Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2010

The Mystery of Forgiveness

BEYOND REVENGE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE FORGIVENESS INSTINCT
by Michael McCullough
Jossey Bass, 2008

NO ENEMY TO CONQUER: FORGIVENESS IN AN UNFORGIVING WORLD
by Michael Henderson
Baylor University Press, 2008

Review by Roger S. Gottlieb

Remember that nervous feeling you have after a fight with your spouse and before you've made up. Or the hidden relish you feel at the thought of payback for some coworker who complained about you to the boss. These are not emotional quirks or moral failings. Such deep attractions to both forgiveness and revenge are, psychological researcher Michael McCullough tells us, hard-wired aspects of our brain and personality. They are experiential and behavioral tendencies created by evolutionary selection that have proved beneficial in the long-term struggle to carry our genes from one generation to the next.

McCullough confronts head-on the widespread idea that revenge is some kind of disease, for which forgiveness is the proper cure. Rather, both revenge and forgiveness are necessary aspects of human development and, in many cases, the development of other animals, as well. The threat, even the practice, of revenge keeps aggression in check and motivates individuals to take equal responsibility in their groups' tasks and dangers. Forgiveness promotes close ties among families, animal groups, and human communities—ties necessary for mutual support in the fight for survival. McCullough supports his account with various types of evidence, describing how certain Latin American fish have strategies to encourage each other to take equal risks in scouting out predators, or how some of the higher primates are more likely to engage in reconciliation activities like hugging, kissing, and grooming after a conflict than before. He also refers to ingenious computer simulations of the outcomes of various strategies of forgiveness and revenge: a cautious program that allows for the judicious use of each is the most successful in the long run, according to these simulations. Finally, he cites neurological studies that associate feelings of revenge and forgiveness with particular parts of the brain.

Beyond Revenge also targets what McCullough calls the "myth of social science"—the idea that human behavior is totally determined by culture, education, and social pressure, and that we have no hard-wired determinants of how we act. Over the course of the book, he compiles evidence to refute this myth.

The irony of McCullough's position is his conclusion: since we are hard-wired to both forgiveness and revenge, it turns out that social, cultural, and historical contexts determine which will predominate. If the context leads us to the three necessary steps of forgiveness—seeing former enemies as people who are worthy of care and with whom we can empathize; feeling that they are no longer a significant threat; and witnessing some kind of apology or self-abasement from them—then forgiveness can arise. If the context doesn't meet these conditions, forgiveness is unlikely to arise. In practice then, both with and without the idea that forgiveness and revenge are built in, the context is all-important.

McCullough's book is intriguing and well written, but at times I wonder if he is really confronting the problem of forgiveness as we face it in real life. While he pays a little attention to social conflicts like the one in South Africa—where the truth and reconciliation commissions seem to confirm some of his claims about the necessary stages of forgiveness—the vast majority of his examples come from animals who try to discipline group members or experimental subjects who, for example, get insulted by an experimenter.

Are these kinds of examples really germane to understanding the dynamic of forgiveness in dreadful flare-ups like the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza, with its attendant nearly 1,500 deaths; or the less publicized but clearly much more severe violence between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, with more than 50,000 deaths; or the civil wars in Lebanon, El Salvador, and Guatemala with over 100,000 deaths in each; or ethnic strife in Darfur, with over 300,000?

Extreme situations like these are the subject of No Enemy to Conquer. And in fact many of the narratives in Henderson's serious, thoughtful, and at times compelling book confirm McCullough's positions, but they also include some important elements that McCullough ignores.

As Henderson himself makes quite clear, his approach is story oriented rather than theoretical, and the heart of his presentation are graphic descriptions of situations in which, after almost unimaginable brutality, some kind of forgiveness and reconciliation arise. His book is also something of a collaborative effort, including short, powerful, and widely varied essays by eleven other "forgiveness activists," including Desmond Tutu, British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, former Ugandan cabinet minister Betty Bigombe, and a number of committed, engaged academics.

Henderson's book leads us to ask: What will allow us to see our enemies in a new light that will make forgiveness possible? How can a member of an ethnic or political group who raped your sister or murdered your son become someone "worthy of care," even if he is no longer a threat? For example: how did Judea Pearl, father of the beheaded-for-the-camera journalist Daniel Pearl, commit himself to public action against the kind of "hatred that took the life of my son," working with a Muslim peace activist in public settings?

From Henderson we know that there are some common points along the journey.

First, there must arise a kind of fundamental revulsion at the process and effects of violence. The broken bodies, families, and communities to which these conflicts give rise must cease to be attractive. An essentially moral horror at the "fruits" of revenge must take precedence over the (evolutionarily based, McCullough insists) pleasure of getting even. Judea Pearl was clear in his assertion that "hate" killed his son, and it was hate that he was opposing.

Only after this kind of perceptual change can empathy arise—a sense of commonality between our grief, frustration, and oppression and that of our enemies. Talking about Ahmed Akbar, his Islamic partner in opposing hatred, Pearl said: "Ahmed was the only Muslim author I read who had expressed empathy for the sense of siege Israelis feel. Empathy is the essence of understanding and the prerequisite to dialogue."

Third, in order for the transformation of select individuals like Pearl or Akbar to have any public effect, an enormous amount of work is necessary, work that involves listening to the horrific stories of survivors, establishing credibility in warring communities, and accepting a host of inevitable setbacks.

Many of McCullough's generalizations, and those of Henderson as well, describe these processes. For those of us who wonder if Palestinian and Israeli, Irish and English, or other warring groups can ever have peace, Henderson's inspiring examples make clear that any groups, no matter what their history, can be reconciled, if something like the combination of factors described so far occurs.

Yet how do particular individuals who themselves have taken part in the violence (and forcefully encouraged others to do so in many of the examples Henderson offers) turn their backs on conflicts that take tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, and come to embrace each other as comrades in the long attempt to heal their common wounds? What gives a person the courage to reject self-righteous hatred and embrace empathy and humility? How can we recognize our own moral weaknesses as well as those of the other side and see that, under comparable conditions, we might act the same way? How do we convince ourselves, on a spiritual and psychological level, that the certainties of conflict are more destructive than the uncertainties of peace, or that love is less painful and more fulfilling than rage and bitterness?

I don't know, and neither do these authors. They can show some of the conditions under which such shifts in attitude take place, both theoretically and as historical narratives. But no one knows why some people make the necessary changes and others don't. Despite these authors' serious attempts to make forgiveness comprehensible, the human heart remains a mystery to us all. Yet at least these books tell us that the changes are possible for us as human beings and have many times, against all expectation, actually occurred. That alone makes both of them very much worth reading.

Roger S. Gottlieb is a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Two of his books are A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future and A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth.

Source Citation

Gottlieb, Roger S. 2010. The Mystery of Forgiveness. Tikkun 25(1): 63.