"Stop saying awesome."
I spent yesterday afternoon at a public dialogue on debt and forgiveness (in an age of excess) hosted by the students of a 400-level Communications course on dialogue and public issues. I initially was interested in attending based on some of the questions related to responsibility for the negative consequences of consumerism. However, it was the moral/theological dimension of the issue that became most interesting to me.
After a panel discussion and somewhat lacklustre Q&A session (which was difficult more for the broad range of topics subsumed under the day’s theme than any shortcoming of the participants, really), I participated in two “table sessions” on the topic of moral debt and forgiveness. Essentially, myself, my supervisor (Dr. Gary McCarron), and a handful of others spent a couple hours talking soteriology. A couple of points that came out of this discussion and my reflection upon it:
- Despite the centrality of “forgiving yourself” to popular therapeutic discourse, is this, strictly speaking, even possible? My own intuition is that it is a contradiction and, logically, meaningless. I have no right or capacity to forgive myself for a wrong I have done to you. By contrast, I wonder if the emotional force of this experience may be related to absence of a strong vocabulary of repentance in the secularized discourse around injury and pardon.
- All of our standards and expectations for forgiveness derive from the interpersonal level. That is, we know what a satisfactory or authentic apology and pardon look like based on our experience of giving and receiving them from individuals. And yet the most “important” apologies seem to involve states and societies. Can these interpersonal experiences scale up to that level, or is it impossible for a state to provide a(n emotionally) satisfactory apology?
- Some of the group discussion later on turned on the example of seeking forgiveness for the genocide and oppression of First Nations people in Canada. The question was, how far does responsibility for events in the past extend? (The examples included new generations as well as immigrants to Canada.) However, I think this issue is more interesting from the alternative hamartiological perspective—that is, sins of omission rather than sins of commission. If one accepts the moral relevance of sins of omission (that is, that one can be held culpable for thigns one ought to have done but did not do), then it seems to me culpability is potentially infinite, since at every moment one could be doing something more moral than what one has done.
- Finally, and in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek mode, I was struck by the opening instructions as to the nature of dialogue (i.e., that it is open-ended, intended to come to understanding of people’s perspectives, not a debate, &c.). Is this normative anomie? What if my genuine perspective is that dialogue is a debate?
All in all, an interesting and surprisingly lunatic-free (for a public talk/event hosted by a university) way to while away an afternoon. Congratulations to all involved in planning it.