Why is it so hard to forgive?
Intellectually, I can make a good case for forgiveness, and I know from experience that I feel better when Im able to do it. And yet, more often than not, I dont. 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. Its never been easy to forgive. But I do think theres something about this moment in history that makes forgiveness even harder or, at least, harder to talk about. Social media is obviously part of this story, but its more complicated than that. A recent tweet by the Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig 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 whos done wrong can atone, make amends, and retain some continuity between their life before and after the mistake.  I think shes right. We dont have a coherent story about how a person whos made a public misstep, or whos been canceled for whatever reason, can find forgiveness. Thats a problem, and we dont talk about it enough. So I reached out to Bruenig to do just that. Shes written powerfully about the death penalty in America, so shes thought a lot about forgiveness  and non-forgiveness. We talk about what it means, why its so hard to forgive in the digital age, and how we can all maybe get a little better at it. You can hear our entire conversation (and theres much more to it) in this weeks episode of Vox Conversations. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows. Subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sean Illing  I want to begin with the death penalty, which is a heavy place to start, but I think its a necessary place, since killing a human being is the ultimate expression of non-forgiveness. Elizabeth Bruenig  It certainly developed how I think about forgiveness. Im a Christian, and being raised a Christian, we all know forgiveness is important. Its in the Lords Prayer. And that sentiment appears repeatedly in scripture. But its 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 had thought about them. Covering capital punishment has certainly put a lot of that into very sharp focus. Because in talking about forgiveness, youve got to weigh a couple of things: the good of the offender for whom forgiveness is critical, and the offense to society, the fact of the crime itself, which cant be undone. All of those things, I think, are brought forward in extremes in capital punishment cases. Sean Illing  Concepts like exoneration or vindication are simple, and we know what they mean: Someone was absolved, cleared of guilt, set free. But forgiveness is not absolution, even though its confused with that. Elizabeth Bruenig  Yes, forgiveness doesnt undo the fact of the offense, nor does forgiveness suggest that the offense wasnt 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 didnt really mean it. They were young, they were ill, etc., etc. And those are all important factors when thinking about how to respond to an offense. But the truth is that forgiveness pertains to a situation in which the person is guilty and culpable. That is when the question of forgiveness actually opens. It does not open up when you have a situation where somebody is not responsible for the offense. Thats not forgiveness. Forgiveness is when you decide to permanently forgo seeking restitution or vengeance  or however you want to think about it  for an offense that someone really did commit. A person cannot actually eliminate the value of their own life, no matter what they do  Sean Illing  We like accountability, we like consequences, we like strength, but forgiveness is something very different and strange, and requires enormous will and courage. Elizabeth Bruenig  Absolutely. Quite a bit of Christian theology tries to come to terms with this. 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 last couple thousand years. But that doesnt mean that its something that is very obvious to most people. If they know theyll be forgiven, what prevents them from doing the wrong?  Sean Illing  Its a fair question. Elizabeth Bruenig  Yeah, I think mercy has a paramount place in justice. The death penalty is an apotheosis of an unmerciful kind of justice. And there are a lot of folks who say, I dont like harsh punishments, Im a prison abolitionist, but when it comes to certain offenses, all of that falls away. And Im not saying that to mock anyone for hypocrisy. Im saying this is a very hard position to hold, that mercy is central to justice. Mercy and forgiveness are very hard. Sean Illing  I think a lot about who forgiveness is really for, and I dont have a good answer. Elizabeth Bruenig  Thats a really important question because a lot of resistance to the idea of forgiveness arises from the fact that its often sold as a kind of self-help practice. Oh, someone hurt you, and youre still traumatized by it. ... All you need to do is forgive them and then youll feel better about it, and you can let go and move on. Thats just not true. And I dont 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 doesnt feel amazing. It can oftentimes be, in its own way, another layer of pain. So whatever forgiveness is, and I do think it is a personal virtue as well as a social virtue, its certainly not something you do for your own pleasure or your own health. The person doing the forgiving isnt getting a lot of bang for their buck. The person who benefits way out of proportion to what theyve done is the offender. But that raises an important point: Forgiveness is not deserved by definition. Its not something somebody earns. Its something thats freely given. You give it to someone for lots 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. Elizabeth Bruenig  I dont know. Thats a difficult question for me to answer because I cant extract myself from my religion. 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 it would be similar to asking someone, Well, does your theory of justice make sense if gravity doesnt exist? Thats kind of a shattering proposition. But there are many religions aside from mine, and many secular ideologies as well, that offer theories of forgiveness that are comparable to Christianity. Sean Illing  There are lots of things about this moment that would suggest it is ripe for forgiveness  youve pointed to all the energy around criminal justice reform, for example. But instead, the opposite is true. There seems to be no place for it, no interest in it. Elizabeth Bruenig  People are very angry, especially when you have forms of systematized oppression that have operated for a very long time, and you finally have an opportunity to reckon with those. I think its very difficult for a lot of people to say, Okay, so for the first time we have the opportunity to deliver accountability here and youre asking us to just walk away and say never mind? Thats not necessarily what forgiveness is, but it does mean asking an individual to decline to prosecute, to the fullest extent of their rights, the offense. And thats a hard pill to swallow. Forgiveness gets confused with so many things. It gets confused with mitigation or exoneration or with this idea that we have to pretend that what took place wasnt all that bad, which is just wrong in my view. But more critically, forgiveness is a very difficult moral practice. And so when you get in a situation where youre asking someone to forgive, the response often comes from a place of, Look, I was victimized, I did nothing wrong, I was minding my business and someone hurt me and Ill never get that back. I have to add a layer of emotional labor and the person who caused this harm is off the hook? And fuck, thats not an unreasonable feeling to have there. I get it. The internet is very good at inflaming our worst tendencies. Elizabeth Bruenig  I definitely think that the Internet is very good at inflaming our worst tendencies. And one of those is the tendency to discipline and punish and prosecute, not for safety, not for the preservation of community, but just for fun. So theres someone whos already been totally raked for a bad tweet or something and has already absolutely taken it on the chin, and then we see the shitty tweet again a year later and were like, Huh, okay, lets go back in on this! That happens all the time, and its a function of the internets capacity for preservation and the incentives for people to resurrect others failings for their own purposes. At the same time, I dont think people have ever been especially forgiving. I dont think we need to be too down on ourselves because I think its just a perennially difficult thing. I look back at late antiquity and the early medieval period and the stuff I studied in grad school, and those are definitely not what Id call especially merciful times or forgiving people. They knew it was important, they thought about it, they wrote about it, it was a virtue on their minds. But in just looking how society played out, it was something that, to borrow from Updike, was on their minds much more than on their schedules. Sean Illing  There seems to be a whole class of people for whom the greatest imaginable joy is discovering another persons mistake and publicly bludgeoning them with it. Humans are wired for vengeance, and I think the ability to mete it out without real effort or risk has been a social catastrophe. Elizabeth Bruenig  Thats exactly right. Like you say, the fact that its incentivized by the internet, and the fact that it carries relatively few consequences, is a huge problem. I mean, you just cut them down. Youre never going to see the consequences. They just disappear from the internet. And its like a video game. But you never see if maybe somebody had a bad day, or maybe theyre going through something hard, or theyve been going through something hard, and God knows weve all gone through a lot of hard stuff the past year. Or maybe they have a substance issue. Or maybe they just made a mistake and posted something shitty. But none of that matters. We see something, and we drag people. And then it becomes a big deal. They lose their job, and thats it. Justice is done. The bad person has been punished. You forget about it. They dont. They still have a family. They still have friends. They still have emotions. And now theyre out of a job, and the reason that they have been fired is now preserved in amber for the rest of human history, such that any time they try to get a new job or 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. Sean Illing  Given the core values of the left (and you and I are both of the left), youd think forgiveness would be a natural outgrowth of progressivism, but thats not the case, or at least its complicated. On the one hand, progressives value forgiveness, and you can see that in their willingness to forgive people whove committed violent crimes, for example. But on the other hand, a lot of progressives seem unwilling to forgive low-stakes missteps like speech crimes. Elizabeth Bruenig  Ive thought about this a lot. I have a friend whos a philosopher and pointed this out recently. Hell notice folks on the left saying 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 doesnt matter the degree to which they change or to which their current views no longer reflect their former views. They cant be forgiven because that stuff is poisonous, and it causes all the problems in society, etc. My friend said its very hard not to feel like they just dont care that much about the harm thats caused by criminals, because by and large, well-to-do professional-managerial class folks are not affected by violent crime. Most of the victims of violent crime are poor people. And so its easy for a professional-managerial class person to say that a 19-year-old who participated in a triple homicide related to a cocaine deal that went off the rails should be forgiven, because their major contact with that kind of individual or that kind of crime is watching Law and Order episodes. But that same person absolutely cant forgive someone who pissed them off on Twitter, because for them being interpersonally offended on Twitter is one of the major conflicts of their life. And I think you hear a lot of explanations. People on the left will say, Well, these interpersonal offenses are upstream of those criminal offenses downstream. So when we allow these bad ideas to percolate in society without punishment, its going to lead to violent expressions. I think thats possible, but I still think that its pretty clear that not all of the offenses that people are canceled for are actually related materially in any way to violent crime. Forgiveness is not deserved by definition. Its not something somebody earns. Elizabeth Bruenig  I say that I have four people that Ive forgiven for things theyve done to me. And its a decision thats kind of like the 12 Steps program: You remake it every day, and you do it every day. Because sometimes itll come to you, the thing that happened. Youre standing at the sink or looking out the window at the bird feeder, and the fury comes back to you and you want to explode all over again. At that point, you have to remake the decision to forgive. A lot of forgiveness, at least as its manifested in my life, is me reaching out and being there, and being friendly and warm and open for the restoration of a relationship with a person who hurt me and saying, Im still here, Im not going anywhere.  But you know, and maybe this is another discussion for another time, its also hard to be forgiven. There are so many issues with respect to pride and ego and accepting fault, and there are feelings of condescension and suspicions of having something lorded over you. So part of forgiving is to stand humbly and say, Im not kidding. Im serious. Elizabeth Bruenig  I think there are things a person can do to another person that make the likelihood that they will ever be forgiven zero percent. But in my view, a person cannot actually eliminate the value of their own life, no matter what they do. Itll always be the right thing to do to allow that person to live. I understand, though, the feeling of not being able to forgive. There are some things that just exceed the moral capacities of even the most morally heroic person. But I think we should always keep in mind that those are very, very rare instances.