Tutu, Krog, Gobodo-Madikizela, and others working with the TRC understood that the work of forgiveness is ongoing. It doesn’t end when a perpetrator confesses and offers an apology, or when a victim says, “I forgive you.” A genuine apology “must communicate, convey, and perform as a ‘speech act’ that expresses a desire to right the relationship damaged through the actions of the apologizer… It clears or ‘settles’ the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings.” Or as Stefaans Coetzee (a member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement convicted of killing four people and injuring sixty-seven others in a bomb attack) came to realize, saying sorry isn’t enough. “There must be doing of sorry.”
…If people fail to investigate the past, they will fail to notice how past structures and patterns of behaving are still influencing and operating in the present and thus not have a clear understanding of what needs to change. But dealing with all the past is not easily done, especially when recalling it brings people face to face with histories of violence and neglect. As numerous scholars have noted, people find it hard to live honestly with themselves. They prefer to repeat to themselves and to others stories about the past that cast them in a good or at least acceptable light. The impulse reverberates in the cultural liturgies that perpetuate myths of a community’s or nation’s innocent and glorious past. But the impulse also resounds in individuals, as Jacqueline Rose observes: “Our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that… we can feel better about ourselves.” This strategy is dangerous because it depends on people denying or distorting their histories. In this denial and distortion they (a) lie about the pain and suffering circulating through the world and (b) refuse to acknowledge their role in perpetuating, whether intentionally or not, that pain and suffering. When people repudiate their role in the creation and perpetuation of brutality in the world, they grant violence “its license to roam, since it then becomes essential that someone else bear the responsibility, shoulder the burden, pay the price.”
We the People
Kevin Williamson:
In our time of imbecilic populism, there is an imperative for politicians and activists to pretend that We the People can never be wrong. And that ends up being a problem when We the People—who are, in the main, fools and worse—aren’t with you on an issue. And so you have to invent some new categories—the Real Americans™ who are always on your side—or else pretend that We the People have been misled, that (the Republican version) they are victims of media bias or (the Democratic version) that they have been bamboozled by people who exploit their quaint religious beliefs in order to blind them to their own interests. We the People and the world’s political forces are like the czar and his ministers: The former must always be good and wise and holy, while the latter is responsible for anything that goes wrong. The czar has absolute power and is responsible for absolutely nothing. All of this nonsense is easier to keep straight in your head if you believe that the other side is simply evil.
“bidden or unbidden“
I’m a non-ordained pastoral presence in the parish, a kind of unofficial deacon. I try to bring the world’s questions to church, and I try to bring the presence of the church to the neighbourhood. When I go out into the world, I look for signs of the active, loving presence of God. Where is he at work? Everywhere. Always. Anxiously fretting as though God has fled the scene, or that we’ve so royally flubbed things down here that he’s hamstrung and his hands are tied—this is not true. Ours is not a position of fear and combativeness; it is one of gratitude and service. Bidden or unbidden, God is present.
Our anxious hand-wringing over “the decline of all things good” is not a virtue, nor is our doomscrolling, searching for evidence to bolster our opinion, the frenetic posting and sharing, exaggerating for the satisfaction of being on the right side of history, whatever you think that might be. Are we in a story of decline or a story of progress? Girard said it’s both simultaneously. The world is amazing: we’ve got it so good. Not everyone, I know, and not equally, of course. But the world is so unbelievably good, it’s not even close. And: some things are truly awful, disastrous, cataclysmic, and thank God we’ve even got the capacity to see that, to know that so many things are not as they ought to be.
Berry commends his readers to “be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” If we’re not going to solve the big problems, we can stop telling the kids or anyone else that things are going to be okay, that we can fix things if we just put our minds to it. Nope. Not going to happen. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. It’s not our task to maintain a broad cultural appreciation of traditional Christian beliefs and practices. We have grown comfortable in socially accepted cultural expressions of our faith and respect for our beliefs, but that luxury is a historical anomaly. Culture doesn’t owe us its admiration, appreciation, respect, or gratitude.
But we are called to be and to do certain things, and we should not be surprised when we aren’t loved or admired for our efforts. When it looks like the end of the world, we might be looking at things the wrong way, and even when it truly is the end of the world, it’s not our job to fret and fight to make sure things go our way. We are, instead, called to maintain a faithful presence. We are called to joy.
“the duty to question and look in the face”
The point is that memory is a sacred fact, tragically dense, identitary and yet open. And it is marked by boulders and pauses for meditation, by beauty and horror, by symbolic writings and images. It should then be left the time and space of sediment, of transformation, of testimony. With all the inconvenience that sometimes comes from that. Hans Piffrader’s imposing bas-relief tells a thousand things, and tells them – even if it is not a masterpiece – with the finesse and passion of the creative gesture. Things that still today invite reflection. No longer propaganda, but document. A corpus that the present has the duty to question and look in the face, continuing to make itself history, to take the burden, to drag forward the echo of the facts, the effort of analysis, the exercise of resistance.
no flux, no glory
Luke Bretherton (emphasis added):
The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, rather than Western culture or a particular intellectual tradition, are the condition for the possibility of movement into new kinds of relationship with God and neighbour. Any such journey of conversion demands that we orient ourselves to living in time and the experience of flux and transition that is part of what it means to be a finite and fallen creature rather than a god.… Seeking to encounter Christ where the Spirit is blowing here and now rules out a nostalgic division that poses the past as good and the present as intrinsically bad. All forms of life are entangled with idolatry and structural sin. The spiritual, moral, and political struggle is to find ways to identify with Christ and participate in the work of the Holy Spirit and thereby dis-identify with the past and present idols and cultural systems of domination that shape us.
a better American tradition
It was disorienting to read [Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option] as a Black American Christian. My people had never been at the centre of power. The Republican Party had not felt like home to most of us since the middle of the twentieth century. And the arc of the arrow of Dreher’s argument, of being pushed from cultural dominance into marginalization and defensiveness, was foreign to me. It was hard not to sniff some deeper insecurity at play in this paradigm that resonated with many white Christians while overlooking a vast swath of American Christian experience. Was Dreher really motivated by a concern for holiness, or was he peddling nostalgia for what looked like the good old days from his limited vantage point?
It was fascinating to see Dreher lift up faraway models of Christians coping amid intensifying hostility—Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia—while jumping right over his American neighbours in the Black Church. I deeply admire the Christian witness as it has found (and continues to find) its shape and subversive power in communist and post-communist contexts. But it felt as though Dreher (and the subsequent proliferation of hand-wringers like him) was keen on stripping all American believers of an inheritance of Christian integrity under hostile circumstances. This is not just bad history; it betrays a culturally selective understanding of gospel power.
humor from a Russian prison
So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favorite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.
A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.
The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favorite American writer, Hemingway?
Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba, with a glass of rum in his hand, and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here, when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.
Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I, too, am writing a book. Next, I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.
humility reveals the final word
If the universe is not a joke but a comedy, not a tragedy but a drama in which love has the final word, then something like the God revealed in Jesus Christ might be worth considering.
I’m aware that a line like this doesn’t pass muster with most Christians I know. Fifteen years ago it wouldn’t have passed muster with me. It’s too soft and wishy washy. “Surely,” we are taught to say, “the almighty God of the universe isn’t the kind to say ‘Maybe you could, perhaps, given your situation, think about possibly considering me?’” But I think that that’s exactly how Jesus spoke to people. It just wasn’t as wimpy as the caricature we use to excuse it and to avoid having to embrace the true humility that God expressed — and constantly expresses — toward us. There is probably a good reason, after all, why the kenosis of Philippians 2 tends to invoke the charge of heresy if you (*gasp*) take it too far.
What I crave, and what I think the world is dying for, are people who will take it seriously… and take it far.
“cross-country regressionss”
This alternative explanation for AJR’s famous result has never been rejected, and it’s so important that the Nobel committee saw the need to issue a disclaimer about it in their prize announcement…
This is a pretty startling thing to have to put in a Nobel Prize announcement, isn’t it? It basically amounts to saying “Well, this result doesn’t actually prove the researchers’ hypothesis, and in fact the hypothesis probably can’t be proven, but we’re going to give it a Nobel anyway because it’s strongly suggestive.” If you want economics to be more of a science and less of a branch of philosophy, that’s not the kind of thing you want to have to write!
“expedient to their political core”
Mark Leibovich, in something of a “hall of faith cowardice” for the Grand Old Party:
He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.
[…]
After Trump won the nomination in 2016, “The party defines the party” became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP’s putative leaders. House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to me that he would “protect conservatism from being disfigured.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Trump is not going to change the institution,” referring to the GOP. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.”
In retrospect, this was hilarious.
Hilarious, of course, because it was pure bullshit. As I’ve been learning, over and over and over again for the last decade-plus, it’s all been steeped in bullshit from the beginning. They were just better at controlling it and hiding it (even from themselves) before someone truly shameless came along and showed them — or showed the rest of the world, anyway — just how little control, and even less integrity, they really have.