Somewhere during the festival of trashy movies that hit television and streaming services around Christmas, I saw the western kung fuflick Shanghai Noon (2000). At one point, Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson smoke the peace pipe with a group of Native Americans. With my mind still on Rutte’s apologies for slavery, I thought of objects linked to words of regret or guilt. Every debt carries the possibility of forgiveness. Objects of regret relate to that possibility, each of which physically reinforces the process of forgiveness in its own way.
The object of regret we know best is the bunch of flowers, often linked in the iconography of modern life to a man who needs to make things right. (“He certainly has something to make up for,” men sometimes mutter when they see a congener walking by with a bunch of flowers.) The bunch of flowers is an expression of regret by one, in an ornamental material form, and does not anticipate forgiveness by the other. other.
The white flag, which comes from nautical history, indicates surrender, weapons that are laid aside. The olive branch has a similar symbolic function, although I would say there is a subtle difference between the white flag and the olive branch. Where the white flag was traditionally often the result of a lost position, of impending defeat, the olive branch (a relic from the Bible, the dove that came flying with an olive branch to Noah, signifying that the flood was over and the wrath of God had been raged) stemmed more from a desire for peace. So the olive branch is more inviting than the white flag.
Unlike the objects that have been reviewed so far, the peace pipe derives its meaning from its communal use: perpetrator and victim, friend and foe, come together and smoke the peace pipe, so that they all symbolically participate in the process of forgiveness . On the scale of regret, from simple apologies (from one party) to forgiveness (the desire of two or more parties to subordinate past pain to a new, conflict-free future), the peace pipe is the pinnacle.
What is Forgiveness? Stopping the carousel of guilt, which keeps spinning because of your own guilt that proliferates, but also because of the accusations of others, which remind you of the guilt. Why it is necessary to stop that carousel? “Without being forgiven, without being freed from the consequences of our actions, our capacity for action would, as it were, be limited to a single act from which we would never recover; we would forever be victims of its consequences,” said philosopher Hannah Arendt in her classic The Human Condition (1958).
Relics
Objects of regret guide the process of forgiveness by solidifying the regret, or apology. Without a fixed form, if the words remain ephemeral, you run the risk that your regrets will come across as noncommittal and that their meaning will evaporate because they are not linked to a new real reality.
All the more unfortunate that most objects of regret have become relics; we still know their meaning but they play no role in our daily lives. Only the bunch of flowers we still use, as a weak individual gesture. The only tangible object of regret we reach for when the suffering caused is really great, is money: compensation (if it concerns concrete, measurable damage) or reparations (if it concerns a large, often moral debt). The great philosophical objection of reparations, of course, is that you reduce a moral debt to a financial one; with every amount you eventually arrive at, you’re basically saying, this is worth the debt, and not a penny more. This would amount to a surrender, an indulgence, the only object of regret whereby forgiveness is not a collective process but a transaction that can be fulfilled single-handedly.
Prime Minister Rutte had no regrets at hand. There were only words, with which he tried to start the process of forgiveness on his own. Hence, many Surinamese officials and government leaders were incensed that they had not been known in advance by Rutte, and were thus forced to respond to excuses they had not asked for. If only someone could explain to our Prime Minister what the difference is between a bunch of flowers and a pipe of peace.