“Be careful,” a friend said as I slouched across from him in the low, sagging vinyl chairs of the library. “You can do it, but you should know that you’re doing it entirely to make him feel bad.” His voice was neutral. Unspoken was the rest of the thought—he’s certainly not going to apologize or even respond, much less come back, newly chastened to be the boyfriend you had dreamed of in those early, hopeful days of easy banter. I stared at the watery half-ring of coffee staining the lip of my cheap paper cup. He was right, of course, both that sending an email detailing all of the ways he had made me feel unsafe was almost guaranteed to be pointless from the perspective of reconciliation, and that I should be suspicious of my motives. Still, I had seen this particular ex for the first time in three months earlier that day and, when he had passed me on the street with a jaunty wave and a friend’s bookcase half-perched on his shoulder, something about his insouciance, his utter lack of embarrassment, infuriated me. I had spent months thinking about everything that had gone wrong, scrupulously trying to disentangle my responsibility from his. And there he was, blithely unconcerned with any hurt he had caused. I didn’t want reconciliation. I just didn’t want to be the only one who had to bear the weight of thinking about it.

I looked up. “He deserves to feel bad.”

He nodded. There was no judgment on his face. “Yes.”

I sent the email, telling him that I refused to forgive him and why. It felt amazing. I never did hear back from him, but that night I went on my first date with the man who would become my husband.

Five years have passed since I sent that email. They have been the years of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and so, so many others killed by the police while unarmed. The months of Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, and Avital Ronnell, all sunk by #MeToo. The time of Trump. Now, since Senator Susan Collins is finishing her speech in support of the most controversial Supreme Court nomination of my lifetime as I write, they also look primed to become the decades of Brett Kavanaugh.

No one looks much in the mood for forgiveness.

We have heard plenty of lamentations about the collapse of civility in public life and exhortations to reach across the aisle—to reconcile and forgive—alongside more resigned calls to give up the idea of forgiveness as a fantasy that leads to election losses. What we haven’t heard is a full-throated case for refusing to forgive—not as an act of spite, not as a temporary state to be overcome, not a lack of Christian virtue, but as a moral stance in its own right.

And why would we when an image of the woman who refuses to forgive is arguably one of the most despised figures in Western literature? She is Miss Havisham, cadaverous in the yellowed satin of her wedding dress. One stocking is shredded from years of pacing around her dressing room in one shoe, the other shoe still perched on the vanity exactly where it had been the moment the letter arrived telling her of her lover’s betrayal. The clocks are stopped and her wedding cake crawls with spiders and beetles on the table where it was set all of those years ago—the same table that she surveys with gloomy satisfaction, remarking “that is where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come look at me here.” Her injury is real enough but her tenacity in clinging to it and her brooding hatred of all men are excessive, morbid, perverse. She is like Dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground, “A sick woman, a spiteful woman.”

When philosophers talk about forgiveness and the refusal to forgive, their reference is most often to Bishop Joseph Butler, the eighteenth century Anglican moralist, not Charles Dickens, but the portrait amounts to the same. The person who refuses to forgive is resentful, nurturing her sense of being wronged to keep her wounds open. At times, Butler admits, the resentful person’s dogged insistence on remembering her wrongs can even cause a good Christians to question God’s providential plan. In a 1726 sermon addressed to his lawyer filled congregation at Rolls Chapel in London, Butler worried over the existence of resentment.

Since perfect goodness in the Deity is the principle, from whence the universe was brought into being, and by which it is preserved; and since general benevolence is the great law of whole moral creation: it is a question which immediately occurs, Why had man implanted in him a principle, which appears directly contrary to benevolence?^[1]

Resentment is a “settled anger,” roused by the sense of being given less than one’s due, he concludes in his seminal analysis. Like all private passions, it serves the public good in much the same way Adam Smith would argue in the following generation that private interest drives the free market. Thus, in moderation it is good, a testimony to the innate sense of justice all people share and a way of creating social cohesion through collective indignation. But, in excess, resentment destroys social bonds and feeds on the natural tendency to imagine ourselves more innocent, and our enemies more base, than is the case. Worse still, resentment rejects the healing gift of time that God gives to stitch all wounds.

Nietzsche, meanwhile, lauded mercy as an act of strength and dismissed resentment as limited to “such creatures who are denied genuine reaction, that of the deed, and who compensate for it through an imaginary revenge…. The resentful person is neither sincere, nor naive, nor honest and forthright with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves hiding places and back doors; everything concealed gives him the feeling that it is his world, his security, his balm….”

Sadistic, squinting, insincere, weak, perpetually trapped in a past that can never be overcome—who would want to be the resentful person who refuses to forgive? Isn’t it in her best interest to forgive? Wouldn’t Miss Havisham’s whole life have been better if she had kicked off her wedding shoes for dancing shoes and learned to move past her broken heart? Isn’t that what conventional wisdom and self-help books insist on telling us? Forgive for yourself, so you can move on.

And yet, my own experience with refusing to forgive makes me doubt that the choice really is between dwelling forever on a wrong or absolving someone for their misdeeds. I have spent remarkably little time in the years since I wrote to him thinking about the ex in question, except occasionally to marvel over how freeing it was to dump him in the mental basket I had labeled “deplorable.” Refusing to forgive him was not a declaration of eternal resentment for me. It was a decision that I simply did not want to take on the emotional labor of absolving him. What had happened, happened. He had taken enough of my energy. I refused to give him any more. Is this attitude resentment nonetheless? Maybe, though on my part I felt it was an act of self-respect.

My story is private and quotidian, but there are much more significant ones. When Dylann Roof opened fire on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015 and killed nine people, there was an immediate rush of opinion pieces about forgiveness. Would the survivors forgive Roof? Should the survivors forgive him? Did he even deserve forgiveness, given his utter lack of repentance? After all, even weeks after the shooting, he steadfastly refused to repent, writing in prison:

I would like to make it crystal clear I do not regret what I did…I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed…I do feel sorry for the innocent white children forced to live in this sick country and I do feel sorry for the innocent white people that are killed daily at the hands of the lower race. I have shed a tear of self-pity for myself. I feel pity that I had to do what I did in the first place. I feel pity that I had to give up my life because of a situation that should never have existed.

Debate only picked up a few days later, when a group of those who had survived the shooting did announce that they forgave Roof, with one survivor, Nadine Collier, very simply acknowledging the world-shattering depth of her loss by saying, “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.” Many praised the survivors for their magnanimity. Others argued that forgiveness was an act of resistance to a racist society, a refusal to be brought to the depths of hate of the white supremacist Roof. Still others, more cynically, wondered if the entire conversation around forgiveness was a monumental act of bad faith by a society that wanted to extort forgiveness from its weakest, most marginalized members in order to paper over ongoing injustices and avoid actual change.

While I share these doubts about the ethics of demanding forgiveness, I am even more skeptical of the efficacy of forgiveness. Most accounts of forgiveness claim its aim is the reparation of the relationship between two people, the injured and the injurer. Yet the trappings of forgiveness, most notably apologies, are routinely dragged into public conversations, as if the right words, the proper display of remorse, could fix our damaged social relations. Every apology in the wake of #MeToo—Harvey Weinstein’s, Louis C.K.’s, Junot Diaz’s, Mario Batali’s—has been dissected and nearly every has been found wanting. Were they insincere or at times strangely flippant? Yes, but they were also the wrong medium for rectifying sexual assault and inequality.

In all of these cases, the problem is that our expectations of forgiveness have not caught up with our explanations of social harms. We know that Harvey Weinstein is the type of story that he is because he is the product of an entire culture that props up the right of powerful men to exploit and degrade women, just as we know that Dylan Roof is a story because his decision to shoot a church full of Black people manifests the social reality of racism. In another more equal society, both acts would be horrifying, but they would not be representative of a whole system of social inequality and violence in the same way. But, as it stands in our present, imperfect world, when we examine Junot Diaz’s or Louis C.K.’s apologies for whiffs of insincerity, we are not asking if we believe they have made amends to the particular individuals they injured. Rather, we are asking if they have adequately apologized for their role in the whole rotten social system that made their abuses possible. This is an impossible thing to demand from an apology, at least so long as we continue to understand forgiveness as a way of repairing relations between individuals. Junot Diaz can only apologize for being Junot Diaz. He can’t apologize for the man who pressed up against you on the subway or the middle-aged man who stymied your career or the wage gap. The fact that this is the case might suggest that our discussion of forgiveness has missed something important about the ways a wrong can feel symbolic of a whole disordered social world, or it might indicate that forgiveness has a much smaller social role than normally recognized, but, regardless, it means that the scope of forgiveness needs to be rethought to address twenty-first century ideas about social responsibility and the origin of violence.

My point in writing all of this is not that we should never forgive (Miss Havishams of the world, unite!). My point is that Miss Havisham was dreamt up as an act of propaganda. For all sorts of reasons (good and bad, dangerous and anodyne) people can’t forgive or actively refuse to forgive. This piece is the first of a series I will write for The Revealer over the next year exploring why people don’t forgive, whether forgiveness is an act of will or an act of the body, how forgiveness fits into a theory of systemic violence, and what these questions about the ethics of demanding forgiveness mean for movements like reparative justice. I don’t know yet what I think about all of these questions, but I do know that they will never get asked so long as the only model we have of someone who refuses to forgive is a fictional woman from two hundred years ago, who stalks around her house in a tattered wedding dress, entombed by her resentment.

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^[1] Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons and Other Writings on Ethics, ed. David McNaughton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 68.

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Liane Carlson is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. From 2015-2018 worked as the Stewart Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Her book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2019.  She is currently working on a new book on the refusal to forgive.
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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.