…. is something else that doesn’t get addressed. My wife and I were discussing this over dinner tonight, and although we started a train of thought certainly we are far from having arrived at a conclusion. The topic is very much of current relevance, of course, because of the vigorous discussion taking place at the moment in this country (and elsewhere) about a suitable contemporary response to the history of the slave trade.
It seems relatively uncontroversial to say that defacing or removing statues is only the beginning of a necessary debate about this aspect of our history. Handled the wrong way it could be a way of avoiding even telling the truth in its completeness. Heaping the opprobrium for slavery onto the heads of a few prominent individuals is no substitute for a clear-sighted examination of the profound extent to which the experience of slavery penetrated deeply into our economy and our culture, as well as the culture and history of Africa. Even telling a complex and detailed truth, however, cannot automatically produce reconciliation. A long process has to connect the two.
A friend of ours put her finger on the centre of the matter this morning, when she remarked that there is an important difference between “remorse” and “repentance”. Our shared reflection on this suggests that remorse is actually rather self-centred, and has as its focus the attitude of the person who has done wrong towards him- or herself. The heart of remorse is a feeling of guilt, which emphasises a person’s regret for what has happened. This can be an important component of telling the truth, of course, but it remains silent in relation to the person or group who have been wronged.
Repentance, on the other hand, probably necessarily, takes into consideration the other. A person repents when they realise fully why it is that what they have done is wrong. Whereas one might feel remorse simply because an action reflects badly on oneself, repentance is driven by a realisation of the full extent of the action, which must include the experience of the person or group who have been wronged. The journey from “truth” to “reconciliation”, therefore has to go beyond the simple telling of the truth, and certainly beyond mere remorse. It has to encompass also a stage of moral reflection in which the experience of the other is fully assimilated, which could be labelled “repentance”.
The removal of statues and even the issuing of public apologies doesn’t really come close to meeting the requirements of that goal. Speaking for myself, I feel that I am only at the beginning of the process of thinking through the implications of this. One possible direction for thought occurs to me, and that is the implication of the slogan “black lives matter”. This surely challenges people to look beyond coping with any sense of remorse for the past, and demands reflection on the consequences of our history for the victims of history, and in that respect should perhaps be read as a demand for repentance.