Forgiveness

LINK to exchange between Archbishop Tutu and Winnie Mandela. Note: Problem with L.A. Times link. Working on it. January 16, 1998.

It's important that you gain some sense of the breadth of concern with this topic and the amount of literature you will come across as you research it. The link to Polis came from a Yahoo search. Try it.

• Select the "Net Search" button at the top of the Netscape Navigator, or hunt for a search button on the browser you are using.

• Select Yahoo. Other search engines are fine, too. They're even sometimes included with good list resources on the WEB. I just had to pick one for us to use in the workshop.

• Select EDUCATION. Enter the search philosophy and forgive*
  

• When search results come on screen, select ALTA VISTA. You'll find over 26000 sites.
  

  One of them is wonderful. A simple page of a young South Vietnamese man's life experiences. He ends by saying that when life "gets a tad too exciting" he goes to the grocery store and looks at the shelves of groceries. He then adds, "I shoot left-handed." Not at the shelves of groceries, I hope.

  I wandered across this site during the first 200 or so sites from the search. I didn't record it's URL. I went back on January 17 to find it again. It was still there. It was its title that landed it on my search list: "To err is human, to forgive is not our policy." -MIT Assassin's Group.

  It probably won't be there long. It was an accident that I found it. Or was it? Try my search, try the LINK to it, and then you decide.

• Click on the links that may offer you insights. These are some of the ones I chose and why:

  • A book publisher's short review of Michael Henderson, The Forgiveness Factor. Keep scrolling down that site and you'll also find a brief review of Bread, Bricks and Belief: Communities in Charge of Their Future. Since one of the real dilemmas of forgiveness is who shall forgive whom, and who owes what to whom, the individual or the community, this sounds like another source we might want to look at, especially since it sounds as though it might give us stories.

  • Try the link to Random House for a short review of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower.

    Because this is a link to new releases, it might change. If that happens try this: Go to the Random House catalog. This will offer you their search engine. Click your cursor in the space for author's last name. Type in Wiesenthal (correctly!). Scroll down to their search button and press. The next screen will offer you two choices: the hardcover version and the paperback version of The Sunflowe. Click on the hardcover version; the full review is not given with thepaperback site. Honest. Check it out.

  • Try the link to Loyola University of Chicago to Professor Eric Posavac. He puts up what he's reading, with short reviews and comments. (Like the list on Jeanne's door, but this one is ever so much more convenient, because we can go take a peek at it, too. And it looks like he updates it on school vacations. Check out the dates. He also accepts e-mail. I'll bet he'd like a short message that you've been there and enjoyed his space.) The first link will take you to some quotes he's pulled from a reading he liked. Take his invitation to go back to his Readings or access this part of his site: http://homepages.luc.edu/~eposava/index.html#READ to find his review on Lynne Cheney's work on "arrogance and responsibility," one of the sore points of forgiveness on our campus.

    Neither of these URLs was working on the evening of January 16. But the URL, shortened to end with "homepages," did produce the homepage directory for Loyola University of Chicago. Unfortunately, Prof. Sposavac is not listed in their directory, but they note that the directory is not complete. I know that Prof. Sposavac and his site are real. I e-mailed him, and he answered me. Welcome to the Internet. Try again tomorrow. And learn for this reason to do your own searches.

    I tried again on January 17. Went back to the history of my sites in Netscape Communicator, found the site from several days ago. Sure enough, it worked. He isn't Prof. Sposavac. (Did you catch the error in the paragraph above? No, this isn't a mystery story. But it's a good idea to learn to look for clues to links that don't work.) He's Professor Posavac. (Notice that the Web server must have had a limit on the number of spaces available, because his identifier doesn't include the final "c" on his name. Somewhere in typing the URL, I put in an "s." This is why you go back and try again. The link is repaired as of January 17, 1998. Jeanne

    CLUE to getting URLS right: Don't copy them; grab them. Depending on the software you have, try this: Go to the site you want. Go to the URL on your browser. Higlight the URL by clicking on it. Then find the "cut, copy, paste" option. On Netscape Communicator it's under Edit in the menu. While the URL is highlighted, click on "copy." Then paste it somewhere, immediately, before you lose it. I switch to my WordPerfect program and paste it there. This will help avoid errors such as I made with Prof. Posavac's URL.

  • Now I didn't expect this one. Pat Acone has an advising page for Sociology's homepage, and I thought we were unique. But here on my Yahoo/Alta Vista search I found: "Academic Forgiveness for Former Coastal Carolina Students." It's not so postmodern as it sounds. I think the Webmaster might have been the most creative one here. But the site is there. And it does forgive students their old academic transgressions, like failing their courses and not taking their college work seriously. It doesn't seem to examine reflexively its own role in that failure, but then I didn't include postmodern in this search.

    This link did not work on January 17. But it was a Sunday. Try again. It's a college, and this is a page from its catalog. I don't think it will go away.

  • One of the last sites at which I dropped in to visit was The Forgiveness Workshop. What a wonderful surprise to find that we weren't the first "Forgiveness" Workshop. I should have thought we were unique. Eagerly I clicked to compare materials and focus. Well, I won't spoil it for you by telling you the ending. Just one clue - here's how you navigate:

    • Click on Training.
    • Click the image map on Counseling and Development.
    • Scroll down to #15.

    Well, not on the evening of January 16, that's not the way to navigate. Then I found myself already past the image map. If that happens to you, just scroll down to #15. But the image map is much more interesting if you can get there. I couldn't on the 16th. And I tried. Lots of different ways.

    Well, I found the URL for the image map on the morning of the 17th. I found it by going back to the history of sites I'd visited in communicator. Try this Link to get to the image map. Again, use all the helps your browser provides, and develop a system for keeping records of your searches. More on this in a future workshop.

  • Finally, I want to remind you that the problem of forgiveness and Habermasian discourse is universal. Forgiveness is one of those threads that seems to run through all of life's encounters, for the individual and herself, for the individual and his community, and for communities. One of the sites on my Yahoo/Alta Vista search was the Serbia Bulletin . It appeared on my search list because of the article this link takes you to: "How Could the Serbs Forgive Vatican." As an artist, I thought it was one of the loveliest sites I had visited. As a teacher, I knew the ambiguity this had to introduce for all of us.

    The Yugoslavian puzzle of violence and not forgiveness is one of the most poignant narratives in the world today. We who are studying Habermas' system of law cannot fail to recognize that Yugoslavian issues are before the World Court. The terrible reality of postmodernism is that we can no longer fathom a world so complex that we cannot know the boundaries of our knowledge. Each text comes before us with a validity claim, which we are bound to hear in good faith. But which text is "true'?

    NOTE that Miroslav Volf, whose book, Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation, (Abingdon Press, 1996) Professor Posovac reviewed at the Loyola University of Chicago link, is a "Croatian-born American." You should expect different validity claims to be raised.

    Now that the Web is before you, you will not be able to evade making decisions on the authority of the texts you encounter. You will not be able to assert with the assurance of the student that the teacher is "right," for the Web is not a classroom, and this is more than an exam of which we speak. The most that we, as teachers can do, is to teach you, as we do here today in the workshop, to write your own texts as you go, to recognize them as valid texts to be taken into account in all intertextual readings, so that all validity claims may be heard, and will be there for all the world to read intertextually as we try to achieve a system of law and justice. May we forgive ourselves and others as we try.

    Jeanne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

From "Forgiveness" in South Africa to "Forgiveness" in the South

In the New York Times, on Sunday, March 22, 1998, in The Week in Review, Kevin Sack presents an articles on current repercussions in Mississippi of the entire Civil Rights issue: "The South's History Rises, Again and Again." The occasion which prompted the article was the "unsealing of 124,000 pages of documents from the state's defunct Sovereignty Commission," which virulently opposed the Civil Rights movement. How do we feel about a Baptist minister who was effectively silenced by economic sanctions against his congregants? How do we manage to forgive the privileging of authority, the refusal to hear validity claims, and now come to the discourse table to build a new millennium? Can we create Habermasian discourse without trust? without forgiveness? How?

Sack says that the southern states "must address their past forthrightly to move forward. But in doing so they must inevitably confront anguish and anger -- evoked by haunting images of Medgar Evers and other civil rights martyrs. And they face a paradox: the fact that revisiting the past both stimulates catharsis and stokes resentment. Whether it ultimately speeds healing or retards it is hard to know." Dr. Emil Posavac has recently pointed out to me Dr. Pennebaker's 1995 book on Emotion, Disclosure, and Health. Are there ways to promote healing without stoking the resentment? California certainly faces this problem, quite as much as the South.

The chancellor for Ole Miss, speaks of "the regions's complexities," which Sacks says are "becoming more common across the South, as are apologies for past behavior. Last fall, at a 40th anniversary commemoration of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas' Republican Governor, Mike Huckabee, said the violent white resistance to school's integration 'may be forgivable, but it is not excusable.'"

"'In the Proverbs,' added Mr. Huckabee, formerly a Baptist preacher, 'it says that he who conceals his sins does not prosper. But whoever professes and renounces them will find mercy.'"

WATCH THIS SPOT

Pennebaker's book has arrived and we will get something up soon on that. But meanwhile, stay alert to the number of references to forgiveness regularly occurring. For example, the following article appeared in the L.A. Times.

"The Redemptive Power of Language"

In the L.A. Times on Saturday, April 25, 1998. on p.E-1, appeared David L. Ulin's article on Dorothy Allison, the author of Bastard Out of Carolina. In the first paragraph of that article Ulin reports Allison's perception of "the redemptive power of language, the way words restore us to ourselves." Her first book, Bastard Out of Carolina, though fiction, is largely autobiographical based on the abuse she suffered as a child. She credits feminism with aiding her to overcome. Of particular interest is her description of "forgiveness" on p.E-8:

"There's this notion . . . that forgiveness is something that happens, that it's a discrete event. And one of the things I've become clear about is that it's not. Forgiveness is something where you get up every day and you set out on this path again. But it's like the Zen arrow: You don't ever really get there. . . I'm still working on forgiving myself. For not dying. Because you're supposed to. The really good ones die. To get through, to survive, you have to trade off pieces of yourself, you have to compromise with your abuser. You have to pretend that you're not hurt, that you're inhuman, that you find all this deeply amusing or not very substantial. But every time you do that, you're compromising with the devil, and you begin to hate yourself."

Dorothy Allison's experience and the healing effect of language for that trauma are impressive factors for us to consider as we approach Pennebaker's work. (James W. Pennebaker, ed., Emotion, Disclosure, and Health, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., 1995. ISBN: 1-55798-308-9) I am particularly struck by Allison's phrase: "The really good ones die." For very different reasons during this last year, when I did not die in the accident that broke my neck, I, too, found myself thinking "The really good ones die." I, too, had to forgive myself, for living. I believe that this is a separate piece from the more straightforward forgiveness we have often addressed on this site. But I believe that the disparate circumstances under which we find such a reaction are indicative of the extent to which our identities are caught up in the act and process of forgiveness. As I summarize bits and pieces of Pennebaker's work, I'll go back to this topic. If it strikes a note of recognition for you, e-mail me. These are issues we need to explore. Jeanne

Jeanne.

First Draft, April 26, 1998

Brief Critical Essay on Pennebaker's Emotion, Disclosure, and Health

This first draft will have to suffice until we get through the end of the semester. It matters that we get this up on the site now because the source comes from e-mail on the site, and our treatment of the source will ultimately (1) illustrate many of the statistical concepts on the Stat Site this semester and (2) illustrate our need and ability to synthesize across the social science disciplines.

Pennebaker's book is a collection of chapters resulting from a conference held in the summer of 1994, in Taos New Mexico. Researchers from many fields contributed to the concept of how and why "translating upsetting experiences into words can promote physical and mental health." The book, as published by the American Psychological Association, is a detailed summary of research in this fledgling area, with the addition and exploration of the latest research conducted and analyzed by the participants and their colleagues. This is not a casual read to take along to the beach in the summer. It is dense, highly technical, and a very good reference if you are interested in exploring forgiveness as it is often approached by pscyhology and therapists, as disclosure.

The general thesis that disclosure is good for the soul has been accepted across many disciplines for many, many years. One of the gratifying aspects of this book is that it calls into question such assumptions. As Martha Minow would suggest it "states" the assumptions, and then reports on experiments that attempt to measure their accuracy. Thus, Chapters 9 and 10 address the issue of repression and how disclosure, or putting into words of distressing experiences, might affect the body's reaction to vaccines or to blood lymphocytes. Does disclosure, especially written disclosure assigned to students for twenty minutes a day on traumatic events (op. cit., at p. 203) over a three-day period, affect the rate at which their bodies respond effectively to a vaccine, and does that response continue over a longer period of time?

Questions of measurement abound. If a person says he does not have negative feelings, may that be taken as an accurate measure of his feelings, or is he repressing negative feelings, so that though truthful, his answer is inaccurate. To answer this, the researchers call on a broad variety of psychological tests and carefully define variables such as repression and disclosure to guarantee the best possible measures, given the state of present research.

Women, who have been told over the years that their headaches are not "real pain," will be pleased to discover the more balanced recognition from this new field which hypothesizes that people who suffer tension headaches have probably been socialized into not expressing emotion, into not disclosing, thus increasing the tension that may contribute to headache. So here we cross over into sociology, into the cultural elements of our learning and behavior, into the histories we carry with us, both as individuals and as part of a larger community. What led us to this source was, in fact, an exchange with Prof. Emil Posavac at Loyola University in Chicago, who mentioned it in relation to the reconciliation committees in South Africa. Will this formal disclosure, even without the parallel requirement of repentance, will this simple admission that the outrages took place, help with healing, in the sense that Pennebaker's group is exploring disclosure and mental health?

What if someone who had built her self-concept on denial and repression of social events she prefers not to, or has been taught not to, recognize is forced through a therapeutically intended disclosure process to recognize that the events really did happen? Is the disclosure likely to increase her physical and mental health in the short term? over the long term? And what about the community as a whole? There is some suggestion that the disclosure can be maladaptive for subjects defined as "repressors," people adjusted to denial of given social events. Is there in fact a need for psychology to explore the "repressor" factor, and the most effective way, if there is such a way, to bring denial to recognition? And is that for the sake of the community and/or of the individual? Short term or long term?

Tough questions. And the research in this book does a good job of addressing them. More, in particular a statistical analysis for the stat class, to follow. Jeanne

Some of the discourse that has begun:

On April 27, 1998, Susan Takata wrote:

Just read the new stuff on forgiveness. Was really bothered by what you said in this piece. "The really good ones die" -- yes and no. There are some really good ones who "survive" (and, who "make it"). . . To survive, though. I see that as having greater meaning because there is a sense of purpose for not having died -- . I think about having survived such a catastrophe results in some kind of even greater good.

Yes, in the past, some good ones have died all too young. But I can't imagine that "all" the "good" ones have up and died on us. Wouldn't that leave a world of the "not-so-good?" We need the good ones. We need as many good ones as we can get. We need other fishes...

I'm not sure if I made much sense, but I was deeply bothered by the thought, "I had to forgive myself, for living..."

On April 29, Jeanne wrote: "Yes, yes. It is a deeply troubling thought. But it is also a thought that resonates through many situations. I think it may be somewhat similar to the thoughts expressed by veterans after war scenes in which they survived, but their friends did not. There is an awesome feeling that somehow fate has stepped in, and that we do not quite understand how that affects us in terms of responsibility, how it has changed identities, and not just our own."

"Of course, this feeling is not rational. You are right, those of you who have been reminding me that it is not true that "the really good ones die." But the thought remains, with many who survive: "Why me?" Pennebaker et al's work seems to suggest that disclosure, open discussion of these reactions to the trauma are benficial to recovering from the trauma. So, here's a little experiment on that concept. Allison triggered a resonance in me with her words. I am disclosing that resonance. Let's explore it. More as more thoughts are shared with the Site. Jeanne

Added April 29, 1998.

Brief Critical Essay on Pennebaker's Emotion, Disclosure, and Health - Reading Statistics in an Actual Collection of Research Studies

One of the major problems with research on the health benefits of disclosure is developing a solid working definition of disclosure that researchers will be able to replicate in the many different studies that will be needed to establish any real causality. Remember that "causality" presents difficulties because there are generally so many variables in the world of social science that it is hard to be sure that the relationship measured is real and not spurious. If variables of gender, age, level of education, race, ethnicity, prior educational achievement, family connections, family experience with decision-making in an institutional setting (like the schools or a corporation), if all these are allowed to vary, it's very hard to figure out which one is "causing" the other to happen. And recall, also, that as you increase the number of variables, in an attempt to make your mathematical model of the social situation more realistic, your sampling error approaches infinity!

So there are problems with accurately defining the way in which you will measure each variable. Disclosure, denial, negative feelings, repression, are several of those that the Pennebaker group had to struggle with. And there are problems with recognizing that you can't measure everything - your sampling error will go to infiinty. This is one plausible explanation for why studies are done in tiny pieces where you can define and control variables more easily. When all the researchers working on a given topic, such as disclosure and health, come together to talk about their findings, their conclusions, and the next steps they need to take, books like Pennebaker's often result. They are summaries of the research at this early stage on this topic.

One of the studies is by Harald C. Traue on "Inhibition and Muscle Tension in Myogenic Pain." His study focused on respondents who had a history of tension headache, but only a two-year history. His control group was made up of people who had no history of headaches. He compared tension in face and neck muscles for the two groups. Traue reports Reich's work in which headache patients are thought to have experienced "socially punishing environmental conditions ...caus[ing] active emotional restraint." (Pennebaker, op.cit, at p. 159. Traue analyzed his data with "nonparametric tests." Recall that lambda and gamma are nonparametiric Proportional Reduction in Error measures. That means that the tests used would establish statistically the amount one could reduce error in predicting tension in the neck and facial area by having knowledge of whether the respondent had a history of headaches.

Traue concludes that "people with chronic headaches and with tension headaches are inclined to underestimate situational stress." (at. p. 170) They are also inclined to "'unlearn' an accurate assessment of stressful circumstances" and this inaccurate assessment is shown to affect their "social relations and therefore . .. the social support network."

Petrie et al., in "Repression, Disclosure, and Immune Function," describe the difficulties of "investigating disclosure and immune function." (at p. 230)

1. "Defining Traumatic Experiences" (at p. 230)

   Some subjects may choose topics to write on or to disclose that are minimally traumatic, because they may repress the really traumatic incidents. Ways need to be found to better define "traumatic" and to get subjects to cooperate by actually examining what is traumatic for them.

2. "Defining What Constitutes Disclosure" (at p. 231)

   "An important related aspect is that of identifying what represents effective disclosure in writing and how these elements can be related to physiological changes. At present there is some suggestive evidence that subjects who gain most from writing use more negative emotion words overall and increase their use of insight type words over the course of the writing sessions (Pennebaker, 1993). The development of the CARMEN program for linking text with autonomic change offers new possibilities to explore this area, especially when these data are linked to a linguistic analysis of the subject's writing (Pennebaker &Uhlmann, 1994). Defining effective disclosure in writing will be a large methodological step forward in being able to link the expression of emotions with immunological changes.

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