ripple effects. It can make the harassers feel even more validated in their actions and anger. It fuels the idea that the offender was never sincerely sorry to begin with, which can lead to more anger and retribution. It also can make the target even less likely to listen and learn the next time someone accuses them of doing something wrong because they’ve already been burned and they have less reason than ever to trust their accusers.

The idea of “bad-faith engagement” has become kind of a buzzy shorthand for the messiness of this process, but it really is the key to any conversation we have about forgiveness.

To reach a point where anger and toxicity are diminished, we have to engage with each other sincerely and respectfully, believing that the people on the receiving end of our anger have the best of intentions in engaging with us. We have to replace bad-faith engagement with good-faith engagement.

We’re a long way from knowing how to do that.

It doesn’t help that a sincere apology — the thing society requires to move forward, presuming a threshold of good faith can be met at all — is often a disaster when it happens on a public stage. If it happens at all.

But once again is the question – does every wrong, even a wrong done to an individual, require a public apology to the rest of us? Is it not enough if the offender has made peace with the victim? Are we so sanctimonious to believe that we are vicariously also owed an apology?

Who are we to say that not enough atonement has been privately made?

The classic apology, as described by social psychologists in 2004, involves “admitting fault, admitting damage, expressing remorse, asking for forgiveness, and offering compensation.” Yet while plenty of research has been done on the perfect apology, we’ve had very few cultural examples of one being delivered effectively and sincerely, certainly by those who chose to do so publicly.

We’ve had even fewer examples of such an apology being followed up with a process of actual atonement.

Whether someone possesses the ability to make a thoughtful, heartfelt apology and then apply those learned lessons to avoid other similar mistakes may seem like an apology side quest. But it’s a further consideration for those who’ve been victimized: When experience teaches you that some people can and do hide bad behaviour under a mask of contrition, it only increases your mistrust.

The fact is, we really don’t know who forgiveness is for. Is it for the alienated, hurt victims of an act, or is it for everyone? Is its aim to heal the injured? Or to allow the general public to move on? Who says we the public are even owed this?

Consider Roman Polanski. Plenty of major Hollywood figures over the years have publicly called for Polanski to be forgiven for raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977. As an adult, his victim publicly forgave him herself. In the absence of any serious accountability for Polanski, however, many refuse to move on. “Forgiveness is not enough,” Julia Baird wrote for Newsweek in 2009, in a piece stressing the importance of holding Polanski accountable for his crime rather than treating his victim’s forgiveness as a form of absolution.

What about the Will Smith/ Chris Rock Oscar slap saga?

Yes, it was messy; yes, it took Smith ages before he made an apology to Rock; and yes the rest of the world felt that we needed to hear that apology – in other words, we insist on being corecipients of the expression of remorse. Why? Because Smith is a “public figure”, who committed a very public offence? Or because modern society believes that atonement and redemption cannot be achieved without the public’s endorsement?

This raises a side question: what precisely constitutes a “public figure”? Perhaps that’s an easy question, with predictable answers. But what modern culture and social media is now doing is making even non“public figures” public; outing “everymen/women” who have committed offences, and forcing them to publicly beg for forgiveness.

And once again, even if the offender does submit to this trial-by-Twitter, when is enough really enough? Because there’s no way to collectively arbitrate accountability for unaccountable individuals, there’s no definable start and end point for forgiveness.

Asking everyone who’s invested in the process to give up and move on, or to collectively agree that someone has atoned, is impossible.

That brings us to what is arguably the most difficult aspect of the forgiveness conversation: letting go.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Marwick’s research is that the social media dynamics that cause us to feel morally justified in harassing one another also reward holding onto our outrage. So much of the genuine fear of cancel culture involves this idea that once you’re “cancelled,” nothing you can do, however wellintentioned, will be enough to satisfy the people baying for your blood. It’s easy to see why that fear exists.

Social media rewards pithy, angry takes rather than nuanced, balanced discussions, then boosts those takes so they attract more angry, non-nuanced takes. It can feel good to be part of that collective anger, especially when you feel righteous. It’s often extremely difficult to let that anger go, to forgive, adjust, and move on. Social media has provided a platform for us all to display the most spiteful and sadistic instincts, under guise of righteousness.

Most moral and spiritual authorities teach us that the cycle of repentance usually involves grace. Grace, the act of allowing people room to be human and make mistakes while still valuing them and affording them a second chance, might be the most precious concept of all in this conversation about right and wrong, penance and reform—but it’s the one that almost never gets discussed.

That’s understandable. Grace relies on some huge assumptions: that people mean well and that their intent is not to be hurtful; that they are capable of selfreflection and change; and, of course, that we all possess equal shares of dignity and humanity.

These are all big asks in a world that has become increasingly divisive and hateful. It’s easy to say we shouldn’t assume that every anonymous internet stranger or every person on the other side of a debate is bad, sure. Still, when you’re meeting people only in the limited context of a username, a profile pic, and a few angry statements on social media, it’s not easy to stop and remember there might be a whole, well-intentioned person behind the avatar.

That’s what makes the concept of grace so powerful. It forces us to contend not only with other people’s human frailty but with our own: to remember how good it feels when someone, out of the blue, treats us with respect, empathy, and kindness in the middle of an angry conversation where we expect nothing but hostility. To be shown the kindness of strangers when we expect cruelty, and then bestow that gift in turn—that’s the remarkable quality of grace. But there’s little room for it when we’re barely able to handle the concept of forgiveness, and equally unable to stop being angry with the offender after all is said and done.

And so, we arrive back at the beginning of the cycle: We hang on to our anger, and all this anger puts the possibility of grace even further out of reach. There is, and always will be, so much grey areas, so much doubt, that we will never be able to differentiate right from righteousness and distinguish wrong from wrong-headedness.

Perhaps there’s a perverse commonality in knowing that no matter what “side” we’re on, we’re all bad at this. Being generous and gracious to each other is a difficult, gruelling process for everyone. We all struggle at it, together.

— Excerpts from: https://www.vox. com/22969804/ forgivenessgibson-loganpaul-jk-rowling.