Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu On Descartes' Radical Individualism
Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 31. (New York: Random House, 2000)
How can you know that someone is contrite?
For the last few weeks my ethics students have been studying forgiveness. One of the persistent questions about forgiveness is whether, in order to be forgiven, one must first be contrite or repentant. (We have not been speaking of the idea of God forgiving people; we’ve limited our discussion to the possibility of people forgiving other people.)
I have to confess that this posting was prompted as much by my viewing, last night, of Battlestar Galactica as by our readings. In season 3, Laura Roslin calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (like South Africa’s after Apartheid) after some human-on-human atrocities. That got me thinking once again about Desmond Tutu and Simon Wiesenthal, and their respective books on forgiveness.
The easy answer to my question is to say that one does not need to be contrite to be forgiven. This is easy, but not simple, because it raises other questions about the nature of forgiveness. And it brings along with it the possibility of depriving someone of their moral agency by denying the reality of their choices.
Most of us are inclined to give the opposite answer, namely that it does not make sense to forgive those who are not sorry for their offenses.
But this raises another difficulty: how do we know when people are adequately sorry? Additionally, does this position make it more likely that we will forgive those people who only seem sorry? What if someone has expressed their contrition to the best of their ability but we have not been able to perceive it, for cultural or other reasons? What if someone is not at all sorry, but has made a convincing public show of contrition?
What do you think?
Desmond Tutu and The Most Subversive Thing Around
“We were inspired not by political motives. No, we were fired by our biblical faith. The Bible turned out to be the most subversive thing around in a situation of injustice and oppression. We were involved in the struggle because we were being religious, not political. It was because we were obeying the imperatives of our faith.” (No Future Without Forgiveness, 93)
Tutu is making a peculiar claim here, and I can’t entirely tell if he’s serious. He says they weren’t motivated by politics, but by the Bible; but then he says the Bible was subversive. Does he mean that it was politically subversive, or is he talking about some other kind of subversion - spiritual or moral or psychological subversion, perhaps? I guess the question is this: what exactly was being subverted? He says plainly that it was “injustice and oppression.” But what is not so plain is whether the injustice and oppression were primarily political; or if the political was only a sign or symptom of something else.
I've also been reading a lot of William James this week, especially The Varieties of Religious Experience. James argues that we should not judge religion a priori but rather a posteriori. As James puts it, "not by its roots, but by its fruits."
In that book and elsewhere, James argues that we are wrong to think that reason's chief role in religious experience is to judge the truth-claims of religion. Rather, religion is to be understood as playing a role within reason itself. Religion "is something more, namely, a postulator of new facts as well" as being a means of "illumination of facts already elsewhere given."
James and Tutu both offer religion as more than simply another second-string player on an already deep bench, and as more than a degenerate form of political reasoning. For both of them, religion is a source of insight that cannot be had in other ways.