IT is difficult enough to continue reposing faith in the wisdom of humankind, but to plead for forgiveness and to endeavour to practice it, going beyond the spirit of revenge and retribution so present in our own imperfect time, is a herculean challenge that cannot be taken lightly. Our present world suffers from an arrogant superficiality that seems to me to be not merely a form of thoughtlessness but a bitter mockery of the greatest achievements of human civilization. The lack of rebelliousness in our contemporary life is the result of our moral downfall and poverty of spirit. Living without revolt means not recognizing the crucial process of life and remaining on its surface. As Albert Camus observes, ‘If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.’¹

Many among us accept such a situation as a normal way of life. We refuse to put ourselves at risk and continue living this way until it becomes unbearable. If we stop for a minute and think outside our herd consciousness, it becomes clear that that such a life desperately lacks the virtues introduced by questioning. Conforming to normality, as we are asked to do on an everyday basis, is the highest stage of spiritual shallowness. In this light, philosophical rebellion, as the deepest form of critical thinking, is the movement by which an individual can protest against her existential condition. Such rebellion is directed against that which denies individuals their nobility of spirit. It is a reaffirmation of thoughtfulness combined with a passionate rejection of its violation. Such rebellion is nonviolent and non-lethal, but it is a radical form of protest against the shallowness of our contemporary world. Lacking the need for conformity, philosophy faces the world with a rebellious sensitivity that negates violence.

 

We live in an age of paradoxes. We talk of forgiving while preparing for revenge. We discuss peace and dialogue, and yet narrow-minded sectarianism and national and religious prejudices govern our thoughts and actions. We are said to live in the time of a global village and multiculturalism but give very little thought to the actual nature of our cultures and traditions. Priding ourselves on being civilized, we function day to day as labourers in a world market but with no true knowledge of the past civilizations in whose name we create colleges, clubs and political parties. But none of us, especially those who care about the nobility of spirit and the creative genius that is so essential for the survival of what we are as human beings with a social-historical past, can ignore the multiple crises in human affairs and the dangers of the moment.

So, what is lacking and how can we correct it? Throughout this essay, without pretending to have a prophetic recipe or a magical formula and by referring only to my own life experience or that of others as revealed in literature, philosophy, religion, or politics, I have suggested the noble goal of forgiveness as opposed to hatred, vengeance and resentment. I am convinced that if we seek forgiveness, whatever form it takes, we must labour to find it rather than working for an insignificant world based on values such as greed, power and hatred. This is a responsibility that our human civilization should accept without fear or apprehension.

I do not know if it is possible to change the future of our world in another direction. But I know that the two most difficult things in life are accepting the errors of the past and preparing for the truths of the future. Every one of us has a different understanding of the past, but we would all like to look at our future as offering positive changes and progress in the right direction. Yet, I have no doubt that if our contemporary world is to attain maturity and common sense, moving beyond its present violent lunacy and destructive madness, it must be attuned to the idea of forgiveness and reconciliation as the sine qua non of living together.

 

Creating such a world is not possible as long as we are living under the menace of the clouds of hatred, resentment and revenge. But where are we to find the avenues that encourage living together in today’s world? How can we avoid naïve wishful thinking and recognize the need to put ourselves at risk? Thinking must become at once an act of revolt and a form of forgiveness. In a world where politics has become the worst form of conformism, philosophy as an act of questioning reality is a form of revolt. Philosophy’s only limits are those it imposes on itself. As perhaps the purest form of rebellion, philosophy is born of a questioning that refuses to be a slave of reality.

Philosophy begins with the ‘decision to try to think purely’, as Hegel says in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Thinking purely means thinking only of the process of thought itself. It is precisely in this respect that thinking always transcends the rationally constituted realm within which we find ourselves. It is by questioning the basic assumptions of our age that philosophy presents itself as thinking toward liberation. However, this liberation does not come to us in an apolitical context but formulated as a form of redemption. As Theodor Adorno claims, ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.’² In other words, as revenge, greed, power and violence diminish as acceptable resolutions to the problems of human existence, the need for forgiveness as redemption becomes more urgent.

 

There is perhaps a philosophical redemption, of which forgiveness offers the promise, that can make our mortal world more livable and lovable. Philosophy, as form of revolt, tries to give form to an act of forgiving that aspires towards a perpetual becoming. All this is to say that to reject philosophical revolt, as an art of dialogue without complacency and conformity, can turn all forms of living together into a violent struggle for power and pave the way for revenge and resentment. The result can only be a de-civilized society that cannot confront its own monsters and nightmares.

It is appropriate here to return to the Camusian vision of justice. In his play, Les Justes, Camus proposes we confront a crucial problem of our time, the limits on violence when confronted with questions of morality. Les Justes is my favourite Camus play. I first read it when I was 17 years old and living in France. I was so impressed by Camus’s powerful writing that I decided to translate it into Persian. (The translation, which was never published, is still somewhere among my belongings in Iran.)

Les Justes is not a historical play, but all the characters are real and the terrorist act described actually took place in Moscow in February1905. Kaliayev, the real world name of the hero of the play, is a complex character, like those in Dostoevsky. In Camus’s play, Kaliayev fails to kill the Grand Duke Serge, the uncle of the Tsar, after seeing several children in his carriage. In the play, Camus, in a Dostoyevskian manner, stages a key encounter between Stepan and Kaliayev on the issue of justice and innocence, revealing the ethical impasse of terrorism.

‘Kaliayev: Stepan, I am ashamed of myself. However, I can’t let you go on. I agreed to kill someone to destroy this dictatorship. But after what you’ve said, I see a new tyranny coming which, if it was ever installed, would make me into an assassin when I am trying to be a maker of justice.

Stepan: What would it matter if you were not a "maker of justice", if justice was done, even by assassins? You and I are nothing.

Kaliayev: We are something and you know it well, because it’s in the name of your pride that you were speaking about earlier today.

Stepan: My pride only looks at me. But the pride of men, their revolution, the injustice under which they live, that is the business of all of us.

Kaliayev: Men do not live by justice alone.

Stepan: When someone steals their bread, what else will they live on but justice?

Kaliayev: On justice and innocence.

Stepan: Innocence? Yeah, maybe I know what that is. But I chose to ignore it, and have it be ignored by millions of men, so that one day it can take on a bigger meaning.

Kaliayev: You have to be very sure that day will come to destroy everything that makes a man willing to keep on living.

Stepan: I am sure of it.

Kaliayev: You can’t be. To know who, me or you, is right, you’d need the sacrifice of may be three generations and a lot of wars, terrible revolutions. When that rain of blood is dry on the earth, you and I would have been mixed with the dust for a long time.

Stepan: Others would come then, and I salute them as my brothers.

Kaliayev, crying out: Others ...yes! But I love those who live today, on the same earth as I do, and they’re the ones I salute; I’m fighting for them and for them I’m willing to die. And for some far-off future city that I’m not sure of, I will not slap the faces of my brothers. I will not add to living injustices for a dead justice. Brothers, I want to speak frankly and at least tell you what the simplest of peasants could say: to kill children is without honour. And if some day in my life the revolution separates itself from honour, I will turn away from it. If you decide that, I will go to the exit of the theater, but I will throw myself under the horses.’³

 

This scene gives dramatic form to one of the central issues in Camus’s writings: Is violence wrong? In answering this question, Camus distinguishes between humane revolt and murder in the name of an ideal. Unlike the words that Camus gives his Caligula, all actions are not on an equal footing. For Camus, no ideal can justify murder. Unlike Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Camus does not advocate pure non-violence, but he attempts to demonstrate that the refusal to kill or to legitimize murder is the starting point for living together. ‘For my part, I am fairly sure that I have made the choice. And, having chosen, I think that I must speak out, that I must state that I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder, and I must take the consequences of such a decision’, writes Camus in his powerful pamphlet, Ni victimes ni bourreaux (Neither Victims nor Executioners), which calls for a move away from abstract principles in favour of the value of human dignity.⁴

‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’ appeared serially in the autumn of 1946 in Combat, the daily newspaper of the Resistance, which Camus helped edit during the Nazi occupation and for a short time after the war. As in the case of his play Les Justes, in this essay Camus is concerned with the effects of murder, terrorism, and other forms of violence on the perpetrators, not only on their victims. Remember Kaliayev’s inability to kill the children who accompany the Grand Duke. For him, the revolution is not a valid justification to kill and destroy his ethical beliefs. Confronted with all the evils of the world, Camus reveals a philosophical deadlock, since for him ‘violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.’ However, Camus sides with Kaliayev and not Caligula.

 

As he puts it: ‘We are asked to love or to hate such and such a country and such and such a people. But some of us feel our common humanity too strongly to make such a choice.’ It is because of the idea of a common humanity that Camus refuses to compromise his moral responsibility. He calls this position safeguarding ‘a dignity common to everyone.’ It is this dignity that, according to Camus, is crushed by the death penalty. In his capacity as an abolitionist, he writes in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: ‘If justice has a meaning in this world …it cannot, by its very essence, divorce itself from compassion.’⁵ Significantly, Camus’s entire thought is distinguished by such compassion, and I believe this is how he tried to bring light into the darkness of his time. And yet he is conscious, as a private individual, of the difficulty of his task. As he notes:

‘Like everyone I have tried, as best I could, to improve my nature by morality. This, alas, is what has cost me most dear. With energy, which is something I possess, we sometimes manage to act morally, but never to be moral. The person of passion who longs for goodness yields to injustice at the very moment when (s)he speaks of justice. Human beings sometimes seem to me to be a walking injustice: I am thinking of myself. If I now have the impression that I was wrong, or that I lied in what I sometimes wrote, it is because I do not know how to make my injustice honestly known. I have doubtless never said that I was a just man. I have merely happened to say that we should try to be just, and also that such an ambition involved great toil and misery. But is this distinction so important? And can the man who does not even manage to make justice prevail in his own life preach its virtues to other people?’⁶

 

The question Camus raises in this passage has been my lifelong concern. Camus’s critical intellectualism is especially clear in relation to human shortcomings. The problem, however, is that most of us are quite comfortable lying about our moral weaknesses and whatever humanism we have seems scarcely to be earned. Yet, as Camus shows us, the human being’s confrontation with herself is part of our destiny as human beings. And this process of self-confrontation, for good or for evil, remains one of the great problems of all times.

As history reveals, seeing the world lucidly and making the right moral choices does not change human destiny any more than it changes Sisyphus’s task of pushing the boulder up the slope. Despite all this, the idea of compassion, so intensely developed by artists and philosophers, reveals that violence and horror do not represent a truthful image of the human condition, for violence always lies and only compassion insists on speaking its mind. Perhaps what Camus called the ‘feverish nature of the time’ invites us to share our horror of evil that manifests itself through all forms of revenge and retaliation.

 

The question then is how to confront the misery and horror of our world while serving what is left of its compassionate nature. Faced with the other, aren’t we always confronted with the dilemma of dialogue or destruction? Formulating an answer to this question must begin with recognizing our common humanity and shared values and goes well beyond a continuous reinvention of our victimhood and a persistent tendency to blame the other. The latter, symptoms of an enduring fearfulness and alack of moral courage to accept one’s wrongdoings, serve to perpetuate and deep-en the violence among us. In a way, dying together, more than living together, has brought us to the same fate. This brief essay seeks to assess the complexities of such a fate.

My general conviction all through its writing has been that there can be no human civilization without compassion. The ethos of shared responsibility finds its expression in the process of taming violence through the act of forgiveness. This is where we need to look for a political exercise of moderation and empathy and where a climate of cooperation and reconciliation could flourish. Today, in a world riddled by insignificance and violence, indifference is no longer acceptable. To fail to recognize this is to betray our consciences. Indifference has cheapened our human life; as the Russian thinker Nicolas Berdyaev says, ‘In making himself God, man has unmanned himself.’⁷

Forgiveness is a quality that cannot be manufactured by businessmen and politicians. It is the quality of a person pursuing decency and human dignity beyond all forms of arrogance and hostility. Its ongoing relevance makes forgiveness all the more compelling in current debates on violence, democracy and culture. In the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘The cultured mind, rooted in itself, should have its doors and windows open. It should have the capacity to understand the other’s viewpoint fully, though it cannot always agree with it. The question of agreement or disagreement only arises when you understand a thing. Otherwise, it is blind negation which is not a cultured approach to any question.’⁸ We often suffer, in our liberal oligarchies, from this ‘blind negation’. It requires critical power and a democratic reflex to renounce some of our traditions of thought and safeguards of the past that, despite what we think, have not given us civility and respectability.

 

So here is our problem. It is too easy, as is the case in North America and Europe, to continue talking about democracy and multiculturalism and to say to religious and ethnic minorities that they should find their own way. It takes help for a young Muslim confronted with the indifference and very often the patronizing attitude of the white Christian majority to find a place in such a world. The changing world has made this young Muslim aware and proud of his/her full worth and dignity as a human being but has led him/her to lose hope and faith in the goodwill of our liberal institutions. As Robert Kennedy once said, ‘Frustrated hope and loss of faith breed desperation.’⁹ And desperate people often turn to violence.

But the answer to this violence is not counter-violence. There is no violent way to suppress young people filled with anger who have lost hope in democracy. This is not a problem of religion or culture. It is a problem of democratic evil. In democracies that lack democratic passion, the only passion that remains is for destruction. Spinoza wrote that without passion no human activity, though supported by reason, can prosper.

But how can one rekindle in citizens, either spoiled by well-being or resentful because of exclusion, the passion for democracy? Since1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberal democracy has triumphed against other systems of governance, but its political ascendancy around the world has not always been accompanied by democratic passion. Democratic man is no longer an animal of political passion.

 

There seems to be no place in today’s democratic regimes for the politics of arguing about politics. Younger generations with no memory of the Cold War are becoming even more apathetic about democracy. On the other hand, John Dewey’s conception of politics as the shadow cast by big business over society seems increasingly accurate as corporations continue to erode our liberal democracies. In light of these problems and the mounting evidence that all is not necessarily well with democracy, we are left with the question: What is left of democracy as a discourse and as an institution?

Experience shows us that it is difficult to pin down democracy to one meaning, since it means different things to different people in different contexts. There is a failure in ‘expanding’ democracy or ‘exporting’ it from one culture or society to another because promoting democracy is ineffective in the absence of a democratic culture; organizing elections is only the starting point in the democratic life of a nation. The real test of democracy is not empowering a victorious majority, giving the greatest liberty to the greatest number, but in a new attitude and approach to the problem of power and violence.

True democratic governance is not power over society, but power within it. If democracy equals self-rule and self-control of society, empowerment of civil society and the collective ability to rule democratically are essential constituents of democratic governance. Where democracy is practiced, the rules of the political game are defined by an absence of violence and a set of institutional guarantees against the domineering logic of the state. Yet, the more we think about it, the more these characteristics alone seem unsatisfactory and incomplete. If democracy were no more than a set of institutional guarantees, how could citizens think about politics and struggle for the emergence of new perspectives of democratic life?

 

Before answering this question, we need to look at how the corruption of democracies can be seen as a democratic evil. There is a specific problem with the legitimacy of violence at the heart of democracies. Looking at democratic violence necessitates a recognition of the paradoxical status of democracy itself. Democracy is the process of taming violence, but democratic states and societies are also producers of violence. The more a democratic community develops instruments of violence, the less resistant it is to this democratic evil. Perhaps this is why the politics of nonviolence is a more valuable safeguard of democracy than the free market.

No matter how much money we accumulate to provide for the necessities of life that make it possible to live comfortably in a democratic society, we all know that we need more than material possessions to give meaning to our common life. If we ask, ‘Why do we live as if democracy matters and is worth our efforts?’ the response could be that life is more than simply the satisfaction of desires. There is an ethical horizon of responsibility without which democracy has no meaning. Vaclav Havel reminds us that, ‘democracy is a system based on trust in the human sense of responsibility, which it ought to awaken and cultivate.’¹⁰

 

This sense of common responsibility is the key to our identity as democratic beings because it comes as a reaction to the intolerable in the name of shared human dignity and vulnerability. It is a moral effort that reveals to us the complexity, spontaneity and heterogeneity of democracy. How one is to value and properly esteem democratic citizens is presently being debated against the backdrop of the horrors and intolerable acts of cruelty that have continued into the new millennium. Perhaps this is the reason we can never be fully satisfied with democracy as a philosophical value and as a political reality – to be so would be to forget the essence of democracy as a daily effort of civic responsibility and as a continuous struggle against the intolerable. That is why any democracy that has bought into the consumer value system with no sense of responsibility beyond the simple mouthing of political ideals will end up becoming a community of mediocrity.

Democracy alone will never be enough; it cannot be established through elections and a constitution. Something more is necessary – an emphasis on democracy as a practice of moral thinking and moral judgment. In other words, we can never build or sustain democratic institutions if they do not have the goal of offering us the Socratic experience of politics as self-examination and dialogical exchange. After all, democracy is made by humans and its fate is related to the human condition. The line dividing democratic action and political evil cuts through the moral choice of compassion and forgiveness. There is an apparently irreducible contradiction between the moral demands of social harmony and dialogical citizenship and the practical requirements of political conquest. Not surprisingly, politics is not only the art of managing complexity or organizing the polis but of the conquest of power. In a speech delivered in 1948, Camus declared: ‘What the conqueror of the Right or Left seeks is not unity – which is above all the harmony of opposites – but totality, which is the stamping out of differences.’¹¹

Of course, conquest has not been an attribute of particular civilizations but the byproduct of their descent into barbarism. So we may say that barbarism is, more than anything else, a state of being where there are no moral standards. As Jose Ortegay Gas-set affirms, ‘Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.’¹² For a spirit with no values or standards, civilization is in vain, because no values exist beyond its own. The major problem that confronts our civilizations is their de-civilizing process, which fails to understand compassion and forgiveness.

 

* Extracted from my forthcoming book, On Forgiveness and Revenge: Lessons from an Iranian Prison. University of Regina Press, 2017.

Footnotes:

1. Albert Camus, ‘The Artist as Witness of Freedom’, Commentary, 1 December 1949.

2. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1951.

3. Albert Camus, Les Justes (The Just Assassins), 1949.

4. Albert Camus, ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’ (‘Ni victimes ni bourreaux’, Combat, November 1946), in Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944-1947. Trans. Alexandre de Gramont. Wesleyan University Press, 1991.

5. Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1961.

6. Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks. Penguin Books, 1989.

7. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World. Hesperides Press, Hong Kong, 2008 [1934].

8. Jawaharlal Nehru, Excerpts from His Writings and Speeches. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi, 1964, p.80.

9. Robert Kennedy, quoted in Jet, 20 June 1968.

10. Vaclav Havel, Toward a Civil Society. Lidove Noviny, 1994.

11. Albert Camus, ‘The Artist as Witness of Freedom’, Commentary, June 2015 [1 December 1949].

12. Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968 (1925).