Forgiveness
We find it all too easy to be haughty, to be disdainful, to speak with a choleric air of arrogance and superiority when we impudently operate by the premise that the people we’re speaking to are intentionally lazy, careless, inattentive, selfish, immoral, or hypocritical.
But time and time again, once we actually take the time to learn the other person’s story, we regret our contemptuous behavior. It is only after the fact—only after we’ve learned that the person we lambasted for being timorous and cowardly had an incredibly difficult and traumatic past, only after we’ve learned that the employee that we shamed for making a mistake on our order has a severe mental disability or grew up with no parents, only after we’ve learned that the ostensibly irresponsible person that never showed up to our appointment got into a tragic car accident—that we begin to commiserate, that we begin to feel remorse.
We are shamelessly quick to assign motives and fabricate narratives to swiftly quell our fear of the unknown, to provide us with at least a surface-level explanation for others’ behavior. But why? Why play this inane game vacillating between contempt and remorse when we can just be a little patient, to take a moment to ask the other person why, to wait things out and actually be presented with real evidence of a certain narrative?
If we latch onto a rigid ideal of free will—that, despite all the chaos, uncertainty, and complexity of this world that we live in, we are all allocated equally difficult circumstances, that we have an equal response to those circumstances, that we all play under the same rules, and thus that we become equally capable actors to carry out our individual desires—forgiveness ceases to make any sense. If we are confronted with any trait or characteristic in another individual that might be considered remotely detestable, why wouldn’t we detest it, if it’s their fault, after all?
But if we do indeed presume that we operate under the same rules and the same constraints, then why is it that we’re not just all the same? Within such a perspective, how do we explain human difference? What is the true origin of benevolence or malevolence that drags us to take certain paths in life? If we predicate that we did indeed choose to be different, then the question inevitably always boils down to what made us choose one thing over another? Why does someone choose to do good over bad, or bad over good? It would be incredibly naive of us to insist that each one of us is granted an unlimited set of options, all of which we deem are simultaneously viable and appropriate. And where do such definitions of viability and appropriateness even derive from, at that? If we were to explain human difference from such a perspective, the logical conclusion would be that there must be some inherent energy within each of our spirits that predisposes us towards a certain path, and, at that point, we’ve come full circle, proving that there is no real choice, and no true free will.
Tolerance and forgiveness is a means of circumventing this absurdity; within each of them is fundamentally an implicit understanding of these limitations that exist within our supposed free will. Just as we might criticize a parent internalizing contempt for their purportedly failed child—the very same child they were responsible for instilling sound character into—it is no different that we might criticize one another for the internalization of contempt at a societal level. If we can agree that this rigid understanding of free will is even remotely flawed—that both the world that we live in and the physical bodies that we inhabit are incomprehensibly complex, impossible to control, inherently unjust in its design, unpredictable, wayward, and capricious—to forgive and to tolerate are the only right things to do. The alternative is the complete and utter destruction of the fabric of humanity—all of us, wallowing in an unceasing pit of antagonism and blame, mired in a putrid miasma of pride and obstinance, and branded with indelible guilt and shame.
