Forgiveness and Empathy

"Although forgiveness is often regarded as an expression of weakness, the decision to forgive can paradoxically elevate the victim to a position of strength as the one who holds the key to the perpetrator's wish. For just at the moment when the perpetrator begins to show remorse, to seek some way to ask forgiveness, the victim becomes the gatekeeper to what the outcast desires -- readmission into the human community. And the victim retains that privileged status as long as he or she stays the moral course, refusing to sink to the level of the evil that was done to her or to him. In this sense, then, forgiveness is a kind of revenge, but revenge enacted at a rareified level. Forgiving may appear to condone the offense, thus further disempowering the victim. But forgiveness does not overlook the deed: it rises above it. 'This is what it means to be human,' it says. 'I cannot and will not return the evil you inflicted on me.' And thus it is the victim's triumph (117)

"One reason we distance ourselves through anger from those who have hurt us or others we know is the fear that if we engage them as real people, we will be compromising our moral stance and lowering the entry requirements into the human community" (120).

"Connecting on a human level with a monster . . . comes to be a profoundly frightening prospect, for ultimately, it forces us to confront the potential for evil within ourselves" (123).

"The absence of empathy, whether at the communal or personal level, signals a condition that, in subtle but deeply destructive ways, separates people from one another. When criminal offenders, even of the most egregious kind, show contrition and apologize, they are, quintessentially, acting as human beings.

"What enables some victims to forgive heinous crimes? What distinguishes them from those who feel unable to do so? In addition to an external context that makes reconciliation normative through the language of restoration - a truth commission, for example, or a counseling agency that focuses on victim-offender encounters, or a national dialogue that begins to put in place the symbols and vocabulary of forgiveness and compromise - there are internal psychological dynamics that impel most of us toward forming an empathic connection with another person in pain, that draw us into his pain, regardless of who that someone is. The possibility of making an empathic connection with someone who has victimized us, as a response to the pain of his remorse, stems significantly from this underlying dynamic. The power of human connectedness, of identification with the other as 'bone of my bone' through the sheer fact of his being human, draws us to 'rescue' others in pain, almost as if this were a learned response embedded deep in our genetic and evolutionary past. We cannot help it. We are induced to empathy because there is something in the other that is felt to be part of the self, and something in the self that is felt to belong to the other. Empathy feels with the other in a reciprocal emotional process in which one asks for it, or his very situation seems to ask for it, and the other responds by offering it. Empathy reaches out to the other and says: I can feel the pain you feel for having caused me pain" (127).