Reason not to Forgive

10/18/2006
A great deal has been written lately in the wake of the tragic events at the Nickel Mines school about the entirely appropriate outpouring of compassion and empathy toward the surviving families, including the family of the killer. Much of it however also takes compassion and forgiveness as inextricable corollaries, the assumption being that forgiveness is always a virtue, and that the more loathsome the crime, the greater the need to forgive it; the harder it is to forgive, the greater the virtue in forgiving it. I write to challenge that assumption.

My aim is not to offend our honorable Amish neighbors. They are a peaceful and industrious people, values I share. Forgiveness is their way, part of a larger creed lived consciously and apart. But the call from armchair observers in the media for the rest of us to extract that one aspect of Amish culture and weave it into the "English" fabric of life is dangerous.

The crime which has befallen the Amish community was neither deserved nor prevented; as has been observed, it is now painfully clear that it can happen literally anywhere. I would like to try to stand in the way of the next one.

The moral apologists would have us all retreat from the horror of the blind, brutish irrationalism which has again snuffed out the lives of local innocents, into another orgy of forgiveness such as we saw after the Borden killings. This time they have a distinctive religious sect as their poster children, and the swiftness with which society worldwide has skipped from moral outrage to forgiveness is not at all comforting, but troubling.
Rather than ask what is the appropriate human response to such an event and why, we are expected to throw up our arms, turn inward, and set about salving our hurt. But the choice is not, as has been quoted, to forgive or "be consumed by it". That false alternative appears each time some senseless tragedy occurs, and serves only to help pave the way for the next one.

While the horror of the crime is so great that the reality of it can be difficult to get one’s arms around, human civilization demands the effort, and we can use the depth of our emotional response as a gauge of how important that is. Is our need to get back to the day to day so great that we cannot be bothered to think about what gives it value? Is the gray of existence so total that we will not see the black or the white of it any longer? Is our love of life so dim that joy is to be experienced only as the exceptional, and tragedy accepted as the norm?

Like moments of great joy, tragedy provides us with a spike of moral clarity, the chance to identify what is good for human life and what is antithetical to it. But we are told we must squash such spikes down, forgive, and accept the bad actors back onto a level moral playing field. Human beings have no business forgiving the unforgivable.

A man intent on sexually molesting ten schoolgirls killed five of them, wounded five more, victimized his own family and terrorized an entire school. A person who can forgive this can and will forgive literally anything. There is a time and place for forgiveness among men – accidents, errors of knowledge, former behaviors not to be repeated. It is not for deliberate acts of brutality. This was an act of pure evil, unmasked by any ambiguity, and the alternatives are to judge it so or not.

Morality, like nature, abhors a vacuum. When virtue makes room for it, evil will expand to fill the void. Are we as a society so terrified of "the enemy within" – that darkness which, according to local columnist Gil Smart, "dwells in all men’s souls" (he can only speak for himself), so afraid that we surrender all of life on earth to the enemy without? With not so much as a whimper of protest will we declare that not only are there "no easy answers", but no answers at all?

If we abandon the effort to define good and evil- what serves human life and what destroys it, the Amish girls, and every other life lost to murder or enslavement, will become martyrs, not to the cause of morality, but to the wiping out of morality. Morality will have been relegated to the status of a harness on the living, not having anything to do with living itself. The premises we hold, correct or not, do have implications and repercussions in society. Yet the practice today in examining such events is to plow them under, reverse cause and effect, and look instead for the sociological "roots" of a given mindset.

The root of evil? Irrationalism. The cutting off of a man’s head as merely a worthless extension of his heart. It is the practice of all the self-professed "humanitarians" and "lovers of mankind" who use compassion as their boarding pass for whatever means their social goals require, and the utter proliferation of advocacy for forgiveness in the media is clear indication that these people are in full swing. Such advocates are impotent to defend man’s life but their successes clear the way for totalitarianism. If you are humble enough, and if you forgive all, you can and will be ruled. And you will have waived your right to object to it. If you can forgive everything, you can defend nothing - least of all freedom.

Evil exists only by permission. It feeds on neglect and roams at will without a leash of moral condemnation. And it grins until you look it in the face and identify it. Forgiving it is an act of cowardice and surrender.

How many more of our children will we lay upon the altar of irrationalism? One does not heal a deadly disease by refusing to look at it, or by forgiving it. One heals by identifying it, learning its nature through a process of reason, and cutting it out if that’s what’s required. And by then pursuing health, passing on to our kids some real, tangible hope for their bright futures. The choice is not to forgive or to hate. The choice is to think or not to think.