Newsletter for December 2001 / January 2002 email : andrew@forgivenessnet.co.uk website : http://www.forgivenessnet.co.uk
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| Some responses to last month's Newsletter Thank you for your thoughtful piece. I do so much public speaking on forgiveness ... and you did a terrific job of raising issues and thoughtfully separating the wheat from the chaff. Fred Luskin, Stanford University What a bright new intellectual vista ... utterly compelling from start to finish. This is a fresh, wonderfully useful perspective that is badly needed. Bill Halal, George Washington University We found your article a wonderful inspiration. Peter and Helen Evans, directors, OneCenter Very powerful, thoughtful, and full of insight. My prayer is that it touches and opens just one heart, if not many. John Pastore, CEO, Blue River
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Responding to another person's lie(with
a postscript on non-violent responses to terrorism)
Reporters and columnists pounce on a lie gleefully. Many young people, learning their values from reality TV, gain the impression that a lie is an ultimate wrong, sufficient reason to evict a fellow participant from the studio or one's desert island. We all lie - for example, when faced with unwanted awareness of one's character or habits. "I'm not proud!" "I'm fine - how dare you imply I'm not OK." "I don't need help with my job." Or often when applying for a new job - apparently 40% of CVs in the UK misrepresent applicants qualifications! Lying is usually wrong - though not always. The Welsh philosopher D Z Phillips wrote a powerful essay (in Moral Practices) asking how you would respond if, when you had your father living with you, the police came to the door announcing they were here to arrest him. Would you protect your dad, saying he was not with you? Flight Commander Ecker, USAF, lied to the Chiefs of Staff during the Cuba Missile Crisis. Ecker was recently an advisor on the marvellous Roger Donaldson movie about the crisis, Thirteen Days. His character appears in the film: he was persuaded to lie (about being shot at) by JFK's adviser, in order not to precipitate a hasty military counterstrike against Soviet troops. His lie probably prevented a nuclear holocaust. The use we make This remarkable story should guide us away from a simplistic "truth=right; lie=wrong" equation. Surprisingly, speaking the truth is not always right, either. It is the use we make of a truth - to build up people and relationships, or to destroy them - which has deeper value. The malicious use of a piece of information about someone, to destroy them or get back at them, is evil. And in the same way, it is how we respond to a lie - as a reason for condemning, or as an opportunity to educate or help - that exposes the deeper value. People with some ability to lead do not see others as they are, but as they have the potential to be. By definition, leaders can take other people to a new place or position. People who lead have to put some degree of trust in relatively incompetent people … in order to gradually train and empower them. Those who lead expect actually people to lie and bullshit, in order to conceal their incompetence, or because they do not know another way, etc. There is a spiritual depth to this. The pre-eminent Greek Orthodox thinker John Zizioulas related how the ancient church father Maximus the Confessor, when asked, "Does God know creatures according to their own nature?" replied ('most interestingly') "No. He knows them as the concrete results of his will." In other words, at the heart of this profound religious vision, God sees people as they are meant to be; and equally as they are formed by his interactions with them. People are not totally defined by their nature, but formed in relationship. God's knowledge of people is a solidarity with them in order to lead them, not a condemnation of their limitations. Lying to NASA In Rob Sitch's wonderful 2000 Australian movie The Dish, an astonishing true story unfolds of the scientific team at Parkes, near Sydney, Australia. Running the largest satellite receiver in the southern hemisphere, they were used by NASA to broadcast the TV pictures of the 1969 moonwalk. But less than two days before the walk Parkes lost the signal from Apollo 11. The three Aussie scientists, and their US colleague, lied to NASA, pretending they were receiving a normal signal and that the break in transmission must be in the connection to Florida. They did this for unclear reasons, connected with not wanting to appear like backwoodsmen to the 'geniuses' at NASA. (Though remember that NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because half the scientists designing it were working in imperial and the other half in metric measurements.) Yet after many anxious hours, they recovered the signal, and the transmission of the moon walk was accomplished wonderfully. We the viewers are entirely won over to forgive the team ... because thanks to the film we can see clearly that they have the potential to work beyond their normal level, and we want them to. What does this say? Lying is always a wrong act - like so very much of our behaviour - but what matters more is how we respond to it. How we respond to it depends on our own leadership. If we depend on other people to lead us, we will feel or claim that we are unable to trust them if they lie. We will generalise from one or two mistakes to a flawed character, etc. Whereas if we tend to lead others, we won’t assess them in terms of what they say or their mistakes, but be more used to trying to help them. Parenting - leading one's children Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the M K Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, told the following story in an address to the University of Puerto Rico last June (visit the Institute at http://www.gandhiinstitute.org/ : 'I was 16 years old and living with my
parents 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar
plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbours, so my two sisters
and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the
movies. One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference,
and I jumped at the chance. 'So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began
to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so
for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for
a stupid lie that I uttered. I decided then and there that I was never going to lie
again. Arun's extraordinary story shows us what is achieved when we stay in relationship with the liar, seeking to help him or her, rather than condemning and abandoning. Postscript - nonviolence and the 'war against terrorism' Mahatma Gandhi's vital and wonderful non-violent approach cannot work in all situations. It only works where there is an existing relationship between the persons involved, which non-violence pressures and interrogates, but does not abandon. After last month's feature on the use of force in Afghanistan, and the resistance we have to acknowledging the limitations of our abilities to transform others, Bill Halal wrote in: "Many point out that Gandhi's non-violent approach would have failed utterly against Hitler. It was the innate morality of the British that allowed Gandhi to succeed." And the many personal relationships Gandhi had forged with the Raj and Indian politicians. As we see time and time again, giving centrality to forgiveness means affirming relationships and working at them, not condemning and scapegoating other people. Andrew Knock |
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