Woodstock Report | Forgiveness and Revenge, In Politics and Business

(left to right) Langan, Bole, Bies, and Hennemeyer

George Bernard Shaw said, "The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing." For all we know, this may be one way of entering into the grace of forgiveness, but growing numbers of people are, thoughtfully and creatively, taking the opposite approach. They are seeking to understand the dynamics of forgiveness and unforgiveness, not simply between two persons, but among groups and societies.

The Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a number of the seminal dialogues on this subject, particularly through its formal project on forgiveness and conflict resolution, which produced the 2004 book, Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace, published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. On several occasions, the Center brought together diplomats, representatives of non-governmental organizations, religious leaders, and other peace practitioners. And, with the help of theologians and ethicists,Woodstock invited them to reflect on their experiences in the trenches of politics and conflict.

During that project, scholars and practitioners arrived at a rough consensus: there is a politics of forgiveness that can contribute to social healing and international conflict resolution. More recently,Woodstock has begun to renew this discussion while also seeking to extend it into other areas of social life, particularly the business world.

On May 16, 2006, the Center sponsored an afternoon of conversation titled "Forgiveness and Revenge, in Politics and Business," held in the Woodstock Library at Georgetown University. The program featured presentations by Woodstock fellows William Bole and retired Ambassador Robert T. Hennemeyer (co-authors of the forgiveness book with Father Drew Christiansen, S.J.), as well as by Robert J. Bies, a Georgetown management professor who has closely studied revenge in the workplace. Father John Langan, S.J., (see page 9) moderated the discussion.

In September,Woodstock issued an electronic occasional paper based on the conversation, edited with summaries by Bole (available at woodstock.georgetown.edu/publications/papers/forgiveness_revenge.cfm). The paper includes responses and reflections by scholars and commentators invited to the dialogue. Brief excerpts from the major presentations are presented here.

"We hope that such conversation will lead to further theological reflection upon the role of forgiveness in politics and business, and to further insights into the ways in which various social actors can contribute to healing in our world," Father Gasper F. Lo Biondo, S.J.,Woodstock's director, says in an introduction to the paper.

William Bole:

A common impression would be that forgiveness is, at best, an ideal of global statecraft, an ideal that's not quite realizable in this dangerous world. Many would look upon forgiveness as a counsel of perfection. And there's truth in that, especially in light of the ultimate understanding of forgiveness that comes to us from Christian faith, comes to us from the Cross. But any real conviction of faith has to have implications for our lives, has to be translatable to some degree in a less-than-perfect world. The question is: How do you do this? How do you reason your way from deity to diplomacy? How do you argue your way from piety to strategy? Well, this is what we have Jesuits for.

“Our tack was to look at the inner dynamics of forgiveness as they were moving forward, paradoxically, in some of the harshest inter-group conflicts of our time” —William Bole

In our case, we had not only Jesuits but a Presbyterian ethicist named Donald W. Shriver, Jr., who took a generous part in our project from the beginning. Shriver wrote a groundbreaking book titled An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, and his signal contribution was to offer a workable definition of forgiveness in politics, a definition that included four basic elements: truth, forbearance, empathy, and the commitment to repair a fractured human relationship.

What this conception works against is a tendency to take forgiveness all too literally as applied to the public square, a tendency to think that forgiveness happens pretty much only when somebody says "you're forgiven" or when somebody otherwise buries the hatchet, once and for all. You don't want to hold your breath waiting for that to happen in the midst of extreme political conflict. And I think you could miss a lot when you're operating with that literal, undifferentiated notion.

Our tack was different. Our tack was to look at the inner dynamics of forgiveness as they were moving forward, paradoxically, in some of the harshest inter-group conflicts of our time. To do that, you have to break up the concept of forgiveness. You have to break it into some usable parts. And one component that we found usable and effective in practical efforts of inter-group reconciliation was acknowledgment - the acknowledgment of wrongdoing by yourself or your group. That falls somewhere shy of an apology, but in our book, it's a transaction of forgiveness. We've seen it many, many times in Northern Ireland. We saw it often, though less visibly, in the former Yugoslavia.

.. One more thing that ought to be said has to do with the limits of forgiveness in politics, and this is where you'd find some of Father John Langan's fingerprints on our text. Not every act of forgiveness will be efficacious. There will be ambiguities, and there have been plenty of those, often having to do with the proper doses of mercy and justice, in places like South Africa and East Timor. There will be miscalculations and unintended consequences. That's another way of italicizing that forgiveness in politics is in politics.

Robert Hennemeyer:

It's important to put forgiveness in the context of a process in which it can be the happy end product, but in which even stops along the way - call them accommodation, cooperation, or whatever - can have a positive effect. And, even if the process stalls there for a while, the road to real forgiveness can still be a possibility. In the international sphere, it is only very rarely that you will encounter forgiveness as a single prophetic act. It's much more helpful to think of it as a process.. [And part of this process is to] understand the role of religion in conflict resolution, and also the role of "mytho-history" - what you think happened in the past and the reasons why you have to be angry. It's like that old joke about Irish Alzheimer's - you forget everything but your grudges.

..I wrote a brief article when Woodstock's forgiveness project was still underway, and I cited Don Shriver's quote from the Robert Frost poem "The Star Splitter" - "To be social is to be forgiving." I asked, "Does this suggest that a wish to seek an eventual solution to a conflict situation is a natural consequence of being social? I think so. There may be a basic peace or compromise vocabulary to which all humans, religious or not, respond. At least some of this teaching may be implanted in all of us."

"In the international sphere, it is only very rarely that you will encounter forgiveness as a single prophetic act. It's much more helpful to think of it as a process" -Robert Hennemeyer

You can understand my pleasure, then, in reading an article in the University of Chicago magazine about the work of neurologist Jean DeCety, who, after extensive MRI research with a large human sample, states: "Empathy begins with the involuntary shared emotion. This is something that is hardwired into our brains, the capacity to automatically perceive and share others' feelings." This seems to validate at least part of Don Shriver's definition, and I think it validates some of our own work.

Robert Bies:

Here is an academic definition: revenge is an action that is intended to inflict damage, injury, discomfort, or punishment on another party judged responsible for some harm or wrongdoing. In other words: someone's responsible, and we're going to try to redress this situation. What I have learned about revenge in the workplace, first of all, is that it's provoked. It is not just a random act..

"What I have learned about revenge in the workplace, first of all, is that it's provoked. It is not just a random act ." -Robert Bies

[There is a] morality of revenge. It is a morality because in people's minds, they have been unjustly treated and they have to "do justice." Often they do justice when the formal system of the organization doesn't capture the injustice or correct it.. In their minds, it's justice. In fact, if you look at the international front, people who carry out revenge do not believe they're doing something wrong; they believe they're doing something right. That is the insight we need to work through.

..Dorothy Day asked: Why do we make saints of those who minister to the poor and the slaves rather than those who try to change the institutional and economic structures that give rise to poverty and slavery? And for me as a scholar, I am not simply looking at the individuals. I am looking at the social institutional structure that allows the preconditions for revenge to occur. I am also looking at situations where there is no mechanism for forgiveness.

In that spirit, Dorothy Day said: "We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, [so] that peace and abundance may manifest for all." I think the workplace connects to this whole discussion of forgiveness because it is a place where people look for peace and community in an imperfect and unfair world.