To know all is to forgive all?

This proverb makes sense best when 'forgive' is understood as 'excuse' and it has the strength of alerting us to the frequent mismatch between the number of occasions in which we take personal offence and the number of occasions in which personal offence is not really justified. That is to say that many of us assume or presume much of the time that some wrong done to us is deliberately, perhaps even spitefully, meant or some kind of blameworthy negligence. The proverb alerts us to the possibility that much of the damage and hurt we do to one another is actually not really 'personal' at all in the sense of malice or inconsiderateness. It recognises that many people act out of limited knowledge, habits of mind and action and even from out of their own damaged-ness and compulsions which are not necessarily under their 'personal' control. In such circumstances they are not truly blameworthy and so are excusable. If forgiveness is most truly about putting aside personal affront which responds to the malice or inconsiderateness of others, then to know all is to discover there is nothing to forgive.

However, the proverb is probably too optimistic: there are occasions when malice and blameworthy negligence are key factors in hurts we sustain in our personal interactions with others. And so while we might be able to say “To know all is to excuse much” we might also have to say “To know all is to understand what truly needs forgiveness”. In putting it that way I'm indicating that I think that that, once all the excuses are made and due weight given to mitigating factors, such as ignorance, irresistible compulsions or cultural relativity, there is likely to remain a residue at least of blameworthy acts or planning of culpable acts which cannot be excused and for which we are truly responsible to some degree. It is these that concern forgiveness. My own suspicion is that these are less frequent or common than some theologies would lead us to suspect. On the other hand 'responsible to some degree' might mean that there are more than more 'optimistic' or relativistic anthropologies might suggest which, as per the proverb in the heading, could well suggest that there are very few or none.

One of the areas where I want, at a later point, to probe further in relation to culpability, is that relating to socialised wrong-doing, in particular in relation to our participation in organisations -corporisations- which subsume us to varying degrees in their own emergent agency. The question that these pose is how far do they subsume our individual agency, and how far are we responsible for their ill-deeds and to what extent are we excusable or even victims of them?

So this piece on excusing should help us to approach forgiving more properly starting in the next post.

Prior post here. Next post here ...