Heart of the Matter

Hello everyone today we have another chapter, this one on the important and challenging topic of forgiveness. There is a lot of good stuff and some weird stuff in here, so I hope you enjoy it and/or find it useful.

Before we get into it, I have some business up front that I wanted to share before we get to the party toward the back. And that is that I just finished up a big contract I've been working on for the past few months and I am now taking on new clients for my main job, which is providing writing and editing support for nonprofits. That includes blogging, op-eds, annual reports, research reports, case studies, press releases, that kind of thing.

Past clients include The Solutions Project, Global Grassroots Justice Alliance, the Barr Foundation, LivableStreets Alliance, Pesticide Action Network, and the David Bohnett Foundation. I’m looking to work with specific kinds of organizations: climate and environmental justice, immigrant rights, labor rights, racial justice, LGBTQ+, agroecology, justice in cities and transportation, and progressive funders.

If that is you, or you know someone who is looking for a good communications consultant, send me an email.

OK here's the main thing:

Heart of the Matter

From Don Henley’s lips to Jesus Christ’s ears

In this chapter, I want to talk about patriarchy and Jesus Christ and climate change, but first comic books so just stick with me for a minute. There is this indie superhero comic book called Invincible, written by Robert Kirkman who you might know as the creator of The Walking Dead, with art by Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley. The comic published 144 issues over 15 years with the same core creative team, which is a pretty incredible run for an independent series. It is a fun comic with highs and lows, and when I binged the whole series on my couch during the pandemic, I noticed this weird narrative pattern that I think about a lot.

I’ll save you too much recap, but to completely spoil the first story arc, the main character is Mark, a teenage superhero who goes by Invincible. His dad is Omni-Man, a superhero from another planet, basically Superman, who is training Mark to follow in his footsteps. Then, in issue 17, pretty fucking far into the storyline, Omni-Man goes ahead and murders an entire team of other superheroes, no explanation given. Eventually, we learn that Omni-Man was actually a scout for a full-scale invasion of Earth by this race of galactic fascist supermen. So Mark has to have this huge, bloody fight with his dad to save Earth from being taken over, something like tens of thousands of innocent people are killed in the process, and Omni-Man ends up fleeing the planet. So that’s that, right? An edgy lesson in our assumptions about heroes—that sometimes, even when they are our family members, they are actually monsters. And Omni-Man is now the bad guy. 

But then something odd happens. A mere five issues later, Mark runs into his dad, this time in space on a mission to help another planet. Omni-Man is like, oh hi, and tells Mark that he realizes now that he was wrong, that he regrets everything he did, and that he now wants to fight alongside humanity against the fascist invaders from his home planet. It’s not right away, but not long after, Mark just forgives him. A lot of other characters forgive him too. So Omni-Man goes from this horrible villain to being a good guy again. And as a reader, you more or less forgive him too. And for the next 15 years of Invincible comics, this type of thing just keeps happening, over and over. Major characters cause all kinds of unspeakable harm and are then forgiven, sometimes going back and forth from villain to hero more than once. 

This is obviously not something that Robert Kirkman invented. The heel turn and the redemption arc are plot devices that have been used maybe as long as we've been telling stories, especially in serial form. Part of it boils down to a necessity of the medium, the fact that in something like a comic book series, we’re stuck with a particular cast of characters that the fans love, and the creators have to keep figuring out what to do with them. But there was something about reading this long melodramatic series in a short period of time that I found oddly relaxing. There is a lot of punching in Invincible, some might argue too much punching, but the whole book settles into this rhythm, not of victory and defeat, but of apology and acceptance. It feels, I don’t know, nice, like a meditative practice of letting shit go. Just as much as it feels good to boo at the bad guy, it also feels good to release that anger. It’s a relief to stop hating someone, even a fictional character. 

When done right, a villain’s redemption arc carries with it tremendous emotional weight. There is something about it that seems wired into us, and not just the redemption part, but the astonishing act of forgiveness it requires on the part of supporting characters. It's a fictional representation of a very specific human capacity. And in our own era of non-fictional atrocities, it’s a capacity that we all need, for our own personal benefit, but also as a way to create change in the world, something far more effective than allowing ourselves to be consumed by anger. 

I feel like I should break in here for a minute to ease a worry that some readers may have about where I'm going with all of this. The point I’m trying to make here is not that all bad people are actually good people, or that we should brush aside the horrible things that people do, especially people like you-know-who, whose name I don't feel like typing right now. Rather, this is about the radical act of repair and forgiveness, and how it can be wielded to find peace within ourselves and build powerful movements. It’s about forgiveness as a tool that can save us from the isolation of the individual and create powerful bonds, even as we are all guilty of the failures and transgressions that are inevitable in the impossible work of building a world that is just.

While forgiveness is a universal human experience, part of the reason I think it looms so large as a plot device in our stories is that it’s actually extremely difficult to do in real life. It is much easier to let go of anger toward a fictional character than it is with a person in your life. Even as I’m about to write many words on the virtues of forgiveness, anger is something that I have benefited from, reveled in, and struggled with for the duration of my life. I don’t think that anger is necessarily a personal failure or something that should be automatically discarded. That’s part of what’s so difficult about it; anger is often righteous. Sometimes it gives us the will to do hard things that are necessary, or the energy to just put one foot in front of the other when we’re running short on other forms of motivation. It can be a course correction to the complacency that keeps systems of oppression in place. It can be a form of emotional honesty that allows us to remove the mask of calm disinterest that we are usually forced to wear. To be angry, often, is simply to give a shit about other people. 

So I’m not trying to say we should be out here like the Buddha all the time, but I do find myself wary of an urge that I sometimes get to cast other people aside. To think, you know what fuck that guy, because sometimes that's what people deserve. Let’s face it, perhaps more than ever in our lives, there is a daunting array of individuals at which to focus our rage. MAGA? Republican? Democrat? Works for an oil company? Blue line flag? Drives a loud car? Fuck that guy. The spectrum is vast. And the irresistible pull toward rage seems to be getting ever stronger thanks to the internet, where it is so easy and invigorating to express our anger at every moment it stirs up from within. Much of that is targeted toward our political opposition, but the world of internet leftists, in particular, is eternally, insufferably filled with rage aimed in just about every direction possible. I have watched the anger of the left expand its focus from mainly people on the right to including centrists, then center-left, and now people seem to be mostly angry at liberals. To be a liberal today, which in America basically means you would like to see government enforce a fairer version of capitalism—something that I don't personally subscribe to, but is a pretty common perspective—is about the worst thing someone can be. Literally everyone hates liberals right now. Except it doesn’t even stop at liberals because most leftists also hate other leftists. A single ideological disagreement or a sideways look at an organizing meeting can get someone tossed into the fuck-that-guy bucket right alongside Trump supporters.

When those of us engaged in the struggle for justice too often define ourselves by who we oppose, by the villains to the heroes we would like to be, we are constantly forced to ask ourselves where we draw the line. Who should we cut out of our lives? Who do we disqualify from our good graces? I would argue that, for our own sanity and for the strength of justice-seeking movements, these are the wrong questions. For the simple fact that regardless of who we draw that line around and banish into the realm of villain-hood, none of these people ever really go anywhere. Trump voters are still there maybe a neighborhood or two over. Liberals still live in the expensive condo next-door. Omni-Man is still out there. The same cast of characters will be here in issue after issue. With that in mind, we can draw power as individuals and as movement actors by asking better questions, about who we can welcome back with open arms, and whether there were really ever any heroes or villains in the first place.

It is very hard to set our anger aside, and sweet Jesus knows I can’t always do it. But I’m trying to get down to the heart of the matter, to quote restorative justice icon Don Henley. Because even when my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter, I really do think it’s about forgiveness.  

A Double Lock

Looking at movement history, the framework of nonviolent resistance demonstrates how forgiveness is not merely a personal virtue, but a strategy for creating change. Nonviolence sometimes gets a bad rap among activists, coming across as a moral mandate or finger-wagging about this or that kind of tactic. When nonviolent resistance is prescriptive, it can serve as a moderating constraint in moments when physical conflict, property damage, or sabotage are fully justified and maybe the only option available. But a lot of supporters of nonviolence, including me, aren't necessarily opposed to violent or destructive activity. It's just a different way of engaging with an opposing force. Nonviolence is often miscast as a philosophy of passivity—not challenging, not fighting—but it can achieve results that fighting alone cannot, very simply because it taps into the power of more people.

By inspiring critical masses of people with diverse perspectives to participate in some way, big or small, nonviolent resistance draws strength in numbers to advance a movement toward its goals. In their book Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan write that violent movements struggle because most people can’t or won’t participate, so they don't build sufficient power to win, or they don't have sufficient buy-in from the community even if they do win. When nonviolent movements succeed, by contrast, they invite vast numbers of people across class and circumstance to join a cause. The late stages involve flipping opponents or otherwise passive supporters over to your side, tipping the scales past a certain threshold of resistance. That even includes members of the opposition who in the final days of a regime’s demise will see where things are headed and stand down. For Chenoweth and Stephan, nonviolent resistance isn't necessarily an intrinsic virtue; it is a path toward a goal. They conclude that violent resistance also succeeds, but that a broad nonviolent movement has an easier time reaching the numbers needed to topple those in power. Looking at over a century of resistance campaigns, they found that nonviolent movements were twice as likely to achieve success as violent ones. Further, they conclude that the outcomes of successful nonviolent uprisings are more durable because more people support them.

Why Civil Resistance Works has many critics, who question the authors' methods and see the book as a condemnation of tactics that are often necessary and justified (seriously, a lot of people hate this book). Andreas Malm, for example, writes in How to Blow Up a Pipeline that struggles for liberation very often have violent or at least destructive contingents that create discomfort among those in power such that they must yield to mostly nonviolent movements. In his call for the use of sabotage in the climate movement, he points out that seemingly nonviolent uprisings actually use more violence than you might think, and such tactics are integral to achieving victory. This is an important critique, but I don't think their conclusions are necessarily at odds with each other. Even in a movement with a violent element, lasting success still eventually requires a critical mass of support, and any new post-revolution status quo relies on an eventual re-embrace of some portion of the community that was either disengaged or flat-out opposed at some point. Even if it contributes to the downfall of an oppressive regime, which it can, violence is not a tool that can build a lasting liberated society. It's a dead end.

There is a period of Martin Luther King Jr.'s writing that I think really captures this tension between violence and nonviolence, anger and reconciliation. During the later stages of the Civil Rights Movement, King had reached perhaps his peak of frustration with white Americans, including those he once considered allies. His 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, offers a scathing critique of white moderates, as the movement had secured important material advances, but stalled out on what King saw as the next necessary fight for economic equality. He criticizes white Americans' shallow commitment to the cause and unwillingness to sacrifice any of their own comforts, stating that they have "in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor."

This was around the time of uprisings in Watts and in other U.S. cities, and much of the book is King wrestling with his commitment to nonviolence and his recognition that such rebellions are an understandable response to this abandonment. "When there is rocklike intransigence or sophisticated manipulation that mocks the empty-handed petitioner, rage replaces reason. Nonviolence is a powerful demand for reason and justice. If it is rudely rebuked, it is not transformed into resignation and passivity." King lays responsibility for late-1960s turmoil at the feet of white Americans, and describes the solution as a "double lock of peaceful change," in which Black and white Americans each hold a key. This is such a powerful metaphor, with King essentially saying that until there is a true shared commitment to equality, violence will come to your doorstep—there is a way out of this, and it requires both of us.

For all of his frustrations, King does not give up on the possibility of reconciliation. In fact, he sees it as the only hope for both communities. King challenges violence as a viable path to change when there is no broad commitment to equality, noting that "few if any violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the nonresisting majority." And he acknowledges the reality that, at the end of the day, we all need to live here. "This is a multiracial nation where all groups are dependent on each other, whether they want to recognize it or not." All of this is to say that King was not demanding passivity, or criticizing militancy, or absolving transgressors of their accountability. But he still saw nonviolence as the best way, maybe the only way, toward a liberated future.

Regardless of the fight in question, unless you plan to simply eliminate those who are not on your side, the numbers just don’t work. That is a hard reality to face, and activists often resist it with all their might. That doesn't mean that we need to befriend fascists, and there will always be some segment of the community that will never come around and needs to be overpowered and outnumbered. But in the space between, there are vast numbers whose hearts and minds can be won over, despite a track record of not-great opinions and behaviors. White activists, in particular, often don’t want to organize middle-class or rural white people, or work with peers who we believe to be too moderate or have flawed politics or are problematic for some other reason. Bridges are burned, people are cast aside, and entire communities are deemed not worthy of engagement. We get smaller and smaller, and angrier and angrier. But that's a path toward isolation, not liberation. As anarchist thinker Chris Crass writes, “We need millions of people in motion for justice and we are going to bring all of our contradictions with us. If you don’t want messy, you don’t want mass.”

Dance of Contempt

If we accept that achieving a just society is to some extent a numbers game that requires us to forgive and reconcile with some mass of people we once opposed, that doesn’t exactly account for why or how those people, who typically hold some kind of power, would make that flip to the side of justice in the first place. How can we possibly forgive and move on together if these conflicts are based in a fundamental mismatch of interests?

It’s one of the eternal frustrations in trying to make any kind of widespread change, which is that people with even a teensy bit of power generally do not want to fuck with the program. Whether it’s in climate change, housing, transportation, education, health, whatever, these sentiments rear their heads at the ends of many failed attempts toward progress. It’s the reason rich parents will campaign for desegregated public schools and then send their kids to a white private school. It’s the reason white people will march in the streets for Black lives, but won’t challenge police with anything more than a body cam. It’s the reason liberals support affordable housing in theory, but not anywhere near their own homes. It’s such a stubborn tendency, in fact, that the inherently conservative principle that people will always act in their own best interests looms large even among progressive organizing efforts, wherein we often gravitate toward pockets of power where material interests happen to overlap.

One way to resolve this conflict, in which our wants and needs keep us in opposition to our neighbors, lies in abandoning the idea that there are two opposing sides in the first place, toward one that recognizes that justice benefits everyone. King makes this case above when describing his “double lock of peaceful change,” a poetic way to describe the concept of mutual liberation, the idea that all of our fates are connected. If we start with that assumption, the goals becomes not exactly to flip someone from one side to another, but to make each of us recognize that oppressing others is actually harmful to the oppressor as well, and seeking to overcome the assumption that one’s wellbeing is the product of successfully depriving others of their own. The power in doing so defeats the villain by dissolving the barrier between hero and villain entirely. It refuses a framework that says for one to dominate, the other must be dominated, and instead of trying to conquer the target of our anger by changing who is standing on top, it erases the need to for anyone to conquer anyone in the first place, because even conquest carried out by those with just intentions is harmful.

For my money, nobody writes about this idea better than bell hooks, in her 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, which challenges the idea that patriarchy is beneficial to men, and therefore, the idea that gender equality requires men to give something up as an act of sacrifice. It is based on the premise that all of us are steeped in patriarchy—that it hurts everyone regardless of gender, it can be perpetrated by everyone regardless of gender, and it can’t be dismantled without men being willing to take up the work. It is a response to the false notion that feminism is pro-woman and anti-man. “The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity,” she writes, “it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.” Just as in all forms of oppression, at the heart of patriarchy is not simply masculinity, it is dominance.

She describes patriarchy as a violent construct that leads to both boys and girls being afraid of their own fathers, and hinders loving relationships in adulthood. It “demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples” and “denies men full access to their freedom of will” by forcing them to live within constraints of a harmful definition of masculinity. It also suppresses the potential gentleness that exists in all of us, and elevates the potential abusiveness that also exists in all of us. Hooks quotes therapist and author Terrence Real:

Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.

Even when the idea of patriarchy is taken seriously, it’s often limited to its political dimension—laws and leaders that protect men who do harm or dole out human rights to women only as they see fit. But for men to find the will to change ourselves and the system, hooks argues, we must recognize that the power patriarchy has ostensibly given us is destroying us. On this point, hooks critiques other feminist thinkers, such as author Susan Faludi, on the topic of why men seem to be in crisis—including job dissatisfaction, drug abuse, suicide, depression and other problems plaguing American men, in particular. One common assumption is that men feel they are losing something they once had and have not been able to deal with that loss, and that is at the core of their modern struggles. hooks writes that this doesn’t adequately name the problem:

[Faludi] never considers that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement is false. Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives…would not exist.

The point hooks makes here is that well-being is not the same as the ability to assert control over other people. It may satisfy in its own way, but it is a slow-dripping poison. “Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health. Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation.”

Hooks is not merely talking about the struggle to end sexism or gender inequality. Rather, patriarchy is tangled up with all iterations of dominance that control and subjugate others, the “one-up, one-down” world view that you must not get something so that I can have it. This is fundamental to everything that is wrong with American society and the capitalist system we’ve plunged the world into. It’s the premise of an economy built atop racism, the invention that some group of others is not deserving, so that the rest can take freely from them. And it’s woven into the fossil fuel economy that gave us climate change—the ever-accelerating consumption of finite natural resources to advance society, through domination. It’s manufacturing abundance through something that is actually scarce, by taking it away from others. It’s why patriarchy loves petroleum, why toxic men love giant trucks that burn coal, and why presidents tear down solar panels. All of these impulses are deeply rooted in domination so that I may have something others do not, and why so many people are terrified to walk away from any power they can claim. As climate writer Eric Holthaus writes: 

Climate writers often slip into a war metaphor. But climate change is not a war, it is genocide. It is domination. It is extinction. It is the most recent manifestation of how powerful men throughout history have sought to steal from the less powerful, and dismiss them as merely inconvenient. Understanding climate change in this way transforms everything.

It can also transform the way we might confront the powerful and cease the great harms they are causing, by viewing them as both victims of the system they are part of, and as necessary allies in dismantling it. If our goal is merely to crush the perpetrators of the fossil fuel economy, or patriarchy, or Trumpism, we are ultimately spreading the poison of domination, of winning and losing, of taking and keeping. 

To dismantle a toxic system, the work is to erase these distinctions and thereby absorb the power of those who once clung to their roles within it. And for that matter, it also means reconsidering existing power structures we all are reluctant to abandon because of the false sense of control they instill in us, and how, by letting them go, we might become fuller, freer human beings.

Everyone Gets a Denarius

I promised some Jesus stuff here, and I imagine some of you are like, ah finally I love Jesus, others might be like eh I don’t know about this. But it’s OK, I’m not particularly religious, there just is this one Bible story that I really like that is relevant to this topic and came to my attention around the time that student loan forgiveness became a big topic of discourse. There were a lot of really bad takes on the idea of the federal government waiving loans for students who are crippled by skyrocketing debt and flat wages, one of which was the idea that it would inspire widespread anger and resentment among those who already paid off their student loans. You would think that this would not be something most people would really care about because why would you be opposed to someone else’s good fortune, but as Roxane Gay wrote for the New York Times, “A great many Americans are only concerned with fairness when they think someone else might get something they won’t get. And they are seething with resentment as they imagine a country in which we help one another.”

The debate got me thinking about what the particular mindset is that would generate such seething, and how it feels similar to a form of anxiety over who deserves what, and who stands to lose what they’re entitled to, that feels very deeply woven into the climate crisis. It’s highly relevant to this overall question of our anger toward each other and our impulse for punishment and penalty. I tweeted something along these lines back when this debate was happening (ugh remember Twitter, so gross) and my friend Erin Mahoney who is a very smart person replied, “It’s also an exact allegory of Matthew 20:1-16.” 

I am godless, so I was like what’s that all about, and it’s this passage called the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.” In a nutshell, Jesus aka the son of god says, imagine the kingdom of heaven as a landowner hiring people to work in his vineyard, and I’m very sorry it’s a he, that is just how land ownership was back in Jesus days. He hires some people first thing in the morning, and then some more people later in the afternoon, and promises to pay them each what is right. At the end of the day, everyone gets exactly one denarius, an old Roman coin equal to a day’s wage, regardless of how many hours they worked. The people who started in the morning say, hey we are getting shafted here, because we’ve been here all day, why don’t we get more denariuses or perhaps denarii. And the landowner says take your money and GTFO please. Like I said, everyone gets a denarius.

“Or are you envious because I am generous?” he says. “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

This is kind of a weird parable, and people have different takes on it. Some say it’s about being nice to religious converts because everyone deserves to go to heaven. On one level it is a pretty straightforward story about how God’s grace is extended to everyone, no caveats or qualifiers. But you can also read it as a story about what true equality looks like in practice, and the power of abandoning our petty impulse to ensure that some get more than others based on who is more deserving. 

One political philosopher who is not Jesus but still writes nicely on this topic is Elizabeth Anderson, who challenges the common formulation in capitalist societies of “luck egalitarianism,” which takes pity on people only such that they have experienced bad luck, and tries to compensate them accordingly and only to the extent that they truly deserve based on that misfortune. Instead, Anderson posits, everyone is entitled to a certain base level of shared dignity and well-being, merely because we are all human. It doesn’t matter if you’ve experienced bad luck or your struggles are entirely your fault. Everyone gets a denarius. 

It sounds like such a simple concept, that everyone is equal and deserves the same, and it’s literally the kind of thing they teach in preschool. But we all know that people don’t really feel that way most of the time, nor do they act in a way that reflects that belief. The human definition of fairness is all too often one of pettiness and nickel-and-diming people, and making them eternally prove themselves to be worthy of what scraps society allows them. And when one of us falls short, they just have to suffer for it, because fuck that guy. 

As one religious scholar put it in an analysis of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: “So excessive is God’s propensity to give and care, it violates our instincts about fairness. Such justice looks rash.” And I guess that’s where I’d like to leave this, the idea that forgiveness is not giving in or backing down or letting someone off the hook. It is a radical, even divine source of power.

The point of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is that this level of justice is so powerful it seems to violate our flawed instincts about fairness. Casting those instincts aside is not a power that exists only in the hands of god. I think it means that we all have the propensity for Jesus-level care within us. Or another way to put it, we all have the capacity to not give in to our least Jesus-like tendencies, aka wanting others to suffer just because we have suffered, or even because they are the ones that caused us to suffer. We have instead a potential nature within us that takes joy in seeing others rise, and recognizes our mutual benefit when they do. And that’s downright heroic, if not divine.