To Forgive Is Also Human

To reimagine the human capacity for forgiveness, we must first challenge our ideas about the human inclination to seek revenge.

Western religious and therapeutic mindsets have come to imagine revenge as a disease that can be cured by civilization. It hasn't been seen as a natural, biologically driven impulse to which we all remain prone under certain circumstances. And at the same time, the seemingly colder eye of evolutionary biology has analyzed ruthlessness as an advantage in the relentless arc of the survival of the fittest. Forgiveness in both of these scenarios is a rare transcendent quality, a cure for revenge albeit one that would never help human beings really triumph.

Michael McCullough of the University of Miami Laboratory for Social and Clinical Psychology says this view of the world is based on simplistic understandings of both human nature and evolution. He describes a science that helps us comprehend how revenge came to have a purpose in human life, but he also stresses that forgiveness is a much more powerful instinct than we realize.

In this interview for Speaking Of Faith, we explore ways to recognize the revenge instinct in ourselves and embolden our inherent capacity to forgive.

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The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.
- Mahatma Gandhi
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