The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

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The Religious in Responses to Mass Atro cit y

A peculiar and fascinating aspect of many responses to mass atrocities is the creative and eclectic use of religious language and frameworks. Some crimes are so extreme that they “cry out to heaven,” drawing people to employ religious vocabulary to make meaning of and to judge what happened, to deal with questions of guilt and responsibility, and to reestablish hope and trust in their lives. Moreover, in recent years, religious actors have become increasingly influential in worldwide contexts of conflict-resolution and transitional justice. This collection offers a critical assessment of the possibilities and problems pertaining to attempts to bring religious – or semireligious – allegiances and perspectives to bear in responses to the mass atrocities of our time: When and how can religious language or religious beliefs and practices be either necessary or helpful? And what are the problems and reasons for caution or critique? In this book, a group of distinguished scholars explore these questions and offer a range of original explanatory and normative perspectives. Thomas Brudholm is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Consulting Researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies. He has his Ph.D. in philosophy and his publications focus on conceptual and normative issues arising in the aftermath of mass violence. Brudholm has been visiting scholar at prestigious research institutes in Denmark and abroad, including CERI/Sciences Po (Paris). He has edited and contributed to several books, and, in 2008, he published Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive. He has contributed articles to the Journal of Human Rights, the Hedgehog Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and Law & Contemporary Problems (forthcoming). Thomas Cushman is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Wellesley College. He is the author and editor of many books on topics including counterculture in Russia, genocide, George Orwell, human rights, and the war in Iraq. He is the founder and was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Rights. He is an honorary Professor in the Social Sciences at the  University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and has been Visiting Professor at Brandeis University and Birkbeck College, University of London.

The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by

Thomas Brudholm University of Copenhagen

Thomas Cushman Wellesley College

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521518857 © Cambridge University Press 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009

ISBN-13

978-0-511-51781-5

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-51885-7

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Eric Markusen, who brought us together.

Contents

List of Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman

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Part I: Between Necessity and Impossibility: The Role of Religion in the Face of Atrocity 1 Religious Rhetoric in Responses to Atrocity Jennifer L. Geddes

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2 The Limit of Ethics – The Ethics of the Limit Arne Grøn

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3 The Intolerability of Meaning: Myth, Faith, and Reason in Philosophical Responses to Moral Atrocity Peter Dews

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Part II: Does It Help to Import Religious Ideas: Reflections on Punishment, War, and Forgiveness 4 Can We Punish the Perpetrators of Atrocities? Antony Duff 5 The Ethics of Forgiveness and the Doctrine of Just War: A Religious View of Righting Atrocious Wrongs Nigel Biggar 6 On the Advocacy of Forgiveness after Mass Atrocities Thomas Brudholm vii

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105 124

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Part III: Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities 7 Making Whole: The Ethics and Politics of “Coming to Terms with the Past” John Torpey

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8 When Faith Meets History: The Influence of Religion on Transitional Justice Daniel Philpott

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9 Genocidal Rupture and Performative Repair in Global Civil Society: Reconsidering the Discourse of Apology in the Face of Mass Atrocity Thomas Cushman 10 Violence, Human Rights, and Piety: Cosmopolitanism versus Virtuous Exclusion in Response to Atrocity Bryan S. Turner Index

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242 265

Contributors

Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and a former president of the (UK) Society for the Study of Christian Ethics. He is the author of “Forgiveness in the Twentieth Century: A Review of the Literature, 1901–2001,” in Forgiveness and Truth, ed. Alistair McFadyen and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001); “Making Peace and Doing Justice: Must We Choose?” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, ed. Nigel Biggar (Washigton, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003); “Between Development and Doubt: The Recent Career of Just War Doctrine in British Churches,” in The Price of Peace: Just War in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Charles Reed and David Ryall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and “Forgiving Enemies in Ireland,” Journal of Religious Ethics, forthcoming. Thomas Brudholm is Associate Professor in the Department of CrossCultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. While editing this book he was Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. He is author of Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008) and of several articles in international journals on responses to mass atrocities. He has coedited a special issue of the Journal of Human Rights on “negative” emotions (vol. 5, 2006) and two Danish books: on genocide commemoration and on the problems facing a variety of different disciplinary approaches to the aftermath of genocide. Thomas Cushman is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Sociology Department at Wellesley. He is the founding editor and editor-at-large of the Journal of Human Rights and the editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Human Rights (2009). He is currently at work on a book entitled A Recovery of Liberal Internationalism: A League of Democracies. ix

x List of Contributors

Peter Dews is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy, with a focus on German Idealism, the Frankfurt School, and modern French philosophy. He has held numerous visiting positions, including at the University of Konstanz, at Columbia University, and at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987, new edition 2007), The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), and The Idea of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Antony Duff is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling, where he has taught since 1970. He is the author of Trials and Punishments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability (1990); Criminal Attempts (1996); Punishment, Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Answering for Crime (2007); and coauthor of The Trial on Trial III: Towards a Normative Theory of the Criminal Trial (2007). With three colleagues, he is now working on a large research project on the issue of criminalization. Jennifer L. Geddes is Research Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on evil and suffering, Holocaust testimony, and the ethics of interpretation, as well as the editor of the award-winning journal, the Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture; Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2001); and The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust, with John K. Roth and Julius Simon (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan). Arne Grøn is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Copenhagen, as well as Cofounder of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Subjectivity Research. He is the author of numerous publications on ethics, philosophy of religion, theory of subjectivity, and history of philosophy. He is the coeditor of Subjectivity and Transcendence (Tuebingnen, Germany Mohr Siebeck, 2007). Daniel Philpott is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science  and Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in religion and global politics and in the politics of transitional justice. He is the author of Revolutions in

List of Contributors

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Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and editor of The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). John Torpey is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Among other works, he is the author of Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) and editor of Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). His current work focuses on the idea of “American exceptionalism.” Bryan S. Turner was Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge (1998–2005) and at the National University of Singapore (2005–2009) and is currently the Alona B. Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, United States. He edited the Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006) and recently published Vulnerability and Human Rights (2006) and Rights and Virtues (2008). He is currently editing the Routledge Handbook of Globalization Studies and The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion.

Acknowledgments

The chapters in this volume were first presented at a conference on “The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity,” which was held in Copenhagen on May 12–13, 2006, and hosted by the Danish Institute for International Studies. The conference was made possible by the cooperation and generous support from several sources. The major source of funding came from the University of Copenhagen, which embarked on a university-wide research initiative from 2003 to 2007 on “Religion in the 21st Century.” The aim of this initiative was to bring together researchers from all of the University of Copenhagen’s six faculties in order to combine the study of separate themes into an overall picture of religion in the twenty-first century. The idea behind the present volume was developed on the basis of discussions in this research network, and we wish to thank its steering committee for its support of the conference and for its funding of the preparatory work. Additional funding was provided by the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Subjectivity Research, and Wellesley College and the Journal of Human Rights. We would like to thank all of these institutions for their interest in the project. A special thanks goes to Nanna Hvidt and Arne Grøn for their enthusiastic and generous support of the entire project. Thomas Brudholm also wishes to thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities for its support of the editorial work.

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Thomas B rudhol m a n d T hom as Cu sh m an Introduction: The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity

There are some deeds that cry out to heaven. These deeds are not only an ­outrage to our moral sense, they seem to violate a fundamental awareness of the constitution of humanity. Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels (1970). So if you want to stay within the religious, you must struggle. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen (1998).

For the most part, those who think about the capacity of human beings to commit acts of spectacular cruelty against each other have puzzled over the question: why? The problem of evil has been a central concern of theologians and philosophers and has also increasingly concerned social scientists and historians who have tried to explain the mass atrocities of the twentieth century. There is, of course, no consensus as to how to explain mass atrocity or even on the question of whether or not it can be explained. For some, the pessimistic conclusion, vide Hegel, is that ­“history is a slaughterbench” and modernity has only intensified its bloody toll. History appears to be a ­progression of events, some of them quite ­atrocious, the causes of which are multifarious, but one thing we observe is that in the face of mass atrocity, human societies have developed various  ways of coming to terms with the horrific events that so often punctuate their ­existence. So, in addition to looking for the causes of such events, we must also address the ­question of how societies respond to them. We do know that there is a whole range of collective responses to mass ­atrocity. For some societies, there is repression of memory, since the weight and intensity of the ­experience of atrocity makes it virtually ­impossible to “go on” knowing that such things have happened and could happen again. Other ­societies, embrace their experiences more actively, realizing that the  weight of the  past can cripple the present and future 1

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if it is not addressed head-on with specific and determinate collective responses. In the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of collective forms of response to mass atrocities. War crimes trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, amnesty programs, reparations policies, collective apologies, and religiously inspired programs of forgiveness have appeared all over the world, wherever we have seen societies struggle with the memory of past atrocity. Indeed, it might be said that the collective attempt to come to terms with mass atrocity is in itself as much a part of the study of mass atrocity as the search for its causes. There has been a global proliferation of research and publications addressing the question of how to respond to ongoing or past atrocities. Most of this research is policy-driven, not so much interested in the simple analytical question of how societies do respond, but how they ought to respond. It is guided by the idea that we must harness the power of our reason precisely to deal with the products of our unreason to guide traumatized societies through the harsh waters of their stormy memories. The establishment of research and policy ­institutes such as the Center for Transitional Justice in New York and the introduction of a United Nations Peacebuilding Commission are examples of such institutional efforts. Many studies have been focused on particular instruments or mechanisms of accountability in themselves or as parts of a broader agendas aimed at coming to terms with the past, often focusing on hard choices between justice and truth or on the tensions between national sovereignty and international legal norms. The aim of this book is to explore one particular but insufficiently studied aspect of many responses to mass atrocities: the role of the religious in responses to mass atrocity. More precisely, the chapters assembled herein focus on two major themes: the roles that religious language, ideas, and actors objectively play in responses to atrocities and the normative assessments of what role religious language, ideas, and actions should or should not play in responses to crimes that shock the conscience of mankind. Our aim is to concentrate on the use and influence of religious language, ideas, or perspectives beyond the confines of particular religious traditions, communities, and institutions. One of the most significant aspects of responses to mass atrocity in the modern age is that religious discourse and practices have seeped out into broader, public, and secular discourse and contexts. As Ian Buruma put it in a critique of the British Holocaust Memorial Day, such official commemorations calls for piety and encourages politicians to act like clerics: “This is not what politicians are elected to do. Sermons belong in places of worship. But more



Introduction

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and more […] religion, or religious posturing is seeping into areas where it should not be” (Buruma, 2002). Yet, even granted this, it might be prudent not to guard the borderline of the secular realm too categorically as we seek to understand or articulate the implications of “unspeakable” evils. As Jürgen Habermas suggested in “Faith and Knowledge,” the “secular side” might do well by not ignoring or closing its mind to the powers of religious language and perspectives (Habermas, 2005). Confronted with massive and heinous violations of human rights – the Holocaust and other genocides of the twentieth century – witnesses, judges, philosophers, artists, and others have often used religious vocabulary in attempts to deal with the questions arising in the aftermath of such mass atrocities. For example, the photographs taken by the Allies at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps are often referred to as “icons” and Susan Sontag (2001, p. 19) famously described her first look at them as a “modern revelation” and a “negative epiphany.” Likewise, testimonies about the camps themselves have invoked the idea of Hell, and discussions about artistic representations have drawn on notions of the so-called ineffable as well as invocation of philosophical and religious taboos against representations of the enormity of mass atrocity, in particular the Holocaust (Berstein, 1994; Cohen, 1988; Lanzmann, 1994). In the modern world, committees responsible for the organization of Holocaust museums and memorial days find themselves enveloped in questions about the place for despair and redemption in the design of exhibitions and commemorations (Linenthal, 2001). Public state-sponsored events like the perennial European Holocaust memorial days are clearly products of secular societies, but they tend to “sacralize” remembrance (Eschebach, 2005) of suffering and commemorate what sociological theorist Jeffrey Alexander (2002) has referred to as “sacred evil.” The idea for this volume emerged from our interest in the many and remarkable ways in which public and scholarly discourse about mass atrocities in recent times is shaped by religious – mainly Christian  – ­terminology and ideas. Indeed, it might be argued that fragments of Christian ideas and imagery have shaped Western postwar representations of the Holocaust (Lawson, 2007). More generally, within recent years religious actors have become increasingly visible and influential in worldwide contexts of transitional justice or the so-called politics of dealing with the past – a story, most often, of atrocious mass violence. In countries like South Africa, Sierra Leone, and Northern Ireland, religious leaders and organizations have been related to state-sponsored truth commissions

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and faith-based diplomacy, and ideals and practices of forgiveness, reconciliation and commemoration have become part of current political discourse and practice (Auerbach, 2005; Levy and Sznaider, 2006; Philpott, 2007). On the basis of his influence in the South African truth commission, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has become a global icon of the potential of religious leaders and religious language and values in relation to societal endeavors to civilize the barbarous space that exists after atrocity. The use of religious discourse and ideas in responses to mass atrocities is fraught with ambiguity. On the one hand, there seems to be an almost functional imperative toward the use of religious language and ideas to attempt to understand what, in an existential sense, cannot be understood. The overwhelming and horrible nature of mass atrocities throws into relief the limits of language, human justice, and our moral understanding. As noted by several contributors to this volume, we are placed in an insoluble double bind where the sense of a need to respond – to witness, to repair, or to do justice – is intimately accompanied by the discomforting sense that any response we offer will be inadequate. Perhaps this is part of the reason why people – whether religious or not – frequently employ religious language and ideas when trying to articulate a response to atrocity. Given the function of religion as a means for understanding what appears to be beyond the reach of our understanding, the use of religious reservoirs of meaning and value may seem to make eminent sense. On the other hand, the importation and use of religious ideas is fraught with problems and open to questioning. Is it, for example, really appropriate to speak of the photographs from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps as secular “icons”? In what sense, if any, is it possible to trace analogies between the religious meaning of an icon and the stark objectivity of photographs of human cruelty and suffering? (Brink, 2000). The same uncertainty applies, for example, to the use of the image of Hell in testimonies about the Nazi camps. According to Hannah Arendt, a description of the Nazi camps as “Hell on earth is more ‘objective,’ that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature” (1953, p. 79). Others have rejected or cautioned against hasty incorporation of the extraordinary into given religious frameworks. According to Holocaust-scholar Lawrence L. Langer (1998), the use of traditional religious language and concepts like atonement and expiation, repentance can become a barrier against an open encounter with the atrocity of mass murder. What he calls the “surfeit of piety” pays “homage to familiar vocabulary at the expense of the crimes themselves, that recede into the



Introduction

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shadows of forgetfulness” (Langer, 1998, p. 174). With specific regard to the above-mentioned use of the image of “Hell on earth,” also consider this poem on the arrival to Auschwitz by Charlotte Delbo: In hell You do not see your comrades dying in hell death is not threat you no longer feel hunger or thirst in hell you no longer await anything in hell there is no more hope and hope is anguish in the heart of empty blood. Why then do you say that it is hell, here. – “Morning of Arrival” (Delbo, 1995, p. 134).

The frequent use of religious language and ideas in responses to mass atrocities represents a genuinely ambivalent and fascinating topic that raises a host of questions: In trying to respond to massive and heinous crimes like genocide, does it help to import religious ideas or frameworks? Do some crimes, as suggested by Peter Berger (1970), “cry out to heaven” in the sense that we somehow need to draw on ideas and perspectives from religious frameworks in order to deal with them and their moral implications? Do we need some kind of religious underpinning or framework in order to make sense of questions about guilt and memory or practices like forgiveness and punishment in relation to people responsible for the most horrible international crimes? In recent years several theologians and other scholars have claimed that religious perspectives and values have an essential and valuable role to play in relation to efforts to understand and deal with mass atrocity. The general arguments are that without such perspectives we cannot grasp the nature of evil or make sense of the idea of human rights; that without a notion of eschatological hope, we risk giving in to despair; that without a devotion to the value and virtue of forgiveness there is no future; that religion is a key to preserve our sense of evildoers as fellow human beings and as something apart from their deeds. There is, however, a need for a critical assessment of the possibilities and problems pertaining to attempts to bring religious or quasi-religious allegiances and perspectives to bear in responses to mass atrocities of our time: When and how can religious language or religious beliefs and practices be either necessary or helpful? And what are the

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problems and reasons for caution or critique? These are the questions that the chapters in this volume seek to address.

Clarification of Terms In order to set out more clearly what is within the scope of this volume, here follows an elaboration of the terms that constitute the title of this collection. We proceed in the most logical way by explaining what we mean by “mass atrocities,” the meaning of the term “responses” and then, finally, why we have chosen the broad term “the religious” as the most important rubric under which to describe responses to mass atrocity. “Mass atrocities” is a concept that is so broad that it can include phenomena of a quite disparate nature. In this book, one will find references to the Holocaust and other genocides, to crimes against humanity such as slavery and apartheid, and to large-scale, deliberate, and systematic violations of human rights. Other books have been written to carve out what is peculiar about genocide or how to differentiate between, say, war crimes and crimes against humanity (May, 2005; Vetlesen, 2005). For our purposes in this book, what these crimes or violations share is more important than what makes them differ. They are, as David Scheffer (2006, p. 239) has suggested all “atrocity crimes”: high-impact crimes of severe gravity that are of an orchestrated character and that result in a significant number of victims and merit an international response. Yet, what arguably matters most in this book is what gives these crimes their name, namely their atrocious or morally horrifying aspect. They “shock the conscience of humankind” as Scheffer writes, using an evidently problematic, but ultimately appropriate phrase from the human rights declaration and several other international legal documents. The philosopher Claudia Card has argued that most well-known examples of atrocity are also central paradigms of evil (Card, 2002). Like evil, or indeed “radical” evil, talk about mass atrocities is saturated with terms expressive of a certain sense of moral horror or extraordinary transgression. The acts and events in question are decried as “unimaginable,” as “heinous,” “abhorrent,” “cruel,” and “inhuman.” The perception of the transgressive nature of mass atrocities finds expression in statements that no response to them can be adequate. As Martha Minow writes in the introduction to her widely read book on legal responses to mass atrocity, the book is “a fractured meditation on the incompleteness and inescapable inadequacy of each possible response to collective atrocities” (1998, p. 5). From this sense of limits, the distance to the realm of religion is not far. Consider for example Hannah Arendt’s famous statement that some evils can neither be punished nor be forgiven and that



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they therefore “transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power” (Arendt, 1989, p. 241). Thus we are led directly to the second central term in the title, namely “responses.” The chapters cover the range of most debated responses in current literature on transitional justice. That is, they include discussions of the role of religious ideas and actors in relation to trial and punishment, truthrecovery and reconciliation, official apologies, reparations, and forgiveness. At the same time, this is more than a volume on transitional justice mechanisms, and in so far as talk about “responses to mass atrocities” mainly brings to mind the range of just mentioned institutions and practices, it is important to stress that our use of the terminology represents a more capacious category. For example, we draw attention to responses to ongoing atrocities such as humanitarian intervention and the doctrine of just war, but also focus on forms of response lying well outside the domains of institutions and public policy. These include the very attempt to speak or give testimony about moral horrors, the cultivation of cosmopolitan ideals, and the reflections of philosophers on humanity, history, and God in the face of mass atrocity. To deal with the question of the religious in responses to atrocity without attention to such phenomena and reflections beyond the kinds of response usually discussed in the literature on transitional justice would be quite unsatisfactory. The reference to “the religious” constitutes the last and probably the most challenging part of the title. What is meant by “the religious” here and why use this problematic term? Let us immediately say that we are not positing the existence a universal Platonic Form or even any kind of clear and distinct idea of “the religious” in itself. To the contrary, behind the choice of title lies a wish to explore a truly human – malleable, historical, and social – phenomenon: The many ways in which religious concepts, values, practices, and rhetoric are brought into play as people – secular as well as religious – try to respond to morally horrifying mass crimes. Thus, for our purposes, “the religious” can be viewed as a modality of language and belief as well as action and practice. Of course, throughout history, religious communities, and institutions have been central to societies’ attempts to respond to massive and heinous violations of human rights. Most observers have approached this subject from the perspective of how specific forms of organized religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam for instance – and their institutions have responded to mass atrocity. While this is a valuable approach, our focus is intentionally more eclectic and less tied to an interest in established religions or traditions and their development. What originally caught our interest was precisely such instances where various aspects of religious discourse, life, and practice are used in otherwise non-religious contexts, where religious leaders chair secular institutions and

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pull religious gestures and language into public settings, or where otherwise secular thinkers draw on the images and rhetorical figures from known from religious traditions. What is interesting is precisely that religious concepts, rhetoric, and actors are active beyond traditional religious realms. In relation to such cases, a title referring more simply to “religious responses” would be misleading. Although terminologically a bit innovative, the chosen title has the advantage of making space for such cases where otherwise secular responses contain or perhaps incorporate some religious dimension. Moreover, to talk of “the religious in responses to mass atrocities” prompts us to acknowledge precisely what it is so easy ignore, namely the question what makes something or someone “religious.” Although the book as a whole is not committed to any specific interpretation of religion and religiosity, it is born of an idea that it is possible and promising to investigate dimensions of “the religious” in responses to atrocity without much attention, if any, to specific religions. Accordingly, several of the chapters in this volume outline the religious features of secular responses to mass atrocity, for example, in the political discourse of Abraham Lincoln on the issues of slavery in America and in the apologies for genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia by the secular world leaders Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan. The distinction between “the religious” and specific religions is absolutely essential, both empirically and conceptually. The religious is not contained within the sphere of religion, but actively intrudes across the social and cultural spheres and boundaries of modernity. Apart from breaking with any substantive definition of religion as something contained only within the mirage of clearly delimited religious traditions and communities, the book as a whole does not illustrate or apply a particular theoretical understanding of “the religious.” The term can refer to certain kinds of social actors and organizations as well as to particular modes of discourse or uses of language. It can be tied to specific metaphysical beliefs, experiences, or ritual practices, to particular rationales, or worldviews. The religious can manifest itself purely at the level of individual subjectivity, as when a witness experiences and attempts to process or make meaning of extreme phenomena. Usually, however, social actors do not suffer in silence; they share and communicate their experiences of atrocity and in doing so attempt to make collective meaning of them, to classify them in collective consciousness, and to render similar private apprehension of the extreme into a public category of “evil” (Kleinman et al., 1997). Thus, “the religious,” as we use it here and as it figures in the title, is deliberately the most generalized classificatory rubric, meant not to foreclose prematurely any potentially interesting example of the phenomenon in the context of response to mass atrocity. It is a pragmatic concept, brought into play to “catch” a wide range of positions and possibilities



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in the ways that individual human beings and societies deal with traumatic experience. As Aristotle once put it, it “precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 3) and our title is adequate to its subject matter in so far as the overall aim of the book is truly to explore a malleable and diverse dimension of many responses to mass atrocities.

Overview of the Chapters The 10 chapters included in this volume are revised and expanded versions of papers presented at the international conference “The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity,” held at the Danish Institute for International Studies in May 2006. In accordance with the original concept of the conference, each author has been free to develop her or his original perspective on a particular aspect of the unifying topic. This collection is not meant to articulate any partisan perspective on the religious in responses to mass atrocity. It contains several chapters that are quite cautious and critical about religious responses (Duff, Brudholm, Torpey, Cushman). There are also some that are decidedly ambivalent or analytically indifferent (Geddes, Grøn, Dews, Turner), and some that are more inclined to a positive evaluation of the role or intervention of religious ideas and actors (Biggar, Philpott). The book is divided into three parts, moving from more abstract theological and philosophical reflections on the use and role of religious language and perspectives in the face of atrocity, to more specific and empirical examinations of particular moral, political, and legal responses to atrocity. As indicated by the subtitle of the volume, the group of authors is interdisciplinary. Not all disciplines are represented (we doubt whether that would be fruitful), but the volume represents a remarkably eclectic and ecumenical collection of thinkers from philosophy, sociology, theology, political science, and religious studies. Part I includes three chapters on some of the most fundamental ethical and philosophical problems arising from the use of religious language and perspectives in responses to mass atrocities. Running through all three chapters is a concern with the apparently intractable tensions and limits of any response to mass atrocity. The first chapter by Jennifer. Geddes explores the very use of religious language – “from the borrowing of the words in the vocabularies of religious traditions to the language of prayer” – in order to understand better its moral dangers as well as its peculiar powers of articulation. The chapter introduces the idea of a “double bind,” that is, the sense that it is necessary to respond in some way, but at the same time, that it is impossible to do so adequately. This is, according to Geddes, a significant reason why some individuals borrow or use the words of religious traditions in their

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attempts to provide some rejoinder to atrocity. However, as Geddes shows through a carefully balanced presentation, religious language can serve both to help and hinder our efforts to respond to mass atrocity. On the one hand, religious language can draw our attention to the extremity of the events of atrocity, the necessity for response, and the proper stance to take as listeners to the testimonies of those who have suffered. On the other hand, the use of religious rhetoric can also serve to obfuscate – and even collaborate with – the atrocity to which it seeks to respond, to demonize perpetrators, and to gloss over or even justify atrocity. Because religious language can be used in such different ways, there is a need for critical sensitivity, but not for a wholesale rejection that would leave us stuttering as we seek to respond to atrocity. Religious rhetoric in responses to atrocity can, as Geddes concludes: “be used to open up the double bind of speaking about atrocity, allowing something to be said, or can be used to dissolve that double bind, by making the atrocity fit within a scheme that makes sense of it and that makes it unnecessary to say anything more about it.” Chapter 2, by Arne Grøn, provides a phenomenological account of the nature and role of the religious in relation to the problem of responding ethically to mass atrocities. Grøn tries to bring out what is most basically at stake when we confront a morally horrifying history. Like Geddes, Grøn argues that we are placed in a double bind or, as he puts it, an aporetic situation. We sense the need to provide an ethical response, but at the same time it seems that there can be no adequate ethical response to mass atrocities. The morally horrifying appears to have an infinite – and thus unmasterable – significance. Whether one thinks of forgiveness or resentment as possible ethical responses to atrocity, they both (as Grøn shows) seem to bring us to the limits of ethics or into a dimension of infinity. Drawing on the continental tradition in the philosophy of religion, Grøn argues that it is precisely the peculiar function or potential of religion to deal with infinite significances that we cannot master. “The religious,” in this perspective, is about the ways in which human beings deal with the limits of their lives, actions and thinking, in articulating, and reflecting on, what is beyond our human powers and imagination and what pertains to our existence as a whole. According to Grøn, religion does not offer an underpinning for any specific moral response, but it offers a certain perspective with which we can reflect on ethical problems that exceed what we can deal with in ethics. And this is exactly what is needed when we face morally horrible atrocities. The third and final chapter in Part I is by Peter Dews. The chapter begins by taking notice of the increasing concern of Jürgen Habermas that the



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erosion of religious traditions can leave behind a gap in the ethical vocabulary and imagination of modern societies. Although Dews acknowledges that we might need the articulative power of religious language to give voice to our repulsion and dismay by mass atrocities, he argues that religious thinking can bestow an illusion of meaning on events that rather demand to be confronted in their meaningless horror. Ultimately, the question raised by Dews is how to register the depth of moral catastrophe without offering false consolation or endowing senseless suffering with a spurious meaning. This is a tall order to respond to, but Dews takes us part of the way by revisiting a cluster of philosophical and theological responses to the question of the significance of “Auschwitz” in any attempt to render history intelligible. More precisely, Dews provides a close reading of an exchange of letters between Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann. Revealing how their exchange of views leave us in an apparent impasse where the position of both thinkers are subject to cogent criticisms, Dews turns to the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno, to examine whether he offers a way of moving beyond the perils pertaining to the two theologians. Yet, as is also clear in Dew’s final consideration of the recent writings of Habermas (Adorno’s successor in the tradition of critical theory) there seems to be no neat and coherent way beyond what Geddes and Grøn call the double bind or aporetic situation. As Dews puts it, we seem to be required to live with an uneasy and divided consciousness: “And such consciousness, rather than embodying a coherent, morally purposeful response to the record of human atrocity, may rather be a further sign of our powerlessness to bind – without obscuring or deceptively healing – atrocity’s still open wounds.” The three chapters in Part II of the volume offer more specific normative reflections and arguments for and against the value of religion – ­variously understood – in relation to the theory and enactment of punishment and forgiveness after mass atrocities. While the contributions by Antony Duff and Thomas Brudholm stress reasons for resistance to the import of religious ideas and for a strongly critical attitude to the advocacy of forgiveness, Chapter 5, by Nigel Biggar, offers an example of what an explicit and reflective use of theological ethics can offer. Chapter 4, by Antony Duff, provides an original philosophical discussion of the question that also forms the title of the chapter, namely: “Can we punish the perpetrators of mass atrocity?” As Duff notes, the question invites a simple affirmative answer. There are questions about whether, why, by whom, and how those who perpetrate atrocities should be punished, but that they can be punished is not an issue. This is, however, only true in a superficial or strictly practical sense. What remains is a philosophical

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question whether whatever is done to such perpetrators can properly count as punishment – whether it can have the meaning, the moral character, that punishment must have if it is to be justifiable. According to Duff, punishment, properly understood, is an exercise in what he calls “communicative censure.” It presupposes a certain kind of fellowship between punishers and punished: the offender is answerable to those who would punish him, as fellow members of a suitable community. Thus, punishment, ideally, is more than imprisonment and harsh treatment and it is very different from expulsion or destruction. It keeps the wrongdoer within the community. Now, how does this normative perspective on the nature of punishment fare in respect to the perpetrators of mass atrocities? More particularly, can a strictly secular perspective find room for the kind of fellowship that punishment, in Duff ’s understanding, requires? Or is it possible only from within a specifically religious perspective? This is the central question to which the chapter is devoted. In the end Duff argues that we should resist any hasty claims that there is a need to leap into the religious realm when we consider punishment for atrocity. While it is enormously challenging, and while it will take us beyond empiricism and naturalism, and into what is in one sense a metaphysical perspective on humanity and the world, the search for an intelligible reason to relate to mass murderers need not take us beyond the secular and the human and into a specifically religious or theistic metaphysical realm. Chapter 5 in Part II by Nigel Biggar takes a very different position on the value of religious ideas and commitments in relation to our attempt to justify responses to atrocity. Contrary to Duff, and albeit with a different focus, Biggar argues the case for the characteristic and relatively distinctive ethical potential of a “religious” view of the righting of atrocious wrongs, that is, one set in the context of a theological metaphysic. More specifically, Biggar presents a lucid and normative account of an explicitly Christian doctrine of just war. The doctrine offered by Biggar includes five salient features including, for example, an invocation of “natural” justice, an ethics of forgiveness, and an eschatological hope that the justice that we humans cannot do here and now will yet be done by God at the end of history. Thus, the doctrine of just war that is presented by Biggar is directly and distinctively shaped by Christian theological concepts and commitments that are clearly religious in nature. Biggar proposes the doctrine as an example of how theology can cast a distinctive light on dark ethical places. At the same time, he is keenly aware that the question of whether theology fares “better” than secular alternatives depends on how one rates its resultant ethic and what those alternatives are. In Chapter 6 in Part II, Thomas Brudholm argues that there is a need for a closer critical look at the question whether or how the advocacy of



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forgiveness after mass atrocities can turn its back on the victims. The conviction that forgiveness has an important and valuable role to play in the aftermath of mass atrocities has gained a considerable momentum in the present day. In his contribution to this volume, Brudholm revisits Cynthia Ozick’s (1998) provocative attack on forgiveness and presents five reasons why her claim – that the face of forgiveness can be “stony to the slaughtered” – is a challenge that needs to be taken seriously. The first three reasons for caution arise from examples of the ways in which advocates of forgiveness talk about victims’ alternatives to forgiving, about “negative” emotions like resentment, and about unforgiving victims. Added to this are two reasons for caution that arise from examples where forgiveness is advocated and practiced without inclusion of the primary victims and where the value and significance of forgiveness is articulated through religious language and gestures. The argument proceeds on the basis of actual examples from the writings and public discourse of Christian proponents of forgiveness, including attention to both scholars and practitioners. Thus, like Duff, Brudholm offers a cautionary perspective on the import of religious ideas or actors in relation to responses to mass atrocities. As a corrective to writings on religious contributions to the promotion of reconciliation that tend to dwell on the value and constructive potential of religion (cf. Philpott, 2007), Brudholm argues that the inclusion of religious actors and their ability to draw on religious language, beliefs, and authority can be a genuinely mixed blessing. Part III of this volume contains four contributions by scholars with a background in sociology and political science. Chapter 7, by John Torpey, explores the contemporary concern to come to terms with the past at two levels: first, through a more general theoretical discussion of efforts in the past century to address the meaning of the past for the present and, second, via a discussion of the tension between the sphere of politics and the sphere of the religious that existed in the attempt to come to terms with the legacy of slavery in the United States. Torpey argues that the concern to “make whole what has been smashed” is problematic on a variety of grounds, but in this context most importantly by a certain quasi-religious enthusiasm that seems to forget that ethics must confront politics in order to set things right in the present. Revisiting Max Weber, Torpey makes the point that the quasi­religious ethics of ultimate ends – action taken without concern for the realworld consequences – is likely to run aground on the shoals of politics, where a more instrumental “ethic of responsibility” is required. The aspiration to come to terms with the past may make its protagonists “feel good,” but if the lofty goals have little chance of being realized, what are they worth? As Torpey concludes, “those seeking to ‘make whole what has been smashed’ may be

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doing ‘God’s work,’ but they need to come to terms with mundane forces in order to achieve their goals.” As indicated by the title of his chapter, “When Faith Meets History: The Influence of Religion on Transitional Justice,” Daniel Philpott argues that under certain conditions religious actors actually do influence “mundane forces.” Philpott begins by noting that journalists and chroniclers have devoted a great deal of attention to the involvement of religious actors on the scenes of transitional justice, but few scholars have sought to chart this involvement systematically. If we are to move beyond the repetitive use of slogans about the “reemergence of religion,” it is crucial to understand better when, how, and why religious actors influence societies’ choices of responses to past mass violence. Philpott delivers a theoretically innovative and empirically based argument, which shows that there is indeed good reason for those concerned about how societies deal with an atrocious past to consider the role of religious actors and their institutional as well as theological backgrounds. In trying to understand why societies choose to prioritize either truth-recovery or justice institutions, it is not sufficient to look to the nature of the transition and to the relative powers of the political regimes in question. Why? In short, religious actors often exert an independent influence on the political process of coming to terms with the past, in particular when they have a well-defined political theology of reconciliation and institutional autonomy in relation to the state. Although Philpott refers to a large number of cases from Latin America, Africa, and Europe, the religious actors he discusses belong mainly to Christian churches. This is the case for the simple reason that the majority of “Third Wave” democratic transitions and transitional justice institutions have found place in countries with a Christian majority. Philpot considers, however, how his arguments about the centrality of religion might travel more widely in societies in which Christians are not the majority. Thomas Cushman’s chapter focuses on the quasi-religious nature of secular apologies for failures to prevent genocide in the last half of the twentieth century. This period of late modernity was characterized by significant “genocidal ruptures” in Cushman’s terms, which punctuated the time and space of modernity and its narrative illusions of progress and global civil society. These genocidal ruptures – represented most poignantly by the cases of Bosnia and Rwanda – were modernity’s evil dopplegangers or doubles, which ought not to have existed and ought not to have been tolerated within the civil society in modernity. Yet, their great significance lay in the fact that they were not only tolerated, but actually abetted by Western leaders and governments. These events, which Cushman describes as “punctuating events,” left gaping holes in the normative fabric of modernity that had to be repaired. He notes that one of the primary mechanisms of repair is the discourse of apology and



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he outlines in detail how this discourse was deployed in the aftermath of the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. These apologies were performative rituals, meant to restore normative and narrative equilibrium and thus set the global system back “in order.” As performative acts, however, these acts had very little phenomenological valence in regard to the actual suffering of the victims of these genocides. The latter, as well as justice for the dead, were occluded by efforts to restore a sense of moral order to the world, for instance, by invoking the mantra of “never again.” Yet these performative practices did little to counter the processes of realpolitik and indifference that, in Cushman’s view, are likely to lead to incidents of mass atrocity in the future, which can then be civilly repaired with the very same kind of phenomenologically meaningless performative apologies that were offered for Rwanda. The last chapter of Part IV is written by Bryan S. Turner. The chapter extends the horizon of this volume by offering a sociological perspective that includes focus on Islam, Buddhism, and current trends in what might be called “world society.” The main question raised in the chapter is about the reasons why our response to atrocity and more precisely our sympathy or fellow-feeling with the suffering of others is so often half-hearted and constrained. Like most other contributions to this volume, Turner presents a two-sided picture of the role of religion in responses to modern evils or mass atrocities. Drawing on an argument developed in his book Vulnerability and Human Rights (Turner, 2006), Turner argues that religious ideas must be given a central place in an account of the historical development of the cosmopolitan consciousness to which the human rights movement is related, and that several of the concepts that have been or should be important in current thinking about human rights – in particular vulnerability and evil – are worth exploring in their religious or theological dimensions. At the same time, religion, in particular what Turner calls “rituals of intimacy,” also works to enhance the dilution of sympathy for others. There is, as Turner concludes, a price to what he calls “pietization,” the process whereby the religious sensibilities of groups turn inward toward themselves and away from the other. This process of pietization mitigates against the possibility of the collective experience of atrocity, and “leads to an increasing impossibility of the globalisation of a cosmopolitan ethic of suffering.” The renewed intensity of piety in modernity promotes cohesive but exclusive social groups and thereby dilutes the capacity for the development of a civil sphere in which all humans recognize their common capacity for suffering. We hope that this volume will stimulate further analysis of the role of religious language, values, and actors in societal responses to mass atrocity. The scholarship on issues arising between religion and atrocity already encompasses extensive and sustained studies of the gloomy nexus between

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religion and the justification and motivation of mass violence (Bartov and Mack, 2001; Lincoln, 2003; Semelin, 2007). Theologians have contemplated the significance of this nexus in the teachings and practices of their ­particular ­traditions and institutions (Roth and Maxwell, 2001; Signer, 2000). In ­addition, around the turn of the century, there has been a proliferation of interest in the potential of religion as constructive force in the public sphere and as an asset to the promotion of peace, conflict-resolution, and reconciliation (Amstutz, 2005; Helmick and Petersen, 2002; Philpott, 2006; Smock, 2006). Yet, as Daniel Philpott (2007) has argued, the bulk of literature addressing the latter topic is often laudatory rather than exploratory, born of enthusiasm rather than dispassionate critical scholarship. And unsurprisingly, the much debated global “revitalization” or “resurgence” of religion in public and international spheres (cf. Petito and Hatopoulos, 2003) has generated a strongly critical reaction among secular thinkers, whose arguments against religion and its influence in various public and secular realms are enabled by the excessive zeal of religious actors in human events (Dawkins, 2006; Harris, 2006; Hitchens, 2007). If this volume meets its aims, it will complement all of these approaches. It joins the recent shift of focus from the nexus between religion and violence to the potential of religion as a constructive response to mass violence. Yet, it takes further the discussion of the role of religion in responses to mass violence on three accounts: First, by the focus on the uses and modalities of religion (discourse, values, concepts, language) outside traditional religious contexts and theological frameworks. Second, by aiming to supply a range of truly explorative and critical chapters, neither meant to promote public religion nor to contribute to its disappearance, but rather taking its point of departure in a wish to probe a deeply ambiguous phenomenon. Third, and finally, as the authors do not write as, or to, members of particular religious communities, but as scholars who aim to understand and address a genuinely human, political, and ethical issue. In this way we would like to think of the present volume not only as an original contribution to the scholarship on responses to mass atrocity, but also as a call for new approaches to the perhaps inescapably ambiguous topic of the role of the religious in human affairs.1 Notes 1

Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, edited by Oren B. Stier and J. Shawn Landres (2006), shares some of the features that demarcate this volume, but is focused on the relationship between religion and various memory landscapes. The book is devoted to “identifying traces of the religious in the memorial responses to violence.” (2006, p. 7).



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References Alexander, Jeffrey (2002) “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (1): 5–85. Amstutz, Mark R. (2005) The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness(Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Arendt, Hannah (1953) “A Reply [to Eric Voegelin’s review of Origins of Totalitarianism],” Review of Politics 15: 76–84. (1989) The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Aristotle (1991) The Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Auerbach, Yehudith (2005) “Forgiveness and Reconciliation: The Religious Dimension,” Terrorism and Political Violence 17: 469–485. Bartov, Omer and Mack, Phyllis (2001) In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books). Berger, Peter (1970) A Rumor of Angels (New York: Anchor). Bernstein, Michael Andre (1994) Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press). Brink, Cornelia (2000) “Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps,” History and Memory 12 (1): 135–150. Buruma, Ian (2002) “Competing for Victimhood,” The Guardian (January 29). Card, Claudia (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cohen, Arthur A. (1988) The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad). Dawkins, Richard (2006) The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin). Delbo, Charlotte (1995) Auschwitz and After. Trans. R. C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press). Eschebach, Insa (2005) Öffentliches Gedenken: Deutsche Erinnerungskulturen seit der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag). Habermas, Jürgen (2005) “Faith and Knowledge,” in E. Mendieta (ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York: Routledge), pp. 327–238. Harris, Sam (2006) The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton). Helmick, Raymond G. and Petersen, Rodney L. (eds.) (2002) Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press). Hitchens, Christopher (2007) God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books). Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and M. Lock (eds.) (1997) Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press). Langer, Lawrence L. (1998) Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press). Lanzmann, Claude (1994) “Holocaust, la representation impossible,” Le Monde (February).

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Lawson, Tom (2007) “Shaping the Holocaust: The Influence of Christian Discourse on Perceptions of the European Jewish Tragedy,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (3): 404–420. Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan (2006) “Forgive and not Forget: Reconciliation between Forgiveness and Resentment,” in E. Barkan and A. Karn (eds.), Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 83–100. Lincoln, Bruce (2003) Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Linenthal, Edward (2001) Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press). May, Larry (2005) Crimes against Humanity: A Normative Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Minow, Martha (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston: Beacon Press). Ozick, Cynthia (1998) “Notes toward a Mediation on ‘Forgiveness,’” in S. Wiesenthal (ed.), The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Revised and expanded edition edited by H. J. Cargas and B. V. Fetterman (New York: Shocken Books), pp. 213–220. Petito, Fabio and Hatopoulos, Pavlos (2003) Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan). Philpott, Daniel (2007) Religion, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice: The State of the Field, SSRC Working Papers. Philpott, Daniel (ed.) (2006) The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Roth, John K. and Maxwell, Elisabeth (eds.) (2001) Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, Vol. 2, Ethics and Religion (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan). Scheffer, David (2006) “Genocide and Atrocity Crimes,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1: 229–250. Semelin, Jacques (2007) Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (London: Hurst). Signer, Michael A. (ed.) (2000) Humanity at the Limit: The Impact of the Holocaust Experience on Jews and Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Smock, David R. (ed.) (2006) Religious Contributions to Peacemaking: When Religion Brings Peace, Not War (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace). Sontag, Susan (2001). On Photography (New York: Picador). Stier, Oren B. and Landres, J. Shawn (eds.) (2006) Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Turner, Bryan (2006). Vulnerability and Human Rights (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press). Vetlesen, Arne J. (2005) Evil and Human Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wittgenstein, Ludvig (1998) Vermischte Bemerkungen/Culture and Value, revised second edition. Ed. G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell).

Part I:  Between Necessity and Impossibility: The Role of Religion in the Face of Atrocity

J e n n if e r L . G e ddes 1.  Religious Rhetoric in Responses to Atrocity

Introduction1 In the exploration of the religious in responses to atrocity, one key area of inquiry is that of language. How does religious language help or hinder our efforts to respond to atrocity? What does the use of religious language enable us to articulate? What does it silence? Are there better and worse ways of using religious language? And just what do we mean by the term “religious language?” In order to respond to these questions, I will begin by looking at a double bind that often characterizes the effort to speak about atrocity, whether religious language is used or not. This double bind, which is experienced most acutely by survivors of atrocity, involves the sense that it is necessary to speak about what happened, but impossible to do so adequately. In response to this double bind, some individuals turn to religious language – for example, they use words with religious connotations, such as “sacred,” “martyr,” “the demonic” – and the way this language functions rhetorically influences whether it hinders or helps in the effort to respond to atrocity. Drawing on writings about the Holocaust, I will discuss two of the ways that religious language can function in response to atrocity – apophatically and redemptively. These two ways do not exhaust the possibilities for how religious language can function, but they do stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of rhetorical functions. When used apophatically, religious language I would like to thank Nigel Biggar, Thomas Brudholm, Thomas Cushman, Johannes Lang, and Charles Mathewes for comments on an earlier version of this chapter, the writing of which was made possible through the financial and collegial support of an Emilia Galla Struppa Fellowship at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

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points to that which is beyond our capacity to know, understand, or imagine completely. In doing so, it brings our attention to that which we can only partially understand and, at the same time, points to the limitations of our knowledge. When used redemptively in relation to atrocity, religious language seeks to bring the atrocity, or some element of it, to closure. The atrocity is placed within a framework in which it is redeemed, ultimately overcome. Redemptive language seeks to contain or explain those very elements to which the apophatic only suggestively points.

The Double Bind of Speaking about Atrocity Those who speak about atrocities often confront, in the words of French philosopher Sarah Kofman, a “strange double bind.” It seems to be both necessary to speak about what happened, and yet impossible to do so adequately. For many who were victims of the Holocaust, the urgency to speak about what happened was strong. As Primo Levi wrote: “The need to tell our story to ‘the rest,’ to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs.”1 The survivors’ testimonies were important for the historical record, for the world to learn and acknowledge what happened. They were also crucial for the purposes of justice, so that at least some of those responsible could be held accountable, tried, and found guilty. The sense of urgency and necessity about speaking also issued forth from the duty survivors felt to speak for those who did not survive – many of whom pleaded with the others to make sure that the world knew what had happened. As survivors but also as eyewitnesses to the suffering and murder of others, those who survived the concentration camps felt a moral responsibility to make sure the truth about what happened was communicated to the rest of the world. But the effort to communicate what had happened to them often gave rise to a sense of despair, a sense that it was impossible to communicate what had happened. The extremity of their experiences exceeded the capacity of language for expression; it was, indeed, impossible for Holocaust survivors to communicate more than a glimpse, a fraction, or an approximation of what they went through. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that there is an “inherent difficulty of accurately describing any event whose central content is bodily pain or injury.”2 In the case of the Holocaust, this difficulty was compounded, to say the least. It was not merely the physicality of their suffering



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that made the experiences they went through difficult to express – it was also the surreal nature of the world they inhabited; the transformation of friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens into enemies; and the vast extent of suffering, to name just a few of the factors contributing to this double bind. Robert Antelme, a member of the French Resistance, who was arrested by the Gestapo and barely survived Dachau,3 writes of trying to speak about what happened to him: We wanted at last to speak, to be heard … we saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and that experience which, in the case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies. How were we to resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had got to the state we were in? For we were yet in that state. And even so it was impossible. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it. … This disproportion between the experience we had lived through and the account we were able to give of it would only be confirmed subsequently.4

This impossibility of speaking was for Antelme both literal and figurative – he literally found himself choking on his words, unable to continue, and then, when he was able to speak again, he found that there was a disproportion between what he was able to communicate and what he and other survivors actually went through. A huge gap seemed to exist between the world of the camps and their experiences, on the one hand, and, on the other, the world around them, in which people seemed to be doing everything possible to forget and “move on.” Holocaust survivors found that their sense of the impossibility of speaking about their experiences was not only a problem related to the limitations of language to express the extremities of human experience but also related to the violence that had been inflicted on them. The Nazis accompanied their violence and killing with various efforts to silence the voices of their victims, to shatter their frameworks of meaning, and to make thought of any depth impossible. The various forms of torture engaged in, the deprivations, the “excremental assault” to use the words of Terrence Des Pres, were efforts to destroy the individual as a person, before he was then murdered. As Scarry notes, “torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation, the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.”5 Survivors of atrocity sometimes suffer from an inability to speak – they may begin choking or stuttering, break down in tears, fall silent while trying to explain what happened, in some cases unable to begin to speak again – because of the violence inflicted on them that sought to discredit, silence, and finally erase their voices.

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The sense of impossibility was further compounded by the limited capacities of listeners to understand or imagine such extreme events. As Lawrence Langer notes, “From the point of view of the witness, the urge to tell meets resistance from the certainty that one’s audience will not understand.”6 Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter expressed this limitation of the human imagination and capacity to understand atrocity, when, upon hearing the testimony of the Polish underground courier JanKarski concerning the murder of Jews, he “(himself a Jew and ardent Zionist), reportedly responded that he was ‘unable to believe’ Karski’s eyewitness testimony. Not that he doubted the truth of what he had heard: as Frankfurter is supposed to have explained, ‘I did not say that this young man is lying; I said that I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.’ ”7 Even survivors themselves are sometimes struck by the strangeness, the unbelievability, of what they have gone through as they hear themselves speaking about it. Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo begins the first volume of her memoir, None of Us Will Return, with the epigraph: “Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain that it is truthful.”8 Even if they were able to overcome the limitations of language, the linguistic injuries of atrocity, and the limited capacities of their listeners, survivors of atrocity would still face the unwillingness of many to hear what they have to say. They would have to fight against the human propensity toward forgetting and ignoring things that cause discomfort. Many Holocaust survivors found themselves trying to communicate to a conversation partner, a group, or a society that was not interested in hearing what they had to say. Elie Wiesel recounts that “After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Auschwitz, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of apathy; it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again …. the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend.”9 Faced with such a double bind, how is the survivor of atrocity to speak? Sarah Kofman asks: How then can one tell that which cannot, without delusion, be “communicated?” That for which there are no words – or too many – and not only because the “limit experience” of infinite privation, like all other experiences, cannot be transmitted? How is it possible to speak when you feel a “frenzied desire” to perform an impossible task – to convey the experience just as it was, to explain everything to the other, when you are seized by a veritable delirium of words – and yet, at the same time, it is impossible for you to speak. Impossible, without



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choking … a strange double bind: an infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irresistible force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking feeling.10

As an academic – a French philosopher who wrote about Nietzsche and Freud – but also, as she calls herself, “a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the Holocaust,”11 Kofman struggles with how to speak about the Holocaust. The double bind is not only a problem for the survivors of atrocity, though it is most acutely so; it also affects those who speak about atrocity who were not its victims. Scholars also encounter the limitations of language, the fact that the series of events that constitute an atrocity and the extreme sufferings they result in far exceed our capacity to speak about them, and in a way that is qualitatively different from the way that other events exceed our capacity to speak about them. We also sense the urgency of speaking about atrocity. Given the many obstacles, the sense that it is an impossible yet urgent task, how do we as scholars proceed? Should the way we speak about atrocity be any different from the way we speak about other things we study? What does it mean when we borrow from the vocabularies of religious traditions to speak about atrocities and why do we do so?

The Turn to Religious Language in Responses to Atrocity Philosopher Berel Lang argues that our descriptions of the Holocaust as unspeakable, or impossible to speak about, are “often also, even always, figurative.”12 Many scholars begin by saying that the Holocaust is impossible to speak about, he notes, but they then continue on for some pages to speak about it. And yet, there is a reason why scholars express this sense of the impossibility of speaking about it. Clearly it means something other than that there is nothing one can say about it, since thousands of books and articles have been written about it, many of them explicitly noting the difficulty or even impossibility of speaking about the Holocaust. This sense of impossibility also emerges in people writing about other atrocities. References to the impossibility of speaking about atrocity are trying to recognize, point to, acknowledge, communicate the excess and extremity of the event, and our incapacity to express that extremity. Making this sense of impossibility and inadequacy explicit by talking about it allows the speaker to begin speaking, thereby creating a little room within the double bind.

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Many people who are not necessarily religious also reach for religious language when they speak about atrocity for precisely this reason – they are expressing the double bind. Religious language often expresses something that exceeds our capacity to understand and speak it – most religious traditions speak of a God or Gods that exist in a realm beyond the human, or behave according to rules unfamiliar to humans, or have attributes that exceed those of humans and that exceed humans’ capacity to understand them. Religious language has struggled with the unknowable, the unfamiliar, the unseen. It gestures toward these things. It is striking that Lang himself calls the Holocaust “an event as close to sacred, after all, as anything in a secular world is likely to be,” even as he is arguing against the claims that the Holocaust is unspeakable. What does he mean by the word “sacred?” It functions in a manner rhetorically similar to the claim that the Holocaust is unspeakable – to point to the excess and extremity of the Holocaust, to suggest something that is beyond our capacities to grasp or express it, to its irreducible otherness. BBC Special Correspondent Fergal Keane expresses his sense of the inadequacy of his own words in trying to give an account of what he saw in Rwanda: “In writing about Rwanda, I am conscious that my words will always be unequal to the task of conveying the full horror of the crime of genocide. For what I encountered was evil in a form that frequently rendered me inarticulate. This was evil as a presence, not as a word or concept.”13 Calling the Holocaust a sacred event, or the horror encountered in Rwanda “evil as a presence,” suggests the significance and extremity of what happened; it is a way of telling us to pay attention, of signaling that something far exceeding that with which we are familiar has occurred and requires our response. It suggests that our standard categories and concepts are inadequate and points beyond them. Religious language – language that borrows from the vocabularies of religious traditions – signals that something outside of the ordinary in human life has occurred, requiring language that is out of the ordinary to respond to it. The use of religious language in responses to atrocity asks for particular modes of response from us, suggesting that our attention is required, that we need to concentrate our listening, that an attitude of solemnity is appropriate. It points to the irreducible otherness of the event, suggesting that something of unique and non-exchangeable value has been violated and that something important is at stake in responding to this violation. Religious language can be used to signal that which lies beyond language’s capacity for expression – sometimes the closest one can come to expression is to acknowledge how far one is from really communicating what one is trying to talk about. This is what I call the “apophatic” use of religious language. Apophatic or negative



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theology appears in several religious traditions and is bound up with the belief that we cannot fully know the God or Gods in which we believe. In struggling to describe God, some religious traditions turn to apophatic language to signal that their capacity to express who or what God is can only achieve the limited goal of expressing what God is not, so far does God exceed language’s capacities. In the effort to express who or what God is, the believer confronts his or her limitations. God exceeds the believer’s capacities as an infinite goodness beyond his or her finite comprehension. In contrast, atrocities exceed our capacities in their destruction, evil, negativity – hence the frequent use of the word “demonic” or the idea of “evil as a presence” to talk about the Holocaust. Rabbi Irving Greenberg suggests that “the Holocaust was an advance warning of the demonic potential in modern culture.”14 Tzvetan Todorov argues that “nothing in modern times comes closer than the concentration camps does to being an incarnation of evil.”15 In both cases, the speaker is stretching language, calling on the resources of religious terms, to try to give a glimpse of the extremity of the evil that took place. Arendt goes so far as to suggest that “a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more ‘objective,’ that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.”16 She argues that religious language more accurately expresses the extremity of life in the concentration camps, than any other kind of language on which we can draw. While the apophatic use of religious language allows us to point to the extremity and excess of atrocity and the limitations and disruptions in our language, thinking, and imagination, religious language can also be used for precisely the opposite rhetorical function, that is, to contain, tame, and frame the atrocity. In this situation that which disrupts us is domesticated and explained. This is what I call the “redemptive” use of religious language in responses to atrocity. It places the atrocity within a religious system in such a way that the horror of the atrocity is tamed and no longer an affront. The redemptive use of religious language attempts to reduce atrocity to an unfortunate but ultimately comprehended part of a providential plan. Religious language of this sort can take the form of simple theodicies that explain the atrocity in terms of a greater good; comforting clichés; calls for forgiving and forgetting and moving on. Redemptive religious language can be used to cover over in vaguely evocative language that which requires accurate reporting, the full force of justice, and the persistence of anger.17 It can reveal an unwillingness to face the extremity of suffering that an atrocity involves. It can set atrocity into a meaningful framework that tames it and can be used to mystify stark realities and make us passive or complacent.

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Three ways in which religious language is used redemptively to try to tame the horror of atrocity are theodicy, the demonization of perpetrators, and the sacralization of victims. In each form, a good impulse takes a disturbing turn. While theodicy seeks to affirm good in the world, specifically the goodness of God, it can do so by way of domesticating the horror of atrocity. While the demonization of perpetrators seeks to express the horror of what the perpetrators have done, it rejects them from the category of the human, thereby making them less troubling to us because their otherness distances them from us. While the sacralization of the victims seeks to honor their dignity and resist the horror of what was done to them, it can sanitize the brutality of the evil inflicted on them. Theodicy.  Traditionally, theodicies have tried to explain how God can be all-good and all-powerful even though there is evil in the world. The way the logic of theodicy works, the problem is set up as follows: if God is all-powerful, God has the power to stop evil; and if God is all-good, God would not want there to be any evil in the world; why, then, is there evil in the world? The most successful of these attempts seek to explain God’s allowing evil to occur through an exposition of the good of human free will, and God’s creating the conditions necessary for the possibility of humans exercising free will. But several scholars have questioned whether, after the Holocaust and the atrocities that have followed it, theodicy is still possible. In fact, some argue that the very attempt to offer a theodicy is itself a morally problematic effort. According to Emmanuel Levinas: Perhaps the most revolutionary fact of our twentieth-century consciousness – but it is also an event in Sacred History – is that of the destruction of all balance between Western thought’s explicit and implicit theodicy and the forms that suffering and its evil are taking on in the very unfolding of this century. … This is the century that in thirty years has known two world wars, the totalitarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia. … The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity.18

According to Levinas, there is no way to explain the quantity and forms of human suffering that occurred in the twentieth century, and no way to declare God just. Theodicy proceeds by way of justifying the suffering of others for some “higher” purpose. But how, for example, might one justify the murder of a million children? What could possibly justify their deaths?



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Levinas argues that “the justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality.”19 Why does Levinas take such an extreme stand against justifying someone else’s pain – such that he describes it as the “source of all immorality?” To justify the neighbor’s pain is to say that there is a good reason for it to happen. This is what most perpetrators and violent regimes do – they begin by justifying to themselves, the people around them, the world, or all of the above, the violence they are about to inflict. Once suffering is justified, there is no limit to its infliction. Levinas sees theodicy, the attempt to justify the goodness and all-powerfulness of God in the face of human suffering, as another attempt to justify the neighbor’s suffering, and so it becomes an immoral act. Levinas argues that others’ suffering must always be useless to me – that is, I must never make it useful or justify it. I must never find a purpose for it. Instead I must respond to, rather than justify, that suffering. I may even suffer in response to the suffering of the other. I must respond responsibly to the other who calls to me in his or her suffering. Irving Greenberg also argues against theodicy, declaring that “the overwhelming testimony of the six million is so strong that it all but irretrievably closes out religious language.”20 By religious language, Greenberg means “talk of love and of a God who cares.”21 The impetus behind Greenberg’s statement is a call for action, for responses to suffering that seek to eliminate it, rather than declarations of God’s love that ignore it. He wants to reject pieties and replace them with engaged efforts to prevent and stop human suffering. He also wants to emphasize the need for us to keep the extreme suffering of the Holocaust at the forefront of our mind. Greenberg goes so far as to offer what he calls a “working principle” for anything we might say about the Holocaust: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.”22 While this statement offers a powerful challenge to anyone seeking to speak about atrocities – and one that I think scholars would do well to keep in mind, wont as we are to lose sight of human sufferings in our academic prose – Greenberg’s statement fails to follow its own principle. How credible would it be to talk about a working principle in the presence of burning children? The principle co-opts the image of burning children as a rhetorical jab to those who speak about God’s love. While the impetus behind it is a good caution, the indelicacy of the way it speaks about these children, who become hypothetical resisters to overly abstract or Pollyannaish statements, is itself problematic. In a sense Greenberg rhetorically enacts the very rhetorical moves he seeks to prevent.

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The problem is, of course, that no statement, whether credible or not, should be made in the presence of burning children – one should, of course, shut up and get those children out of the fire immediately. And Greenberg acknowledges this when he argues that “To talk of love and of a God who cares in the presence of burning children is obscene and incredible; to leap in and pull a child out of a pit, to clean its face and heal its body, is to make the most powerful statement – and the only statement that counts.”23 If this is the case, if action is the only appropriate response to being in the presence of children who are burning, where does this working principle leave us in terms of what we might say in response to atrocities? Does Greenberg really want to suggest that there is nothing to say, that the only statement we can make is with our actions? No, Greenberg provides us with a stark caution to be reflective about the kinds of things we say concerning the suffering of atrocity, particularly when it veers toward the theodical. When we talk about atrocities, we must not lose sight of the particular individuals who suffered and the extremity of their suffering. Particularly when our language starts to affirm the love of God and the goodness of the world, we would do well to remember how many and how severely individuals, including over a million children in the last century, have suffered torture and brutal murder. Demonization.  We often resort to quasi-religious language when speaking about the perpetrators of atrocities. They are figured as monsters or demons. The impulse to demonize perpetrators is understandable – in trying to articulate the horror of the deeds, to express the outrageous and extraordinary quality of those deeds, we turn to the language of myth and the demonic. And yet, in doing so, we thereby put a safe distance between ourselves and the evil-doers such that little or no self-reflection is called for on our part. Todorov himself recognizes this danger and suggests: “the perpetrators of this evil were neither monsters or beasts but ordinary people, rather like us. … First of all, we must not abandon the principles of justice, the guilty must be judged, each according to his precise acts and responsibilities. … Second, we must refuse to establish a radical discontinuity between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ to demonize the guilty …”24 Demonizing perpetrators – seeing them as demonic figures – moves them away from the realm of justice and from the question “what does it mean to be human?” We also contain the scandal of the evil by labeling the evil-doer a monster. Contained within the realm of myth, the perpetrator then requires no clear explanation: Why do demons or monsters do what they do? They just



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do – that is why they are monsters. Even more troubling are the implications for justice: How do we hold a demon morally responsible? Have we not, in so naming him, removed him from the human community in such a way that it no longer makes sense to punish him for his deeds? The perpetrator becomes a mysterious aberration, jettisoned from the category of “human being.”25 In her account of the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was struck by the fact that someone responsible for organizing the deportation of millions to their deaths could be such a banal individual. He displayed little of the demonic demeanor that one would expect. Arendt went to Jerusalem expecting a monster and was confronted with a thoughtless bureaucrat. “That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”26 Thinking about perpetrators in terms of the demonic may lead us to overlook the evil going on around us, should they not be announced in the guise of demonic monsters. As Arendt says of Nazi Germany, “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation.”27 If we expect to see perpetrators of atrocity in the guise of demons, we may fail to recognize them even as they are carrying out atrocities. Sacralization.  Another danger in the use of religious language involves the sacralization of victims, their suffering, or their deaths. The impetus behind this move is to affirm the dignity and innocence of those who died, against the propaganda of the perpetrators, which usually describes victims in such a way that they seem to deserve what they get, and against the actions of the perpetrators, who often attempt to dehumanize and terrorize their victims along with killing them. In speaking about the victims of atrocity, we sometimes display an impulse to “redeem” suffering, to find something good that can or has come out of it. The suffering is placed within a meaningful – sometimes religious – framework that explains it, or at least gives it some purpose. But doing so often involves a failure to acknowledge the extremity of suffering undergone as a result of atrocities. Sometimes we sentimentalize and thereby sanitize extreme suffering, glossing over the sheer destructiveness of it and ignoring the unpleasant, harsh, or even disgusting elements associated with it. We want to think of the experience of extreme suffering as at least being useful – in other words, as not being completely suffering but as somehow leaving the victim with something that can be of use. But sometimes suffering is “for

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nothing.” Sometimes suffering is useless. Sometimes nothing good comes from evil.28 In the case of the Holocaust, some scholars use the word “martyr” to refer to those who were murdered by the Nazis. But the use of this word suggests that their deaths had a higher purpose, stood for something, meant something positive to the rest of their community. Referring to Jewish victims of the Holocaust as martyrs – and the word “holocaust,” meaning a wholly burnt offering to God, echoes this sense of sacrificial death – seems to cover over the fact that only a very few had a choice about their deaths. They did not willingly make a sacrifice. They were not killed for their faith – whether they believed in Judaism or not made no difference in whether or not they were killed29 – they were killed for their supposed race or the “Jewishness” of their grandparents. Surprisingly, even Levinas calls the Eastern European Jewish and children victims of the Nazis “martyrs,” as if their deaths had a meaning and purpose, in his essay “Useless Suffering.” He uses the word “martyr” to emphasize the victims’ innocence, and against “every proposal and every thought that would explain [their deaths] by the sins of those who have suffered or are dead.”30 Here the word functions to resist any implication that these people were in any way deserving of what happened to them. It actually resists one religious interpretation of the Holocaust, which saw it as the punishment of God. Even with these important rhetorical functions, it is hard not to see the use of the word “martyrs” as also resisting the very uselessness of their deaths that Levinas outlines in the rest of the essay.

Conclusion In response to the double bind of trying to speak about atrocity, individuals reach for religious language. Sometimes this religious language works apophatically, pointing to the atrocity’s horror and its extremity, as well as to the limitations in our capacity to think and speak about that horror and extremity. Sometimes this religious language functions redemptively, serving to frame the atrocity in such a way as to tame its horror and extremity. Because religious language used in response to atrocity can be used in such different ways, speaking about atrocity requires a reflexivity about our ways of speaking, the words we choose, and the tone and stance that we take toward our subject matter. Our scholarly discourses themselves need interrogation. The “neutrality” of academic prose can present torture as if it were one action among others.



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What does it mean to describe a situation of such outrage in a calm, rational manner? Is such a discourse morally implicated in not registering moral outrage at the events it is depicting? Can one give an account of torture in the same language that one gives an account of the election of a president, the directions to a restaurant, or the structure of a poem? How should the nature of what is being described influence the kinds of discourse, language, and rhetoric being used to describe it? Arendt argues that to “describe the concentration camps sine ira [without anger] is not to be ‘objective,’ but to condone them; and such condoning cannot be changed by a condemnation which the author may feel duty bound to add but which remains unrelated to the description itself.”31 Terrence Des Pres describes the experience of trying to write his book about survival in the Nazi death camps and his struggle with the stance to take in relation to it: I could not take a stance of detachment, could not be “clinical” or “objective” in the way now thought proper. A curious fact about language … is that to write about terrible things in a neutral tone or with descriptions barren of subjective response tends to generate an irony so virulent as to end in either cynicism or despair. On the other hand, to allow feeling much play when speaking of atrocity is to border on hysteria and reduce the agony of millions to a moment of self-indulgence. There seemed one language left – a kind of archaic, quasireligious vocabulary, which I have used not as a reflection of religious sentiment, but in the sense that only a language of ultimate concern can be adequate to facts such as these.32

While Arendt argues that she needs to use the word “Hell” to describe objectively the concentration camps, Des Pres found that an archaic, quasireligious language was the only language in which he could write about what he had learned about life in the death camps. This suggests that if we reject religious language, we may find ourselves unable to articulate certain aspects of atrocity. But, if we are not reflexive about how we use religious language, we may silence other aspects of that atrocity. For, as Des Pres’s example shows, religious language functions in complex ways in responses to atrocity, sometimes allowing us to recognize its horror, sometimes seeking to shield us from that very same horror. Writing about the difficulties of speaking about the Holocaust, Kofman rejects the standard academic voice of the expert. She relies extensively on the words of others, quoting in such a way that her own voice is frequently interrupted, answered, replaced by the voices of others. She refuses a voice of mastery, of closure, engaging the interrogative in a sustained way. She

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breaks with academic protocol by weaving the personal with the philosophical, the interrogative with the declarative. Her engagement is thorough, provocative, searching, personal, emotional, and intellectually sophisticated. She wonders: “To speak: it is necessary – without the power: without allowing language too powerful, sovereign, to master the most aporetic situation, absolute powerlessness and very distress, to enclose it in the clarity and happiness of daylight. And how can one not speak of it, when the wish of all those who returned – and he did not return – has been to tell, to tell endlessly, as if only an ‘infinite conversation’ could match the infinite privation?”33 As we think about the role of the religious in responses to atrocity, particularly as we seek to make, in the words of the book’s editors, “a critical assessment of the possibilities and problems pertaining to attempts to bring religious – or semi-religious – allegiances and perspectives to bear in responses to mass atrocities of our time,” we would do well to be reflective about our scholarly uses of religious language. But we would also do well to keep in mind the ways in which “the religious” figures into the responses of those who have been the victims of atrocities. While writing this chapter, two images have stood at opposite edges of my thought. Both are images of Jewish men praying in Auschwitz. At one edge is an old man named Kuhn. Primo Levi describes the scene of his prayer as follows: … I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.34

What can one say about Kuhn’s prayer? On the one hand, there is nothing to say. Concerning a situation as extreme and horrifying as the Holocaust, what right do we have to say anything that smacks of judgment of either Kuhn’s prayer, or Levi’s judgment of it? On the other hand, there is the image of Beppo, whose death is implicitly cast as the will of God in that prayer. Kuhn has taken his religious framework and adapted



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it to the life of the camps, such that the Nazis’ decision not to choose him for death is a decision for which to thank God. Here the religious language of prayer has adapted itself to the perversions of the camp, and in so doing has fallen into the danger of redeeming the very atrocities of the Nazis. Here the redemptive use of religious language in relation to atrocity is at work. At the other edge of my thought is Rabbi Berek Kofman. This is the “he” who did not return to which Sarah Kofman refers in the passage quoted earlier, and to which the title of her book, Smothered Words also refers.35 She tells of a rather different scene of prayer: My father, a rabbi, was killed because he tried to observe the Sabbath in the death camps; buried alive with a shovel for having – or so the witnesses report – refused to work on that day, in order to celebrate the Sabbath, to pray to God for them all, victims and executioners, reestablishing, in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power. And they could not bear that a Jew, that vermin, even in the camps did not lose his faith in God.36

Berek Kofman’s religious language, his prayers, served as his last protest against the Nazi system. Rather than adapting his religious language to the contours of the camps, Kofman refused to let the camps shape his religious language. He may have thanked God for God’s mercies toward him, but in doing so, he registered his protest against the horrors around him. The presumptuous aspirations of the Nazis to reign as gods were broken in that prayer, while in Kuhn’s prayers, those aspirations came perilously close to being achieved. That Berek Kofman chose to pray knowing that it would mean his death suggests that we take seriously the ways in which religious language functions in responses to atrocity, and that we not give in to a tooeasy dismissal of religious language as the talk of clichés and false comfort, just because it sometimes is that. Religious rhetoric in responses to atrocity, from the borrowing of words in the vocabularies of religious traditions to the language of prayer, can be used to open up the double bind of speaking about atrocity, allowing something to be said, or can be used to dissolve that double bind, by making the atrocity fit within a scheme that makes sense of it and that makes it unnecessary to say anything more about it. Whether religious language is used apophatically or redemptively does not depend on whether it is spoken from the stance of faith or from the stance of a secular or nonreligious borrowing from religious traditions. The difference depends on one’s willingness to resist justifying the other’s suffering.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Primo Levi, “Author’s Preface,” Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1993), p. 9. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford, 1985), p. 13. The first part of Scarry’s book offers a detailed account of how pain and torture deprive individuals of a voice. Edgar Morin, “Homage to Robert Antelme,” in Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans.  Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (1957; Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1992), pp. ix–x. Robert Antelme, “Foreword,” The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (1957; Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1992), pp. 3–4. Scarry, pp. 19–20. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. xiii. E.T. Wood and St. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (New York: Wiley, 1994), p. 188, as quoted in David Engel, The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education, 2000), pp. 62–63. Charlotte Delbo, None of Us Will Return, in Auschwitz and After (New Have: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 1. Elie Wiesel, “The Nobel Lecture,” From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: Summit, 1990), pp. 244–245. Kofman, pp. 38–39. Kofman, p. 7. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 17–18. Fergal Keane, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 4. I am indebted to Roberta Culbertson for bringing this passage to my attention. Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” in Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, ed. John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1989), p. 327. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1996), p. 229. Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 404. I thank Thomas Brudholm for bringing this passage to my attention. This is not to say that all talk of redemption rhetorically functions in this manner. It is possible to speak of redemption apophatically, that is, to point to some sort of future good of which one has but a glimpse. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 97. Levinas, p. 99. Greenberg, p. 332. Greenberg, p. 331. Greenberg, p. 315. Greenberg, p. 221. Todorov, p. 229. We begin to echo the rhetorical strategies of the Nazis themselves in jettisoning ­people from the realm of the human. As Yehuda Bauer notes, the Nazis saw the Jew as “a Satanic element and a parasitic one, both weak and contemptible, and yet also immensely powerful and absolutely evil” (“The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History,” Holocaust, p. 17).

26

27 28

29

30 31 32

33 34 35

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37

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), pp. 287–288. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 150. For more on the ways in which we seek to mythologize evil and domesticate suffering, see my essay “Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust,” Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, ed. Robin May Schott (Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 110–120. Jean Améry describes reading about the Nuremberg laws in the newspaper and finding himself, quite to his own astonishment, categorically a Jew: “Society, concretized in the National Socialist German state, which the world recognized absolutely as the legitimate representative of the German people, had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew, or rather it had given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me, namely, that I was a Jew” (p. 85). Levinas, p. 98. Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” p. 404. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. vi. Kofman, pp. 9–10. Levi, pp. 129–130. The title of Kofman’s book, Smothered Words, refers to Robert Antelme’s description of finding himself choking over his words while trying to speak about what he went through, to the literal smothering of her father, and to the problematic that Blanchot sets up of how to speak about the Holocaust. The book is written “In memory of my father, who died in Auschwitz/ For Robert Antelme/In homage to Maurice Blanchot” (Kofman, p. 3). Kofman, p. 34.

A rn e G røn 2.  The Limit of Ethics – The Ethics of the Limit

In pondering this question, it did not escape me that resentment is not only an unnatural but also a logically inconsistent condition. It nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future. – Jean Améry, “Resentments,” At the Mind’s Limits, p. 68.1

Ethics? The title “The Limit of Ethics – The Ethics of the Limit” may give rise to two questions, at least. First, why should we talk about ethics when we are dealing with the religious in responses to mass atrocities? This first question reverses a question that could be posed to the title of this book: Why focus on religion in responses to mass atrocities? Mass atrocities are morally horrifying. In dealing with responses to mass atrocities we are in the sphere of morality or ethics.2 Why should responses to mass atrocities go beyond ethics in invoking the religious? One could, of course, argue that religious responses to mass atrocities are in fact deeply moral. But I take it that what we are asking about is the religious in a sense in which it cannot just be translated into a moral response.3 Second, if we are in the sphere of ethics, why should we then talk about the limit of ethics? As the first question opens up the issue between ethics and religion, the second leads into my argument: We have to ask about the limit of ethics, both to understand why the religious can enter the picture, in response to what is morally horrifying, and to understand what is ethically at stake, also in religious responses. The limit of ethics implies an ethics of the limit. The religious in responses to mass atrocities calls for a variety of approaches. To take a philosophical approach is to come to a halt to reflect on our ways of 38



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approaching and to ask: Why the religious? What is the religious in responses to mass atrocities? What is the relation of the ethical and the religious? This does not mean that we should have a general view on ethics and religion, which then, in a second turn, could be applied to our context. Instead, we should rethink the very question of ethics and religion. Religion can be taken as directly offering a definite moral position (that can in fact be what people are looking for in religion: to have definitive, absolute answers to moral questions, answers that are not to be questioned by oneself or others), or as having ethical implications (which we then have to explicate), or as a resource for a normative ethics. If we, instead, focus on religion and ethics as approaches to the world in which humans are situated, there is a philosophically more challenging option: In religion, humans can be dealing with difficulties inherent in ethics that question answers that ethics can offer. To be more specific, religion can respond to a disproportion between, on the one hand, situations that are deeply ethical and, on the other hand, the apparent impossibility of giving appropriate ethical answers to these situations. This can be called a peculiar double bind4 : We should respond by giving ethical answers that seek to solve the ethical problem and by doing so change the situation, but providing appropriate answers seems impossible. The ethical (in terms of problems) here exceeds ethics (in terms of answers or positions). Religion can respond to this situation, because it deals with limits of human existence.5 In religion, humans can come to see their human existence in an ultimate perspective, as a matter of ultimate concern, and, in this perspective, humans can seek to articulate experiences of evil that are beyond understanding. My suggestion, however, is not that religion can offer answers where ethics fails. On the contrary, to account for the peculiar dynamics and ambiguities of religion itself, we will have to insist on the problems that ethics addresses.

Philosophy? If the origin of philosophy is wonder or bewilderment, as Plato and Aristotle would have it, the situation here – how to respond ethically to mass ­atrocities – is more than bewildering.6 The situation is disturbing in ways that cannot be captured as bewilderment. The sense of wonder or bewilderment seems out of place. In a deep sense we are left without orientation as to what it is to be human. Our difficulties in orienting ourselves are not just to be solved; they also affect philosophy as a reflection on our basic human orientations in life.

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What then can philosophical reflection offer in dealing with responses to a morally horrifying history? As already indicated, I argue that a philosophical approach should not consist of some sort of applied philosophy, but of asking philosophical questions once more, from the beginning, as it were. The sense of a philosophical approach is itself challenged. This is reflected in asking what is at stake for us, as humans, in facing a morally horrifying history. What is at stake is precisely our notion of what it is to be human. History is not just behind us; it bears witness to (in)human possibilities of humans. As reflective human self-understanding, philosophy deals with the implications of such possibilities. My further claim is that a philosophical approach will have to reformulate the normative dimension of what it is to be human. To show this, I take as my lead the notion of the limit as an issue between ethics and religion.

Limits to Humans, for Humans Ethics concerns what we ought to do, but, more basically, it concerns what we can do and yet precisely ought not to do. That is, ethics concerns limits that are limits to our own doings, limits that we nevertheless can go beyond or transgress. Already in this sense, ethics is ethics of the limit. It is a matter of being aware of what we do: what it means, what its implications are, how it will change the world and ourselves, and how it will affect our situation taken in the sense of how we are related to ourselves as humans. We do not just act on the human condition as the condition of being human. What we do can also affect the condition on which we act. Thus, the ethical implies that one is to account and to answer for oneself, yet it is possible for humans to be blind, or to blind themselves, to what they do. This is a possibility belonging to humans as self-interpreting animals.7 When, for example, ethnic cleansing is interpreted as a natural, biological phenomenon, thus naturalizing not only human actions in a third-person perspective but also one’s own actions (as the former president of the former republic Srpska, Biljana PlavšiĆ, did when she was put to trial at the court in Den Haag), it is a matter of self-­interpretation, but a self-interpretation that changes the situation as to the condition to be acted on. As self-interpretation, it reveals the human condition it denies.8 Because the human condition on which we act can be affected by what we do, ethics is a matter of imagination. It demands imagination to cultivate an awareness of what we as humans are capable of (i.e., an awareness of our possibilities, which are not simply ours but also would affect what we are, as humans).9 This imagination, however, is already ethically sensitive (which means that ethics should not only be imaginative but also be an ethics of



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imagination). Ethics has to do with our sensibility toward what is at stake, both in what we ourselves do and in what we experience. If we start by taking ethics to be a matter of moral preferences or priorities, we get things wrong. Ethics concerns the limits of human action that humans can go beyond. Yet, humans can only do so by being affected. Through what they are doing, they are affecting their sense of self, changing the character of their lives, or losing their own humanity. This possibility can rhetorically be termed inhuman, but the inhuman is only possible for humans. What is ethically at stake in experiencing these limits is what it is to be human. What about religion? Religion also deals with human limits, in the double sense of limits for humans and limits in which what it is to be human is at stake. These limits are limits for humans in the sense that they are limits not only to what humans can do but also to what humans can understand, and limits, however, that call for humans to respond. The implicit claim is that in facing these limits, humans can come to see what it is to be human. To be human is not some simple fact, just to be discovered and to be acknowledged. It is itself a matter of self-understanding. In religion, humans deal with how they are situated as humans, but they do so through a peculiar move beyond their human condition. Religion concerns the limits of human existence. As existing human beings, we are situated between an ultimate beginning (birth) and an ultimate end (death), both of which must be told by others, and only the first can be told to us. Although we live our lives also in narrating, history (in which we take part) and narrative differ. Narrative is a matter of re-situating ourselves in the world in which we are situated. Religions offer what could be called radical narratives. Through these narratives humans can re-situate themselves in their existence, in viewing the history in which they are situated from an ultimate beginning and from an ultimate end. Religious narratives are radical in that they not only re-­situate humans in existence, but can also do so in re-situating human existence. They point to human existence as an existence in between. However, viewing human existence, not only between past and future, but also from its beginning and its end, is what humans cannot do. In religion, the limit of the human is – enigmatically – an affair for humans. Humans can talk about what a divine, nonhuman perspective means or should mean to humans. In dealing with a divine perspective, humans deal with the limits of being human. Religion, as a human enterprise, has to do with this other-than-human perspective on human existence. What does it mean? How does it change human existence? One way it can change our lives as human is that it can make us aware that humans often want to be more than human. This can go together with not recognizing other humans as human. Idolizing is a human

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possibility. So is dehumanizing. What religion can articulate and reflect is the (rather complicated) fact that humans have their being human as a problem. It is a problem in being human, that is, in coming to terms with the human condition.10 Thus, the limit as the limit to humans, for humans, is of critical importance in both ethics and religion. Religion differs from ethics in dealing with the limits of human existence, but the problem of dealing with the limits of being human, as a problem of being human, turns the issue into an ethical one. Moreover, religion puts into the foreground not only limits of human existence but also limit situations that humans face in existing.11 Or rather, religion deals with the connection between the two. There are situations in which humans encounter limits in which human existence itself is reflected. The embodied character of human existence becomes naked, as it were. That can be the moment a human life begins (birth) or the moment it ends (death). But our own history can also reach a zero point at which we face the question of how it is possible to continue. If we experience a loss that affects our relation to the world, sorrow can turn into despair. Or if we come to see ourselves as trapped by what we have done, in having made our life into a search for something that turns out not to give meaning to our life, then our life can, as it were, turn against us. Or if we cannot escape sufferings we have imposed on others, our situation can become unbearable. Religion can articulate and interpret such experiences of a “zero point” or a “death” in life, and it can do so in articulating a vision of, and a hope for, new beginnings in the midst of life. In this sense, religion embodies and concerns basic orientations in life (as philosophy reflects on such orientations). As a matter of orientation in living our lives, religion concurs with ethics; still, religion and ethics differ in their setting and in their approach. In religion, humans can articulate and interpret questions of orientation in existence, questions that impose themselves on humans. In this perspective, human passivity is accentuated in view of the question, what to do? Humans are also recipients of their own lives; in a sense they are even recipients of their own actions (as, e.g., in experiencing guilt). They can not only make others suffer but also suffer themselves from what they are doing. The religious point of view on human existence concerns what it means to be thus situated – in the midst of a history, the end of which we cannot tell ourselves. Religion deals with situated existence in a movement beyond human existence. How should we understand this movement of transcendence? In my outline, religion and ethics are taken as differing, yet concurring, approaches to the world of humans. The following objection seems to present itself: Religion is about transcendence, a world beyond the world of



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humans; therefore, it is not able to “carry the weight of ” human existence.12 As Nietzsche would argue, placing truth and meaning in a second world beyond this world amounts to depriving this world – the world in which we move and think and live – of meaning and truth. Nietzsche’s countermove is illuminating: It is a move toward immanence; that is, it aims at affirming immanence, in taking this world on ourselves, and in saying “yes” to our human existence without reservation. Yet, this movement itself takes place in “the horizon of the infinite,”13 in a movement of transcendence.14 A simple interpretation of transcendence as a second world beyond this world poses at least two problems. First, it cannot account for the attraction and the dynamics, and even the ambiguity, of religion. Second, it cannot address the problems involved in asserting an immanent view on human existence. This is due to the fact that, in taking leave of religious transcendence, it reproduces the schematic notion of immanence and transcendence as separate worlds.15 As humans, however, we are not just “in” existence; we do not simply move within a human perspective but have – in our human perspective – being human as a problem. In sum, transcendence, as the movement beyond human existence, is complicated precisely in relating to the world of humans.16 This is already to be seen from what could be called negative examples. Even when humans take religious transcendence as a sort of escape from the world, they live in this world, in the mode of escaping. Even if they take their religion to mean that the world is to be denied, they relate to this world – as a world to be denied. Religion as response draws on the problems to which it responds, the problems posed by the world of humans. How then are we to understand transcendence, if we want to account for the complicated character of religion as human self-understanding? In line with what I have already argued, we should see that, in religion, humans do not simply go beyond the world of humans. If that was what they were doing, they would still carry their world along on that journey. What then is the point of the movement beyond? In being moved “beyond,” humans can come to see what the world of humans is like, for example, in seeing the embodiment of human existence naked, as it were. It has become fashionable to point to the embodied character of human existence, yet it is striking that in living as embodied beings, we do not see that we are embodied beings. Embodiment does not “stand out,” but it can do so in limit situations, in an ultimate perspective on human existence. Furthermore, in what I have called radical narratives, humans might be able to re-situate themselves in an existence in which they can no longer see themselves. Thus, the movement “beyond” does not only carry this world along. It can also turn into a

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movement “toward” this world, in that the point lies precisely in carrying the weight of this world, and in refusing to despair. A religious point of view as “exterior” can point to the exteriority or alterity “in” human existence. In radical narratives, human history is told from “somewhere else,” but this “somewhere else” has to do with the limits we encounter in the middle of our history, in limit situations. In religion, human existence is seen from its limits, which are to be taken as limits to what we, as humans, can understand and do. But in this, religion can have an indirect, deep relation to ethics. It is indirect in the sense that it need not amount to a definite moral position. It is indirect in a “deep” sense in that it can offer room for articulating and reflecting on ethical problems that exceed ethical (or moral) answers. What are the implications of this way of conceiving ethics and religion (as differing, yet concurring approaches to the world of humans) in view of the religious in responses to mass atrocities?

Morally Horrifying Mass atrocities are morally horrifying. Both words should be stressed: morally and horrifying. Obviously, the first announces a moral dimension, but through qualifying the second. The second belongs to this moral dimension, accentuating what is morally at stake – namely a violation of the inviolable . What is inviolable is precisely something that can be violated. This is the normative character of the limit. What morally horrifies is something that humans can do. “Horrifying” thus indicates a dimension of inviolability. We can try to capture the character of the inviolable in describing it as holy (referring to, e.g., the ethics of Kant). The holy is something for humans to take as holy. It is linked to the response or the attitude of seeing it as holy. Yet it is not simply a matter of interpretation. Humans can violate the inviolable, but at the cost of losing their human dignity and maybe having their world go to pieces. Thus, morally horrifying announces a moral dimension, but in invoking the religious (the holy) as a resonant voice: morally horrifying. It seems obvious that responses to mass atrocities, as morally horrifying, should be moral or ethical. Although we are in the sphere of ethics, there is, however, much reluctance to talk about ethics in these – deeply ethical – matters. Why? One reason is that the issues of ethics are often taken in terms of the morals people actually have (and quite often they do have differing morals) or in terms of moralism (people having morals on behalf of others, imposing their morals on others). Both ways, however, reduce the ethical phenomenon. If we describe the morally horrifying in terms of people taking



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something to be morally horrifying, we must add that, in taking something to be morally horrifying, people point beyond their moral reaction. They are not in a position in which they are free to take another stance. They do not just express an emotion; in their moral reaction they relate to how their world appears to them: beyond understanding. We can try to capture this by saying that what is at issue is the context of orientation for human selfunderstanding. Self-understanding is also about understanding the world in which we seek to orientate ourselves. In this world, we communicate with others, we negotiate and trade, and we give and receive, and in this we deal with others and with the world of others, but we do so within a context that we only partially make explicit, a context that has an intrinsically normative dimension. There is, in these relations, an inherent reciprocity that we can affirm or ignore, or even deny. Implied in relating to others is also an understanding of what it is to be human that can be affirmed or ignored, or even denied, but this understanding is presupposed in being denied: as something to be denied. Treating humans in ways that deprive them of their humanity presupposes that one has already seen them as humans – that is, as beings that can be deprived of humanity.17 This does not, however, question the reality of dehumanizing acts. On the contrary, the point is to understand what dehumanizing means. It has a normative dimension to it. My argument here concerns this intrinsically normative dimension. We cannot articulate what is at stake in responding to atrocities without recognizing the normative dimension of being human. And this is a matter of neither morals nor moralism. It cannot be reduced to a matter of moral priorities. Rather, it redirects our attention to the problem of being human, to the vulnerability, and also to the fragility, of being human. It is important to distinguish between vulnerability and fragility. As embodied and embedded human beings, we are vulnerable. In what we are, as humans, we are exposed. Our lives can change, almost beyond recognition. We can lose our sense of dignity. But we are also fragile in that we can ourselves fail. We can lose selfrespect, not only through what we experience but also through what we ourselves do. In their difference, vulnerability and fragility go together: one’s sense of dignity and one’s self-respect are intertwined. But what is enigmatic is that humans can disfigure the sense of being human, and that they can do so in ways that presuppose what is being denied: a sense of being human. To understand the relation of ethics and humanity, or the ethics of humanity, it is of critical importance to focus on the problem of being human. Unfortunately, rhetoric of humanity that invokes the “truly human” as a moral ideal can make the problem and the question disappear. Too easily it goes together with moralism.

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An Aporetic Situation Thus, one reason for being reluctant in dealing ethically with situations that are deeply ethical, in responding to mass atrocities, is that ethics is often reduced to morals, moralism, or to some rhetoric of humanity. A second reason that is more to the point is that a straightforward ethical approach seems to be impossible, precisely due to the deeply ethical nature of the situation. What we encounter is, ethically speaking, “much too much.” There is an ethical infinity, in the negative. To anticipate my argument a bit: this is what religion can respond to, albeit not in a direct manner, as if it could solve the problem of ethics, but in articulating a resonant dimension of infinity in human existence. The negative ethical infinity is “too much” for ethics in terms of our ethical approach. Thus, we should distinguish between the normative dimension of human existence and ethical approaches to that dimension. If we do, we can describe the situation of responding to mass atrocities as aporetic. In responding to a morally horrifying history, what is at stake is our very notion of what it is to be human, but the only way to recognize the significance of a history of mass atrocities seems to be to recognize that it is impossible to measure its significance. The notion we would need to measure its significance, and thereby distance ourselves from the past and open a view to the future, namely, the notion of what it is to be human, is itself questioned. If we do not recognize this, we do not acknowledge what is ethically at stake. The situation is aporetic in the sense that it can only be described in terms of ethics, on the one hand, and that it seems to find no direct ethical answer, on the other. It is crucial to see that the reason for finding no direct ethical answer is precisely the ethical nature of the situation, the ethical infinity in the negative. Still, we have to find ethical responses to situations that are deeply ethical.

Ethics of Forgiveness: Beyond Ethics? What could an ethical response be? It cannot simply be a position taken, for example on which rules to follow, but must convey an understanding of, and an attitude toward, the situation. Forgiveness seems to be such an answer: In transforming the situation, it responds to an ethical situation that appears to be without any direct ethical answers. The situation to which forgiveness responds can be described as aporetic. In a relation in which the one has betrayed or let down the other, the situation is ethical in nature, but what would an appropriate ethical answer be? Apparently, we can give some



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direct answers: “You should repent” and “You should forgive.” The one having betrayed or let down should repent and seek to “make it up,” but what he thus ought to do he cannot do on his own. Whether he will be doing what he should do will depend on the other. But it will also depend on how he is doing what he should do. If he himself considers the situation to be one of “making it up” to move on, he will not be doing what he should. The situation is not just to be settled, and the problem not just to be solved. The situation is itself a matter of taking the weight of the situation upon oneself. So is there an appropriate answer? Is it possible to “make it up”? These questions point back to the situation in which the two are placed. What the one to repent has done has changed the situation so that the character of the relation is affected. An appropriate ethical response would have to recognize the – changed – character of the situation and the impossibility of just settling the situation. But what is an appropriate ethical response on the part of the other? As mentioned, forgiveness seems in fact to be a, if not the, strong ethical response. It responds to a situation that is radically changed (what has to be “made up” is not something that can be sorted out within the given situation, but something that affects the situation itself). Forgiveness is a strong response in that it is not only responding to but also ethically transforming the situation. It does so in seeing the situation differently, by focusing on the truly human dimension of time, the future, as Jean Améry puts it, and in seeing the one to be forgiven as a human being, beyond what he or she has done. Yet this could imply that forgiveness is not just forgiveness but demands the one to be forgiven to understand the situation, that is, to repent and to acknowledge what he has destroyed.18 What the other (as the one forgiving) should do requires an understanding on the part of the one to be forgiven. This might be taken as the point implicit in an ethics of forgiveness to restore the dignity, not only of the victim but also of the perpetrator. An ethics of forgiveness could thus be taken as a response to what seems to be an aporetic situation. Forgiveness transforms the situation. Still, we can argue that there are no direct ethical answers. The ethical significance of saying “You should repent” and “You should forgive” depends on how it is done, that is, it depends on how the one repenting and the one forgiving understand the situation. This is already a matter of ethics. Furthermore, the aporetic character does not disappear, but seems to come up in an ethics of forgiveness. Although forgiveness appears to be, on ethical terms, a strong answer, the question is whether it is possible at all to make an ethics out of forgiveness. It can be argued that forgiveness goes beyond ethics (this is a long-standing issue that pertains to the relation of ethics and religion). Let me give two reasons for this. First, ethics accentuates the identity

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between a person and his or her acts. The ethical begins by demanding us to account for ourselves, in acknowledging “I’m the one having done this.” Forgiveness could, on the one hand, be taken to imply that the one to be forgiven should acknowledge what he or she has done, yet, on the other hand, forgiveness loosens precisely the link between a person and his or her acts. The difference in perspective is, of course, crucial. If I see the other in such a way that the link between her and her acts is loosened, this would not place me in the same position. If we could forgive ourselves, as we can forgive others, we would no longer be the ones to account for ourselves. We would, in fact, be beyond ethics. Second, forgiveness is also asymmetrical in the sense that it cannot be made into an ethical demand as, for example, recognition can. I can demand that the other whom I recognize also recognizes me, but I cannot demand that the other forgives me, although I might, at some point, have forgiven her. In what sense, then, can we speak of an ethics of forgiveness? It seems to demand an attitude that is sovereign in the sense that it provides its own conditions. Implicitly if not explicitly, an ethics of forgiveness seems to take an ethics of love. Yet the questions returns. Although an ethics of love is, in discussions on morals, considered as one option, how is it possible to make an ethical demand – or even the ethical demand – out of love that precisely cannot be demanded? In what appears to be a strong ethical response, namely, forgiveness, we encounter in this sense a limit of ethics. But we do so from within, as it were. It can still be argued that forgiveness is a deep ethical response to a situation left without any straightforward ethical answers. It is ethical in the sense that it, precisely in loosening the link between a person and her acts, is able to see the other in ways that transform the situation itself. Forgiveness is possible, as an ethical demand on oneself, in that it sees the other as a person being more than what she has made herself into. This brings the crucial issue of ethics and time into focus. The ethical character of forgiveness concerns time. It opens up the truly human dimension, the future, in giving time to the other. She is not what she has shown herself to be (her past acts), but has a future to appear differently. Although forgiveness loosens the link between the other and his or her acts, it is not indifferent to the other. On the contrary, it believes in the other, despite of what he or she has shown.

Ethics of Resentment? Ethics and Time Still, the question remains: Is it possible to make an ethics out of forgiveness? The question is intensified if forgiveness is taken as a deep ethical response



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to an aporetic situation, and if this is not only a situation between the one betraying the other (in which case, we can understand the relation within a wider social context that is not destroyed), but a situation within a “context” of mass atrocities (in which a world in common is destroyed). If we would transfer an ethics of forgiveness to a context in which the social and political world of individuals is at stake, it becomes even more important to focus on the ethical problem of forgiveness. If forgiveness is to be an ethical response to what is morally horrifying, it depends on articulating what is morally horrifying, what is being violated, and what is ethically at stake. But this is what insisting on the moral nature of resentment could do. It can harbor an acute sense of what is violated. Accordingly, we might speak of resentment’s virtue or an ethics of resentment. It can be argued that this is the concern in Jean Améry’s essay on resentment.19 The moral sense of what is inviolable, but has, in fact, been violated, concerns the life of the victim, but this is not just one life on the one side. In the life of the victim, there is a life common to victim and perpetrator (or, to people having witnessed without doing anything) that is violated. To insist on the ethical nature of resentment is to point to the dignity of the victim, voiced in his or her resentment, as a dignity beyond being a victim. Therefore, as an ethical response, resentment points to the humanity in common, the life as humans, that is destroyed when the relation is turned into a relation between victim and perpetrator. The demand harbored in resentment is that the perpetrator should see his own life affected by what he has done.20 Why? The answer is, I think, that this is what ethics is about. There is no other way to recognize the inviolable nature of that which has been violated. It is the only possible way to “make up” what cannot be made up. It is the only way to “make whole” what has been smashed (if this is possible). The paradoxical claim in Améry is to undo what has been done. “Absurdly, it [resentment] demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone.”21 The impossible claim to undo what has been done points to the ethical. It has to do with the relation of ethics and time. In one sense, the relation of ethics to time is straightforward. Ethics concerns the future, both in the sense of what we ought to do and in the sense of what our life, on that account, will be. It concerns the future, not simply as mine or yours, but as a shared future depending on what we do. Ethics concerns the future of the other as a matter of what we ought to do. But ethics not only concerns the future (what we ought to do), it also concerns ethical failures: what we did wrong, or what we did not do, but should have done. If we do not let the past be a matter of ethics, we do not take the ethical seriously. The implication, however, seems to be that we should deal with the past in

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order to deal with the future. That is, we should seek to come to terms with the past – past wrongs – to set ourselves free to deal with the future. But in relating to the past, our moral sensibility is at stake. This implies understanding the past in terms of possibilities: that it could have been otherwise22 and that the present is also the lost, or undelivered, future of the dead.23 In Améry, the time of ethics is accentuated in contradistinction to biological and social time. Biologically and socially we seek to go on, leaving the past behind us. Ethically, the demand is absurd: to undo the past. If the demand is absurd, what is the point? It is, I think, the ethical. This includes the moral sensibility in remembering, in understanding what is at stake in living a human life. Paradoxically, an ethics of resentment that appears to block the access to the truly human dimension of time, the future, can insist on the ethical. It can do so as a countermove, against an impossible “undoing” of the past that has nevertheless shown itself to be possible: to live as if nothing has happened. Améry’s impossible claim (to undo what has been done) responds to what is already an impossible response: to lead a life as if what has been done was not done. That is the impossible atmosphere (in Germany in the mid-1960s) in which Améry voices his impossible claim. To live as if nothing has happened is – in fact – possible, but ethically it is impossible. To undo what has been done is – in fact – impossible, but saves the ethical possibility. Facing the will to be ignorant, to carry on living as if nothing had happened, the will to remember what has happened must, it seems, take the form of resentment. The further question, however, is whether ethics of resentment can do without a notion of reconciliation. If resentment is about ethical sensibility, if it harbors the sense of what has been violated, and if, consequently, it is about the life we have in common as humans, resentment seems to have as its horizon a vision of reconciliation. In resentment as an ethical response, there is a demand for dignity, or rather for restoring dignity, not only the dignity of the victim but also that of the perpetrator. He should come to see what he has destroyed, the community or the human link between the other he has turned into a victim and the one (himself) that he has turned into a perpetrator. As indicated earlier, this can be seen as that which an ethics of forgiveness aims at, but we should make a distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation.24 Reconciliation seeks to anticipate what is to be restored, the dignity and self-respect on both sides, and, in that, the human life in common. But reconciliation also puts the demand on the perpetrator that he comes to see the life in-between that he has destroyed. Yet this poses problems on its own. The first one is the problem that Améry’s essay bears witness to. It is possible for humans to live as if what has



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happened does not matter. Blindness is part of human self-­interpretation, but when it amounts to leading a life in such a way that one lives as if that which one has done did not happen, then blindness destroys the sense of the ethical. The second problem affects the ethical nature of our possible answers. What does it mean to “make whole” what has been smashed? Is it possible to restore a life that has been broken? What does it mean to “undo” the broken past – would that be to “make whole” again? In my judgment, it is only possible to speak of “making whole” again if we recognize the immeasurable character of what is at stake. This leads us back to the issue of infinity, and to the religious. Améry accentuates the ethical, to the point of absurdity (as a demand of reversing time). He does not invoke the religious, but the question is whether his ponderings move in a dimension of infinity, “a horizon of the infinite,” that is also the dimension in which the religious moves. In responding to the morally horrifying, what humans encounter has an infinite significance which they cannot master.

Infinity and Religion, or Beyond Imagination? Beyond Understanding? Religion deals with phenomena that carry an infinite significance for humans that they themselves do not master. Would this give us a lead in understanding what the religious can do in responses to mass atrocities? The short answer would be that this depends on whether religion can address the limit of ethics, as an ethical limit. Let me explain. We live by phenomena that are immeasurable, in the sense that we cannot measure their significance, or if we try, they will change. Such phenomena are, for example, friendship and love, and also guilt. If we wish to decide, or to control, what a relation in which we are personally involved means to us, the relation itself will change. This does not preclude that we can be in situations in which we have to limit what the relation means (or meant) to us in order to live our life. We do so by, for example, withdrawing ourselves, and, by that gesture, the relation changes. But what does it mean that something can have infinite significance for us? It means that our relation to the world, the character of our life, and the way in which we can understand ourselves, are affected. That is not without problems. If our identity is at stake in relation to others, it can be difficult to see them as others that have their own life to live. The point, however, is that if we see relations to others as a matter of our own identity, if we seek to define who we are by defining what such relations to others mean to us, this would

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also affect ourselves. What we seek to define, our identity, would escape us. Although we understand ourselves through relations in which we are ourselves involved, we also have to experience what these relations mean to us. Probably our self-understanding is most deeply affected in relations of love, but love is immeasurable, not so much in the sense of being overwhelming or exceeding measures, as in the sense that to measure would be to misunderstand. If we try to measure our own love, it will not be love that we measure. That does not prevent us from doing a lot to measure love, for example in taking credit for “our” love, but to measure love means to change it, in changing ourselves, that is changing the way we are seeing the other and ourselves. To acknowledge that we cannot measure love without changing it is to recognize the humanity of the other person. It implies seeing that our own humanity depends on seeing the humanity of the other. It is crucial, however, to be aware of the intricate character of this relation. We are finite beings. We are, as Kant puts it, not holy, but our humanity must be holy to us.25 Why? Because we can disfigure ourselves, we can lose the sense of dignity, and, by that, our life will change in character. This infinitude is the human condition. The human character of religion depends on seeing this. Thus, we live by phenomena that are immeasurable. We live our lives in dealing with phenomena that harbor an infinite significance which we might seek to control, for example in dealing with sorrow or in dealing with guilt, but if this is not a matter of turning indifferent to what we have experienced or what we have done, it is because the infinite significance of sorrow and guilt has become a question of ourselves being able to lead our own life. Living a human life, an examined life in the Socratic sense, implies not only that we pose questions but also that we are ourselves questioned. We are so in living a life in which questions of infinite significance impose themselves upon us. What matters to us is not something that we simply decide. It also determines who we are. What I have called infinity in the negative, the infinite significance of the morally horrifying, destroys the sense of this infinitude in being human. It is infinity against infinity. Mass atrocities are morally horrify in violating what is inviolable, but they do so in denying, or ignoring, the sense of inviolability, and in this the sense of humanity. In mass atrocities, what has taken place in a world of humans cannot be part of this world. It is holy “in the negative,” as it were. In thus trying to formulate what is beyond understanding, I draw upon a religious language – as Kant does in talking about the holy and Levinas does in talking about infinity (Levinas, 1961/1969). My suggestion is that religion articulates a dimension of infinity that is resonant when humans encounter the morally horrifying. In orienting ourselves



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in a world of humans, we also move in a dimension of infinity, in orienting ourselves by that which is immeasurable. We orient ourselves through a sense of limits that makes it possible for us to see others and ourselves as human, in our infinitude. This also implies seeing that we, as humans, can turn inhuman. The sense of infinitude reminds us of our own humanity that we can ignore. Thus, it can protect us, our humanity, from ourselves. But if the sense of humanity being at stake in the affairs of human is destroyed, how is it possible to reorient oneself? What religion can do is to articulate the dimension of infinity still resonating in seeing something as morally horrifying. It deals with limits to human understanding in which humans can come to see being human as a problem. Yet the point is that religion can only deal with limits to human understanding in dealing precisely with human understanding. Religion concerns ways of seeing, in relating to that which cannot be seen; it deals with ways of imagining, in relating to that which is beyond imagination. Thus, a remarkable feature of religion is the role played by human imagination in dealing with that which is beyond imagination. This feature also has an ethical significance. As mentioned earlier, ethics demands imagination that is already ethically sensitive. Ethics is, in this sense, an ethics of imagination. In reflecting the dimension of the immeasurable, religion can articulate the problem that the ethical significance of what humans are capable of doing can be too much to be captured in ethics. Although it is to be seen and heard, it is beyond imagination, but describing it as beyond imagination is a way of approaching the morally horrifying. It is to insist on human understanding implied in imagination. If religion gives room for articulating ethically aporetic situations, religion itself nevertheless relates to the limit of ethics. Religion does not offer a sort of second infinity to replace the negative infinity. Or rather, if it does this would be on the human condition on which we have religion. Thus, in dealing with the limit of ethics, we are led back to the ethics of the – human – limit.

Ambiguity of Religion As a human, all-too-human enterprise, religion is marked by ambiguity. This is in particular manifest in dealing with the problem of evil. On the one hand, religion can articulate experiences of evil, as human sufferings; it can articulate a sensibility to evil that is deeply ethical without being transformed into morals or moralism. It can do so by voicing a hope against despair, or against a situation under the weight of which the only response seems to be to give up hope. On the other hand, religion responds to a human need to make sense

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out of something that is experienced as meaningless, or even as destroying our sense of meaning. In responding to this, religion can interpret evil by restoring a world in which humans can also morally re-situate themselves. The world should be in order. Religion can do so in particular by dealing with perspectives: it can turn the experience of evil into a matter of the point of view taken, thereby reducing the experience of evil that questions the notion of a moral world order. Thus, the ambiguity of religion toward evil is ethically ambiguous. That does not preclude that questions articulated in religion can be religiously disturbing (as, for instance, in the Book of Job). The implication is that if religion can articulate the limit of ethics, religion itself calls for a human self-reflection that is ethical. This means that a philosophical approach has to reformulate the normative dimension implied in our notion of what it is to be human, confronted with possibilities of humans turning inhuman.

Reformulating the Normative Dimension What I have called the limit of ethics is itself ethical. It is the limit of ethics. Responses to mass atrocities are responses to something that is morally horrifying. It is beyond understanding, as something we have to understand. We encounter a limit of ethics because it is ethically immeasurable. That the limit of ethics is itself ethical is to be reflected in religion. In dealing with what is beyond (ethical) understanding, religion itself is to be understood in ethical terms. The question is: Does it recognize the human condition on which it is religion? How should we then conceive of the ethical in response to mass atrocities? I have distinguished between two ways of responding. The first one consists in seeking to find – as we should – ethical answers in forms of, for example, ethics of forgiveness, ethics of resentment, or ethics of reconciliation. The second is to articulate the aporetic situation of ethics in response to mass atrocities. This would itself be an ethical response. My point here is twofold. First, in a sense, we do measure what is morally horrifying by seeing that it is beyond imagination and that our notion of what it is to be human is at stake. Second, to articulate the difficulty in providing an ethical response, that is, to maintain that the situation is deeply ethical and ethically immeasurable (the ethically aporetic situation), is a way of qualifying the answer we have to give (in terms of the first): forgiveness, resentment, reconciliation. An ethics of the limit seeks to articulate what is at stake, also in our ethical responses. It points to and seeks to articulate a moral and ethical sensibility. This means that the normative dimension is not to be identified with ideals or positions,



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but has to do with the character of the human condition, that is, the vulnerability, and also the fragility in being human. On this account, ethics is more than normative ethics, and indeed more than morals and moralism. As ethical reflection, it is a matter of sensibility to that which is at stake in our being human. It reflects upon that which concerns us as humans in view of what we ought to do and ought not to do. The ethical begins in responsibility (our willingness to account for what we do and not do) and in our sense of the inviolable. Ethics concerns limits that humans can transgress only in affecting their own humanity. It is an ethics of the limit (to humans, for humans). But as such, it must reflect upon situations in which humans have to deal ethically with ethical failures, their own and others, and situations in which we encounter the limit of ethics, situations that are deeply ethical, but for that reason exceed the ethical answers humans can provide. I have argued that religion, as a radical approach to the world of humans, can deal with the disproportion between situations that are deeply ethical and the ethical answers we can – and should – give. It can reflect the limit of ethics (in terms of answers) that is due the excess of the ethical (in terms of problems). If, in a relation, the one lets the other down, then repentance and forgiveness are ways of “making whole” again, but only with the question left open: Is it possible to “put it right?” What would that mean? The answers are reflected in the way the relation is changed. But what if the relation itself is ignored, in the sense that the one denies that there is a human relation in which the other takes part? In mass atrocities, the very context of human orientation is destroyed. How is it then possible to articulate the infinite ethical significance of what has happened? In religion, humans can be given a language to articulate a dimension of infinity that is still resonant in what is morally horrifying. But that does not place us beyond ethics. On the contrary, it can re-situate us ethically, reminding us that what is at stake is the ethical as the sense of being human. The limit is itself ethical, and the humanity of religion can itself only be maintained in an ethics of the limit. I have suggested that to articulate that the situation is both deeply ethical and ethically immeasurable in response to mass atrocities is a way to qualify the answers we have to give in terms of, for example, forgiveness, resentment, and reconciliation.26 Let me, as a sort of conclusion, say a little bit more. Ethics is also about what to do about ethical failures. It demands that wrongs be rectified. But if wrongdoings destroy the context of ethical orientation, how is it possible even to talk about putting things right? The problem is intensified, but so is the ethical demand, to the point of absurdity to undo

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what has been done. The demand is to “make whole” what has been smashed, but there are cases in which this is what we cannot do, due to their ethical significance. No matter what we do, we will not be able to “make it up.” In that sense, there are no appropriate ethical answers. What we can do requires that we recognize that we cannot “make whole.” This is to recognize the infinite ethical significance of what has happened. The impossibility of “making whole” implies that what has happened cannot be made part of a coherent worldview. Instead, we will have to take it with us as something that cannot be integrated, but questions us as to our humanity and to our worldview. That is, we will have to remember. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel points to the wonder of spirit: it can heal without leaving scars behind.27 That is the ideal of forgiveness and reconciliation giving rise to a new life. What has happened is remembered, integrated, in this new life. But if it is integrated, is it then remembered? Maybe it is only by remembering that which we cannot integrate, the immeasurable, that we are reminded of what we should remember. In this, our notion of the ethical is at stake. It might even be challenged. That also goes for our notion of the religious. Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6 7

“Es ist meinem Nachdenken nicht unentdeckt geblieben, dass das Ressentiment nicht nur ein widernatürlicher, sondern auch ein logisch widersprüchlicher Zustand ist. Es nagelt jeden von uns fest ans Kreuz seiner zerstörten Vergangenheit. Absurd fordert es, das Irreversible solle umgekehrt, das Ereignis unereignet gemacht werden. Das Ressentiment blockiert den Ausgang in die eigentlich menschliche Dimension, die Zukunft” (Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, p. 111). In the following, I take the difference between “moral” and “ethical” to be a matter of accent: In ethics, we are articulating questions that affect us as to what we should do or not do, and we are seeking answers to these questions. Moral is a matter of being affected (moral sensibility), but also a matter of responding to our being affected, by taking a position (morality) or advocating a position (this can turn into moralism). This is an issue in philosophy of religion from its modern beginning in the eighteenth century, in particular after Kant’s critical turn. Is religion a matter of morality? Or is the religious (as argued in, e.g., Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Otto) a category of its own, not to be reduced, neither to metaphysics nor to morality? Cf. Chapter 1 by Jennifer L. Geddes in this volume. Talking about what religion can or cannot do, I do not want to suggest that religion is some sort of superhuman agent. Religion is a deeply human enterprise that testifies to human ambiguities. I use the term “religion” to explore, in a philosophical approach, the field of human possibilities and ambiguities in religions. Cf. Theaetetus (Plato 1970, 155 D) and Metaphysica (Aristotle 1972, 982b11ff). To the notion of self-interpretation as part of being human, cf. Heidegger (1927, esp. §31) and Taylor (1985). The fact that it is possible for humans to be blind, and to blind themselves, to what they do, including interpreting themselves, both confirms and complicates this notion. Heidegger seeks to deal with this in his problematic account of “das Man.”

8

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The notion of the human condition (Arendt, 1958) has thus to be interpreted in view of the questions it opens. Part of the problem in Heidegger’s analysis of “das Man” pertains to the way he conceives of possibilities as “our own.” This has to do with the idea that “das Man” becomes the subject (“das Wer”). But we are turning ourselves into this anonymous subject. This is also a possibility of “our own,” belonging to us as self-interpreting animals. Or, as Kierkegaard would put it, humans have problems in being satisfied with being human, and in finding this being human joyful (being “contented with being a human being,” cf. Kierkegaard, 1846/1992, 159ff.). Karl Jaspers defines limit situations (“Grenzsituationen”) as given with the finite human existence: They are not “machbar,” they are not manageable, we cannot change them, we cannot go beyond contingency, death, or guilt (Jaspers, 1923/1973, 271ff.). In the following, I take limits situations as pertaining to what we experience and do – and experience in what we do. Again, limit situations are related to what we can do. And if religion cannot “carry the weight” of this existence that is ours, then the ways of ethics and religion should indeed part. A critique of religion can have this ethical tenor. Cf. Nietzsche (1884/1988, §124). Cf. Grøn (2006). Asserting immanence presupposes what it denies: religious transcendence. If the point is to “carry the whole weight” of human existence, this only makes sense as the weight we should carry when we are left without transcendence. Cf. Grøn (2007). No one can treat a human being “like a dog,” if he did not first see or take him as human. The point in humiliating or dehumanizing acts would disappear. This is said in the following quote taken from an article by Sartre in Les Temps Modernes (July–August 1957). In the quote, however, Sartre also seems to conclude that it makes dehumanizing impossible. Dehumanizing the oppressed turns itself against the oppressor in alienating him. By what he – the oppressor – is doing, he calls forth the humanity he wants to destroy. However, it is crucial to clarify in what sense dehumanizing is impossible. The quote reads: “Nul ne peut traiter un homme ‘comme un chien,’ s’il ne le tient d’abord pour un homme. L’impossible déshumanisation de l’opprimé se retourne et devient l’aliénation de l’oppresseur: c’est lui, c’est lui-même qui ressuscite par son moindre geste l’humanité qu’il veut détruire” (quoted from Contat and Rybalka, 1970, p. 313). Cf. Nigel Biggar’s distinction between forgiveness as compassion (unconditional) and forgiveness as absolution (conditional) in Chapter 6 in this volume. Cf. Brudholm (2008). Améry’s impossible claim to undo what has been done then harbors the demand, and the appeal, that the other recognizes the life in common that has been destroyed, and this implies: recognizes himself to suffer from what he has done. Cf. the remarkable “dialectics of destiny” in Hegel’s Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal (in Hegel, 1971, esp. 342 ff.). “Absurd fordert es, das Irreversible solle umgekehrt, das Ereignis unereignet gemacht werden. Das Ressentiment blockiert den Ausgang in die eigentlich menschliche Dimension, die Zukunft” (Améry, 1966, p. 111). Cf., for example, Kierkegaard (1846/1992). Cf. Benjamin’s “Theses on History.” In a discourse on reconciliation in Works of Love, Kierkegaard says that forgiveness bears the traces of the wrongs, reminding of the difference in position between the wrongdoer to be forgiven and the one to forgive, while reconciliation bears the spirit of the community to be anticipated (cf. Kierkegaard, 1847/1995, p. 336). “Der Mensch ist zwar unheilig genug, aber die Menschheit in seiner Person muß ihm heilig sein” (Kant 1788/1967, p. 155).

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This second way of responding ethically also opens the possibility that we find no ethical answer. It would then not qualify, but rather replace, the first. “The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind” (§669)/”Die Wunden des Geistes heilen, ohne dass Narben bleiben” (p. 360).

References Améry, J. (1966) Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), 2004/. At the Mind’s Limits (London: Granta), 1999. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1998. Aristotle (1972) The Works of Aristotle, vol. VIII: Metaphysica. Ed. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon). Benjamin, W. (1969) “Theses on History,” in Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. Ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books). Brudholm, T. (2008) Resentment’s Virtue. Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Contat, M. and Rybalka, M. (1970) Les Ècrits de Sartre. Chronologie. Bibliographie commentée (Paris: Gallimard). Grøn, A. (2006) “Im Horizont des Unendlichen. Religionskritik nach Nietzsche,” in I. U. Dalferth and H.-P. Grosshans (eds.), Kritik der Religion. Zur Aktualität einer unerledigten philosophischen und theologischen Aufgabe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), pp. 145–162. Cf. also Grøn, A. (2005) “Jenseits? Nietzsches Religionskritik Revisited. Zum Stand der Forschung in Sachen Nietzsche und die christliche Religion,” Nietzsche-Studien 34: 375–408. Grøn, A.(2007) “Subjectivity and Transcendence: Problems and Perspectives,” in A. Grøn, I. Damgaard, and S. Overgaard (eds.), Subjectivity and Transcendence (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Hegel, G. W. F. (1971) “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal (1798–1800)”, in Frühschriften. Gesammelte Werke, Vol.1. Ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp). Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/1977) Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. H.-F. Wessels and H. Clairmont (Hamburg: Felix Meiner), 1988 (pagination following Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9)/Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1977. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer), 1971. Jaspers, K. (1923/1973) Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer). Kant, I. (1788/1967) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Ed. K. Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner) (pagination of the Akademie-edition). Kierkegaard, S. (1846/1992) Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. 7. Ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al. (Copenhagen: Gad), 2002/Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. II. Trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press).



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Kierkegaard, S. (1847/1995) Kjerlighedens Gjerninger. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. 9. Ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al. (Copenhagen: Gad), 2004/Works of Love. Kierkegaards Writings, vol. XVI. Trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Levinas, E. (1961/1969) Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’exteriorité. Paris (Livre de Poche), 1992/Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). Nietzsche, F. (1884/1988) Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3. Ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter). Plato (1970) Plato’s Theory of Knowledge. The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato, translated with a running commentary by F. M. Cornford (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Taylor, C. (1985) “Self-interpreting animals,” in Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 45–76.

Pet e r Dews 3.  The Intolerability of Meaning: Myth, Faith, and Reason in Philosophical Responses to Moral Atrocity

In recent years the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, long known for his championing of Enlightenment ideals, has begun to endorse the suggestion that the erosion of the “power of articulation” of religious traditions has left a gap in the ethical vocabulary of predominantly postreligious, individualistic, modern societies. “Secular languages,” Habermas claims, “which simply eliminate what was once intended leave behind feelings of discomfort. As sin was transformed into guilt, and the transgression of divine commands into the breaking of human laws, something was lost.”1 If we enquire more specifically what has been lost, then Habermas’s answer seems to be the eye-opening and heart-opening, the ethically inspirational power of symbolic modes of expression, such as religion once made available to many. Habermas, in fact, has become increasingly concerned that, no matter how deeply the aspiration to universal justice may be anchored in modern consciousness, as an ideal it is simply too abstract and formal to inspire the level of commitment required to advance humankind toward it. In his view, “Pure practical reason can no longer be so confident of countering a process of modernization which is running out of control, emptyhanded except for the insights of a theory of justice. For such a theory lacks the creativity of linguistic world disclosure, which would enable it to regenerate a normative consciousness which is withering on all sides.”2 In itself, the concern is scarcely a new one, of course. During the third decade of the nineteenth century, in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, the greatest thinker of the age sought to sustain a religious consciousness whose content he believed was being eroded by the “abstract thinking” of the emerging bourgeois society of the day. As Hegel stated at the end of his 1827 cycle of lectures: “Once reflection has invaded the sphere of religion, thinking or reflection assumes a hostile attitude toward the representational 60



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form in religion and toward the concrete content. And once thinking has begun in this way, it does not stop; it carries through, it empties heart and heaven …”3 “Representation” (Vorstellung) is Hegel’s technical term for the symbolic, mythic, and narrative elements of religion discourse, which he believed could be rendered in purely conceptual, philosophical terms. More specifically, Hegel was confident that the essential truth-content of Christianity, which he regarded as the supreme form of religion, because of its sense of the unity of the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine, could be reformulated through the speculative structures of his own thought. Hence modern human beings need not be forced to choose between faith and reason. As Hegel declares, “philosophy demonstrates the rational content of the Christian religion … it shows that the witness of the Spirit, the truth in the most all-embracing sense of the term, is deposited in religion.”4 But, of course, Hegel can only makes this claim because he regards religion and philosophy as manifestations of “absolute Spirit”: as two of the supreme ways (the third being art) in which the one fundamental, reconciling truth about the world can be expressed. This truth is that the world is ultimately a rational place, and that therefore human beings, as rational beings, may feel at home in it. On occasion, Hegel goes so far as to present his own thought as rescuing the metaphysical significance of religion from the increasing subjectivism, the dubious reliance on appeals to intuition and feeling, of the theologians of his day. He declares that “we have recently reached the point where philosophy has had to defend the content of religion against certain kinds of theology.”5 But conviction of the intrinsic rationality of the world, and hence of human history, which underlies this startling claim has held up poorly in the nearly 200 years since Hegel gave his lectures in Berlin. Many thinkers have regarded the political disasters and moral catastrophes of the twentieth century as discrediting the kind of faith which Hegel still believed could be rearticulated in philosophical terms. Few thinkers today would subscribe to Hegel’s claim that “the true good, the universal and divine reason, also has the power to fulfil its own purpose, and the most concrete representation of this goodness and reason is God”; and hence that “philosophy should help us to understand that the actual world is as it ought to be.”6 Indeed, such a contention might well be regarded as frivolous, if not downright callous. If the creativity of religious language still needs to be salvaged in some way, as Habermas contends, we cannot begin from the understanding that religion enables us to feel at home in a world ultimately ruled by reason. Rather, we might need the power of such language to help express our repulsion and

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dismay at the crimes which have stained – and continue to stain – human history. * A strong case can be made that the philosopher Hans Jonas, in his essay The Concept of God after Auschwitz, was grappling in his own way with these issues.7 Jonas was an early Jewish pupil of Heidegger, who broke with the master over his enthusiasm for Hitler, whose mother was murdered in the camps, and who fought against Nazi Germany in the uniform of the British army. In this much-discussed text, first delivered as a lecture in 1984, Jonas sketched the rethinking of the concept of God which he believed to be demanded by the moral catastrophe of the Holocaust. In doing so, he built explicitly on theological and cosmogonic reflections developed in an earlier essay, “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” from which he quotes extensively. In both pieces, Jonas’s basic contention is that, after Auschwitz, we can be more certain than ever before that three primary attributes of God on which the Jewish tradition has insisted – his omnipotence, his benevolence, and his intelligibility – cannot all be retained. If we continue to believe that God is all-powerful, then his failure to intervene to prevent horror on the scale of the Holocaust must result in his unintelligibility. Yet it is crucial to Judaism, Jonas argues, that something of God’s will and intentions can be known. He has given a necessarily broken and limited, but far from entirely obscure intimation of these in the language of the prophets.8 But since goodness is also an indispensable attribute of God, it is the attribute of omnipotence, Jonas argues, which must give way. God can no longer be understood, as in Jewish tradition, as the “Lord of History.” Rather, we must envisage God as surrendering his power entirely in order to make a space for his creation. Jonas suggests that – at the very beginning of things – God “abandoned Himself and his destiny entirely to the outwardly exploding universe and thus to the pure chances of the possibilities contained in it under the conditions of space and time. Why He did this remains unknowable. We are allowed to speculate that it happened because only in the endless play of the finite, and in the inexhaustibility of chance, in the surprises of the unplanned, and in the distress caused by mortality, can mind experience itself in the variety of its possibilities. For this the deity had to renounce His own power.”9 The consequence of this speculation is that, within the sphere of time and becoming, the moral fate of the world lies solely in the hands of human beings. God, Jonas declares, does not intervene in the “physical course of



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worldly things”; He makes Himself felt only through the “mutely insistent appeal of his unfulfilled goal.”10 Furthermore, it is not simply God’s moral purpose that remains to be fulfilled. Rather it is God Himself who is incomplete. He does not reign over the world in eternal self-identity, but – through the act of creation – has submitted himself unreservedly to the contingency of the finite, and to the outcome of the use and abuse of human freedom. God has surrendered his immunity, and hence the fate not just of the world, but of Divinity itself now lies with human beings. Jonas fully accepts that his myth of a suffering and becoming God provides us with no knowledge of metaphysical truths. He offers it as philosophical work on the “meaning and significance” of the concept of God (as opposed to a proof of the existence of God), one which makes avowed – and ­unavoidable  – use of mythical language.11 Jonas clearly believes, however, that his reflections have force against conceptions of God which appear to justify the course of history in terms of a divinely guaranteed triumph of the good. Even if such conceptions may have appeared as philosophically plausible in the past, the Holocaust, Jonas contends, has rendered them morally unbearable. “The disgrace of Auschwitz” – he affirms – “is not to be charged to some all-powerful providence or to some dialectically wise necessity, as if it were an antithesis demanding a synthesis or a step on the road to salvation.”12 Hegel’s interpretation of history, whose ostensible triumphalism is Jonas’s explicit target here, is rejected because it seems to lend a meaning to events whose measureless evil is the negation of all meaning. Jonas does not reject the notion of cosmic purposiveness altogether. On the contrary, he defends a conception of nature as purposive against the mechanistic tendencies of the modern scientific worldview. But, on his account, the “God who has become world,” who “experiences himself in affirmation” in human aesthetic, cognitive, and moral achievement, does so only in what he terms an “endangered sense.”13 * Yet ironically, in an exchange of letters, Jonas found himself accused of a failing very similar to the one he had denounced in Hegel. His critic was Rudolf Bultmann, the leading twentieth-century theologian, who was also his former teacher and lifelong friend. In “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” Jonas had argued that the ancient notion of immortality as posthumous fame, and the traditional religious notion of immortality as the prolongation of existence after death, are no longer plausible for modern human beings. The closest we come to the experience of immortality is in

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sensing the transcendent significance of the instant of moral decision; it is in what is most fleeting that we come nearest to the eternal. Jonas then seeks to elucidate our sense of the absolute importance of the moral life through further mythical images. We can imagine that our deeds are recorded in an eternal register, or what Jewish tradition calls the “Book of Life.” Or, in another image, he suggests that, though our actions are fleeting temporal events, they contribute – in their moral dimension – to the transcendent image of God.14 Our just deeds enhance that image, and help to bring it to completion. Our misdeeds can darken it and stain it. But what of those who had no chance to achieve maturity and moral responsibility, or who were deprived of them through total dehumanization? What, for example, of the innumerable victims of the Nazi camps? Although they were deprived to the opportunity to catch a glimpse of eternity through the prism of the moral deed, their lament, Jonas affirms, has troubled eternity itself. After Auschwitz, “Eternity looks down on us darkly, itself wounded and disrupted in its depths.”15 The first of Bultmann’s objections to Jonas’s self-confessed excursion into myth is that – despite Jonas’s disclaimer – it represents an attempt at theodicy (a justification of the ways of God in the face of a world of suffering and evil). The second is that it portrays divinity as “the reconciled unity of all contradictions,” with the consequence that “the concept of God is thus ultimately an aesthetic concept.”16 Bultmann, in effect, turns Jonas’s attack on speculative attributions of a purpose to human suffering against Jonas himself: “I will only briefly mention” – Bultmann writes in his letter – “that it can scarcely be a consolation for the suffering, the martyred, and so on, even for those left behind, if they are assured that their suffering is a meaningful happening in the fate of the divine, in the process through which the Divinity gains his reality in the alternation of life and death.”17 Jonas’s error, Bultmann contends, is to continue searching for a “meaning of Being” – in other words, to try to contemplate the universe “from the outside” – whereas what really matters, he asserts, is the meaning of “my being,” the question of “my dying, of my death.”18 Jonas’s myth of God as “suffering and becoming,” as totally immersed in the world process, whose moral outcome lies in the hands of his free creatures, offers no approach to these existential questions. Indeed, for Bultmann, it forecloses them. But in his response to Bultmann, Jonas denies that what he calls “the ‘know thyself ’ ” – the philosophical imperative of self-investigation – can be separated from the knowing of things, since “self-understanding is only possible in an understanding of the whole.”19 It is the distinctive ambition of the human mind to seek to comprehend the totality of which it is simultaneously



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a part. “I can of course not ‘see’ the whole or even add it up as a sum,” Jonas writes in his reply, “but I can speak meaningfully of its nature, its ground, and its determination.”20 Indeed, Jonas contends, I have to do so if I am to understand what is ethically required of me, since: “the law of human behaviour must be derived from the nature of the whole.”21 In other words, even under modern circumstances, and – more specifically – after Kant’s critique of metaphysics, Jonas still clings to the traditional idea that ethics should be the expression of a “fit” between human beings and a philosophically comprehended cosmos. Yet, at the same time, Jonas rejects Bultmann’s accusation that his conception of the world as the realization of the divine is “aesthetic.” He emphasizes that he is not concerned with the ultimate harmony of apparent contraries, but rather with the conflict of evil and good. The possibility of doing evil is a condition of human freedom, and hence of the “worldly realization of the good,” which can only be achieved as a free response to the moral demand. But this does not make evil anything other than the opposite of the good. Jonas does not deny that his myth represents a “symbolic experiment, which most closely expresses what seems to me to bring meaning into the puzzle of being and existence.”22 But he rebuffs the suggestion that by “meaning” he understands anything reconciling or affirmative per se. Meaning, he asserts, is not tantamount to “value.” * We can understand this exchange of letters between Jonas and Bultmann, between Jewish thinker and Christian theologian, as an expression of basic philosophical tensions which arise when we consider how moral atrocity impacts our understanding of the world. On the one hand, for the reasons outlined at the start of this essay, we may come to feel that the language of modern secular naturalism fails to provide us with the resources we need fully to articulate our moral intuitions, especially in extremis. Yet, on the other hand, the invocation of an ultimate frame of meaning, which would allow the significance of human decision and action fully to resonate, risks softening, even falsifying the harshness of the reality with which we are confronted. Thus Jonas is convinced that we cannot comprehend the centrality of the moral life to our existence, and therefore measure the depth of moral violation, unless we envisage a transcendent dimension in which fleeting, temporal acts leave a lasting mark. As he writes, I can never be “sure how decisively eternity will be affected by my action, and so [I am] uniquely responsible in the present situation, whatever it may be.”23 At the same

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time, Jonas cannot accept that moral commands are the commands of an all-powerful God. For to believe that God is all-powerful is to believe that good must triumph in the end, and that therefore empirical events which seem to run counter to this belief cannot disclose the ultimate character of reality. “We hard-pressed children of the now,” Jonas asserts, “insist on taking seriously what appears, as our factical reality.”24 We, modern, secularly oriented human beings, cannot accept the consolation that the ravaged faces and distorted bodies of Buchenwald are merely “appearance,” and that truth lies elsewhere. Jonas struggles, then, to preserve a sense of ultimate significance, without entertaining the notion of an “otherwordly” compensation for this-worldly wrong and suffering. In order to do so, he believes, he must offer some philosophical account, necessarily inadequate, of the relation between divine transcendence and worldly immanence. But for Bultmann, the very attempt to outline the metaphysical relation between God and the world risks introducing a false sense of meaning – one that does injustice to the victims. Long before the correspondence with Jonas, Bultmann had ruled that “… only those statements about God are legitimate which express the existential relation between God and human beings. Statements about God’s activity as a cosmic event are illegitimate.”25 The basis of Jonas’s speculations could not be more directly attacked. But to understand the basis of Bultmann’s criticism, we must briefly consider the character of his own theological project, which centers on the concept of “demythologization.” * According to Bultmann, the worldview of the modern natural sciences has destroyed the possibility for us to accept the mythological language in which the message of the Bible is couched. But he also believes that the clash between science and myth offers a new opportunity to define the character of religious faith. For faith does not accept the exclusivist claim of the modern natural sciences either. Or rather, faith opens up a transcendent dimension which is radically other than objectifying thought, whether mythological or scientific. In seeking to define the experience of faith, Bultmann draws extensively on existentialist thought, and in particular on the thought of Heidegger. This philosophy, Bultmann argues, offers the best understanding we currently have of human existence as open toward the future, as a question that confronts us.26 Drawing on this understanding, the mythical language of religion can be interpreted as – fundamentally – addressing the problematic task of



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existing, which cannot be reduced to an event or process within the scientifically objectified world. As Bultmann writes, “I deny the worldly connection of events when I speak of myself; for in this connection of worldly events, my ego, my own ‘existence’ is no more visible than the acting God.”27 Faith, then, discloses my existence in relation to God, in a dimension that is entirely other than the mundane dimension. And insofar as faith expresses a confidence in God’s power, his activity must not be equated with any historical train of events. Bultmann speaks in this context of the “beyondness and hiddenness of the acting God.”28 Indeed, he claims that the stance of faith can be summarized in the German word “dennoch” – “nevertheless,” “notwithstanding.” Accordingly, the cosmic eschatology of the Bible, the doctrine of the ultimate triumph of the good and the end of all things, must also be interpreted in existential terms. “The eschatological existence of the believer is not a worldly phenomenon,” Bultmann declares, “but is realized in a new self-understanding.”29 It is not difficult to see that Bultmann’s project of demythologization is an attempt to deal with issues that are also central to Hegel’s approach to Vorstellung – the pictorial language of religion. But whereas Hegel seeks to translate the content of religious belief into philosophical terms, and thereby reconcile faith and philosophical knowledge, Bultmann’s contention is rather that faith and knowledge are dangerously confused in mythological language. The existential content of such language must therefore be retrieved hermeneutically, interpreted as an expression of faith. In this sense, Bultmann aggravates the gap between faith and knowledge, rather than seeking to overcome it. He does not suggest that religion can do without mythic imagery altogether. But he claims that “mythological language loses its mythological sense when it serves as the language of faith.”30 Mythic elements can be employed as “symbols” or “pictures.” But we must always remain on our guard against the tendency of myth to objectify the transcendent into something immanent, this-worldly. * How coherent is Bultmann’s own position? Although the letter Jonas wrote in reply to his friend is primarily explanatory and defensive, a criticism of Bultmann’s thought can be readily extrapolated from others of his writings. In particular, we can note the close connection that Jonas perceives between existentialism and the modern problem of nihilism. For Jonas, existentialism makes the mistake of conceding the modern scientific view of nature as the domain of inherently purposeless casual processes, opening up a disastrous

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gulf between the natural world and human existence. As he writes, “That nature has no concern is the real abyss. That only the human being is concerned, with nothing but death before him in his finitude, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projected meanings – this is a truly unprecedented situation.”31 As we have seen Bultmann to seek remedy for this situation with a faith which is independent of any objectifying worldview. But for Jonas this is far too fragile and vulnerable a basis constantly in danger of being overrun by the naturalistic metaphysics derived from modern science. In other words, despite Bultmann’s claim that God is genuinely disclosed in faith, his stark opposition of faith and knowledge leaves him vulnerable to the skeptical worry that “God” is simply one of those “projected meanings” to which Jonas refers. In fact, in an essay on “Heidegger and Theology,” Jonas argued explicitly that the existential translation of religious language functions as long are we are concerned with the character of human existence – but that, as soon as we try to talk about God, we cannot help but use the objectifying language of myth, albeit in full consciousness of its inadequacy.32 It seems, then, that both Jonas and Bultmann can marshal cogent criticisms of each other’s position: we are left in an apparent impasse. Although Jonas stresses that the world process is meaningful only in an “endangered” sense, we would still have to infer – to extend the language of his mythico-theological account – that God thought Auschwitz was a risk worth taking. Indeed, his suggestion that God became world in order that the panoply of possibilities opened by finite existence could be experienced does seem uncomfortably close to the aesthetic concept of God which Bultmann has accused him of espousing. Certainly, Jonas accepts the “cruelty” (Grausamkeit) of the natural world as adding to the richness and intensity of life, even if he draws the line at moral wrongdoing.33 Yet from Jonas’s point of view, without a narrative of creation as purposive or meaningful, without the conviction that “Being as such” is good, we will remain constantly prey to nihilism. Bultmann’s thought, Jonas argued, in his moving address at the theologian’s funeral, remains too Kantian in separating God’s transcendent or noumenal activity – disclosed only in faith – from the phenomenal world as described by natural science. It is obvious, he claims, “that this idea of God’s acting crosses Kant’s dividing line because it does not seclude that acting within the parallel transcendence of the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but lets it ingress into appearance itself, and into public perceptibility at that, not only a private one.”34 A religion of revelation and obedience, Jonas argues, stands and falls with this exception to the Kantian segregation of immanence and transcendence, since it must have before its eyes “the self-revelation of divine will through



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human speech,” and “cannot be content with the ‘inwardness’ of the word in individual existence.”35 * Is there any way of moving beyond this impasse? In the concluding part of my discussion, I intend to address this question by taking up some strands in the thought of the leading Critical Theorist of the generation preceding Habermas, Theodor Adorno – and then briefly moving back to Habermas himself. As is well known, Adorno was a thinker profoundly concerned with the impact of the Nazi Holocaust upon thought and culture. Perhaps the most famous of all his pronouncements, familiar even to those with little knowledge of his philosophy, is that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”36 But would Adorno have regarded the conceptual poetry of Jonas’s myth as equally barbaric? There is reason to think so, insofar has he claims, in his philosophical masterpiece, Negative Dialectics, that “The capacity for metaphysics is crippled, because what occurred has shattered the basis of the unification of speculative, metaphysical thought with experience.”37 Auschwitz, Adorno declares, has condemned to scorn the “construction of a meaning of immanence which radiates from an affirmatively posited transcendence.”38 We cannot extract any meaning, no matter how bleached out, from the victims’ fate. But, at the same time, Adorno struggles to resist the conclusion that we inhabit the inherently meaningless universe proffered us by modern secular naturalism. On his account, it is precisely this draining of all inherent significance and qualitative shading from the world, through the technically rational, homogenizing process of “identity-thinking,” which has culminated in industrialized mass murder. Auschwitz, he declares, has “confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death.”39 Furthermore, despite his deep indebtedness to Hegel’s dialectical method, Adorno firmly rejects Hegel’s “theodicy of antagonism,” the interpretation of human history as the advance – through social conflict – of the consciousness of freedom. History is rather a “permanent catastrophe,” revealing the inexorable rise to dominance of technical or instrumental reason. But does this mean that Adorno would have been sympathetic to the retreat into a defiant inwardness, to Bultmann’s condensation of faith in the word “dennoch” – nevertheless? Let us first consider Adorno’s possible reply to Bultmann. From Adorno’s point of view, the very attempt to purify myth of all objectified content, to distill a purely existential message from it, still betrays too much confidence in the power of critical reason. In other words, there is perhaps not

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much to choose between the demythologizing movement of Enlightenment, which, for Adorno, progressively eliminates all symbolic meaning in favor of a positivistic registration of facts, and the dynamic of Bultmann’s theology. For this theology espouses a notion of faith severed entirely from any intelligible movement of history. Just as, on Adorno’s account, modern positivism reverts to myth in its fetishizing of the given, so a totally transcendent God becomes an inscrutable power to which human beings can only submit.40 Indeed, in his lectures on metaphysics, Adorno argues that the “wholly other” God of the early twentieth-century “theology of crisis” (from which Bultmann’s thought descends) transforms God into an “abyss,” resulting in what can only be regarded as “a sinister mythology or demonology.”41 Kafka, he suggests, gives us the best insight into such a world. To put this in another way, Adorno’s is convinced that there cannot be any – even theological – hope which does not make some reference to the shape of events in the human world, but at the same time he resists the suggestion that this meaning can be found in history as it has unfolded up till now, and as it continues to unfold. It is this conviction which produces his distinctive approach to the philosophy of history, in which progress in individual spheres, such as science, technology, even aesthetic technique, is combined with the regression, the intensifying unfreedom of the whole. As Adorno stated in his radio lecture, “Education after Auchwitz,” “Barbarism continues, as long as the conditions which produced that relapse into barbarism essentially continue. That is the whole horror. The social pressure still weighs down on us, despite the invisibility of distress today. It drives human beings to do unspeakable things, which culminated, on a world-­historical scale, in Auschwitz.”42 We cannot, then, regard history as an, albeit painful, process of human self-emancipation, which – in religious terms – could be portrayed as the action of God’s progressive self-revelation, as Hegel had suggested  – quite the reverse. But to reject any overall understanding of the dynamic of history would simply leave us at its mercy. Hence Adorno often states that universal history must be construed as much as it is denied. A human potential for freedom accumulates as history advances, but this potential is thoroughly held in check by the self-perpetuating dynamic of instrumental reason. As we shall see, this conception of history, which we can term negatively developmental, also sets Adorno not just against Bultmann (for whom history simply “goes on, and over and over again demolishes all Babylonian towers”43) – but also against Jonas. At first glance, there may seem to be strong similarities between Jonas and Adorno. In particular, both thinkers share a sense that the traditional objects



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of metaphysical contemplation have been irreparably damaged by the atrocities of the twentieth century. As Adorno writes, “One of the mystical impulses which secularized itself in dialectics was the doctrine of the relevance of the innerwordly, the historical, for what traditional metaphysics distinguished as transcendence …”44 Jonas, in effect, gives direct expression to this impulse in suggesting that even “Eternity” may be besmirched by human action. But for Adorno, even the thought that at least wrongdoing – and so, indirectly, its victims – leaves a trace beyond time would offer too much consolation: “After Auschwitz there is no word intoned from on high, not even a theological one, that – untransformed – has any right.”45 Furthermore, Adorno would surely also have deplored Jonas’s rejection of the idea that human beings are essentially historical beings, who must understand their own practical situation through an interpretation of their past. For Jonas, “every present time of human beings is its own purpose, and thus every past was too.”46 Indeed, he argues that “finite eschatology, which postulates a definitive goal and end of time [is] incompatible with our [modern] conviction of the indefinite continuance of cosmic alteration.”47 For Jonas history is the sphere of free human agency, of the struggle between good and evil, and in this domain nothing can be predicted. It is simply up to human beings whether they act to further the realization of the good, or whether they act against it. God, we recall, does not interfere in the physical course of things, on Jonas’s account, but makes himself felt only through “the mutely insistent appeal of his unfulfilled goal.” But if God, on this view, is experienced only in the unavoidably imperative character of the moral demand, if he gives no structure or shape to history, and leaves it up to human beings to respond to the demand or not, then Jonas’s criticism of Bultmann for banishing God to the noumenal realm surely backfires. After all, it is only the prophetic manifestation of God’s will which Jonas allows to cross the Kantian divide. But this is in fact merely the revelation of a moral purpose. It could only be identified as divine action if it brought consequences which could not be attributed to human freedom alone. Adorno seeks a way of connecting hope and history, without falling prey to a naïve, even callous progressivism, by interpreting human history as driven by what he calls “natural history” (Naturgeschichte). Human beings increasingly enslave themselves to a rampant instrumentalism, thereby paralyzing their own accumulating technical and cultural potential. From his perspective, the very notion that history hangs in the balance, is dependent of the outcome of our free decisions, underestimates the extent to which history has built up its own dynamic, in the face of which straightforward appeals

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to human freedom and moral commitment can only appear derisory. Jonas rejects what he regards as Hegel’s intolerably optimistic version of historical necessity, in favor of due recognition of the contingency and hazard of the world. But, for Adorno, such a rejection throws out the baby with the bathwater, overlooking the truth concealed in Hegel’s position: that history exercises a coercion over human beings as it unfolds, exemplifying a logic – albeit a broken one – which can be rationally deciphered. Resignation to the “world’s inscrutable ways,” Adorno argues, has always been “calamitous”; rather, “we have nothing except our reason … we have no option but to measure by our concrete experience.” 48 But whereas the convergence of reason and experience in Hegel revealed history to be the advance of Spirit’s consciousness of freedom, for Adorno the dominant theme is that of intensifying unfreedom. In Hegel’s philosophy, we perceive the dynamic of history back-to-front. For “the idea of a positivity that can master everything that opposes it through the superior power of a comprehending spirit is the mirror image of the experience of superior coercive force inherent in everything which exists by virtue of its consolidation under domination.”49 Or, as an aphorism from Negative Dialectics has it, “The world spirit is; but it is not spirit.”50 * “Der Weltgeist ist, aber ist keiner, ist nicht Geist ….” This almost contradictory formula summarizes Adorno’s attempt to solve our central problem: how to find a perspective which can register the moral depth of atrocity, of that “permanence of catastophe” which – for Adorno – characterizes human history, without offering false consolation, endowing senseless suffering with a spurious meaning. If the formula is not simply incoherent, this is because it is the expression of a tacit hope: that spirit might one day shed the coercive traits which denature it, which transform it into its opposite – that one day it might realize itself in the form of a free human community. Yet the difficulty here is that Adorno, in his eagerness to block the tendency of reflective subjectivity to inflate itself into an absolute, often seems to espouse a purely naturalistic, quasi­Freudian account of the emergence of mind. He states in Negative Dialectics, for example, that “Consciousness which has become independent, the epitome of active side of cognitive performances, is derived genetically from the libidinous energy of the species being man.”51 Adorno’s motive is understandable, and we can sympathize with it. He is concerned that the mind should not imagine itself as prior to nature, for this one of the central illusions which – on his account – helps to sustain domination. But of course, if mind (or spirit – both are expressed by the German word “Geist”) is simply an extension of natural



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compulsion, then it can never become a principle of freedom, and Adorno is aware of this dilemma. For example, in Minima Moralia he states: “Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else.”52 Yet he has no philosophically coherent account of how material existence could give rise to the mental, something radically other than such existence. Without naturalism, it seems, there is no brake on the imperialist tendency of mind; but given naturalism, we cannot explain the existence of mind in the first place. * We can note, by way of conclusion, that a comparable problem confronts the thought of Adorno’s successor in the tradition of Critical Theory, with which we began. In his recent writings on the philosophy of religion, Habermas has increasingly portrayed the relation between faith and a secular consciousness informed by naturalism as a reciprocal one. Confronted with the rise of the natural sciences and the pluralization of worldviews, religious believers in the modern world, led by the theologians, have been obliged to work their way through to a more reflective stance. They have had to incorporate an awareness of their own confession as one of a multiplicity of beliefs, and to recognize the challenge posed by profane knowledge. At the same time, believers cannot be expected to pay the existential price of giving up the dogmatic core of their faith entirely under these pressures. Indeed, Habermas is more worried that a triumphalist secular consciousness, closed off to possible insights stemming from the religious domain, will become complacent and rigid. The “postmetaphysical” standpoint that he has long advocated in philosophy implies resistance. He now suggests, to closing down prematurely on the possibility that religious insights – suitably translated – could enrich the secular perspective (since an exclusivist naturalism is itself a form of metaphysics). The dialogue between religion and philosophical thought should be held open.53 But this account of the relation between religion and secular consciousness leads to awkward consequences – comparable to the problems generated by Adorno’s equivocation between the language of naturalism and the language of Geist. On the one hand, according to Habermas, we have traditions of discourse which show great diagnostic sensitivity to the ways in which forms of human living can go wrong – sometimes appallingly wrong. But this heightened insight is paid for with the retention of a dogmatic core, which is resistant to rational justification. Although Habermas has tried to downplay this problem in recent writings, suggesting that the opaque core of religious experience is inaccessible to philosophical reflection in the same

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innocuous way as the enigmatic kernel of aesthetic experience,54 the comparison is not quite convincing. For works of art do not make truth claims, as religion does, and therefore do not invite or require discursive legitimation. On the other hand, secular moral and political discourses, which are open to comprehensive criticism and rational elaboration, seem to lack the visionary force – as Habermas admits – to motivate the restraint of a distorted modernization process that may be slipping out of control. Habermas’s theory pays due attention to the modern condition of a pluralism of worldviews. But it leaves us bereft of secular images of emancipation or reconciliation, both as an inspiration action and as a measure of the sometimes catastrophic depths of human failure. And he does not deny that this is a tangible loss. This is no doubt why he states, in his lecture Faith and Knowledge: “profane but nondefeatist reason has too much respect for the glowing embers which flare up again and again at the question of theodicy to tread to close too religion. It knows that the desacralization of the sacred begins with those world-religions which disenchanted magic, overcame myth, sublimated sacrifice and aired what was secret.”55 The suggestion, then, is that religious consciousness, from the very beginning, has been engaged in its own reflective process of rationalization, and so – by implication – can cope without external philosophical interference. Correspondingly, modern philosophy is presumed to be able to acknowledge its debt to – and the continuing stimulus deriving from – religious tradition, without compromising its independence, while remaining “methodologically atheist,” as Habermas puts it. We have to accept, in other words, that religion and philosophy cannot be seamlessly integrated, as Hegel once believed. But they can limit one another’s totalizing claims – and this stand-off blocks both the emergence of a falsely transfigurative, comprehensive framework of meaning, and secular naturalism’s equally comprehensive evacuation of meaning. The solution is, in some ways, reminiscent of Bultmann’s. But, in its problematic division of labor, it may also suffer from similar weaknesses. For the difficulty is that it requires us to live with an uneasy, conflictual, divided consciousness. And such consciousness, rather than embodying a coherent, morally purposeful response to the record of human atrocity, may rather be a further sign of our powerlessness to bind – without obscuring or deceptively healing – atrocity’s still open wounds. Notes 1 2

Jürgen Habermas, Glauben und Wissen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 24. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Grenze zwischen Glauben und Wissen: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte und aktuellen Bedeutung von Kants Religionsphilosophie,” in Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), p. 218.

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G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Volume III: The Consummate Religion, Peter C. Hodgson, ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p. 245. Ibid., p. 247. G. W. F Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (Cambridge: CUP, 1980), p. 37. Ibid., pp. 66, 67. Hans Jonas, Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). Ibid., p. 39. Hans Jonas, “Matter, Mind and Creation: Cosmological Evidence and Cosmogonic Speculation,” in Morality and Mortality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, Lawrence Vogel ed. (Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1996), pp. 189–190. Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz, p. 42. Ibid., p. 9. “Matter, Mind and Creation,” p. 188. Hans Jonas, “Letter to Rudolf Bultmann,” in Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit: Zur Lehre des Menschen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), p. 70. Hans Jonas, “Unsterblichkeit und heutige Existenz,” in Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit, pp. 53 ff. “Unsterblichkeit und heutige Existenz,” p. 61. Rudolf Bultmann, “Letter to Hans Jonas,” in Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit, p. 66. Ibid. Ibid., p. 67. “Letter to Bultmann,” p. 71. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 72. “Letter to Bultmann,” p. 71. “Unsterblichkeit und heutige Existenz,” p. 48. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christus und die Mythologie (Gütersloh: Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1964), p. 81. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, “The Historicity of Man and Faith,” in Existence and Faith (London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1964), pp. 107–129. Jesus Christus und die Mythologie, p. 75. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 78. Hans Jonas, “Gnosis, Existentialismus und Nihilismus,” in Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit, p. 24. Cf. Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 18, 1964, p. 232. Cf. “Unsterblichkeit und heutige Existenz,” p. 57. Hans Jonas, “Is Faith still Possible?: Memories of Rudolf Bultmann, and Reflections on the Philosophical Aspects of his Work,” in Mortality and Morality, p. 161. Ibid., p. 162. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in The Adorno Reader, Brian O’Connor, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 210. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 362 (trans. altered). Ibid., p. 354. Ibid., p. 362. For a fuller statement of this criticism, to which I am indebted, cf. Werner Brändle, Rettung des Hoffnungslosen: Die theologische Implikationen der Philosophie Theodor W. Adornos (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), pp. 138–144.

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47 48 49 50 51 52

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Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 121. Theodor Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” in Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 85. Bultmann, Jesus Christus und die Mythologie, pp. 42–43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 361 (trans. altered). Ibid., p. 367. Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 386. Jonøs, “Unsterblichkeit und heutige Existenz,” pp. 54–55. Ibid., p. 121. Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 87. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 304. Ibid., p. 185 (trans. altered). Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978), p. 243. See, for example, Habermas, “Religion in der Õffentlichkeit,” in Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze, pp. 119–154. See ibid., pp. 149–150. Habermas, Glauben und Wissen, p. 28.

Part II: Does It Help to Import Religious Ideas: Reflections on Punishment, War, and Forgiveness

A n ton y Duf f 4.  Can We Punish the Perpetrators of Atrocities?

As [a pirate] has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him.11 These are deeds that demand not only condemnation, but damnation in the full religious meaning of the word – that is, the doer not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community.2 [Some] may say that even such people are owed unconditional respect, meaning, not that they are deserving of esteem, but that they are owed a kind of respect which is not conditional upon what they have done and which cannot be forfeited. Some will say that even the most terrible evil-doers are owed this respect as human beings and that we owe it to them because we are human beings.3

The question that forms the title of this chapter invites an obvious and simple answer – an answer which is also true, in a formal sense. Of course we can punish them: if they can be captured and their guilt duly proved, they can be subjected to the institutional process of a criminal trial; they can be formally convicted; the court can formally sentence them to imprisonment or even death; pursuant to that sentence, they can be locked in a prison, or killed through the formal process by which death penalties are carried out. From this perspective, there are questions about whether, why, by whom and how those who perpetrate atrocities should be punished; but that they can be punished is not sensibly in question. However, my concern is not with the institutional form of punishment, but with its moral substance. My question is whether whatever is done to Thanks to participants in the conference on “The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities,” for helpful criticisms and suggestions and thanks also especially to Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman.

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such perpetrators can properly count as punishment – whether it can have the meaning, the moral character, that punishment must have if it is to be justifiable. We can lock such perpetrators up, or kill them: but why should (how could) this count as “punishment,” rather than merely as some kind of incapacitative or preventive detention, or as the disposal of a dangerous enemy or outsider? The formal answer to that question, given earlier, is that what is done to them counts as punishment if it is done in accordance with the formal penal procedures of a criminal justice system; but, we will see, the substantive answer is much less straightforward. It is less straightforward because, I will argue, if punishment is to be a morally appropriate response to criminal wrongdoing, it must have a communicative, and thus inclusionary, purpose – which is to say that it must address the person punished as a fellow member of a normative community. I sketch this argument in the section “Punishment, Communication, and Inclusion,” before turning in the section “Limits to Community” to the problems this poses for the punishment of those who perpetrate the kinds of atrocity that make it tempting to call them hostes generis humani or outlaws,4 and difficult (impossible?) to recognize them as fellow members of a normative community. In face of this difficult, some would claim that only a religious perspective can make it possible to see such perpetrators as fellows for whom we must strive to retain the kind of respect that punishment should display; I argue in the section “Religious and Secular Conceptions of Community” that we should resist this claim. (I will not try to define “atrocities”: the kind of cases that make punishment problematic form a subclass of what are orthodoxly classified as “crimes against humanity”5 ; paradigm instances are those systematic exercises in human destruction that display a complete denial of their victims’ humanity.)

Punishment, Communication, and Inclusion On some views of punishment, there is in principle no special problem about the punishment of those who perpetrate atrocities. A consequentialist must ask what goods such punishments can achieve, and whether those goods outweigh the costs that such punishments incur; and it might be far from obvious that the ordinary justifying benefits of consequentialist punishment (deterrence, reform, incapacitation) will be substantially achieved in these cases – especially when the crimes were committed decades ago.6 But other benefits may be gained, in terms of the satisfaction of urgent demands, or the possible achievement of some kind of “closure”; and the question is anyway



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an empirical or contingent one about the good (and the harm) that such punishments can be expected to bring. On some versions of retributivism, there is also no in principle problem about punishing such perpetrators. If the purpose of punishment is to inflict the kind and degree of suffering that the wrongdoer deserves, we can ask what kind and degree they deserve: thus Blackstone, in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter, goes on to say that “every community hath a right … to inflict that punishment upon [the pirate], which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do.” We might think that no punishment, or none that we could allow ourselves to inflict, could be adequate to the atrocious wrongfulness of what they had done, but that would be to say that we could not punish them enough, not that we could not punish them: so Berger suggests that the perpetrator who “separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community … invokes a retribution that is more than human,” since “[n]o human punishment is ‘enough’ in the case of deeds as monstrous as these.”7 I suggest, however, that the problem of whether we can properly punish those whose crimes are so terrible that they might be seen as hostes generis humani goes deeper than this. That it goes deeper is suggested by the ease with which such hostes may also be seen as outlaws. [Terrorists] are hostis humani generis, enemies of all mankind and as such should be viewed as outlaws. Their acts should be treated as offences against the law of nations and every state can and should [bring] them to justice.8

Now an “outlaw” is precisely someone who is outside the law – someone who has excluded himself, or has been excluded, from the protection of the law: but how then can we aim to bring such a person to justice or to punishment, since that is to treat him as being within the law – as being both bound and protected by its norms? Outlaws might be killed, as a matter of public defense, or locked up as a preventive or incapacitative measure, but they cannot qua outlaws be punished: for punishment operates within the law, whilst outlaws are outside it. This limited point about the idea of an outlaw leads to a larger question about who can be punished, and about the status that a tolerable system of criminal punishment must accord to those whom it punishes. Punishment, on any plausible theory of its justification, requires a responsible wrongdoer who can be said to deserve punishment for what he has done: whether or not we think that consequential benefits are also necessary to an adequate justification of punishment, we must surely accept the modest

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claim of the “negative retributivist,”9 that if punishment is not deserved, it is not justified; and only a responsible wrongdoer can deserve punishment for what he has done. Now to be responsible is to be answerable: to say that I am responsible for wrongdoing is to say that there is some person or body who has the right or standing to call me to answer (to account) for it. This dimension of responsibility, as an essential condition of criminal punishment, is crucial to the legitimacy of a criminal process of trial, conviction, and punishment. A criminal trial is not just an inquiry on an alleged wrongdoer, which aims to determine the truth or otherwise of the proposition that she committed a specified wrong; it is a process through which she is called to answer – to answer to the charge that she committed this crime, and to answer for such wrongful conduct as is proved against her. That is why we cannot legitimately try a person who is so mentally disordered or incompetent that he cannot understand or play any active role in the proceedings (even if he was sane and competent at the time of the alleged offence). We can hold an inquiry to determine whether he committed the crime: but it would be a travesty to put him on trial, since that would be to call to answer someone whom we know is incapable of answering; or to convict him, since a conviction aims to communicate to a wrongdoer the condemnation that he has been proved to deserve.10 Now to call someone to account for her alleged wrongdoing is to address her as a fellow member of a normative community. We accuse her of wrongdoing in the light of values that we must claim to be hers as well as ours: not necessarily in the sense that she actually accepts them, but at least in the sense that they are (we must claim) binding on her. We address her as a fellow member of a normative community that those values define and structure, a member whom those values both bind and protect. In calling her to account, we must also claim the standing to do so: we must claim that her wrongdoing is our business, that we have the right – perhaps also a duty – to intervene in this way; but what makes it our business is that we are fellow members of a relevant normative community. I must answer to my colleagues and my students for my failures as a teacher: they have a right to call me to answer for such failures, and I cannot refuse to answer on the grounds that it is not their business. But if a passing stranger, or a police officer, calls me to answer for such failures, I can properly reply that that is none of their business – I am not responsible to them.11 What is the relevant community in the context of crime and criminal trials: to whom are criminal defendants answerable, as members of what community? Different political theories will generate different answers to this question, but for any state that aspires to be a liberal democracy the most plausible answer is that we are responsible, answerable, as citizens to our



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fellow citizens, as fellow members of a liberal polity.12 In our civic lives we are related to each other not by the shared bonds of subjection to the commands of a sovereign (as classical legal positivism portrayed it); nor by anything as intimate and mutually interested as some of the more ambitious forms of communitarianism portray it; nor merely by the limited terms of a social contract between strangers (a contract that cannot be binding if it is truly between strangers), but as participants in a civic enterprise that requires us to recognize each other with a certain mutual concern and respect as citizens, whilst also leaving each other those extensive realms of individual freedom and privacy that are so important to liberals. Within such a liberal polity, the criminal law speaks to us not in the peremptory tones of a sovereign whose commands and prohibitions are given authority by the effective threat of sanctions, but in our own collective voice, and in terms of the values that define and bind us as a polity. The criminal law defines those wrongs that properly count as “public” wrongs, that is wrongs for which I must answer to the polity and its members, and which are the business of my fellow citizens simply in virtue of our shared citizenship.13 I have not talked yet of criminal punishment, as something that is imposed on responsible citizens for their wrongdoing; but we can now cast the problem of punishment in a different and sharper light, by asking not just how criminal punishment can be justified in the abstract, but how citizens can justifiably punish each other. For punishment is imposed by courts that claim to speak and act in our name as citizens, under laws that claim to address us as citizens – and “our” and “us” include all citizens, offenders and nonoffenders alike. The challenge for a liberal penal theory is therefore to show how in punishing offenders we can still claim to be treating them as citizens – as fellow members of the normative political–legal community.14 Neither consequentialists nor orthodox retributivists tend to take this challenge seriously, but it faces anyone who espouses the values of liberal or republican political community. I have argued elsewhere that we can meet it only by portraying punishment as an enterprise of moral communication. A criminal conviction communicates to the defendant the judgment that he committed the wrong described in the charge. As a communicative act, it is intended to elicit an appropriate response – of understanding and (ideally) remorseful acceptance: the intention is that the defendant come to understand not merely that he is being treated with hostility, but that and why he is being condemned as a wrongdoer; the hope is that he will thereby come, if he has not already come, to make that condemnation his own, by recognizing his wrongdoing with remorseful eyes for himself. The punishment that he then receives – the fine, the term of probation, Community Service or imprisonment (although imprisonment can play only a small

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part in a communicative system of punishment) – gives that condemnation a more forcefully symbolic material form; it too aims to communicate the condemnation that the crime warranted, as part of an attempt to bring  the wrongdoer to recognize and confront the wrongfulness of his crime. The offender must be able to understand this dimension of his punishment, and to respond to it appropriately (even if he actually remains unpersuaded and unrepentant). That is why it is wrong, as a travesty of punishment, to punish someone who is so disordered or so impaired that he cannot understand what is done to him as a punishment: we might detain such a person, for his own safety or that of others; but we cannot punish him, since nothing done to him could have the communicative meaning and intent that punishment must have. Such a conception of punishment as communicative finds its modern roots to Feinberg’s influential article on punishment’s expressive function;15 but by talking of communication, rather than merely of expression, I want to emphasize the way in which punishment should be not just a one-way process of expressing something to or at someone, but a two-way process that aims to engage, and to solicit an appropriate response from another rational, responsible agent. If all that we do to the offender is to express our anger; or threaten him with sanctions to deter him or others from future crimes; or subject him to restraints to incapacitate him from future crimes; or impose on him some quantum of suffering that is meant to match, in some cosmic balance, the wrong he committed: we cease to address him as a responsible citizen. If, however, punishment can be an attempt to engage in forceful moral communication with the offender, it can be a process that addresses the offender as a responsible fellow citizen – and thus be something that citizens could properly do to each other. There are very different ways to develop the idea that punishment has a communicative dimension that is central to its meaning and proper purpose: ways that differ, in particular, in how they explain the “hard treatment” aspect of punishment (the fact that the censure which punishment is to communicate is communicated through measures, such as imprisonment, fines, compulsory community service, and the like, that are burdensome quite independently of their meaning); in the answers they give to the question “Why not communicate censure by purely verbal denunciations, or by purely symbolic punishments that are burdensome only in virtue of their meaning?” We need not discuss these differences here16 ; all that I need is the argument that punishment must be justified as an appropriate method of communicating to offenders the censure that they deserve for their crimes. As such, it must address them as fellow members of the relevant normative community – of



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the political community by whose laws they are bound and protected, and to whose other members they must answer as fellow citizens. This is an essential difference between criminal punishment and other coercive measures whose material substance might be similar to that of punishment – between imprisonment as a punishment and other modes of coerced detention (the preventive detention of those judged to be dangerous, or the quarantine of those diagnosed as being dangerously infectious, or the imprisonment of enemy soldiers); between a fine as a punishment and a tax on or charge for various kinds of activity; between Community Service as a punishment and compulsory work on community projects as a form of conscription. The point is not just that punishment has an essential ­precondition – criminal guilt – that these other kinds of coercion lack; it is that the very meaning of such impositions is utterly different when they are imposed as punishments. One crucial point about punishment as communication is that it is an inclusionary, rather than an exclusionary, enterprise. We do not impose punishments on offenders as a positivist sovereign imposes them on her recalcitrant subjects; punishment attempts to engage with the offender as a fellow citizen – someone who has done wrong, but who is not thereby excluded from community. Punishment is quite different from mere expulsion or destruction: it keeps the wrongdoer within the community, and seeks a response from her as a citizen.17 It is patently false to claim that criminal punishment, as practiced in many if not all of our existing legal systems, is an inclusionary enterprise. So many of those who suffer punishment had already been excluded from many of the rights and benefits of citizenship – both from the protection of the values by which the polity claims to define itself, and from real participation in the articulation and development of those values. So much of the rhetoric of criminal law and punishment is exclusionary: offenders are portrayed as enemies against whom the war on crime (or on drugs or on antisocial behavior) is fought, as a dangerous “they” against whom the law-abiding “we” must be protected. So much actual punishment is exclusionary, in its meaning and in its effects: its message to the offender is that she is excluded from community with the law-abiding (this is true especially but not only of imprisonment); and its effects are often to inflict further economic, social, and political exclusion on the offenders, whose “debt to society” has been formally but not in substantive effect discharged.18 But to argue that punishment is an inclusionary enterprise is not to deny such glaring facts about our existing systems of criminal justice: it is, rather, to offer a normative account – an ideal – of what criminal punishment ought to be or become if it is to be an acceptable feature

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of a liberal polity; it is thus also to offer a normative standard against which we can assess and criticize our existing penal practices. Such a conception of punishment does, I think, make moral sense of criminal punishment as it could be imposed on the majority of offenders: if we are to claim the collective standing to call them to answer and punish them for their wrongs, we must recognize and address them as fellow citizens in the political community. However, it comes under serious strain in some kinds of case, when it is far from clear whether we should, or how we can, seriously maintain that view of the offender.19 One such strain arises with those whose criminal careers involve persistent, very serious crimes. It is tempting to argue that, whilst most crimes should not exclude the offender from the community or make it impossible for him to be fully restored to community, someone who persists in committing crimes that flout the most basic bonds of community should in the end be seen to have excluded himself. That idea could underpin some version of the notorious American “three strikes and you’re out” rules20 : given a long enough record of serious enough crimes (much longer and more serious than existing “three strikes” laws require), the offender has put himself “out” from the political community. Like many liberals, I would resist such an argument: but to resist it we must appeal to a demanding conception of citizenship as more or less unconditional – a conception such that no criminal wrongdoing, however persistent or serious, can negate the wrongdoer’s standing as a citizen. I will not say more about this here, since we turn now to a more extreme version of this problem.21 It is feasible, albeit morally demanding, to see almost all criminal offenders as fellow citizens who must be called to account for their wrongdoing, but to whom we owe respect and concern as fellow participants in the civic enterprise; and so to see punishment, at least in ideal theory, as a communicative enterprise which addresses offenders as responsible citizen. However, when we ask how we can respond to those who commit the most terrible atrocities, the feasibility and desirability of that ideal come into serious question.

Limits to Community? One problem raised by such cases, a problem which I cannot discuss in detail here, is that of jurisdiction.22 National courts have jurisdiction over crimes committed within the borders of the state – typically crimes committed by and against its citizens: offenders are answerable to that polity and its members, and are called to answer by and before its courts. Sometimes a crime cannot be thus allocated to a single state, since its commission and impact are



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not thus localized: to deal with such crimes, states must either claim a more extensive jurisdiction to cover them (either unilaterally or by international agreement), or share in the creation of a supra-national court (the development of European criminal law is interesting in this context). Some trans-national crimes are of a categorically different kind: for they are committed by states, against other states and their members. The most familiar of these are war crimes – aggression, as a violation of jus ad bellum, and other war crimes that violate jus in bello. The only morally plausible forum to try such crimes is an international criminal court – either an ad hoc tribunal like that created for the Nuremberg trials in 1945, or a standing international criminal court of the kind that has now been created.23 A deeper puzzle arises when crimes located in particular states are treated as international crimes. This happens in two ways. First, a state’s courts might claim “universal” jurisdiction over certain crimes committed anywhere in the world, whether or not a citizen of that state is involved as either victim or perpetrator24 : a theft committed in Chile by a Chilean against another Chilean is no crime in English law, nor triable by English courts; torture committed in Chile by Chilean officials on Chilean citizens, however, is a crime in English law, triable in an English court.25 Second, an international criminal court might have jurisdiction, as the ICC has over “crimes against humanity”: although “crimes against humanity” must be “part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population,” that attack can be directed against victims within, as well as outside, the state whose agents commit it.26 There are two ways to interpret, and ground, such claims to universal jurisdiction. First, we could say that those who perpetrate “crimes against humanity” are still ideally answerable to the polity within which they commit their crimes, if those crimes were thus localized, and if there is a polity that can call them to account (which might be problematic): that is why Saddam Hussein is properly tried by an Iraqi court, for his crimes against Iraqi citizens. But sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the local courts and criminal justice system cannot be expected to call the wrongdoers to account – especially when the crimes are committed by or at the instigation of state officials, or the polity’s institutions have collapsed. When that is so, other states, or an international court, can properly intervene, and act in the name and on behalf of the citizens whose own local institutions are failing to act: the wrongdoers, that is, must still answer to their own polity, but do so through a foreign or international court. The alternative reading of such claims to universal jurisdiction takes seriously the idea of “crimes against humanity”: not (primarily) as crimes which

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victimize or harm “humanity” as distinct from some more specific group,27 but as wrongs which properly concern all human beings simply in virtue of their shared humanity. Thus the Preamble to the Rome Statute talks about “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole,” and of “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity.” Many wrongdoings, committed in polities not our own, are not our business: we can be moved by them, regret them, wish that they were not committed; but we lack the standing to call their perpetrators to answer for them. We do not have that standing either as individuals or collectively, through our states or through whatever international institutions we create. Some kinds of wrong, however, should concern us, and are properly our business, simply in virtue of our shared humanity with their victims (and their perpetrators): for such wrongs the perpetrators must answer not just to their local communities, but to humanity. We will no doubt need to pursue both these lines of thought (which might anyway start to overlap with each other) if we are to find any adequate grounding for such claims to universal jurisdiction, but it is on the second that I want to focus here. The idea of “humanity” as a community within and by which perpetrators of atrocities can be called to answer for their crimes to their fellow human beings is clearly problematic, and it might be tempting to dismiss it as nothing more than overblown rhetoric – or as an arrogant claim to universal jurisdiction by bodies which actually speak only for some set of more local interests. One question is whether it makes any sense to talk of “humanity” as a community at all – whether we can really say that all human beings are united by some set of shared values or concerns, in something recognizable as a shared life, in virtue of which we can be expected to recognize any other human being as a fellow.28 Even if we can talk of such a community in some aspirational sense, a second question is how and by whom it could be given appropriate political or legal shape: can we see the UN, or the ICC, as speaking and acting for “humanity” – or only as structures through which nation states can try to pursue their own interests and to ward off a Hobbesian state of inter-national nature? A third question, if the first two can be answered satisfactorily, will then concern the proper scope of an international criminal law: for what crimes should which perpetrators have to answer to “humanity”? Whom could such a court properly call to account, for what? I cannot answer these questions in detail here, but should at least indicate the direction in which answers may lie. On the first question, the idea of a common humanity is not so very strange: some might cash it out in Kantian terms of the kingdom of ends; others will look for less rationalistic, religious,



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or humanistic ways of understanding it.29 Integral to such an idea is a conception of what we owe to each other, by way of respect and concern, in virtue simply of our shared humanity; such respect arguably includes a readiness to answer to other human beings, in terms of the values that I recognize as binding and protecting us all, for whatever conduct is properly their business. That is, perhaps, enough for us to be able to talk of the community of humanity, once we recognize that communities can be partial and relatively thin: that they need not involve sharing richly all-embracing forms of life.30 However, there are obvious differences between the idea of answering individually to other people as fellow human beings, and that of answering before an international court to humanity – differences analogous to those between answering individually to fellow citizens for my civic failures, and answering to the polity before a criminal court for my crimes: these lead us to the other two questions. As to the second question, the obstacles in the way of creating institutions that can truly claim to speak for humanity are clearly formidable, given the extreme differences in power and resources, and the deep differences in fundamental values, between the states that would be most directly involved in that process, and the scope that the creation of such an institution offers for ideological conflict and imperialism; we need not say more about those difficulties here. It is however worth suggesting – at least as a thought that might have force in our more optimistic moods – that the attempt to create and operate an ICC can itself help to create, as well as to express, the kind of community of humanity in whose name it is to act. As to the third question, the ICC has jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.31 It is worth noting that these crimes, in virtue either of their formal definition in the Statute or of the limitations of individual agency, require both a collective victim, and a collective agency which, even if it does not include state officials, acts at the instigation or with the connivance of the state.32 However, we cannot pursue the question of just how, and how broadly, “international” crimes should be defined here; what is more important for present purposes is the question of who can be called to answer for them, since it is this question that become problematic in the case of atrocities. One point that should have emerged from s. 1 is that to call someone to answer to us is to see her as a fellow member of some normative community by whose values we are all bound, protected, and liable to be judged. That is to say, if we are to call someone to answer to us, we must be able to see her as someone who falls under a normatively laden description under which we also fall: as, for instance, as a colleague who is answerable to us, as her

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colleagues, for her performance of her job; or as citizen who is answerable to us, as her fellow citizens, for her conduct in the civic enterprise in which we are all engaged; or, we can now add, as a human being who is answerable to us, as her fellow human beings, for wrongs that concern all human beings. Now faced by the perpetrator of terrible atrocities, and especially if we try to see him through the eyes of his victims, we can of course recognize that in a formal sense he is a human being, as we are: but can we recognize, and address, him as a fellow human being in the substantive sense that is needed if we are to call him to account or punish him?33 Just why is this problematic? Our understanding of the crimes that such a person commits is structured by our recognition that he is a human being and a moral agent: the horror that we feel at such crimes is in part a horror that a human being could do that to his fellows; and our description of his crimes as atrocities is precisely a description of things done, not by natural causes or by a human being who is so mentally disordered that he cannot be seen as a moral agent at all, but by a human moral agent. However, to call someone to account, whether informally outside the law or formally at a criminal trial, goes further than that (this was part of the point of s. 1): it is to address him, to try to communicate with him, as someone who shares with us in a form of life, and to whom we therefore owe the kind of respect and concern that flow from the values which structure that form of life. That shared form of life, that normative community of which we recognize our common membership, need not be rich in its shared content. Given the wide diversity of human communities, human lives, and human goods; given the ways in which we are relative strangers to most other human beings, what unites us as human beings must be something fairly minimal, perhaps fairly abstract, in its content. But if we are to talk of crimes against humanity whose perpetrators must answer to humanity, we must suppose such a substantive commonality; we must be able to address the wrongdoer, not (merely) with hatred, horror, disgust, or contempt as someone who is “beyond the pale,” but as a responsible moral agent with whom we endeavor to engage in this communicative process of calling to account and judgment. For communication is essentially a twoway enterprise: it requires us to recognize the other as a participant in (not merely the object of) the process of explanation, persuasion, and judgment in which we are engaged; we must be able to say to the other something along the lines of “Let us discuss this issue, and try to work towards an appropriate judgment”; it requires that we respect the other as a participant in this process, so as someone to whom we must be willing to listen as well as talk; it requires that we are ready, indeed that we aspire, to reach an



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agreement which would allow us to speak with one voice about the matter under discussion. If the account of criminal punishment sketched in the previous section is plausible, then similar points must apply to the punishment of those who perpetrate even the most atrocious crimes against humanity; to punish them should be to attempt still to communicate with them as fellow members of some normative community; in punishing them we must endeavor to recognize and respect their moral standing, and to address them not as outlaws (who cannot be punished), but as fellows – fellows who have committed grievous wrongs, but with whom we still recognize our fellowship. But can we, or should we, aspire to such a substantial recognition of fellowship when we face those who have committed the most terrible atrocities? We can try to determine whether they committed the atrocities. If we determine that they did so, we can kill them, or lock them up to protect others, or exile them from human community. But can we call them to account at a trial, or punish them as a way of trying to communicate with them as fellows? Should we not recognize, would we not come to recognize if we really grasped the full character of the wrongs that had been committed, that by their crimes they put themselves beyond the bounds of human community; that their utter denial of their victims’ humanity, and their systematic attacks on humanity, have destroyed the possibility of human community with them? These questions gain added force when we think of perpetrators who themselves continue to deny any such community with those whom they wronged or those who now call them to account: what sense does it make to try to engage in the kind of mutually communicative enterprise that, on the account sketched earlier, criminal trials and punishments should be, with someone whose words and demeanor make clear his contemptuous rejection of the court’s authority, and his determined refusal to engage in any such process, or to recognize the values to which it appeals? The moral possibility of trials and punishments does not, of course, depend upon their actual success in bringing wrongdoers to engage in the communicative enterprise, or to answer for, to repent, or to make amends for their crimes: we must address the wrongdoer as someone who could respond appropriately, else there is no sense in seeking a response from him; but the value and importance of the attempt to engage him in a penal dialogue does not depend on its actual or likely success.34 However, faced by a perpetrator whose past deeds and present demeanor at his trial make clear his utter contempt for the values in whose light we seek to call him to answer, we must surely wonder whether we should, or really can, treat him as a fellow member of any normative community.

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Who are “we” in this context? The “we” includes not just the victims of the atrocities, or those with particular ties to them: it is the “we” of humanity in whose name the courts act, and to whom the perpetrator is to answer; to ask what this “we” can or should do is to ask what we could or could not do if we had the appropriate kind of concern for our fellow human beings, including the victims of these crimes, and fully grasped the nature of the crimes. However, the victims’ perspective is clearly crucial: we must ask whether we could see the perpetrator and his deeds from the victim’s perspective, and still recognize him as a fellow human being with whom we must try to engage in a communicative enterprise of calling to account.35 It might seem that I have invented an unreal problem here: for surely someone convicted of such atrocious, humanity-denying crimes can still be punished appropriately, by exclusion or exile from the human community that he himself so completely denied? Arendt suggested that the Israeli court should have said to Eichmann “we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”36 This is also one reading of Berger’s comment, quoted at the start of this chapter, that such deeds “demand not only condemnation, but damnation in the full religious meaning of the word”; “the doer not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community.”37 There is, however, a crucial difference between saying about a person that his deeds “demand” expulsion, and saying to him that he must be expelled as a punishment. The latter is what conviction and punishment properly require (if the argument of s. 1 was right); but what it requires is therefore that we seek the wrongdoer’s agreement to the judgment that his conviction and punishment express; and here we face a serious problem. I suggested earlier that capital punishment could, in principle, be a communicative mode of punishment;38 it could indeed in principle be a punishment that an offender accepts, or that he imposes on himself, in recognition of what he sees as the implications of his crime, and a way in which he can reconcile himself in death with those whom he wronged. To address the offender in this way is still to address him as a fellow member of the moral community, albeit as one who, we think, must leave the community (I think the apparent paradox here is only an apparent one). But if our judgment is that he “separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community,” that appears to cut off the possibility of trying to communicate with him in this way – in which case we can kill him or lock him up, but we cannot punish him.



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We can see this point by attending to much less dramatically terrible examples. Someone who has lost patience with an acquaintance’s persistent misconduct might say dismissively “I’ve got nothing to say to him.” In saying that she is turning away from the wrongdoer, and renouncing (or marking what she takes to be his renunciation of) whatever relationship they had – as acquaintances, as neighbors, as colleagues: whilst that relationship survives, she should be willing to talk to him – including talking about his misconduct; but with its demise, that commitment to communication also dies.39 In less serious cases one does not deny all community with the wrongdoer – he is still at least a fellow human being; but the example illustrates the point that communication requires a recognition of community. If criminal trials and punishments are communicative enterprises, they too require a recognition of normative community with the wrongdoer: but is this possible with those who commit the kinds of terrible atrocity that Berger is talking about?

Religious and Secular Conceptions of Community Perhaps we should simply accept that there are limits to community: whilst we must strive to recognize our fellowship with most other human beings, including serious offenders, we need not, or perhaps in moral honesty should not, think that we can preserve community with those who commit the most terrible atrocities – in which case, I have agued, we must recognize that we cannot punish them, or hold them responsible for their deeds. We can, of course, subject them to simulacra of trial and punishment: we can bring them to court, follow the rituals of a trial, present the evidence against them; the court can pronounce a verdict and sentence; the material substance of that sentence (death or imprisonment) can be carried out. Such rituals might serve various useful purposes: to reaffirm our collective commitment to the values that were flouted, and our solidarity with the victims; to bring some satisfaction to the surviving victims and those who loved them. But they would not be trials and punishments in the strict or proper sense: they would not constitute an enterprise of calling a wrongdoer to answer for his wrongs. To which it might be said – why should we expect to be able to engage in such an enterprise with such people? Calling someone to answer, holding someone responsible, is a communicative endeavor which presupposes normative community; normative community requires at least a modicum of mutuality; but such wrongdoers reject any such mutuality with their victims and with those who would now hold them to account. Furthermore, punishment as a communicative enterprise normally presupposes a prospect of reconciliation with the community within which

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one is called to account: the wrongdoer is called to recognize and repent his wrongdoing, and by undergoing punishment to make moral amends for it – amends which give forceful material form to the apology that he owes those he has wronged; by making such amends, he can achieve some kind of reconciliation with his fellows.40 But could we, should we, even hope for such reconciliation with the perpetrators of such terrible atrocities? Could we (and could they) recognize the full reality of what they had done, and still think that through punishment and penitence they could be reconciled with their victims and with the wider community? Should we not instead recognize that they have irrevocably excluded themselves from the possibility of human community? But yet – is it senseless, or morally crass or blinkered, to harbor the hope that we could still try to recognize and treat even such perpetrators as our fellow human beings; to hope that we could still try to communicate with them through an appropriate criminal process of trial and punishment? I am certainly not arguing that we should do this: before we begin to talk in such impersonal or universalist terms of what “we” or “one” should do, or of what should be done, rather than in first person singular terms of what I can or cannot find it within myself to do,41 we must ask what kinds of response are morally intelligible, given what preconditions or assumptions; and it is this question of intelligibility that concerns me here. Can we find a morally intelligible conception of community that would make it morally possible to see the perpetrators of even the most terrible atrocities as our fellows, with whom we can still try to engage in the kind of process of moral communication that, I have argued, criminal trials and punishments should constitute? Perhaps, however, this is the wrong question. For there are people, even some surviving victims of atrocities, who precisely do manage to maintain such a responsive recognition of the perpetrator – who can bring themselves, for instance, to face the perpetrators at a trial and to speak not merely about them, but to them as moral agents who must be brought to face what they have done. We can admire such people; we can wonder both at their courage and at their moral capacity still to see the other’s humanity; we surely should not say that they are wrong or misguided. So our question then must not be whether it is possible still to recognize such perpetrators as fellow members of a normative community, but how it is possible: what conception of community, and of the person, could ground such attitudes and responses to those who have perpetrated atrocities? It would be very hard, or impossible, to ground them in familiar secular conceptions of normative community. Think, for instance, of the various



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kinds of contractualist account both of morality and of civil and political society – accounts according to which our dealings with each other should be determined by the terms of a contract that we are to imagine making with each other.42 Insofar as such conceptions have a place for ideas of community at all, they portray us as sharing our moral and political communities with our fellow contractors – with those whom we can see as parties to the contract: it is to them that we owe whatever duties of respect and concern the contract specifies. Now a contract can of course survive breaches of its terms (and rational contractors will agree penalty clauses to deal with such breaches), but there will be limits to this: the maintenance of the contractual relationship is conditional on at least a minimal level of continuing reciprocity; some breaches of the contract, and especially systematic and unremedied breaches of its most basic terms, will be terminal, in that they will effectively render the contract null and void. Anything I owe to you as a contractual matter is in that way conditional or contingent on your conduct toward me: if you utterly disregard the contract, it ceases to bind me. But if anything can void a social or moral contract, surely the systematic perpetration of the kinds of atrocity we are concerned with here must do so: to put the point sharply, how can such crimes not negate the possibility of a continuing contractual relationship between perpetrator and victim? Now it is true that many of our moral relationships are not best understood on the model of a contract: it would be a strange friendship in which the friends’ mutual concern could be expressed in contractual terms.43 It is also true, however, that many of those relationships do involve a kind of precontractual (if not proto-contractual) notion of reciprocity, and that they are conditional or contingent on that reciprocity persisting. Whilst I do not see my friendships as contractual matters, and even if they transcend the defective kinds of friendship based on pleasure or utility that Aristotle identified,44 they are not unconditional; amongst the factors that can (quite reasonably) destroy a friendship are persistent, serious breaches of the norms or demands of friendship. When we turn from such intimate relationships as friendships to our relations with our fellow citizens, or with strangers with whom all we have in common is our humanity, we are even more likely to see those relationships as ones in which reciprocity is crucial: whilst we should initially do unto others as we would want them to do unto us, if they persistently and utterly fail to respond appropriately, we cease to see any requirement to continue such treatment. In some intimate relationships, we might aspire to an unconditional regard for the other: that is one ideal of family ­relationships – of the love that parents could have for their children, and children for their

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parents; it could also be one ideal of marriage – although it was at least more common in religious (or Christian) conceptions of the marriage bond as ordained by God, than in secular conceptions of marriage.45 But that is not how we typically understand our relationships with those who are not thus intimately connected to us: if strangers persistent in flouting the most basic bonds of reciprocal community, how can we not respond to them with a version of “I have nothing more to say to you”; if they persistently turn their backs on the minimal values that bind us, how can we not turn our backs on them? If we think in these terms, we might also think that only a religious perspective can allow or help us to recognize continuing community even with the perpetrators of the most terrible atrocities – in which case, if the arguments of the earlier parts of this chapter are right, only a religious perspective can allow us to punish such perpetrators. That is not of course to suggest that all we need add in is some or other religious perspective: we are after all familiar enough with religious beliefs according to which serious enough wrongdoing can exile the wrongdoer permanently from God’s love, and thus no doubt also from other human beings. But it might seem that two kinds of religious idea would help. First, and most importantly, the idea that we all have an absolute, unconditional, noncontingent status as God’s creatures: a status that reflects God’s love for his creatures, and that demands of all of us an equally unconditional, noncontingent regard for other human beings as God’s creatures. Second, perhaps, the idea that certain kinds of punishment are a matter for God rather than for us. Perhaps it is true of a perpetrator that he “not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community”; but such a final and irreversible condemnatory judgment is not for us to make – it is for God.46 Rai Gaita points us towards one version of this suggestion when he says, in talking about how we could respond to the kinds of evil perpetrated by the Nazis: [i]n the face of such evil some people believe that they must assert, and others that they must deny, that even people who have done such deeds are sacred. Few people will say that in full seriousness because only someone who is religious can do it.47

It is true that an idea of the sacred requires what is in some sense a religious metaphysic: the sacred is that which is sanctified by its participation in or infusion by something transcendent, something lying beyond human life and, perhaps, human understanding (it is also true, of course,



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that this notion of the “religious” is far from precise, once we recognize that it reaches beyond specifically theistic worldviews). Gaita goes on to say, however: But there are people who are not religious who want to say what they hope will be a secular equivalent of it and they will hunt for one of the inadequate expressions available to us to do it.48

Amongst these “inadequate expressions” are that: even such people are owed unconditional respect, meaning not that they are deserving of esteem, but that they are owed a kind of respect which is not conditional upon what they have done and which cannot be forfeited. Some will say that even the most terrible evil-doers are owed this respect as human beings and that we owe it to them because we are human beings. That amounts to saying that they remain our fellow human beings whatever they do. (p. 2)

The respect that we owe them has to do in large part with the ways in which we must not treat them or see them – it is expressed in the thought that “no human being may be killed in the spirit of ridding the world of vermin” (p. 3): but it follows from this too that anything we do to them must be consistent with that recognition of them as fellow human beings, as trial and punishment are.49 It is of course (as Gaita emphasizes) one thing to say such words, one thing to talk in the comfortable context of a philosophical seminar about the unconditional respect that we owe to every other human being in virtue of our shared humanity; and quite another thing to live one’s life in that spirit, and to respond to “the most terrible evil-doers” in that spirit: all I can try to do here is to suggest, following Gaita, that it is a possible perspective, a possible (albeit enormously challenging) spirit, from within which the trial and punishment of perpetrators of even the most terrible evils can become possible. Much more also needs to be said about the kind of moral metaphysic that has room for such notions of absolute value and unconditional respect, since they can certainly find no room in the kinds of empiricist or naturalist views of the world that inform the most familiar contemporary moral ­theories – including, for obvious examples, the various versions of Utilitarianism and contractualism. We might look to Iris Murdoch’s attempt to retrieve a Platonic notion of the Good as a secular focus of attention50 : although her idea of transcendence involves in the end a detachment from human concerns that is deeply problematic, the “just and loving gaze” that she takes to be crucial to the moral life could be seen as a kind of gaze upon, a kind of attitude toward, other people that is both informed by and a route

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toward a recognition of their unconditional or absolute value. The point I want to emphasize, however, is that whilst the attempt to make sense of a perspective or attitude of this kind must indeed take us beyond empiricism and naturalism; whilst it must take us into what is in one sense a transcendent metaphysics, which appeals to a conception of humanity that cannot be captured from within a physicalist or scientistic worldview: it need not take us beyond the secular and the human, into a specifically religious or theistic metaphysics that posits a God on whom human beings depend for their existence and value.51 That recognition of the other is partly a matter of recognized fellowship (I see her as a fellow human being who shares my – our – human fate, and who for that very reason has an unconditional claim on my concern); and partly a matter of recognized separateness (I see her as an independent being who marks a limit to my will, and who thus has an unconditional claim on my respect). To those of a materialist bent, this will seem metaphysically baffling: how could our material world contain such beings as these?52 Such a metaphysical concern, however, can hardly give us reason to look to a religious worldview for a secure moral foundation: Gods are metaphysically at least as puzzling as are human beings when conceived as loci of value. What underpins claims that any such moral perspective requires a religious grounding is rather, I suspect, concerns about point or motivation, in particular the thought that a Christian God provides a point to, a motivation for, taking human beings seriously as loci of value, and sources of reasons for action, which would otherwise be lacking. That thought is clearly illustrated in Perry’s argument, and in particular in his claim that “there are no categorical imperatives, only hypothetical imperatives.”53 If I am to be given good and motivationally efficacious reason to behave in a certain way toward others, I must be shown the point of doing so. That “point” will lie in some further good that such conduct, such a way of living, can be expected to secure; the appeal is thus “If (or since) you value that good, you ought to conduct yourself thus.” That appeal will be rationally authoritative, and motivationally efficacious, only if it is an appeal to something that I already care about – for an obvious instance, to my own ultimate well-being. Given a suitable theology, we can say (Perry argues) that for each of us our well-being depends upon our recognizing others as having an inviolable moral status and treating them accordingly. But without such a theology, he argues, we cannot thus connect an unconditional concern and respect for others to our own well-being, and thus cannot give it the rational grounding that it needs if it is to motivate us.



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This is not the place for a discussion of whether we can make sense of imperatives that are genuinely categorical, or of “external” reasons for action that do not depend on what the person for whom they are to be reasons already wants or values.54 All I would say is that the kind of recognition of the other that Gaita explicates, and to which I am appealing here, does indeed involve a recognition (a recognition that is in itself motivationally forceful) of certain moral demands as having a categorical and unconditional authority, independent of my own existing desires or goals; but that such recognition of moral demands is both intelligible and essential to a plausible morality.55 What is more relevant for present purposes is the form that this recognition can take in the case of those who have perpetrated atrocities. As I have argued already, one form that it can take is precisely the attempt to call such people to answer, to hold them responsible, for their crimes: to do that is already to address, to recognize, them as fellow members of a normative community by whose values we are all both bound and protected; it would make no sense to try to call a genuinely amoral monster to account. Such a calling to account might be informed by anger, indignation, hatred, even contempt and disgust – by a whole range of what Strawson described as “reactive attitudes”56 : but it addresses the wrongdoer as someone who could hear (if he would only listen) what we say, and could respond appropriately to it (even if we are empirically sure that he will not do so); as someone of whom it makes sense to hope (however empirically vain we might know such hope to be) that he will come to face the terrible truth of what he has done. The same is true of punishment, understood as an attempt at moral communication: the punishment must be administered in the hope (however vain) that the wrongdoer will come to see it as what he should suffer for what he has done, and accept it as an appropriate (secular) penance; which means that we must see the wrongdoer as someone who could be brought to such a repentant understanding of his crimes and his punishment. This is not to say that we must expect that he will in fact respond to his punishment in this way: but an implication of this conception of human beings is that we must never see anyone, whatever they have done, as being beyond repentance and thus beyond redemption.57 There are further and difficult questions to tackle about what could count as “redemption” in this context, and about just what it would be for such a wrongdoer to come to an adequate, repentant understanding of what he had done – about what form such repentance could take, and what kind of action or life could express it. Although such questions bear directly on the question of just how such perpetrators could be punished (if punishment is meant to

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induce a repentant understanding), we cannot pursue them here. All I have argued is that if we are to punish the perpetrators of atrocities (as distinct from merely killing them or locking them up), we must be able to see, to address, and to respond to them in this way. I have certainly not argued that this is what we ought to do – let alone that it is how those most directly affected by such atrocities ought to see and treat those who perpetrated them. I have tried to show, first, that this is what is required if we are to punish them; and second, that it is possible (which is not to say that it is anything less than extraordinarily difficult) to see and to respond to them thus as fellow human beings whom we must try to call to account, from within a firmly secular view of the world. Notes 1

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Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769; Oxford University Press); available online at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/blacksto.htm IV.5.iii, p. 71. P. L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels (Penguin, 1970), p. 87; thanks to Thomas Brudholm for pointing me toward this passage. R. Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Macmillan, 1991), p. 2. The idea of a hostis generis humani was applied originally (by Cicero) to pirates: Blackstone explains its implications in the passage quoted earlier. See for example, C. Joyner, “Arresting Impunity: the Case for Universal Jurisdiction in Bringing War Criminals to Accountability” (1996) 59 Law & Contemporary Problems 153. See the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (available at http://www.icccpi.int), arts. 5, 7; for commentary, see A. Cassese, International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 64–95. See I. Tallgren, “The Sensibility and Sense of International Criminal Law” (2002) 13 European Journal of International Law 561; W. Wringe, “Why Punish War Crimes? Victor’s Justice and Expressive Justifications of Punishment” (2006) 25 Law and Philosophy 159. Berger, op. cit. n. 3 earlier, p. 87. See H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (rev. ed.; Penguin, 1994), p. 250, on the suggestion that “Eichmann’s deeds defied the possibility of human punishment, that it was pointless to impose the death sentence for crimes of such magnitude” (a suggestion that she herself rejected). Dr. Peter Tomka, Permanent Representative of the Slovak Republic to the United Nations; statement to the United Nations General Assembly 56th Session, Agenda item No. 166: Measures to eliminate international terrorism (New York, October 2001); http://www. un.org/terrorism/statements/slovakiaE.html On negative as distinct from positive retributivism, see D. Dolinko, “Some Thoughts about Retributivism” (1991) 101 Ethics 537, 539–543. For the English provisions on unfitness to plead (other legal systems have similar provisions), see Criminal Procedure (Insanity) Act 1964. For this conception of a criminal trial, see R. A. Duff, Trials and Punishments (Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 4. Some might argue that, whilst I am only answerable to a limited set of others for my failures as a teacher, for my moral wrongdoing I am answerable to every other moral agent as such. I do not think that this is true, but need not pursue the issue here: the essential point is that I am answerable to fellow members of a relevant normative community; to say that I am



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answerable for my moral wrongdoings to all other moral agents would be to say that the relevant normative community is that of moral agents (the Kantian kingdom of ends, perhaps). See further R. A. Duff, Answering for Crime (2005) 106 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 85. On liberal political community, see further R.A. Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community (Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 2; see also R. Dagger, Civic Virtues (Oxford University Press, 1997) on republicanism. To say that crimes must be “public” wrongs is thus to say not that they must be wrongs that impact on “the public” as distinct from any direct individual victim (see, e.g., Blackstone, op. cit. n. 2 earlier, IV.1, p. 5), but that they must be wrongs that properly concern “the public,” that is the whole polity: see S. E. Marshall and R. A. Duff, “Criminalization and Sharing Wrongs” (1998) 11 Canadian Journal of Law& Jurisprudence 7. Some deny that that is the challenge, arguing that criminals forfeit their standing as citizens (A.H. Goldman, “Toward a New Theory of Punishment” (1982) 1 Law & Philosophy 57; C.W. Morris, “Punishment and Loss of Moral Standing” (1991) 21 Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53); but see Duff, op. cit. n. 13 earlier, pp. 14–16. J. Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” in Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 95; for further development and criticism see A. J. Skillen, “How to Say Things with Walls” (1980) 55 Philosophy 509; I. Primoratz, “Punishment as Language” (1989) 64 Philosophy 187; M. Davis, “Punishment as Language: Misleading Analogy for Desert Theorists” (1991) 10 Law and Philosophy 311. For two very different versions, see A. von Hirsch, Censure and Sanctions (Oxford University Press, 1993) (see also A. von Hirsch and A. J. Ashworth, Proportionate Sentencing: Exploring the Principles (Oxford University Press, 2005)); Duff, op. cit. n. 13 earlier. I would have liked to be able to argue that a communicative conception of punishment therefore has no room for capital punishment, but (though there are plenty of other powerful arguments against the practice) cannot do so. Someone who has committed a terrible wrong might rationally kill himself as an expression of his belief that his crime cut him off from humanity. By that very act of self-execution he might reconcile himself with those whom he wronged, and capital punishment could thus be meant to communicate to the wrongdoer the message that his crime had this implication, and that execution is the only adequate way of recognizing and marking it. I would argue that that is not a message that we should ever communicate, in this way, to another person, but that is a further argument; see Duff, op. cit. n. 13, pp. 152–155. A good indication of the extent to which punishment is in fact exclusionary is the extent to which convicted offenders lose the right to vote, as those serving prison terms do in England during their imprisonment, and as those imprisoned for felonies do for life in some American states. See “Disenfranchising Felons” (2005) 22 Journal of Applied Philosophy 211–273; J. Q. Whitman, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003) provides further useful comparative material on offenders’ moral and civic standing. One unproblematic qualification to this account should be noted here: that it also allows for the punishment of temporary visitors to the polity. As visitors (as guests of the polity), they are both protected and bound by the local laws; they can be expected, and called, to answer to their hosts for wrongs that they commit as visitors. See Whitman, op. cit. n. 19, pp. 56–57, and further references provided there. See Duff, op. cit. n. 13 earlier, pp. 170–174; von Hirsch and Ashworth, op. cit. n. 17 earlier, pp. 50–61; and further references given in those places to the larger debates about “dangerous” offenders. See M Hirst, Jurisdiction and the Ambit of the Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2003).

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See generally Cassese, op. cit. n. 6 earlier, pp. 327–345; Hirst, op. cit. n. 23 earlier, ch. 5. We must distinguish such claims to “universal” jurisdiction from claims to extra-territorial jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad either by or against the state’s citizens, as for example in the French Code Penal art. 113.6–7, and the German Strafgesetzbuch ss. 5, 7; see Hirst, op. cit. n. 23, ch. 5. See Criminal Justice Act 1988, s. 134 (giving effect to the UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984)); this was the provision involved in R v Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate ex parte Pinochet Ugarte [2000] 1 AC 147. Other European states have similar provisions. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, art. 7.1. This was also a feature of the Charter creating the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: see A. Altman and C. H. Wellman, “A Defense of International Criminal Law” (2004) 115 Ethics 35, 36. See the Preamble to the Rome Statute on “grave crimes” which “threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world”; also Arendt, op. cit. n. 8, p. 269; see also L. May, Crimes against Humanity: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2005) on the “international harm principle.” For criticism, see Altman and Wellman, op. cit. n. 27, pp. 40–42; see also n. 14 earlier, on the related idea of crimes as “public” wrongs. Compare the Preamble to the Rome Statute, on the signatories’ “conscious[ness] that all peoples are united by common bonds, their cultures pieced together in a shared heritage.” See R. Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Macmillan, 1991) and A Common Humanity (Routledge, 2002) for a rich and complex humanistic perspective on this; I discuss Gaita further in the section “Religious and Secular Conceptions of Community” later. This point is crucial to the possibility of a liberal political community (see Duff, op. cit. n. 13 earlier, pp. 42–56). It is also clearly relevant to “cosmopolitanism” – the question of whether we should cultivate a single “human community” (see P. Kleingeld and E. Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2002 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu); but we cannot pursue that topic here. See the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, art. 5; arts. 6–8 further define the first three types of crime. See generally Cassese, op. cit. n. 6 earlier, ch. 4; also Altman and Wellman, op. cit. n. 27 earlier (although they favor a more extensive definition of “crimes against humanity” than is currently orthodox, they still insist on involvement by the state or by state officials, as committing, instigating, or permitting the crimes. Hannah Arendt (op. cit. n. 8 earlier, p. 251) quotes Martin Buber as saying that he had “only in a formal sense a common humanity with those who took part” in the atrocities committed by the Nazis; to which she replies that “the law presupposes precisely that we have a common humanity with those whom we accuse and judge and condemn.” She also argues that “[n]o communication was possible” with Eichmann, given his “inability … to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (p. 49). My question is: can we even try to communicate? See further Duff, op. cit. n. 13 earlier, pp. 121–125. The central idea here, which comes under real pressure in the context of atrocities, is that we should never see or treat anyone as being beyond the reach of remorse – not even if we have very good empirical grounds for believing that they will not be persuaded into remorse. A further, related question which I cannot pursue here concerns the responsibilities of surviving victims of atrocities: could we expect them to engage in the process of calling the perpetrator to account, that is to address him as a fellow? On victims’ responsibilities in the criminal process, see generally S. E. Marshall, “Victims of Crime: Their Station and its Duties,” in M. Matravers (ed.), Managing Modernity: Politics and the Culture of Control (Routledge, 2004), p. 104. Arendt, op. cit. n. 8, p. 279.

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See at n. 3 earlier. Expulsion or exile need not involve execution; it could take the form of imprisonment for the remainder of the person’s natural life, although the character of that imprisonment would be radically different from that of imprisonment as a punishment. See n. 18 earlier; I should emphasize again that I am not arguing in favor of capital punishment. Matters are slightly more complex if what she says is “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” thus communicating to the wrongdoer her judgment that (further) communication is impossible or undesirable; that is analogous to the case in which a wrongdoer’s punishment is exile. On punishment, apology, making amends and reconciliation, see Duff, op. cit. n. 13 earlier, ch. 3; C. Bennett, “Taking the Sincerity Out of Saying Sorry: Restorative Justice as Ritual” (2006) 23 Journal of Applied Philosophy 127. On “I” and “we” in ethics, see L. Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics” (1965) 74 Philosophical Review 3; see also Wittgenstein’s remarks as quoted in F. Waissmann, “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein” (1965) 74 Philosophical Review 12, at 16. Contractualism takes many different forms. For paradigm examples of different brands of contractualist theory, see for example J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971); D. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford University Press, 1986); T. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard University Press, 1998). Jeremy Waldron’s insightful discussion of the relationship between rights and such moral relationships as marriage and friendship is relevant here: “When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights” (1988) 11 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 625. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII–IX. A radical example of such an unconditional conception of the bonds of marriage is provided by Stephen Blackpool in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times: his wife leaves him, and returns only when she needs his help; each time she returns, he takes her in, helps her back to health – and then sees her leave again; for she is still his wife. Compare M. Perry, “Does Liberal Democracy Need Religious Faith? The Dignity and Inviolability of Every Human Being” (forthcoming; I am grateful to Michael Perry for allowing me to see an advance copy of this essay). Perry argues that liberal democracy’s commitment to human rights requires a commitment “to the proposition that each and every human being has inherent dignity and is inviolable” – a commitment which can find an adequate grounding only in a religious perspective. Though my concern here is not with human rights as such, what follows is meant to be the start of an answer to Perry’s argument. Gaita, op. cit. n. 4 earlier, p. 1. Loc. cit. The rest of his book is an extended exploration of the sense and significance of these “inadequate expressions”: see especially ch. 3 on “Mortal Men and Rational Beings”; also Gaita’s A Common Humanity (Routledge, 2000). See especially Gaita, “Evil Beyond Vice,” in A Common Humanity (n. 49 earlier), p. 29. I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 1970); another useful source is R. F. Holland, “Is Goodness a Mystery?,” in his Against Empiricism (Blackwell, 1980). One can of course use “religious” in a broader sense, to refer to any moral perspective that reaches beyond or deeper than the limits of a pleasure- or desire-based Utilitarianism, or of a strictly contractualist morality grounded in claims about what rationally self-interested beings would agree; but I take it that the interesting question in this context is whether a recognition of the absolute or unconditional moral status of all human beings requires a specifically theistic grounding. Compare J. L. Mackie’s notorious “argument from queerness” against the reality of moral values, in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, 1977), pp. 38–42. Perry, op. cit. n. 46 earlier, p. xxx. See also his comments about finding inviolability and dignity in a world bereft of meaning – of the kind of meaning that a Christian God might provide.

104 54

55

56

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On categorical imperatives, see J. McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” (1978) 52 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol., 13 (responding to P.R. Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972) 81 Philosophical Review 305); on external reasons, see J. Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford University Press, 2000), contra B.A.O. Williams, “Internal and External Reasons” in Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 101. Gaita’s works, and the works by Murdoch and Holland cited in n. 51 earlier, show how this dogmatic claim can be fleshed out and rendered plausible; see also R.A. Duff, “Desire, Duty and Moral Absolutes” (1980) 55 Philosophy 223. P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) 48 Proceedings of the British Academy 1 (reprinted in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 72). Compare E. Garrard, “Forgiveness and the Holocaust” (2002) 5 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 147 (but I am not arguing here that forgiveness of such perpetrators is either possible or desirable); and see Duff, op. cit. n. 11 earlier, pp. 264–266.

N ig e l B ig g a r 5.  The Ethics of Forgiveness and the Doctrine of Just War: A Religious View of Righting Atrocious Wrongs

In talking about responses to atrocity, does it help to import religious ideas? Does the invocation of religious concepts give voice to otherwise inarticulate intuitions? Does the language of religion have the power to cast peculiar light on dark places here? These are the questions that this chapter will seek to address. Good answers pay close attention to the terms of their questions. We begin, therefore, with an analysis of two terms: “atrocity” and “religion.” In common usage, “atrocity” refers to a kind of killing of human beings. If it is used to indicate the killing of nonhuman animals or the nonlethal maltreatment of human ones, then that use is secondary, analogous, and weaker. An “atrocious” killing is, of course, an immoral one. It is unrestrained, excessive, and merciless. More exactly, it is indiscriminate, taking the lives of noncombatants – women as readily as men – of infants and the elderly as easily as adults. Further, an “atrocity” is large in scale, involving the deaths of many. The “many” here could be a race – as in genocide – but need not be. They could also be a village or even a family. Since it would not normally describe the killing of a series of individuals by a peacetime criminal, it follows that “atrocity” typically points to the killing of many people in a single event during a war. Beyond what it denotes, an atrocity also connotes something especially horrendous. Precisely which of its features provokes such horror bears reflection. Most obviously, its scale compounds the gravity of the crime. Insofar as the murder of four innocents is a greater evil than that of one – or four thousand than four – it requires greater wickedness to do it. But there are two other, less obvious reasons for the special horror that atrocity provokes. One is this: in the case of single murders in peacetime, civilized norms surround and prevail. In the case of atrocity, however, moral constraints upon the use of violence in time of war have collapsed – all hell has broken loose and arbitrary killing swaggers in packs along village main streets sporting cool shades, blue jeans, and Kalashnikovs.1 105

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The other less obvious cause of the horrendous nature of atrocity is that it makes shockingly clear what is normally hidden from view. It writes unavoidably large the disturbing limitations of any human justice that can be done in response to the murder of any innocent. We shall return to this point later. For now, let us turn to analyze what we mean by “religion.” We have said that our focus in this chapter lies on the question of whether the language of religion has any peculiar power to make satisfactory sense of atrocity and of fitting responses to it. “Religion,” however, is an abstraction that can be taken to imply a common core of belief and practice that is shared among all actual religions. Since such a core does not exist, we had better speak more carefully: this chapter aims to examine the way in which the language of Christian religion – Christian theology – understands atrocity and shapes our responses to it. This selection is not arbitrary. A major part of the debate about the proper nature of such responses concerns the appropriateness or otherwise of a role for forgiveness; and the prominence of forgiveness in Christian discourse is uniquely high.2 Our stated aim is a large one, and if we try to meet it in the small compass afforded us here, then we risk operating only at a bland and unsatisfying level of generality. Therefore, we shall move from Christian theology in general to one particular strain of it: namely, the highly developed theory of international response to injustice that is the doctrine of just war. According to this doctrine, embarking upon and waging a war may be an act of justice under certain conditions. One of these is that it is a response to a grave wrong. The reason that the wrong must be grave is that even just war causes very serious evils (e.g., the killing of human beings), and to deliberately cause these in response to trivial wrongs (e.g., an insult) would be disproportionate and so immoral. The class of grave wrongs is, of course, more capacious than that of atrocious ones, but the latter are certainly a species of the former. Atrocious wrongs, therefore, are one of the efficient causes that, ceteris paribus, make war just. During the Cold War, military intervention in the affairs of foreign states in order to right grave wrongs was often unthinkable, given the risk of escalation to a full nuclear exchange between the rival superpowers. In such circumstances, an attempt to do justice by way of armed force was considered  – and rightly so – to be impossibly imprudent. Accordingly, NATO declined to intervene in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, however, the risks attending military intervention, though still considerable, are not so very high as to put it beyond serious consideration; and in recent years the doctrine of just war has been developed so as to help decision-makers discern when war may be an appropriate response to gross violations of human rights.3



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Our interest here in the doctrine of just war lies in the way that Christian theology shapes its response to atrocious wrongdoing. Or, to be more precise, our interest lies in how it should shape that response. There is more than one way to understand the doctrine, and I aim to present what I consider to be the best one. What follows may be an analytical description, but it is a description of a normative proposal. How, then, should theology shape the response of just war to atrocity? I identify five points: the appeal to “natural” justice; the duty of forgiveness-as-compassion and of the desire for forgiveness-as-absolution; the affirmation of a qualified retributive punishment; the endorsement of qualified resentment; and the intention of a “peace” whose justice is finite.

I The doctrine of just war invokes “natural” justice. That is to say, it takes it for granted that there is a universal moral order that transcends national legal systems and applies to international relations, even in the absence of positive international law. It believes that there are human goods and moral obligations that exist in and with the nature of things, and which exercise a guiding and constraining moral authority long before human beings articulate (and develop) them in statutes or treaties. That is to say, it holds that law is given before it is made – or, more exactly, that moral law is given before positive law is made. This implies, of course, that military action could be morally justified in the absence of – and even in spite of – statutory or customary international law. The point here is not that positive international law carries no moral weight itself. There are good moral reasons of a prudential sort why we should be loathe to transgress positive law even for the noblest of motives. The case for this is made strikingly in A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More. In one scene More is urged by his daughter, Alice, and his future son-in-law, Nicholas Roper, to arrest Richard Rich, an informer. The subsequent argument rises to this climax: Alice (exasperated, pointing after Rich): While you talk, he’s gone! More: And go he should if he was the Devil himself until he broke the law! Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

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More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – Man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.4 The power of law (as distinct from force) to order a society – whether national or international – and so to safeguard the rights of its members, depends upon its authority; and this authority, in turn, depends upon the willingness of those it commands to obey it. But such voluntary obedience will only be forthcoming so long as the law-abiding do not feel that their compliance is putting them at a general disadvantage. In other words, the authority of the law depends upon a general confidence that those who break it will not be able to keep the unfair advantages they have seized and that the law will be enforced effectively against them. If the law is not so enforced, and if lawbreakers are seen to secure unfair advantage over the law-abiding, then the respect of the latter for the law will be shaken and its authority will accordingly diminish. If this diminution proceeds far enough, then the rule of law will disintegrate and society will dissolve into anarchy; and here those who have taken advantage of others’ law-abidingness will find themselves reduced to an equality of defenselessness – the laws all being flat. Since anarchy lets slip the leash on demonic evils,5 there is strong moral reason to bolster the authority of law by obeying it. Usually, of course, those who incline to disobey the law do so for the sake of gaining some private advantage – material resources, say, or an increase in political power. But sometimes, paradoxically, people are moved to break the law for the sake of justice. This is because there are occasions when those with the power to enforce the law fail to do so – whether because they lack sufficient evidence to make an arrest or secure a conviction, or because their hands are tied for political reasons; and in these cases, private bodies might be moved to take the law into their own hands in order to punish the wicked or rescue the oppressed. As a rule, however, they should not. The general order and peace that ensues from prevalent respect for the law is a very precious good, which once broken is not easily mended. There is therefore a reasonable, and moral, presumption that the very pursuit of justice must suffer the constraints of the law – even at the expense of letting the Devil himself escape. A presumption, however, falls short of an absolute rule. What this allows is that there may be occasions when the injustice being perpetrated is so very



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great – so atrocious – and agreement on the need to stop it is sufficiently widespread, that remedial action in transgression of the law’s letter would not seriously damage the law’s authority. Such an action could be compliant with moral law while contravening positive law. That is to say, it could be moral without being legal. One example of this, arguably, was NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo in 1998. Here a group of states intervened militarily in the affairs of the “sovereign” state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in order to halt the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovar Albanians and in order to prevent the consequent irruption of civil war in Macedonia and further Balkan meltdown.6 They did so without the authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations, because Russia and China, each fearful of secession within its own borders, would have vetoed such a mandate. Therefore, according to the letter of statutory international law, which prohibits unilateral military action except in self-defense, NATO’s intervention was illegal. Nevertheless, international support for it was sufficiently widespread as to remove any threat of serious damage to the law’s authority. After all, NATO itself comprised 19 states representing a variety of international interests and views. And, what is more, the Security Council rejected a resolution tabled by Russia calling for a halt to NATO’s action, and refused (by a vote of twelve to three) to condemn it. So, the doctrine of just war takes it for granted that there is a universal moral order that transcends systems of positive law, and which can furnish moral justification for humanitarian action in the absence of – and even in the face of – international law. Accordingly, the doctrine’s proponents cannot join those who are satisfied that the “legitimacy” of military intervention to prevent or halt atrocity is decided simply by the presence or absence of authorization by the Security Council; for positive law cannot have the final word. Such is the doctrine’s position. But how far is it theological? It is theological at least insofar as it is consonant with, and supported by, monotheism. Part of the meaning of the assertion that there is only one God is that the world of space and time in all its variety and change has a fundamental point of unity that gives it a basic coherence, order, rationality, and intelligibility. Part of the meaning of the assertion that there is one (quasipersonal) God is that this order is not just physical, but benevolent. That is to say, its physical processes are governed by God’s intention to bring the world to fulfillment. This cosmic fulfillment involves the emergence and securing of beings capable of appreciating, and freely committing themselves to, what is true and beautiful and just – that is, it involves the growth and establishment of a community of virtuous human persons. This is the human good: the condition where persons flourish. The virtuous commitment that intends

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such good is the foundation of morality, for moral rules are the explication of what that commitment requires of behavior: right action is demanded by it; permissible action is consonant with it; wrong action contradicts it. One kind of wrong action is the unjust treatment of other persons – that is to say, treatment that fails to recognize others as fellow-subjects of an equal calling to grow into membership of a community of virtue. Atrocious treatment is unjust in this sense, because it characteristically involves some persons treating others as subhuman, deserving no more regard than – to take an example from the Rwandan genocide – cockroaches. So monotheism implies a real, universal human good, with regard to which moralities try to order human conduct. Anyone, then, who affirms such moral “realism” will find allies in orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Clearly, however, not all moral realists are monotheists. Many of them feel able to affirm a culturally transcendent moral order without having to resort to theology. Whether they should feel so able depends upon the upshot of the debate about whether belief in a universal moral order logically requires monotheism (which is not the same, of course, as the belief that monotheism logically implies a universal moral order), or whether a universal order at least needs monotheism for optimal intelligibility. In favor at least of the latter, this theist would urge the following considerations: Can human striving to realize the good remain sufficiently intelligible, if it is understood to occur in a cosmos whose fundamental driving energies are blind and heartless? How much authority can human dignity and rights continue to command among those who are convinced of a relentless cosmic indifference? How motivating can the project to realize a community of virtuous persons be, if in the end death reduces all of its members for ever to dust? What more can it be than a form of whistling in the enveloping dark? In other words, was not Kant correct to argue that the coherence of a commitment to do human persons justice ultimately requires the postulates of immortality and therefore of an immortalizing agent, God?

II The second point, as I see it, where theology shapes the just war response to atrocious wrongdoing is in its incorporation of an element of “forgiveness.” This will seem counterintuitive to many Christians and non-Christians alike, for surely war is about retribution, not forgiveness? In my view these are not mutually exclusive, and in order to show how this is so I must explain the theory of the process of reconciliation that I have adumbrated elsewhere.7 It seems to me that discussion of the process of reconciliation and of



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forgiveness is generally vitiated by a tendency to conflate two moments that ought to be distinguished. On the one hand, this leads some to hold on biblical and theological grounds that victims are bound to forgive their oppressors unilaterally and unconditionally – that is, without waiting for any sign of repentance.8 On the other hand, it leads others to hold on philosophical and psychological grounds that the victim’s forgiveness must be conditional upon the perpetrator’s repentance, if it is to be morally responsible.9 It seems to me that both sides are half-correct, for each champions a different moment of forgiveness, one of them unilateral and initial and the other conditional and final. Let us call these, respectively, “compassion” and “absolution.” Yet both sides are also half-wrong, since each champions one moment to the exclusion of the other; whereas in fact a Christian and responsible process of reconciliation will incorporate them both. The first moment of forgiveness, compassion, is where the victim allows her feelings of resentment to be moderated by a measure of sympathy for the perpetrator. Moderated by what? Partly by the acknowledgment of the authority of certain truths. For example, the truth that she herself is no stranger to the psychic powers that drive human beings to abuse each other. The truth that some individuals, for reasons that remain hidden in the mysterious interpenetration of history and the human will, are less well equipped than others to resist common pressures. The truth that some are fated to find themselves trapped in situations where only an extraordinary moral heroism could save them from doing terrible evil. Even victims have responsibilities; and one of them is to acknowledge truths like these even in the midst of the maelstrom of pain and resentment. Openness to the truth, however, is not the only matrix of sympathy and the only force for moderation. There is also the commitment to rebuild rather than destroy – to “reconciliation” rather than vengeance. Now, “reconciliation” should mean different things according to the nature of the relationship between victim and perpetrator. In the paradigmatic case of relationships between family members or friends it will mean the restoration of intimacy, signaled typically by the act of embrace. In the case of relationships between political dissidents and their informers or of génocidaires and surviving victims, however, it will usually mean something analogous and weaker – say a readiness to coexist in the same city or neighborhood or street.10 But whatever kind of reconciliation is appropriate, victims should prefer it to the sheer wreaking of “vengeance” – that is to say, action whose overriding intention is to inflict harm and which takes no care to moderate the harm inflicted. Why should victims prefer reconciliation? At least, because of a proper care for their own souls – or, if you like, for the shaping of their moral and

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spiritual characters; for to devote oneself to vengeance is to drink a poison that embitters and tyrannizes. The point is arrestingly made in Peter Shaffer’s play, The Gift of the Gorgon. Here, Edward Damson, hot-blooded playwright of Slavo-Celtic parents, champions the cleansing, cathartic virtue of the passion for revenge. Liberal forbearance and tolerance, in his eyes, is “just giving up with a shrug – as if you never really cared about the wrong in the first place … Avoidance, that’s all it is!”11 But to this Helen, his wife and cool English daughter of a classics don, retorts: You go on about passion, Edward. But have you never realised that there are many, many kinds – including a passion to kill our own passion when it’s wrong? … The truest, hardest most adult passion isn’t just stamping and geeing ourselves up. It’s refusing to be led by rage when we most want to be … No other being in the universe can change itself by conscious will: it is our privilege alone. To take out inch by inch this spear in our sides that goads us on and on to bloodshed – and still make sure it doesn’t take our guts with it.12

At the very end of the play Helen wins the argument by showing that it is forgiveness, not revenge, that requires the greater strength and realizes humanity. But there is one cliff-hanging moment when, enraged by a macabre trick that Edward has played on her, Helen sways on the brink of plunging into vengeance. What pulls her back are the bald words of her stepson, Philip: “The truth is,” he says, “you must forgive him or die.”13 That is to say, she must forgive or forever be possessed by bitterness. Another, real-life expression of this prudential wisdom comes from the lips of the daughter of one of three women taken from the Spanish village of Poyales del Hoyo on the night of December 29, 1936 and murdered by Fallangists at the roadside. Interviewed 66 years later, she said: “This thing has stayed in my mind all my life. I’ve never forgotten. I am reliving it now, as we stand here. All the killers were from the village …. I can pardon, but I cannot forget. We have to pardon them or it makes us just like them.”14 Vengeance does grave moral and spiritual damage to the one who wreaks it. That is one good reason why victims should steer clear of it. Another is that vengeance is – by common definition – excessive.15 It does not strive to proportion its retribution to the wrong done. Its driving ambition is to make the wrongdoer – together with his family or his village or his race or his country – suffer. As a consequence, vengeance has the effect of multiplying injustice, as wrongdoers are made to suffer more than they deserve and suffering is inflicted on innocents who do not deserve it at all.



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There is yet a third motive for preferring reconciliation to vengeance: the knowledge that vengeance upon the murderer will not raise the innocent dead to life again. This is, of course, common sense. But some common sense is just too desolate to constrain the vital, throbbing pain of loss and indignation from spiralling into an ecstatic, destructive rage. It is conceivable, however, that theological hope for the resurrection of the innocent dead, resting as it must on faith in a more-than-human power, could so infuse desiccated common sense as to strengthen its moral arm. However it moderates resentment – whether through the confession of human solidarity in sin-as-moral-weakness16 or through the commitment to “reconciliation” – forgiveness-as-compassion is unilateral and unconditional. It does not need the green light of the perpetrator’s repentance in order to proceed. It is entirely the responsibility of the victim to acknowledge the truths of solidarity-in-sin and to commit herself to “reconciliation” rather than revenge. But compassion is just the first moment of forgiveness. The second is “absolution.” This is the moment when, paradigmatically, the victim addresses the perpetrator and says, “I forgive you. The trust that was broken is now restored. Our future will no longer be haunted by our past.” Forgiveness-as-absolution should not be granted unilaterally and unconditionally. To proffer trust to someone who has shown himself to be untrustworthy and who is unrepentant about it is, at very least, foolish. But it is also careless of the wrongdoer, for it robs him of the salutary stimulus to reflect, to learn, and to grow, which the withholding of trust constitutes. Even worse, it degrades him by implying that what he does is of no consequence.17 Out of respect and care for the wrongdoer, then, forgiveness-as-absolution should wait for signs of his genuine repentance – all the while looking upon him with the eyes of forgiveness-as-compassion. So much for my understanding of forgiveness. What has it to do with the doctrine of just war and its response to atrocious injury? On the one hand, insofar as the doctrine insists that just belligerents understand what they are doing as the policing action of one set of sinful creatures to limit and repair the wrongdoing of another set – and not as the crusading action of the righteous upon the unrighteous, or the godly upon the infidel – it enjoins a constitutive element of forgiveness-as-compassion. This in turn serves to moderate the  use of violence, so that it is proportioned both retrospectively to the nature of the wrongdoing and prospectively to the goal of “reconciliation” or a more just peace.18 Thus it is saved from the vengeful temptation to answer atrocity with atrocity. On the other hand, since just war makes a punitive, retributive response to atrocious wrongdoing, it withholds the political analog of forgiveness-as-absolution until the offending state has demonstrated

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the political analog of repentance. However, the fact that just war is looking for “repentance” at all means that its goal is “reconciliation,” not vengeful annihilation – peace with the living, not peace among the dead. So just war involves both moments of forgiveness. But what has this to do with theology? Certainly, forgiveness is characteristically Christian. It has a prominent place in the teaching and practice of the founder of the Christian religion and in its founding documents – the New Testament – and it often has a correspondingly prominent place in subsequent Christian ethics (even if many Christians are, in my view, rather confused about what it requires). Perhaps less certainly, but nevertheless probably enough, forgiveness is distinctively Christian. As noted earlier, this is the (often disapproving) opinion of some informed and reflective non-Christian observers.19 Nevertheless, what is Christian is not necessarily theological. Christians are human beings as well as believers in God. Their ethics too are formed partly by common human experience. They too know the damage that vengeance can do to its devotees, and the injustices that it proliferates. And yet, actually, to call such knowledge “common sense” is to indulge in a complacency only open to those who have managed to avoid noticing how often human societies dissolve into vicious cycles of increasingly atrocious vendettas: Witness Ireland in the 1920s, Spain in the 1930s, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, Iraq in the 2000s. What passes for common sense in social circles privileged with a long history of peace is far from universal. Experiences may be common and yet give rise to seriously different lessons. Not everyone experiences vengeance like Shaffer’s Helen. Arguably, most people experience it like Edward: “There’s only one real moral imperative: don’t piss on true rage – it can be the fire of sanity.”20 It may be, then, that the counterproductiveness and futility of vengeance only appear obvious (or “rational”) in the light of a particular set of beliefs – or, more modestly, that a particular set of beliefs helps them to appear obvious. One such set of beliefs is provided by Christian theology. The belief that there is a more-than-human agent, who is able and intends to do justice beyond this world of space and time, frees theists to accept the limits of such justice as can be done here and now without compounding injustice. The belief that human creatures are responsible to their Creator for the growth of their lives as a whole endows theists with a greater sense of participation in spiritual weakness and moral shortcoming – and so with a disposition to compassion for fellow sinners – than is possessed by those who measure themselves moralistically in terms of their avoidance of bad conduct in discrete relationships with other humans. The belief that Jesus was God Incarnate imbues his teaching and example of forgiveness with an unusual moral authority – for this, after all, is how the Creator  and  Redeemer



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seeks to right wrongs. And the belief that Jesus rose from the dead transforms forgiveness from being a symptom of moral weakness – the feeble shrug of avoidance – into the salvific route to glorious vitality beyond death.

III I mentioned earlier that just war doctrine understands war as a punitive response of a retributive kind to wrongdoing. Now the concept of retributive punishment is very widespread in human cultures, and it is hardly the preserve of Christian theists. On the other hand, it is very controversial in contemporary Western societies, and in certain circles – not excluding the Christian churches – it is very unpopular. Therefore, if a retributive response to wrongdoing is morally correct (as I think it is), and if Christian theology supports a certain kind of retribution, then it is relevant to the topic of this chapter – the formative impact of theology on responses to atrocity – to explain the connection. The main reason why many in the contemporary West repudiate retribution (and war along with it) as an appropriate response to wrongdoing is their assumption that retribution is vindictive or vengeful, aiming at very best to achieve a barren equality of suffering. To this many Christians add the further assumption that the duty of forgiveness by definition logically excludes retribution. Let me deal with each of these in turn. First, retribution need not be vengeful. Minimally it comprises a negative response to a wrongdoer on account of the wrong done. This response need not comprise a vindictive attempt to inflict pain on the one who first caused it for the sake of seeing him suffer. Rather, liberated from the temptations of rage, it can take the form of a disciplined reaction designed to spare the victims further injury and prevent the perpetrator from further wrongdoing. Moreover, it can take the form of responsible communication to the wrongdoer, which recognizes his dignity as a moral agent, telling him that his action is not acceptable and that he must show a genuine willingness to change before a relationship of trust can be restored. Whether in fact it will take these forms depends, of course, on how the victim sees the perpetrator and on what ultimate outcome she seeks. If she is free to view him with the eyes of forgiveness-as-compassion, and to commit herself to keeping open the door of forgiveness-as-absolution, then her retribution will be proportioned accordingly and preserved from the demons of vengeance. This brings us to the second questionable assumption that forgiveness logically excludes retribution. It is clear from I have just said that I do not assume this. Rather, I think that forgiveness should qualify, not supplant, retribution.

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Retribution remains vitally important as an attestation of the importance of the wrong done and thereby of the one who has been wronged. If qualified both by forgiveness-as-compassion and by a desire for forgiveness-as-absolution, retribution can also be an act of fraternal responsibility toward the wrongdoer, caring that he should learn and change, so that “reconciliation” might be possible. Forgiveness that supposes itself to be sufficient without retribution amounts to premature absolution, implying that neither the wrong, nor the victim, nor the wrongdoer matters – truly, a shrug of avoidance. Given its high esteem for the vocation of human beings and given its deep concern for their salvation, however, Christian theology is bound to take such things very seriously. And if forgiveness can prevent vengeance, then theology is free to endorse a benevolent form of retribution. Except for the fact, some might say, that Jesus himself did not. But is that a fact? His reaction to those whom he saw as lacking in compassion or exploitative was often verbally fierce: “You brood of vipers” (Matthew 3.7, 12.34, 23.33); “Woe to you … hypocrites!” (Matthew 23.13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29); “You blind fools!” (Matthew 23, 16, 17, 19). To describe such language as “critical” is to tame and civilize it. Surely it is also violent language, designed to wound and sting. Is it vindictive? Not necessarily. Not if it aimed to sting into new awareness and a change of mind. Not if it aimed to provoke repentance. Not if, governed by forgiveness, it was benevolently retributive. The notion that retribution is an appropriate response to atrocious wrongdoing is, of course, not peculiarly Christian. The notion, however, that such a response should take the form of forgiving retribution is as peculiar to Christianity as is its emphasis on forgiveness. As we have argued earlier, that is quite peculiar and strongly formed by theological considerations.

IV If a certain form of retribution is a morally fitting response to atrocious wrongdoing, then so is a certain form of anger or (better) resentment.21 This is so, because resentment is the opprobrium for the wrongdoing and against the wrongdoer that fuels retribution. Again, to many contemporary Christians – and to many contemporary post-Christians22 – this will sound counterintuitive; for surely “love” for the wrongdoer must exclude any hostile attitude or feelings toward him? Not so, according to the Anglican moral ­philosopher-cum-bishop, Joseph Butler, for whom resentment is a “natural passion” that may be virtuous or vicious according to circumstances, but which in itself is indifferent.23 Not so, even according to St. Paul, who in his epistle to the Ephesian Christians enjoined them, “Be angry, but do not sin”



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(Eph.  4.6).  Not  to resent an injustice is akin to not grieving the death of a beloved. Something – someone – of great value has been damaged, perhaps destroyed. Not to react negatively is pathological – a failure to care for something that deserves to be cared for. And in cases where another person is culpably responsible24 for the damage, (proportionate) anger or resentment against that person is an appropriate expression of care for what has been damaged. Resentment can, of course, be inappropriate (because the wrongdoer should not be blamed for what he did) or disproportionate (because the damage done was not so great); and, given the pejorative connotation of the word, common English usage assumes that it is vicious in one of these two ways. Maybe here the language bears the imprint of 15 centuries of Christianization – or, as I see it, mis-Christianization. After all, St. Paul made a distinction between anger and sin. And Jesus himself showed no compunction about addressing “the scribes and Pharisees” in stinging language that is replete with righteous resentment.25 Again, the notion that resentment is a fitting response to atrocious wrongdoing has not been given to the world by Christian theology. On the contrary, it is, as Joseph Butler admits, a natural passion. No one needs to be taught to resent injustice – although one might need to be taught what it is that deserves resentment. However, not everyone supposes that resentment should be moderated by forgiveness-as-compassion and by the desire to achieve forgiveness-as-absolution; and not everyone supposes that it can be so moderated. As I understand it, a properly Christian ethic holds that such moderation is both possible and obligatory; and, as I have explained earlier, some of the reasons for taking such a position are theological. This does not mean, of course, that one must own those theological reasons – that one must be a Christian theist – in order to take this particular ethical position. Nevertheless, it might still be the case that Christian theism provides stronger reasons or, more boldly, the only fully adequate ones. But whatever the truth of this moot point, it is clear that Christian theology makes a difference: it supports a particular, finely balanced position that commends resentment while requiring its moderation – and this is a position that not everyone takes. It is not a conclusion of natural reason. It is not common sense.

V Just war doctrine understands a just war to be a retributive act, motivated in part by a proper resentment at a grave, perhaps atrocious, injustice. The resentment and the retribution that it fuels, however, should be qualified by forgiveness-as-compassion and disciplined by the desire for the “reconciliation” or “peace” that forgiveness-as-absolution ushers in. Ideally this peace

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should involve the repair of the damage done to the victim, the healing of the moral corruption of the perpetrator through his coming to own and repudiate his deed as wrong, and the consequent restoration of trust between the perpetrator and his neighbors. In fact, justice as rectification usually falls far short of the ideal. Some kinds of damage are simply beyond human repair: the death of victims, the apparently irreversible moral corruption of some wrongdoers. It is perhaps one of the distinguishing features of atrocious wrongs that their combination of extensive scale (the massive number of victims) and intensive scale (the high degree of indiscrimination, mercilessness, and cruelty) exposes the limits that almost invariably attend human attempts at justice, but which are usually not so shockingly obvious. Just war doctrine is wisely Augustinian in the modesty of its final cause26 : the stopping of the atrocious wrongdoing by the disabling of those who are perpetrating it, and the building of a new political order that is at least sufficiently just and stable not to return to the old ways. The building of a just future will require that there is sufficient public repudiation of the past; but the building of a stable future may well require something less than comprehensive retribution. Some wrongdoers will not be punished at all; others will not be punished enough. Some may learn the errors of their ways; others will not. And, when all is said and done, their murdered victims will remain dead. No “infinite justice” here, then. Such Augustinian modesty is partly inspired by the prudence that cumulative common experience teaches: to insist on too much justice is to risk propagating further injustice. However, what experience would teach and what humans are prepared to learn are often discrepant – especially when those humans are disturbed and driven by inordinate resentment at terrible wrongs. So prudence alone may not be a sufficient matrix of patience. Augustinian modesty, however, also has the fuel of eschatological hope – the final theological feature of just war doctrine that is relevant to our theme. This is the hope that the justice that we humans cannot do here and now – the raising from the dead of innocent victims, the meting out of retribution upon those perpetrators who have escaped earthly punishment, the maturing of penitence and reconciliation that history has cut short – will yet be done by God at the end of history. While it is conceivable that such hope can be construed in such a way as to undermine moral effort, it is equally conceivable that it can be so construed as to inspire it. And while such hope can be dismissed as nothing but wishful thinking, it can also be proposed as a reasonable wager upon the truth of the value of the good of human being: if that value is not an illusion, if our commitment to defend and promote it is not a noble absurdity, and if eschatological hope is necessary to make such



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commitment maximally intelligible, then adhering to such hope is both morally serious and rational.

VI Our discussion of the doctrine of just war has covered five points at which theology should shape a Christian view of righting (atrocious) wrongs: a universal moral order, forgiveness as both compassion and absolution, “forgiving” resentment, “forgiving” retribution, and the acceptance of limited rectification. According to this theologically formed doctrine, then, it could be morally right to intervene with armed force in a foreign state to stop and repair atrocities, even if the letter of positive international law forbad it – for there is a higher, “natural” law. It is true that to wage any war – even a “humanitarian” one – is to cause great evil: it involves the destruction of human beings, many of them innocent, and of social and physical infrastructures. It is one of the tragic features of the “secular” age that sometimes one cannot do good without incurring evil, and yet to fail to do that good would permit other evils to flourish and proliferate. Nevertheless, provided that one does not intend (or want) the evil, that the good cannot be had without it, that it can be considered worth suffering for the sake of the good, and that one accepts it with an appropriate reluctance, to cause it would not only be morally blameless but also morally right.27 Tragic, but right. Beyond this, those who would use armed force in response to atrocity must see themselves as engaging in an act of policing, and not in a crusade. They stand to the perpetrators not as the righteous to the unrighteous, nor as the faithful to the infidel, but as one set of fellow creatures and sinners to another. Their adversarial relationship is qualified by a more basic solidarity or “compassion.” Their task is not to rid the world of evil and usher in (some version of) the kingdom of God, but to put a stop to particular evils and to prepare the ground for the reconstruction of such political conditions and structures as will prevent their recurrence. Such reconstruction should normally involve the retributive punishment of perpetrators, at very least to communicate clearly and publicly that the atrocious ways of the past shall not be the way of the future. However, what form that punishment should take and upon whom it should be meted out will depend, in part, on prudential considerations such as the stability of the new political order. For retribution should be disciplined, not only retrospectively by the gravity of the atrocities, but also prospectively by the requirements of establishing a just peace – that is, by a political analog of “reconciliation.” Either way it must not be

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fuelled by vengeful or vindictive resentment. In this respect Charles Canning, Governor-General of India in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, is exemplary. Lord Canning was under severe pressure, not least from irate newspaper editorials in Calcutta and London, to abandon his measured and discriminate (if still severe) response to the infamous massacres of British women and children, and instead to avenge them with ruthless retribution. Keenly aware of the danger to future political stability of alienating ordinary Indians, Canning refused, declaring, “As long as I have breath in my body, I will pursue no other policy than that which I have been following – not only for the reason of expediency … but because it is just. I will not govern in anger.”28

VII So what is our answer to the questions with which we began? In talking about responses to atrocity, does it help to import religious ideas? Does the invocation of theological concepts give voice to otherwise inarticulate intuitions? Do they have the power to cast peculiar light on dark places here? Our conclusion is that, judging by the doctrine of just war, Christian theology certainly makes a difference. It casts a particular light on the matter and it gives voice to a particular set of responses, which does not command universal assent. Whether or not this appears helpful will depend, of course, on how far one approves of the response that it produces. Those who approve will find theology helpful. Some may find theology helpful, of course, without being moved to endorse it. That is only to be expected: parties to human agreements regularly differ in the reasons they give for agreeing. They recognize the others as allies, but not as fellow-believers. Still, some parties may have better reasons than others; and allies who take one another seriously (and are intellectually curious) will be moved to consider which rationale is best. If some find that theology gives voice to inarticulate moral intuitions or gives better voice to already articulate ones – if it throws light on places otherwise more or less obscure – then that would suggest that theology has greater power to make sense of what we assume to be true. And that should count in favor of the truth of theology. If we are convinced of one thing and another seems required to make logical or psychological sense of it, then that gives us a reason for believing the second as well as the first. That is, unless we are absolutely convinced that this latter cannot be true. In which case we must either set about developing an equally satisfactory nontheological rationale for this moral response, or go hunting for another response altogether.



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Notes 1 2

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4 5

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The allusion is to television news footage of Serb irregulars in Bosnia. This is a very grand claim, and counterevidence can certainly be brought against it. Historical religions are complex entities, finding different – and sometimes contradictory – expressions at different times and in different places. On the one hand, there are instantiations of Christianity, for example, where retributive (even vindictive) punishment appears to be the norm. And forgiveness is by no means absent from, say, Judaism and Islam. Indeed, it might even be more present in certain versions of them than in certain versions of Christianity. Nevertheless, it was the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who accredited Jesus with being “[t]he discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs” (The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958], p. 238). It was Jewish commentators on “The Sunflower” who rebuked Christian ones for judging that the concentration camp inmate should have granted forgiveness to the dying SS officer (Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, rev. ed. [New York: Schocken, 1997], pp. 164–166 [Abraham Joshua Heschel], 216–220 [Dennis Prager]). And it was Christian influence on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that is blamed by critics for using forgiveness to buy reconciliation at the price of justice (e.g., Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]; “Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Rethinking Legal Pluralism and Human Rights,” Current Anthropology, 41 [2000]). According to the testimony of outsiders, then, it seems that Christianity and forgiveness have a close association that is characteristic and distinctive. For example, The Responsibility to Protect, the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001). Robert Bolt, A Man for all Seasons (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 38–39. I refer to “demonic evils” and “demons” on two occasions in this chapter. What I mean by this is the sociopsychological condition where groups of human beings, usually young men, are possessed by a lust for murderous violence. When I say “possessed” I do not mean to absolve them of responsibility for their action; but I do mean to refer to that stage in moral degeneration when the human agent is more controlled by his lust than his lust by him. Indeed, this is what the “lust” means: overwhelming desire. When I use such terms, I have a particular image in mind. It comes from the penultimate scene of Michael Caton Jones’ film about the Rwandan genocide, Shooting Dogs (BBC, 2005). The UN “peacekeeping” troops have just departed the school compound, abandoning hundreds of Tutsis who have sought refuge there from the merciless attention of the surrounding Interahamwe militia. The Interahamwe bestir themselves for their final, murderous assault. The camera homes in on a single face among them. He is wearing a floppy hat that gives him a comic look; but his eyes are bloodshot and crazed. He raises his bloody machete, and blows his whistle, and cries, “To the Work!” The motives for the intervention are, of course, disputed. In the eyes of some – not least those of the famous British playwright, Harold Pinter – NATO’s intervention was basically “Anglo-American aggression.” Of this view I have already written: “I find it hard to contain my contempt for a position that seems to me to be so dishonest. It seems so, because how can anyone have failed to notice that there are 19 NATO countries involved, more or less willingly, and not just America and Britain; and that these include France, whose military commitment is roughly equal to Britain’s, and which has made an international career out of not doing whatever America wants? Further, given that this objection claims that “Anglo-American” intervention is not really for humanitarian purposes at all, its proponents are obliged to come up with a reasonably plausible alternative explanation of British and American motives. I have yet to hear one. Pinter’s ritualistic assertion that it has all been

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about America trying to consolidate its domination of Europe is so clichéd as to be laughable; but it also confirms my suspicion that this objection is largely fuelled by a resentful, petulant anti-Americanism out of which, I am ashamed to say, some of us have still to grow” (Church Times, June 18, 1999, p. 12). Nigel Biggar, “Making Peace and Doing Justice: Must We Choose?,” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, ed. Nigel Biggar (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), pp. 7–13; “Conclusion,” in ibid., pp. 314–317; “Epilogue: Burying the Past after September 11,” in ibid., pp. 328–329; “Forgiveness in the Twentieth Century: A Review of the Literature, 1901–2001,” in Forgiveness and Truth, ed. Alistair McFadyen and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 215–217. Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1989), pp. 176–177; L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 21, 102, 121, 144, 146, 160–161. Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 81–86, 148–149. For further discussion of the relationship between political “reconciliation” and its interpersonal paradigm, see Nigel Biggar, “Conclusion,” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), pp. 314–317. Why is the interpersonal form of reconciliation paradigmatic? I suppose that, in Christian or post-Christian cultures, part of the answer has to be the iconic authority of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. Peter Shaffer, The Gift of the Gorgon (London: Viking, 1993), p. 16. Shaffer, The Gift of the Gorgon, pp. 60–61. Shaffer, The Gift of the Gorgon, p. 92. Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a Country’s Hidden Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp. 13–14. I am being careful here because I am aware that some are arguing for the moral rehabilitation of vengeance as an appropriate response to grave and malicious injury (e.g., Willa Boesak, God’s Wrathful Children: Political Oppression and Christian Ethics [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995]; Willa Boesak, “Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation,” in H. Russel Botman and Robin M. Petersen, eds., To Remember and to Heal: Theological and Psychological Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation [Cape Town: Hutman and Rousseau, 1996]; and Marth Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence [Boston: Beacon, 1998], pp. 9–24). One may, of course, choose to use the word “vengeance” to refer to proportionate retribution. My own sense, however, is that in common English usage “vengeance” tends to connote something excessive and out of control; and that therefore to talk of “vengeance” when one means something moderated and proportionate is to risk at least confusion and perhaps even serious misunderstanding. In Christian theology the concept of “original” sin refers to the “fated” dimension of human wrong-doing. This does not displace the individual’s responsibility for his choices. But it does refer to the fact that every individual makes his choices under the weight of history’s sociopsychological legacy. If we are free, we are free only within bounds; and the bounds are unequal, for history has dealt more kindly with some than with others. This freedom-underfate is something that victims share with perpetrators. My thinking here follows Richard Swinburne (e.g., Responsibility and Atonement, pp. 81–86, 148–149), except that what he takes to be the whole of forgiveness, I take to be just the second moment. The observation that the proportionality of just warfare is constituted by both a backward and a forward reference is Oliver O’Donovan’s (The Just War Revisited [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], pp. 48–63).

19 20 21

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See n. 2 earlier. Shaffer, The Gift of the Gorgon, pp. 16–17. As I (and Joseph Butler, as it happens) understand common English usage, “resentment” is a constant form of “anger.” “Anger” tends to refer to an explosive moment or passing mood, resentment to a more settled attitude. “Resentment,” however, sometimes carries the connotation of meanness, ungenerosity, or egoism. When I use the word, I do not mean that, since I obviously do not think that resentment at injustice need carry any of those qualities. “Post-Christians” are those who live off the moral capital of Christianity without investing in its religious or theological sources – that is to say, most Europeans. Joseph Butler, “Upon Resentment”, Fifteen Sermons, ed. W. R. Matthews (London 1953), p. 123 (Section 3). One can be responsible for an effect without being culpable for it. I can choose to perform an act that I foresee will probably or certainly have an evil effect, without “intending” (or wanting) that effect, provided that my choosing is sufficiently reluctant and its reasons sufficiently strong. Hereby, of course, I endorse the doctrine of double effect. For further discussion, see my Aiming to Kill: The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2004). pp.71–88. I have explained earlier (note 15) why I dissent from those theologians who seek to rehabilitate “righteous vengeance.” Nevertheless, I do approximate them insofar as I am arguing for a rehabilitation of “righteous resentment” and “righteous retribution.” I say “Augustinian” here, because it was St. Augustine who characterized our historical situation as “secular.” By this he meant that we belong to the saeculum or age that lives between the token of glorious transformation that is the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and its fulfillment in the glorious transformation of the world as a whole. As a consequence, our moral and political endeavors are fraught with tragic tension, aspiring to ideals that can only be realized partially, ambiguously, and fleetingly under the conditions of secular history. In The City of God Augustine offers an arresting judicial example of the tragic character of secular endeavor (City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson [London: Penguin, 1972], Book XIX, chapter 6, pp. 859–61): the need perchance to torture someone who might be innocent, to find out the truth about some crime. And at one point in a letter to Paulinus of Nola in AD 408), he gives moving voice to the spiritual agony that the exercise of judicial office produces in the judge: On the subject of punishing and refraining from punishment, what am I to say? It is our desire that when we decide whether or not to punish people, in either case it should contribute wholly to their security. These are indeed deep and obscure matters: what limit ought to be set to punishment with regard to both the nature and extent of guilt, and also the strength of spirit the wrongdoers possess? What ought each one to suffer? … What do we do when, as often happens, punishing someone will lead to his destruction, but leaving him unpunished will lead to someone else being destroyed? … What trembling, what ­darkness! … “Trembling and fear have come upon me and darkness has covered me, and I said, Who will give me wings like a dove’s? Then I will fly away and be at rest” …. [Psalm 55 (54), 5–8] (Augustine, Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], Letter 95, pp. 23–24).

27 28

See n. 24 earlier. Saul David, The Indian Mutiny 1857 (London: Viking, 2002), p. 238.

T homas B rudhol m 6.  On the Advocacy of Forgiveness after Mass Atrocities

Forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. […] It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim […] The face of forgiveness is mild, but how stony to the slaughtered. Cynthia Ozick (1998). There is an imprudent manner of recommending forgiveness to us that rather is a means for making us disgusted with it. Vladimir Jankélévitch (2005).

In August 2007, an Iraqi delegation visited Denmark and a hearing was held in the Danish Parliament. The topic was the role of religion in relation to reconciliation in Iraq and the delegation was led by the Anglican vicar Andrew White who has for some years been involved in peace-work in Iraq and the Middle East. The hearing was plagued by the usual problems of simultaneous translation and minds, or maybe just mine, started to drift. Yet, near the end, a member of the audience asked the panel to elaborate their perspectives on Desmond Tutu’s famous statement that, as one speaker put it, “there can be no future without reconciliation.” Of course, what Tutu has written and proclaimed on numerous occasions is something different and more controversial, namely that there can be no future without forgiveness (Tutu, 1999). What was interesting to me was not the misquotation as such, but the fact that the topic of forgiveness had not been mentioned a single time during the hearing – not even by the vicar, who otherwise jested and spoke in ways reminiscent of I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers from Cambridge University Press as well as Nigel Biggar, Thomas Cushman, Arne Grøn, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Hannah Holtschneider, Katharina von Kellenbach, Jeffrie Murphy, Valérie Rosoux, Margaret Walker, and Claudia Welz for comments on earlier versions of this chapter the writing of which was made possible by a post doc grant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities.

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the charismatic performances of his much more well-known Anglican fellow. The striking replacement of the most prominent word in Tutu’s motto brought to mind the surprising absence of the rhetoric of forgiveness in the hearing as a whole. In fact it was quite extraordinary: a hearing on the prospects of religious promotion of reconciliation without any mentioning of what is often held to be one of the most distinct contributions of religious approaches to peacemaking and conflict resolution (cf. Auerbach, 2005; Philpott, 2007). It is tempting to use this little incident to speculate as to whether talk of forgiveness has gone out of fashion, but it is more likely that it reflects particular problems of speaking about forgiveness in places like Iraq or maybe simply the limits of one panel discussion in Copenhagen. In a more general perspective, there is no strong sign that one should speak in the past tense about scholarly and practical interest in forgiveness after mass atrocities. Indeed, although it was once said that forgiveness “died” in the Nazi death camps (Jankélévitch, 1996), the question of its possibility and value after mass atrocities continues to attract attention and in recent years there has been a steady flow of conferences and publications on the topic. Forgiveness has gathered the interest of transitional justice scholars from a variety of disciplines and the literature comes along with concrete examples of advocacy and practice on the ground. Forgiveness might be advocated in the context of state-­sponsored truth commissions and in relation to judicial proceedings such as the gacaca tribunals in Rwanda.1 It might be encouraged during rehabilitation programs, in the context of pastoral counseling, in the congregations of faith communities, or the private relations between people somehow involved in mass atrocities. Although religious actors are active in several of these contexts, advocates also include representatives of secular political authorities as well as psychologists, health-care workers, and others involved in conflict-resolution practices.2 Thus, in relation to current discussions how societies can deal with an atrocious past, the little episode in the Danish parliament was testimony to the exception rather than the rule. Forgiveness is in the air and most often spoken of on the assumption that the “journey” toward forgiveness is a tough but ultimately desirable undertaking. The ideal of forgiveness holds the promise of a restoration of normal relationships and a forward-looking perspective on life. Advocates typically stress that forgiving benefits and liberates forgivers from the past and keeps them from wallowing in resentment and fantasies of revenge. Indeed, the overcoming or letting go of these often unpleasant repercussions of injury are central in most attempts to define or account for the nature of forgiveness.3 Given this background, Cynthia Ozick’s indictment quoted at the beginning of this chapter seems grossly misguided or at least exaggerated.4 Not only because it goes against the more prevalent beliefs in the value and rewards

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of forgiving, but also because it seems incompatible with most understandings of the nature of forgiveness. I do not want to analyze or subscribe to each or any of Ozick’s claims in particular. However, I would like to show that she raises a question that ought to be considered very seriously as we think about the advocacy of forgiveness after mass atrocities. The question is: Can the promotion of forgiveness become a liability to the victims? In order to challenge widespread tendencies to dwell on the benefits and promises of forgiving, I want to present five reasons to take the gist of Ozick’s indictment seriously. In other words, this chapter emerges from an observation that the advocacy of forgiveness can indeed become a liability to the victims and that there is a need to bring out for examination the missteps and perils about which advocates of forgiveness should be aware. It is important to be precise here, so let me emphasize that the aim is not to show how forgiving in and of itself (appropriately conceived as the prerogative of victims and as something different from forgetting, excusing, or condoning) can harm the victim. The focus lies precisely on the advocacy of forgiveness. That is, on what is said and done – or silenced and omitted – when victims are encouraged to forgive by third parties. To some extent, this is the well-known question of the danger of cheap forgiveness and it has been considered before, most prominently by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1963), but more recently by, for example, Charles Griswold (2007), Jeffrie Murphy (2003), Paul Riceour (2004), and Katarina von Kellenbach et al. (2006). I owe a debt to these thinkers whose insights are sometimes present in advocates’ concerns about the significance of repentance, the relationship between forgiving and forgetting, the avoidance of pressure on victims to forgive, or the question “Who has the right to forgive?”5 I wish to add to the discussion by focusing systematically and exclusively on the dangers arising from the actual advocacy of forgiveness after mass atrocities.6 Advocates often assure their critics that they would never command or pressure victims to forgive. I hope to show that the absence of manifest orders or pressures does not necessarily mean that they are not there in more subtle or latent forms. Indeed, most interesting are precisely the risks and missteps that can occupy the gray zone between the extreme of overt demands and a careful respect for the autonomy and situation of the victims. I will present five reasons to take Ozick’s challenge seriously. The first three arise from examples of the ways in which advocates talk about victims’ alternatives to forgiveness, about “negative” emotions like resentment, and about unforgiving victims. Added to this are two reasons for caution that arise from examples where forgiveness is advocated and practiced without inclusion of the primary victims and/or where the value and significance of forgiveness is articulated and praised through religious language and gestures.

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The examination is confined to examples from the arguments and advocacy of Christian thinkers and practitioners. A comparative or comprehensive treatment of the advocacy of forgiveness over and across religious and disciplinary differences could easily consume a whole book of its own. Yet, even granted this, why choose to focus on Christian forms of advocacy? First, it is because forgiveness is predominantly being advocated by Christian leaders and theologians. Insofar as the present chapter is a call for a more critical reflection on existing discourses and practices, it seems appropriate to focus (at least to begin with) on the most vocal and influential group of actors and thinkers. Second, among proponents of forgiveness after mass atrocities, the most self-assured and audacious beliefs as to the legitimacy and value of advocating forgiveness are found among Christian advocates. Indeed, according to some theologians, any non-Christian approach (religious or secular) will be ethically compromised and unable to meet the challenges facing forgiving after mass atrocities (cf. Torrance 2006).7 In the face of the actual predominance and alleged superiority of Christian approaches, I find it particularly important and even necessary to offer a critical examination of the advocacy of forgiveness as it is and has been conducted by a range of Christian activists and thinkers. In fact, I would like to venture a bold conjecture and surmise that the need to take the question of the responsibility vis-à-vis the rights and needs of victims seriously is particularly relevant in relation to the Christian advocacy of forgiveness. I shall return to this in the final section and relate it to the broader question of the benefits and problems of religious responses to mass atrocities. The issues to be considered are more or less closely related and in some instances clearly intertwined. At the same time, they are logically distinct and anyone of them can appear without necessarily being joined to a certain other. Therefore, each will be considered in an independent section. Breaking down what often appears in a bundle into its analytically distinct components hopefully makes it easier to focus discussions and to relate the present examination to other kinds of forgiveness advocacy.

Only Forgiveness The first of the five ways in which the advocacy of forgiveness can become a liability for the victim is unfortunately quite widespread in the Christian advocacy of forgiveness. It has to do with the rhetorical way in which forgiveness is promoted not only as one favorable option, but also as the most favorable response to an atrocious past. In this context, “vengeance” is often invoked to serve as the apparently only, and certainly bad, alternative to

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forgiveness. As Pope John Paul II put it in his message for the World Day of Peace: “The deadly cycle of revenge must be replaced by the new-found liberty of forgiveness” (cited in Amstutz, 2005, p. 66). A similar use of an imagined future of bloody revenge as the frightening alternative to forgiveness runs through Desmond Tutu’s advocacy of forgiving. For example, as he expresses his exhilaration by those victims of apartheid who “instead of lusting for revenge […] had this extraordinary willingness to forgive” (1999, p. 86), or as he asks what makes victims “ready to forgive rather than wreak vengeance?” (1999, p. 31). Sometimes Tutu adds a third possibility, namely to do nothing or to insist on forgetting and blanket amnesty (Tutu, 1998). Yet, like vengeance, these options are not invoked as feasible alternatives and Tutu provides the most concise formulation of his perspective with the claim that forgiveness and reconciliation (here used more or less as synonyms) are “the only truly viable alternatives to revenge, retribution and reprisal” (Tutu, 2004, p. 204). The representation of forgiveness as the only viable response to past atrocity is also found among Christian scholars. As Lewis Smedes puts it, “forgiving is the only way for any fairness to rise from the ashes of unfairness” (1996, p. 556), and according to Mark Amstutz, forgiveness is desirable “because it provides a way – indeed the only way – to overcome past wrongdoing” (Amstutz, 2005, p. 73). Even though Amstutz here refers to entire societies, he also claims that “forgiveness is important because it is the sole way by which victims can be healed emotionally […] the only way by which they can ultimately overcome justified anger and the desire for revenge” (Amstutz, 2005, p. 63).8 Thus, like so many other advocates of particular competitive practices and principles, proponents of forgiveness tend to frame their favored ideal in ways that serve to imply that there is no better or even no other solution. Given the way in which the possibilities of response are presented the normative conclusion is inevitable: “Without forgiveness there is no future” (Tutu, 1999). Now, how does the talk of “only forgiveness” or “forgiveness or vengeance” support my basic claim that the advocacy of forgiveness can become a liability to the victims? First and foremost by its neglect of possibilities of vindication and repair “between” the extremes of vengeance and forgiveness. As Margaret Walker has put it: If the possibilities for addressing conflict are represented as “vengeance or forgiveness,” victims may feel, or may actually be, pressed to take an undemanding, or even a forgiving stance, even where this frustrates their needs for vindication or forecloses any of the varieties of vindication that might satisfy their needs to have their dignity restored, their suffering acknowledged, or their losses compensated. (Walker, 2006a, p. 99)

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The claim that forgiving is the sole way that victims can be healed emotionally might goad people to accept or endorse a form of therapy that is neither the only available possibility, nor a kind that has been proven to be the most desirable. Among psychologists, the introduction of forgiveness to the realm of psychological counseling is a highly contested issue. In contrast to rhetorical promises of healing, several psychologists – such as Sharon Lamb (2006), Mona S. Weissmark (2004), or Judith S. Herman (1992) – have strong reservations to the imperious claims that forgiving is the key to healing among victims of mass atrocities. Concerning the question of vindication, the advocacy under scrutiny dismisses or fails to acknowledge the possibility and legitimacy of criminal justice as an alternative path to reconciliation. The simplified picture of the available alternatives leaves no space for victims who want neither to forgive nor to wreak vengeance, but who seek justice within the limits set by legal prosecution and punishment. To talk as if a support of trials and punishment, on the one hand, and a desire for revenge, on the other hand, were one of a kind constitutes a failure to acknowledge a difference of moral significance for many survivors. Furthermore, the reductive rhetorical use of “revenge” or “vengeance” simply as the dangerous and irrational “alternative” to forgiving is arguably even unfair to victims who actually desire revenge; who consciously desires satisfaction of vindictive passions directed toward the perpetrators. Of course, the political use of revenge can be a devastating and destructive reality in the lives of individuals as well as societies. Nonetheless, if one pays attention to the complex real-life examples of survivors’ or witnesses’ vindictive responses to morally horrifying atrocities, one finds avengers and acts of revenge that are difficult to dismiss as easily as the rhetoric of forgiveness or vengeance leads us to assume.9 However, the most misleading aspect of the rhetoric of “vengeance or forgiveness” perhaps lies with the assumption that revenge is what victims naturally and expectably crave. Studies of what victims feel and desire present a much more nuanced and complex picture where neither revenge nor forgiveness occupies the foreground (see, for instance, Stover, 2005; Walker, 2006a). In short, it might be alluring to employ the powerful rhetoric of “either forgiveness or vengeance” or “only forgiveness,” but it is a temptation that advocates should resist – not least because it can do wrong to the victims.

Negative Emotions The second reason to take what might be called “Ozick’s challenge” ­seriously emerges from tendencies among advocates of forgiveness to deal too hastily

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with victims’ anger and resentment in the aftermath of mass atrocities. When the question is how to promote forgiveness most effectively, the interest in resentment is often reduced to a concern about how to get rid of it. Like ­vengeance, resentment appears only as the negative sentiment to be overcome or it is mentioned mainly when there is reason to celebrate its absence. For example, during the hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, expressions of rejoicing by the absence of resentment and other “negative emotions” were part of the public praise of those who were willing to forgive (Verdoolaege, 2006; Wilson, 2001). Advocates may grant that anger is understandable and that victims need to be given space to vent it, but what often remains beyond view is exactly what matters a lot to many victims, namely an acknowledgment of the moral legitimacy of anger and resentment. Sometimes, anger and resentment are portrayed and denounced as dehumanizing and dangerous forces that ought to be “avoided like the plague” (Tutu, 1999, p. 31). Of course, anger can be excessive, unjustified, and dehumanizing, but it need not be so. More than that, the absence of anger in the face of evil can in itself be seen as a loss of humanity. For instance, telling about the public hanging of a group of men in Auschwitz, Primo Levi connects the lack of anger in the crowd forced to watch, with the dreadful degree to which the Nazis had succeeded in destroying the humanity of the prisoners (Levi, 1987, p. 135f). Another – and more subtle – kind of reduction occurs when victims’ expressions of moral resentment are seen only as ­mental-health issues to be treated, as something detrimental to the well-being of their holders or as something incongruent with being a responsible citizen. When ­victims voicing their anger (e.g., with a certain amnesty policy or as a result of societal expectations that they will forgive or forget) are treated as victims of an illness, a new offence may be added on top of the original injury. The pathologization of anger facilitates a blindness to the moral and social protest that may be inherent to victims’ anger after mass atrocity. It allows the party to whom the angry protest is directed to reduce the social cause and object of the victim’s resentment to the symptom of individual trauma and as something that the victim cum patient should “get over” for his or her own sake, as something in need of counseling and treatment rather than a moral–political response.10 There is a need to resist hasty condemnations and pathologizing approaches, but also to raise a quite contrary position that allows for the possibility that sometimes it might be as permissible or laudable to hold on to resentment as to let go of it through forgiving. In this regard one might look to the essays of Jean Améry who argued that resentment – or, more precisely, a special kind of ressentiment – can

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possess a profound moral significance. Arguing against the grains of popular perceptions as well as the philosophical tradition, Améry frankly declared that he neither could nor would let go of the resentments he harbored against a present dominated by a desire to move on as if nothing had happened. Améry’s resentments – given voice and tenor in his essays on the conditio inhumana of the surviving victim – were his human right and privilege, his protest against cheap forgetting and what he called the pathos of forgiveness and reconciliation (Améry, 1999). In Améry, the preservation and defense of resentment imply an unreconciled remembrance of the atrocious past. However – and this is one of the interesting challenges to present understandings of resentment – the refusal to reconcile with the past, indeed the plea for a general acknowledgment that there can be no reconciliation with the past, is tied to a struggle for reconciliation between peoples. In this way Améry’s account provides a counterexample to prevalent notions of resentment as a pathological, dehumanizing or ignoble attitude, tied only to concerns about the self and incompatible with a struggle for reconciliation.11 An acknowledgment of the moral significance of resentment is not incompatible with a commitment to forgiveness. In fact, and in spite of the notion of anger as a deadly sin, some Christian thinkers have sought to balance a strong evaluation of forgiveness with an acknowledgment of the moral nature and value of anger and resentment.12 Nonetheless, finding a place for an acknowledgment of anger and resentment or reaching a more nuanced understanding of these emotions – in theory no less than in practice – remains one of the ethical challenges facing advocates of forgiveness after mass atrocity. When failing to operate on an appropriately nuanced understanding of the moral aspects and significance of victims’ resentment, advocates of forgiveness put at risk the basic aim of their undertaking. That is, instead of facilitating repair and reconciliation, they risk causing new resentment on top of whatever was already there. As one apartheid victim said in relation to his experience of being pressured to forgive by the South African TRC: “I refuse not to be angry and cannot forgive. What is even more difficult is to have someone tell me I should not still feel like this” (Verdoolaege, 2006, p. 76). According to several philosophers, the holding and expression of resentment is tied to the stance of holding relevant others responsible, of calling to account. According to Richard Wallace, in expressing emotions like resentment we are not just venting feelings of anger and vindictiveness; rather, “we are demonstrating our commitment to certain moral standards, as regulative of social life” (Wallace, 1994, p. 69). The “message” provided when this kind of resentment is treated only as an obstacle to be overcome, as something to be avoided like

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the plague or as an understandable traumatic reaction has been succinctly formulated by Pamela Hieronymi. She argues that a past wrong that has not been appropriately recognized as a wrong (and victims’ resentment can be upheld precisely to express this kind of recognition) makes a claim: “It says, in effect, you can be treated this way, and that such treatment is acceptable. That – that claim – is what you resent” (Hieronymi, 2001, p. 546). This is, evidently, not a message that advocates of forgiveness want to convey, and that is one of the reasons why a more nuanced approach to emotions like resentment is needed.

Unforgiving Victims The third reason to take Ozick’s challenge seriously is tied to tendencies in advocates’ notions of the moral character of unforgiving victims and of the unforgiving stance as such. First of all, in accordance with the given approaches to revenge and resentment, there is often not much testimony of truly explorative or probing analyses of the reasons why some victims refuse to forgive. In his reflections on the work of the South African TRC, Desmond Tutu remarks: “There were those who said they would not forgive” (1999, p. 271). Yet, he instantly continues: “That demonstrated for me the important point that forgiveness could not be taken for granted; it was neither cheap nor easy. As it happens, these were the exceptions. Far more frequently what we encountered was deeply moving and humbling” (ibid.). Thus, the phenomenon is recognized, but there is apparently no need to dwell on the cases of refusal or resistance. Indeed, and in accordance with the uses of “revenge” and “anger,” in this case the reference to the unforgiving victims is used only to return to and to reinforce the praise of their more exhilarating counterparts. Thus, one kind of approach to the unforgiving victim is simply a kind of disregard, but the representations of unforgiving victims are more often reproachful or cautionary. For example, in 1985 the advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury on Jewish–Christian relations, Anthony Phillips, wrote that Jews by declining to forgive the Holocaust perhaps “unwittingly invite it” (Harries, 2003, p. 66). Of course, if the only viable path to a better future lies with forgiveness, then those who refuse to forgive can be blamed for jeopardizing our future. Also in accordance with the trends that have already been considered, the unforgiving victim might be seen in the picture of the Nietzschean “man of ressentiment” (possessed by malice and bitterness and an impotent or irrational desire for revenge), and the “failure” to forgive might be seen as an understandable, but also inferior, self-preoccupied, and pathological form of response.

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Ultimately, the refusal to forgive is dismissed as a kind of dehumanization. Many Christian advocates of forgiveness think of the willingness or enactment of forgiving as a sign of human perfection. In forgiving, we “re-­establish the deepest qualities of humanity” (Müller-Fahrenholz, 1997, p. ix), or as Alan J. Torrance has put it, to be human “in truth” is to love unconditionally and to do that is to forgive unconditionally. But then “to refuse to do so, or indeed to make conditional this orientation toward others, is to dehumanize both others and ourselves” (Torrance, 2006, p. 58). Sometimes, Christian advocates of forgiveness caution that by refusing to forgive, victims risk getting somehow on a par with their perpetrators; thinking, feeling, or acting like them. For example, in the first edition of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, Father Edward Flannery suggested that Simon Wiesenthal, by not forgiving a dying SS-man, had become complicit in the sins of the Nazis (Langer, 1998 p. 169). Another, and more ambiguous, approach is to suggest that the victim could have become a perpetrator, had the historical and biographical circumstances been different. Keeping in mind the horrors that were committed by the perpetrators and suffered by the victims, I think that any mobilization of such claims must at least be very carefully qualified. Indeed, although contrafactual thought experiments can teach lessons in moral humility and work against certain kinds of self-righteousness, I have a great deal of sympathy with Primo Levi’s rejoinder to such appeals to the imagination insofar as it leads to a moral confusion of guilt and responsibility: “I do not know,” wrote Levi, “and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer” (Levi, 1988, p. 48). Perhaps victims sometimes become perpetrators on a level of culpability that might be comparable to that of the original perpetrators – and sometimes, refusals to forgive might play a role in this. Still, it seems to me beyond dispute that survivors of genocide can refuse to forgive without becoming accomplices to genocide. “Refusing to forgive Nazis is,” as Catholic theologian Didier Pollefeyt rightly puts it, “a far cry from torturing or exterminating them physically” (Pollefeyt, 2004a, p. 130). At the same time, Pollefeyt is first and foremost concerned to caution that the refusal to forgive can make the victim “vulnerable to the same Manichean approach or logic as the Nazis used, and eventually to the possible consequences of it” (ibid.). This is so because Pollefeyt mainly discusses the refusal to forgive as the consequence of the victim’s “diabolicisation” of the Nazi. The diabolizing victim sees and treats the Nazi as the incarnation of evil and as monstrous being to whom no mercy can be bestowed and with whom no shared humanity can be acknowledged. Diabolicisation sustains hatred, self-defensive, or dualist thinking – and the idea of the unforgivable. Thus,

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refusing to grant forgiveness “obscures the potentiality and reality of evil in oneself and one’s communities” (Pollefeyt, 2004b, p. 56). Insofar as this position is akin to Nazi logic, and insofar as the refusal to forgive is tied to this logic, the refusal to forgive is reminiscent of that logic. Yet, even granted that this is a thinkable position, one may wonder to what degree actual victims who refuse to forgive have been/are driven by this kind of extreme thinking? Whether one thinks about the talk of “only forgiveness” or of the hasty approaches to resentment, anger, or the refusal to forgive, forgiveness advocates often appeal to what might be called an argument from excess. That is, what we are presented with are often quite extreme and pathological examples and vile ideas. Perhaps, if taken to the extreme “rejecting forgiveness after Auschwitz, one could create a universe with remarkable analogies to the Third Reich’s dualistic and pitiless rule” (Pollefeyt, 2004b, p. 56). But how many survivors reject forgiveness at large or as such? How often are victims’ refusals to forgive that dramatic? Even Vladimir Jankélévitch (2005), who stood behind the outcry referred to as we began, that forgiveness “died” in the Nazi death camps, actually did not reject forgiveness as such. I think that victims more typically refuse to forgive specific perpetrators under specific social circumstances, or they refuse, on principle, any forgiving of certain kinds of cruelties, and so on. Even though it is certainly possible to construct a fanatical and perhaps even quasi-Nazi logic of unforgiveness, we should beware not to let the dramatic construction overshadow a more spacious, empirically informed and ethically nuanced perspective. Perhaps the constructions of unforgiving victims are reminiscent of a common approach to dissent or dissenters. As Barbara H. Smith has written, explanations of dissent often recur to “the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow (sceptic, atheist, heretic, pagan, and so forth) is either a devil or a fool – or, in more (officially) enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/ or intellect: ignorance, innate capacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on” (Smith, 1997, p. xvi). In relation to the topic under consideration here, the given images of resistance or of the unforgiving victim seem to exemplify a comparable pattern. If the unforgiving survivors understood more about the background of the perpetrators, or about what ideals and values really count, if they did not confuse forgetting and forgiving, if they were more capable of managing their anger, if they thought more rationally about their own good or the good of the nation, then they would try to forgive or let go of their resentment and engage more constructively in the process of reconciliation. Relentless, backward-looking resentment must

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be the sign of some kind of moral failure or irrationality on behalf of its holder. Ultimately, unforgiveness is a morally impossible stance. It might be acknowledged that one should not reproach those who cannot or will not forgive, because forgiveness is a free gift or an act of generosity beyond moral duty. Yet, what remains unacknowledged is the possibility that those who refuse to forgive can be guided by a moral protest and ambition that might be as permissible or perhaps admirable as the values and desires behind the willingness to forgive. Drawing upon the voices and reflections of unforgiving victims themselves, it is possible to provide a challenge to the ways in which resistance, or resistant actors, are commonly represented in the rhetoric of forgiveness. There are moral sources of protest and resistance against forgiveness and they should be acknowledged and respected. Resistance might, for example, be tied to morally legitimate concepts of certain conditions and limits of forgiveness or to struggles against frivolous conceptions of forgiveness. Neglect of the morally legitimate sources of resistance disrespects the victims and becomes a serious reason to worry that the advocacy of forgiveness becomes a liability to the victims. Proponents of forgiveness need to consider much more seriously the possibilities of justified unforgiveness and to dwell on the stories and reasoning of victims who refuse to forgive.13

Forgetting the Victim So far, even though the focus has been on Christian advocates of forgiveness, none of the reasons for caution that I have raised are related to claims or acts of a distinctly religious nature. Of course, the problems at hand can be the sign of certain problematic Christian values or background assumptions, but no references to God or divine authority have been made, and none of the dangers exposed have been related to the use of particularly religious practices or theological doctrines. In this and the next section, we shall focus on hazards that are more directly tied to the use of distinctly religious beliefs and discourse. The fourth issue relates to Ozick’s claim that forgiveness forgets the victim. As I will construe it here, the claim is not that forgiveness as such implies or equals forgetting, but rather that the advocacy of forgiveness can fail to pay proper heed to the rights, voice, or needs of the victim. What is at stake is a kind of negligence with regard to the victims of the perpetrators in relation to whom forgiveness is promoted or encouraged. Whether such “insensitiveness toward the victim” can be the price of a special cultivation of “sensitiveness for the murderer” (as Ozick put it) is partially a separate issue, but I shall briefly address it in this section as well.

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At first glance, the charge of forgetfulness might seem blatantly wrong if not absurd. Why? Because forgiving is often seen as the prerogative or right of none but the victim: “Forgiveness to the injured doth belong” as the often cited quote by John Dryden goes.14 How could it be possible to “forget” the victim when it is the victim who forgives? Moreover, there is a strong therapeutic trend in current forgiveness-discourses and the main focus lies on the ways in which forgiveness allegedly benefits, liberates, or heals the victim. Finally, in what is beyond doubt the most prominent recent example – the TRC of South Africa – the stories and responses of victims were part and parcel of the discourse and promotion of forgiveness. The question whether the victims were treated appropriately is a separate issue, but they were definitely not forgotten or “left behind,” outside of the field of consideration. However, all of this notwithstanding the voice or needs of the victim are not always and not necessarily involved in the advocacy or politics of forgiveness, but who has standing to “substitute” for the victim? Who forgives the perpetrator (and for what?) if it is not his or her actual victims? Let us look at a range of examples where advocates address or appeal to non-victims and consider whether it implies that “forgiveness” forgets the victim. The first example is a memorandum from 1949, signed by three German theologians from the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and addressed to the American military administration (in English).15 It presents a compilation of brief reports of alleged legal deficiencies of the trials of Nazi perpetrators in the immediate postwar years. Under the headline “Act of Grace,” the clergy asks (as servants of God), “for an act of mercy for all those who have committed deeds that are not punishable according to German criminal law” (Wurm et al., 1949, p. 22f). The memorandum contains no references to the victims of the Nazi perpetrators in question. The activism of the church council is exclusively on behalf of the plight of the latter. Apparently, this kind of bias in favor of the plight of the perpetrators rather than their victims was characteristic of the activism of the German churches. According to Victoria J. Barnett, the churches ignored the victims and “the absence of reference to the victims – essentially an evasion of any responsibility for their suffering – was coupled with an avoidance of confronting the perpetrators and collaborators with the specificity of their guilt” (Barnett, 2005, p. 365). Likewise, Katharina von Kellenbach (2001, p. 657) has argued that the churches mainly “used their moral capital to mobilize nationally and internationally on behalf of forgiveness for the perpetrators.”16 However, in the specific case at hand, the plea was for mercy (not forgiveness) and as argued by Jeffrie Murphy, mercy is “less personal than forgiveness, since the one granting mercy (a sentencing judge, say) typically will not be a victim of wrongdoing” (Murphy, 2003, p. 14). Mercy can

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be asked for and bestowed without inclusion of the victim. Indeed, pardon, amnesty, and acts of mercy can be enacted by state actors, judges, and so on without necessarily infringing on the autonomy of victims. Thus, to address a call for mercy to the American authorities ­cannot be an example of a neglect of any exclusive right of the victim to forgive or not to forgive. However, even if the advocacy is for mercy rather than forgiveness (and “on the ground,” the difference might be quite blurred), not to pay heed to the Nazi victims seems to me to qualify as a kind of neglect – not of the autonomy or rights of the victim, but of the needs of victims and of the impact of mercy on their situation. Moving from history to current theorizing, it is worth noticing that in recent years several scholars have argued that ­forgiveness proper actually is the sort of thing that a state can do and that it is sometimes desirable for states to forgive. Insofar as this idea is implemented in political discourse and transitional justice, it becomes possible to imagine discussions and transactions of political forgiveness in relation to which the victims have no say and no role to play.17 The second kind of case involves addresses to people who are somehow related to the direct victim and often victims themselves too. It might be family members (as in the South African TRC) or just persons who belong to the same ethnic, national, or religious group as the victim (as in The Sunflower where Wiesenthal was fetched to the deathbed of the dying Nazi officer simply as a Jew). Should the practice of encouraging relatives and survivors to forgive perpetrators of wrongs mainly suffered by others be treated as an example of neglect or even a kind of infidelity to the “primary” victim? Is it morally justifiable to encourage relatives or other “secondary” victims to forgive those who have tortured and murdered their sons or daughters, mothers, or fathers, and so on? This is one of the most important ethical issues arising from the advocacy of forgiveness after mass murders: Who has the right to forgive whom? Evidently, the question emerges with acute force after genocides where thousands upon thousands and perhaps millions of people have been exterminated. Almost any crime leaves not just one victim, but a whole collectivity that has been harmed by the crime in different ways. During genocide and other forms of collective violence, the individual victim is not targeted due to his or her individual acts or traits, but rather as a member of a given group. Arguably, anybody who is member of the group attacked by the perpetrator has something and some standing to forgive. Indeed given that there is such a thing as “crimes against humanity,” perhaps forgiveness of their perpetrators is an issue of some relevance to any human being? (cf. Garrard, 2003). Whatever the merits of this line of reasoning (and I do think that it is important to preserve a keen sense of distinctions between

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actual victims and humanity in general), the enormity of the culpability and harm in question also raises another question that seems as debilitating as the one above may seem liberating. That is, how can any single person – even the persons who are among the thousands who have been wronged – forgive a mass murderer without “forgetting” the voice that ought to be granted to the all too many others who can no longer speak for themselves? It seems that any forgiving after mass atrocity is necessarily fractured, incomplete, and in danger of constituting a wrong to the dead. At least, to avoid forgetful frivolity, it has to be hedged by caveats as to its necessarily partial and incomplete nature. The problem about the standing of secondary victims or individual victims’ authority to forgive mass murderers is not solved by a kind of arithmetical assurance that one forgives the perpetrator only for that aspect of his acts that has harmed oneself. On top of the basic question whether this kind of “parceling” of a guilt and forgiveness makes sense, one faces the question whether the granting of forgiveness can compound the sense of guilt or shame that remains with some survivors of mass atrocities. That is, they might feel responsible if the perpetrator feels comprehensively liberated from his past deeds and if they come to believe that their even highly conditional and qualified pronouncement of forgiveness was the occasion for that. This is moral speculation, but I would at least like to flag the issue. The third and final scenario is undoubtedly also about forgiveness proper and who complements or substitutes for the human victim is God or someone acting in the name of God. Unless one is fully absorbed in current therapeutic and secular perspectives on forgiveness, this is a well-known feature of the Christian approach to forgiveness. Sometimes, especially when the victims are dead (or alive but unwilling or unable to forgive), it is said that forgiveness (like vengeance) is in the hands of God alone. In this case, divine forgiveness appears as something impenetrable and beyond the limit of what we human beings can accomplish or enact, and the introduction of the religious perspective testifies to the limits of what we can accomplish. More commonly, the introduction of God is thought to provide human actors with certain duties, powers, or possibilities of “participation” in what would otherwise have been impossible. According to the theologian Richard Harries, “all Christian churches have a means of assuring penitents that they are forgiven” (Harries, 2003, p. 73). As summarized by Mark Amstutz, Catholic theologians believe that Christ transferred the authority to forgive sins to his apostles, commanding them to forgive in his name. Thus, given the proper conditions, Catholic priests can give absolution to wrongdoers (Amstutz, 2005). According to L.G. Jones – a Protestant theologian – any Christian confronted with the call for forgiveness “is empowered and even

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commanded to act for God in the process of forgiveness” (Jones, 1995, p. 288). Wondering how a Christian facing a repentant mass murderer’s plea for forgiveness (the situation of Simon Wiesenthal in The Sunflower, for instance) could respond, Jones offers a little fictional scenario that reads: “I cannot speak for your victims. However, I am called to speak to you as a child of God, and as such I am empowered as a disciple of Jesus Christ to pronounce forgiveness in God’s name […] in the name of God I embrace you, and tell you: ‘Your sins are forgiven’ ” (ibid.). A comparable perspective has been offered by Alan J. Torrance: We are not only permitted to forgive but obliged and indeed commanded to forgive others – and that means all others. Where we are not entitled to ­forgive, the crucified Rabbi is. And where we are unable to forgive, we are given to participate in his once-and-for-all forgiveness and to live our lives in that light and from that center – not the least in the political realm. (Torrance, 2006, p. 75)

From such Christian perspectives, the question of forgiveness is certainly not over and done with even if the primary victims are dead. Indeed, the granting of forgiveness is not reserved exclusively for the earthly victim of human wrongdoing alone, and forgiveness is not only a question about the repair of human relationships, but also a question about the relationship between the wrongdoer and God. Even though this relationship cannot be isolated from the way in which the perpetrator relates to his or her victims, the very idea of its reality introduces an additional sphere of forgiveness. Now, what is the relationship between the risk of neglecting or forgetting the victims, on the one hand, and the introduction of God or the ideas of being empowered to pronounce forgiveness in his name on the other hand? Philosopher Trudy Govier mentions that the focus of Christian tradition on the restoration of the relationship between the sinner and God “may seem to diminish the significance of the victim.” Apart from urging the victim to forgive the offender, there “may be little attention to the hurt of the victim or to his or her need for healing or vindication” (2002, p. 159). Drawing on the theologian Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, Govier cautions against a Christian preoccupation with those who do wrong rather than those who suffer it. Historical testimony of this danger has been provided by Katharina von Kellenbach in her study of German prison chaplains counseling of Nazi perpetrators in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Kellenbach shows that the pastoral enactment of forgiveness was often conducted in the absence of concern about the suffering and fate of the concrete victims of the perpetrators. Indeed, according to Kellenbach’s findings, the pastoral

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forgiveness of sins was often simply a license to the perpetrators to feel released from the responsibility for their past without any or much engagement with the suffering they had brought upon their victims. As Kellenbach makes clear, neither Protestant nor Catholic doctrines of forgiveness and reconciliation preclude concern about the victim. Theological license of the practice of forgiving of the perpetrator in the name of God can be tied to expectations that the former perpetrator will use the gift to pay heed to the situation of his victims (cf. Kellenbach et al., 2006, p. 228). But the priest or the perpetrator are not obliged to seek or obtain the consent of the victim in order to engage in the forgiveness process. Therefore, it is possible to forget or bypass the actual victim: forgiveness can be offered and accepted and discussed without concern about or recalling of the perpetrator’s actual human victims. Insofar as Christian theologies of reconciliation allow divine or priestly forgiveness of perpetrators without consultation or empathy with their victims, the Christian advocacy of forgiveness becomes particularly susceptible to the risk of forgetting the victims (Kellenbach et al., 2006, p. 271). Neglect of the victims can be related to a variety of different motives and explanations, for example, national solidarity and the banal reality of personal complicity. The more interesting question is whether certain kinds of Christian ethics or theology further a preoccupation with the perpetrator. “Our God,” writes Desmond Tutu, “was one who had a particularly soft spot for sinners … a God who had a bias for sinners” (Tutu, 1999, p. 84). It is tempting to use this as evidence of a bias for the perpetrators, but the bias referred to by Tutu is probably a bias in relation to the devout and self-righteous believer, rather than the victim. I do not think that proponents of forgiveness or restorative justice are not concerned about the victims. But perhaps, “since love of victims come relatively naturally, the preponderance of effort is devoted to the cultivation of love for the offender” (Acorn, 2004, p. 29). Lurking behind these questions of the place of the victims in pastoral counseling of perpetrators one faces the very idea that was expressed in the excerpts from Jones and Torrance, that is, the religious belief in forgiveness granted to everyone already by God. How can acting on this idea escape being tied to a radical kind of religious suspension of an ethical responsibility to treat the victim as an autonomous moral being? Indeed, how to describe a God, who forgives persons for the atrocities they have committed against other persons, if not as forgetful of the rights and autonomy of the victims? Of course, if he only forgave sinners for their sins against the divine will or the moral order, then the charge would be dismissed. But it is very clear that more than that is at stake. Whether one listens to Jones or Torrance there is

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no indication that the forgiveness offered by God is somehow only partial or only relevant to the relationship between God and the sinner. More interestingly, both Jones and Torrance are emphatic and explicit on the point that their understanding of the whole scenario does not forget or do wrong to the victims. Indeed, in the essay authored by Torrance, the claim is that only on Christian ground can one advocate forgiveness after mass atrocity and avoid compromising the victims. Only God can forgive in a manner that upholds the dignity of the victim, and only on Christian grounds can peace be served without being “inexcusably ethically compromised” (Torrance, 2006, p. 74). According to Torrance, anyone advocating forgiveness on nonChristian ground will get stuck in the face of the moral fact that forgiveness offered by anyone other (and here the reference is to other human beings) than the victim is an “illegitimate appropriation” and a “supreme form of dishonor, namely to offer on behalf of those who have been brutalized and are now dead something that is theirs to offer and that they themselves may not have wished to be offered […] the instigation of a further evil against the dignity of the voiceless dead” (Torrance, 2006, p. 69). That is, on secular or non-Christian ground we will not be able to forgive genocidaires and other mass murderers without ethical compromise. And this is, so Torrance, deeply disturbing because without forgiveness there can be no true reconciliation or no morally justified coming to terms with past injustices (p. 73). However, as already indicated, theology provides the warrant that escapes any other perspective and it comes in the form of a belief in the “vicarious humanity” of Christ: “In the crucified God we have the One who is alone entitled to forgive on behalf of the victim (both the primary and secondary victim) because the victim is ‘in him’ and he ‘in the victim’” (p. 74). Raising the objection whether this does not fail to take seriously the particularity of suffering, Torrance elaborates that Christ’s vicarious humanity means that “the incarnate Son identifies concretely with the particular pain and suffering of the particular victim” (p. 75). For reasons that will be clear by now, I do not think that there is reason to be particularly disturbed by the prospect of not being able to sustain an advocacy of forgiveness of persons responsible of the most horrible atrocities, and I do not think that an acceptance of the limits of forgiveness leaves us with nothing but ethically appalling modes of dealing with the past. Yet, what seems to me most interesting here is the concrete example of the point where the advocacy of forgiveness becomes distinctively and irreducibly religious. If Torrance is right, the kind of beliefs and visions one needs to embrace in order to endorse or even understand the theological justification of post-atrocity forgiveness are deeply religious, indeed mysterious, and

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takes us far beyond any secular ethical perspective. Of course, Christian faith and dogma might be supposed to function by virtue of the absurd or to be offensive to reason. But can any modern secular and pluralist society support the advocacy of forgiveness in the sociopolitical realm if the moral legitimacy of the entire enterprise really rests on an endorsement of deeply religious and sectarian theological beliefs? And most importantly in this contest: Can the advocacy of forgiveness on these grounds escape imposing Christian faith on victims who might not share such beliefs at all? A discussion of this would lead directly into present debates about the place of religion in public reason and politics. These are substantial questions that must be addressed in no uncertain terms.

Praise, Sacralization, and Redemption Peter Berger has argued that some acts are so morally horrible that even secular persons – groping for an adequate response – need to reach out for a religious concept of damnation (Berger, 1970, p. 87). Interestingly, something similar has been suggested by witnesses to the enactment of forgiveness of perpetrators of torture and other severe human rights violations. For example, reflecting, from a secular or humanistic and psychological point of view, on stories of forgiveness from the South African TRC, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2006, p. 95) writes: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that there must be something divine about forgiveness expressed in the context of tragedy. How else can we understand how such words can flow from the lips of one wronged so irreparably? Archbishop Tutu, whenever we were witnesses to such inexplicable human responses at a public hearing of the TRC, would be driven to call for silence ‘because we are on holy ground.’ There seems to be something spiritual, even sacramental, about forgiveness – a sign that moves and touches those who are witnesses to its enactment.” Indeed, the conclusion that Gobodo-Madikizela finds it “hard to resist” is readily and enthusiastically embraced by Desmond Tutu. During his time as the chair of the TRC as well as in subsequent speeches around the world, he has described the encounter with forgiving victims as a “deeply moving and humbling” experience (Tutu 1999, p. 271). As Tutu recalled it in a speech at the University of Virginia (whispering, according to the transcript): “I said, ‘Let’s keep quiet, because we are in the presence of something holy. Really, we ought to take off our shoes, because we are standing on holy ground’” (Tutu, 1998, p. 5, 2002, p. xii). This kind of sacralization is often related to the telling of anecdotes about the turning point where forgiveness

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overcomes anger. For instance, on a host of occasions, Tutu has told the story of a hearing about the so-called Bisho massacre where South African security forces killed 30 unarmed participants in a protest march. Tutu tells of the tensions building up during the hearing. Yet, due to one of the former perpetrator’s unexpected apology, a startling change of mood took place and the audience broke out in a deafening applause: “It was as if someone had waved a magic wand that transformed anger and tension into display of communal forgiveness and acceptance of erstwhile perpetrators. We could only be humbled by it all” (Tutu, 1999, p. 151). The telling of such stories of “magical” transformation is recurrent in the writings of proponents of forgiveness and restorative justice, and they share a number of features. In all cases, there are stories about unexpected-yet-real healing transformations of the relationship between formerly antagonistic parties, individuals, as well as groups. The stories culminate in the turning point where a catharsis or a breakthrough of mutual sympathy allegedly takes place. The tenor is always uplifting (i.e., change or transformation is possible, anger and bitterness can be overcome through forgiving) and the narrator witnesses to an experience of something holy, religious, or “magical.”18 This kind of celebration of the “grace” of forgiveness can be part of an edifying message of hope. In several contexts, Tutu tells how devastating it was to hear of the crimes and harms committed during the years of apartheid. However, he also always adds, that “paradoxically one comes away from it exhilarated by the revelation of the goodness of people” (Tutu, 2002, p. xi). Why? Because the testimonies of the evil and suffering were only one side of the picture: “Gloriously, there was another side that would be revealed as well. It was the side that showed people who by rights should have been filled with bitterness … Instead they were to demonstrate a remarkable generosity of spirit … in their willingness to forgive” (Tutu, 1999, p. 144). Even God is pleased by the spectacle of the forgiving victims. Indeed being willing to forgive, victims are not only doing what will release themselves and strengthen the nation, more than that the readiness to forgive is vested with religious-redemptive significance. As Tutu puts it: There may indeed have been moments when God may have regretted creating us. But I am certain there have been many more times when God has looked and seen all these wonderful people who have shone in the dark night of evil and torture and abuses and suffering; shone as they demonstrated their nobility of spirit, their magnanimity as they have been ready to forgive, and so they have dispelled the murkiness […] It has filled people with new hope that despair, darkness, anger and resentment and hatred would not have the last word. (Tutu, 1999, p. 158)

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Some Christian advocates of forgiveness deliberately try to keep religious language, gestures, and reasoning in the background or wholly out of the way as they promote forgiveness in the sociopolitical or public realm (Bole et al., 2004). As is well-known and clearly shown earlier, Desmond Tutu did the exact opposite and brought into play the full panoply of religious practices and expressions, from the wearing religious regalia and employing religious practices such as prayer or the singing of psalms to an extravagant enactment of characteristically religious modes of discourse such as praise and glorification, uplift and redemption, and references to religious ideals and sources of authority. For example, as Tutu supports the case for unconditional forgiveness by mentioning that: “Jesus did not wait until those who were nailing him to the cross had asked for forgiveness. He was ready as they drove the nails, to pray to his Father to forgive them and he even provided an excuse for what they were doing” (Tutu, 1999, p. 272). Now, do such uses of religious/Christian discourse and practices expose the victims to any particular hazards? One may argue that the use of terms like “holy,” “sacramental,” or “magic” are brought into play too quickly, exemplifying a hasty leap beyond what could be the result of human interaction and what could be explored on ethical or sociopsychological ground. There might also be theological reasons to worry about invoking the perspective of God and – as has been argued elsewhere – there is a need for more skepticism and less sentimentalism in the reception of the anecdotes of success told by advocates of forgiveness and restorative justice.19 But, and this is what is essential here: do any of these or possible other concerns relate specifically to the question about the rights, needs, or voice of victims? I would suggest that this kind of religious praise and celebration of forgiveness offer an all too sanguine perspective. There is apparently no such thing as inappropriate forgiving and there is a fancy for the telling of uplifting stories and redemption. For example, when asked about his involvement in a BBC reality show, where victims met with perpetrators from the conflict in Northern Ireland, Tutu offered his usual kind of statement that they had experienced some “extraordinary moments,” and that it was “like something divine had intervened, and it was exhausting, but eminently exhilarating.”20 One has to look elsewhere to find reports of examples and reasons for concern or caution.21 Insofar as the “boosterism” of forgiveness in religious language provides a distorted picture of the value and promise of forgiveness, it seems to me on a par with irresponsible “marketing.” Not the least when religious leaders appeal to victims to forgive unconditionally, regardless of

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whether or not perpetrators have provided signs of contrition or repentance. Consider, for example, Tutu’s reference to Christ on Golgatha (above) or this passage from the report of the TRC in Sierra Leone (authored by chair, Joseph C. Humper, Bishop of the United Methodist Church of Sierra Leone): Those who have confronted the past will be able to forgive others for the wrongs committed against them. Where the act of forgiveness is genuine it does not matter whether the perpetrator declines to express remorse. Learning to forgive those who have wronged us is the first step we can take towards healing our traumatised nation. (TRC Sierra Leone, 2004, p. 3)

In relation to victims who are Christians, I wonder whether such statements or the invocation of Jesus on the cross and the attitude of God to his creation put improper pressure on the believer to comply with what is at least partially also at political agenda. However, the most important problem emerges as a variant of often rehearsed concerns about the enactment religion in the public realm. Obviously one cannot say that the given examples of advocatory discourse forget or diminish the victim as such. No, to the contrary, victims are the focal point of the discourse of praise and they are celebrated publicly for their significance to the nation and the preservation of an optimistic view of the world. However, what about those victims who said they would not forgive? And what about the possible reasons not to forgive? They are forgotten or ignored, because the glorification of forgiveness assumes and imposes a deep moral and religious consensus. This is particularly clear in the quasi-ritualistic enactment of silence in the face of the holy. Literally speaking, it silences or makes inappropriate the voicing of dissent and resistance – especially when the discourse is enacted with charisma and from a privileged position of power. In the essay by Alan J. Torrance, the author defends the direct use of Christian language by proponents of forgiveness operating in the secular political context. That is, sometimes one “simply paints things as one sees them in the hope that, by God’s creative presence, others may be given the eyes to see the truth that one is affirming. One may argue for forgiveness, as Tutu did, in the conviction that opponents will glimpse the light and healing that attends it” (Torrance, 2006, p. 67). Indeed, Tutu’s ability and determination to do exactly this might be one of the reasons why his advocacy has been praised by many as particularly moving. Yet, the objection stated earlier remains: the discourse pays homage to a strongly Christian message of hope and redemption at the expense of an acknowledgment of the more cumbersome phenomenological reality of victims. As has been

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argued by Grunebaum-Ralph and Stier (1999, p. 151), the discourse of reconciliation in and by religious communities “can be used to displace precisely the trauma that this discourse seeks to ameliorate.”

Religion and the Advocacy of Forgiveness I opened this chapter by claiming a need for a closer critical look at the question whether the advocacy of forgiveness after mass atrocities can turn its back on the victims. Focusing exclusively on Christian sources and examples, I have argued that, indeed, the advocacy of forgiveness can become a liability to the victims, and it is important to be alert to this when forgiveness is mobilized as the key to peace, reconciliation, or the transformation of hearts and minds. More specifically, I have presented a fivefold cluster of pitfalls and problems that shows why “Ozick’s challenge” should be taken seriously as we think about the ethics of promoting forgiveness. It is not necessary to recapitulate the specific reasons for caution. Instead, and as promised in the beginning, I would like to surmise that it is – de facto, not necessarily de jure (i.e., in principle or forever) – particularly important to pay heed to Ozick’s challenge when forgiveness is promoted by advocates who speaks and acts on Christian grounds, relying on Christian commitments and possibly using the religious authority, language, and practices available to religious thinkers and leaders. The idea is emphatically not that all problems disappear if or when forgiveness is mobilized by secular political authorities or adopted and promoted as a purely therapeutic strategy. So, why not simply fire a “broadside” against any kind of cheapening and malpractice? I am much drawn to take this approach and I have elsewhere focused on discontents arising from the therapeutic and political use of forgiveness in responses to genocide (Brudholm, 2008; Brudholm and Rosoux, forthcoming). Indeed, I fully endorse a more general critique like the one that has been offered by Charles Griswold in his philosophical exploration of the conditions upon which the exercise of forgiveness can be considered a virtue. As Griswold has it: When forgiveness becomes the public rallying cry, played out on daytime television soap operas, encouraged by civic and religious leaders, and praised far and wide for its power to heal, its slide into confusion and vulgarity is inevitable. It becomes identified with “closure,” it is sentimentalized and transformed into therapy, and the criteria for its practice are obscured. It melds into forgetfulness of wrong, and is granted all too easily, once the expected public theatrics are performed. (Griswold, 2007, p. 182)

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Nevertheless, I do think that the upside-down version of the theological claim to “special standing” deserves some scrutiny. Maybe a certain ambivalence pertains to the traits that are often held to speak in favor of the Christian advocacy, allegedly establishing it as an asset to the promotion of peace and reconciliation or even as the most helpful, rich, and ethically justified kind of advocacy. Trends in the Christian literature and practice of forgiveness provides testimony of an extraordinarily deep commitment to forgiveness, sometimes the endorsement of unconditional forgiveness and the promotion of forgiveness as a Christian duty or a sign of the degree to which one is able to practice Christian love and true humanity. Christian religious leaders can draw on the powers of religious language, on ritual and divine authority as well as the ability of religious discourse to “recode” or “frame” certain acts as sacred or holy (cf. Lincoln, 2003). Add to this, what Tutu called a bias for the sinner; the idea of a divine license of “third party” forgiveness; tendencies to vilify resentment; a stake in the upholding of an optimistic worldview and a view that we can grow and learn through suffering. To be sure, the charismatic religious leader might be extraordinarily capable of tapping into the resources “deep within the faith of the people” (Torrance, 2006, p. 45), and moving people to embrace forgiveness might be a peculiar “asset” of faith-based peacemaking (cf. Smock, 2006). However, in the face of mass atrocity, the whole cluster of traits emerges not simply as assets and advantages. These and other aspects of religious interventions can be employed in ways that come out – as I hope to have shown through the earlier sections – as reasons for caution. As a corrective to writings on religious contributions to the promotion of reconciliation that tend to dwell on the value and constructive potential of religion (cf. Philpott, 2007), I would like to suggest that the inclusion of religious actors and their ability to draw on religious language, beliefs, and authority is a genuinely mixed blessing; possibly an asset in various ways (a possibility on which I have admittedly not been focused here), but sometimes also a liability in terms of how societies deal with mass atrocities. As emphasized by Arne Grøn in his contribution to this volume, religion – as a human enterprise – is marked by ambiguity. The ambiguity of religion as both a source of atrocious violence and visions of peace is probably acknowledged in all current writings on religious contributions to peacemaking. However, what is often evaded is exactly the point that the ambiguity carries on even into the situation where religion is used to promote goods like forgiveness and reconciliation. This chapter is meant as a challenge. It does not argue or conclude that it is morally impossible to advocate post-atrocity forgiveness in any form and on any level whatsoever. I neither can nor desire to exclude the possibility of a kind of advocacy in which the given problems and reasons for caution

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have been appropriately dealt with. But the degree to which Christian advocates of forgiveness are able to rectify the shortcomings appearing in practice and theory will determine to what extent they can be seen as providing a valuable and ethically sound resource in contexts of conflict resolution and reconciliation. At the end of this examination of pitfalls and problems it might be objected, that at least the Christian advocacy of forgiveness comes with a tenor of optimism in relation to which what I have contributed is only negative critique and pessimism. So, let me finish with a passage from John Dewey’s Ethics, not only because it suggests a more dialectic understanding of the relationship between optimism and pessimism, but also because it eloquently captures what might ultimately be at stake when forgiveness is pursued in hasty and sentimental ways: In fact a certain intellectual pessimism, in the sense of a steadfast willingness to uncover sore points, to acknowledge and search for abuses, to note how presumed good often serves as a cloak for actual bad, is a necessary part of the moral optimism which actively devotes itself to making the right prevail. Any other view reduces the aspiration and hope, which are the essence of moral courage, to a cheerful animal buoyancy; and, in its failure to see the evil done to others in its thoughtless pursuit of what it calls good, is next door to brutality, to a brutality bathed in the atmosphere of sentimentality and flourishing the catchwords of idealism. (cited from Putnam, 2004, p. 11)

Notes 1

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The gacaca tribunals were introduced in Rwanda in the face of the overwhelming problems facing the criminal courts after the genocide in 1994. Traditionally, the gacacas were a community level instrument of dispute resolution, dealing for example with issues concerning marriage, land, succession and aimed toward the restoration of social order. For examples of post-atrocity forgiveness-advocacy on secular ground, see Digeser (2001), Gobodo-Madikizela (2006), Govier (2002), and Staub et al. (2005). I have deliberately avoided getting sidetracked in more substantial discussion of the nature or best account of forgiveness – a task which could easily consume the entire chapter. The literature is vast and many works in the bibliography at the end of this chapter includes attention to the question. Particularly extensive and/or interesting discussions can be found in Griswold (2007), Murphy and Hampton (1988), Walker (2006b), Jankélévitch (2005), Derrida (2001), and Hieronymi (2001). The excerpt from Ozick belongs in a comment to Simon Wiesenthal’s account of an encounter with a dying Nazi in The Sunflower. Cf. Wiesenthal (1998). In Brudholm (2008, pp. 50–56), I argue the case for a concept of forgiveness “boosterism” in order to supplement the theological concern with cheap grace with an account with a wider scope and a more clear focus on the public advocacy of forgiveness. A couple of terminological clarifications: “Advocacy” means here any kind of promotion of forgiveness – whether in actual practice or in the form of theoretical writings which argue

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or develop the case for forgiveness after mass atrocities “Mass atrocities” – in accordance with what has come to be referred to as “atrocity crimes” – include genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (cf. the introduction to this volume). The issue is related to a much broader and more fundamental discussion whether forgiveness is a human moral virtue that can be accounted for within a strictly secular terms of reference, or whether it is somehow inescapably religious and only fully “at home” in a Christian framework. For theological reflections, see Adams (1991), Volf (2005), and Biggar (2001). For reflections on the issue from secular-philosophical perspectives, see Murphy (2003). Amstutz also quotes, with approval the South African writer C. J. Arnold’s claim, that “we never recover until we forgive” (Amstutz, 2005, p. 63). More probing and nuanced treatments of revenge and the vindictive emotions can be found in Murphy (2003) and Solomon (1999). For concrete cases, see Jacoby (1988) and Tobias and Zinke (2000). For an example of this perspective on angry or unforgiving victims, see Villa-Vicencio (2000) and Brudholm (2008) for a critique. I have elsewhere offered a detailed reading and discussion of Jean Améry’s reflections on the victim’s ressentiments (cf. Brudholm, 2008). Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752), one of the most quoted sources in modern philosophical writings on forgiveness, preceded a sermon on forgiveness with one on resentment – which he considered to be our “weapon” against injustice and cruelty (Butler, 1897, first published in 1726). Also, in 1946 Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a remarkably interesting and, even more remarkably, mostly unnoticed essay on “Anger and Forgiveness” (Niebuhr, 1946). In present theology, similarly complex perspectives have been presented by Nicholas Wolterstorff (2006), Gregory L. Jones (1995), and Nigel Biggar (2001). See, for example, Hatzfeld (2006) and Brudholm and Rosoux (forthcoming). The quote by John Dryden originally appeared in his The Conquest of Granada (Part ii. Act i. Sc. 2). The memorandum is signed by D. Wurm, D. Niemöller, and D. Hartenstein. It is only accessible in various archives. The copy consulted for this chapter is placed in the archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D C, and a copy is by the author. I would like to thank Katharina von Kellenbach for making me aware of its existence. An emphasis of the way in which both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches felt called upon to defend old corrupt elites and to repel everything that went further than a highly abstract acknowledgment of guilt can also be found in Frei (2000, p. 164). See Wolterstorff (2006) for a Christian perspective and discussion of the issue. For an interesting critique of the use of “nirvana stories” among proponents of restorative justice and forgiveness, see Acorn (2004). The emphasis on the anecdotes of success speaks to what one hopes to be possible, and it is alluring to suspend disbelief. Nonetheless, in most cases the stories are not told by “neutral” witnesses, but rather by advocates pursuing such moments in practice or partly relying on them to promote the cause of religion in conflict-resolution or restorative justice practices in the aftermath of political mass violence. See  http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/02_february/14/truth. shtml, Retrieved October 30, 2007. For example, in an essay on the same BBC series, Jonathan Freedland referred to the following episode: “Sylvia Hackett, whose husband Dermot was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, has clearly moved beyond wanting to do to Michael Stone what he and his comrades did to her. But on Monday night’s programme she seemed to feel that was not enough; she forced herself to walk over to Stone and shake his hand. When he placed a second hand on hers, she recoiled and fled from the room. It was too much. She may not have wanted to kill Stone, but nor did she want to be his friend. Yet our present day notions of forgiveness confuse the two” (Freedland, 2006).

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References Acorn, A. (2004) Compulsory Compassion (Vancouver: UBC Press). Adams, M. M. (1991) “Forgiveness: A Christian Model,” Faith and Philosophy 8: 277–304. Améry, J. (1999) At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Trans. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta Books). Amstutz, M. R. (2005) The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield). Auerbach, Y. (2005) “Forgiveness and Reconciliation: The Religious Dimension,” Terrorism and Political Violence 17: 469–485. Barnett, V. (2005) “The creation of ethical ‘gray zones’ in the German Protestant Church: Reflections on the Historical Quest for Ethical Clarity,” in J. Petropoulos and J. K. Roth (eds.), Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York: Berghahn Books), pp. 360–372. Berger, P. (1970) A Rumour of Angels (New York: Anchor). Biggar, N. (2001) “Forgiveness in the Twentieth Century: A Review of the Literature, 1901–2001,” in A. McFadyen and M. Sarot (eds.), Forgiveness and Truth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark), pp. 181–218. Bole, W., Christiansen, D., and Hennemeyer, R. T. (2004) Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace (Washington, D C: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). Bonhoeffer, D. (1963) The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan). Brudholm, T. (2008) Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Brudholm, T. and Rosoux, V. 2009 “The Unforgiving: Reflections on the the Resistance to Forgiveness after Atrocity”, in Law & contemporary problems, Spring 2009 (forthcoming). Butler, J. (1897) Sermons by Joseph Butler, D.C.L. Sometime Lord Bishop of Furham (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Derrida, J. (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge). Digeser, P. (2001) Political Forgiveness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Freedland, J. (2006) “Forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to love your husband’s killer,” The Guardian, (March 8). Cf. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/ story/0,,1725912,00.html Frei, N. (2000) “Von deutscher Erfindungskraft oder: Die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit,” in G. Smith Gary (ed.), Hannah Arendt Revisited: Eichmann in Jerusalem und die Folgen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), pp. 163–176. Garrard, E. (2003) “Forgiveness and the Holocaust,” in E. Garrard and G. Scarre (eds.), Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 231–245. Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2006) A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Govier, T. (2002) Forgiveness and Revenge (London: Routledge). Griswold, C. (2007) Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Grunebaum-Ralph, H. and Stier, O. (1999) “Remains: Remembering Shoah, Forgetting Reconciliation,” in J. Cochrane et al. (eds.), Facing the Truth: South African Faith Communities and the Truth & Reconciliation Commissions (Claremont, South Africa: David Phillips). Harries, R. (2003) After the Evil (Oxford University Press). Hatzfeld, J. (2006) Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. Trans. L. Coverdale (New York: Picador). Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books). Hieronymi, P. (2001) “Articulating an Uncompromising Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62: 529–556. Jacoby, S. (1988) Wild Justice : The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper & Row). Jankélévitch, V. (2005) Forgiveness. Trans. A. Kelly (Chicago: Chicago University Press). (1996) “Should We Pardon Them?” Trans. A. Hobart, in Critical Inquiry, Spring 1996 (Chicago: University of Chicago), pp. 552–572. Jones, L. G. (1995) Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans). Kellenbach, K. v. (2001) “Christian Discourses of Forgiveness and the Perpetrators,” in Roth, J. K. and Maxwell, E. (eds.), Remembering for the Future (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 725–731. Kellenbach, K. v., Krondorfer, B., and Reck, N. (eds.) (2006) Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945 (München: Güterloher Verlagshaus). Lamb, S. (2006) “Forgiveness, Women, and Responsibility to the Group,” Journal of Human Rights 5 (1): 45–60. Langer, L. (1998) Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Levi, P. (1987) Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. S. Woolf (New York: Collier Books). (1988) The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books). Lincoln, B. (2003) Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Murphy, J. G. (2003) Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits (New York: Oxford University Press). Murphy, J. G. and Hampton, J. (1988) Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Müller-Fahrenholz, G. (1997) The Art of Forgiveness – Theological Reflections on Healing and Reconciliation (Geneva: World Council of Churches). Niebuhr, R. (1946) Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermond for To-day and To-morrow (London: S.C.M. Press). Ozick, C. (1998) “Notes Toward a Mediation on ‘Forgiveness,’ ” in Wiesenthal 1998, pp. 213–220. Philpott, D. (2007) “Religion, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice: The State of the Field,” SSRC Working Paper, accessed at: http://www.ssrc.org/. Pollefeyt, D.(2004a) “Ethics, Forgiveness and the Unforgivable after Auschwitz,” in D.  Pollefeyt (ed.), Incredible Forgiveness. Christian Ethics between Fanaticism and Reconciliation (Leuven: Peeters), pp. 121–160.

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(2004b) “Forgiveness after the Holocaust,” in D. Patterson and J. K. Roth (eds.), After-Words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice (Seattle: University of Washington Press), pp. 55–68. Putnam, H. (2004), Ethics Without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Ricoeur, P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Smedes, L. (1996) The Art of Forgiving (Nashville, TN: Moorings Publishing). Smith, B. H. (1997) Belief and Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Smock, D. R. (ed.) (2006) Religious Contributions to Peacemaking: When Religion Brings Peace, Not War (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace (PEaceworks, No. 55)). Solomon, R. C. (1999) “Justice v. Vengeance: On Law and the Satisfaction of Emotion,” in S. A. Bandes (ed.), The Passions of Law (New York: New York University Press), pp. 123–148. Staub, E., Pearlman, A. L., Gubin, A., and Hagengimana, A. (2005) “Healing, Reconciliation, Forgiving and the Prevention of Violence after Genocide or Mass Killing: An Intervention and its Experimental Evaluation in Rwanda,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24 (3), 297–334. Stover, Eric (2005) The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague (Philadelphia: Penn). Tobias, J. G. and Zinke, P. (2000) Nakam – Jüdische Rache an NS-Tätern (Hamburg: Konkret Litteratur Verlag). Torrance, A. J. (2006) “The Theological Grounds for Advocating Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Sociopolitical Realm,” in D. Philpott (ed.), Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press). Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sierra Leone (2004) Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Accra: GPL Press). The entire report can be retrieved from: http://www.trcsierraleone.org/drwebsite/publish/index.shtml Tutu, D. M. (1998) “Reconciliation in Post-Apartherid South Africa: Experiences of the Truth Commission,” accessed at http://www.virginia.edu/nobel/ Tutu, D. M. (1999) No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday). Tutu, D. M. (2002) “Foreword,” in R. G. Helmick and R. L. Petersen (eds.), Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press). Tutu, D. M. (2004) “South Africa, Africa and the World,” Conflict, Security & Develop­ ment 4 (2): 199–205. Verdoolaege, A. (2006) “Managing Reconciliation at the Human Rights Violations Hearings of the South African TRC,” Journal of Human Rights 5 (1): 61–80. Villa-Vicencio, C. (2000) “Getting on with Life: A Move towards Reconciliation,” in C. Villa-Vicencio and W. Verwoerd (eds.), Looking Back Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press), pp. 199–209.

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Volf, M. (2005) Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Michigan: Zondervan). Walker, M. (2006a) “The Cycle of Violence,” Journal of Human Rights 5 (1): 81–106. (2006b) Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press). Wallace, Richard J. (1994) Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Weissmark, M. S. (2004) Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II (New York: Oxford University Press). Wiesenthal, S. (1998) The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Revised and expanded edition edited by H. J. Cargas and B. V. Fetterman (New York: Shocken Books). Wilson, R. (2001) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wolterstorff, Nicholas (2006) “The Place of Forgiveness in the Actions of the State,” in D. Philpott (ed.), Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press), pp. 87–112. Wurm, D. et al. (1949) “Memorandum by the Evangelical Church in Germany on the Question of War Crimes Trials before American Military Courts.” The memo was “Not for Publication,” but printed in numbers by the Officin Gust (Stürner: Waiblingen-Stuttgart).

Part III: Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities

J ohn Torpey 7.  Making Whole: The Ethics and Politics of “Coming to Terms with the Past”

The idea of reconstruction, of “making whole what has been smashed,”1 is a powerful one in contemporary culture. So is the phrase which has acquired the character of a mantra for those seeking to deal with social problems seen as rooted in history: namely, the idea of “coming to terms with the past.” In this phrase, the past is regarded not so much as a “foreign country,”2 but as an alienated part of ourselves – a part cut off from us yet confronting us as an alien being and continuing to do us harm despite being “over.” The parallels in this figure of thought with Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism are hard to miss; for Marx, despite their human origins, the world of man-made objects had taken up a position “over against” man, dominating the present as congealed past exertion and as the bastard progeny of an inhumane economic order. The past is widely seen in similar terms today – a Pandora’s box of unresolved wrongs that cause persistent troubles for the living. This chapter explores the contemporary concern to come to terms with the past at two levels – first, through a more general and philosophical discussion of efforts in the past century or so to address the meaning of the past for the present and, second, via a discussion of the political and ethico-­religious motifs associated with coming to terms with the legacy of slavery in the United States. I argue that (1) the concern to right past wrongs is problematic on a variety of grounds, such as the tendency to impute quasi-religious significance to problems of more mundane character and that (2) ethics must confront politics in order to set things right in the present.

The Problem of the Past The contemporary preoccupation with “coming to terms with the past” recalls Nietzsche’s adumbration of a “critical” history conducted in the service of 157

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“life.” Nietzsche’s arresting discussion of this matter, which includes a number of strikingly contemporary notes despite having been written over a century ago, bears quoting at length: [E]very past is worthy to be condemned [because] human violence and weakness have always played a mighty role in them. … [S]ince we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and inplant [sic] in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate. …3

Nietzsche here reminds us that we cannot escape the past and, moreover, that despite the ways in which one might say that there is “too much” past, we sometimes need to address, condemn, and discard the past in order to move forward. This sentiment seems very close to the heart of the widespread contemporary desire to “come to terms with the past.” Still, Nietzsche suggests that “we” – all of us – are the products of past crimes; he would doubt that there is much point in reserving guilt for some and victimhood for others (beyond those directly meriting those attributions), and would not likely imagine the retributive stance toward history that is now so widespread. He is arguing instead that we must recognize the chain of injustice that leads to the present, try on the basis of that knowledge to acquire a new understanding about where we have come from and thus adopt new “habits,” and move on. Note that Nietzsche’s conception of critical history stops at the point of “knowledge” on the part of those who come later; he would surely eschew as fatuous the notion of a recovered “wholeness” that underlies much contemporary work on the consequences of past history. Some argue, however, that knowledge is “mere” knowledge, but not acknowledgment, and hence not enough to do anything adequate for those wronged in the past. In contrast to this perspective, Alvin Gouldner has suggested that the quest for objective knowledge is itself motivated by a search for wholeness in the sense of overcoming the limited, partial, and partisan perspectives on our existence that have held sway heretofore. Gouldner argues that the idea of objectivity involves (among other things) “the hope of dissolving the differences that divide and the distances that separate men by uniting them in a



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single, peace-bringing vision of the world.”4 From this perspective, “coming to terms with the past” entails a fuller, more complete rendering of the past; it recalls E. P. Thompson’s avowal that he was “seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”5 To these we would now add a variety of groups suffering more from inadequate social “recognition” than exploited in terms of “redistribution.”6 The impulse in recent years to “come to terms with the past” and to “make whole what has been smashed” is bound up with a search for wholeness with deep religious and human roots. It bears a resemblance to the motifs of “metaphysical guilt” in Karl Jaspers’s Question of German Guilt. In trying to make sense of the “liability” (Haftung) of the German population for its wrongdoing during World War II, Jaspers argued that “there exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each ­co-­responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world. … That I live after such a thing has happened weights upon me as indelible guilt. … God alone can judge such guilt.”7 This sensibility, which we might characterize as “survivor’s guilt,” has led many concerned parties to seek the prospect of wholeness offered in “coming to terms with the past.” It is perhaps worth noting here that Jaspers’s student and friend Hannah Arendt viewed this aspect of Jaspers’s account of German guilt as overly freighted with religious residues, and hence insufficiently “this-worldly” in its understanding of the nature and consequences of German guilt. In her view, Jaspers’s concept of metaphysical guilt (in the words of Anson Rabinbach) “completely desocializes and depoliticizes the concept of human solidarity.”8 Jaspers tended to regard the perpetrators’ embrace of guilt and the attendant moral purification as essential to renewing a riven moral order. For him, the overarching theological conception of reparation involved the restoration of a community in need of healing. Yet it is not clear that such a community ever existed to be put back together in the first place. In contrast, Arendt was inclined toward a more forward-looking approach to dealing with the past that, as Andrew Schaap has put it, “seeks not to restore an imagined moral order that has been violated but to initiate new relations between members of a polity. … A reconciliatory moment is not construed as a final shared understanding or convergence of world views, but as a disclosure of a world in common from diverse and possibly irreconcilable perspectives.”9 Arendt’s approach to coming to terms with the past avoids the fallacious notion that this effort can restore some mythical political status quo ante that in fact never existed, or that we can (or should) ever

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achieve a past upon which everyone agrees. Instead, it invokes the achievement of more satisfying relations among citizens in a future that must be battled out in the public sphere rather than invoked, ex post facto, as a restoration of the supposed status quo ante. From Arendt’s perspective, therefore, it would be impossible to ask, as one commentator has done, “How do we restore communities that have been fractured by racial violence?”10 There is no “community” to “restore,” Arendt’s writings suggest, only one to create ever anew. Against this background, it hardly seems coincidental that the recent enthusiasm for “making whole” – whether in terms of “transitional justice,” “reparations,” or political apologies – has come on the scene with such force in the aftermath of the collapse of socialism. From one perspective, the reason is that the Cold War and its politically motivated evasions about the past no longer stood in the way of a truthful accounting of past wrongdoing.11 At the same time, however, with socialism in eclipse as a viable political project, religious enthusiasm – of which socialism was a secular variant – has gained new force as a source of meaning and inspiration. The language of “reconciliation,” once eschewed in favor of a jargon of (class) struggle and confrontation, has correspondingly taken wing. If the future cannot be fixed, perhaps the past can. The terms on which “coming to terms with the past” is premised, though sometimes entailing public forums such as criminal trials and truth commissions, tend toward the personal and apolitical. The search for wholeness via state-sponsored rituals of contrition and forgiveness tends to ignore the fact that, for example, other than one-to-one, from wrongdoer to wronged, apologies are problematic. It is doubtful, for example, whether those alive today can meaningfully apologize to others alive today for crimes committed against perpetrators and victims now dead.12 Moreover, “truth” and “reconciliation,” however spiritually uplifting, may change little in the unequal material circumstances that have been handed down from the past and that constitute one of the most distressing legacies of earlier wrongdoing. But the projects of “making whole” and “coming to terms with the past,” if they are to be effective in the world, are fundamentally political in nature. And “politics … demands both a knowledge of the good and a knowledge of the means to attain it, both good intention and successful action.”13 What form do the ethical intentions behind the efforts to “come to terms with the past” take, and how do they fare, in the world of politics? In order to explore this question, I want to examine the varied responses to one particular historical crime against humanity – racial slavery in the United States and its sequelae. In doing so, I will examine the role of religiosity in these responses,



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but a religiosity of a very particular kind: namely, American civil religion. It is from the resources of American civil religion – the chief tenet of which I take to be the idea of equality – that various actors have drawn, in different ways, to respond to the plight of blacks in American society. Where those resources have been neglected, as we shall see, the political prospects of the idea of coming to terms with this past have been dim. Against this background, I want to consider the historical developments of emancipation, affirmative action, and the recent push for monetary “reparations” for black Americans. In each case, I consider the character of the rhetoric associated with each approach to “coming to terms with the past.” Intriguingly, it is those instances in which actors drew on a religious or quasi-religious idiom where political success has been more striking.

Lincoln and Emancipation There is good reason to believe that Abraham Lincoln regarded slavery as an unqualified evil and that he devoted much of his political career to eradicating it. In doing so, he took as his maxim the central notion in the American creed, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” It is also true, however, that not everything Lincoln did or said might appear to be free of racial bias or antipathy. For example, he spoke in favor of the separation of the races and supported the idea that freed blacks should colonize areas outside of the United States, including Africa and Central America, in order to reduce the suffering caused by their presence – “on each side” of the color bar.14 At the same time, however, he insisted that “the Declaration includes ALL men, black as well as white,” while recognizing that the authors of that document did not mean to say that “all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity,” or “that all were then actually enjoying that equality.”15 Instead, according to Lincoln, it was a statement of aspiration and a barrier against despotism, a goal never attained but constantly to be striven for. In order to achieve that country, it was necessary to maintain the existence of the structure that held it together. It was this structure that the secession of the South threatened, and along with it the goal of equality. The Civil War was therefore an unavoidable necessity, in Lincoln’s view, for the rescue and defense of liberal equality. Though Lincoln understood that slavery was the cause of the war, ending slavery was not necessarily his purpose in fighting it. His purpose was to defend the Union, which was the vehicle for achieving equality. If the emancipation of the slaves would help the Union cause, he would pursue it; if not, he would leave it aside; he assumed

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that slavery would eventually die out in any case.16 Indeed, the Emancipation Proclamation reads very much more like a document outlining an aspect of military strategy than it does the announcement of a major transformation of American life. It simply promulgates a previously enunciated policy of emancipation and names the states in which that measure would then take effect. Claiming the power to take this step on the basis of his authority as commander-in-chief, he freed the slaves in the states deemed in rebellion against the Union “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” He invoked the “gracious favor of Almighty God” in support of the measure, which he described as “an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, on military necessity.”17 Otherwise, however, the declaration was rather mundane, and includes none of the high-flown, Biblically inspired rhetoric for which Lincoln is renowned. Nonetheless, Lincoln understood the war itself in fundamentally religious terms, as the retribution of a just God wreaked on a sinful people. And the sin in question was clearly that of slavery. Here was the language of Scripture applied to the “sins” of a political community in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope – ­fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God will that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”18

Suffused with the imperatives of judgment, Lincoln’s oratory is closer to the Jonathan Edwards of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) than it is to the cheerful prophets of uplift and prosperity more typical of our own day. There was a debt of sin to be paid, and it would be paid with the nation’s blood. Yet the judgment in Lincoln’s speech is qualified in significant ways. It does not target the South exclusively, but sees the sins for which the war was the price as abiding in both sectors of the nation. In the next and final paragraph of the speech, Lincoln says, “With malice toward none; with



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charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds ….”19 Lincoln sought not to point the finger, in other words, but – with military victory in view – to reconcile the two sides and contribute to the process of healing that would be necessary after the war. Despite the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the early promise of Reconstruction, however, that process would ultimately leave blacks in a vulnerable position that often resembled slavery itself.20 While Lincoln’s address invoked the terrible scourge of divine retribution for “those by whom the offense came,” he said nothing in the speech about the situation of blacks themselves after the war was over. It would take the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s to complete at least part of the work that the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to achieve. The intervening years were, as Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith have detailed, not auspicious for black equality.21

Johnson and Affirmative Action The Civil Rights Movement came in the aftermath of World War II, during which black American soldiers fought against Germany’s bid for racial domination in mostly segregated units. The realities of racial segregation and inequality back home thus rankled more than they might have had the war been fought for different reasons. As a result of the Great Migration from the South, moreover, the situation of blacks had since the early part of the twentieth century become an issue of national rather than merely regional significance. Meanwhile, the oppression of blacks became an embarrassment in the context of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds” of the world’s people. American dominance of the “Free World” was sullied for much of the rest of the world by the facts of racial separation and subordination. Eventually, the sense of urgency generated by the black freedom movement would yield the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which fulfilled the promise of Brown v. Board of Education a decade earlier by outlawing segregation and discrimination in public accommodations and employment, and by giving the government the means with which to enforce these strictures. By the time that historic law was passed, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson had succeeded him as president. Even more than in the case of Lincoln, there were good reasons to doubt Johnson’s commitment to racial equality. As a Texas senator beginning in 1949, Johnson

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“effectively guarded a social order propped up by racist legislation.” Yet 15 years later, no doubt with the pressure of the civil rights movement stimulating his thinking, “he had become a revolutionary.”22 He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for the passage of which Kennedy’s assassination and huge protest marches had paved the way. The next major step on the civil rights agenda was a voting rights bill that supporters thought would pull the rug out from under racial domination once and for all by putting the ballot in the hands of millions of black voters. The extension of the franchise was the chief objective of the Freedom Summer of 1964, which in turn led to the brouhaha at the Democratic convention over which delegation to recognize – the official one or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenger (ultimately the official delegation was seated). Despite the upheaval in Atlantic City and the animosity that he had garnered from many civil rights activists for refusing to recognize the MFDP, Johnson won the election, with 94% of the black vote – the margin of his victory.23 Only 7 months later, with the voting rights bill on the horizon, Johnson would make a speech that would give rise to his reputation as a “revolutionary.” He was invited to give the commencement address at Howard University, long the nation’s premier institution of black higher education, which would be conferring upon him an honorary doctorate of law. Johnson began by noting that “in far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation.” Yet, he argued, progress toward freedom had been made as a result of the protests of blacks and the acceptance of changes by most whites. Freedom, Johnson said, was within reach of blacks. What is freedom?, he asked. “Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society – to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.” This was all perfectly compatible with the familiar American creed that “all men are created equal.”24 At this point in his remarks, however, Johnson took a radical turn, outlining an extraordinary transformation in the status of blacks in American life. Freedom is important, he told the middle-class audience: But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to



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open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.25

With these words, Johnson articulated a vision of equality that surely surpassed anything previously suggested by an American president in the post–Civil War era. His Southern compatriots already regarded him as a traitor for his changed views on the place of blacks in American society and for signing the Civil Rights Act. But a policy effecting changes of this order for blacks and whites was practically unimaginable. American liberalism had always been about the pursuit of equality, not its actual attainment. Johnson had given a remarkably expansive twist to the inherited American creed, suggesting a degree and kind of equality to which the nation had never before been committed. Johnson said little about God in the speech, except to remind his audience (not that they needed reminding) of the “the antique enmities of the heart which diminish the holder, divide the great democracy, and do wrong – great wrong – to the children of God.”26 Most of the speech was instead taken up with characterizing the nature of the wrongs done to American blacks, and attributing the woeful situation of the black population to the blemishes of a hate-filled and oppressive history – both during slavery and thereafter. Johnson clearly saw himself as embarked on a course of righting grievous historical wrongs. In the late 1940s, his predecessor Harry Truman had impaneled a President’s Committee on Civil Rights whose final report – devoted mainly to addressing the rights denied blacks – was titled, To Secure These Rights. In contrast, Johnson announced in his speech that he would organize a conference to explore further the issues raised in his speech, and that the conclave would be called, “To Fulfill These Rights.” Its “object will be to help the American Negro fulfill the rights which, after the long time of injustice, he is finally about to secure.” Clearly, Johnson saw himself as going well beyond previous efforts to address racial inequality in the country: “[I]t is the glorious opportunity of this generation to end the one huge wrong of the American Nation and, in so doing, to find America for ourselves, with the same immense thrill of discovery which gripped those who first began to realize that here, at last, was a home for freedom.”27 Johnson thus envisioned the realization of black equality as a reinvention of the nation, a rediscovery of its original redemptory promise. With little of Lincoln’s overt Biblical inflection, Johnson nonetheless concluded in a prophetic vein in which the achievement of freedom for all, black and white,

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could be understood as a reinvigoration of the old project of creating a “city upon a hill.” Of course, even if Johnson did not mention this specifically, the black churches, many Jewish synagogues, and the more liberal elements of mainstream Protestantism were crucial aspects of the political base on which his vision rested. The civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s and its successors in the Nixon era created what we now know as “affirmative action.” The term, which by then had been around in government circles for a few years,28 was used in Executive Order 11246, which Johnson signed only a few months after the Howard University speech, but did not yet refer to compensatory treatment of blacks. The order required “nondiscrimination” on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin (later expanded to include sex) in government employment, as well as “affirmative action” on the part of government contractors to ensure that these nondiscrimination provisions would be enforced by them as well. Over time, of course, the idea of “affirmative action” spread to the arenas of minority capitalism, admissions to institutions of higher education, women’s participation in sports, and elsewhere. This “mission creep” – and the extension of affirmative action to immigrant groups for whom it was not initially intended – is part of what has helped to discredit it in the public mind.29 Still, affirmative action in higher education admissions has survived a major Supreme Court test – barely – and remains an important element of public policy that seeks to redress black disadvantage. Johnson’s vision of the realization of “equality as a fact and equality as a result” has never been achieved for all Americans, and certainly not for blacks. Blacks in American society continue to suffer disproportionately high rates of incarceration, ill health, poverty, unemployment, low educational achievement, premature mortality and the rest. Yet, at the same time, there has been a dramatic improvement in the social status of blacks as a result of the civil rights movement and its legislative consequences. “Separate but equal” is no longer the law of the land. Indignities once taken for granted would now be unthinkable. A substantial black middle class has emerged. The armed forces, largely segregated only 50 years ago, are the most integrated major institution in American life. “Affirmative action” – both in the sense of nondiscrimination policy and in the sense of taking “diversity” into consideration in various realms of life – has surely had much to do with this transformation. By comparison to the era before Johnson’s presidency, one can surely speak of a “revolution.” And yet blacks remain overwhelmingly disadvantaged in terms of wealth assets compared to whites. This disadvantage has deep roots, from the time



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of slavery through the twentieth-century period “when affirmative action was white.”30 Johnson’s grand plans for a “Great Society,” of which the civil rights and affirmative action policies were a significant part, came to grief on the rocks of the Vietnam War, which led him to abandon his effort to recapture the presidency for a second full term. The continuing disproportionate inequalities suffered by blacks, along with the sense that affirmative action is under severe political strain, has in the meantime led to a resurgent movement for “reparations.” It is to this effort to “come to terms with the past” that we now turn.

The Rhetoric of Reparations One major consequence of the waning support for affirmative action was a renewed call among some, especially in the black intelligentsia, for “reparations” to blacks to make amends for the inequalities experienced by blacks in American society. In his discussion of the case for reparations for AfricanAmericans, for example, Robert Westley straightforwardly enunciated the relationship between the flagging popular support for affirmative action and the demand for reparations. Writing well before the legal challenge to affirmative action in higher education admissions was aired in the Supreme Court in 2003, Westley insisted, “Affirmative action for Black Americans as a form of remediation for perpetuation of past injustice is almost dead,” and it is thus necessary to “revitalize the discussion of reparations.”31 Westley’s call for a rejuvenation of the idea of “reparations” for blacks was soon followed by Randall Robinson’s book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, the themes of which in turn became the subject of a gathering of progressive black intellectuals at Robinson’s policy institute, the TransAfrica Forum. The 2000 meeting, at which Congressman John Conyers was a keynote speaker, was to discuss “The Case for Black Reparations.” Links were made at the TransAfrica Forum gathering to the so-called “Black Manifesto” of former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist James Forman. The Manifesto was first delivered – unscheduled and uninvited – to a dumbstruck congregation at the famously liberal Riverside Church in New York on Sunday, May 4, 1969. It demanded “five hundred million dollars in reparations from the racist white ‘Christian’ churches and the Jewish synagogues” in compensation “for the centuries of exploitation and oppression which they had inflicted on black people around the world.” In the minds of its drafters (Forman had worked it out in collaboration with fellow members of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers), the Manifesto was not merely a claim for monetary compensation, but “a call

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for revolutionary action … that spoke of the human misery of black people under capitalism and imperialism, and pointed the way to ending those conditions.” The Manifesto articulated a number of demands for economic improvements for blacks of the kind that would appear in subsequent efforts to obtain reparations, such as land, banks, university education, and job training programs designed to benefit blacks.32 Once he got over the initial shock, the minister whose Riverside Church service had been interrupted, Ernest Campbell, eventually responded favorably to the basic outlook of the Manifesto, as did the Episcopal Church hierarchy. Similarly, an article by Charles Willie, a black sociologist then at Syracuse University, wondered in print whether the document was “prophetic or preposterous,” but was fundamentally sympathetic to the aims of the Manifesto – if not to its addressee. In a critique that would arise again later in the context of recent lawsuits for reparations for slavery against private companies, Willie argued that the Manifesto’s focus on the church was misguided because compensation from religious institutions cannot “absolve the government of what is government’s responsibility.”33 Yet the wider response to the Manifesto was unsympathetic, at best. In the pages of the New York Times, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins urged churchmen to “shun reparations as [a] delusion” and instead to contribute to organizations like the NAACP itself that were working to defend the gains achieved by the civil rights movement.34 The tensions between more radical and nationalist forces, on the one hand, and the black churches, on the other, would echo down through subsequent black politics.35 Indeed, the recent upsurge in reparations-related activism seems to have virtually no contact with the black churches. It is concentrated instead among two groups not distinguished by their roots in the church: black nationalists, spearheaded by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), and the Reparations Coordinating Committee, a group dominated by the leadership of TransAfrica Forum and its allies. The two agreed in early 2002 to work together more closely to enhance their clout. This does not appear to have had much in the way of results; turnout for the “Millions for Reparations National Rally” that took place on Saturday, August 17, 2002 in Washington, DC was relatively meager – perhaps a few thousand. Time columnist Jack E. White, who was present at the TransAfrica Forum gathering in early 2000, was probably correct to argue that “the fight for slave reparations is a morally just but totally hopeless cause,”36 and this has helped undermine its prospects in the post-9/11 context. The political prospects of the drive for reparations were the chief concern of the one important black critic of the effort, Adolph Reed. In his discussion



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of the reparations cause, he dismissed the pursuit of reparations as a “political dead end.”37 On the assumption that it was “so obviously a nonstarter in American politics,” Reed sought in his commentary on the subject to make sense of why the idea of reparations had gathered such momentum in a political climate in which the fortunes even of affirmative action, presumably a more moderate approach, had declined substantially. He agreed that the economic wrongs inflicted on the American black population by slavery and legal segregation manifestly deserved to be remedied. He also understood the symbolic dimension of reparations, the yearning for public acknowledgment of the injustices of the past. But this, he asserted, “does not require the rhetoric of reparations,” and it fit what he called “the Clintonoid tenor of sappy public apologies and maudlin psychobabble about collective pain and healing.” Like many other critics, Reed finds insuperable the complications involved in reparations compensation: Who would be the recipients? Who would pay? If payments were made to a corporate entity, how would that entity be held accountable? Ultimately, however, Reed’s objections to the idea of reparations were political: “What strikes me as most incomprehensible about the reparations movement is its complete disregard for the simplest, most mundanely pragmatic question about any political mobilization: How can we imagine building a political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue?” Moreover, at a time when “common circumstances of economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for building broad solidarity across race, gender, and other identities,” he argued, the “demand for racially defined reparations … cuts precisely against building such solidarity.” In short, Reed opposed the idea of reparations as politically divisive – not with respect to some airy, nonexistent American “community,” but rather with regard to those elements of American society who are worst off because of their shared class position and who might be mobilized to seek political and social change on that basis. Given the apparent dearth of grassroots mobilization behind the reparations idea, perhaps the most striking feature of the campaign so far has been the relative absence from its ranks of the black churches. The pulpits have historically been the most reliable channel between elite black opinion and mass grassroots activism, and there is no obvious reason to think that that relationship has profoundly changed. Church support will be necessary before the idea of “reparations” (understood as financial compensation) is likely to have much traction in American politics. It may be that the problem lies in the distance of the idea of “reparations” from core aspects of the “American creed” and its assumptions about individual merit. While it may be “morally just” to compensate blacks for the wrong of slavery and the damages of Jim

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Crow policies, this approach seems doomed to marginality. In the words of Ira Katznelson, “There is no adequate rejoinder to losses on this scale. In such situations, the request for large cash transfers places bravado ahead of substance, flirts with demagoguery, and risks political irrelevance …. Whatever the abstract merits of such claims, this utopian politics seems entirely symbolic, not really serious.”38 In this case, in short, politics trumps ethics, and in all events the politics of race in America inevitably involves the churches if it is to have broader impact. In his important book on the sources of racial inequality in contemporary America, Katznelson argues that the need to address past discrimination against blacks remains urgent, and yet the rationale for corresponding policies has been poorly articulated. Katznelson seeks to defend affirmative action as an appropriate response to the injustices outlined in Johnson’s speech at Howard University 1965. He recognizes that the room for political maneuver is narrow, to a large degree because the putatively color-blind critics of affirmative action have assumed the higher ground in recent years. His purpose in writing the book was to remind us of the ways in which, in much of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, “affirmative action was white” – that is, of the ways in which public policy had racially discriminatory effects in fact, if not in name – and thus to give ammunition to those seeking grounds for public policies intended to compensate blacks for past iniquities. By recalling the principles laid out in Justice Powell’s opinion in the Bakke decision (1978), in which Powell accepted the relevance of racial criteria in designing policies narrowly tailored to remedy past injustice, Katznelson makes a signal contribution to the potential realization of American ideals of equality that continue to be dishonored when it comes to black Americans. As Katznelson well knows, however, it is not so much legal opinions as legislative majorities that will be crucial in achieving those ideals.

Conclusion Here, it seems, we come face to face with one of the main difficulties in the current quasi-religious enthusiasm for “coming to terms with the past” and “making whole what has been smashed.” As Weber pointed out long ago, the ethic of ultimate ends – action taken without concern for the real-world consequences – is likely to run aground on the shoals of politics, where an “ethic of responsibility” is (also) required. Weber had little patience for the person who thought it was enough to “do right and leave the consequences to the Lord.” The articulation of “maximalist” positions may make



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their holder “feel good.” But if they have little chance of being realized, what are they worth? At the same time, those concerned with moral action must always deal with the question: “Should one sacrifice principle on the altar of realism?”39 Ethics and politics are the Scylla and Charybdis of right action in the world, and there is of course no heavenly chart for navigating between them. Weber saw the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility as complementary, not mutually exclusive; only the person who combined both could truly be said to have what Weber thought of as the “calling” for politics. But moral principles and political effectiveness are likely to compete with one another in the real world. Those two clashing imperatives require both attentiveness to the world as it is and a sense of the world that one would like to bring into being. Living up to the demands of both would constitute an ethical achievement of the highest order, because it would bring about a genuine reconciliation of the living with the dead and of the victims with their wrongdoers. It is this limited sort of “heaven on earth” that is sought by those seeking to “make whole what has been smashed.” They may be doing “God’s work,” but they need to come to terms with mundane forces in order to achieve their goals. Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

The phrase is taken from Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 257. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 76. Alvin Gouldner, “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State,” in For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 66. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Penguin, 1968 [1963]), p. 12. See the discussion in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political–Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Verso, 2003). Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001 [1946]), p. 26. I have slightly revised the translation. Anson Rabinbach, “Karl Jaspers’s The Question of German Guilt,” in idem., In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 152. Andrew Schaap, “Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility: Arendt, Jaspers and the Resonance of the ‘German Question’ in Politics of Reconciliation,” Political Studies 49 (2001), p. 762. Danny Postel, “The Awful Truth [about Lynching],” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 12, 2002.

172 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities 11

12

13

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16

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18

19

20

21

22

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26 27 28 29

30 31

32

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See Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000). See Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 136. Abraham Lincoln, “The Ban is Still Upon You,” in Richard Current, ed., The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 207–213; the quotation is from p. 208. Lincoln, “The Declaration of Independence Includes All Men,” in Current, ed., Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 88–89. See Current’s comments on Lincoln’s pragmatism in Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, p. xxix. “Slaves … Shall Be Free (Final Emancipation Proclamation, 1863),” in Richard Current, ed., Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, p. 240. Abraham Lincoln, “With Malice Toward None (Second Inaugural Address),” in Richard Current, ed., Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, p. 316. For an extended discussion of Lincoln’s rhetoric with regard to healing the wound of slavery, see Brian Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), pp. 97–108. Abraham Lincoln, “With Malice Toward None (Second Inaugural Address),” in Richard Current, ed., Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, p. 316. For an extended analysis, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2001). See Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 9. Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), pp. 179–186. Indeed, the language was remarkably reminiscent of that in a classic sociological treatise on citizenship, T.H. Marshall’s “Citizenship and Social Class.” Lyndon Johnson, “To Fulfill These Rights,” reproduced in Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, pp. 174–175. Johnson, p. 180. Johnson, p. 181. See the discussion in Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, p. 145. See Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and, more generally, John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard University Press, 2002). Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White. Robert Westley, “Many Billions Gone: Is it Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations?” Boston College Law Review 40: 1 (December 1998): 429, 432. This account is drawn from James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997 [1972]), pp. 545, 547; for the Manifesto itself, see Arnold Schuchter, Reparations: The Black Manifesto and its Challenge to White America (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970). Charles Willie, “The Black Manifesto: Prophetic or Preposterous?” The Episcopalian, September 1969, quoted in Schuchter, Reparations, p. 11.

34

35

36 37

38 39

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Mitchell Maki et al., Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 71, 252 n. 35. See Michael C. Dawson’s discussion of the tensions between black nationalists and the churches in Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 107–108. Jack E. White, “Don’t Waste Your Breath,” Time, April 2, 2001, p. 27. See Adolph L. Reed, Jr., “Class Notes: The Case Against Reparations,” The Progressive (December 2000). Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, pp. 157–158. Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 78.

Da n ie l Phil p ot t 8.  When Faith Meets History: The Influence of Religion on Transitional Justice

Over the past couple of decades, a historically unusual concatenation of societies – Germany, Rwanda, Guatemala, South Africa, and so many ­others – has confronted the injustices of their past, ranging from systematic authoritarian suppressions to the mass atrocities of communal conflict. Words and images persist: defiant dictators in the docket at the trial of the century (of which the last century featured many), relatives facing the killers of their kin at truth commissions, debates over reparations, and typically a surrounding clamor of charges and countercharges: victors’ justice, no justice, stunted justice, retributive justice, perverted justice, restorative justice, injustice. Occasionally, the clamor has yielded a long awaited just verdict, a head of state’s healing speech, or a genuine expression of repentance and forgiveness, moments where “hope and history rhyme,” in the words of Irish poet Seamus Heaney.1 In these diverse scenes, one often descries miters, beards, clerical robes, pectoral crosses, or clusters of women chanting prayers. In the politics of transitional justice, religion is often, though not always, involved. Journalists and chroniclers sometimes have made much of this involvement, but not usually scholars, few of whom have sought to chart it systematically (exceptions are Graybill, 2001; Vinjamuri and Boesenecker, forthcoming). To be sure, theologians have written about the ethics of transitions, many of them urging reconciliation and forgiveness (de Gruchy, 2003; Schreiter, 1998; Volf, 1996). For support in the research and writing of this essay, I am grateful to the “Religion in Global Politics” project at Harvard University, supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Smith Richardson Foundation, and to the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. I thank the editors, Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman, as well as J. B. Allcock for their valuable suggestions. For valuable research reports and assistance, I thank Robert Dowd, Julia Fitzpatrick, Colleen Gilg, Ben Kaplan, Dana Lee, Kevin Loria, Kevin McCormick, Robert Portada, John Skakun, Carolyn Sweeney, and Erin Urquhart.

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But does religion actually make a difference in the politics of transitions? Or is its effect mostly lapidary, ceremonial, and sacral? Religious leaders and their organizations have in fact played remarkably varied roles in transitional justice, this chapter argues. In many locales, they have encouraged and even conducted truth commissions; less often, they have urged trials; in some places, they have worked for healing within civil society; in other instances, they have exercised little influence at all due to a legacy of complicity in authoritarianism or even mass atrocity. Why does religion diverge so widely in its influence on transitional justice? What factors shape this influence? These are the central questions of this chapter. It begins by categorizing major approaches to transitional justice. It then charts the kinds of influence that religious actors have had on it and offers some correlational evidence for this influence in 15 countries. Next, it proposes an explanation for why religious leaders and organizations are highly influential in the transitional justice of some countries like Guatemala and South Africa, but hardly influential at all in other countries like Rwanda. It then tests this explanation through cases. Finally, it asks why almost all of these countries are Christian, Protestant, and Catholic at that. Might the argument travel more widely? All in all, the chapter holds that religion matters in transitional justice, but in certain ways and under certain kinds of circumstances.

Institutions for Transitional Justice A genocide in Rwanda that killed 800,000 people, four decades of communist rule in East Germany that took comparatively few lives but violated the human rights of many, apartheid in South Africa, the Guatemalan military’s massacres of Mayans: these are the various and dolorous subjects of transitional justice. They include both authoritarian regimes and civil wars, but always involve large scale and sustained violations of basic human rights. In a very inexact sense, transitional justice takes place after these episodes have come to a halt through a peace settlement or the downfall of an authoritarian regime. The claim is inexact because a peace settlement can then experience stops, starts, and breakdowns; war and authoritarianism is not always succeeded by democracy; and because some efforts to “deal with the past,” to borrow a phrase common in Northern Ireland, do not take place until years or even decades following a transition. When countries do undertake transitional justice, though, their approaches fall into two broad categories, ones that emerge as distinct in the arguments, justifications, and purposes of advocates, detractors, participants, and commentators: “truth recovery”

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and “punitive justice.” The distinction, though, is hardly a pure one, either conceptually, in that aspects of each are contained in the other, or in practice, in that transitional societies often adopt both at the same time, though in different proportions and with different levels of emphasis, ambition, vigor, and success. Truth recovery aims to uproot the truth about the past. Its quintessential form is a truth commission, a temporary body appointed by the state (or, in some cases, the United Nations) to unearth the human rights violations of a specified period (Hayner, 2001, p. 14). Usually, truth commissions culminate in the publication of a comprehensive report of these violations. Reasonably included is also the work of “quasi-truth commissions,” civil society organizations who investigate the past political injustices of an entire state, much as official truth commissions do. In Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala, it was indeed churches that played this role. Advocates of truth recovery offer several rationales for knowing the truth about the past. It contributes to victims’ healing and the restoration of their citizenship, creates a public record of the past that disables the lies through which perpetrators vindicate and re-empower themselves, establishes the new regime on the basis of truth and accountability, encourages deliberative democracy, and promotes reconciliation between victims and perpetrators (Amstutz, 2005, pp. 91–113; Gutmann and Thompson, 2000; Ignatieff, 1996; Minow, 1998; Neier, 1995, p. 34). The task here is not to evaluate these rationales or to determine how just any transition has been. In this volume, Thomas Brudholm, Nigel Biggar, Arne Grøn, and R.A. Duff offer fine examples of normative reasoning about responses to past atrocities. Here, the task is empirical. Still, if comparisons between truth recovery efforts are to be made, criteria are needed for determining their scope, ambition, and success. Only some of these criteria can be measured quantitatively, while the relative importance of any of them in the overall truth recovery effort is quite subjective. For any given country, though, the criteria can be assessed and aggregated to such an extent that comparisons can be made. The criteria include: How extensive are they in their budget, their staff, and in the amount of time they are given to investigate? What portion of the human rights violations during the period of war or authoritarianism does the commission report? How extensively does it report them? What proportions of victims testify? An important strength of truth recovery is balance. Its efforts are not simply a victors’ justice that only tells one side’s story and disproportionately punishes one side’s perpetrators. Further: Are truth recovery institutions empowered with subpoena, search and seizure, and witness protection? Do they name perpetrators? To what extent do they grant perpetrators amnesty in order to secure their testimony?



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Do they involve hearings? Do they both promise and provide reparations to victims? Do they promote apology and forgiveness? Were these efforts well-received? It is important to remember that any truth recovery effort, even those that score highest on these criteria, will be mixed in its results and pockmarked with compromises and misfires of justice. It is in comparison with one another that truth commissions are judged strong or weak. Punitive justice, in contrast, aims to try and punish human rights violators  – proportionately, with respect for due process. Its quintessential institution is the courtroom trial, but it can also involve purgative ­procedures  – “lustration,” as they are known in the Central European ­context – that debar perpetrators from government positions. Proponents of punitive justice defend it according to the intrinsic value of retributive justice, but also for its contribution to human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and deterrence of crime in the context of new regimes. Punitive justice can even contribute to the discovery of the truth about past injustices. For punitive justice, too, there are criteria for judging comparatively the strength of institutions. How empowered – with personnel, money, the power to elicit testimony, and public prestige – is an institution for assessing and determining guilt? What portion of human rights violations does it cover? How many are tried? Convicted? Later pardoned due to political pressure? What portion of total violators do they include? Are violators on all sides of a conflict tried? What powers does a punitive institution possess to elicit testimony? Finally does it promote the rule of law through fairness, due process, and right procedure? With these criteria, transitional societies can be compared according to the relative strength of their institutions for truth recovery and punitive justice, each ranging along a continuum of “strong,” “moderately strong,” “moderately weak,” “weak,” and “nonexistent.” Table 8.1 arrays 15 countries into a chart according to the strength of their institutions. An initial glance shows a spread of both kind of institutions, arrayed from strong to weak. Rare are countries with strong institutions of both kinds. Countries with strong truth recovery institutions tend to have weak punitive justice institutions or lack them altogether, while those with the comparatively strongest punitive justice institutions range from strong to weak in their truth recovery institutions. Only one country examined, Northern Ireland, has developed neither sort of institution. The 15 countries were indeed selected to include strong and weak institutions of both kinds as well as institutions prominent for their magnitude or historical significance, thus offering grist for a robust comparative assessment of the influences behind their institutions (George, 1979; King et al., 1994).

178 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities Table 8.1.  Comparative strength of truth commissions. Truth Recovery Punitive justice

None None

Northern Ireland

Weak

Weak

Poland

Moderately Czech weak Republic Moderately strong Strong

Rwanda; Former Yugoslavia

Moderately Moderately weak strong

Strong Peru

El Salvador; Guatemala; Brazil South Africa Argentina Sierra Leona; East Timor Germany; Chile

Behind Choices of Transitional Justice “Hermeneuticists of suspicion,” as philosopher Paul Ricoeur called them, will doubt that religion, or any set of ideas, explains transitional justice. The most credible and parsimonious version of such suspicion looks to the relative power of the negotiators of transitions. So goes Samuel P. Huntington’s explanation for whether prosecutions occur in democratic transitions (1991, pp. 211–231).1 His reasoning can easily be adapted to include truth recovery and the context of civil wars. Political transitions, the logic of power runs, involve a contest between the prior regime and its opponents. The stakes are high. They have been vying mightily, either through open war or through a struggle pitting police forces against popular demonstrations. They know that for the loser, justice could mean long prison terms, public dishonor, or even death. Transitional justice interests them keenly. In some transitions, which Huntington calls “transformations,” members of the regime in power take the lead in negotiating a transition to democracy or an end to civil war.2 Because of their relatively strong role in initiating and conducting talks with their democratic opponents, the regime’s members are able to prevent their own prosecution, and usually to secure an amnesty for themselves (Huntington, 1991, p. 114, pp. 215–217). Punitive justice, then, does not result. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and, at first, Chile, settlements of civil wars even left many top military officials in powerful positions – and unpunished for their human rights violations, of course.



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Other transitions occur through what Huntington calls “replacement.” Here, the ruling regime is defeated, overthrown, or exits power under heavy pressure, leaving its successors with control over the police, the armed forces, and the judiciary. Punitive justice is far more likely (Huntington, 1991, p. 114, pp. 217–225). It is the means by which victors disempower, discredit, and punish their opponents. A stark example was the execution of Communist President Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania’s transition in December 1989. Huntington posits a hybrid category, “transplacement,” where democratization results from joint action by the regime and opposition groups. The outcome for transitional justice will be the result of a tug-of-war between the two parties. The regime’s members will secure some sort of amnesty for themselves, though it may be reversed or overthrown. Punitive justice may result, but it will likely be weak. Again, Huntington focuses his explanation on punitive justice. A mirror argument for truth recovery, also rooted in power, is not difficult to imagine. Truth telling, and still more, reconciliation, the logic runs, are sops for justice unachieved. Where opposition forces are too weak to overthrow a regime and establish a new one on their own terms, they will have to settle for less than the prosecutions that they would desire. Truth recovery is their consolation prize. Where they succeed in disempowering the regime, by contrast, they will push for prosecution. Truth recovery, then, is likely to emerge in transformations, and perhaps sometimes in transplacements, but not in replacements. In every transition, “[j]ustice was a function of political power,” Huntington concludes (1991, p. 225). Replacements produce punitive justice and no truth recovery; transformations produce solid amnesty, but often efforts to uncover the past as well; transplacements yield amnesty, but on shakier terms, and sometimes truth recovery. The underlying logic is embodied in Thucydides’ description of the punitive justice that Athens imposed upon Melos during a very different time: “the strong do what they can and the weak accept what they must.” How well does a relative power explanation account for transitions? Table 8.2 arrays the 15 countries shown on Table 8.1, posing the nature of each country’s transition side by side with its truth recovery and punitive justice ratings. Though the sample is too small to demonstrate an indubitable statistical correlation between transition type and transitional justice approach, it may still be investigated for patterns. The relative power explanation proves to account for an important part of the outcome, especially regarding punitive justice, as Huntington claims. Replacement transitions

180 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities Table 8.2. Type and strength of transitions. Country

Transition

Truth recovery

Punitive justice

South Africa Guatemala East Timor Chile Peru Sierra Leone El Salvador Northern Ireland The Czech Republic Poland Argentina Brazil East Germany Rwanda Former Yugoslavia

Transformation Transformation Transformation Transformation Transformation Transformation Transformation Transformation Transplacement Transplacement Replacement Replacement Replacement Replacement “Replacement”a

Strong Strong Strong Moderately strong Strong Strong Moderately strong None None Weak Moderately strong Moderately strong Moderately strong Weak Weak

Weak Weak Moderately weak Moderately strong None Moderately weak Weak None Moderately weak Weak Moderately weak Weak Moderately strong Moderately strong Moderately strong

a

  Yugoslavia is not a “Replacement” in the ordinary sense. Following the Dayton Accords of November 1995, in none of the successor states to Yugoslavia did regime change occur. But it follows the dynamic of replacement insofar as outside actors created the impetus for punitive justice in the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. In a sense, pressure from outside actors “replaced” a situation where these regimes acted alone as sovereign actors.

correspond to a concentration of three “moderately strong” punitive justice settlements, while transformations correspond to three out of five weak cases and both of the cases where no punitive justice resulted at all. The pattern of truth recovery settlements also corroborates the relative power explanation, with transformations yielding all five of the strong cases and replacements yielding a comparatively weak array of no strong cases, three moderately strong ones, and two weak ones. Yet, there is much about transitional justice that relative power leaves unexplained. Although each type of transition corresponds broadly to the cluster of outcomes that its configuration of relative power predicts, several specific outcomes do not fit the pattern neatly. Transformations, which predict strong truth recovery and weak punitive justice, included two cases of moderately weak punitive justice and one of the moderately strong cases of punitive justice, Chile, and one case where no truth recovery resulted. Replacements included three moderately strong truth recovery efforts, toward the strong end of the truth recovery spectrum, and two cases where punitive justice was weak or moderately weak. Transplacements are ambiguous, as might



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be expected of this middle category, but they also included one case of no truth recovery, found at one end of the spectrum. Though few outcomes flatly contradict the relative power account, several appear to be inadequately explained by it. Beyond correlational issues, the logic of relative power does not account for why one approach to transitional justice is chosen at all: truth recovery. In cases where the regime in power prior to the transition continues to exercise sway during the transition, it will understandably act to secure amnesty for itself. But why would its members agree to a truth commission, which threatens to expose their deeds, ruin their reputations, and delegitimate them in the eyes of their nation? Yet, truth recovery emerges even in cases like El Salvador, where the ruling regime remains in power during the transition. A relative power perspective might maintain that truth recovery is the compromise that opponents are able to extract in cases of transformation: they are too disempowered to extract trials, but strong enough to win a truth commission. But unless proven by criteria independent from the outcome, such an explanation can only be post hoc. Still less does relative power explain hybrid solutions that involve both punitive justice and truth recovery like East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Germany. Again the claim is not that relative power is logically inconsistent with transitional justice institutions, but only that it does not sufficiently explain them. What else, then, might account for transitional justice? The preferences, not just the power, of negotiators, matter. In the South African transition to democracy, amnesty for apartheid officials can well be explained by their strong negotiating position, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is difficult to explain apart from the perspective of the African National Congress, which was arguably rooted in South Africa’s cultural and religious traditions. Eluding a relative power account even more sharply is the influence of actors other than the regime and its opponents. These may include international organizations like the United Nations, which strongly shaped transitional justice in countries like El Salvador, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. They also include civil society actors – parties, unions, domestic and foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the present object of inquiry, religious organizations, and their leaders.

How Does Religion Affect Transitional Justice? A religious actor is a religious body, a religious political party, a NGO with a religious affiliation and purpose, or an individual cleric or layperson who

182 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities

leads such an organization. Such actors do not always speak singly or comprehensively in their politics. Religious actors at the national level, the focus here, do not always cooperate with their leaders outside their borders, and can be fractured themselves. The Protestant Evangelische Church in Communist East Germany, for instance, diverged between a hierarchy that accommodated the Communist regime and a rank and file that often dissented. Any faction or sector might constitute a religious actor to the degree that it acts as a cohesive agent. Prima facie evidence that religious actors are important to transitional justice appears back in Table 8.1, which highlights in bold face those transitions in which religious leaders and groups asserted strong sway. What emerges there is a sharp correlation: eight out of 10 countries whose transitions involved moderately strong or strong versions of truth recovery were ones where religion was actively influential, while in all other, weaker, cases of truth recovery, religion had virtually no shaping role at all. Religion’s correspondence with punitive justice appears to be far more mixed: its influence on transitional justice was strong in four out of eight cases where punitive justice was moderately weak or moderately strong (again, the strong end of the spectrum), but strong also in four out of seven cases where punitive justice was weak or nonexistent. This pattern suggests that religion has both an influence and a certain kind of influence. It is strongly associated with truth recovery, but ambiguously with punitive justice. The pattern consists only of correlations – again, with a small sample size – which do not alone prove that religion influences transitional justice. The same results might have occurred in religion’s absence. Nor does it show exactly what sort of approach religion influenced in what sort of way. In a country whose transitional justice approach combined both truth recovery and punitive justice, for instance, it is not clear which approach religion influenced. What buttresses and clarifies the influence of religion is a close examination, through case studies, of the activities through which it shapes, or fails to shape, transitional justice (George, 1979). These activities take two broad forms – those that shape the formation and those that shape the implementation of transitional justice institutions. Among religious efforts to clamor and organize for transitional justice, the strongest are truth recovery efforts that religious actors organize and carry out themselves. Again, the work of churches in Chile, Guatemala, and Brazil fit this description. More common are the efforts of religious actors to encourage their state to undertake transitional justice. They lobby their governments, both publicly and privately, and are sometimes even involved in the circles that negotiate transitional justice institutions. Even more directly, another sort of



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religious actor – not prelates, but religiously motivated political ­officials – will use their power and prerogatives to influence their country’s transitional justice institutions. Less directly, but still powerfully, religious actors can influence the character of transitional justice by shaping the content of a society’s political discourse – for instance, by injecting the language of reconciliation, apology, and forgiveness into the media and political debate. Once a set of institutions for transitional justice has been negotiated and decided upon, religious actors may help to construct and conduct them. This is far more likely with truth recovery than with punitive justice, since trials are the distinct preserve of state courts. Religious organizations may influence the selection of commissioners, while their leaders may actually serve as commissioners, sometimes even bringing religious language and ceremony to the commission, as did Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. South Africa’s truth commission was also notable for having corporate entities, not just individuals, testify about the past; among these were religious communities. In several truth commissions, religious organizations provided logistical support, helping to organize and conduct hearings, locate and support victims and witnesses, and provide counseling in the wake of hearings. Just as religiously motivated political actors can encourage the formation of transitional justice institutions, so too can they contribute to their functioning. And in this stage, too, religious actors can shape transitional justice by bringing the language of reconciliation into the discourse. In all of these manners, religion contributes to transitional justice – in different ways in different cases, to greater and lesser degrees, and with different outcomes. Table 8.3 arrays these several forms of religious contribution, assesses their strength in the case of each transitional justice institution, and derives a composite rating of the general strength of religious influence upon that institution.

Behind Religious Influence Table 8.3 manifests the variety of religious influence and clarifies the causal logic behind the correlations shown in Table 8.1, showing which transitional justice institutions were influenced by religion. In eight countries, religion actors exercised a strong (or in one case, moderate) influence in eliciting a truth recovery approach, and in one of these countries, Chile, the Catholic Church influenced both a proto-truth commission and a truth commission. In only two places did a religious actor shape punitive justice – East Timor, where trials occurred, and Germany, which practiced lustration. In two countries, including El Salvador and Argentina, truth recovery was strong

184 Argentina – CONADEP Argentina – courts Brazil – truth investigation Chile – Vicariate of Solidarity Chile – National Commission On Truth and Reconciliation

Transitional justice institutiona

None

n/a

Strong

Strong

Strong

Weak

Strong

Strong

Strong None

n/a

n/a

None

None

Moderate

n/a

None

None

Weak

Strong

n/a

None

None

None

Institutional formation

Strong

Strong

Strong

None

Weak

Moderate

n/a

n/a

None

Weak

None

n/a

n/a

None

Moderate

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

None

Role of religious actors in creating institution

Moderate

n/a

n/a

None

None

Strong

n/a

None

None

None

Institutional implementation

Strong

Strong

Strong

None

Moderate

Table 8.3. The influence of religious actors in forming and implementing transitional justice institutions.

Weak

Overall influence of religious actorb

Creates and carries out a “prototruth commission” c Participates in formal negotiation of official transitional justice institution Urges formation of institution through public lobbying or private channels Political actors motivated by religious belief influence formationd Shapes the discourse surrounding an institution during negotiation phase Participates in construction of transitional justice institution

Religious leaders serve as commissioners or judges

Religious leaders utilize religious ceremony as commissioners or judges Influence selection of commissioners/judges Influence of political actors motivated by religious belief on construction of truth commission/trial Shapes the discourse surrounding an institution during implementation phase

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Participate in investigations and hearings as corporate religious communitiese

Moderate

Strong

Strong

None

None

Logistical support for conduct of institution

185

Chile – Court System Czech Republic – Lustration Czech Republic – Trials East Timor (CAVR and Community Reconciliation Division) East Timor – Trials El Salvador – Truth Commission Germany – Enquete Commission (truth commission) Germany – Gauck Authority (Stasi files and lustration) Germany – Trials Guatemala – REMHI Guatemala – CEH

n/a

Strong

n/a

Strong

Weak

None

Weak

Weak

n/a

Strong

n/a

n/a

Strong

Strong

n/a

Weak

None

n/a

Weak

Moderate

n/a

Weak

Strong

n/a

None

Strong

Moderate

None

None

Strong

None

Weak

None

Strong

n/a

None

Strong

Moderate

None

Strong

Strong

None

None

None

None

None

None

Weak

Weak

None

Weak

Strong

None

None

None

None

Strong

None

Strong

Moderate

Weak

Strong

Strong

None

Weak

None

None

Strong

None

Strong

Moderate

None

None

Strong

None

None

None

None

n/a

None

Strong

Strong

None

None

Moderate

None

None

None

n/a

n/a

None

None

None

n/a

n/a

None

n/a

n/a

n/a

None

n/a

None

None

Moderate

None

None

Moderate

None

None

None

None

n/a

None

None

Weak

None

Strong

Strong

None

n/a

None

None

Strong

None

Moderate

Weak

Moderate

Strong

Strong

None

None

None

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Moderate

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

(continued)

None

Strong

None

None

None

Moderate

None

Strong

None

None

None

186 Ireland Peru – Truth Commission Poland – Truth investigation Rwanda – ICTR Rwanda – Gacaca Courtse Sierra Leone – Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Transitional justice institutiona

n/a Weak

None

n/a

None

n/a

n/a Strong

Weak

Weak

Weak

Strong

Overall influence of religious actorb

Creates and carries out a “prototruth commission”c

Moderate

Weak

None

Strong

Weak

Weak

None

n/a Strong

Weak

Moderate

None

None

n/a Weak

Institutional formation

n/a Moderately strong Weak

Participates in formal negotiation of official transitional justice institution Urges formation of institution through public lobbying or private channels Political actors motivated by religious belief influence formationd

Moderate

Weak

Weak

Strong

n/a Moderate

Moderate

Weak

None

n/a Moderately strong None

Strong

n/a

None

None

n/a Moderate

Strong

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a None

Role of religious actors in creating institution

Table 8.3. (continued)

Shapes the discourse surrounding an institution during negotiation phase Participates in construction of transitional justice institution

Religious leaders serve as commissioners or judges

Moderate

None

None

None

n/a Moderate

Moderate

Weak

Weak

Weak

n/a Weak

Institutional implementation

Religious leaders utilize religious ceremony as commissioners or judges Influence selection of commissioners/judges Influence of political actors motivated by religious belief on construction of truth commission/trial

Strong

Moderate

None

Weak

n/a Strong

Shapes the discourse surrounding an institution during implementation phase

Strong

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a n/a

Participate in investigations and hearings as corporate religious communitiese

Strong

Moderate

None

None

n/a Moderate

Logistical support for conduct of institution

187

n/a

n/a

n/a

Weak

Strong

Weak

None

Moderate

None

None

Weak

None

None

Moderate

None

None

Strong

None

None

Moderate

None

None

Strong

None

n/a

Strong

n/a

None

Moderate

None

None

Weak

None

None

Strong

None

n/a

Strong

n/a

None

Strong

None

a

  Transitional justice institutions can include trials, truth commissions, lustration procedures, “proto-truth commissions,” or nongovernmental organizations that carry out investigations into political injustices on behalf of an entire state. In Brazil and Chile, the latter conducted their work well before a regime transition took place and thus are not technically transitional justice institutions. But their work is so similar in spirit and substance that they are included. b   “Overall influence” is a composite rating that combines the strength rating of each particular component of religious influence into a single resultant. It is not merely additive of these components, but takes into account the particular circumstances that might make a particular category especially important. For instance, in Guatemala, the Catholic Church’s performance of the activity of creating and carrying out the performance of a proto-truth commission was far stronger in substance than any of its other activities, and thus receives an especially strong weighting. c   For this criterion, “n/a” obtains where the institution is a trial or where a religious actor influences a truth commission, making a proto-truth commission a moot point. d   For this criterion, “n/a” obtains where a truth commission, or, in all cases, trials, provide no opportunity for corporate hearings. In corporate hearings, representatives of religious organizations appear to speak for their entire organization. e   Rwanda’s Gacaca courts are still in progress, so complete information is unavailable. The two categories dealing with religious leaders’ role as judges or commissioners are labeled “n/a due to insufficient information.”

Sierra Leone – National Courts South Africa – Truth and Reconciliation Commission Yugoslavia – ICTY

188 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities

but the influence of religion weak. Six other countries show that the seemingly ambiguous relationship between religion and punitive justice is in fact a fairly strong inverse one. In the Former Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Rwanda, Argentina, Sierra Leone, and Chile, punitive justice was strong relative to other cases, but religion’s influence upon it was weak. Why, then, does religious influence vary in strength and kind? Two influences in particular prove promising for explanation. The first of these corresponds to a concept found in modern sociology, though it also finds far earlier antecedents (Casanova, 1994, pp. 3–75; Martin, 1978; Tocqueville, 1988). It is the mutual autonomy of religion and state in their basic institutional authority. What level of authority does the state exercise over a religious body’s governance, appointments, finances, speech, worship, or practice? Does the state establish a religion through law? Does it provide religions, especially minority religions, the freedom to worship, educate, speak publicly, and carry out other distinctive activities? Reciprocally, does any religious body hold express constitutional prerogatives, standing titles, offices, or legal prerogatives in appointing state officials or vetoing government decisions? A low level of autonomy may embody either a consensual coziness between religion and state or the state’s domination of religion. Throne and altar relationships between the Catholic Church and the state in Argentina and between both the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant churches in Rwanda illustrate mutual “integralism”; the East German state’s power over the hierarchy of the Protestant Evangelische Church illustrates the far less mutual version. Autonomy is high, by contrast, when religious actors maintain distance from the state’s authority, either by constitutional design or through determined resistance against a dictatorial regime, such as churches undertook in Poland, Guatemala, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, East Timor, Peru, El Salvador, and East Germany, at least among the rank and file of the Protestant church. Religious actors who exercised a strong influence on transitional justice approaches are ones who practiced autonomy from the state, first before the transition away from war or dictatorship and then during the transition. Prior to the transition, many of them maintained their autonomy against constant threat, carving out what George Weigel has called a sphere of “moral extraterritoriality” (1992, p. 151) in which they could develop, articulate, and lobby for their politics. During the transition to peace or democracy (and often both), their autonomy, often heroically preserved, bequeathed them a moral authority that then empowered them to exercise influence on their state’s approach to transitional justice. Religious actors who exercised little such influence were the same who enjoyed little autonomy – and little accompanying moral authority.



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But if autonomy explains what enables religious actors to shape transitional justice, it does not account for what kind of approaches they advocate. Here, a second sort of influence on religious actors becomes relevant – the set of ideas that they hold about legitimate political authority and justice. Who possesses it? The state? Some other entity? What is the proper relationship between political and religious authority? What conception of justice ought to govern the state’s behavior? Rooted in its both its core doctrines and the circumstances of time and place, political theology prescribes a religious actor’s stance toward the state and motivates it to pursue certain kinds of approaches to political transition. A sympathetic political theology indeed motivated the churches that promoted truth recovery. Often, it emphasized human rights and called for exposing their violation. Another political conception encouraged these churches to promote truth recovery even more strongly: reconciliation. The concept shows up in the transitional discourse of religious actors in Peru, Guatemala, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Sierra Leone, East Timor, El Salvador, Germany, Argentina, and in some churches in Rwanda and Northern Ireland. Reconciliation indeed finds its most ancient expression in religious traditions – especially the Abrahamic ones, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – where it commonly connotes the restoration of right relationship. It now appears in the discourse of transitional justice all across the world, as well as in the writings of theologians, philosophers, and social scientists. In the political context, it calls for several practices designed to restore relationships along the many dimensions that political violence severs them: a public acknowledgment of the suffering of victims, reparations and other forms of memorial and public honor for victims of injustice, and practices of apology and forgiveness. Reconciliation does not necessarily exclude punishment, but defends it as “restorative justice” and envisions it taking creative political forms – the public exposure of perpetrators’ injustices before victims in a truth commission, for instance (Abu-Nimer, 2001; Gopin, 2000; de Gruchy, 2003; Kiss, 2000; Marshall, 2001; Shriver, 1995, Tutu, 1999; Volf, 1996). Contrasting with reconciliation is the idea of retributive justice, whose central goal is the proportionate punishment of guilty offenders, usually through imprisonment, sometimes through death. The balancing of evil with deserved pain and privation is obligatory and should not be compromised by other goals. In the context of transition, it might additionally help establish the rule of law in the new regime. But it is distinguishable from the punishment in reconciliation by its emphasis on traditional forms of punishment as an end in itself. Retributivism also finds expression in the Abrahamic traditions; in the Christian tradition, it has enjoyed prominence since the Middle

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Ages (see Gorringe, 1996). A political theology of retribution will favor punitive justice. Other political theologies are possible, too. Religious actors might translate their texts and traditions into support for human rights, a caliphate, or an established church. A political theology might prescribe loyalty to the state regardless of its character. Or it might call for the privileging of an ethnic community (Auerbach, 2005, pp. 472–473). A religious actor’s political theology might also simply be undeveloped, or even entirely lacking. It is hard to explain systematically why such a large proportion of religious actors have held a political theology of reconciliation in the transitions of recent years. Potential explanations lie in global theological trends within Catholic and mainline Protestant churches over the past generation, as well as in the influence of voices for reconciliation like South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu or Pope John Paul II. But whatever exactly its sources, this political theology has made its way into the language of religious actors in transitions all over the world. In sum, the argument is that those religious actors who influence approaches to transitional justice will be those that are institutionally autonomous and that hold a political theology sympathetic to the institution that they influence. In the vast majority of cases, those religious actors who are influential advocate truth recovery and draw from a theology of reconciliation and human rights in doing so. In a small number of cases, they advocate punitive justice, either out of a theology of reconciliation that emphasizes accountability or one of retribution. Conversely, those religious actors that are not influential either lack autonomy from the state, hold a political theology that favors no particular approach to transitional justice, or both. To stress autonomy and political theology is not to claim that these are the only determinants of religious influence on transitional justice. The size of a religious body, the centralization of its hierarchy, and, in the spirit of Max Weber’s argument, the presence of a charismatic leader – again, Tutu comes to mind – all matter as well. And again, religion itself is far from the only determinant of transitional justice institutions. But these two influences explain a great deal, as the cases now show.

Religious Actors and Transitional Justice: Cases It is in the texture and particularity of 15 countries and 25 transitional justice institutions arrayed in Table 8.3 that the forms of religious influence upon transitional justice and, in turn, the shapers of this influence, become apparent.



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Cases of Strong Religious Influence, Mostly for Truth Recovery.  Religious actors shape institutions for transitional justice most directly and powerfully when they create them and conduct them, apart from, and sometimes in opposition to, the state. It is only truth recovery efforts that arise through such direct civil society initiatives; punitive justice is always the state’s work. So, too, such initiatives have been rare, found only in Guatemala, Brazil, and Chile. Their occurrence, though, is especially elusive to explanations that lie in the power dynamics of the transition. Religiously organized transitional justice is neither blocked nor enabled by negotiations; rather, it circumvents them altogether. In 1995, perceiving weaknesses in official plans for a truth commission to investigate three decades’ worth of atrocities in Guatemala’s civil war, the Human Rights Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala, led by Bishop Juan Gerardi, launched its own Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI). In the end, the government’s Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) turned out to be one of the most extensive truth recovery efforts to date. But REMHI was similarly impressive, uncovering 14,291 incidents of human rights violations involving 52,427 victims, gleaning them through a personalist form of investigation that supported victims psychologically and spiritually. Its final report, Nunca Mas (“Never Again”) adopted the language of reconciliation, repentance, and forgiveness, and was even-handed, covering the crimes of both the government and the guerilla opposition. Its biggest weakness lay in accountability: few perpetrators offered testimony, repented, or were even exposed. Well after the peace accords, the military was successful in suppressing the truth in numerous instances. Punitive justice in Guatemala’s transition from war was correspondingly weak. Though a 1996 amnesty agreement exempted crimes of genocide, torture, and other offenses for which international law demands prosecution, only a tiny fraction of perpetrators have faced trial (Hayes and Tombs, 2001, p. 34, pp. 104–107, 108, 111, 125; Jonas, 2000, pp. 156–157; REMHI, 1999, pp. xxiii–xxix, 304–305; Sanford, 2003, p. 19, 64; Tomuschat, 2001, p. 243, 253). All in all, though, truth recovery in Guatemala was comparatively strong, and the Catholic Church played a strong role in bringing it about. By the 1980s, this Church’s hierarchy and grass roots had come together in asserting autonomy from the state, a position from which it came to criticize the government’s human rights abuses, channel civil society organizations into the peace process, and through this leadership gain respect as an efficacious moral force. No testimony to the Church’s clout is more powerful than the opposition it incurred from the military: Two days after he presented the REMHI report at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Guatemala City in 1998,

192 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities

Bishop Juan Gerardi was bludgeoned to death. In his address at the Cathedral, Gerardi stressed reconciliation, echoing the REMHI report and the consistent social teachings of this Church since the 1980s. In 1995, in the last stage of the peace process, it issued a major document calling for repentance and forgiveness as a response to the past. Such a political theology guided the efforts made possible by the Church’s institutional autonomy (Jeffrey, 1998, pp. 28–63; Klaiber, 1998, pp. 216–238; REMHI, 1999, xxiii–xxix). In Brazil and Chile, unlike in Guatemala, religious organizations conducted truth recovery during the reign of the military regime that violated human rights. In Brazil, they did so in secret. There, Cardinal Evaristo Arns, founder and head of the Brazilian Catholic Church’s Commission of Peace and Justice, and Protestant Pastor Jaime Wright, a human rights activist, worked from 1979 to 1985 to investigate the regime’s practices of “disappearance,” torture, and sometimes murder of political opponents between 1964 and 1979, its most repressive period. Spiriting from government offices records of the regime’s trials of military officers for torture, they established incontrovertible evidence of its crimes. After the regime fell in 1985, they published a report, Nunca Mais (“Never Again”), which became a bestseller in Brazil for 91 straight weeks (Klaiber, 1998, pp. 23–36; Wright and Dassin, 1998, pp. xi–7). All of these themes – active opposition to the state, a focus on human rights – arguably resounded in the Brazilian Catholic Church more strongly than they did in any other Latin American church. By the early 1970s, Arns and several other prelates had become regular and outspoken critics of the regime, especially its human rights abuses. As was reflected in the language of Nunca Mais, their political theology was largely centered around human rights. But it was an understanding of human rights that advanced certain themes of reconciliation – acknowledgment of victims’ suffering, and accountability through exposure (Cleary, 1997, p. 255; Klaiber, 1998, pp. 25–32, 34–36). The Chilean Catholic Church similarly worked to bring attention to human rights violations under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Its leading human rights advocate, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, organized the ecumenical Committee for Cooperation for Peace in Chile (COPACHI) in 1973, and then the Church’s own Vicariate of Solidarity in 1976. Over the next 15 years, the Vicariate became a model throughout Latin America for its work in investigating, publicizing, and recording human rights violations (de Brito, 1997, p. 115, 158; Brown, 1987, pp. 10–24). Following Pinochet’s defeat in a popular referendum in 1988, Chile’s transition to democracy took the form of a transformation. Its military command



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structure, with Pinochet as Commander-in-Chief, survived intact. In this milieu, President Patricio Aylwin created a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation on April 25, 1990. The language of reconciliation pervaded the commission right up to its close, when Aylwin, in at least two major speeches, apologized to victims on behalf of the nation, urged the armed forces to join him in repentance, and begged forgiveness for the state. Victims received significant reparations. As in Guatemala, though, the Chilean commission was weak on accountability, hampered by feeble investigatory powers, a decision not to name perpetrators in its report, and a mandate that limited its work to crimes ending in death, thus ignoring thousands of surviving torture victims. Chile, then, managed to stage truth recovery on a moderate scale, though one that remained limited by the extant power of the military and the political right (Brown, 1991, p. 10, pp. 21–25; de Brito, 1997, pp. 153–160; Hayner, 2001, pp. 36–37, p. 112, 322). Predictably, punitive justice was largely quelled during this transformational transition. In August, 1990, the Supreme Court upheld a 1978 amnesty law that had given broad immunity to military officers who had committed atrocities up to that date. Defying the power logic, however, human rights lawyers have since succeeded through gradual legal victories in prosecuting and convicting at least 35 military officers, including five generals, for human rights violations (de Brito, 2001, pp. 133–157). Chile’s period of transition itself, though, featured its truth commission, behind which were strong Catholic forces. The Vicariate of Solidarity provided it with indispensable archival information, while Church leaders supported it through public statements, pastoral letters, homilies calling for public acknowledgment of victims’ suffering, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Prior to the commission, Pope John Paul II himself spoke for truth recovery and reconciliation in his visit to Chile in 1987. President Aylwin was also a powerful carrier of Catholic ideas. His support for the commission was animated by a conception of reconciliation “laden with Catholic associations” that he articulated in his inaugural address and made a major theme of his presidency (Brown, 1991, pp. 4–5). Aylwin’s Christian Democratic Party and the larger “concertacion” of parties that brought down Pinochet also frequently voiced the Church’s message of reconciliation and supported the commission on this basis (de Brito, 1997, pp. 106–113, 155– 160; Fleet and Smith, 1997, pp. 160–166). The Church’s own message of reconciliation was empowered by its autonomy from the state. By 1976, Chile’s bishops had united behind Cardinal Silva’s precedent in denouncing Pinochet for his widespread violations of human rights, and already used the language of reconciliation in doing so.

194 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities

Through such public criticism, the Church gained the popular respect to become an important mediator of Chile’s democratic transition in the late 1980s, and then an efficacious supporter of its truth commission. The Chilean commission was a prototype for another commission that has become the world’s most famous: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Though its investigation was sizable, what earned the TRC so much fame were its nationally televised hearings – over 200 – where victims, and often perpetrators, recounted their stories. The commission notably also held hearings for corporate actors – businesses, labor unions, prisons, the media, and religious associations. The TRC’s most controversial feature was its provisions for amnesty, which arguably created impunity for human rights, but also elicited the accountability of exposure: applicants appeared at public hearings where they faced the accusations and lamentations of victims and the difficult task of explaining themselves. Though not all perpetrators were remorseful, many, including some prominent ones, showed genuine contrition and enduring repentance. The language of reconciliation, repentance, and forgiveness suffused the TRC more than they did any other commission. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC’s chairperson, proclaimed these themes regularly and volubly and gave them a central place in the commission’s final report. Accounts of the commission reveal a comparatively high proportion of perpetrators and victims practicing apology and forgiveness, though still containing significant numbers of refusals (Graybill, 1995, pp. 103–123; Krog, 1999; Meiring, 1999). Unquestionably, the TRC, particularly its amnesty provisions, was the fruit of a deal cut in the negotiations that ended apartheid. True to the logic of transformation, the apartheid government refused to relinquish power without securing impunity for its officials. It was only within this bargain that the African National Congress managed to extract conditionality for amnesty. What these power dynamics do not explain is the form, content, and spirit of the TRC, which was shaped by influential leaders who drew from South Africa’s culture and religion. South Africa’s church leaders were not in fact among the TRC’s chief shapers. Far more directly influential were ANC and other political leaders. But in a less direct way – by injecting the concept of reconciliation into South Africa’s public discourse – South Africa’s religious communities did help shape the TRC. From as early as 1968, a broad coalition of anti-­apartheid churches – the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) – gave reconciliation a central place in their message. It was a constant theme of Tutu, who served



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as General Secretary of the SACC from 1978 to 1985. In the Rustenburg Declaration of 1990, a broad coalition of church leaders reiterated reconciliation as a central political theme (Boraine et al., 1994; Boraine and Levy, 1995; Niehas, 1999). Having become prominent in South Africa’s political discourse, reconciliation, along with ubuntu, an African concept connoting human interdependence and restorative justice, could play a central role in the debates that shaped the commission. Deputy chairperson of the TRC, Alex Boraine, confirms the importance of these concepts in shaping, not merely in retrospectively rationalizing, the TRC. Boraine’s own commitment to the concept arose from his early theological training (Boraine, 2004, Interview). Johnny de Lange, the Member of Parliament who chaired the Justice Portfolio Committee that shaped the commission’s enabling legislation, offers a similar conclusion about Parliament’s proceedings (de Lange, 2003, Interview). It was in the implementation of the TRC that religious leaders played the direct role that created familiar media images. As Chairperson, Tutu presided over the TRC’s hearings in full ecclesial regalia, opened individual hearings with a prayer, and led the assembly room in hymns at particularly emotional moments. Other members of the commission sometimes questioned the appropriateness of this overt religiosity, but its presence was unmistakable. Churches also provided the TRC with staff, publicity, and spiritual and psychological support for victims and perpetrators. Its leaders made public statements supporting the commission, encouraged their own followers to participate in it, and participated in hearings for faith communities (Graybill, 1998; Meiring, 1999, p. 357, 2000). In South Africa, too, the churches’ political theology of reconciliation was bolstered by their autonomy from the state. Not all churches: The leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church, sometimes called “the National Party at prayer,” continued to associate itself closely with the apartheid state up until its final demise. But the broad coalition of Protestant churches in the SACC, as well as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had forged a position of institutional autonomy through over two decades of protest, followed by repression from the state, which in turn strengthened the church to protest further, effecting what Tristan Anne Borer has called a “spiral of involvement” that eventually brought down the apartheid state (Borer, 1998). In three other countries – Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Peru – churches also contributed to strong truth recovery, in part because their architects sought to improve upon South Africa’s experience. In all three cases, a truth commission followed a lengthy civil war and produced a hefty report

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documenting thousands of human rights violations. Like South Africa’s TRC, each of these commissions held hearings. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission held 200 public ones, 500 private ones, and 15 public meetings. Each commission also incorporated reconciliation processes – healing ceremonies in Sierra Leone, and community restorative justice initiatives in East Timor. All three commissions made recommendations for substantial reparations for victims (“CAVR & Refugees,” 2003; Dougherty, 2004; Farrington, 2004; O’Flaherty, 2004). Sierra Leone and East Timor were notable for consciously combining truth recovery with punitive justice. A Special Court in Sierra Leone envisioned trying up to 20 of the worst violators of human rights. Transitional justice in East Timor included a “Serious Crimes Unit” to prosecute major human rights violators that indicted 391 people and secured 84 convictions (Hirst and Varney, 2005). Although both countries notably failed to prosecute many perpetrators of large scale and heinous crimes – East Timor faced the powerful opposition of Indonesia – they still achieved significant, though still “moderately weak,” punitive justice. Peru conducted its Truth and Reconciliation Commission so as to build the legal and evidentiary groundwork for prosecutions, but so far, few have actually taken place. In all three countries, transitional justice emerged from a peace agreement that not did involve the total defeat of one side – a transformation. But the character of transitional justice in each country eludes this power dynamic. None involved a blanket amnesty; although Sierra Leone’s Lomé Agreement proclaimed one in 1999, it was canceled two years later. In all three cases, the character of truth recovery emerged not merely from the peace agreement, but from the initiatives of parties following the agreement, including the UN in Sierra Leone and East Timor. In both of these cases, the UN also helped to effect punitive justice, also contrary to the power dynamics of transformational transitions. In all three cases, religious actors also shaped transitional justice. True to the pattern, they were autonomous from the state, at least as far back as their country’s civil war, and espoused a political theology of reconciliation. In Sierra Leone, an interreligious council of Christian and Muslim leaders sheltered refugees during the conflict, played a crucial role in the peace process, helped shape the truth commission, and then helped to conduct healing and reconciliation ceremonies following the commission’s hearings, in all of these activities deploying the language of reconciliation. As in South Africa, the commission’s Chairman was a clergyman, United Methodist Bishop Joseph Humper, and one who also spoke frequently of reconciliation (Dougherty, 2004, p. 3; Turay, 2000, pp. 4–5; Shaw, 2004, pp. 2–3).



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During East Timor’s quarter-century long struggle for independence against Indonesia, its Catholic Church became a vigorous and defiant defender of the East Timorese people. Like the Catholic Church in Chile, its popular prestige and identification with the nation was so strong that the government had little choice but to tolerate it as the sole oppositional institution. After a violence-ridden referendum for independence in 1999, Bishop Carlos Belo and other members of the Catholic hierarchy strongly urged punitive justice, coming closer than any of the other influential religious actors to espousing a retributivist political theology. Still, the Church has also spoken for reconciliation, publicly supporting East Timor’s Commission for Reception Truth and Reconciliation, including its Community Reconciliation Panels. Two of seven commissioners were clergy (Kohen, 2001, pp. 50–51; Tanter et al., 2001, pp. 250–252). Although no church exercised similar social influence in Peru’s civil war, some of its churches played an important role in its peace process. During the three-cornered conflict between the Shining Path terrorist guerilla army, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and the Peruvian Government, both evangelical Protestant and Catholic Churches supported victims and documented violence on each side. Evangelical Protestants founded the National Evangelical Council of Peru (CONEP) with similar purposes in mind. After the peace settlement, church groups advocated, provided human rights data for, participated in forming, and helped to conduct the TRC. The Catholic Bishops publicly supported the TRC and even advocated the insertion of “reconciliation” in its title. Three out of seven commissioners were clergy. Here, too, religious groups supplemented the work of the commission by working for reconciliation on the level of civil society (Gamarra, 2000, p. 274; Klaiber, 1992, pp.  136–139, 2004, pp. 178–179). Finally, East Germany’s transition to democracy following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a more complicated case of religion’s influence on transitional justice. Transitional justice itself was complex, involving a rich admixture of several institutions. The government of unified Germany, which took power through a replacement process in which the outgoing Communist government carried little clout, conducted punitive justice by carrying out highly public trials of leading officials of the German Democratic Republic and border guards at the Berlin Wall, by forming an office in Berlin to investigate thousands of cases of lower-level crimes and bring perpetrators to trial, and through a lustration process that resulted in the dismissal of up to 55,000 officials from the civil service and private industry (McAdams, 2001, pp. 23–54; Sa’adah, 1998, pp. 143–188).

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The transition also pursued truth recovery through several institutions. The opening of the files of the Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, to public examination resulted in thousands of discoveries of collusion and betrayal by ordinary citizens, though it involved little of public acknowledgment of victims. More systematic was the work of the Enquette Commission, created by the Bundestag to create a public historical record of the Communist regime. Like other truth commissions, it produced an extensive record – 18 volumes – based on extensive testimony – 44 public hearings, 40 closed ones, and 150 subcommittee hearings during its first 3 years of operation. Yet, it created little public conversation, privileging academic analysis over stories and personal testimony (McAdams, 2001, pp. 88–123; Sa’adah, 1998, pp. 185–186). Unlike the other religious actors in this section, East German churches and their leaders are a case of weak influence, having had little effect on these institutions. East Germany’s influential religious actors were instead pastors in its Evangelische Church who had never participated in their church’s leadership or in its collaboration with the Communist regime. With their moral authority and their autonomy, they voiced different political theologies that led to different institutional approaches. One of these pastors, Joachim Gauck, helped to form and was then appointed head of the commission to open the Stasi files and to manage the lustration of former collaborationist officials. For him, exposure, accountability, and repentance among offenders were prerequisites to establishing an honest and just successor society, though he viewed them as part of a larger concept of reconciliation that included forgiveness. In contrast was the vision of reconciliation of another pastor, Friedrich Schorlemmer, head of the Enquette Commission, who urged victims to welcome collaborators into the new order, show restraint in judging their culpability, and be willing to forgive, though he also thought that perpetrators needed to come to terms with their deeds. Both espoused a version of reconciliation, but with different emphases and institutional results (McAdams, 2006, pp. 127–149). Cases of Weak Religious Influence and Punitive Justice.  Where religious leaders and organizations have rallied effectively for transitional justice – almost always truth recovery, but in a couple of cases, punitive justice – in sites of lamentation and outcry, they have by and large come to enjoy international renown: Guatemala’s Gerardi is a martyr; Chile’s Vicariate is heroic; South Africa’s Tutu is a visionary. In other, equally dreadful, sites of atrocity, though, religious actors have become infamous for their acquiescence in tyranny, civil war, and genocide, and for their impotence in the aftermath. In a darker way, these cases, too, confirm the present argument. In three sites



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where punitive justice was comparatively strong and truth recovery quite weak – Rwanda, the Czech Republic, and the former Yugoslavia – religious actors exercised little influence on transitional justice. They lacked the requisite autonomy from the state, as well as a strong, commonly held political theology by which they could have advocated either alternative institutions for truth recovery or the punitive approach that their countries adopted. Following Rwanda’s genocide of 1994, in which some 800,000 died, mostly Tutsis at the hands of Hutus, Tutsi rebels overthrew the Hutu government and promised to bring punishment to génocidaires. The legally innovative International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which focused on high-level cases, had succeeded in conducting 34 prosecutions, resulting in 29 convictions, 18 of these life sentences, and five acquittals by January 2007. National level courts tried around 10,000 detainees between December 1996 and December 2006. These are comparatively high numbers. But punitive justice in Rwanda also left a preponderance of 100,000 to 125,000 detainees untried and was plagued by administrative problems. National courts practiced low standards of due process and mostly failed to try Tutsis, who had committed their own share of atrocities. In 2002, to reduce its docket, the government then revived Rwanda’s traditional village gacaca tribunals to try all remaining suspects except for those who had taken leadership in organizing the genocide. Touted by the government through its rhetoric of reconciliation, the tribunals aimed to combine community truth telling, apology, forgiveness, and punishment. Though they have achieved some success, they have also been criticized widely for low standards of fairness and due process, for deepening ethnic divisions through their trial of mostly Hutus, and for sometimes encouraging recrimination and revenge. Added up, though, Rwandan punitive justice has been extensive enough to warrant a rating of “moderately strong” (Cory and Joireman, 2004, pp. 73–81; Daly, 2002; Rutikanga, 2003, pp. 156–157; Vandeginste, 2001, pp. 223–231, 238–243). Punitive justice in Rwanda has by and large subordinated truth recovery – an outcome matching the dynamics of Rwanda’s replacement transition. In March 1999, the government created a National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, but this body has relatively little to show for its work, certainly nothing along the lines of any official truth recovery effort. Though President Paul Kagame frequently uses the language of reconciliation, it has corresponded to scant institutional efforts. Rwanda’s established churches – Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian – exercised little influence on official efforts to deal with the past. True, their hierarchies, along with smaller churches and para-church organizations such

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as African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries, now speak of reconciliation, encourage the gacaca courts, conduct civil society efforts to heal societal wounds, and in some cases have issued statements of repentance. But they have done little to advocate or implement transitional justice institutions. The churches failed to influence transitional justice because their moral authority was compromised in the genocide itself. Though top leaders of the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches did not actually help organize the killing, they were largely silent toward it while the Catholic hierarchy endorsed the Hutu regime – forms of acquiescence that many in the public interpreted as endorsement. Several lower-level clerics and a few bishops even helped to carry out the genocide, including two Catholic nuns who were convicted in Belgian courts for slaughtering some 5000 civilians (Graybill, 2001, pp. 9–10; Longman, 1998, p. 58, 2001, p. 166, 180; Rittner et al., 2004; Van Hoyweghen, 1996, pp. 394–396). Behind this infirmity lay a history of close integration between the churches and the Rwandan state. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries were originally partners to the Belgian colonial state and helped to create ethnic divisions there. In the late 1940s and 1950s, a more socially defiant Catholic Church came to support the Hutu majority underdogs – only then to practice a reconfigured symbiosis with a Hutu regime after Rwanda became independent in 1962. Although the major churches contained dissenting factions and episodically took issue with the regime, these remained aberrations. Generally, their leaders shared close personal relations and strong class ties with state officials, cooperated with them on public projects, and supported Hutu ethnic domination within their own hierarchies. Sanctioning all of this was a dominant political theology that stressed individual salvation to the detriment of social change, human rights, or social reconciliation (Longman, 1998, pp. 54–56, 2001, p. 171; Van Hoyweghen, 1996, pp. 380–392). Neither the evil addressed through transitional justice nor the supine posture of churches toward the regime was as dramatic in Czechoslovakia as these were in Rwanda, but the logic of religion and politics ran broadly the same. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic after the breakup of the state on January 1, 1993, largely pursued punitive justice (Slovakia all but dropped the process after it became independent). Czech courts tried 198 and convicted 29 communist officials for specific crimes like beating and killing dissidents, but trials were overshadowed by a far more ambitious scheme of lustration in which some 200,000 high communist officials and citizens who worked or collaborated with the State Security Corps (Stb) were debarred from holding positions in the government (Rosenberg, 1995, pp. 67–121; Ash, 2002; Enriquez, 2001, pp. 225–240).



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The Czech transition was largely one of replacement: the summary fall of Communism left the new regime to call the old one to account as it saw fit. Aside from a few exceptional voices, Czech churches, Catholic and Protestant, played little role in advocating or implementing trials or lustration, or in advocating an alternative of truth recovery. These churches lacked autonomy and public moral authority. With their governance and activities dominated by the Communism regime, they largely failed to speak out, at least until the 1980s, and then only weakly in comparison to defiant churches in Poland, South Africa, and elsewhere. In the street protests of 1988 and 1989, the churches were only a few among the many factions that coalesced. It is not surprising, then, that they exercised little influence on the transition that followed (Ramet, 1998, pp. 112–119; Weigel, 1992, pp. 159–190). A final case of weak religious influence upon punitive transitional justice is Former Yugoslavia, where a civil war between 1991 and 1995 took over 200,000 lives and created up to a million refugees. Two special complexities arise here. First, Yugoslavia disintegrated into several successor states, each having its own experience of transitional justice. Yet, the most prominent institution for transitional justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), covers crimes from the entire former federal state. My imperfect solution is to treat Yugoslavia as an aggregated case, but then to note particularities in the transitional justice approaches of its successor states.3 Second, though Yugoslavia is called here a case of “replacement,” it was not the usual sort of replacement, where a holder of power is removed. But the power dynamic was similar insofar as outside actors – the United Nations and NATO – became involved so as to place pressure on state governments. Ultimately, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević was himself “replaced” when he was electorally defeated in September 2000, and subsequently faced prosecution himself. Formed by the UN in 1993, the international tribunal continues to indict and try alleged war criminals, including Milosevic up to his death in March 2006. By March 2006, it had indicted 161 people and had convicted 43. Punitive justice here somewhat defies the logic of replacement, since Milosevic continued to rule in Serbia well after the court was established. It was the UN and other outside authorities that made the court possible. At the time of this writing, war crimes trials have begun to take place in national level courts in Bosnia and Croatia, and Serbia. Together, these institutions render punitive justice in Yugoslavia “moderately strong.” On the official level, truth recovery efforts are virtually nonexistent. In Bosnia, though, several NGOs have sought to gather information on war crimes, indeed systematically enough to render them “proto-truth commissions.” In

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Serbia, President Vojislav Koštunica established a Yugoslavian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2001, but it dissolved without results 2 years later. Calls for a truth and reconciliation commission for Bosnia have come from civil society leaders like Rabbi Jakob Finci of Bosnia’s Jewish community, in cooperation with other organizations. To date, though, no official commission has emerged, in part because of opposition among both victims’ groups and ICTY officials (Borello, 2004, Interview). Though truth recovery efforts in the Yugoslavian successor states have existed, they have never become more than “weak.” Aside from Finci’s tiny Jewish community, religious communities have given little force to the idea of a commission. In a war fought between nations with identities defined primarily by religion – Orthodox Serbia, Catholic Croatia, and Muslims in Bosnia – these communities played a highly mixed role. To be sure, some leaders and lower-level clerics in all three communities called for an end to fighting and urged reconciliation. But many, including top ecclesiasts, failed to distance themselves from nationalist leaders like Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević, who mobilized religious symbols and loyalties for brutal ethnic war. Leaders of the Catholic Church, especially Franciscans in Croatia, and of the Orthodox Church, including the Bishop of Banja Luka, themselves propagated national myths and memories through sermons, speeches, and media images. While most Muslim leaders were moderate in tone, statements of the Muslim President of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, publicly raised fears of a religiously intolerant Islamic Bosnian nation (Steele, 2003, pp. 126–129). As a result, in the wake of the conflict, religious communities have commanded scant moral authority for reconciliation. Again, the story is mixed. Interreligious councils were formed in the late 1990s to bring together religious leaders from each community in both Bosnia and in Kosovo, where another civil war took place between Serbs and Muslims in 1999, but these councils had little influence on official institutions. Generally, in comparison to the influence of religious actors on truth recovery elsewhere, the impact of Bosnia’s religious leaders, like that of the Czech Republic’s and Rwanda’s, has been fairly feeble.

Anomalies: Apparent and Real The cases cited earlier sustain the argument best. Influential religious actors were autonomous actors, and endued with a political theology that led them to advocate a particular institution for transitional justice, in most cases, one of truth recovery. Weak religious actors were neither. Other cases, though,



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are not so straightforward. Both Argentina’s and East Germany’s transitions involved not only significant measures of punitive justice, but also strong truth recovery efforts, the sort that religious actors are most commonly behind. Yet churches played scant role in forging either country’s political approach. East Germany’s transition, as argued earlier, was a rich mixture of several institutions for both truth recovery and punitive justice. As a collective institution, though, the East German Evangelische Church had little effect on it. Argentina’s transition to democracy, one of replacement, occurred through the fall of a military dictatorship whose “Dirty Wars” of 1976 to 1983 perpetrated a documented 8963 “disappearings.” Trials resulted in the conviction of five top junta officials, but President Carlos Menem later reversed these gains by pardoning them in 1990. Argentina also created one of the first contemporary truth commissions, the National Commission on the Disappearance of People (CONADEP), which compiled the testimony of around 7000 relatives of the disappeared into a bestseller, Nunca Mas, but was weaker than later commissions elsewhere for its meager investigatory powers and its lack of public hearings. Here, Catholic bishops issued only a few weak calls for reconciliation and none for trials (de Brito, 2001; Brysk, 1994). Why then, did these churches have so little influence, despite the fact that their countries’ truth recovery was strong? In part, because religion is not required for truth recovery. Secular actors can perfectly well advocate truth recovery and espouse reconciliation. More importantly, the relative impotence of the churches in East Germany and Argentina arises from the very factors that the argument stresses – the absence of autonomy and of a political theology of reconciliation. During the Dirty Wars, the Argentinian bishops were closely tied to the military regime. Only four out of 80 bishops spoke out against its human rights violations. Belatedly, and somewhat mutedly, they recognized this complicity in 1995, when they publicly asked for forgiveness for the “guilt we can be accused of ” (Klaiber, 1998, pp. 75–91). The hierarchy of the Protestant church in East Germany had long accommodated its Communist regime and submitted to its oversight, having declared itself a “church within socialism” in 1971. Until just before the Berlin Wall fell, neither it nor the East German Catholic hierarchy voiced strong criticism of the regime or a robust doctrine of human rights or reconciliation. Despite the fact that both of these transitions involved truth recovery, then, neither church was involved for the same reasons that churches were not influential in Rwanda, Czech, and Yugoslavia – they were not the sort of church that brings about democracy or robust transitional justice (Conway, 1994; Kellogg, 2001; Monshipouri, 1996; Ramet, 1998).

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El Salvador presents a bigger problem for the argument. Following the settlement of its civil war, this country conducted a truth commission in 1992– 1993 that was moderately strong for its partial naming of perpetrators but also hampered by a lack of endorsement from the government. Shortly after the commission published its report, President Alfredo Cristiani granted blanket amnesty to combatants under the rationale “forgive and forget,” undermining the credibility of the commission along with any possibility for accountability. Here, too, the Catholic Church hardly participated, apart from providing rhetorical and moderate logistical support. But here, the Church was indeed the sort that brings democracy and truth recovery. Like the Guatemalan Church, it played an autonomous, mediating role in the civil war, had come to preach human rights since the late 1970s, and urged reconciliation in the aftermath of the conflict. In fact, the reason for this weakness is not a systematic one: This commission was shaped and carried out by the UN, who involved few other organizations, even human rights groups, in its work. El Salvador reaffirms that religious actors are not necessary for truth recovery (Pope, 2003; Popkin, 2000; Santiago, 1993, p. 169, 180). Neither are religious actors sufficient for truth recovery. Or for punitive justice, for that matter. This is the lesson of two other cases – Northern Ireland and Poland. Both states had active, vibrant churches, but neither adopted strong truth recovery. Northern Ireland has also lacked punitive justice, a predictable outcome of the transformational end of its civil war in the Good Friday agreement of 1998. None of the parties to this pact, all of which remain at large and powerful, will consent to the trial of its leaders. A leading NGO, Healing Through Remembering, publicly proposed a truth commission, but its prospects are highly uncertain. The British Government, averse to any forum that would place it on an equal footing with the Irish Republican Army, is reluctant to participate (Porter, 2005, Interview). Churches in Northern Ireland have issued mixed messages about transitional justice. In this conflict fought between communities defined by religious identity, some churches closely identified themselves with their community’s militants – they lack both autonomy and a political theology of reconciliation, and clearly reject a truth commission. Other churches range from the Presbyterian Church, which passed a resolution against a truth commission, to the Methodist Church, which supports one, to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which is ambivalent (Porter, 2005, Interview). The fall of Communism in Poland was also a transformational transition, negotiated through a Roundtable of Communists and their opponents in 1989. In the new democracy, lively debates arose over how to address



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injustices of both the communist period and World War II, with voices like those of the first prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and former dissident Adam Michnik favoring forgiveness and reconciliation, and nationalists like Lech Walesa favoring punishment. What emerged was weak punitive justice. The Head Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation carried out 1900 investigations of crimes occurring between 1939 and 1989, but only a handful of judicial indictments resulted. After the courts struck down an early lustration law in 1992, parliament passed another, more scrupulous, one in 1997. Its implementation, however, has been continually plagued by corruption and judicial challenge. An official initiative for truth recovery, by contrast, has been almost entirely lacking (Rosenberg, 1995, pp. 178–222; Walicki, 1997). That the Polish Catholic Church has played little role in shaping transitional justice is curious. A model of autonomy under authoritarianism, its defiance of the Communist state, famously abetted by favorite son Pope John Paul II, was instrumental in the regime’s downfall in 1989. Recent allegations of Polish church leaders collaborating with the Communist secret police tarnish this conclusion somewhat, but leave it mostly intact. What is missing is a strong political theology of reconciliation. As late as 1966, when the Polish bishops forgave Germany for its crimes against the Polish nation, such a theology was strong. But in the 1980s, it seems to have yielded to anti­Communism and human rights, and then, after 1989, to positions on abortion, the family, and sexuality. In both Poland and Northern Ireland, then, even vibrant churches failed to influence official transitional justice. Few of the Irish churches combine autonomy with a political theology of reconciliation; those that do face the ambivalence or the opposition of other churches and the reluctance of the British government. The Polish Church, though autonomous, has not spoken strongly for reconciliation. Both autonomy and political theology are essential, these cases show, but even a strong religious actor is not sufficient to effect a particular approach to transitional justice.

Conclusions Together, the cases show that religious actors are a significant influence on transitional justice. They have made a difference in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Peru, Sierra Leone, Germany, and East Timor. They also show how religious actors are significant for transitional justice. In almost every site where they were efficacious, they advocated truth recovery. Wherever they advocated truth recovery, except, perhaps, in Brazil, they articulated

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the case for it through the language of reconciliation. Although they often viewed some form of accountability as an important part of reconciliation, only in East Timor and Germany did a religious actor strongly urge trials, lustration, or a political theology of retributivism. Finally, the cases show under what conditions religious actors are influential, namely when they are institutionally autonomous from the state and hold a political theology of reconciliation. Most of the cases are predominantly Christian countries, Protestant and Catholic ones at that, though not all of them: Sierra Leone is 60% Muslim, while in South Africa, where Christians are a vast majority, prominent Muslims helped shape and conduct the TRC. The Christian emphasis arises from an empirical fact: Most of the Third Wave democratic transitions, and most of the transitional justice institutions to arise from civil wars, have taken place in majority-Christian countries. Might the argument’s conclusions travel more widely? Transitions in the last generation have also occurred in Eastern Orthodox countries, at least two Buddhist countries, Taiwan and Cambodia, and a handful of Islamic countries. Eastern Orthodoxy follows the model well. In neither Greece, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, nor Serbia did this church play an important role in democratization or in advocating for an approach to transitional justice. All of these national churches had been tied quite closely to their countries’ pre-democratic regimes – though in some cases, only after dissidents resisted and faced martyrdom – thus following a pattern of collaboration dating back to the “Caesaro-Papism” of the Byzantine period and continuing into the era of modern nation states. Insofar as they held a “political theology,” it was largely one of acquiescence to the state. Orthodox churches have embraced human rights only weakly in comparison to western Christianity and have only occasionally preached reconciliation in a political context (Philpott and Shah, 2006, p. 44, 47, pp. 49–50). Evidence is already emerging that truth recovery can take place where Islam is predominant. Following on the experiences of Sierra Leone and South Africa is Morocco, which has just completed the first major truth commission in a country that is almost solely Muslim. The government of Afghanistan, also almost entirely Muslim, has approved an “Action Plan for Peace, Reconciliation, and Justice in Afghanistan” to investigate past human rights violations, commemorate victims, and implement reconciliation mechanisms. A survey of Iraqis conducted by the International Center for Transitional Justice also shows them largely open to truth recovery, while Iraq’s Prime Minister has recently advocated a national reconciliation plan (ICTJ, 2004; Partlow and Sebti, 2006).



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But the case for Islam must go deeper: Does the tradition include a political theology of reconciliation? It is a large question to ask about a religion with centuries of writings on justice, punishment, and politics. At least some prominent contemporary scholars of Islam point to the possibility. George Irani and Nathan Funk (1998) have documented traditional Arabic Islamic rituals of sulh (“settlement”) and musalaha (“reconciliation”), rich practices of reconciliation that include apology, forgiveness, restitution, and community ratification. Abdulaziz Sachedina (2001) makes a case that a conception of restorative justice is rooted in the Qur’an. Whether these and other statements of Islamic restorative justice (Ammar, 2001) can command a broad consensus within Islam is still an open question. Transitional justice will continue to be important. As long as countries are becoming democracies they, or at least most of them, will want to look back at their pre-democratic past. As long as civil wars are being settled – and there are plenty still raging – the parties involved will want to assess injustices committed during the combat. The justice of transitions will interest both activists who proffer solutions and analysts who want to understand why certain solutions are adopted and what their effects are. Both will look around to other countries for lessons and patterns. If the current argument is correct, they will want to pay special attention to the role of religion. Notes 1

2

3

This is not to say that Huntington is generally a “hermeneuticist of suspicion.” His scholarship is known for its emphasis on ideas, culture, and religion. See The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Huntington notes the correspondence between his own categorization of transition processes with that of Donald Share and Scott Mainwaring (1986). For helpful comments on this section, I thank John Allcock.

References Abu-Nimer, Mohammed (2001) Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence (Lanham, MD: Lexington). Ammar, Nawal H. (2001) “Restorative Justice in Islam: Theory and Practice,” in The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice. Ed. Michael L. Hadley (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 161–180. Amstutz, Mark (2005) The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Ash, Timothy Garton (2002) “Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past. Ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 265–282.

208 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities Auerbach, Yehudith (2005) “Forgiveness and Reconciliation: The Religious Dimension,” Terrorism and Political Violence 17: 469–485. Boraine, Alex and Janet Levy (1995) The Healing of a Nation? (Cape Town, South Africa: Justice in Transition). Boraine, Alex, Janet Levy, and Ronald Scheffer (1994) Dealing with the Past: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Cape Town). Borer, Tristan Anne (1998) Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980–1994 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). de Brito, Alexandra Barahona (1997) Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press). (2001) “Truth, Justice, Memory, and Democratization in the Southern Cone,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies, Ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Gonzalez-Enriquez, and Paloma Aguilar (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), pp. 119–160. de Brito, Alexandra Barahona, Carmen Gonzalez Enriquez, and Paloma Aguilar (eds.) (2001) The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Brown, Cynthia (1991) Human Rights and the ‘Politics of Agreement’: Chile during President Aylwin’s First Year. An Americas Watch Report. (1987) The Vicaria De La Solidaridad in Chile. An Americas Watch Report. Brysk, Allison (1994) The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina: Protest, Change, and Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Casanova, Jose (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). “CAVR & Refugees” (2003) La’o Hamutuk Bulletin 4 (5). Cleary, Edward L. (1997) “The Brazilian Catholic Church and Church–State Relations: Nation-Building,” Journal of Church and State 39 (2): 253–271. Conway, John (1994) “The ‘Stasi’ and the Churches: Between Coercion and Compromise in East German Protestantism,” Journal of Church and State 36 (4), Autumn, 725–746. Cory, Allison and Sandra F. Joireman (2004) “Retributive Justice: The Gacaca Courts in Rwanda,” African Affairs 103 (410): 73–89. Daly, Erin (2002) “Between Punitive and Reconstructive Justice: The Gacaca Courts in Rwanda,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 35 (2): 255–296. Dougherty, Beth (2004) “Searching for Answers: Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” African Studies Quarterly 8 (1): 39–56. Enriquez, Carmen Gonzalez (2001) “De-Communization and Political Justice in  Central and Eastern Europe,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in  Democratizing Societies. Ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, ­Gonzalez-Enriquez, and Paloma Aguilar (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 218–247. Farrington, Arin (2004) “Moment of Truth: Peru’s Struggle to Recover Its Moral Memory is a Remarkable First Step in Remaking the Society,” Ford Foundation Report 35 (2): 26–31. Fleet, Michael and Brian H. Smith (1997) The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).



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Gamarra, Jeffrey (2000) “Conflict, Post-Conflict and Religion: Andean Responses to New Religious Movements,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2): 271–287. George, Alexander (1979) “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Comparisons,” in Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory and Policy. Ed. Paul Gordon Lauren (New York: Free Press). Gopin, Marc (2000) Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gorringe, Timothy (1996) God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence, and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Graybill, Lyn (1995) Religion and Resistance Politics in South Africa (Westport, CT: Praeger). (2001) “To Punish or Pardon: A Comparison of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Human Rights Review 2 (4), 3–18. de Gruchy, John W. (2003) Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson (2000) “The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions,” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions. Ed. Robert  I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Hayes, Michael A. and David Tombs (2001) Truth and Memory: The Church and Human Rights in El Salvador and Guatemala (Leominster, UK: Gracewing). Hayner, Priscilla (2001) Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge). Hirst, Megan and Howard Varney (June 2005) Justice Abandoned? An Assessment of the Serious Crimes Process in East Timor. International Center for Transitional Justice Occasional Papers Series. Huntington, Samuel P. (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Ignatieff, Michael (1996) “Articles of Faith,” Index on Censorship 25 (5), 110–122. International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) (2004) Iraqi Voices: Attitudes Toward Transitional Justice and Reconstruction. Irani, George E. and Nathan C. Funk (1998) “Rituals of Reconciliation: Arab-Islamic Perspectives,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (4): 53–72. Jeffrey, Paul (1998) Recovering Memory: Guatemalan Churches and the Challenge of Peacemaking (Uppsala, Sweden: Life & Peace Institute). Jonas, Susanne (2000) Of Centaurs and Doves (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). Kellogg, Michael (2001) “Putting Old Wine Into New Bottles: The East German Protestant Church’s Desire to Reform State Socialism,” Journal of Church and State 43 (4), Autumn: 747–772. King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994) Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Kiss, Elizabeth (2000) “Moral Ambition Within and Beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice,” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions. Ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

210 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities Klaiber, Jeffrey (1992) “Peru: The Church and the Shining Path,” America, 6: 136–139. Klaiber, Jeffrey (1998) The Church, Dictatorship, and Democracy in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books). Klaiber, Jeffrey (2004) “Peru’s Truth Commission and the Churches,” Bulletin of Missionary Research 28 (4): 178–179. Kohen, Arnold S. (2001) “The Catholic Church and the Independence of East Timor,” in Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia, and the World Community. Ed. Richard Tanter, Mark Selden, and Stephen R. Shalom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Krog, Antjie (1999) Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Random House). Longman, Timothy (2001) “Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Religion in Africa XXXI (2), 163–186. (1998) “Empowering the Weak and Protecting the Powerful; The Contradictory Nature of Christian Churches in Central Africa,” African Studies Review 41 (1): 49–72. Marshall, Christopher D. (2001) Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans). Martin, David (1978) A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper & Row Publishers). McAdams, A. James (2001) Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McAdams, A. James (2006) “The Double Demands of Reconciliation: The Case of Unified Germany,” in The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice. Ed. Daniel Philpott (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), pp. 127–150. Meiring, Piet (1999) Chronicle of the Truth Commission (Vanderbylpark, South Africa: Carpe Diem). (2000) “The Baruti versus the Lawyers: The Role of Religion in the TRC Process,” in Looking Back, Reaching Forward. Ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd (Capetown, South Africa: University of Capetown Press). Minow, Martha (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press). Monshipouri, Mahmood and John W. Arnold (1996) “The Christians in Socialism – and after: The Church in East Germany,” Journal of Church and State 38 (4), Autumn, 751–773. Neier, Aryeh (1995) “What Should Be Done About the Guilty?,” in Transitional Justice. Ed. Neil Kritz (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press). Niehas, Carl (1999) “Reconciliation in South Africa: Is Religion Relevant?,” in Facing the Truth: South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Athens: Ohio University Press). O’Flaherty, Michael (2004) “Sierra Leone’s Peace Process: The Role of the Human Rights Community,” Human Rights Quarterly 26 (1): 29–61. Partlow, Joshua and Bassam Sebti (2006) “Iraqi Leader Outlines Plans for Reconciliation,” Washington Post, June 26, P. A.



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Philpott, Daniel and Timothy Samuel Shah (2006) “Faith, Freedom, and Federation: The Role of Religious Ideas and Institutions in European Political Convergence,” in Religion in an Expanding Europe. Ed. Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pope, Stephen J. (2003) “The Convergence of Forgiveness and Justice: Lessons From El Salvador,” Theological Studies 64: 812–835. Popkin, Margaret (2000) Peace Without Justice: Obstacles to Building the Rule of Law in El Salvador (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press). Ramet, Sabrina P. (1998) Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in EastCentral Europe and Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI) (1999) Guatemala: Never Again! (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books). Rittner, Carol, John K. Roth and Wendy Whitworth (2004) Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House). Rosenberg, Tina (1995) This Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (New York: Random House). Rutikanga, Bernard Noel (2003) “Rwanda: Struggle for Healing at the Grassroots,” in Artisans of Peace: Grassroots Peacemaking among Christian Communities. Ed. Mary Ann Cejka and Thomas Bamat (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books). Sa’adah, Anne (1998) Germany’s Second Chance: Truth, Justice, and Democratization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sachedina, Abdulaziz Abdulhussein (2001) The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press). Sanford, Victoria (2003) Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Santiago, Daniel (1993) The Harvest of Justice: The Church of El Salvador Ten Years After Romero (New York: Paulist Press). Schreiter, Robert (1998) The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books). Share, Donald and Scott Mainwaring (1986) “Transitions Through Transaction: Democratization in Brazil and Spain,” in W. A. Selcher, ed., Political Liberalization in Brazil: Dynamics, Dilemmas and Future Prospects (Boulder, CO: Westview). Shaw, Rosalind (2004) Forgive and Forget: Rethinking Memory in Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. April 29. Shriver, Donald W. (1995) An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press). Steele, David A. (2003) “Christianity in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo: From Ethnic Captive to Reconciling Agent,” in Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik. Ed. Douglas Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Tanter, Richard, Mark Selden, and Stephen R. Shalom (eds.) (2001) Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia, and the World Community (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). de Tocqueville, Alexis (1988) Democracy in America, vol. 1. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence (New York: Perennial Library). Tomuschat, Christian (2001) “Clarification Commission in Guatemala,” Human Rights Quarterly 23, 233–258.

212 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities Turay, Thomas Mark (2000) “Civil Society and Peacebuilding: The Role of the InterReligious Council of Sierra Leone,” accessed at www.c-r.org/accords/s-leone/ accord9/society.shtml. Tutu, Desmond (1999) No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday). Van Hoyweghen, Saskia (1996) “The Disintegration of the Catholic Church in Rwanda: A Study of the Fragmentation of Political and Religious Authority,” African Affairs 95: 379–401. Vandeginste, Stef (2001) “Rwanda: Dealing with Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity in the Context of Armed Conflict and Failed Political Transition,” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict. Ed. Nigel Biggar (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press), pp. 251–286. Volf, Miroslav (1996) Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press). Walicki, Andrzej S. (1997) “Transitional Justice and the Political Struggles of Post-Communist Poland,” in Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies. Ed. A. James McAdams (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press), pp. 185–238. Weigel, George (1992) The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wright, Jaime and Joan Dassin (1998) Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964–1979 (Austin: University of Texas Press).

T homas C ushm an 9.  Genocidal Rupture and Performative Repair in Global Civil Society: Reconsidering the Discourse of Apology in the Face of Mass Atrocity

Acts of Apology One of the most interesting developments in political discourse over the last few years has been the emergence of official, public apologies by nations, individuals, religious institutions, and institutions of global governance for their culpability for and failure to prevent atrocities, gross violations of human rights, and genocide. The Queen of England apologized for the treatment of the Maori people by the British Empire, the Roman Catholic Church apologized for the Spanish Inquisition and other acts of violence committed in its name; and the United States, several European countries, and the United Nations have apologized for failing to prevent genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda.1 Hardly a day goes by, it seems, without a representative of some nation, social institution or group apologizing for the misdeeds of some individual, institution, or group for either doing something to them or failing not to do something for them. Why has this “age of apology” (Gibney et al., 2008) come about? And what does it mean? Or more to the point, what do apologies mean? Clearly, it was not always the case that powerful nations and institutions have apologized for their acts. Indeed, the opposite has been the case: wars, imperialism, mass killings, and other such nefarious acts have generally been committed in the name of self-defense, material interest, considerations of national interest, realpolitik and simply as ordinary business. The exercise of power throughout history has always been attended by an unapologetic and willful rhetoric of justification and righteousness, the latter being the antithesis of the rhetoric of apology. Historically speaking, what Hegel called the “slaughterbench of history” has always been a bed that has been made in a distinctly unapologetic way.

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The discourse of apology in the modern world is, thus, something that seems directly tied to the modern social condition and it is to the structures and culture of modernity that we must look for our explanations of it as a central new form of political discourse. Moreover, the cultural meanings of apology must be examined as both a product of and a producer of contemporary forms of institutional interaction in the modern world. Contemporary political culture is alive with the rhetoric of apology and there is a vibrant discussion of this phenomenon in the scholarly literature (see, for instance, Barkan and Karn, 2006; Gibney et al., 2008; Lind, 2008; Nobles, 2008; Tavuchis, 1993). Like much literature on violence and human rights abuses, the most writings on apologies has been “interested” in the sense that it is grounded in a normative framework that favors social justice and reconciliation and sees apology as means toward achieving the latter2 ; social science often serves as the intellectual “arm” of the modern body politic that has become deeply inflected with normative ideas about the value of such things as forgiveness, reparations, and reconciliation. Consider this passage from the introduction to an important new work on apology: “Our hope is that these apologies will have political consequences; that they will lessen the level of bitterness, anguish, and desire for revenge among victims; and that they will engender in perpetrators a genuine understanding of past harms and a genuine feeling of remorse. If all this happens, in some of it not all cases, it will contribute to reconciliation and trust, both elements we believe that are crucial for democratic civic interaction. But weighed against this eventuality are hypocrisy, realpolitik, resentment, and cynicism. This is the cause of our unease at the same time that we regard genuine political apologies as a hopeful sign of a more peaceful world” (HowardHassman and Gibney, 2008, p. 8). The passage blends a desire for serious scholarly understanding of apology with kind of liberal, progressive hope for the positive functions of apology in the public sphere. It reflects longstanding tradition of social scientific understanding in the service of social progress, in this case understanding the role of apology for the past in terms of its functions for the present and future. At the same time, it wisely expresses some “unease” at the factors that the authors’ sense can mitigate the positive outcomes of the act of apology in the civil sphere.3 In this chapter, I would like to reconsider apologies not so much as acts that are impinged upon, in Howard-Hassman and Gibney’s sense, by the ethically nefarious processes of “hypocrisy, realpolitik, resentment, and cynicism” noted by Howard-Hassmann and Gibney, but as acts that play a central role in the very constitution and reproduction of a global social system that is driven by the very practices and logic of hypocrisy, realpolitik, resentment,



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and cynicism. The approach to apology presented here is critical in the sense that it explores the kinds of things that official apologies actually do in a sociological sense other than apology is often assumed to do in an idealtypical sense, or the kinds of things that liberal, progressive-minded people hope that it does: that is, establish an empathic, intersubjective bond between victim and perpetrator in which the latter, through apology, acknowledges wrongdoing, accepts responsibility, and asks for some kind of forgiveness as the basis for resuming a social contract for living together. My aim is not to deny that there might be positive ethical or utilitarian consequences of apology for social reconciliation. Rather, I wish to think in a more theoretically complex sociological way about apology as a discourse of modernity that has the presumed manifest function (in Robert Merton’s sense) of effecting what Jeffrey Alexander (2001) refers to as “civil repair,” but which also, by virtue of its highly ritualized and even quasi-religious character, leaves the institutional mechanisms that facilitate acts of modern atrocity in place. In this sense, I want to question the authenticity of acts of official apology in relation to establishing a truly meaningful intersubjective relation between victims and perpetrators that actually does repair injustice and allows both parties to put the past behind them and restore the integrity of the civil sphere as a basis for the future. While the issue of the authenticity of apology and ambivalence toward the effectiveness of apology is a topic of many contemporary studies of apology, I want to elaborate how it is that secular, but nonetheless sacred, acts of apology function to maintaining the social conditions that allow for a repetition of atrocity, in addition to whatever uses apologies might have for reconciliation and progressive social futures. The empirical focus in this chapter is on the acts of apology that occurred in the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda. I wish to show that these acts were primarily “performative events” that discursively addressed the failure of nations and international organizations (what the interlocutors themselves refer to mythically as “the international community”) to act in ways that might have prevented genocide. There is perhaps no phenomenon more traumatic in human societies than genocide. Not only Rwanda in 1994 but also the genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina from 1992 to 1994 before that and in Darfur at present represent an extreme challenge to the moral foundations of modern, global civil society. The moral discourse of “the good” in global civil society modern civil sphere was always grounded, either explicitly (as in the case of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), or implicitly in reference to the “sacred evil” of the Holocaust (Alexander, 2003, pp. 27–84). The normative discourse of modernity was decisively shaped and perhaps even centrally constituted by the United Nations Declaration of Human

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Rights, and this ethical discourse was instantiated into law immediately after the foundation of the United Nations in the form of the The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, adopted by resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1948. It was most symbolic that the first convention passed by the United Nations addressed genocide, the crime out of which the United Nations itself was founded, and in which it legitimated itself in its foundational rhetoric. Yet, the Genocide Convention, as an international law, though ratified by the majority of the nations in the world, has been the basis of a concrete intervention to prevent genocide. Even in cases where there was intervention by powerful states to prevent genocide (for instance, the NATO intervention in Kosovo), the action was grounded in the rationale of “regional security” rather than international law or human rights; indeed, it was even held to be, strictly speaking, against the international law that prohibits violations of sovereignty (Kosovo Report, 2001). Genocide is practice that ought to have no place in modernity, if modernity is conceived of as a project of the Enlightenment. Zygmunt Bauman (2001) chillingly pointed out, however, that the Holocaust was specifically enabled by the cultural logic and institutions of modernity. His implication is that modernity was not then and is not now in and of itself a guarantee of the prevention of genocide and, in fact, might actually be facilitated by ­modernity.4 Genocide appears to be a regular occurrence, from a sociological point of view; it appears to be “built-in” to modernity and perhaps even facilitated by the institutional configuration and cultural logic of later modernity. The contrast could not be starker: on the one hand, genocide appears to be a normal aspect of modernity, yet, on other hand, genocides in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur are new icons of “sacred evil” that ought not to be part of the present human condition. We are simultaneously outraged by them, but indifferent toward them. We express moral horror toward them, but do not approach them. These genocides are something more than inconvenient truths; they are glaring contradictions of the global moral order. These genocides have successively “ruptured” or “punctuated” the progressive, celebratory, and equilibratory discourse of global civil society. Genocide is modernity’s evil twin, a doppelganger, which hangs heavily over the mythology and institutional structures of global progress. Such “genocidal ruptures” are a normal part of the modern environment and every time they occur they demand civil repair. Apologies presume to effect this civil repair, yet because they are primarily symbolic performances they may have little to do with actually fixing that which is “broken,” at least in terms of repairing the international institutional order that appears to tolerate and even facilitate mass atrocity in the present day.5 Apologies are performative acts, in



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the sense of what J. L. Austin (1975) meant by the sense of the performative, which presume that one is doing something by simply saying something. As I shall make clear in the last section of this chapter, it may be that not only do apologies do nothing in terms of preventing the kinds of atrocities to which they are addressed, but instead actually strengthen the very system that gives rise to atrocious practices.

The Pattern of Response to Genocide Before analyzing the discourse of apology for the genocide in Rwanda, I begin by outlining, in the most general sense, the pattern of response to late modern genocides in terms of three distinct phases, of which the last phase – apology – will be the main focus of the chapter. If we take the most visible genocides of the last two decades – Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, the pattern of response can be articulated as follows: 1. Recognition of atrocity: In this first stage, information about actual and impending atrocities is brought to the attention of institutions through a variety of surveillance mechanisms. This information is filtered through bureaucratic structures and assessed in relation to the normative values and practices of the institution. In this stage, the primary goal of institutions is to forestall intervention on moral or human rights grounds in deference to practical national or international interests. Intervention is generally unpopular both domestically and internationally. In addition, bureaucratic structures are slow to respond to genocide because the processes of genocide proceed faster than the bureaucratic structures that guide the institutions that may respond to genocide. 2. Redescription and denial: In the second stage, information about genocide is processed and redescribed in discursive terms that favor nonintervention. A descriptive vocabulary that specifically denies genocide is developed and deployed and this vocabulary generally denies that the phenomenon under consideration is genocide. Generally, genocide is redescribed in more neutral or amorphous terms such as “civil war” or “age-old hatreds,” terms that deny causation or culpability to any one party, and therefore make it more difficult to take sides or to intervene. In addition, a specific rhetoric of “the complexity of the situation” and the demand for further understanding and the necessity of negotiation emerge. It is under the cover of such processes that the actual atrocities escalate and genocide occurs without intervention.

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3. Apology and culpability: The third stage is the stage of apology and the performance of civil repair. In this stage, leaders of groups, institutions, or nations deploy a rhetoric of apology that acknowledges the errors and mistakes of institutional processes to prevent genocide. In some cases, apologies are presented with the promise of “never again,” referring, of course to the slogan based on the experience of the Holocaust, which has guided all efforts at genocide prevention in the modern world. These are primarily symbolic events and seek to reintegrate institutions back into the moral universe of the global discourse of prevention and concern for human rights. Such apologies, however, seldom outline the exact political mechanisms and cultural processes that led to nonintervention in the first place. Thus, they are primarily rituals that work to address normative wrongs and to reestablish faith and trust in the culpable parties and institutions for failure to prevent genocide into a community of moral concern.6 Yet this reintegration, as I will argue, leaves intact the very social structures and cultural logic of realpolitik that created the possibilities for genocide to occur in the first place. They leave unaddressed and invisible the very mechanisms that are likely to lead to a renewal of the pattern of atrocity, avoidance, and apology in the face of new gross violations of human rights. The result is a bifurcated civil sphere of international politics, in which there are two planes of discourse, the one normative and the other instrumental, which are incommensurate: the normative plane of moral and ethical concern and the plain of political interests and formal rationality. It may very well be that the two planes intersect, but this is not, in my view, an inevitable or “natural” characteristic of modernity.

The Clinton Apology for the Rwandan Genocide The events that led up to the genocide in Rwanda are rather well known (see, for instance, Gourevitch, 1999; Power, 2007). In the months leading up to the mass atrocities committed in April–June 1994, a clear body of intelligence emerged that indicated that the extremist leaders of the Hutu ethnic group was mobilizing to commit mass murder of Tutsis in the country. This intelligence was reported by national intelligence agencies, State Department officials and UN personnel, in particular, General Romeo Dallaire, commander of peacekeeping forces in Rwanda (see Dallaire, 2005). On the American side, this evidence was ignored, with specific instructions that the word “genocide” was not to be used by any American officials to describe events in Rwanda (Power, 2007). This linguistic directive (not, incidentally, exclusive



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to the American side but at work more generally in the broader global stage) had the pragmatic utility of releasing the signatories of the UN Genocide Convention from the obligation to intervene to prevent genocide. As events played out in the spring of 1994, the mass atrocities in Rwanda were captured and presented as a compelling and tragic social drama. What is most notable about late modern genocides is their sheer visibility: because of modern media technologies, atrocities in far away places were captured in intimate detail and presented to mass audiences all over the world. The instantaneous nature and depth of the coverage of mass atrocity in Rwanda was significant in two senses. First, it could not be argued that “we did not know” (as it often was in the case of the Holocaust). Second, the coverage created a pool of information from which a moral discourse of outrage and disgust could be constructed. The Rwandan case, as the Bosnian case before it, indicated that the amount of information could be very effective in creating a moral discourse of outrage and disgust, but had very little to do at all with bringing about the practical action of intervention and prevention (the present case of Darfur, shows this relation even more – the amount of information about mass atrocities in Darfur and legions of Darfur activists in the West are perhaps unprecedented in history of mass killing; yet, still, no effective practical response was or has been mounted to prevent genocide in Darfur. This suggests a bifurcation between the normative plane of global civil society and the practical plane of international politics, a topic I shall return to in the final pages of this chapter).7 On March 25, 1998, American President Bill Clinton, together with a delegation of members of Congress and other notable Americans, appeared with the president and vice president of Rwanda at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda. Clinton delivered a speech that acknowledged the atrocities committed there in 1994 as genocide, an apology for Western failure to intervene to stop genocide in the country, and a message of strong American and international support and solidarity for the Rwandan people and.8 The affair, like other events of this sort, was a highly symbolic political ritual in which the head of state of the most powerful nation met with the new president of Rwanda to acknowledge the wrongs that had been committed and to recognize the errors that were made in responding to the situation in Rwanda. In the opening parts of his speech, which was specifically addressed to “genocide survivors” (who it seems were specially convened to make up the audience at the event), Clinton rehearsed in detail the litany of horrors that had occurred during the genocide, horrors that the Rwandan people who survived the massacres surely did not need to be reminded of. He noted, as well, that the killings were not “spontaneous or accidental”: and were “aimed at the systematic destruction

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of a people.” In short, Clinton used the language that defines the crime of genocide, a language he had specifically and intentionally disavowed and disallowed in his administration during his first term as president. Clinton’s opening comments were primarily didactic, articulating a detailed history of the atrocities that occurred in 1994. In dramatic fashion, the president affirmed the memory of the survivors by acknowledging what they had experienced first-hand. His historical description is laden with language that is central to the vocabulary of definitions of genocide: he notes the scale of the atrocities by noting that “at least a million lives” were lost, and he stressed the intensity of the mass killing by pointing out they were “five times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the Nazis,” thus inferring that it was at one level even worse. In symbolic and quasi-religious language, Clinton discovers not only the genocide, but “pure evil”: … these killings were not spontaneous or accidental … they were certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles. … These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people. The ground for violence was carefully prepare, the airwaves poisoned with hate, casting the Tutsis as scapegoats for the problems of Rwanda, denying their humanity. All of this was done, clearly, to make it easy for otherwise reluctant people to participate in wholesale slaughter. … Lists of victims were drawn up in advance. Today the images of all that haunt us all: the dead choking the Kigara River, floating to Lake Victoria. In their fate we are reminded of the capacity for people everywhere – not just in Rwanda, and certainly not in Africa – but the capacity for people everywhere to slip into pure evil. We cannot abolish that capacity, but we must never accept it. And we know it can be overcome. (emphasis added)

Clinton’s narrative masterfully does what is acknowledged to be very important for victims of genocide: he renders the historical experience of mass atrocity by Rwandans into the objective form of genocide. He disavows terms such as “civil war” or “tribal warfare,” the very terms of discourse that were invoked earlier in his administration as narratives that justified a stance nonintervention. From conceptualization, however, Clinton moves to theology: the opening narrative of his apology does not stop at labeling events as genocide, but induces from this historical experience a secular theodicy. What happened in Rwanda was “pure evil.” He further indicates that this pure evil seems, like original sin, to be simultaneously and contradictorily both ineradicable and able to be “overcome.” There is a strong possibility of redemption evoked; the language of overcoming is deeply spiritual and vague at the same time, for it evokes sin and injustice, but at the same time the possibility – and in this case a certainty – of redemption and salvation in an unspecified future. Apologies seem always to be about the past, but in any



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apology, as in this one, a discussion of the future, the refrain of “never again,” often is embedded, implicitly or explicitly in acts of apology. Clinton then proceeds to talk about responsibility of external actors, in this case, the “international community:” The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear and full of hope. … We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror.

This passage is the core of Clinton’s apology, which assigns blame and responsibility for failure to prevent genocide. Yet what is most notable about the apology is that the entity that bears responsibility for failure to prevent genocide is the international community, a collective entity that is amorphous and undefined, but presented as an objective entity, a reality sui generis that is endowed with moral failings, conscience, and will, as if it were a human agent. By attributing blame and responsibility to a mythic entity known as “the international community” – a “community” that has neither an agreed upon meaning as a community in a sociological sense existence nor an objective corporeality or social facticity, and therefore cannot bear responsibility in the same way as a human agent can (in a Durkheimian sense, a person, an organization, a state, or military alliance have social facticity to the degree to which they can be said to exert power over individual agency, a power that cannot be said to exist with the socially constructed category of “international community”). In apologizing for the inaction of the world community, Clinton assures that blame and responsibility can be attributed to no single individual, group, nation, or organization. It specifically exculpates the president’s denial of individual responsibility for concrete decisions that he made that enabled the genocide in Rwanda (or at least allowed him to take no personal responsibility for failing to fulfilling the obligations of the Genocide Convention as a representative of the United States as a signatory). The act of apology in this case is thus offered by the very actor that bore some responsibility for the event itself and in this sense might be described as an act of “self-exculpation” by way of damnation of an unspecific collective.9 Clinton does come close, however, to admitting personal culpability: “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of

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your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror (emphasis added).”10 This passage of the apology is one of the few that contains the word “me,” but the reference to “me” or “I” is decidedly anomalous and out of place in a greater symbolic universe dominated by “we-talk.” It is beyond the scope of this analysis to interrogate fully the idea of “the international community,” which is a socially constructed fiction: it is sufficient to point out that this entity is often invoked in the discourse of international relations as if it were an objective force with a clear definition and the power or will to act. While some may argue that there is such a thing, it is generally not specified, especially in contexts of political speeches, exactly what the international community is. It is, rather, simply assumed to be, and more importantly is a moral force with values that it fails to uphold. Clearly, as the chief executive, Clinton gave orders to deny the reality of events as genocide in the nation that was perhaps most influential in intervening, and by implicating and casting blame on the international community, elides and masks his own involvement in the very history that he describes as pure evil. In addition, the realpolitik considerations that guided the decisions about nonintervention are masked under a resacralized set of peremptory norms against genocide using apologetic discourse that elides processes of realpolitik that guided the actions of members of this supposed community. This displacement of responsibility is further strengthened by Clinton’s use of the pronoun “we” to describe the failure to “call these crimes by their rightful name.” In using what Herbert Spiegelberg (1973) refers to as “we-talk,” in this case the speaking for what Spiegelberg refers to as the “absent-we” (pp. 136–137), Clinton claims to speak for the actions of a mythical international community that is itself a vague and amorphous construction, yet in whose name and deeds he presumes to speak. Clinton thus presumes what Spiegelberg calls the “givenness” that follows from the use of “we-talk,” in this case the givenness of the international community as a moral entity, which, since it not an clearly defined corporeality, and therefore cannot be said to have any agency, does not have a voice, and therefore cannot itself speak. Even if this international community were definable, or able to speak, its own voice would have also have to contain the language of realpolitik. The absent-we of the supposed international community and Clinton himself, in his presumptive role as the representative of the absent-we, were thus able to mask the instrumental logic that gave rise to the very history for which the apology in Rwanda is being made. “Calling these events by their rightful name,” that is genocide, was



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an option that was willfully denied by the actors who bore moral and legal responsibility for failure to prevent genocide. Having thus discovered history, pure evil, and responsibility and failure, the narrative of Clinton’s apology continued with calling to mind a global moral community with the ability to act in the future to prevent genocide: We owe to those who died and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future – here or elsewhere. Indeed, we owe to all the peoples of the world who are at risk – because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable – we owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror. So let us challenge ourselves to build a world in which no branch of humanity, because of national, racial, ethnic, or religious origin, is again threatened with destruction because of those characteristics, of which people should be rightly proud. Let us work together as a community of civilized nations to strengthen our ability to prevent and, if necessary, to stop genocide.

Again, he uses the pronouns “we” and “us” to specify the newfound moral obligations and responsibilities to prevent genocide. This ritually constructs the international community of moral concern, rather than a community of politics that is guided more by instrumental logic than ethical norms and leaves hidden the specific social-structural mechanisms that failed in the first place. In this “imagined world community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term, ethical possibility must constantly be reaffirmed, but without reference to the concrete structural processes and logics that remain in place and which, remaining in place, virtually guarantee a replication of ethical transgression. In this sense, the act of apology, in its act of reconstituting the public sphere of moral concern, serves to reconstitute the integrity of that sphere quite apart from considerations of the sphere of practical politics. Like many official apologies, the reification of ethical duties is followed by practical plans for making real on the promise of salvation that, in the case of genocide apology, almost always is put in terms of the sacred admonition “never again,” in Clinton’s own words: “We have seen, too – and I want to say again – that genocide can occur anywhere. It is not an African phenomenon and must never be viewed as such. We have seen it in industrialized Europe; we have seen it in Asia. We must have global vigilance. And never again must

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we be shy in the face of the evidence.” Clinton outlines a series of pragmatic political solutions that express future obligations: I am directing my administration to develop a system for identifying and spotlighting nations in danger of genocide violence, so that we can assure worldwide awareness of impending events … we must as an international community have the ability to act when genocide threatens.

Clinton expresses a personal national obligation to prevent genocide, but also calls back into mind the “we” of the international community: This afternoon in Entebbe, leaders from central and eastern Africa will meet with me to launch an effort to build a coalition to prevent genocide in this region … we hope the effort can be a model for the world because our sacred task is to work to banish this great crime against humanity.

Again, the affirmation of genocide prevention is cast as a sacred task, to be achieved by a secular political coalition. The President then outlines a plan for financial support, which is actually a set of reparations, though not specifically called that, which include a Genocide Survivors fund, and financial support for local Rwandan courts, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR): We must work now to remedy the consequences of genocide. The United States has provided assistance to Rwanda to settle the uprooted and restart its economy, but we must do more. I am pleased that America will become the first nation to contribute to the new Genocide Survivors Fund. We will contribute this year $2 million, continue our support in the years to come, and urge other nations to do the same, so that survivors and their communities can find the care they need and the help they must have. To help ensure that those who survived in the generations to come never again suffer genocidal violence, nothing is more vital than establishing the rule of law. There can be no peace in Rwanda that lasts without a justice system that is recognized as such … We applaud the efforts of the Rwandan government to strengthen civilian and military justice systems. I am pleased that our Great Lakes Justice Initiative will invest $30 million to help create throughout the region judicial systems that are impartial, credible, and effective. In Rwanda these funds will help to support courts, prosecutors, and police, military justice and cooperation at the local level. We will also continue to pursue justice through our strong backing for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The United States is the largest contributor to this tribunal. We are frustrated, as you are, by the delays in the tribunal’s work. As we know, we must do better. Now that administrative improvements have begun, however, the tribunal should expedite cases through group trials, and fulfill its historic mission.



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These pragmatic steps indicate a willingness to atone politically for the political sins of the past; they are put forth grounded in the sacred discourse of moral obligation and common humanity, as they must be so as not to be considered “payoffs” for human suffering. For the most part, Clinton’s apology, especially in its practical provision of financial resources, is rather straightforwardly secular, but it is infused with sacral mythologies of evil, transgression, guilt, redemption, and a reified global ethical community. It is important to amplify these religious dimensions of apologies as responses to mass atrocity, since they render what are a rather straightforward performance of politics into acts of moral and sacred duty. In the modern world, we have seen how nations have invested in themselves with sacredness, and in this case, we have a prime example of how international entities, in this case the “we” of the international community is also invested with quasi-religious and mythical values and power. In spite of this, however, at the end of his apology, Clinton invokes specifically religious terminology, as if to indicate that the sacred work of the international community is itself melded with and in alliance with the work of God: To those who believe that God made each of us in His own image, how could we choose the darker road? When you look at those children who greeted us as we got off that plane today, how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children? To experience the joy of another morning sunrise? To learn the normal lessons of life? To give something back to their people? When you strip it all away, whether we are talking about Rwanda or some other distant troubled spot, the world is divided according to how people believe they draw meaning from life. And so I say to you, though the road is hard and uncertain, and there are many difficulties ahead, and like every other person who wishes to help, I doubtless will not be able to do everything I would like to do, there are things we can do. And if we set about the business of doing them together, you can overcome the awful burden that you have endured. You can put a smile on the face of every child in this country, and you can make people once again believe that they should live as people were living who were singing to us and dancing for us today.

The apology completes its work by invoking the name of God and a vision of a bright utopic vision that is defined in the special one-time ritual circumstances of the apologetic event, which sacralize memory, and offer redemption in a moment of celebration that, once the president has left the airport, remains as a sacred memory of the day that the American president came

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to accept responsibility, atone for “our suffering,” and to make the Rwandan world whole again. Like other ritual memories, it remains in consciousness, fading over time into the fabric of everyday existence, both in Rwanda and in the rest of the world, in which suffering and atrocities remain a permanent and ongoing fixture. Clinton was not the only leader to apologize to Rwanda. In 2000, the Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt took responsibility for not intervening and would even go further and ask specifically for forgiveness of Belgium by the Rwandans.11 The language of forgiveness of an external actor was not specifically used by either Clinton or Annan; neither leader specifically asked Rwandans to forgive the United States nor the United Nations or the “international community.” Clinton did not mention forgiveness at all, and Annan compelled the Rwandans themselves to forgive without specifically asking the Rwandans to forgive him, the United Nations, the “international community” or the world. Verhofstadt’s public apology was the most explicit of official apologies in asking Rwandans to forgive Belgium (without, of course noting how it is precisely that they were to do that in any meaningful way), but nonetheless retained a supranational sense of responsibility be claiming that “… the international community as a whole carries a huge and heavy responsibility in the genocide.” And in considering the consequences, Verhofstadt took a stark metaphysical approach: “For reasons beyond our understanding nothing was done to help them.” This response indicates that the discourse of apology can be tightly tied to an idea that the causes and consequences of the failure to protect by the international community are unknowable and almost supernatural, when in fact they are quite easily explainable sociologically: national self-interest, the organizational self-interest of the United Nations, and the inability of large bureaucracies to respond to rapidly occurring acts of violence in far-away places explain a great deal about why there was no adequate response. By making such causes “unable to be understood,” Verhofstadt relegates a consideration of actual social-structural mechanisms of indifference and nonintervention to the realm of the undiscussed, a realm where there can be no culpability because the causes of actions are ineffable.

The United Nations and Kofi Annan’s Apology to Rwanda We have seen in the previous section that Clinton’s apology accepted responsibility for failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994, but he did so by blaming the mythic entity of “the international community,” an entity that was not specified in any objective sense. When people use the term, “the



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international community,” they often are referring to what is the closest objective, institutional formation of that community: the United Nations. Clinton could not apologize for the actions of the United Nations; he could only use “we-talk” to refer to some imagined world community that, because it has no corporeality and facticity, could not challenge his claim to represent it. Had he claimed the right to say “we” in relation to the United Nations, he would have clearly overstepped his boundaries as a political actor. As is well-known, the United Nations, and in particular, the secretarygeneral at the time, Kofi Annan, was well-informed about events in Rwanda prior to the genocide. The United Nations, however, refused to act, since its peacekeeping force in Rwanda was not authorized to “take sides” in the conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi; in Annan’s terms, such action was beyond the “mandate” of UN forces (see Dallaire, 2005). As a result, the United Nations, as an organization, failed to act in accordance with the Genocide Convention, one of its foundational treaties, to say nothing of normative requirements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the substantive and moral basis of its Charter. Not long after Clinton’s visit, on May 7, 1998, Secretary-General Annan traveled to Rwanda to address the Rwandan Parliament in Kigali. This speech was an apology that bears many of the hallmarks of Clinton’s apology, and, as we shall see, a remarkably similar discursive structure. Annan, as the Secretary-General, was a representative of the United Nations, so he was able to use “we-talk” in reference to an objective institution for which he was authorized to speak. While Clinton’s apology for the most part attributed failure to an amorphous and mythic community, Annan was able to specifically attribute failure to an institution, though he continually mixes his references to other collective entities that are presumably responsible for failure. Annan begins with the sacred invocation of his mission: “I have come to Rwanda today on a mission of healing – to help heal the wounds and divisions that still torment your nation and to pledge the support of the United Nations so that once again we can become a partner and ally in Rwanda’s search for peace and progress.”12 Having defined it as a “mission” is important, since the missionary work is a staple of religious activity, and especially geared toward redemption and salvation. Unlike Clinton, who spent a great deal of time adding empirical depth to the moral horror, Annan evokes the horrors of Rwanda three times, and in a very truncated way. The first instance appears in the very beginning of the speech: Four years ago, Rwanda was swept by a paroxysm of horror from which there is only the longest and the most difficult of escapes. It was a horror that came from

228 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities within, that consumed and devastated entire communities and families. It was a horror that left you as survivors of a trauma which to the world beyond your borders was unimaginable, even though we all now know it happened.

The second and third appears shortly thereafter: In your people’s agony, an ideology of hate and inhumanity tore the very fabric of existence and made victims of an entire people, turning every Tutsi man, woman and child into human prey in a concerted, planned, systematic and methodical campaign of mass extermination … Evil in Rwanda was aimed not only at Tutsis. It was aimed at anyone who would stand up or speak out against the murder. Let us remember, therefore, that when the killers began, they also sought out Hutus now described as “moderate” – that is, Hutus who would not kill, Hutus who would not hate.

For the most part, the Secretary-General’s speech focused on the failure to prevent the killing, and he uses “we-talk” rather freely, though without any specific reference to the actual practices of the United Nations at the time, or to his own actions. His speech is deeply inflected with moral vocabulary, with ideas of sacred evil, failed ideals, guilt, repentance, and prayers of hope: We will not pretend to know how you must overcome the unimaginable. We can only offer, in humility, the hope and the prayer that you will overcome – and the pledge that we stand prepared to help you recover. We must and we do acknowledge that the world failed Rwanda at that time of evil. The international community and the United Nations could not muster the political will to confront it. The world must deeply repent this failure. Rwanda’s tragedy was the world’s tragedy. All of us who cared about Rwanda, all of us who witnessed its suffering, fervently wish that we could have prevented the genocide. Looking back now, we see the signs that then were not recognized. Now we know that what we did was not nearly enough – not enough to save Rwanda from itself, not enough to honor the ideals for which the United Nations exists. We will not deny that, in their greatest hour of need, the world failed the people of Rwanda. In the face of genocide, there can be no standing aside, no looking away, no neutrality – there are perpetrators and there are victims; there is evil and there is evil’s harvest …

Annan evokes two separate entities that “failed” – the United Nations and the “international community” – but calls upon another presumed entity – “the world” – to “repent.” As with Clinton’s apology, Annan uses “we-talk”



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and more specifically the “absent-we” to lay the task of repentance on an indefinable entity. The international community and the United Nations are faulted for a lack of “political will” but this is a vaguely specified term, and the language of “will” signifies agency, whereas the United Nations is a bureaucracy, guided by very distinct cultural logic of realpolitik in its operations with regard to genocide in particular. Annan masks this reality, disavows his own personal responsibility, and exculpates both himself and the United Nations by noting that “we” did not see the “signs.” Again, as with Clinton, in laying the responsibility on the international community, he claims to speak for it, and there is no corporeal entity to challenge his claim. And he demands that the “world” repent, but it is difficult to imagine what, concretely, an act of “world repentance” might look like. He declares that there can be “no standing aside,” “no looking away,” and names indifference as an evil that is associated with the greater evil of genocide. His apology, condemnation, and demand for repentance is followed by an outline of progressive demands, the foremost of which is justice. He notes: The return to peace, coexistence and reconciliation in Rwanda must begin with justice after the genocide. It must be guided by an unshakeable determination to end the culture of impunity and to prosecute and punish the genocidaires under the full force of the law. Only thus can you begin to honor the memory of the multitudes cut down with such cruelty and cowardice. As long as our world is one where you are more likely to be met with retribution if you kill one person than if you kill a thousand, justice cannot reign. But to be complete, justice must be carried out with due process and above reproach, so that it can promote the process of healing that is so vital to Rwanda’s future. That is why our commitment to your future begins with the pursuit of justice. Here in Rwanda, we are assisting you in your efforts to strengthen your judiciary and improve your prisons. At the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the last six months have witnessed a fundamental change in the effectiveness of the Tribunal’s work. As you all know, the court witnessed a historic moment last week when the former Prime Minister pleaded guilty to genocide.

Speaking of justice internally for genocidaires within Rwanda and through the ICTY, Annan creates an idea of healing that is internal to Rwanda: local courts and international tribunes deflect attention away from the institutional logics that patterned indifference to the genocide. It conveys the idea of retribution, which is a strong desire among genocide survivors, and assumes a restorative and redemptive function of justice. In calling specific case of

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the guilty plea of the former Prime Minister, Annan attributes responsibility to a specific nameable Rwandan individual, thus finding the locus of evil an embodied person rather than in the amorphous tropes of the world, the international community, or the United Nations as an organization. To be sure, it has been something of a logical fallacy to presume that indifference to genocide is the same thing as perpetration of genocide, so to the extent that specific individuals can be symbolically reified as the perpetrators it is possible to displace attention to external collective entities. In a later part of the speech, Annan stresses further the fact that the Rwandans are responsible for themselves: In the case of Rwanda, you have a monumental challenge before you, I know, but I am confident that with the establishment of the rule of law and with the end of violence, your people can begin to rebuild and restore the process of development which will form the foundation of lasting peace. As you continue to rebuild the fabric of tolerance that is the basis for every society; as you slowly, but surely, restore trust and security to your country so that no woman, no man and no child will fear the night or dread the morning, you should know that we shall stand alongside you. Ultimately, however, you and only you can put an end to the violence. You and only you can find the spirit and the greatness of heart to embrace your neighbors once again. You and only you can show the world that there is life even after genocide, love even after hate, humanity even after evil. Allow me therefore to conclude by citing the magnanimous words of President Bizimungu upon the mass return of refugees to your country: “The Rwandan people were able to live together peacefully for 600 years, and there is no reason they can’t live together in peace again.” I have no doubt that one day you will. I pray that it will be soon. From broad calls for justice, Annan raises the importance of forgiveness and building trust in post-genocide Rwanda. For him: Justice, however, must also serve a larger purpose – the purpose of closing wounds, of coexistence and of trust between the Hutu and Tutsi communities of Rwanda. Restoring that trust is perhaps the greatest challenge facing your nation today. No one imagines that it can be restored easily or quickly. No one imagines that it can be restored without a degree of atonement and forgiveness that few peoples have ever had to find within themselves. It is nevertheless that trust that must and will form the basis of the One Rwanda that you are working so hard to create. To restore trust in your State, in your communities, in your neighbors, in yourselves – you must marginalize the extremists once and for all. You must teach your neighbors that you, and they, can change.



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And you must teach your children that the return from genocide must be paved with tolerance, mercy, and friendship.

Annan’s discourse here assumes a remarkably priest-like tone, as if he is imploring a flock of sinners to mend their ways. To be sure, restoring a social future in a post-genocidal society involves the building of trust. Annan conveys a notion that trust – a sacral element of global civil society – must be rebuilt, but he also assumes that it existed in a form that is recoverable. The ethnic tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi had never been resolved decisively: the two ethnic groups had coexisted together, but in a situation of latent and sometimes overt conflict that had to do with status differences that went back to colonial days. The very idea that there was one Rwanda that consisted of Hutus and Tutsis coexisting with one another was a myth of an imagined community in the past that could hardly be said to have existed (contrary to what President Bizimungu inferred). Annan calls for a restoration of what “once was” through the call for tolerance, a cardinal virtue of Western civil society, but also specifically through a Christian vocabulary of forgiveness and mercy, and the interpersonal relation of friendship (as if to assume that friendship cut across ethnic lines in an unproblematic way in pre-genocide Rwandan society). As with Clinton’s apology, Annan moves from sacral language of evil, mercy, forgiveness, friendship, and the like to more pragmatic, future­oriented actions. While noting the Herculean challenges of the future, Annan notes that: In meeting these challenges, I take faith in the fact that the international community is showing a genuine commitment to Rwanda’s future. The United Nations is prepared to help, and to advise in whichever way your people may wish. We are ready to work with you in partnership. With the presentation of my recent report on the sources of conflict in Africa to the Security Council, we are seeking to open a new chapter in the relations between the nations of Africa and the United Nations. In that report, I sought to identify the main challenges facing Africa, as well as to recommend realistic and achievable remedies to your problems. I believe you will recognize them as ideas and aims that we hold in common. I have urged dramatic debt relief measures from Africa’s creditors, as well as increased resource flows. I have emphasized the need for good governance, for governments that serve the people’s needs first – beginning with peace, security, and development. I have pointed to the urgent need for an international mechanism that will help host governments maintain the neutrality and security of refugee camps.

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Once again, Annan expresses faith in the international community, and attempts to reaffirm trust in the institution of the United Nations: “We are ready to work with you in partnership.” By stressing future partnership, and putting it on the basis of financial reparation, Annan atones for failure of external powers, including and especially that of his own organization. Yet, this does not address the failure of the implicit partnership – and the failure of that partnership – between societies like Rwanda and the United Nations that existed at the time of the genocide. The very idea of the United Nations is that it was to be an organization of partners abiding by the common moral values embodied in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the letter of the law of its treaties, in this case the most relevant treaty being the Genocide Convention. To call into question that these specific values and laws failed would be to acknowledge the foundational legitimation crisis of the United Nations, which offers itself as an “international community” guided by values, on the one hand, but which, on the other hand, is a bureaucracy guided by the norms of its own culture (Barnett, 2003) and the instrumental rationality of its member states in pursuing their own interests. Annan in his apology tries to reconstruct the United Nations as a moral community, but it is only a moral community that exists in the realm of rhetoric and performance. Speaking at about the same time as Clinton, Annan’s apology shares many of the characteristics of Clinton’s apology: constructing the genocide as a sacred evil, assuming responsibility for the failure of collective entities, the hope of redemption for evil, utopic visions of a happy and just future, pragmatic assistance, and new solidarities. He invokes quasi-religious categories to refer to secular collective entities and specifically invokes Christian ideas as a basis for the future. He diffuses blame to corporate entities and mythical constructions. Annan, however, unlike Clinton, held the position of secretary-general long after Clinton served out his second term as president. As such, Annan was compelled to address Rwanda up until the end of his term as the leader of the United Nations. In doing so, he had other occasions to apologize outside of Rwanda, where he was addressing those who were not victims inside Rwanda, or political leaders in the country. Not long after his speech to the Rwandan Parliament, Annan greeted the news of the first judgment on genocide in the history of international courts. In a statement issued on September 2, 1998, Annan noted that this landmark case as “[bringing] to life, for the first time, the ideals of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, adopted 50 years ago … This judgment is a testament to our collective determination to confront the heinous crime of genocide in a way we never have before. It is a defining



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example of the ability of the United Nations to establish an effective international legal order and the rule of law.”13 Annan is correct to say that this case was a landmark one in relation to the Genocide Convention, but by stressing the “punishment” aspect of it, he does not – indeed cannot – address the most important moral demand of the Convention, which is “prevention.” In the second part of his statement, Annan notes: “Let us never again be accused of standing by while genocide and crimes against humanity are being committed.” Perhaps Annan’s choice of words was infelicitous, since the very wrong that he had apologized for in Kigali just months before, was precisely that “we” had “stood by.” The success of the ICTY in this case was in doing something after the fact of genocide, using the fulfilling of one of the provisions of the Genocide Convention as a replacement and a post-hoc exculpation for the “crime” of failing to prevent. Immediately upon doing this, he reverted to the sacral “we-language” of the international order: I am sure that I speak for the entire international community when I express the hope that this judgement will contribute to the long-term process of national reconciliation in Rwanda. For there can be no healing without peace; there can be no peace without justice; and there can be no justice without respect for human rights and the rule of law.

In this passage (in addition to re-expressing his surety about speaking for the “entire international community”), Annan announces one small step in the redemption of evil in Rwanda the redemption of those who did nothing and places in central place the central sacred canons of the moral order of global civil society: peace, justice, human rights, and the rule of law. In later speeches, Annan stresses these themes and others: the importance of the prevention of genocide, the sin of failure to protect, the moral duties and obligations of the international community of the international community, and the ever repeated refrain that it must never be allowed to happen again. On the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Annan gave a speech in Canada, in which he called for the remembrance of the moral horror of Rwanda: We must remember the victims – the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children abandoned to systematic slaughter while the world, which had the capacity to save most of them, failed to save more than a handful, forever sullying the collective conscience. We must also help the survivors still struggling with the physical and psychological scars. But most of all, we must pledge – to ourselves as moral beings and to each other as a human community – to act boldly, including through military action when no other course will work, to ensure that such a denial of our common humanity is never allowed to happen again.14

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Annan invokes the memory of Rwanda as a stain in the “collective conscience” of the human community, as if there is actually such a thing as either a “human community” and that community can be said to have a conscience. Such reification, however, is necessary as pretext for absolution through vigilance and promises that it must not be allowed to “happen again.” Just 13 days later, at Memorial Conference on the Rwandan Genocide in New York, Annan presented an even more regretful and sorrowful tone: The genocide in Rwanda should never, ever have happened. But it did. The international community failed Rwanda, and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow. If the international community had acted promptly and with determination, it could have stopped most of the killing. But the political will was not there, nor were the troops.15 While continuing to lay the blame on the “international community and labeling its actions as” sins of omission, Annan went much further than he ever had before in inculcating himself in the disaster: The international community is guilty of sins of omission. I, myself, as head of the UN’s peacekeeping department at the time, pressed dozens of countries for troops. I believed at that time that I was doing my best. But I realized after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support. This painful memory, along with that of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has influenced much of my thinking, and many of my actions, as Secretary-General. None of us must ever forget, or be allowed to forget, that genocide did take place in Rwanda, or that it was highly organized, or that it was carried out in broad daylight. No one who followed world affairs or watched the news on television, day after sickening day, could deny that they knew a genocide was happening, and that it was happening on an appalling scale.

And in a final act, he declares a day of commemorative mourning for the victims of genocide: The General Assembly has designated 7 April as the International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda. The Government of Rwanda, for its part, has asked that the world’s observance of the Day include a minute of silence at noon local time in each time zone. Such a minute of silence has the potential to unite the world, however fleetingly, around the idea of global solidarity. I have written to all the world’s heads of State and government, asking them, and especially their public servants, to honor it. I have also instructed all UN offices, throughout the world, to take part. Here today, I would like to urge all people, everywhere, no matter what



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their station in life, whether in crowded cities or remote rural areas, to set aside whatever they might be doing at noon on that day, and pause to remember the victims. Let us be united in a way we were not 10 years ago. And let us, by what we do in one single minute, send a message – a message of remorse for the past, resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again – and let us make it resound for years to come. May the victims of the Rwandan genocide rest in peace. May our waking hours be lastingly altered by their sacrifice. And may we all reach beyond this tragedy, and work together to recognize our common humanity. If we can accept that everyone on this earth, regardless of color, creed, language, or ethnicity is fully human – and, as such, fully worthy of our interest, sympathy, and acceptance – we will have taken a giant step forward from dehumanization and toward a stronger sense of global kinship.

In some ways, this last passage, in one of Annan’s last speeches on Rwanda, represents the most religious discursive formation in the history of apologies for the Rwandan genocide. It has the quality of a funeral oration – “May the victims of the Rwandan genocide rest in peace” – with the notable exception in this case that one of those who by his own admission was complicitous in mass atrocity is himself leading the sermon. In ritualizing the memory of the sin of genocide and the sin of difference, and in calling to mind that the future of “global kinship” and “common humanity” lie in the memory of the sacred evil, Annan eerily repeats the history of the foundation of the United Nations in the memory of the sacred evil of the Holocaust. Toward the end of his term as the leader of the United Nations, he reaches for closure on the event by encapsulating it in a sacred language of good, evil, hope, and redemption. The irony is that the later apologetic speeches of Annan occurred a year after the mass atrocities and genocide in Northern Africa, in Darfur, Sudan, had already began. This is a fact on which the secretarygeneral remained willfully silent.

Unhappy Performances: Apology and the Incommensurate Cultural Logics of Modernity In the foregoing analysis, I have tried to outline the basic forms and content of apologies for genocide, using the case of Rwanda as a particularly poignant example of secular rituals (Moore and Meyerhoff, 1977) that are deeply inflected with, articulate, amplify, and dramatize sacred themes of good and evil, of guilt and responsibility, of hope and redemption. In many ways, they have all the characteristics of religious rituals, not only because of their gravitas, but also because they constantly evoke images of sin and evil, ideas of

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forgiveness and reconciliation, and redemption. They are religious in form and content, even though they deal with the failings of people, institutions, and collectives in a moral language that presumes to address and rectify these failings in an authentic way. They might be seen in this sense as what Jeffrey Alexander refers to as “trauma dramas” (2003). This discourse of official apology has emerged as part of the cultural system of modern global civil society (Nobles, 2008). They are ritual performances that ostensibly seek to effect “civil repair” by recognizing the reality and suffering of genocide, and resolve to guard against the repetition of genocide in the future. As symbolic discourses, they work to mend “ruptures” in the normative fabric of modernity by addressing, in this case, modernity’s “other”: the barbaric and evil act of genocide. As dramas, they are staged and orchestrated in fields distant from the history of the events that they call to mind and at a distance from the phenomenological world of those who have suffered and survived. In the opening pages of this chapter, I made a distinction between what I call “performative repair” and “civil repair” (see footnote 5). In making this distinction, I wish to stress the idea that acts of performative repair must be looked at in terms of their own structure as modes of symbolic discourse and considered in terms of their structure and function separately from the question of the degree to which apologies actually effect civil repair. Performative repairs, while appearing to be directed toward the victims of mass atrocity, have functions that may have very little to do with the suffering of those victims: in addition to serving exculpatory functions for elites and institutions for failure to prevent genocide, they sacralize the elemental normative elements of the discourse of global civil society: vigilance about history, the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, and the setting in motion of new commitments to care and concern about human suffering. What is most notable about the cases I have examined here is their self-referentiality, not in the specific sense of speaking for or about specific selves, but in the sense that they dramatize and sacralize the norms and values of the normative system of global civil society, and serve to reestablish and repair the normative dimension of this “imagine community.” Performative repairs reenact and revivify the norms and values of what is itself a mythical reality, and in that sense do not – and cannot – call to mind the realities of another plane of global civil society, the instrumental plane, which is characterized by the logic of instrumentality and interest. It is on that plane where genocidal ruptures are facilitated, yet it is on the normative plane that such ruptures are “repaired.” In the beginning of this chapter, I noted that the ideal-typical sense of apology is that it is as an act that seeks to effect civil repair by affirming empathy



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for victims of mass atrocity and reestablishing at the level of intersubjective communication, a sense of ontological security, and trust as the basis for an ordered social future. In this sense, it is not possible to know what the concrete effects of sacred official apologies are at the level of subjectivity in Rwandan society, unless we specifically ask Rwandans themselves what these are. One can surmise that they might feel that their abandonment by “the international community” was an act of indifference that had much to do with considerations of interests and the instrumental logic of realpolitik; the latter clearly trumped ethical concerns in the decisions of external actors not to intervene. Yet, in the ritual of apology, any discussion of realpolitik is specifically avoided, and even “forbidden.” The performance focuses on reaffirming an ethic of care and responsibility that was, ironically, trumped by a logic instrumental rationality, which if exposed in public form would dissolve any illusions that the international community – whatever that might be – is actually guided by normative concerns. In this sense, actors might be aware that the authenticity of such performances is questionable, especially when the apologies have been performed by the very actors who by their own admission and by virtue of the historical record bear some responsibility for their suffering. And in terms of actually “fixing” the very problems that the performances construct as sacred, duties, the apologies could be said to be inauthentic, or in J. L. Austin’s (1975) terms, “unhappy” or “infelicitous performances.” Austin addresses the issue of authenticity by linking the performative act with specific intentions and consequences. He notes those situations in which performative acts “go wrong”: “Besides the uttering of the words of the so-called performative, a good many other things have as a general rule to go right if we are said to have happily brought off our action. What these are we may hope to discover by looking at and classifying types of case (sic) in which something goes wrong and the act – marrying, betting, bequeathing, christening, or what not – is therefore at least to some extent a failure: the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false but in general unhappy” (Austin, 1975, p. 14). For Austin, unhappy performances are “infelicitous,” in the sense that they are “not implemented, or not consummated …” (1975, p. 16). They are seen as more or less felicitous in relation to the good or bad intent of those who utter them and the consequences that are commensurate with, or follow from, what is said. An apologetic performance could be quite “happy” in Austin’s sense if it had the specific consequence of effecting a discernible kind of civil repair, in this case the prevention of genocide in the future. We should be able to look back at apologies for genocide and link concrete outcomes in terms of prevention of genocide to the promises and commitments made in such apologies.

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Yet when we look back at these apologies, they are infelicitous: they sacralized values that have no determinative valence, they made promises that could not be kept, spoke for collectivities that cannot act or for which the performer purports to speak but does not, and, especially, had no discernible consequences in terms of altering the structures that lead to indifference toward genocide. The invocation of the promises of “never again,” of global vigilance and the responsibility to protect, seem to have had no effect in altering the effect of the cultural logic of instrumental rationality and the practices and structures that it produces. The genocide in Darfur, which began at the very time that Kofi Annan was apologizing for Rwanda, is evidence of the persistent role of instrumental rationality and the “cunning of history” that guides international affairs. Its occurrence, and the failure to prevent it, bears out the fact that the sacred discourse of the normative planes of global civil society has little to do with the ongoing production of mass atrocity. Indeed, the extent to which the apologetic discourse on genocide calls attention to sacred evil and celebrates the norms and values of global civil society and, in so doing masks instrumental rationality, it create an illusory reality where values and ethics seem to matter, but where the dominant reality is banality and “secular sin.” Notes 1

2

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5

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A most detailed list of institutional and official apologies in history by Graham G. Dodds can be found at http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/politicalapologies.html. The list is notable in demonstrating that the growth of institutional apologies has been quite rare, begins to increase significantly in the twentieth century and appears exponentially throughout the twentieth century to the present. A prime example of work which is not only “interested,” but also celebratory of apology can be found in Lazare (2005). In another work (Cushman, 2003), I have addressed this moral concern in the social science discourse on genocide, arguing that there are virtually no scholars who study genocide merely because they find it “interesting,” but because they hope that the knowledge they produce will play an important role in the prevention of genocide. The same could be said of most studies of apology: by understanding apologies, there is a strong belief that they are, in and of themselves, valuable as a means to building a better society and preventing future atrocities. From a social-scientific perspective, it is hard to imagine what an empirically valid measure of the functionality of apology might be. An important collection of essays which explores the connections between the Enlightenment and genocide can be found in Kaye and Strath (2000). In this sense, I would make a distinction between what I would call “performative repair” and what Jeffrey Alexander (2001) refers to as “civil repair.” The latter presumes a somewhat more progressive and authentic sense of the actual possibility of mending what is “broken,” as opposed to what I consider to be “performative repair,” which is the symbolic representation of civil repair which may or may not have any effect on actual repair. The idea that apologies are primarily attempts to reestablish the trustworthiness of institutions is poignantly argued by Pablo de Greiff (2008, p. 134), and he rightly notes that trying



7

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to reestablish trust in institutions “does not mean that citizens, particularly victims, will in fact trust those institutions …” In a previous work, I have pointed out this relationship between information and action, arguing that there is no assumed correlation between knowledge of atrocity and the propensity to at to stop it (Cushman, 2003). The main point of the argument is to deny the simplistic and misleading ideas, especially regnant among social scientists, that knowledge is directly related to prevention. For a full text of this speech, see http://www.clintonfoundation.org/legacy/032598-speechby-president-to-survivors-rwanda.htm. All further references to this speech in the essay can be found at this source. The writer Jacob Weisberg (1998) provides a particularly astute criticism of the authenticity of Clinton’s apology: This apology seems insincere, because Clinton did not offer any realistic sense of the obstacles to humanitarian military action involving the United States. At first Clinton may have wished, at some level, to intervene in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Haiti. But for practical and political reasons, he determined intervention was possible only in Haiti, then later in Bosnia. This was after the debacle in Somalia, remember, and at a time when his popularity was at low ebb. Clinton’s judgment that he was in no position to send troops to Rwanda may not have been courageous. It may not even have been correct. But like a decision not to risk saving someone from a burning building, it is not morally culpable. Stephen J. Pope (1999) offers a more stinging moral critique of Clinton: This kind of ‘apology’ cannot be dismissed as yet another attempt of the ‘Comeback Kid’ to use superficial sentiment as a means of damage control. It amounted to an alibi for unconscionable negligence and even active obstruction of what any decent person would recognize as a duty to protect people from being massacred. Far from ‘paying respect,’ Clinton’s speech further insulted its victims and their loved ones.

10

At the time of the Clinton’s visit, it was widely known what the president knew and what he did not do, a fact that in this ritual context could not have been expressed. It is in the nature of ritual to suppress latent hostilities and resentments of those who are performing them – these express themselves in the pattern of everyday life of those who have such hostilities and resentments, or in other forms. In this case, in 2000, the Organization of African Unity published a report which made public the repressed memory of Clinton’s personal responsibility for failure to act: E.S.34. The US has formally apologized for its failure to prevent the genocide. President Clinton insists that his failure was a function of ignorance. The facts show, however, that the American government knew precisely what was happening, not least during the months of the genocide. But domestic politics took priority over the lives of helpless Africans. After losing 18 soldiers in Somalia in October 1993, the US was unwilling to participate in any further peacekeeping missions, and was largely opposed to the Security Council’s authorizing any new serious missions at all, with or without American participation.

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The complete report of the “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide” can be found at: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/OCHA-64DEEY?OpenDocument. For excerpts from Verhofstadt’s speech, see: “Belgian Apology to Rwanda,” BBC News Online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/705402.stm. The complete text of Annan’s speech can be found at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/ docs/1998/19980506.sgsm6552.html. All further reference to this speech in this essay can be found at this source.

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14

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This statement can be found at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/1998/19980902. sgsm6687.html. The full text of this speech can be found at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/ sgsm9197.doc.htm. The full text of this speech can be found at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/ sgsm9223.doc.htm. All further references to this speech in this essay can be found at this source.

references Alexander, Jeffrey (2001) “The Long and Winding Road: Civil Repair of Intimate Injustice,” Sociological Theory 19 (3): 371–399. Alexander, Jeffrey (2003) The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Austin, J. L. (1975) How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Barkan, Elazar and Alexander Karn (2006) Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Barnett, Michael. (2003). Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) Baumann, Zygmunt (2001) Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell: Cornell University Press). Cushman, Thomas. (2003). “Is Genocide Preventable: Some Theoretical Considerations.” Journal of Genocide Research, 5 (4): 523–542. Dallaire, Romeo (2005) Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carrol and Graf). De Greiff, Pablo (2008) “The Role of Apologies in National Reconciliation Processes: On Making Trustworthy Institutions Trusted,” in Gibney, Mark, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassman, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner (eds.), The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 120–136. Gibney, Mark, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassman, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner (eds.) (2008) The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Gourevitch, Phillip (1999) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador). Howard-Hassman, Rhoda and Mark Gibney (2008) “Introduction: Apologies and the West,” in Gibney, Mark, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassman, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner (eds.), The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 1–12. Independent International Commission on Kosovo (2001) Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kaye, James and Bo Strath (eds.) (2000) Enlightenment and Genocide: Contradictions of Modernity (Bruxelles: P.I.E-Peter Lang). Lazare, Aaron (2005) On Apology (New York and London: Oxford University Press).



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Lind, Jennifer (2008) Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell: Cornell University Press). Moore, Sally Falk and Barbara Meyerhoff (1977) Secular Ritual (Assen: van Gorkum). Nobles, Melissa (2008) The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pope, Stephen J. (1999) “The Politics of Apology and the Slaughter in Rwanda,” America 180 (7): 8–. Power, Samantha (2007) A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Perennial). Spiegelberg, Herbert (1973) “On the Right to Say ‘We’: A Linguistic and Phenomenological Analysis (1),” in George Psathas (ed.), Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications (New York: John Wiley & Sons), pp. 129–156. Tavuchis, Nicholas (1993) Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Weisberg, Jacob (1998) “Sorry Excuse: Rules for National Apologies,” Slate, April 4 at: http://www.slate.com/id/2309/.

B rya n S . T urn e r 10.  Violence, Human Rights, and Piety: Cosmopolitanism versus Virtuous Exclusion in Response to Atrocity

Introduction: Fellow Feeling and Its Limitations There is a well-established argument in moral philosophy and to some extent in political economy that human beings qua human beings have a strong sentiment of sympathy for others. In 1759 Adam Smith who was then the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow published his The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he had much to say about “fellow feeling.” It is worth quoting Smith at some length on this issue, since his views have to some extent remained definitive on the topic: Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune. (Smith, 1984, pp. 190–191).

David Hume took a similar view in writing the three volumes of the Treatise on Human Nature (1958) in the 1730s. For Hume A good natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company. … A cheerful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind (Hume, 1958, p. 317).

But Hume noted that when I feel sympathy for a child who has injured himself, I do not actually feel pain and hence he reasoned that sympathy or the ability to sympathize with the mood of a fellow human being is in fact the basis of morality as such. The question that is automatically promoted by 242



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such views of sympathy and morality is simply why the human response to suffering, especially gross suffering such as atrocity, is so often inadequate, half-hearted, or muted? What are the social and psychological conditions that might constrain what we might call Smithian fellow feeling? In my own Vulnerability and Human Rights (Turner, 2006), I attempted to provide a theory of human rights in terms not so much of fellow feeling but by reference to a common ontology. Human beings are frail and their natural environment is risky and unpredictable. In order to protect themselves from the afflictions of life, they must seek to build social institutions that come to constitute collectively what we call “society.” We depend upon the companionship of other social beings, and through the sharing of resources we attempt to equip ourselves with the means of collective, mutual cooperation. These institutions are, however, themselves uncertain and precarious and they cannot guarantee a reliable social environment. These risks and uncertainties produce inter-societal patterns of dependency and connectedness that in their more psychological manifestations produce sympathy and trust without which society would not be possible. This sense of dependency on others can be cultivated by education – an idea I take from J.-J. Rousseau and Richard Rorty – to develop a full-blown sense of sympathy as part of what I call “cosmopolitan virtue,” namely concern and care for other cultures. This virtue can only exist if we also have a sense of irony that is the capacity to distance ourselves from our own cultural environment to take a more objective look at ourselves and our neighbors. On these conditions, sympathy toward others can become an active ingredient in cosmopolitanism – a necessary perspective in a world of global interconnectedness. However, all social existence is characterized by the contradictory relationships between scarcity involving conflicts of interest and solidarity involving a sharing of resources. Because life is nasty, brutish, and short, human beings require contractual relations, and we can therefore understand human rights as cultural and juridical expressions of patterns of solidarity whose foundations are in the common experience of vulnerability. The concept of vulnerability is derived from the Latin vulnus or “wound.” It is instructive that “vulnerability” should have such a metaphorical connection with human embodiment. This openness to wounding is part of what Peter Berger (1969b, 1980) has called our “world openness,” namely that we do not live in a biologically determined or species-specific environment. In the seventeenth century, vulnerability had both a passive and active significance, namely to be wounded and to wound. In mediaeval religious practice, veneration of the Passion was associated with meditation on the Seven Wounds of Christ. These wounds were evidence of the humanity and

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suffering of Christ and these human attributes came to emphasize his vulnerability. In its modern usage, it has come to signify the human capacity to be open to wounding. Vulnerability has evolved into the more abstract notion of the human capacity to be exposed to psychological or moral damage. In modern discourse, it refers increasingly to our ability to suffer morally and spiritually rather than to a physical capacity for pain from our exposure or openness to the world. The idea of vulnerability as a wound is also related to the notion of trauma which in pathology referred to a wound or external bodily wound. Hence traumatology was the scientific description of wounds. It was only with the development of psychoanalysis, specifically in the work of Sigmund Freud, that trauma acquired a primarily psychological meaning to signify a disturbing experience that affects the mind of a person resulting occasionally in severe hysteria. More recently, the notion of trauma has been used by sociologists to describe a massive social shock and to ask question about what forms of social repair might be put in place to respond to such extreme circumstances (Alexander et al., 2004). In Vulnerability and Human Rights, I argued that human rights cultures emerged in response to the trauma of modern warfare in which military technology had wrought devastating consequences for civilian populations, but this argument still leaves open the question about why the human response to trauma – mass warfare, genocide, and other atrocities – should be often minimal, economical, and inadequate. What constrains the force of fellow feeling? In this chapter, I first explore the various ways in which religion has shaped our understanding of the nature of and need for human rights. This discussion concentrates on the issues of vulnerability, evil, and human free will in the world religions. I then attempt to expand my earlier argument about vulnerability to examine how social processes that constitute strong group membership may be associated with the compartmentalization of emotions that diminish or dilute our sympathy for others (Turner, 2007). Sympathy for others is, through the processes of group formation, offset by the sociological pressures that are necessary for group solidarity and in a world of diasporic communities and political insecurity, the need for group solidarity is necessary for individual security. I argue that social membership or “groupness” is enhanced by religious revival or “pietization” because, for example, the proscription of interfaith marriage increases the social integration of a social group at the cost of sympathy and cosmopolitan virtue. Our capacity to respond to atrocity is blocked by the counterweight of social membership in groups that are exclusionary in dividing the world sharply into an inside and outside.



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Human Rights and Human Suffering We can interpret the growth of human rights as a response to insecurity and our growing vulnerability as a consequence of technological advances in military hardware and the targeting of civil populations in modern warfare. More importantly, we can treat the growth of human rights as a historical index of the growth of global values and cosmopolitan virtue. The twentieth-century spread of human rights was in large measure a consequence of the process of globalization, and the rise of globalism is culturally connected to the historical growth of the world religions. There is an important sociological relationship between religion and rights. Hence we cannot understand the human rights revolution historically and sociologically without examining the relationship between religious notions of suffering and the globalization of rights relating, for example, to freedom from torture, and yet with few exceptions globalization theory has neglected religion in the formation of global processes and cultures. Religious globalization and “the juridical revolution” are the two most important forms of global social change in the modern world, and yet the sociological analysis of the cultural causes and consequences of globalization lags behind economic and political contributions. The concept of “world religions” as a classificatory system was by the middle of the nineteenth century part of the conceptual apparatus of the emerging “science of religions,” and Max Weber (1991) spoke in the famous “Introduction” to the “social psychology of the world religions” about the “religiously determined systems of life-regulation” in as including Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism was included implicitly as a foundation of both Christianity and Islam. More recently writers include Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Taoism (Smart, 1989) in the list of world religions. It is clear that by the late nineteenth century the leaders of the world religions were themselves conscious of a growing interconnectedness of religious institutions as illustrated in the first World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. Under pressure from both the western powers and Japan by the end of the century, Chinese intellectuals were forced to consider what set of terms could best describe the notion of “religion.” The globalization of the idea of “religion” laid some of the foundations for the globalization of the idea of “humanity” as a precondition for the evolution of human rights. In general these evangelical religions that have a cosmological sense of “the world” have contributed significantly to a global consciousness. Any conception of a world must necessarily generate a notion of alterity, and this notion of otherness must develop various strategies for dealing with an outside through a mixture of aggression and accommodation including jihad,

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crusades, just wars, conversion, ecumenism, or cooperation. To what extent is the notion of “the world” a product of the “axial age breakthroughs” that created the foundations of the “world religions” (Eisenstadt, 1982)? One implication of this interpretation is that critical notions of worldliness, salvation, and conversion that constitute contemporary alterity are western notions. We might counteract this assumption by pointing for example to the world-constructing activities of Buddhism or the significance of the Baha’i movement or diasporic Ismaili consciousness, or the cosmopolitan and universalistic aspects of Confucianism, which embraced a notion of humanity in general. Sikhism also offers an example of a religion with non-western conceptions of equality and universalism. Crucial to the distinctive character of Sikhism was the rejection of the caste system and its associated rituals and legal apparatus by the Sikh Gurus or teachers. Sikhism was founded by Guru Shri Guru Nanak Dev (1469–1539), who promoted religious tolerance and equality of women. His most famous saying was “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” We can take this foundational principle as an early notion of moral cosmopolitanism, transcending “local” classifications. In addition to rejecting caste, Nanak taught that Sikhs should respect the rights of all creatures, especially of human beings.

Evil and Human Free Will In these international responses to historically significant cases of human cruelty and atrocity – slavery, nuclear war, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, and genocide – we can detect a religious theme that runs through the development of human rights. These extreme forms of violence against civilians have forced human rights research to turn to an understanding of evil in human affairs, and hence to explore a theological view of human depravity. The question of evil is often attached to human rights, because these rights are often asserted in the face of extraordinary or unspeakable examples of human violence such as genocide, ethnic, systematic torture, or gang rape. We might start with a preliminary definition of evil acts as involving the mindless or irrational enjoyment of the misery and destruction of other human beings, when these gross acts appear to have no utilitarian logic other than the pure enjoyment of the suffering of others. Evil acts involve as it were superfluous and gratuitous violence. Evil can be said to exist, because our vulnerable natures expose us to destruction by permitting other agents to play on our frailty, and evil is especially crafted to destroy human beings through a loss of personal wholeness. Vulnerability has two dimensions. We are vulnerable externally to



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outside, especially physical, forces and we are vulnerable internally because we are sympathetic and reflective creatures, which have a capacity for self­understanding. Violence employs this duality to torture humans through their own reflective sensitivity. This facet of evil-doing can be illustrated by the question – we can inflict pain on animals but can we inflict evil on them? Hence evil is especially and fundamentally related to our capacity for suffering (Scarry, 1985; Wilkinson, 2005). Animals experience pain but they do not suffer as such; they cannot lose their dignity, only their lives. This notion that suffering belongs to culture not to nature may well be a western notion that is attached to the fact that the God of Christianity is not primarily a God of nature but a Being of history. Our vulnerability is such that we need to understand evil and give it a meaning, even when we perceive evil as meaningless violence. Theodicy was originally any attempt to explain evil within a religious paradigm where God is seen to be good. If God is truly good and compassionate, why is there so much evil in the world? The characteristic Christian answer to this issue has been to say that human beings are moral beings, and hence free to choose either goodness or evil. Contemporary crimes such as the massacres and genocides of Darfur and Rwanda have an enormity that brings into question the very possibility of a coherent theological answer, namely how can such acts of inhumanity and barbarity be understood within existing moral or religious categories? How should we respond to atrocity? It is not self-evident for example in the case of Rwanda that human beings are exercising agency when they find themselves in genocidal situations. Such monstrous acts of barbarity appear to stand outside the boundaries of normality. We can therefore distinguish between ordinary or routine acts of cruelty that are explicable, and evil that is extraordinary and inexplicable in human affairs. We might argue therefore that the very concept of theodicy is itself a consequence of human vulnerability. Our natures determine that we are wounded creatures and hence we search for theodicies to make sense of otherwise senseless acts of violence and atrocity. We can plausibly regard the evolution of human rights culture as a contemporary attempt to deal with evil, to provide some safeguards, albeit incomplete and inadequate, against future atrocity, and through the courts to bring wrongdoers to justice. In fact human rights culture is an attempt not so much to understand evil as to deal with it. However, the notion of evil raises a major theological problem for these monotheistic religions. How can an all-powerful and merciful God allow human suffering, especially where suffering is a product of evil? Does God cause the evil that results in our suffering, and can a merciful God allow atrocity without self-contradiction? These questions relating to free will, the

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nature of divinity, and the existence of evil have troubled theologians for centuries. The problem of radical evil is shared by the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but they have different conceptions of it and different solutions for it. To some extent, the basic religious texts of these religions do not speculate about good and evil – they simply take it for granted. Speculation about such issues became a matter of philosophical not theological concern. It is striking that the Bible appears to see God as the origin of both good and evil, thereby rejecting any dualistic thought. In Isaiah (45:7) God declares “I form the light, and create the darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am the Lord, that doeth all these things.” The metaphysical problem of evil only arose with the impact of Plato and Aristotle on theologians and as a result evil became not the opposite of good but a lack or a nonexistence. Platonic theology in all three religions had the consequence of introducing a dualism between form and matter in order to deny the concrete reality of evil. It was left to the mystics to recapture the reality of evil through inventing a new symbolism of evil (Scholem, 1991). There are, however, some subtle differences between the Christian tradition on the one hand and the Jewish and Islamic traditions on the other. It is possible to argue that law rather than theology has been central to both Judaism and Islam but not to Christianity, and hence there is more theological speculation about evil in Christian thinkers than in other traditions (Turner, 2003). Islam has been more concerned to regulate human behavior through legal means and hence speculation about the nature of law and correct conduct is more significant than understanding the presence of evil in human affairs. The problem of evil is not unknown in other religious traditions. The Buddha is the one who can triumph over Mara and awaken mankind from its stupor. Victorious over the evil figure of Mara, Buddha found the ford and the road to direct humanity away from the endless cycle of suffering (Ling, 1962). The evil one in Buddhism was literally “the killer” and references to this evil figure were common in both the Pali literature and in Sanskrit Buddhist literature. However, in Buddhist thought Mara has no significant ontological status and Mara functioned as a sort of bridge between the everyday understanding of the layperson and the truth nature of reality according to the intellectual tradition of the Buddhist monk. In the teaching of Confucius and Mencius, there is a clear recognition of good and bad actions, and the need to cultivate human virtue to offset the negative effect of human desire, but there was no radical notion of evil (Chan, 2002). The problems of the Confucian world were more to do with civil unrest than of opposition from evil as an ontological and existential threat. It is difficult finally to provide a neat summary of the question of evil in Hinduism, given the great variety of beliefs



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that we lump for convenience under the umbrella of “Hindu mythology,” but suffice it to say that Kali represents the principle of evil. The female goddess Kali can assume many forms, sometimes as awe-inspiring with a necklace of skulls and sometimes as a warrior goddess or Durga with weapons to protect her devotees. It appears that the notion of a radical ontologically concrete evil as an existential challenge to the notion of humanity and divinity is peculiar to Abrahamic traditions, and especially to Christianity. In this context, one can well understand how certain key events in history have, to some extent retrospectively presented deeply unsettling problems of theodicy in western thought. These have included in modern times the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda and, for many observers, Darfur. These have in common that they are examples of genocide if we accept the definition of genocide (Shaw, 2007, p. 154) as “a form of violent social conflict, or war, between armed power organizations that aim to destroy civilian social groups and those groups and other actors who resist this destruction.” Martin Shaw (2003) in War and Genocide has produced a historical account of the extension of war to the killing and destruction of civilian populations from the world wars through the Armenian genocide, Stalin’s mass murders, the Holocaust, Japan’s genocidal wars, the Allied bombing of Germany, nuclear war and the genocides in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Adapting his argument to the conclusion of this section of my argument, we might say that modern conflicts produce an excess of killing or a superfluity of death. The scale of these killings often appears to bear little relationship to any rational plan of achieving victory in war. Shaw usefully describes these conflicts as a degeneration of war. While his book is an important if depressing contribution to the sociology of war, there is a sense that degenerate war still defies rational explanation, precisely because it is such a moral enormity. To some extent, genocide represents the limit of what is comprehensible in a social science, because genocidal or degenerate war charts out an arena within which social science concepts palpably falter and fail. This sense of the inexplicable nature of mass, excessive killing has been commented on by Peter Berger in Rumour of Angels (1969a) who says that modern genocide appears to exist outside the boundaries of enormity for which we have no ultimately credible explanation. In this context, both sympathy and revenge may fail as human emotions. Can we extend sympathy to the perpetrators? Sympathetic acceptance is hardly possible, because we cannot recognize them as fellow humans. Revenge is not adequate, and it would have to take place on such a scale that we would also lose our humanity by inflicting revenge. We are in a way stuck with Derrida’s paradox that we have to contemplate forgiving the unforgivable.

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Because social science as it were falters on this outer perimeter of the imaginable, many writers have argued for “a theological turn” in social sciences and humans that would, amongst other things, recognize this evil. The destruction of community can take many forms from overt military attacks to stealing their children and enslaving their adults. Slavery also represents an important challenge to any philosophical or theological argument that because human beings share a common ontology, they share either a common set of ultimate concerns or that at the very least, they share a common sympathy for each other’s suffering. Slavery has, therefore, within the literature on the history of human rights, been regarded as a major crime against humanity. To treat human beings as chattel is to rob them of their humanity, by robbing them of their freedom to choose. Slavery puts people into the same category of moveable property as cattle. The struggle against the evils of slavery is a particularly important example of the impact of religious consciousness on the construction of human rights. In his book, Disposable People (1999), Kevin Bales recognizes that we often reify evil in response to modern atrocity, but this reification of evil is not necessarily helpful in conducting empirical research into cases of extreme abuse such as slavery. In one sense Bales recognizes the historical and contextual setting of slavery. If we want to regard slavery as an example of evil, then we might be forced to recognize that evil is morally and culturally relative. Slavery has existed for as long as documented human history. Although in the ancient world, some Roman jurists, following Stoic philosophy, regarded slavery as unnatural, slavery was widely practised. In Christianity, the Church condemned Christians who enslaved other Christians, but theologians as eminent as Thomas Aquinas believed that slavery was morally justifiable and economically necessary. The historical evidence suggests that slavery has been widespread and that it has been regarded as normal and necessary. Hence arguments against slavery are culturally relative; they are merely preferences. Against this conclusion, Bales considers a powerful movement against regarding slavery as morally justifiable from around 1700 starting with Quaker tracts against slavery. In 1787 the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery was formed in Britain and by 1804 slavery had been abolished in many Northern states. Writing in 1856, Walt Whitman regarded the abolition movement as “the greatest moral convulsions of the earth.” The case for the abolition of slavery eventually shifted from economic arguments of the eighteenth to moral arguments in the nineteenth century. These antislavery campaigns prepared the ground work for the human rights campaigns of the twentieth century. This campaign expanded the definition of evil and the types of actors who commit acts of evil have also become more



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varied. Evil is no longer committed simply by nation states. Globalization has had the consequence of disseminating the language and values of human rights definitions of evil, but these in turn have religious foundations in what we might call “narratives of suffering.”

History, Memory, and Forgiveness A further step in this evolution a human rights consciousness was the creation of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in response to the collapse of the apartheid system in South Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s, the apartheid system had become a veritable symbol of radical institutional evil and atrocity. These confessions were considered to be “true” if they were characterized by full disclosures and demonstrated remorse (although the latter was not formally required). The TRC was a response to the collapse of the South African apartheid system. Apartheid – the separation of whites and non-whites – was the policy of the Afrikaner National Party that came to power in 1948. On leaving the Commonwealth in 1961, apartheid was resisted by the African National Congress (ANC) through the 1970s and 1980s. The Soweto riots in 1976 resulted in 176 deaths and caused worldwide condemnation of the regime. Nelson Mandela became the charismatic leader of the ANC and embraced nonviolent means of struggle. After the collapse of apartheid, the TRC was inspired by the theology of Bishop Desmond Tutu who saw these confessions as important in the collective healing process of the nation. Historical knowledge and historical methods have become a crucial aspect of human rights processes, because reparations and justice require adequate records if trials are to take place with any prospect of success. Collective memory is not only a condition of bringing criminals to justice, but also an important part of therapy for survivors. History has become a contested part of the legal process of human rights. The status of the Holocaust has become a controversial issue in historical revisionism. The problem of responsibility for Nationalism Socialism and the Holocaust was presented in Karl Jaspers’s The Question of German Guilt (1947) which set the agenda for the new Federal Republic – guilt could not be confined merely to a small elite within National Socialism but extended to everybody who tolerated, condoned, or ignored the rise of fascism and the destruction of the Jews. Christian morality has given the act of forgiveness a constitutive value in human rights discourse, partly because it is seen to have transformative capacities. There are of course major philosophical and practical criticisms against such processes of reconciliation and forgiveness (Brudholm, 2008;

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Levy and Sznaider, 2006). These historical disputes do raise an important ethical and political problem. We know that cultural trauma is transmitted across generations, but is responsibility transmitted across generations indefinitely? Sustaining the idea of intergenerational guilt may be difficult, but without acceptance of responsibility it is difficult to see how forgiveness could have some therapeutic role. Recognition appears to be a precondition of forgiveness. Truth Commissions seek to discover different truths: factual or forensic; personal or narrative truth; social or consensual truth; and healing and restorative truth. Confessions to TRC committees spoke persistently about scars and wounds, opening and closing suffering. The Commission was in this sense literally about vulnerability. These investigations raised questions, which have dominated the whole memory debate: how far back should one go historically to establish responsibility? There are also questions about authority and obedience – who gave what orders to whom? Finally, there are questions about degrees of involvement. The Truth Commission has been criticized on the grounds that truth telling often secures an amnesty, but leaves the survivors without a sense of justice (Wilson, 2000).The collective narrative of the African National Congress is also under strain with tensions between those who suffered in South Africa and were imprisoned, and those who were exiled and spent their adolescence outside the country, there are tensions between the revolutionary ambitions of the founders and the routinization of post-Apartheid South Africa. Justice is obviously not easily secured, especially when the work of Truth Commissions starts long after civil conflicts are over. For example in the case of Timor-Leste, the report of CAVR (Relatorio da Comissao de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliacao) considered violations over a 25-year period from 1974 and 1999, and was only too aware of such difficulties, but noted that truth seeking should not compromise the rights of victims for justice and that these measures should be implemented “with a view to strengthening, not weakening, the chances of criminal justice” (CAVR, 2005, p. 187). In his essay On Cosmpolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), which deals with the contemporary importance of Truth Commissions, Jacques Derrida (2004) attempted to unravel the growing importance of forgiveness and repentance in international law that has its origins in the Nuremberg Tribunal. Derrida argued that the legal language of forgiveness for crimes against humanity only makes sense within a religious (Christian) framework. Hence this globalization of a religious language entails a globalatinization – the spread of Christian values into a global legal framework. Derrida saw an inevitable paradox in the legal quest for forgiveness, because forgiveness



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can only forgive the unforgivable. We are searching for the possibility of forgiving unforgivable crimes such as the Holocaust or the Turkish genocide against the Armenians. We also expect the criminals to ask for forgiveness, but the unforgivable nature of their crimes normally precludes such motives. Unforgivable crimes are inexpiable and irreparable. Who has the authority to forgive the unforgivable? This question requires a religious answer – only the right grace belongs to the sovereign who acts on behalf of God. But because the sovereignty of the state is typically founded by an act of violence, how can the state distribute the grace of forgiveness? Can we have a notion of “crimes against humanity” without a notion of evil? The problem of evil in the discourse of “crimes against humanity” is probably the most potent illustration of the globalization of a religious discourse of justice. This notion of evil is inevitable once we are confronted by the enormities of twentieth-­century crimes against humanity that were in part consequences of expanding military technology. There is some justification for Derrida’s puzzlement over the language of amnesty and restorative forgiveness. On the face of it, the language of Truth Commissions and the underlying presupposition of evil suggest the globalization of the Christian theory of the true confession. Evil acts can be forgiven if the confession is the product of sincere and contrite expression of guilt (Hepworth and Turner, 1982). The growth of a human rights culture with notions of evil, forgiveness, confession, and reparations is an example of the globalization of religious values in the field of law. However, this process is not just westernization or globalatinization, because these values also become embedded in local cultures. One interesting illustration of this process has been the role of Theravada Buddhist values in the reconciliation process in contemporary Cambodia. While Cambodian Buddhist culture had little understanding of individual rights, Theravada Buddhist values proved to be easily reconciled with human rights culture. Buddhist values of compassion, tolerance, and nonviolence provided a fertile framework for programs to promote human rights values in war-torn Cambodia. Buddhist leaders saw the crisis of the civil war as a consequence of the breakdown of morality and respect for human rights could be achieved by the restoration of basic Buddhist precepts in the community. The Khmer Rouge brought Cambodian Buddhism close to extinction and by 1975 most monasteries were closed, monks were forced to labor, Buddha images were beheaded, and ancient manuscripts used for rolling cigarettes. At a trial of Pol Pot in 1979, evidence was presented claiming that Pol Pot himself had executed 57 monks (Yang Sam, 1987). Given this violence against Buddhists, it is not surprising that the Khmer Rouge was regarded as the embodiment of Mara sweeping the countryside. Since 1992,

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however, an annual peace march has taken place through the leadership of Venerable Mahaghosananda, a monk from Wat Sampeou, who is an admirer of Ghandi (Harris, 1999). He has made a film called The Serene Life to spread his message of reconciliation and the Dhammayietra Centre for Peace and Reconciliation has been established at his wat in Phnom Penh. The globalization of the notion of humanity through the medium of human rights culture is thus more than “globalatinization” because these values become successfully embedded in and transformed by the host culture.

Pietization In the first half of this discussion, I have outlined a normative position on human rights by exploring the religious roots of the idea of a common humanity and I have treated this human rights culture as an important precondition for the possibility of cosmopolitan virtue. This normative argument involved a discussion of ontology, namely human vulnerability. In the second half of this analysis, I want to consider the conditions that limit sympathetic responses to the severe plight of others, namely what dilutes or expunges our sense of fellow feeling. To quote Smith again, what is it in the structure of human societies to inhibit or expunge the exquisite sense of fellow feeling? The argument is paradoxically that, while religious values, especially in the Christian tradition, appear to support sympathy and concern for the other, the intensification of religious behavior, which I shall simply call “pietization,” can increase the sense of in-group cohesion and exclusiveness to the extent of making out-group sympathy a threat to the social continuity of the group. Pietization is a social process of expanding adherence to religious norms of conduct and with fundamentalism there is, as it were, an inflationary pressure to increase the scope and depth of these norms. In short, pietization which appears to be a common manifestation of modern fundamentalism produces a compartmentalization of emotions, thereby limiting the possible scope of fellow feeling. While the notion that modernization would bring about secularization was a dominant aspect of sociological thinking in the second half of the twentieth century, the contemporary revival of religion globally, especially in the political sphere, has also seen a revival of the idea that religion is somehow critical to the actual constitution of the social and political world. In the current global crisis around politics and religion, it is clear that many of the existing institutional arrangements – secularism, the separation of church and state, the privatization of religious identity, liberalism, and the social policies based on multiculturalism and pluralism –have either failed or are under threat.



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These tensions in modern politics are not only connected with terrorism, religious nationalism, or militant religions. They arise partly because the sovereignty of states has been compromised by various globalization processes, because of the resilience of religion as a public institution, and because in many places religious identities appear to be more robust and primordial than the political identities of secular citizenship. Religious communities and movements can typically call upon cosmologies, mythologies, values, and rituals that can be plausibly seen to have an ancient past and credible authenticity. The secular rituals of the modern state appear as simply invented traditions and hence the nation state itself often has the character of what Benedict Anderson (1983) has called an “imagined community” whose existence was brought into being by the development of modern education, mass literacy, and the circulation of newspapers. By contrast, the world religions lay claim to have emerged with humanity as such or that their message is fundamental to our understanding of the world – at the beginning of time was the Dharma. Religion has the capacity to move the human spirit with powerful emotions, profound mythological narratives and cosmic visions that are understood to be more than the products of mere human imagination. Why has there been a revival of religion in the public sphere? One answer is that religious cosmologies and collective symbolization have a collective force that was not fully available to the ideological systems of communism such as Stalinism or Maoism which collapsed after a relatively short period. By contrast religion allows a national community to express its history in deep-rooted myths or sacred time as if that national history had a universal significance. Religion can become important in expressing the mythical history of a nation in terms of a narrative of suffering and survival about humanity as a whole. One classical illustration would be from the history of Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church has been the defender of Christianity and where the miraculous Black Madonna, Our Lady of Czestochowa, has been the guardian of the nation (Zubrzycki, 2006), but Mexico and the Philippines, or more recently East Timor, would also provide powerful examples. By contrast, the Protestant Churches have been more readily the vehicles for individualism, and perhaps less able to function as national vehicles of collective action. In the Muslim world, the suffering of the Palestinian people, the war in Afghanistan, and the crisis in Iraq have been regarded as powerful symbols of the global spiritual struggle of Muslims. Many of these illustrations of religion and religious identity as powerful social forces are based on cases where a single religious tradition is dominant such as Catholicism in Poland or Shi’ism in Iran, but the crucial problem with the modern global world is that we live, whether we like it or not, in

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plural and multicultural societies where individuals often experience their social world from the perspective of a diaspora or a minority tradition. Through migration or the accidents of history, people live in societies where a secular state appears to be hostile to minority traditions or where a state that identifies with one religious tradition appears to act in a partial or prejudicial manner toward minorities. Different religious traditions can then pull communities apart, regardless of the fact that they might once have shared a common identity as citizens of a secular state. In these situations, the state may seek to impose an artificial cultural unity on its minorities in order to preserve its sovereignty over a given territory. At that point, minorities experience their political inclusion as a form of cultural or religious subordination or cultural marginalization. Religious pluralism is typically a political problem from the perspective of the state, because religious identities are almost inevitably overlaid by or overdetermined by equally powerful racial, ethnic, and cultural identities and loyalties. The political tradition of liberalism assumed that religious belief and practice were private matters of the individual conscience, and therefore that religion should be kept out of the public sphere, but this neat and simple solution has become problematic, because religious revivalism has often reconstructed religious identities as public identities. In situations where there are conflicts between religious communities tensions are exacerbated when religion comes to define national identity. National communities which for centuries have survived with religious diversity such as the southern provinces of Thailand, in the Moluccas, or many societies in central Asia suddenly find themselves pulled apart by political movements that can draw ideological strength from deeply rooted and separated ethno-religious traditions. If we consider a traditional sociological perspective on the social group, then we would have to conclude that the dynamics of group life tend in plural societies to work against notions of liberal reciprocity and cosmopolitanism. Sustaining group loyalty through revivalism and exclusionary religious norms are important for maintaining group cohesion, but they are not immediately compatible with the idea of cosmopolitan, plural societies. In particular, marital homogamy (“like marries like”) has long been recognized by sociologists as a fundamental feature of marriage patterns. The trend toward marital homogamy in Southeast Asia has increased with religious norms prescribing intrafaith marriage as a religious duty. A series of fatwas from the Indonesian Council of Ulemas (MUI) in July 2005 proclaimed that interfaith marriages were against Shari’a law, and condemned ecumenical activities between different faiths. These pronouncements are not automatically underwritten



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by the state but they significantly impact on daily practice. For example, Indonesians of Chinese descent and Indonesians whose religion falls outside the official list of recognized religions have difficulty getting their marriages registered; very few officials will participate in weddings of couples from different religions. In Malaysia Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) has advocated the creation of a strong Islamic state, enforcing customary hudud penalties on women requiring severe limitations on their rights to divorce, and permitting men to have numerous wives (Anwar, 2001). Malaysia has as a direct result of the policy of Islamization experienced significant protest movements from the Hindu minority and clearly the Chinese business class, which is typically either Buddhist or Christian, in Malaysia occupies a problematic location in the system of social stratification. Volunteer self-dense corps which were originally created in the 1960s to guard against communists are now mobilized to find and deport illegal workers. Renamed Rela, these corps number around half a million members who are deployed to intimidate the estimated 3 million illegal workers in Malaysia. PAS itself has not had significant electoral success across Malaysia, but it exercises a conservative constraint forcing the government to accept the Islamization of the law. These trends pose problems for the state, because while Islam is the dominant religion, Muslims constitute only 50% of the total population. The emphasis on conversion and the dangers of apostasy make the achievement of social harmony within cultural diversity highly problematic. Several cases have recently appeared in the international media. The most spectacular was the attempt by Muslim clerics to put to death Mr. Abdul Rahman an Afghan man in March 2006 who had converted to Christianity. The apostasy rule goes back to the foundations of Islam when tribal leaders joined in a social contract with the Prophet that was the basis of the Constitution of Medina, creating the original Muslim umma. When the Prophet died, some of these tribes attempted to leave the community resulting in the War of the Ridda or Apostasy War. Subsequently the apostasy rule is that any Muslim leaving the umma and who maligns or abuses the community shall be severely punished. The apostasy rule has been criticized by some Muslims including the former Indonesian president who pointed out in the Washington Post that the teaching of the Qur’an states “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Wahid, 2006). Nevertheless there is considerable customary pressure not to quit the community and these norms have important, often divisive, consequences for inter-faith marriage. Revivalism and an emphasis on strong religious identities and loyalties mean in practice that women, or more specifically mothers, are very important in the construction of religious identities because women are responsible

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for domestic arrangements such as managing the children’s religious education, making choices about food and diet, and organizing private space. Group cohesion is enhanced by in-marriage, by ensuring the effective transmission of culture across generations, and punishing all attempts to exit the group. Group cohesion requires the domestic and public regulation of women, and hence patriarchal religious norms are typically invoked when social groups are under threat, or perceived to be under threat. In Ache, newly enforced religious rules prevent local women from serving alcohol to Western visitors and in May 2006 Syarifah Binti Jauhari was sentence to 10 months in jail for breaking this rule. Similarly attempts to impose rules against pornography in Indonesia will prevent women having bare arms in public spaces (Tedjasukmana and Cangkring, 2006). Muslim militant groups or vigilantes are now common in cities in Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998 to enforce restrictive sexual norms, typically against single women in public. There is also considerable religious pressure in Iran to ensure that women cover their hair adequately in public. Women are preeminently expected to express the values of the social group through acts of personal piety and in this respect piety and politics become inseparably linked. Hostility to other social groups is expressed through obsessive commitments to social norms, especially diet. In the Philippines, these commitments to group identity between Catholics and Moros is marked above all by pork consumption. While pork is a staple in the diet of Catholics, it is absolutely prohibited by Muslims. The unintended consequences of pietization are a range of difficulties in interpersonal behavior with non-Muslims. Everyday norms that are important for defining religious differences, sustaining group identities, and maintaining the continuity of the group may be called “rituals of intimacy.” These are rituals that specify how pious believers can connect with the outside world through religious norms that influence interactional strategies with outsiders, whose very presence may have contaminating affects. In formulating the idea of rituals of intimacy, the assumption is that pietization will increase communal tensions as a consequence of strained social interactions around pork, dogs, alcohol, hair, clothes, courtship, dating, and marriage. These group norms are more likely to be invoked when a community is a minority or where the majority feels it is under threat by a minority which for example is economically dominant. The pietization of the everyday world becomes deeply problematic for interpersonal conflict and violence when the state is seen to protect a majority that feels culturally threatened by a minority or vice versa where the state protects a minority which may be important to the state for economic or political reasons. In these circumstances, resentment rather than fellow feeling becomes the dominant motivation of individuals



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or social groups, and obviously resentment may become a psychological screening process that prevents us responding to social groups that have/are the victims of atrocious conflict. The jubilation by which some groups, who for various reasons hate the United States and its allies, received the news of 9/11 may be the classic modern example of the effects of resentment. As Muslim imams compete for lay followers, there is a tendency to increase the strictness of norms that are seen to be required by Shari’h. One interesting example is that while halah food such as the prohibition of pork is well known, in an inflationary religious setting these norms also come to include the idea of halal water. The pornography bill before the Indonesian Parliament will inflate the range of activities and circumstances that can be defined as pornographic from kissing in the street to revealing “sensual” body parts. The growth of Internet has greatly increased this sense of the global umma, and the importance of strict adherence to norms (Mandeville, 2001). There are also a series of contingent circumstances that have enhanced the perceived need to defend Islamic practice. In particular the attack on the Twin Towers, the notion of a clash of civilizations, and the war of terror have all conspired to enhance the norms of group identity (Roy, 1994, 2004). The rituals of intimacy – the norms that determine how we should interact with strangers who enter our social space and conversely the norms that dictate relations between friends – are by definition in fact rituals of social exclusion. If a ritual or norm defines a person as my friend or peer or ­co-religionist, it automatically defines some other person or group as not my friend, peer, or co-believer. Intimacy is an exclusionary practice that creates a circle of intimates and outsiders. The stronger the code of intimacy, the more intense the web of exclusion. These rituals are partly a creation of modern times (through religious inflation), where religious identities are becoming more difficult. At the same time these rituals quarantine the everyday world, making future inter-group conflicts more likely, and reducing the conditions for liberal reciprocity. These group norms become psychological and social filters that curb our capacity to response sympathetically to the plight of others and dull our sensibilities with respect to much traumatic events such as atrocrity. Although this discussion has focused on piety in modern Islam, similar arguments can be mounted for the consequences of pietization in Buddhism. The increasing emphasis on lay piety in merit making in Thailand is also connected with the pervasive notion that Buddhism defines membership of the Thai state, thereby marginalizing and excluding Muslims in the southern provinces of Thailand. Malay-speaking Muslims in Pattini experience the

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Thai state as repressive and alien. Because of the intimate political connections between Buddhist sangha and Thai state, Buddhist monks and monasteries are inevitably perceived by Muslims as colonizing forces (McCargo, 2007). The cycle of resistance and repression has been consolidated by the government’s refusal to implement the recommendations of the National Reconciliation Commission of 2005–2006 (Yusuf and Schmidt, 2006). Because the Thai monarchy defines the sacred nature of the state, any attack on state institutions is inevitably seen as an attack on the foundations of the Buddhist state, and therefore acts of personal piety are also acts of politics – in this case a politics of exclusion. In the United States, Christian pietization has had similar effects in making sympathetic understanding of others who happen to hold different beliefs – for example, toward abortion or homosexuality – an unlikely intellectual or emotional position.

Conclusion: The Price of Piety Piety tends to have a radical impact on the everyday world of believers by encouraging them to reform their habits or in the language of modern sociology to transform their religious habitus that is their dispositions and tastes toward the material world (Bourdieu, 1984). Piety is about the construction of definite and distinctive lifestyles of new religious tastes and preferences. Piety or the pietization of the everyday world often involves combining new religious elements to create a religious habitus that stands in competition with more traditional practices in a competitive religious context. These new combinations are then defined as the orthodox standards by which the worth of a good Christian or a good Muslim or a good Jew could be measured. Pietization is deeply paradoxical since a movement to abstain from thisworldly activity (through abstinence and self-control) has produced a rationalization of lifestyle and religious practice. We can in this respect easily recast Weber’s sociology of religion into a modern idiom for example in the language of Michel Foucault (1997) arguing that piety is par excellence a technology of the self-designed to produce religious excellence or virtues. Being virtuous or pious can be effectively measured by contrast to those who are impious or lacking in virtue. There is therefore a competition over virtue – who in a given community is the most virtuous and how can that be measured and known? The central paradox of piety is however that to display it openly – we might say to provocatively flaunt piety is to destroy it, and hence piety must be subtly insinuated and suggested by indirect comparisons with those lacking in religious virtue. In Weber’s analysis of religious ethics,



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piety necessarily creates hierarchies of religious virtue in the form of pious status groups that are defined by their successful combinations of orthodox practices. Within this competitive struggle over virtue, there is a hierarchy of virtuous values and practices. This struggle is perhaps most clearly illustrated in his The Religion of India (1958) in the contrast between the ascetic standards of Theravada Buddhism for mendicant monks and the secular needs for success which are captured in popular Buddhism. In terms of this dialectic between high and low religion, the true piety of the religion elite is measured by its apparent separation from the magical practices that characterize popular religion. In many Asian and Southeast Asian countries, there is a widespread pietization process involving the erosion of traditional practices and a competition between major religious traditions for cultural – and to some extent political – domination. These pious competitions in strengthening and enhancing group solidarity and group competition diminish the possibility of inter-group understanding and sympathy. In short, pietization makes the possibility of cosmopolitan virtue unlikely and at the same time therefore reduces the capacity for sympathetic response to plight of other people that is to people who are not part of one’s religious tradition. Because religious identity is all too often simply ethnic identity, the capacity for cosmopolitan fellow feeling is greatly reduced. Pietization leads to a fracturing of the experience of atrocity, such that only the atrocities defined by the group itself are phenomenologically real and therefore pietization leads to an increasing impossibility of the globalization of a cosmopolitan ethic of suffering. As a result, pietization contributes to the emergence of what I have called “enclave society” in which we are increasingly concentrated into ghettoes – physical and cultural – that are morally and emotionally deaf to the cries of suffering of others and only attuned to the cries of our group. Given his scepticism about official religions, this outcome of piety – the capacity for sympathetic feeling toward others – would have been a consequence that Hume would have anticipated only too well. references Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N., and Sztompka, P. (2004) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press). Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso).

262 Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities Anwar, Z. (2001) “What Islam, Whose Islam? Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Women’s Rights,” in R. W. Hefner (ed.), The Politics of Multiculturalism. Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), pp. 227–252. Bales, K. (1999) Disposable People (Berkeley: University of California Press). Berger, P. L. (1980) “ ‘Foreword’ to Arnold Gehlen,” Man in the Age of Technology (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. vii–xvi. Berger, P. L. (1969a) A Rumour of Angels. Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday). Berger, P. L. (1969b) The Social Reality of Religion (London : Faber and Faber). Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Brudholm, T. (2008) Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). CAVR (2005) Chega! The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste (Executive Summary). Chan, A. K. L. (ed.) (2002) Mencius. Contexts and Interpretations (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press). Derrida, J. (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London : Routledge). Eisenstadt, S. N. (1982) “The Axial Age: the Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” European Journal of Sociology 23 (2): 294–314. Foucault, M. (1997) Technologies of the Self. Subjectivity and Truth (London: Allen & Unwin). Harris, I. (1999) “Buddhism in Extremis: the Case of Cambodia,” in Ian Harris (ed.), Buddhism and Politics in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Continuum), pp. 54–78. Hepworth, M. and Turner, B. S. (1982) Confession: Studies in Deviance and Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Hume, D. (1958) A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Jaspers, K. (1947) The Question of German Guilt (New York: Capricorn). Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2006) “Forgive and Not Forget: Reconciliation between Forgiveness and Resentment,” in E. Barkan and A. Karn (eds.), Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press), pp. 83–100. Ling, T. (1962) Buddhism and the Mythology of Evil (London: Allen & Unwin). Mandaville, P. (2001) Transnational Muslim Politics (London and New York: Routledge). McCargo, D. (ed.) (2007) Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence (Singapore: NUS Press). Roy, O. (2004) Globalised Islam. The Search for the New Ummah (London: Hurst & Co.). (1994) The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Scholem, G. (1991) On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead. Basic Concepts of the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books).



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Shaw, M. (2003) War and Genocide Organised Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press). Shaw, M. (2007) What Is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity Press). Smart, N. (1989) The World’s Religions. Old Traditions and Modern Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Smith, A. (1984) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund). Tedjasukmana, J. and Cangkring, T. (2006) “Indonesia’s Skin Wars,” Time Magazine, April 10. Turner, B. S. (2003) “Introduction,” in Islam. Critical Concepts in Sociology (London: Routledge), pp. 1–41. (2006) Vulnerability and Rights (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press). (2007) “The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility,” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (2): 287–303. Wahid, A. (2006) “Extremism isn’t in Islamic Law,” Washington Post, May 23. Weber, M. (1991) From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge). Wilkinson, I. (2005) Suffering. A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press). Wilson, R. (2000) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Yang Sam (1987) Khmer Buddhism and Politics from 1954 to 1984 (Newington, CT: Khmer Studies Institute). Yusuf, I. and Schmidt, L. P. (eds.) (2006) Understanding Conflict and Approaching Peace in Southern Thailand (Bangkok: Konrad Adenhauer Stiftung). Zubrzycki, G. (2006) The Crosses of Auschwitz. Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).

Index

Note: entries followed by a lower-case “t” refer to tables. abolition of slavery, 250–251 absent-we, in official apologies, 222 absolution, in Christian theology, 111, 113 abstract thinking, Hegel on, 60–61 Abu-Nimer, Mohammed, 189 accountability for wrongdoing, normative community and, 89–91 acknowledgment, knowledge vs., 158 Acorn, A., 140 Action Plan for Peace, reconciliation, and Justice in Afghanistan, 206 Adorno, Theodor W., 11, 69–72 advocacy of forgiveness, 12–13, 124–148; Christian forms of, 127; context for, 125; forgiveness as most favorable response, 127–129; proponents of, 128; religion and, 146–148; in sociopolitical or public realm, 144 affirmative action, 163–167; waning support for, 167 Afghanistan, truth recovery in, 206 African National Congress (ANC), 181, 194, 251, 252 Afrikaner National Party, 251 Alexander, Jeffrey, 3, 215, 236, 238n.5, 244 A Man for All Seasons (Bolt), 107 ambiguity, in religious discourse and practices, 4, 53–54, 147 Améry, Jean, 37n.29, 38, 51; ethics of resentment and, 49, 50; paradoxical claim of, 49, 50, 57n.20; resentment

of, 130–131; and time dimension of forgiveness, 47 Ammar, Nawal H., 207 Amstutz, Mark R., 16, 128, 138, 176 Anderson, Benedict, 223, 255 anger: forgiveness overcoming, anecdotes about, 142–143, 144, 149n.20; and sin, distinction between, 117; of victims after mass atrocity, 130–131 animals, suffering and, 247 Annan, Kofi: apologies for Rwandan genocide, 8, 226–232; on first genocide judgment, 232–235 antagonism, theodicy of, 69 Antelme, Robert, 23, 37n.35 Anwar, Z., 257 apology(ies): acts of, 213–217; cultural meanings of, 214; ideal-typical sense of, 214–215, 236–237; making whole and, 160; meaning of, 213; ritual of, 237; secular, quasi-religious nature of,14–15, 215. see also official apologies apophatic use of religious language, 21–22, 27 aporetic situation, 46; in ethics of forgiveness, 47–48; in ethics of resentment, 48–51 apostasy, dangers of, 257 Apostasy War (War of the Ridda), 257 265

266

Index

Arendt, Hannah, 27, 31, 33, 159, 160; on Eichmann, 92, 102n.33; on evil, 6–7; on image of Hell, 4 Argentina, transitional justice institutions in 184t, 203 Aristotle, 9, 39, 95, 248 Arns, Evaristo, 192 Ash, Timothy Garton, 200 atrocious wrongs, response in Christian theology: forgiveness vs. absolution, 110–115; good vs. evil consequences in, 119–120; language of, 106, 121n.2; natural justice, 107–110; peace and finite justice, 117–119; qualified resentment, 116–117; qualified retributive punishment, 115–116 atrocity: characteristics of, 105–106; moral, philosophical responses to, 60–74; pietization and, 261; recognition of, 217; reframing as sacred or holy, 147 atrocity crimes: defined, 6; punishment of, 91 attitudes: and conception of humanity, 97–98; reactive, 99 Auerbach, Yehudith, 4, 125, 190 Augustinian modesty, in establishing just future, 118 Auschwitz, Adorno’s pronouncements on, 69 Austin, J. L., 217, 237 authenticity of official apologies, 214; Clinton’ speech in Rwanda, 221, 239n.9; intentions and consequences and, 237 autonomy, of transitional justice institutions, 188–189, 190 Aylwin, Patricio, 193 Bakke decision (1978), 170 Bales, Kevin, 250 barbarism/barbarity: Adorno on, 70; vs. acts of cruelty, 247 Barkan, Elazar, 214 Barnett, Michael, 232 Barnett, Victoria J., 136 Bartov, Omer, 16

Bauer, Yehuda, 36n.25 Bauman, Zygmunt, 216 Berger, Peter L., 1, 5, 81, 92, 93, 142, 243, 249 Berstein, Michael Andre, 3 Biggar, Nigel, 11, 12, 105, 176 birth, in narrative of human existence, 41, 42 Bisho massacre, 143 Black Manifesto, 167–168 Blackstone, Sir William, 81 blindness (cognitive), in selfinterpretation, 51 The Body in Pain (Scarry), 22 Boesenecker, L., 174 Bole, W. B., 144 Bolt, Robert, 107 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 126 boosterism of forgiveness, 144–145, 149n.6 Boraine, Alex, 195 Borello, Federico, 202 Borer, Anne, 195 Bosnia, transitional justice in, 201, 202 Bourdieu, P., 260 Brazil, transitional justice institutions in, 184t, 192 Brink, Cornelia, 4 British Holocaust Memorial Day, 2–3 Brown, Cynthia, 192, 193 Brown v. Board of Education, 163 Brudholm, Thomas, 11, 12–13, 124, 146, 176, 251 Brysk, Allison, 203 Buddhism, 246; in Cambodia, 253; evil one in, 248; pietization in, consequences of, 259–260 Bultmann, Rudolf, 11; existentialism and, 68–69, 74; on metaphysical significance of religion, 63–65, 66 Buruma, Ian, on collective response to mass atrocity, 2–3 Butler, Joseph, 116, 117 Cambodia, Buddhism in, 253 Campbell, Ernest, 168 Cangkring, T., 258 Canning, Charles, 120



Index

capital punishment, 92, 101n.17 Card, Claudia, 6 Casanova, Jose, 188 Catholic Church: in Brazil, 192; in Chile, 192–194; Chile’s proto-truth and truth commissions and, 183; in East Germany, 203; in East Timor, 197; in El Salvador, 204; in Guatamala, 191–192; official apology by, 213; in Peru, 197; in Poland, 205; in Rwanda, 199; in South Africa, 194, 195 CAVR report, 196, 252 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 179 Center for Transitional Justice (New York), 2 Chan, A. K. L., 248 Chile, transitional justice institutions in, 184t–185t, 192–194 Christ. see Jesus Christ Christianity: and pastoral enactment of forgiveness, 138–140; radical evil in, 248; and transitional justice institutions, 14, 174–175. see also just war, Christian doctrine of Christian theology, and response to atrocious wrongs: advocacy of forgiveness, 127, 147; forgiveness vs. absolution, 110–115; good vs. evil consequences in, 119–120; language of, 106, 121n.2; natural justice, 107–110; peace and finite justice, 117–119; qualified resentment, 116–117; qualified retributive punishment, 115–116 civil religion, 161 civil repair: of genocidal ruptures, 216–217; performative repair vs., 216, 236, 238n.5 Civil Rights Act (1964), 163, 164 Civil Rights Movement, in U.S., 162–167 Civil War (United States), 161–163 Cleary, Edward L., 191–192 Clinton, Bill, apologizes for Rwandan genocide, 8, 219; analysis of narrative, 219–226; authenticity criticized,

267

239n.9; personal responsibility and, 222, 239n.10 closure, punishment and, 80–81 coerced detention, vs. criminal punishment, 85 Cohen, Arthur A., 3 Cold War, 106 collective responses, to mass atrocity, 2–3 commemorative mourning, for genocide victims, 234 Commission for Reception Truth and Reconciliation (East Timor), 196 Commission of Peace and Justice (Brazil), 192 Committee for Cooperation for Peace and Chile (COPACHI), 192 Committee for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery (Great Britain), 250 common sense knowledge, 114 communicative dimension, of punishment, 83–86; and calling wrongdoer to account, 90–91, 93, 99; capital punishment, 92, 101n.17; and recognition of community, 93, 94 community: calling wrongdoer to account, 89–91, 99; contractual elements of, 95; destruction of, 250; humanity as, 88; imagined, of Anderson, 255; recognition of, 93, 94; religious and secular conceptions of, 93–100; responsibility for wrongdoing and, 82–83; restoration of, moral purification and, 159–160. see also international community; normative community Community Reconciliation Panels (East Timor), 196 Community Service, 83 compassion, in Christian theology, 111–113 CONADEP. see National Commission on the Disappearance of People (CONADEP) concentration camps, prayer in, religious language of, 34–35 The Concept of God after Auschwitz (Jonas), 62

268

Index

condition inhuman, 130–131 CONEP (National Evangelical Council of Peru), 197 Confucianism, 246; question of evil in, 248–249 consciousness: Adorno on, 72–73; secular, relation between religion and, 73–74 consequentialists, punishment and, 80–81, 83 contractualism, 95, 103n.42 conversion, religious, 257 Conway, John, 203 Cory, Allison, 199 cosmopolitanism, sympathy in, 243, 261 Council of the Evangelical Church (Germany), 136, 149n.16 counseling: pastoral, place of victims in, 140–141; psychological, forgiveness issue in, 129 crime of aggression, jurisdiction over, 89 crimes: atrocity, defined, 6; international, jurisdiction over, 87, 89; jurisdictional limits and, 86–87; persistent serious, punishment and, 86 crimes against humanity, 87; forgiveness of perpetrators of, 137–138; jurisdiction over, 89; universal jurisdiction and, 87–89 criminal offenders, punishment of, 86 criminal punishment: coerced detention vs., 85; exclusionary nature of, 85–86, 101n.18 criminal trial, legitimacy of, 82, 84 criminal trials: calling wrongdoer to account at, 90; in East Timor, 183, 185t Cristiani, Alfredo, 204 Croatia, transitional justice in, 201, 202 cruelty (Grausamkeit): barbarity vs., 247; of natural world, 68 culpability, acknowledging, 218 Cushman, Thomas, 14–15, 213 Czech Republic, transitional justice institutions in, 185t, 200–201

Dallaire, Romeo, 218, 227 Daly, Erin, 199 Darfur, genocide in, 219, 238 Dassin, Joan, 192 Dawkins, Richard, 16 death, in narrative of human existence, 41, 42 de Brito, Alexandra Barahona, 192, 193, 203 The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (Robinson), 167 de Grieff, Pablo, 238n.6 de Gruchy, John W., 174, 189 dehumanizing force(s), 42, 45, 57n.17; anger and resentment as, 130; refusal to forgive as, 133–134 de Lange, Johnny, 195 Delbo, Charlotte, 24; poem by, 5 demonic evils, 108, 121n.5 demonization of perpetrators, in redemptive use of religious language, 30–31 denial, of atrocity, 217 dennoch (nevertheless/notwithstanding), 67, 69 Derrida, Jacques, 252–253; paradox of, 249–250, 252–253 Des Pres, Terrence, 23, 33 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 188 Dewey, John, 148 Dews, Peter, 10–11, 60 diabolicisation, of perpetrators, 133–134 diplomacy, faith-based, 4 Dirty Wars (Argentina), 203 discourse, religious. see religious language disobedience, to authority of law, 108–109 Disposable People (Bales), 250 Dodds, Graham G, 238n.1 double bind, in speaking about atrocity, 9, 22–25; Dews on, 11; ethics and, 39; religious language and, 21. see also aporetic situation Dougherty, Beth, 196 Dryden, John, 136 duality, of vulnerability, 246–247 Duff, Antony, 11–12, 79, 176



Index

Durga (Hindu god), 249 Dutch Reformed Church, 195 East Germany, transition to democracy, 197–198 East Timor, transitional justice institutions in, 185t, 195–196, 197 Edwards, Jonathan, 162 Eichmann, Adolf, 31, 92, 102n.33 Eisenstadt, S. N., 246 Elizabeth II (queen of England), official apology by, 213 El Salvador, transitional justice institutions in, 185t, 204 emancipation, of slaves in U.S., 161–163 Emancipation proclamation, 161–163 embodiment, in human existence, 43–44 emotions, negative, 13 enclave society, 261 Enquete Commission (East Germany), 198 Enriquez, Carmen Gonzalez, 200 equality, freedom and, 164–167 Eschebach, Insa, 3 ethical failures, 55–56; resentment and, 49–50 ethical infinity, 46; making whole and, 51 ethical orientation: articulating and interpreting, 42; infinity dimension in, 52–53, 55, 57n.11 ethical vs. moral, 38–39, 56n.2 ethics: of forgiveness, 46–48; human limits and, 40–44; immeasurable nature of, 54; limit of, 38–39; and politics, 171; of resentment, 48–51; of ultimate ends, 171 Ethics (Dewey), 148 ethnic cleansing, 40; in Kosovo, 109, 121n.6 evangelical religions, 245–246 Evangelische Church (East Germany), 182, 198, 203 evil, 1; acts of, examples, 246; Arendt on, 6–7; demonic, 108, 121n.5; and good, in just war, 119; and human free will, 246–251; paradigms of, 6; struggle against, 71; vulnerability and, 15; war

269

as, 119. see also atrocious wrongs; atrocity; atrocity crimes; mass atrocity; sacred evil evil-doers. see perpetrators evil-doing, vulnerability and, 247 exile, 92, 103n.37 existentialism: mythological language and, 69–70; nihilism connection with, 67–69; radical evil and, 249 expulsion, 92, 103n.37 extra-territorial jurisdiction, universal jurisdiction vs., 102n.24 Faith and Knowledge (Habermas), 74 faith-based diplomacy, 4 family: relationships within, unconditional nature of, 95–96; as secondary victims, forgiveness of perpetrator and, 137–138, 144, 149n.22 Farrington, Ann, 196 fatwas, 256 Feinberg, J., 84 fellowship, recognition of, 97–98 financial support, for genocide survivors, 224–225 Finci, Rabbi Jakob, 202 Fleet, Michael, 193 forgetting/forgetfulness, victim and, 135–142 forgiveness: biblical and theological grounds for, 111; and Christian doctrine of just war, 113–114; Derrida’s paradox, 249; ethics of, 46–48; grace of, celebrating, 143, 144; ideal of, 125; as issue in psychological counseling, 129; Kiergegaard on, 57n.224; and making whole, 55; mercy vs., 136–137; overcoming anger, anecdotes about, 142–143, 144, 149n.20; of perpetrators, encouraging, 137–138; religious praise of, 144–145; sacralization of, 142–146; third party, 147; value of religion and, 11–12. see also advocacy of forgiveness; liability of forgiveness, to victims; unforgiveness/unforgiving victims

270

Index

forgiveness-as-absolution, in Christian theology, 113; resentment and, 117– 118; retribution and, 116, 117–118 forgiveness-as-compassion, in Christian theology, 110–113; retribution and, 116 forgiveness boosterism, 144–145, 149n.6 forgiveness process: acting for God i n, 138–140; historical knowledge and methods in, 251–252 Forman, James, 167 Foucault, Michel, 260 Frankfurter, Felix, on survivor testimony, 24 freedom and equality, Johnson’s speech on, 164–165 Freedom Summer of, 1964, 164 free will, evil and, 246–251 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 244 friendship, reciprocal nature of, 95 Funk, Nathan, 207 gacaca tribunals, 125, 148n.2, 199, 200 Gaita, Rai, 96, 97, 99 Gamarra, Jeffrey, 197 Garrard, Eve, 137 Gauck, Joachim, 198 Geddes, Jennifer L., 9–10, 21 Geist. see mind (Geist) genocidal ruptures, 14–15, 216; civil repair of, 216–217 genocide: jurisdiction over, 89; modernity enabling, 216; pattern of response to, 217–218; prevention of, 219, 239n.7; radical evil and, 249; as sacred evil, 232 Genocide, in Darfur, 219 Genocide Convention, 215, 221 genocide survivors: Clinton addresses, 219–220; financial support for, 224–225 Genocide Survivors fund, 224 genocide victims, commemorative mourning for, 235 George, Alexander, 177, 182 Gerardi, Bishop Juan, 191, 192 German people, liability of, 159

Germany, post-war: bias toward Nazi perpetrators in, 136, 149n.16; transitional justice institutions in, 185t Gibney, Mark, 213, 214 The Gift of the Gorgon (Shaffer), 112 globalatinization, 252–253, 254 global civil society: genocides rupturing, 216; good and evil in, 214; rupture in. see genocidal ruptures Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 142 God: in forgiveness process, acting on behalf of, 138–140; humanity’s unconditional status with, 96–98; name invoked in official apologies, 225–226; as origin of good and evil, 248; and sinner, restoring relationship between, 139, 141 good and evil: in global civil society, 214; God as originator of, 248; human suffering and, 247; in just war, 119; struggle between, 71 Good Friday agreement (1998), 204 Gopin, Marc, 189 Gorringe, Timothy, 190 Gouldner, Alvin, 158 Gourevitch, Phillip, 218 Govier, Trudy, 139 grace of forgiveness, 143 Grausamkeit (cruelty), of natural world, 68 grave wrong, as justification for just war, 106–107 Graybill, Lyn, 174, 194, 195, 200 Great Society, of Johnson, 167 Greenberg, Irving, 27; on theodicy, 29–30 Griswold, Charles, 126, 146 Grøn, Arne, 10, 38, 147, 176 groupness, 244 Grunebaum-Ralph, H., 146 Guatamala, transitional justice institutions in, 185t, 191–192 guilt, survivor’s, 138, 159 Gutmann, Amy, 176 Habermas, Jürgen, 3; on erosion of religious traditions, 10–11, 60, 69, 73–74



Index

Haftung (liability), of German people, 159 halal food, 259 Harries, R., 132, 138 Harris, J., 254 Harris, Sam, 16 Hatopoulos, Pavlos, 16 Hayes, Michael, 191 Hayner, Priscilla, 176, 193 Healing Through Remembering (Northern Ireland), 204 Heaney, Seamus, 174 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 56, 63, 67, 69, 72, 74, 213; on abstract thinking, 60–61; on metaphysical significance of religion, 61–62 Heidegger, M., 62, 66, 68 Hell, images of: Arendt on, 4; poetry depicting, 5 Helmick, Raymond G., 16 Hepworth, M., 253 Herman, Judith S., 129 hermeneuticists of suspicion, 178, 207n.1 Hieronymi, Pamela, 132 Hinduism, question of evil in, 248–249 Hirst, Megan, 196 Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), 191 historical knowledge and methods, 251 history, nature of, 1 Hitchens, Christopher, 16 Holocaust: modernity enabling, 216; religious language of, 25–32; speaking about, necessity and impossibility of, 22–25; theodicy and, 29–30 hostes generis humani (outlaws), 80, 81 Howard-Hassman, Rhonda, 214 hudud penalties, 257 human beings: ethics and, 40–44; fellow feelings for, 242–244; as Jonas’ historical beings, 71; religious transcendence and, 43; selfinterpretation by, 40; sympathetic feeling of, 242–243; vulnerability of, 243–244

271

human existence: embodied character of, 43–44; narrative of, religion and, 41–42; scarcity vs. solidarity in, 243. see also ethical orientation human free will, evil and, 246–251 human good, monotheism and, 97–98, 109–110 humanity: as community, 88; dehumanizing of, 42, 45, 57n.17; globalization of idea of, 245; rhetoric of, 44–45; unconditional value of, recognizing, 97–98; vicarious, of Jesus Christ, 141. see also crimes against humanity human rights: culture of, 253; process of, historical knowledge and methods in, 251; religious influences on, 245–246; society and, 243 human suffering: as product of evil, monotheism and, 247–248; religious influences on, 245–246; sacralization of, 31–32; theodicy justifying, arguments against, 28–29 Hume, David, 242 Humper, Joseph C., 145, 196 Huntington, Samuel P., 178–179 Hussein, Saddam, 87 ICC (International Criminal Court), jurisdiction of, 89 ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), 199, 224 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia), 201, 229 Ignatieff, Michael, 176 imagination, ethics and, 40–41, 53; morally horrifying and, 54–55 imagined world community, of Anderson, 223, 236, 255 imperatives, categorical vs. hypothetical, 98–99 impossibility, vs. necessity, in speaking of atrocity, 22–25 imprisonment, 83–84, 92, 103n.37 Indian Mutiny (1857), 120 Indonesia, Islamization of law in, 258 Indonesian Council of Ulemas (MUI), 256

272

Index

infinite justice, 118 infinity: Améry and, 51; immeasurable phenomena and, 51–52; and religion, 51–53 infinity in the negative, 46, 52 injustice, risk of, 118 integralism, of transitional justice institutions, 188 international community: and imagined world community of Anderson, 223, 255; Rwandan genocide and, 221–222, 229, 233–234 international crimes, jurisdiction over, 87, 89 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 199, 224 International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), 201, 229 international legal norms, national sovereignty and, tensions between, 2 intimacy, rituals of, 259 Irani, George, 207 Iraq, truth recovery in, 206 Islam: radical evil in, 248; truth recovery and, 206–207 Izetbegovic, Alija, 202 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 124, 125, 134 Jaspers, Karl, 159, 251 Jauhari, Syarifah Binti, 258 Jeffrey, Paul, 192 Jesus Christ, 117; moral authority of, 114–115; resentful language of, 117; retributive language of, 116; vicarious humanity of, 141; wounds of, 243–244 Jewish community, in Bosnia, 202 John Paul II (pope), 128, 193 Johnson, Lyndon B., 163–167 Joireman, Sandra F., 199 Jonas, Hans, 11; on existentialism, 67–68; on metaphysical significance of religion, 62–63, 65–66 Jonas, Susanne, 191 Jones, L. G., 138–139, 140–141 Judaism, radical evil in, 248 jurisdiction, 86–87; of ICC, 89. see also universal jurisdiction

just future, establishing, 118 justice: as alternative path to reconciliation, 129; infinite, 118; moral vs. positive law in pursuit of, 108–109; as political power, 179; as rectification of wrongdoing, 118; restorative, 189; transitional, mechanisms of, 7; and truth, choices between, 2. see also punitive justice justification, of punishment, 81–82 just peace, 119–120; finite, in Christian theology, 117–119; forgiveness-asabsolution and, 117–118 just war, Christian doctrine of, 12, 106, 119–120; forgiveness and, 113–114; grave wrongs and, 106–107; universal moral order for, 109–110. see also Christian theology, and response to atrocious wrongs Kali (Hindu god), 249 Kant, I., 44, 52, 65, 68, 110 Karn, Alexander, 214 Katznelson, Ira, 170 Keane, Bergel, 26 Kellogg, Michael, 203 Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 163, 164 Khmer Rouge, 253 Kierkegaard, Søren, 57n.22 King, Gary, 177 Kiss, Elizabeth, 189 Klaiber, Jeffrey, 191–192, 197, 203 Kleinman, K., 8 Klinkner, Philip, 163 knowledge: objective, Gouldner on, 158–159; and prevention of genocide, 219, 239n.7; vs. acknowledgment, Nietzsche on, 158 Kofman, Rabbi Berek, religious language of, 35 Kofman, Sarah, 22, 24–25; scholarly voice of, 33–34; on prayer, 35 Kohen, Arnold S., 197 Kosovo, military intervention in, 109 Kosovo Report, 216 Koštunica, Vojislav, 202



Index

Krog, Antjie, 194 Kuhn (concentration camp inmate), prayer of, 34–35 Lamb, Sharon, 129 Landres, J. Shawn, 16n.1 Lang, Berel, 25, 26 Langer, Lawrence L., 4–5, 24, 133 language: of Christian theology, in response to atrocious wrongs, 106, 121n.2; limitations when speaking of atrocity, 22–25; mythological, natural sciences and, 66–67; of reconciliation, making whole and, 160; resentful, of Jesus Christ, 117; retributive, of Jesus Christ, 116; scholarly prose, neutrality of, 32–33; secular, 60. see also religious language Lanzmann, Claude, 3 law: moral vs. positive, pursuit of justice and, 108–109; obedience to authority of, 108 Lawson, Tom, 3 Les Tempes Modernes (Sartre), 57n.17 Levi, Primo, 22, 130, 133; on prayer, 34 Levinas, Emmanuel: describing victims as martyrs, 32; on theodicy, 28–29, 52 Levy, Daniel, 4, 252 Levy, Janet, 195 liability, of German people, 159 liability of forgiveness, to victims, 126; forgetting the victim, 135–142; forgiveness as most favorable response, 128–129; negative emotions, 129–132; sacralization of forgiveness, 142–146; unforgetting victims, 132–135 liberal penal theory, challenges of, 83 Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 161–163, 166 Lincoln, Bruce, 16, 147 Lind, Jennifer, 214 Linenthal, Edward, 3 Ling, T., 248 Lomé Agreement (1999), 196 Longman, Timothy, 200 love, measuring, 52 lustration, 183, 185t

273

Mack, Phyllis, 16 Mahaghosananda, 254 making whole: and coming to terms with past, 157–161; and ethical infinity, 51; impossibility of, 56; reconstruction and, 157; repentance and forgiveness and, 55; Weber on, 171 Malaysia, Islamization of law in, 257 Mandela, Nelson, 251 Mandeville, P., 259 man of ressentiment, 132 marital homogamy, 256–257 marriage: patterns of, 256–257; relationship ideal in, 96, 103n.45 Marshall, Christopher D., 189 Martin, David, 188 martyrs, victims as, 32 Marx, Karl, 157 mass atrocity: defined, 6; societal responses to, 1–2. see also atrocious wrongs; atrocity; atrocity crimes Maxwell, Elisabeth, 16 May, Larry, 6 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 205 McAdams, James, 197, 198 McCargo, D., 260 meaning, religious thinking bestowing illusion of, 11, 60–62 Meiring, Piet, 194, 195 memory repression, 1 Menem, Carlos, 203 mental impairment, punishment and, 82, 84 mercy: plea for perpetrators, 136, 149n.16; vs. forgiveness, 136–137 metaphysical significance, of religion: Bultmann on, 63–65; Hegel on, 61–62; Jonas on, 62–63 Meyerhoff, Barbara, 235 MFDP (Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party), 164 Michnik, Adam, 205 military intervention: adversarial relationship in, 119; risks associated with, 106 Milošević, Slobodan, 201, 202

274

Index

mind (Geist): emergence of, Adorno on, 72–73; language of, 73–74 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 73 Minow, Martha, 6, 176 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 164 modernity: discourse on, 214–215; genocide enabled by, 216 modesty, Augustinian, in establishing just future, 118 monotheism: human good and, 97–98, 109–110; human suffering and, 247–248; moral realists and, 110 Monshipouri, Mahmood, 203 Moore, Sally Falk, 235 moral, vs. ethical, 38–39, 56n.2 moral atrocity, philosophical responses to, 60–74 moral communication, punishment as, 83–85 moral extraterritorality, 188 moral law, pursuit of justice and, 108–109 morally horrifying: dimensions in religious language, 44–45; ethical response to, forgiveness and, 49; and the inviolable, 52 morally horrifying acts, as beyond understanding, 54–55 moral order, genocides contradicting, 216 moral positions, religion offering, 39 moral purification, and restoration of community, 159–160 moral realism, monotheism and, 110 “Morning of Arrival” (poem by Delbo), 5 MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement), 197 MUI (Indonesian Council of Ulemas), 256 Müller-Fahrenholz, Geiko, 133, 139 Murdoch, Iris, 97 Murphy, Jeffrie, 126, 136–137 musalaha (reconciliation), 207 mythological language: existentialism and, 69–70; natural sciences and, 66–67 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 163–167

Nanek Dev (guru), 246 narrative, of human existence, religion and, 41–42 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 163–167 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), 168 National Commission on the Disappearance of People (CONADEP), 203; Nunca Mas report from, 192, 203 National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Chile), 193 National Evangelical Council of Peru (CONEP), 197 National Reconciliation Commission (Thailand), 260 national sovereignty, and international legal norms, tensions between, 2 National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (Rwanda), 199 NATO: during Cold War, 106; in Kosovo, 106; in Yugoslavia, 201 natural history (Naturgeschichte), 71–72 natural justice, 107–110 natural sciences/world: cruelty of, Jonas’ views on, 68; mythological language and, 66–67 Naturgeschichte (natural history), 71–72 Nazi concentration camps, reactions to photos of, 3; as secular icons, 4 N’COBRA (National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America), 168 necessity, vs. impossibility, in speaking of atrocity, 22–25 Negative Dialects (Adorno), 69, 72 negative emotions, 13, 126; advocacy of forgiveness and, 129–132 neglect of victim. see forgetting/ forgetfulness Neier, Aryeh, 176 nevertheless/notwithstanding (dennoch), 67, 69 New York Times, 168



Index

Niehas, Carl, 195 Nietzsche, F., 25, 43, 157–158 nihilism, connection with nihilism, 67–69 Nixon, Richard, 166 Nobles, Melissa, 214, 236 None of Us Will Return (Delbo), 24 nonforgiveness. see unforgiveness/ unforgiving victims normative community: accountability for wrongdoing to, 89–91, 99; atrocity crimes and, 91–92; communicative dimension of punishment in, 84–85; criminal punishment and, 83; responsibility of, 82–83 normative dimension: immeasurability and, 51; of morally horrifying, 44–45; reformulating, 54–56 Northern Ireland, transitional justice institutions in, 204 Nunca Mas (CONADEP report), 192, 203 obedience, to authority of law, 108 objective knowledge, Gouldner on, 158–159 official apologies: authenticity of, 214, 221, 237, 239n.9; God’s name invoked in, 225–226; history of, 213, 238n.1; as performance events, 214, 236; purpose of, actual vs. hopeful, 214, 238n.6; social science discourse and, 214, 238n.3 official apology(ies): as civil repair, 216–217; in response to atrocity, 218 official commemorations, politicians’ role in, 2–3 O’Flaherty, Michael, 196 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Derrida), 252–253 Organization of African Unity, on Clinton’s personal responsibility toward Rwandan genocide, 239n.10 orientation. see ethical orientation outlaws (hostes generis humani), 80, 81 Ozick, Cynthia, 13, 124, 125–126, 132, 135, 146 Ozick’s challenge. see liability of forgiveness, to victims

275

Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS), 257 Partlow, Joshua, 206 PAS (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia), 257 pastoral counseling, place of victims in, 140–141 pastoral forgiveness, of sins, 138–140 past wrongs, coming to terms with, 157–161 peace. see just peace performance events, official apologies as, 214, 216–217, 236; failure of, 237 performative repair vs. civil repair, 216, 236, 238n.5 perpetrators: calling to account, 92, 102n.35; demonization of, in redemptive use of religious language, 30–31; diabolicisation of, 133–134; God’s judgment of, 96–97; justice and, 118; plea for mercy toward, 136, 149n.16; punishment of, 91; quasireligious language used about, 30. see also criminal offenders Perry, Michael, 98, 103n.46 Peru, transitional justice institutions in, 186t, 195–196, 197 Petersen, Rodney L., 16 Petito, Fabio, 16 phenomena, immeasurable nature of, 51–52 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 56 Phillips, Anthony, 132 philosophical approaches, to responses to mass atrocity, 39–40 Philpott, Daniel, 4, 13, 14, 16, 125, 147, 174, 206 pietization, 15, 244, 254–260; in Buddhism, consequences of, 259–260; in Christianity, 260; in Islam, unintended consequences of, 258–259; paradoxical nature of, 260–261 piety: in modern Islam, 256–259; in modernity, 15; official commemorations and, 2–3; paradoxical nature of, 260–261; price of, 260–261; religious language and, 4–5

276

Index

Pinochet, General Augusto, 192–193 Plato, 39, 248 Platonic theology, 248 Plavšić, Biljana, 40 Poland, transitional justice institutions in, 186t, 204–205 political apologies, making whole and, 160 political power: transitional justice and, 181; transitions and, 179–180, 180t political theology: reconciliation and, 189; of religious leaders and institutions, 190; of retribution, 189–190 political transitions, transitional justice and, 178–181; in East Germany, 197–198; type and strength of, 179–180, 180t politicians, role in official commemorations, 2–3 politics: and coming to terms with the past, 160–161; ethics and, 171; and the religious, tension between, 13–14, 255. see also slavery in U.S. Pollefeyt, Didier, 133–134 Pol Pot, 253 Pope, Stephan J., 204 Popkin, Margaret, 204 Porter, David, 204 positive law, pursuit of justice and, 108–109 Powell, Lewis, and Bakke decision, 170 Power, Samantha, 218, 219 power, unapologetic rhetoric of, 213 Poyales del Hoyo, Spain, murders in, 112 practices, religious. see religious language praise, religious, of forgiveness, 144–145 prayer: in concentration camps, religious language of, 34–35; Kofman on, 35; Levi on, 34–35; as protest, 35 probation, 83 protest, prayer as, 35 Protestant Church: in Czech Republic, 201; in East Germany, 182, 198, 203; in Rwanda, 200 proto-truth commissions: in Bosnia, 201–202; in Chile, 183 prudence, in establishing just future, 118

psychological counseling, forgiveness issue in, 129 punctuating events. see genocidal ruptures punishment: benefits of, 80–81; capital, 92, 101n.17; of criminal offenders, 86; inclusionary vs. exclusionary nature of, 85–86, 101n.18; justification of, 81–82; in liberal penal theory, challenges of, 83–84; moral dimension of, 79–80; purpose of, 81; redemption and, 99–100; refraining from, St. Augustine on, 123n.26; retributive, in Christian theology, 115–116; value of religion and, 11–12. see also communicative dimension, of punishment; criminal punishment punitive justice, 177, 178t; in Poland, 205; political theology or retribution favoring, 189–190; in political transitions, 179, 180, 180t; religious actors shaping, 183, 188; religious influence on, 198–202; in Rwanda, 199–200; in Yugoslavia, 201–202 Quaker tracts against slavery, 250 quasi-religious language, about perpetrators of atrocities, 30 The Question of German Guilt (Jaspers), 251 Rabinbach, Anson, 159 racial equality, freedom and, 164–167 radical evil: as existential challenge, 249; in world religions, 248–249 radical narratives: of human history, 44; religions offering, 41–42 Rahman, Abdul, 257 rally, in favor of reparations for slavery, 168 Ramet, Sabrina P., 201, 203 reactive attitudes, 99 realpolitik, apology and, 213, 214, 222, 229; and ritual of apology, 237 reciprocity, in relationships, 95 reconciliation: criminal justice as alternative path to, 129; ethics of



Index

resentment and, 50; forgivenessas-absolution and, 117–118; Islamic ritual of, 207; language of, making whole and, 160; process of, historical knowledge and methods in, 251–252; sympathetic political theology and, 189; truth and, 160; vs. vengeance, 111–113. see also transitional justice institutions Reconstruction, after U.S. Civil War, 162 reconstruction, and making whole, 157 Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI), 191–192 rectification of wrongdoing, justice as, 118 redemption: forgiveness and, 142–146; punishment and, 99–100 redemptive use of religious language, 21–22, 27–28; demonization of perpetrators in, 30–31; sacralization in, 31–32; theodicies in, 28–30 redescription, of atrocity, 217 Reed, Adolph L., Jr., 169 refusal to forgive. see unforgiveness/ unforgiving victims relationships, conditional vs. unconditional, 95–96 relative power, transitional justice and, 181 religion(s): ambiguity of, 4, 53–54, 147; characteristics of, 106; effect on transitional justice, 181–183; evangelical, 245–246; human existence and, 40–42; limits of, 40–44; and infinity, 51–53; metaphysical significance of, 61–65, 73–74; moral positions offered by, 39; radical evil in, 248; radical narratives offered by, 41–42; the religious vs., 8; revitalization of, secular thinkers and, 16; revival of, 254–255; as social force, 255–256; transcendence and, 42–44; value of, after mass atrocities, 11–12; world religions concept, 245–246 Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place (Stier and Landres), 16n.1 The Religion of India (Weber), 260–261 religious, the, see religious discourse and practices see the religious

277

religious actors. see religious leaders and institutions religious conversion, 257 religious discourse and practices: ambiguity in, 4, 53–54, 147; bestowing illusion of meaning, 11, 60–62; globalization of, 253; Hegel on, 61; limit of ethics and, 10, 38–56; nature and role of, 10; piety and, 4–5; politics and, tension between, 13–14, 157–171; reframing atrocious acts as sacred or holy, 147; in response to mass atrocity, 2–3, 5–6, 21–22; role of, 34; sociological perspective of, 15; vs. specific religions, 8 religious ideas, value of, 12 religious identity: revivalism and, 257–258; as social force, 255–256 religious language: apophatic use of, 21–22, 27; dimensions of morally horrifying in, 44–45; erosion in modern societies, 60; ethical and philosophical problems of, 9–10; globalization of, 252–253; as help vs. hindrance, 10; promotion of forgiveness and, 144; redemptive use of, 21–22, 27–28; in response to atrocity, 21–35 religious leaders and institutions: effect on transitional justice, 181–183; forms of, 181–182; influence of, 14, 174–175; influence on transitional justice and truth recovery, 179–180, 180t, 182–183, 184t–187t, 188–190; involvement in truth commissions, 3–4 religious pluralism, 256 religious praise, of forgiveness, 144–145 religious traditions, erosion of, 10–11 religious vocabulary, use of, 3, 4 reparations: for genocide survivors, 224–225; making whole and, 160; for slavery, rhetoric of, 167–168 Reparations Coordinating Committee, 168 repentance, and making whole, 55

278

Index

replacement, in political transitions, 179–180, 180t, 201 representation (Vorstellung), 61, 67 repression of memory, 1 research, on responses to mass atrocity, 2 resentment, 13; of Améry, 131; in Christian theology, 116–117; ethics of, 48–51; forgiveness-as-compassion moderating, 113, 117–118; message implied in, 131–132; moral significance of, 131–132; reconciliation and, 50; of victims after mass atrocity, 130–131 resistance, in rhetoric of forgiveness, 135 responses, to mass atrocity: collective, 2–3; defines, 7; memory repression, 1; moral vs. ethical, 38–39, 44–45, 56n.2; philosophical approaches to, 39–40; religious discourse and practices as, 2–3; research on, 2 responsibility(ies): ethics and, 55, 171; of victims, 111; for wrongdoing, punishment and, 82–83 ressentiment, 130–131; and Nietzschean man of ressentiment, 132 restoration of community, moral purification and, 159–160 restorative justice, 189; in Qur’an, 207 retribution: forgiveness-as-compassion and, 117–118; political theology of, 189–190 retributive justice, in Christian theology, 189–190; and punishment, 115–116 retributivism/retributivists, 189–190; negative, 82; orthodox, 83 revenge. see vengeance revitalization/resurgence, of religion, 254–255; religious identity and, 257–258; secular thinkers and, 16 rhetoric: of forgiveness, resistance in, 135; of humanity, 44–45; of Nazis, 36n.25; of reparations, 167–170. see also religious language Ricoeur, Paul, 126, 178 Rittner, Carol, 200 Robinson, Randall, 167 Rome Statute, 88, 102n.26–102n.28 Rorty, Richard, 243

Rosenberg, Tina, 200, 205 Rosoux, Valérie, 146 Roth, John K., 16 Rousseau, J.-J., 243 Roy, O., 259 Rumor of Angels (Berger), 249 Rustenburg Declaration (1990), 194, 195 Rutikanga, Bernard Noel, 199 Rwanda, transitional justice institutions in, 186t, 199–200 Rwandan genocide, 14–15; Annan’s apology for, 227–232; Clinton’s apology for, 218–226 Sa’adah, Anne, 197, 198 Sachedina, Abdulaziz, 207 sacralization: of forgiveness, 142–146; of victims, in redemptive use of religious language, 31–32 sacred event, Holocaust as, 26 sacred evil, 3, 214; genocide as, 232; new icons of, 216 St. Augustine, 119, 123n.26 St. Paul, 116–117 Sanford, Victoria, 191 Santiago, Daniel, 204 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 57n.17 Scarry, Elaine, 22, 23, 247 Schaap, Andrew, 159 Scheffer, David, 6 Schmidt, L. P., 260 scholars: double bind concept and, 25; prose used by, neutrality of, 32–33 Scholem, G, 248 Schorlemmer, Friedrich, 198 Schreiter, Robert, 174 Sebti, Bassam, 206 secondary victims: confronting perpetrator, 144, 149n.22; forgiveness of perpetrator and, 137–138 secular apologies, quasi-religious nature of, 14–15, 215 secular consciousness: good vs. evil consequences and, 119; relation between religion and, 73–74 secular institutions, transitional justice and, 203 secularism, 254



Index

secular language, 60 secular thinkers, revitalization of religion and, 16 self-interpretation: blindness in, 51; ethics and, 40, 56n.7, 57n.9 self-understanding, 45 Semelin, Jacques, 16 Serbia, transitional justice in, 202 The Serene Life (movie), 254 sermons, official commemorations and, 2–3 settlement (sulh), 207 sexual equality, affirmative action and, 166 Shaffer, Peter, 112 Shah, Timothy Samuel, 206 shame, among survivors, 138 Shari’a law, 256, 259 Shaw, Martin, 249 Shaw, Rosalind, 196 Shining Path guerilla army, 197 Shriver, Donald W., 189 Sierra Leone, transitional justice institutions in, 186t–187t, 195–196 Signer, Michael, 16 Sikhism, 246 Silva Henríquez, Cardinal Raúl, 192–193 sin(s): and anger, distinction between, 117; pastoral forgiveness of, 138–140; racial slavery as, Lincoln on, 162 sinner, God’s relationship with, 139, 141 slavery, 250; abolition of, 250–251; as destruction of community, 250; as example of evil, 250 slavery in U.S., legacy of, 161–163; affirmative action, 163–167; reparations, 167–170 Smart, N., 245 Smedes, Lewis, 128 Smith, Adam, 242 Smith, Barbara H., 134 Smith, Brian H., 193 Smith, Rogers, 163 Smock, David R., 16, 147 Smothered Words (Kofman), 34–35, 37n.35 social existence. see human existence social groups, religious sensibilities of, 15, 256–257 sociological perspective, of the religious, 15

279

Sontag, Susan, 3 South Africa, transitional justice institutions in, 187t, 194–195. see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC), 194, 195 South African Council of Churches (SACC), 194, 195 Southcott, Joanna, 159 Soweto riots, 251 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 222 spirit. see mind (Geist) Stasi, 198 Steele, David, 202 Stier, Oren B., 16n.1, 146 Stoic philosophy, 250 Stover, Eric, 129 Strawson, Peter F., 99 suffering: animal, 247; human. see human suffering sulh (settlement), 207 The Sunflower (Wiesenthal), 133 survivors: and calling perpetrators to account, 102n.35; forgiveness of perpetrator and, 137–138; shame among, 138; testimonies of, double bind concept and, 22–25 survivor’s guilt, 138, 159 suspicion, hermeneuticists of, 178, 207n.1 sympathy, 242–243, 244 Sznaider, Natan, 4, 252 Tanter, Richard, 197 Tavuchis, Nicholas, 214 Tedjasukmana, J., 258 theodicy, 247; of antagonism, 69; in redemptive use of religious language, 28–30 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 242 the religious: defined, 7–8; as pragmatic concept, 8–9. see also religious discourse and practices third party forgiveness, 147 Thomas Aquinas, 250 Thompson, Denis, 176 Thompson, E. P., 159 Time (magazine), 168

280

Index

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 188 Todorov, Tzvetan, 27, 30 Tombs, David, 191 Tomuschat, Christian, 191 Torpey, John, 13–14, 157 Torrance, Alan J., 127, 133, 139, 140–141, 145, 147 torture, vulnerability and, 247 TransAfrica Forum, 167, 168 transcendence: Murdoch’s idea of, 97–98; religion and, 42–44 transformation: of anger to forgiveness, 143; in political transitions, 178, 180, 180t transitional justice: effect of religion on, 181–183; forgiveness and, 125; making whole and, 160; mechanisms, 7; political transitions and, 178–181, 180t; religious influences on, 14, 174–175 transitional justice institutions, 175–177; comparative strengths of, 177, 178t; formation of, 182–183, 184t–187t; implementation of, 183, 184t–187t; religious influence on, 183, 184t– 187t, 188–190 transitions. see political transitions transplacement, in political transitions, 179, 180–181 trauma, societal, 244 trauma dramas, official apologies as, 236 TRC, see Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) Treatise on Human Nature (Hume), 242 Truman, Harry, 165 truth: justice and, choices between, 2; and reconciliation, 160; and reconciliation commissions. see transitional justice institutions Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Peru), 196, 197 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Sierra Leone), 145 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa), 136, 142, 181, 183, 194–195, 251

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Yugoslavia), 202 truth commissions: advocacy of forgiveness and, 125; purpose of, 252; religious leaders and organizations involvement with, 3–4 truth recovery: comparative strengths of, 177, 178t; in El Salvador and Argentina, 183, 184t, 185t; in Muslim nations, 206; in political transitions, 179, 180t; purpose of, 176; religious influence on, 191–198; transitional justice institutions and, 175–177 Tudjman, Franjo, 202 Turay, Thomas Mark, 196 Turner, Bryan S., 15, 242, 243, 244, 248, 253 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 4, 124, 128, 130, 132, 140, 142–145, 183, 189, 194, 195, 251 ubuntu, 195 ultimate ends, ethic of, 171 unforgiveness/unforgiving victims, 13, 126, 132–135; Derrida’s paradox and, 249; dissent/dissenters compared with, 134; as morally impossible stance, 135 United Nations (UN), 181, 196, 201; Peacebuilding Commission, 2. see also Annan, Kofi United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, 215. see also Genocide Convention United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 214–215 universal jurisdiction, 87–89; vs. extraterritorial jurisdiction, 102n.24 Vandeginste, Stef, 199 Van Hoyweghen, Saskia, 200 Varney, Howard, 196 vengeance: as alternative to forgiveness, 127–128; reconciliation vs., 111–113 Verdoolaege, A., 130, 131



Index

Verhofstadt, Guy, apologizes for Rwandan genocide, 226 Vetlesen, Arne J., 6 Vicariate of Solidarity (Chile), 192 vicarious humanity, of Jesus Christ, 141 victims: anger and resentment of, 130–131; collective, ICC jurisdiction and, 89; diabolizing of perpetrators by, 133–134; forgiveness forgetting, 135–142; forgiveness of perpetrator and, 137–138; of genocide, commemorative mourning for, 235; justice and, 118; as martyrs, 32; responsibilities of, 111; sacralization of, in redemptive use of religious language, 31–32; unforgiving, 13, 126, 132–135. see also liability of forgiveness, to victims; secondary victims vindication, advocacy of forgiveness and, 129 Vinjamuri, A, 174 violence, vulnerability and, 247 Volf, Miroslav, 174, 189 von Kellenbach, Katarina, 126, 136, 139–140 Vorstellung (representation), 61, 67 vulnerability, 243–244; dimensions of, 246–247; and evil, 15 Vulnerability and Human Rights (Turner), 15, 243, 244 Wahid, A., 257 Walesa, Lech, 205 Walicki, Andrzej S., 205 Walker, Margaret, 128, 129 Wallace, Richard J., 131 war: as evil, 119; just. see just war, Christian doctrine of War and Genocide (Shaw), 249 war crimes, jurisdiction over, 89 War of the Ridda (Apostasy War), 257 Washington Post, 257 Weber, Max, 13, 169, 190, 245, 260–261 Weigel, George, 188, 201 Weisberg, Jacob, 239n.9 Weissmark, Mona S., 129

281

well-being, and unconditional concern for others, 98 Westley, Robert, 167 we-talk, in Rwandan genocide apology: of Annan, 227, 228–229; of Clinton, 222, 229 White, Andrew, 124 White, Jack F., 168 Whitman, Walt, 250 Wiesel, Elie, 24 Wiesenthal, Simon, 133 Wilkins, Roy, 168 Wilkinson, I., 247 Willie, Charles, 168 Wilson, R., 130, 252 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1 women, piety invested in, 258 Works of Love (Kierkegaard), 57n.22 world openness, vulnerability and, 243–244 world religions, radical evil in, 248–249 world religions concept, 245–246 wounds: human vulnerability and, 244; Jesus Christ and, 243–244 Wright, Jaime, 192 wrongdoing: accountability to normative community for, 89–91, 93, 94; criminal punishment for, 83; public vs. civil, 83; rectification of, justice as, 118; responsibility for, 82–83 wrongs: affirmative action addressing, 163–167; grave, as justification for just war, 106–107; past, coming to terms with, 157–161; reparations for, rhetoric of, 167–170; slavery and, 161–163. see also wrongdoing Wurm, E., 136 Yang Sam, 253 Yugoslavia, transitional justice institutions in, 187t, 201–202 Yusuf, I., 260 zero point (death), in narrative of human existence, 41, 42 Zubrzycki, G., 255