Things Worth Remembering: Why Forgiveness Matters

Douglas Murray (The Free Press), Things Worth Remembering: Why Forgiveness Matters:

This week, I want to turn to a speech about forgiveness and why forgiveness is so important when it comes to freedom—the freedom of both the forgiver and the forgiven.

Some speeches are memorable because of their rhetorical power. Others stick with you because of the depth of their insights. Sometimes that comes with the feeling “I know that to be true.” Sometimes it’s more like “I’m going to need to think about that.”

When I first read this magnificent talk given by Hannah Arendt, I felt both.

Arendt is the political philosopher best known for her monumental 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her speech took place on November 10, 1964 at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The title of the conference she spoke at—“Christianity and Economic Man: Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society”—and that of the lecture she delivered—“Labor, Work, Action”—were not encouraging. Certainly, they lacked the wit of William F. Buckley or the emotional force of James Baldwin. But none of that matters here, because of the content of the speech itself. ...

Arendt began the talk by discussing the irreversibility of human action: “Since we always act into a web of relationships, the consequences of each deed are boundless, every action touches off not only a reaction but a chain reaction, every process is the cause of unpredictable new processes.”

She goes on: “This boundlessness is inescapable.”

All this may sound abstract. But the implications of what she’s talking about are not. If we cannot know what the consequences of our actions are, and if all human action is indeed irreversible (“no author or maker can undo or destroy what he has done”), then we risk living lives that are unbearable, or even unlivable. How is one to go on not knowing how many people we have hurt, how much wrongdoing we have inadvertently introduced into the world?

And this is where she hits on a truth that is so urgent for our own age: “Without being forgiven,” Arendt says, “released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.” ...

Now more than ever, the number of people we can affect—including those who misconstrue our words and deeds—includes everybody on earth thanks to technologies that did not exist in Arendt’s day. Thinking about forgiveness has never been more urgent.

I was reminded of this while reading Nellie Bowles’ new book, Morning After the Revolution,  the other day. It is, in part, a catalog of people who have been “canceled” or otherwise unpersoned for a single act or word. The social media age adores this pastime.

We rarely consider the possibility of uncanceling people, allowing for the possibility of redemption. What would a world in which people are forgiven for making a mistake—for example, uttering a politically inconvenient truth—look like? Older people sometimes tease younger people, so-called digital natives, for their fragility. But I sympathize with them, in no small part thanks to Arendt. A world of infinite possibilities is also a world of infinite catastrophes, a world in which one is always at risk of being consigned to the ranks of The Unforgiven. Who are those of us who did not grow up in such a world to tell those who did to buckle up? We, too, might be fragile, frozen into a kind of sad compliance or inactivity.

As Arendt argues in this beautiful passage of her lecture, we are born not simply to die, but to create, to act. That is how we transcend our mortal confines.

“Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin something new,” Arendt says. “Initium ut esset homo creatus est—‘that there be a beginning man was created,’ said Augustine.”

Then, she adds: “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world—which, of course, is only another way of saying that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth.”

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to the faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.

More on faith and forgiveness:

• Pepperdine Caruso Law 3L Commissioning Service (Apr. 21, 2024)
• We Can All Learn About Forgiveness From Colorado Football Player Travis Hunter (Oct. 8, 2023)
• ‘The Bear’ And Our Need To Belong (July 23, 2023)
• Tim Keller: Forgive — Why Should I And How Can I? (Nov. 20, 2022)
• The Incomprehensible Witness Of Forgiveness (Nov. 12, 2022)
• Pandemic Forgiveness (Nov. 6, 2022)
• Faith, Forgiveness, And Little League Baseball (Aug. 14, 2022)
• Esau McCaulley: The Dangerous Politics Of ‘We Will Not Forgive’ (Oct. 3, 2021)
• Tim Keller: The Fading Of Forgiveness — Tracing The Disappearance Of The Thing We Need Most (May 16, 2021)
• Ted Lasso, Law School Deaning, And The Power Of Forgiveness (Aug. 2, 2020)
• July 4th, Hamilton, And The Power Of Forgiveness (July 4, 2020)
• Forgiveness And Mercy: Our Most God-Like Power (Jan. 5, 2020)
• Forgiveness: Law, Faith, Christmas, And Hamilton (Dec. 8, 2019)
• From Moses To Hamilton: A Dean’s Journey (Aug. 31, 2017)
• C.S. Lewis & Lin-Manuel Miranda: How I Found My Faith In Mere Christianity And Deepened It In Hamilton (July 24, 2017)
• Hamilton And Law School Deaning (July 7, 2017)
• Forgiveness In Charleston (And Beyond) (June 21, 2015)
• Forgiveness (Oct. 25, 2013)