Why Forgiveness — Not Weapons — May Be Our Best Response To War
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“Responsibility” is one of the Ten Commitments of the Humanist Creed, one I don’t think about much until bad stuff happens. Like war. Being responsible for happiness is easy, but I am loath to respond to war, even though not responding is being irresponsible.
I struggle to put the words “responsible” and “war” together and make sense. There is no such thing as a responsible war, and the only words that come are woulda, coulda and shoulda words. The options besides war are my response to war.
I don’t want to talk about the obvious — the devastating economic and ecological brinks of war, the bodies of beloveds being sutured and snuffed, the broken minds and hearts of soldiers. I don’t want to tell the story of crumbled places and shattered lives. We have the human chronicle called history for that.
But we are nowhere if we can’t look back and see how we carry yesterday’s wars like a club.
We’ve come a long way from beating the bush, but we still carry the fear of snakes. We are genetically stuck inside our skulls and uniforms of human skin with the same primitive impulses and traumas of our ancestors. A person can make the case that human beings are basically cavemen with cell phones and nuclear clubs in hand.
We’re wired for war — but also for peace
Most of us can recognize and control that primitive impulse to club everything in sight in favor of safety and civilization. Between wars from way back, humans dropped the club and learned to speak, to convey meaning from sounds and symbols, and I kinda like the words-over-weapons thing we had going. You can make friends with words, only enemies with weapons. We know how to live in peace, or we wouldn’t have made it this far. But we also know how to war.
People have been armed forever, stones and slings, clubs of wood, spears and arrows, and guns, bigger guns, bombs, etc. Since WWII, humans have entered a study of transgenerational trauma, the predisposition toward epigenetic stress markers linked to emotional, behavioral and biological illnesses, including addiction. Descendants of warring people (all of us) may be biologically predisposed to lose control and be over-ridden by inherited neurosis.
War is just the kind of violence that spreads and cultivates cycles of addictive revenge. In his book, “The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction,” James Kimmel breaks down the neuroscience of revenge and compulsive motive control failures in humans. Brain images reveal that the seduction and stimulation of revenge is as addictive as gambling or chemical substances.
We know addictions are self-destructive, but there are numerous societal costs to untreated revenge addiction. Revenge addicts self-justify crime and destruction to get their fix. The random slights of an ordinary day can keep a revenge addict in an unhealthy mental and emotional state — other drivers, co-workers, bosses, spouses, ex-spouses can bump a revenge state all day, every day. But war … war is fuel to the fire.
Kimmel advises we treat revenge addiction like a disease and to use evidence-based addiction interventions and treatments currently available. According to Kimmel, forgiveness is particularly effective for treating revenge addiction and preventing relapse. Neurologists can observe a person’s brain change by a forgiving heart.
Kimmel explains that forgiveness is not forgetting or condoning a crime. It is not found in a courtroom. Forgiveness is a private thing, just for the benefit of the forgiver. I confess this is where Kimmel’s book surprised me. It can’t be that simple. That’s hard.
Forgiveness as medicine
In another book, “Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness,” Dr. Fred Luskin approaches forgiveness through a medical lens. The neurology of forgiveness isn’t just for peace of mind; forgiveness benefits our bodies, decreases healing time from injury or surgery and keeps us able to rise to the challenge of daily bumps and bruises.
Comparative religions, personal development programs, addiction recovery programs and therapeutic psychology all encourage forgiveness. Why not physicians? Educators? Dr. Luskin believes that forgiveness is learnable and urges people to cultivate peace as the environment most supportive of forgiveness.
When the war started, I panicked. It’s hard to cultivate peace for forgiveness in wartime when we need it most. Because we have no choice but to help this new batch of warred-up revenge addicts, I am campaigning for forgiveness as the responsible thing to do here.
Where to start
I am not alone in wanting the peace of forgiveness. The Forgiveness Project, and Discover Forgiveness are abundant with resources for children and adults, educators, faith leaders and mental health professionals.
With warring ancestors like ours, we are all in a revenge addiction recovery process, and we’re going to need to learn how to forgive and practice it hard. We can blame a little of today’s warring on transgenerational trauma, but we cannot escape the responsibility to give the future a chance to drop the club and live in peace. The time to predispose the future away from trauma-induced illnesses is now.
Revenge addicts need treatment, not weapons. There is no winner in war if the prize is a revenge-addicted future. If the antidote to revenge addiction is forgiveness, let’s get on with it.
This article was originally published in FaVS News.
Janet Marugg is an avid gardener, reader and writer living in Clarkston, Washington, with her husband, Ed, and boxer dog, Poppy. She is a nature lover, a lifelong learner and a secular humanist. She can be reached at janetmarugg7@gmail.com.