Stoic Meditation #9 - Forgiving Others - Revisited
"The sudden sight of me causes panic in the streets. They have yet to learn - only the savage fears what he does not understand." - The Silver Surfer
In the previous post on forgiving others, I skirted around the issue of forgiving extreme behaviors. I couldn't quite figure out how to articulate the distinction between understanding extremely unforgivable behaviors and implicitly condoning them. As usual, someone else has found a way to make this distinction clear. While reviewing the book "Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty" by psychology professor Roy Baumeister, Rob Henderson had this to say:
For some social phenomena, people have difficulty distinguishing between explanation and justification.
Why did that man murder his brother? “Because his brother humiliated him.” That’s no excuse! “You’re right, it’s not an excuse. It doesn’t exonerate him. But it is an explanation.”
As Baumeister puts it, “I do not want to make apologies or excuses for people who commit terrible actions. I do want to understand them, however, and so it is necessary to understand the excuses, rationalizations, minimizations, and ambiguities that mark their state of mind.”
This makes many people uncomfortable. But the book states that if social scientists refuse to understand evildoers on their own terms, then they are ultimately abandoning scientific understanding in favor of moral condemnation.
When I was in high school, I read both John Toland's book on Adolf Hitler and Hitler's "Mein Kampf", often while sitting in the common area for the history department. No one chastised, accosted, or otherwise interfered with my curiosity or my desire to understand. (Crack open my backpack and you would have found copies of the Bible, 1984, and Stryer's Biochemistry - 2nd Edition. I was curious about the world.) Seeing those books in my hands might have made a few folks uncomfortable, but if it did, they kept to themselves. Different times. I don't think high school students can be so bold with their curiosity today.
My interest wasn't in how to become a Nazi. My interest was in how to recognize the nascent seeds that grow into mass insanity. I wanted to be better positioned to subvert the growth of such a movement. I read and continue to read many books related to this goal.1 It's a complex subject and the shallow understanding that passes for rigorous assessment today just makes the bad behavior more likely. After years of research and inquiry, I'm a lot closer to understanding what happened while being further away from forgiving the behaviors that lead to WWII and the Holocaust. Forgiveness isn't mine to grant.
That's an extreme example of working to understand extremely unforgivable behavior on a global scale. The effort has spanned decades and I'm a better citizen for having shouldered the task. In my view, there's a duty to understand commensurate with the severity of the behavior if we are to have any hope of preventing it in the future. Perhaps more importantly, working to understand extremely bad behavior may reveal that it only appears to be so because it's us that is at the extreme fringe looking back at the center (or another extreme.) Working relentlessly to deconstruct and understand appearances helps us to know where we are on the spectrum and, if necessary, move away from extremists and come in off the edge.
More contextualized to my life and equally difficult was the effort I made to understand the family into which I was born. In my early twenties I had hopes of having a family of my own. I knew enough then to know that the ill-formed and unconscious beliefs and patterns of behavior from my childhood were something I didn't want to continue using with my own children. That Fate decreed children of my own would not be part of my experience doesn't detract from the fact that I'm a better person for having rooted out the malformed mental models inherited from my parents.
Work through a few of the really tough examples like this and it becomes ridiculously easy to forgive a galaxy of mundane transgressions. My work in many areas isn't done, but at least my parents are forgiven. As for Nazis...I hate those guys.
Postscript: I wrote this post and placed it in the queue before Hamas invaded Israel. Tragically, real-time events are illustrating the points I'm attempting to make in this post. Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, captures in three sentences what I've tried to articulate across two posts:
"Throughout all of this [the invasion of Israel], we have tried to do something difficult: look evil in the eye. It’s important to understand what just happened in order to understand what will come. It’s important to understand what just happened so that it never happens again."
Footnotes
1 As crazy as the world seems today, my sense is mass insanity isn't imminent. But then again, I don't like the direction history and events suggest. So I continue to read on this subject. Some of the books that stand out as influential in understanding aberrant social phenomena, as Henderson might put it, on the scale of 20th century mass movements include:
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Hitler's furies: German women in the Nazi killing fields by Wendy Lower
If This Is a Man • The Truce by Primo Levi
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please use the comments section or email me directly.
Photo by Luca Discenza on Unsplash
Excellent main point: to explain is not to excuse. And I like your reading list in the footnote.