Personal vs. Historical Forgiveness

I think what is necessary to achieve forgiveness is knowing that either the behaviors one is forgiving will not be repeated or that if those behaviors are repeated, the person forgiving can deal with the consequences. Some people are able to forgive more easily than others because they might not fully understand or not feel affected by the consequences that exist if the behaviors they are forgiving are repeated.

While people, in the personal sense, can find closure in their own lives, history cannot; we, as a society, should not have forgiveness in the historical sense.  Some events that have happened throughout history are unforgivable. Further, many of the people who have experienced those acts have had the opportunity to ever forgive horrifically taken from them— it would be an injustice for society to forgive people’s killers on their behalf. In regard to what is necessary to achieve forgiveness, society cannot forgive certain violations of humanity, in a historical sense, because we cannot necessarily know that those atrocities will not be repeated, nor can we know that society as a whole can deal with the consequences if certain behaviors are repeated.

As a society, it would be reckless to condone certain horrific acts from history, by forgiving them, when we do not truly have a way of knowing that they will not happen again. One person can feel assured that even something horrible may not happen again, especially in his or her own lifetime, and in dealing with trauma, it can be critical for individuals to forgive so that they can move on with their own lives, rather than becoming debilitated by an incapacity to forgive and gain a personal sense of closure. An individual can also forgive, without believing that the behaviors she or he is forgiving will not be repeated (even in his or her lifetime), because as time has passed, that person has become stronger and seen that she or he has the ability to deal with certain consequences of others’ actions and can ultimately forgive and move on knowing that. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that personal forgiveness is a right but not an expectation.

While individuals may feel a need to forgive to gain personal closure and move forward in their own lives, society inherently cannot have closure and needs a lack of forgiveness to move forward. An individual can accept events as part of his or her own past, but letting go of historical atrocities—not simply as an individual who experienced them but as a society—encourages people to repeat them (even if unintentionally). The sense of a lack of closure, that we maintain as a society by not forgiving history’s atrocities, necessitates that society strives to achieve that sense of closure— by continuing to work towards solutions to the world’s problems in order to gain the assurance, needed for forgiveness, that the unforgivable acts from history will not be repeated. In other words, society needs to lack closure so that people continue to strive for it. Society as a whole cannot move forward when it leaves room for history’s unforgivable events to be repeated. Rather, society moves forward by preserving a lack of forgiveness— to serve as a constant reason for people to learn from the worst parts of history and work for a better future.