On November 14, 2006, the Woodstock Theological Center sponsored an evening of conversation titled “Forgiveness and Revenge, in Politics and Business,” held at the Lotos Club in New York. This “Woodstock on the Road” event featured presentations by Woodstock nonresident fellows Robert T. Hennemeyer and William Bole as well as by Robert J. Bies, a Georgetown University management professor who has closely studied revenge in the workplace. The conversation followed up on a May 2006 discussion at Georgetown featuring the same speakers, and delved more deeply into the dynamics of revenge in contemporary culture as well as business. Moderating the November discussion was Father Drew Christiansen, S.J., who edits America magazine and co-authored Woodstock’s 2004 book, Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace, with Bole and Hennemeyer. What follows is a text of Bole’s remarks, which address, among other questions, whether revenge can ever be right. Thank you Father Drew, who has been my mentor on all things related to peacemaking in the Catholic tradition. Thank you Father Gap for, once again, taking Woodstock on the road, together with Ann Coughlin. Thank you Phil Lacovara*, whom I met for the first time tonight, although I felt I already knew him, having written a number of times about his work on the ethics of lobbying and the legislative process. And I imagine that in the new Congress, there might be issues with revenge, and perhaps a few cries for forgiveness. And thanks to everyone here. This question of forgiveness and revenge is very much with us today and it’s resonating in our culture – including our popular culture. One night this past September, I clicked on the television to watch the 10:00 news and caught the tail end of an episode of “Criminal Minds,” a series about FBI profilers. The episode was apparently about someone who went postal, murdering a few of his co-workers, and I gather that he perished in the end. As the show closed, with images of lives lost and rescued, a voiceover intoned, “Confucius said, ‘When setting out on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’ ” I thought: now this is wisdom that I’d welcome from a prime-time television drama. And, curious about the prevalence of such wisdom, I searched for discussions of revenge on the Internet. I was sobered to find some other messages, different messages, including Web sites with names like “Revenge Unlimited” and “ThePayback.Com,” which give tips on how to settle scores with friends, lovers, co-workers, and any others who have given you offense. And this being America, some of these sites also peddle revenge products, like dead-fish packages (which, for those interested, go for $19.99, shipping included). Payback.Com says, “There's nothing that gets your message across better than a smelly, nasty dead fish!” No doubt, if your message carries as odorously. Anyhow, hearing the words of Confucius that night on television was something of a coincidence, because I had been out at Boston College, at a forum on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Lutheran theologian who was born a hundred years ago and died a martyr against Nazism. Bonhoeffer was a pacifist who never renounced his belief that all violence is antithetical to Christian faith, as revealed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. He once wrote that no deed on earth could justify an act of revenge or any manner of retribution, including “retributive justice.” And yet, he chose to take part in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolph Hitler, a choice that sealed his martyrdom when he was just 39 years old. That same week, I was reading a piece in The New Yorker by Lawrence Wright, about the future of Islamic jihad (in the edition dated September 11, 2006). In that piece, he talked about a Palestinian sheikh named Abu-Muhammad al-Maqdisi, described by Wright as “one of the most renowned ideologues of the radical Islamist movement.” What caught my interest, especially in light of our topic tonight, was Maqdisi’s apparent belief that he is not in the business of revenge. Sure, he spends his days whipping up holy war on the West, but he draws the line at suicide bombings, and he had this to say in July 2004, after a string of suicide attacks by Al-Qaeda in Iraq: “There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them [meaning the jihadists].” So, during a week or two in September, I heard a TV drama convey traditional wisdom about the futility of revenge, I checked in on Web sites that not only recommend revenge but facilitate the dirty deed, I heard talks about a Christian peacemaker who, some say, resorted to retribution, and I read a piece that talked about an Islamic warrior who disavows vengeance. Forgive me if I don’t give a straight answer to the question of how people are working through these concepts of forgiveness and revenge. What I will give, in these brief remarks, is an illustration of revenge and retribution in politics, particularly in the politics of extremely fractious societies. Then I’ll illustrate an alternative road, what we, at Woodstock, see as a fledging, international politics of forgiveness, a turn toward reconciliation in the midst of social fractiousness. And I’ll part with a few remarks about the space between forgiveness and revenge, with a bow in the direction of our friend and colleague Bob Bies, and in doing so I’ll prowl around this question of whether revenge can ever be right. In the book, Bob and Drew and I focused mainly on forgiveness, not revenge. But we did look at the cycle of revenge, treating it as one of several forces of unforgiveness, which is not a dictionary word, but we ran with it. And that was a way of acknowledging, from the beginning, that forgiveness can seem counter-intuitive in an age when people crash planes into skyscrapers (in the name of God, no less), an age when the politics of resentment seems more palpable than the politics of forgiveness. That much, you don’t need a think-tank project to figure out. I was sitting at my computer one morning and working on this book [Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace to Peace] when I heard something about a plane crashing at the World Trade Center. At another point in the drafting, I spoke to our family physician, an illustrious local doctor named Susan Black, who had just gotten back from Kosovo, where she spent three months as a volunteer, helping to set up medical clinics. On one of the last of those rounds, her translator, whose name was Faza, and with whom she had been traveling all that time, pulled out a gun and shot the surgeon, dead. As it turns out, they had been next-door neighbors. The surgeon, who was a Serb, had turned in the translator and his family, who were ethnic Albanians, and probably political activists. Faza’s family went into hiding, and the surgeon looted their house. That day in the clinic, the surgeon was wearing one of Faza’s shirts. Dr. Black, who has since retired, told me (referring to the conflicting ethnic groups), “They will never live together.” We used her account in the book because it so starkly illustrates the cycles of revenge, the forces of unforgiveness. Maybe it’s all about the “hothead factor.” And here I’m referring to a term used by the clinical psychologist Everett L. Worthington. In short, the hotheads are the ones who try to keep people apart by committing violent and hateful acts. The hotheads shall always be with you, but so shall the cool heads and the passionate promoters of peace. The question is: Who prevails – the hotheads or the cool heads? And, to give a sense of the obstacles here, Worthington borrows a page from family psychology and in particular marital research. Those studies have found that it takes, on average, five or six “positive events” to make up for a single negative event in a marriage. I think we all know what those are. And that’s in a normally healthy marriage. In a troubled marriage, the ratio is more like 10 to one or even higher. That’s the number of positive events it takes to reverse the tide of the negative. This research throws a little sober light on what it takes to overcome these forces of unforgiveness, the memories of offense, the sense of victimization, which become ideologies and mythologies that propel the cycle of revenge. That’s the bad news. That’s the road of revenge. But there’s an alternative road. The most celebrated example is South Africa. A brutal, white minority regime fell, and black South Africans rose to power. Practically everyone assumed that blacks would do unto whites as whites had done unto them. They didn’t, as a group. Nelson Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president, appointed a truth commission, instead. And through that commission, South Africa formally abstained from revenge. Mandela had also made his white jailer – the one who kept the keys during many of his 27 years as a political prisoner – he made that fellow an honored guest at his presidential inauguration in 1994. In South Korea, at his own presidential inauguration, Kim Dae Jung stood beside several ex-autocrats who had once been more than happy to provide him with free lodging on death row. Kim is a Catholic who has spoken movingly of how he experienced Christ’s love and forgiveness while awaiting execution for his human-rights activism. On that day of triumph in 1988, Kim proclaimed that the “politics of retaliation” is over. And it was. In the book, we identified many other acts and gestures elsewhere, in places like Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. What you’ll often find in these examples is a search for truth, and a desire for public acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Sometimes all you’ll find is a decision to not to seek retribution, to not settle the score, to forbear from revenge. That counts. That’s all part of the politics of forgiveness, according to the approach that we took, based on the seminal work of our friend, the Christian ethicist Donald W. Shriver, Jr. Signs and gestures of empathy – an expression of the commitment to eventually reconcile – those are also part of forgiveness in politics. When you look at forgiveness in this way, when you look at the essential parts, you can see that forgiveness does happen, and is happening, in world affairs. At this point, I’d like to try to build up to Bob Bies, without really getting into what he says, because you’ll hear that in a moment. But, basically, there’s a fair amount of research suggesting that the social and psychological dynamics of revenge may not be as distant and disconnected from forgiveness as many moralists would like to believe. That’s a discussion by itself. But this perspective, I think, is not a vast distance from our approach that Bob Hennemeyer will say more about. That approach was to look at forgiveness as always a work in progress, and to work with a fleshly notion of forgiveness – a forgiveness that doesn’t forget, a forgiveness that lets anger have its day, that doesn’t sweep aside some very human needs and values, like truth, acknowledgment, justice, punishment, and reparation. And when you introduce some of these concepts into the equation, you could come out with something that might not look very forgiving in the conventional sense. You could wind up telling human-rights violators that they better divulge their crimes, or else, as South Africa did. You might put these people behind bars for the sake of the common good. This is justice, which has to be part of any strong notion of forgiveness in politics. But, can revenge take us to the some place? As Bob Bies’s research shows, this is exactly what many avengers believe they are serving up – justice. They believe their acts of revenge are blameless, at least partly because of their belief that they didn’t trigger the cycle. As clinical studies have shown, the avengers tend to see their actions as a consequence not a cause, a consequence of what someone else has done, not as a cause of the conflict. And that has to do with what the Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert refers to as “the principle of even-numberedness.” Really it’s an ethics of even-numberedness. The second punch that gets thrown is right and just, because it responds to the first. That’s why the fourth punch, and the sixth punch, and the 88th punch, are all fair and good, because these blows respond to all of the odd-numbered punches that came before, according to the ethics of even-numberedness. But here’s the catch or part of the problem that Gilbert puts his finger on – people count differently. They disagree on who started the fight, who perpetrated the first grisly act, who threw the 63rd punch. And so goes the cycle of revenge, and the “morality of revenge.” Maybe revenge can be righteous, or self-righteous, even if it isn’t right. I suspect that when most thoughtful people say that an act of revenge can be a morally good thing, they’re often thinking of something else. They might be thinking of justice, they might be thinking of a demand for truth or an apology, but those concepts have their own centers of moral gravity and meaning, apart from vengeance. And I suspect that when people say revenge can be good, they’re looking at revenge primarily as an act (and one that could have some utility), when it’s as much a motivation behind an act. You could punish out of sense of justice or a thirst for revenge, or both, perhaps. I’d say revenge is something that’s done, most of all, with resentment. Indeed, Nietzsche spoke of resentment as “spiritual revenge,” as well as “inexpressible vengeance.” And there’s quite enough of that to go around, in our popular culture, in our politics, and in our workplaces today. --- * Philip Lacovara co-authored the study, “The Ethics of Lobbying: Organized Interests, Political Power, and the Common God,” produced by Woodstock in 2003. He and his wife, Madeline, graciously hosted the Woodstock evening of conversation at the Lotos Club, where these remarks were presented.