Joyce McMillan: Forgiveness is all the rage, but do humans deserve it?

Joyce McMillan yearns for the days when panto villains were vapourised, leaving nothing but their shoes (Picture: Stuart Cobley)

Panto time at the Byre in St Andrews; and as the story – a brand-new version of Sleeping Beauty – comes to an end, the age-old question arises of what to do with the villainous wicked fairy, known here not as Carabosse, but, since the story is set in Scotland, as Raven La Corbie. Some of the children in the audience suggest a few bloodthirsty options.

These days, though, most of them know that that’s not how it’s going to go; for nowadays – 20 years on from the film Wicked, with its powerful psycho-political rehabilitation of the Wicked Witch of the West – it seems almost routine for female villains, in particular, to be offered a big closing scene in which they confess the embittered loneliness of their lives, repent of their evil doings, and are welcomed back into the family fold.

So at St Andrews, as at many theatres across Scotland this Christmas, the wicked lady morphs from ghastly force of evil to genuine loving sister in less time than it takes to yell “she’s behind you”; and everyone heads off happily into the night, with a couple of rousing final choruses. Yet something in me can’t help yearning for the old days of spectacularly slamming trap-doors, and nothing left on stage but a smoking pair of shoes, as the villain melts into oblivion. And at a time of such tempestuous and unforgiving passions in British politics, the whole panto experience has left me wondering about the business of forgiveness, and where it sits in our current public life; and whether it is always the unequivocal good suggested by shows like Sleeping Beauty.

For about forgiveness, there are undeniably some caveats to be made, and not just about the shrieking demands for instant forgiveness – or its opposite – often inflicted by sections of the media on the relatives of the victims of some atrocity. In the first place, it is vital never to confuse forgiveness with forgetting. Forgiveness can and does free individuals and communities from the past, and allow them to move on; forgetting is an act of stupidity that prevents us from learning from history, in ways that are not only disrespectful to the victims of past conflicts, but dangerous, in condemning us to relive them.

Then secondly, we should be aware of the dangers of a glib culture of psychological understanding and forgiveness when it is applied to a deeply unequal society, where wealthy celebrities can often rehabilitate themselves, even after criminal behaviour, simply by staging a tearful chat-show confession, accompanied by a fulsome apology and a promise to “get help”. The quality of mercy is strained indeed, when it is applied with sentimental fellow-feeling to well-connected young college students being tried for sexual misconduct or violence, but ruthlessly withheld from defendants from less privileged backgrounds charged with less serious offences.

Forgiveness is the key to forgetting the past

And ten years on from the 2008 financial crash – a decade which has seen negligent and sometimes criminal conduct by those in charge of large financial institutions remain largely unpunished – it’s as well to remember that justice is an essential element of the social fabric, and that where the powerful and privileged can offend with impunity – with judges muttering forgiving nonsense about how the mere embarrassment of being charged and tried means these well-to-do criminals “have suffered enough” – the result can only be increasing disaffection and social breakdown.

And yet, for all the dangers surrounding the idea of quick and easy repentance, there is something gloriously liberating and creative about a deep feeling of forgiveness, when it fully takes possession of the heart; and at this grim moment in human affairs, when our planet is facing catastrophic human-made climate change, and is swept once again by a vile politics of tribalism, exclusion and hate we once thought banished forever, it’s difficult not to feel that some kind of deep forgiveness is needed, if we are to move on from the mood of bitter mutual disgust – often shading into thinly-veiled self-disgust – that is now paralysing our politics, at almost every level.

It’s not, of course, that there is no reason for humanity to hate itself, at this point in history. The greed, the unwisdom, the devastation of nature, and the sheer inhumanity of man to man, written into the bones of our present global system, are there for everyone to see; and they not only make countless thousands mourn, but make thousands more turn away in despair from the very idea that humanity might still have a future worth fighting for. One night last week, though, a friend of mine posted on social media – which is meant to be a curse of our time, but is of course a mixture of curse and blessing – a simple, grainy black-and-white video, 20 minutes long, of John Coltrane and his band, in Berlin in 1965, playing their legendary version of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music.

And I don’t know what it was about the precise mood of this mighty piece of jazz; it’s sheer implacable sophistication and complexity, its knowledge of everything human and refusal to be silenced by it, its insistence – on the contrary – on becoming ever more brilliant and beautiful in the face of it, that made me feel this sudden welling not only of tears but of a real forgiveness, for all the mighty mess we have made of things. God knows, as we face this Christmas, we as a human race have plenty to hate ourselves for, in the way of greed and cruelty, selfishness and short-sightedness, and rank failure to organise our lives around the things that really matter. But we also have this; our unique music, our defiance, our ability to reflect, to muse, to love, to struggle, and to create new beauty where there was none before. This Christmas of 2018 may not be the merriest, in other words; but if we can celebrate it by first forgiving ourselves and one another, from the heart, then we may at last be able to begin to recognise and gather our strengths, to know ourselves for the strange and remarkable species we are, and to move on.