Pinning Your Own Tail on Someone Else’s Donkey – Guilty feelings got you down? Let Dr. Feelgood help you move on.

Forgiveness is one of the golden words of our culture. It glistens with a hundred admirable qualities, and its purity and moral prestige seem beyond challenge. Even when we cannot ourselves forgive a transgressor, we usually credit the generosity of those who can. To forgive others is taken to be a sign of a full and munificent and sacrificial heart, and moreover a heart that wisely recognizes the fleeting nature of life and the universal weakness of all human beings, very much including oneself. There but for the grace of God, or sheer happenstance, go I, it seems to say, so why hold a grudge, when life is short and happiness ephemeral? In the face of our shared human frailty, forgiveness expresses a kind of transcendent and unconditional regard for the humanity of the other, free of any admixture of interest or punitive anger. It transcends mere considerations of justice, for to forgive, whether one is forgiving trespasses or debts, precisely means suspending all such just and legitimate claims in the name of the higher ground of love and human solidarity.

But we live in a therapeutic age, and nothing shows that fact more clearly than the ways in which we have changed the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness is now deemed admirable and desirable for an entirely new reason: It makes us, the forgivers, feel better. Arguably this all began with Sigmund Freud, who sought ways to relieve in his patients the worst burdens imposed by their oppressive and hyperactive superegos, without rendering any judgment as to whether those guilty feelings were or were not justifiable. But the nonjudgmental therapeutic worldview whose seeds he planted has come into full flower in modern America, and the venerable moral transaction called “forgiveness” has been profoundly affected thereby.

One can get a glimpse of this shift by scanning the self-help shelves of American bookstores, where you will find books bearing such titles as Total Forgiveness, Forgiveness: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Get On with Your Life, Choosing Forgiveness: Your Journey to Freedom, and Forgiveness: The Greatest Healer of All. Dozens of websites devote themselves to the subject, including a website called “Forgive for Good” by one Frederic Luskin, Ph.D., director and cofounder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project (and author of Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness), who declares that “forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.” Even the respected journalist Gregg Easterbrook has posted an article on the Beliefnet website entitled “Forgiveness Is Good for Your Health.”

I don’t mean to disparage these writings in a blanket way or label them utterly wrong. There is no small truth to what they say, and the forgiveness they advocate still is, or can be, a beautiful and noble act that can release the soul from captivity to hateful emotions. But the shift in emphasis is notable. In the new acceptation, forgiveness is all about the forgiver and his or her well-being. And the motivation is sometimes bordering on the suspect. As Dr. Luskin puts it, in arguing for the health-giving benefits of forgiving, “Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge.... Forgiveness is about personal power.”

This puts a rather different cast on the idea that the forgiving heart “rises above” the one that wounded it. In seeing forgiveness as a locus of power and revenge, we are a long way from Portia’s unstrained “quality of mercy,” which “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” and blesses both “him that gives and him that takes.” And a longer way from Christ’s anguished cry from the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And perhaps even further from the most basic sense of forgiveness, the cancelling of a monetary debt or the pardoning of a criminal offense, in either case constituting a very conscious suspension of the rightful demands of justice.

We still value forgiveness but are very confused about it, and in our confusion we may have produced a situation in which forgiveness has in fact very nearly lost its luster as well as its meaning. Like the similar acts of confession or apology, forgiveness is in danger of being debased into a kind of cheap grace, a waiving of standards of justice without which such transactions have no meaning. Forgiveness makes sense only in the presence of a robust sense of justice; without that, it is in real danger of being reduced to something passive and automatic and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on.

We live in an age in which being nonjudgmental in our dealings with others is increasingly viewed as part and parcel of being civilized, the only truly generous and humane stance. But without the exercise of moral judgment there can be no meaningful forgiveness, as surely as there cannot be mercy without a prior commitment to justice. Forgiveness can’t be understood apart from the assumption that we inhabit a moral universe in which moral responsibility matters, moral choices have real consequences, and justice and guilt have a salient role. Forgiveness in its deepest sense is something different from “letting go of anger” so that we can individually experience wholeness and healing. It involves an extraordinary suspension of the normal workings of justice: of the normal penalties for crimes, and the normal costs for moral failings. By definition, it is something that can only be done rarely without undermining the very moral basis upon which it rests and creating an entirely different set of expectations. The famous admonition from Tuesdays with Morrie that we should “Forgive everybody everything” is perhaps wise as a psychological instruction, but meaningless as a more general dictum.

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So there is a problem with the understanding of guilt and forgiveness in our day; they have transformed into floating signifiers without any effective objective correlative. This arises partly out of the influential therapeutic view that the experience of guilt does not reflect one’s apprehension of real moral issues but rather the interplay of psychic forces that do not relate to anything morally consequential.

But there is another factor at work too, a paradoxical one that might be called the infinite extensibility of guilt. In a world in which individuals become ever more powerful and effective agents, and in which the web of relationships between causes and effects becomes ever better understood, the range of our moral responsibility, and therefore of our potential guilt, expands to literally infinite proportions. I can see pictures of a starving child in a remote corner of the world on my television, and know for a fact that I could travel to that remote place and relieve that child’s suffering, if I cared to. Whatever donation I make to a charitable organization, it is never as much as I could give. I can never diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give to the poor enough, or otherwise do the things that would render me morally blameless. The demands on an active conscience are literally as endless as an active imagination’s ability to conjure them.

Notwithstanding claims about a post-Christian world devoid of censorious public morality, we in fact live in a world that carries around an enormous and growing burden of guilt, and yearns to be free of it. That burden is ever looking for an opportunity to discharge itself. Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be “right with the world.” One would be right to expect that such a powerful need, nearly as powerful as the merely physical ones, would continue to find ways to manifest itself, even if it has to do so in odd and perverse ways.

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Which brings me to a very curious story, full of significance for these matters. It comes from a New York Times op-ed column by Daniel Mendelsohn, published on March 9, 2008, and aptly titled “Stolen Suffering.” Mendelsohn, a Bard College professor who has written a book about his family’s experience of the Holocaust, tells of hearing the story of an orphaned Jewish girl who trekked 2,000 miles from Belgium to Ukraine, surviving the Warsaw ghetto, murdering a German officer, and taking refuge in forests, where she was protected by wolves. The story was given wide circulation in a 1997 book, and its veracity was generally accepted. But it was recently discovered to be a complete fabrication, created by a Belgian Roman Catholic woman named Monique De Wael.

Such a deception, Mendelsohn argued, is not an isolated event. It needs to be understood in the context of a growing number of “phony memoirs,” such as the notorious child-survivor Holocaust memoir Fragments, or Love and Consequences, the putative autobiography of a young mixed-race woman raised by a black foster mother in gang-infested Los Angeles. These books were, as Mendelsohn says, “a plagiarism of other people’s trauma ... written not, as they claim to be, by members of oppressed classes (the Jews during World War II, the impoverished African-Americans of Los Angeles today), but by members of relatively safe or privileged classes.” Interestingly, too, he notes that the authors seemed to have an unusual degree of identification with their subjects — in fact, a degree of identification approaching the pathological. Ms. De Wael, for example, declared, rather astonishingly, that “the story is mine ... not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.”

Mendelsohn goes on to draw pertinent conclusions from these stories, about how we have lost a sense of reality and have been taken in by the claims of “empathy” in our culture. All true. But I believe there are perhaps even more profound inferences to be drawn from this strange phenomenon. There have always been stories abroad about “stolen valor,” about those who inflate their standing with others by boasting of wartime exploits that never occurred. And it is not hard to understand the motive behind such fraudulence: the desire to be thought a hero and identified with heroic virtues. But this is different. What these authors are appropriating is stolen suffering, and the identification they are pursuing is an identification with certifiable victims. It is a particular and peculiar kind of identity theft. How to account for it? What is motivating it? Why would comfortable and privileged people want to identify with victims? And why would their efforts appeal to a substantial reading public? How, in a word, can one account for the rise of the prestige of victims, as a category, in the contemporary world?

I believe the explanation is traceable to the pervasive need in our time to find moral absolution, to somehow discharge one’s moral burden, and to the fact that the conventional means of finding that absolution are no longer open. Making a claim to the status of certified victim, or identification with victims, however, offers itself as a substitute means by which the moral burden of sin can be shifted, and one’s innocence affirmed. Recognition of this substitute may have operated with particular strength in certain individuals, such as these authors. But there seems to have been a larger shift of sensibility, which represents an adaptation of the moral economy of sin. And almost none of it has occurred consciously.

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In the modern West, that moral economy remains deeply tied to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the fundamental truth about sin in the Judeo-Christian tradition is that it must be discharged. It cannot be dissolved by divine fiat nor repressed nor borne forever. In the Jewish moral world in which Christianity originated, and without which it would have been unthinkable, sin had had always to be paid for; its effects could never be ignored or willed away. To do so would mean a violation of God’s perfectly just nature. Which is precisely why, in the Christian context, forgiveness of sin was specifically related to Jesus Christ’s substitutionary atonement, his vicarious payment for all human sins, procured through his death on the cross and made available freely to all who embraced him in faith. Forgiveness has an enormously high standing in the Christian faith. But it is bound to fundamental theological and metaphysical beliefs about the person and work of Christ, which are in turn traceable to Jewish notions of sin and how one pays for it. Without those beliefs, forgiveness can be very hard to sustain in any meaningful form.

But how, in a society that retains Judeo-Christian moral reflexes without Judeo-Christian metaphysics, can a credible means of discharging the weight of sin be found? A workable way to be at peace with oneself and feel just and “right with the world” is to identify oneself as a certifiable victim — or better yet, by identifying oneself with victims. This is why the Mendelsohn story is so important and so profoundly indicative, even if it deals with a rather extreme case. It points toward the way in which identification with victims, and the appropriation of victim status, has become an irresistible moral attraction. Indeed it suggests the real possibility that claiming victim status is the sole sure means left of absolving oneself and securing one’s sense of fundamental moral innocence.

Why should that be so? The answer is simple. With moral responsibility comes inevitable moral guilt, for reasons already explained. So if one wishes to be innocent, one must find a way to sustain a claim that one cannot be held morally responsible. This is precisely what the claim of victimhood accomplishes. When one is a certifiable victim, one is released from moral responsibility because a victim is someone who is, by definition, not responsible for his condition, but can point to another who is responsible. (The readiness with which many people are willing to explain their failures or misbehaviors by reference to “objective” medical conditions, such as “sexual addition,” is a variation on the same theme.) As a victim, he can project onto another person, the victimizer or oppressor, any feelings of guilt he might harbor, and in projecting lift it off his own shoulders. The designated oppressor plays the role of scapegoat, upon whose head the sin comes to rest, and who pays the price for it. By contrast, in appropriating the status of victim, or identifying oneself with victims, one can experience a profound sense of moral release. It is no wonder that this should have become so common a gambit in our time, so effectively does it deal with the problem of guilt. At least in the short run.

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This phenomenon could not have happened absent the influence of Christianity. Staking a claim to false suffering would have been incomprehensible in ancient Greece or Rome, for example, where pagan virtues did not notably include compassion, humility, and willingness to forgive. There would be no moral status there to be drawn from identification with the victim. Indeed, such reflections cause one to remember the shocking contrast between the proud glories of the classical world and those of this strange emergent Jewish sect, which followed an incognito God who came into the world as the least among us, emptied of all majesty, and who submitted to a horrifying and humiliating death. The great moral reversal wrought by Christianity was the indispensable source of most of today’s commonplaces about universal human rights, human dignity, and much else that the secular world proudly claims for itself.

Although this new sensibility is a product of Christianity, one should quickly add that it is a perversion of Christianity, a religion that in its orthodox form would have no way of understanding forgiveness independent of the earthly ministry of Christ and our human response to it. It is not a coincidence that the rise of the cult of victimization in our culture corresponds fairly exactly with the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Identifying with the poor because Christ commanded it is a very different matter from caring about the poor because the cult of victimization demands it.

This new sensibility creates enormous problems, especially in our public life, precisely because it does not deal honestly with the problem of sin, but merely plays a game of projection and displacement, in which everyone is pinning his own tail on someone else’s donkey. Public apologies for the institution of slavery, such as the recent one put forward by the United States Senate, are an example. Not only do such apologies seek absolution for the living at the expense of the dead, but they point toward the extensibility of guilt; once we are fully in the grip of that idea, nothing can ever be forgiven, because moral responsibility is spread everywhere and nowhere, too pervasive and diffuse ever to be located, let alone answered.

Some of the most poisonous effects of this changed sensibility and the cult of victimhood are visible in academe, where both the unreality and infinite extensibility of guilt are prime tenets, where common sense is often weak, and where the atmosphere is often charged with a half-mad level of moral electricity. Faculty and administrator watchdogs leap with both feet upon would-be transgressors who fail, in even slight and well-meaning ways, to observe the regnant pieties regarding race, class, or gender in their public statements. These watchdog figures are not only policing discourse in a way that conflicts with the very purposes of the academy, but in so doing, they are working out their own salvation with fear and trembling. They are seeking justification for themselves through identification with the victim, or putative victim, and by establishing the distance between themselves and the oppressor. By attacking the scapegoat oppressor (who is often merely a hapless and vulnerable colleague) forcefully and ostentatiously, they displace their guilt onto him, and prove to all the world their own innocence. Upon his head are transferred the sins of the community, enacting one of the most ancient rites of moral transference, leaving the community purified thereby. It is an ugly and corrosive little game, and in the end serves only to exacerbate differences and erode the very possibility of civility. But at bottom it is driven by a general moral compulsion, operative in all of us even if we choose not to see it.

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If we are to find our way out of this miasma, we need to begin by recovering a sense of how the moral economy of sin is still operating in our putatively secular world, and adjust our thinking accordingly. We may have, for example, to concede that forgiveness is an example of a virtue that may not be extensible beyond its religious warrant. It is one of Christianity’s most beautiful gifts to our civilization, but if it cannot sustain its nature when detached from its original religious framework, we need to understand that, and understand why. Forgiveness may not be secularizable precisely because it relies upon ideas and sources of justice that are not generally agreed upon in this age.

In our nonjudgmental culture, we are more awash in forgiveness than we are in sin — but are we seeing the real forgiveness? Or are we seeing the continuation of therapy by other means? If so, should we call it something else? The same question can be asked about the public confessions, public apologies, and other efforts to address sin and malfeasance in our public life.

Alas, it seems that all of our most venerable moral markers of soul-turning have now become suspect. It is a shame, for there has never been a time that we needed them more. But they will do us more good if we do not lose touch with their original meanings. If we can regain a sense of the roots of these concepts, then we may yet see a time when forgiveness is once again concerned with the soul of the transgressor and the well-being of society, and not merely with the forgiver’s good health and his sweet psychological revenge.