Understanding and Forgiving
This article was first published in the Minden Times in March 2025.
As circumstances seem on the cusp of harder times, at least for some of us -- maybe most of us -- we should reconsider our stance on the question of free will and culpability.
There’s a lot of prattle about holding people ‘accountable’, but the conversation gets confused because it’s never crystal clear who is responsible for what. When things go wrong, the finger of blame gyroscopes. (When things go right, a choir of cherubs is apt to show up, but that’s another story.) Things seldom go wrong in one fell swoop: it’s usually a long and frequently invisible process, and it’s often not clear what stage of development the problem is at when it becomes apparent. Should we consider a problematic behaviour a symptom of something awry upstream, a snapshot in time, or an indication of worse trouble to come?
Never a simple question. In earlier days, we made it simple by attributing it to god or luck or fate. But in the early 19th century, thinkers like Bertrand Russel began to consider that as we knew more about science, we had to admit that there were forces that influenced behaviour. Acknowledging this, he still confirmed that people should be held accountable for their behaviour. Understand, yes; forgive, no.
In 1957 when West Side Story hit the stage, it struggled with how the youngsters should be understood and therefore dealt with. Gee, Officer Krupke pretty much summarizes the free-will arguments of the day, and therefore the assignment of culpability. Did the kids who’d landed involuntarily in malfunctioning families – no choice on their part -- need a shrink, a social worker, a decent job, or a year in the Pen?
Current debates about involuntary treatment for drug addicts, and enforced destruction of encampments suggests we’re still struggling with precisely that question.
Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroendocrinologist, very contentiously updated the argument with his book Determined: a Science of Life and Free Will published by Penguin Random House in 2023. (Bob McDonald interviewed him on Quirks & Quarks Nov 10/23.) He comes at the question from the perspective of ‘justice’, how we hold people accountable for illegal actions. The legal argument must prove a misbehaving person is ‘responsible’ by showing they 1) had intent, 2) knew the consequences of their actions and 3) thought they had options. Sapolsky says this snapshot process is as illogical as judging a movie from its last three minutes. Because, he says, ‘intent comes from…every single thing in that person’s past over which they have no control that made them who they were at the moment they intended to do that’. He traces causation, based on what we now know about physiology and chemistry and genetics and intergenerational transmission, back to basically the beginning of humanity. He says that knowing what we know now, given the exponential increase of scientific knowledge, we need to revisit our ethical and moral metrics.
His book caused widespread gasps and pearl-clutching among, one might presume, the relatively privileged (the under-privileged were probably otherwise occupied and not paying attention to the furor) and a full-frontal attack on the irresponsibility of saying humans had no free will.
But his point, to my ears, was that we, the people who think we have some influence over how the world operates, have to be responsible for what we have or have not done to change circumstances that we know create bad behaviour. Poverty. Ecological devastation. Starvation. Fear of imminent death. Hopelessness. Cruelty.
Oliver Burkeman, in an article in The Guardian in Oct 24, 2023, agrees. He says that Sapolsky (who looks like Moses, and Burkeman describes his style as that of a ‘hugely knowledgeable yet stoned west coast slacker’) nevertheless ends up making the case for ‘profound forgiveness and understanding…a There but for the grace of God go I’ stance.
Burkeman doesn’t get to what I heard on the Quirks and Quarks interview. I heard a call to action. A reprimand for not doing what we know we should do to make the world a better place. It resonates strongly with (my guru) Senator Landon Pearson’s definition of useful action as changing the circumstances so that alternate options become evident.
We are sliding into what promises to be tough times and knowing what we do about the relationship between poverty and ‘misbehavior’, drug addiction and homelessness may become even more prevalent. The circumstances will require new choices by all of us: e.g., individuals should Buy Canadian, provinces should reduce barriers to interprovincial trade, leaders of all ilk should put national wellbeing above personal interest.
The circumstances will also require each of us to revisit the connection we make between understanding and forgiving. Deciding where in the developmental process the problem of the moment is at, which then defines free will and culpability, seems to me a very good place to start.
