Yesterday was a good day to think about forgiveness. It has been very much on my mind lately.

In one sense, it is very easy to forgive. If someone wronged me, and I am the only person affected, all I need to do is decide to wipe the slate clean. It may be difficult to come to this decision, because it requires letting go of what may be well-justified anger about the initial wrong; and perhaps I may have some concern that I don’t want that wrong repeated. But I can make the decision entirely on my own, there is no one I need to consult. Not only is it easy to do, it feels good. Even more than that, forgiveness can put me in a better place than I started off - it gives me a chance to understand the other person that much better, and perhaps to provide even more rigorous accountability than simple revenge might have done.

But what if I’m not the only person affected? What if that person hurt other people in my life? In that case forgiveness is not really mine to decide on; everyone affected needs to decide. The decision in fact needs to be unanimous; or in any case, forgiveness that’s only partial doesn’t really “work”. Moreover the decision needs to incorporate some degree of accountability and moral hazard - while the initial wrong is forgiven, we don’t really want to see it repeated. The more people affected, and the more hurtful the initial wrong, the more important accountability is. At the same time, the more profound and powerful forgiveness can be: it can create yet more understanding and deeper trust than the simple case of one person wronged.

The problem becomes more complicated still when we think about actions that affect entire groups, including people I’ve never met. At this level I think about people who tend to get cast as villains in documentaries: the corporate lobbyists who tried to hide the dangerous impacts of cigarette smoking; elected officials who upheld Jim Crow laws; the judges whose decisions legalized police brutality and corporate malfeasance; and on and on. Is it even possible to forgive these people? What does the forgiveness process look like in these cases? How do we maintain accountability, and what sort of wider benefits are there to all involved?

Hopefully it’s obvious how relevant this question is, not just today but for a long time to come. I like to think that some day, we will look back on 2020 as “the year that broke politics”, in the best imaginable way. Today we are in a real mess, and that is without even considering the public health crisis. Our political system seems to operate on distrust and hatred, and to produce ever more of it, in some kind of nightmarish dystopian cycle. In some way it is this political system which has made the pandemic so miserable - in that the public policy response has been such a massive wreck, and has caused so much unnecessary misery in every direction.

For a long time now there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about animosity and vitriol in politics. I don’t know how to assess it quantitatively, but it does seem to me that politics has become a lot meaner over the course of my lifetime. (Though granted, it depends on your perspective - it was not so long ago that “politics” in some parts of the country included widespread domestic terrorism in order to scare millions of people away from participation in public life.) There’s a lot of question about how severe the problem is, and whether, indeed, it is a problem - never mind how to solve it. I think those questions are very fair: quite often the hand-wringing about civility in politics amounts to a ham-handed attempt to silence people with a very legitimate grievance. At the same time, at this point it’s impossible to deny just how damaging the tone of public life is. In some fashion the widespread distrust is responsible for our uneven and inept response to the pandemic - in turn we can chalk up huge amounts of death, economic ruin, and plain misery to this problem.

To be sure, it’s not just the tone of discourse, but the people in power who contribute to and even exacerbate that tone. Just as significantly, it’s these leaders who make substantive, ruinous decisions to mismanage the crisis. If actions speak louder than words, then there are some extremely loud actors who are responsible for an awful lot of wreckage today. We need to hold these people accountable, no doubt about it: they need to lose power, history needs to judge them harshly for their failures, and so forth. That is beyond question, it is a simple matter of democratic accountability.

Here is the question that is weighing heavily on my mind: is it possible to forgive these people? What does that process look like? Could we somehow come to a kind of deeper healing, as a society, by undergoing some form of a forgiveness process? What would that mean for our future?

I have in mind something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that attempted to heal the wounds of apartheid in South Africa. Of course, as terrible as the pandemic is, in many ways it pales in comparison to apartheid; I don’t mean to equate our suffering today with that of South Africans over the course of decades. Moreover, the Commission was not without its critics, and certainly it made some mistakes - granting amnesty to past offenders being perhaps the gravest one. Nevertheless, it’s the most significant process of intentional national forgiveness that comes to mind.

Is something like that needed, once we are finally past this pandemic? Is it possible? Is it wise? What would it look like?

I don’t know the answers - these questions are not rhetorical at all. I like to think that it is somehow possible for our society to forgive those leaders who have wronged us. It’s not right to ask for some kind of bland “civility in politics,” especially not as a way to silence disempowered people with legitimate grievances. But perhaps it is possible to ask for “forgiveness in politics” - and thereby to empower those same people, to give voice and even healing to their grievances. Is that something we can do? Can we make it work? I certainly hope so.