An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. - book reviews

Christian Century, July 5, 1995 by Kyle A. Pasewark

NO READER can be blamed for supposing that to speak of forgiveness in politics is to risk an oxymoron," remarks Donald Shriver in this impressive work. The important task of the book is to demonstrate that forgiveness is politically significant and that the failure of political forgiveness means the death of politics. Recent events testify that political repentance, the mirror of forgiveness, is not oxymoronic. In 1988 Jesse Jackson made an extraordinary "God has not finished with me yet" apology to Jews on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. George Wallace's late public life has been a continuing exercise in repentance. Earlier this year, Representative Dick Armey beat a hasty retreat after referring to a fellow congressman as "Barney Fag" (without quite apologizing). Senator Alfonse D'Amato apologized "if" he offended anyone with his caricature of Judge Lance Ito, then added a full apology. And Robert McNamara admitted guilt about his role in prosecuting the Vietnam war. If repentance and forgiveness are irrelevant to politics, many have been deceived.

Shriver's explanation for this deluge of repentance is straightforward: the heartbeat of politics, which depends in part on "open public talk," cannot continue without the oxygenating flow of forgiveness and repentance. Although Shriver is more concerned with group rather than individual offenses, Shriver's contention applies to both: without forgiveness there is only war, not politics--only the ferocious battle of will against will without understanding, conversion, change or humaneness.

What does "forgiveness" mean in the social and political realms? Shriver argues that the conventional wisdom of "forgive and forget" is wrong. Our axiom must be "quite the reverse: 'Remember and forgive.'" Without memory, forgiveness is cheap and destructive. If we refuse to recall the wrongs we have committed, we cannot "protect the future against their repetition." "Cheap reconciliation" simply does not reconcile. Both the perpetrators and victims of injustice are left untransformed; the roots of injustice nourish violence anew. A "new politics of life" is possible only if we do not let sleeping dogs lie, but instead "accurately recollect what the politics of death did."

"Remember and forgive" provides a critique of the American unwillingness to attend to history and its lessons, and of the Christian tradition's tendency to remove forgiveness from the public realm and confine it to a private transaction between the individual and God. The latter tack was recently demonstrated by Argentina's President Carlos Menem, when he urged military officials responsible for "disappearances" in the 1970s to confess only to priests and not "rub salt in old wounds" by confessing publicly. The effect of these evasions, according to Shriver, is to abandon the social world rather than repair it.

The will to social reconstruction exposes a core feature of Shriver's understanding of forgiveness: forgiveness is not an end in itself, but a means "for the renewal of a human relationship. Not merely an act of moral high-mindedness, forgiveness aggressively seeks to repair the fractures of enmity." Memory is ambiguous, after all. We need memory if we are to avoid the dangers of careless forgetfulness of suffering and evil. Yet the memories of crimes, racial violence and hatred can themselves fuel endless cycles of violence (as the Serbian cry "Remember Kosovo" illustrates). Memory is the tinderbox of revenge, and the justice of revenge cannot be equilibrated, except in "forgiveness and its twin repentance." Repetition is the enemy of a politics of life. Therefore Shriver's version of political forgiveness must be judged according to its ability to prevent repetition--to provide the possibility for a new future rather than adding a new verse to the violent song of the past.

An Ethic for Enemies proceeds along three lines. First, Shriver outlines a theory of political forgiveness and repentance. Second, he culls narratives by Aeschylus and Thucydides and the biblical stories of Cain and Joseph in order to show that the possibility of politics depends on "the taming of revenge by the institutions of justice."

THE BULK of the book, however, occupies itself with case studies (focusing on postwar German-American and Japanese-American relations, and American race relations) which serve to illustrate Shriver's theory of political forgiveness and repentance. He relies not on theologians and philosophers but on literature, history, journalism--the arts of narration rather than those of speculation. This approach reveals two crucial points. First, forgiveness is usually a process that takes time, not an instantaneous event. Second, forgiveness in politics is possible; we know it is possible because it is already present in political and social relations.

According to Shriver, forgiveness entails four elements. It "begins with a remembering and a moral judgment of wrong, injustice and injury." This requires that both sides of the moral gulf must have some agreement with respect to the wrongs committed. In addition, as Shriver persuasively demonstrates with respect to American race relations and U.S. relations with Germany and Japan during and after World War II, there is generally guilt on both sides that cries out for repentance and forgiveness, even though such guilt is not equal. Second, although the move toward forgiveness demands the renunciation of vengeance, it does not require the abandonment of justice. To the extent possible, injustice must be rectified, and what has been taken must be restored. In short, concrete repentance is required.