GUILT
We preserve our good conscience by practising our bad faith.
Conscience, as Freud says, may chide you like a parent when you are young. But as you grow up you have to train it to behave like a good child, to be seen and not heard.
The one weight harder to bear than our undeserved troubles is our deserved ones. So it’s a good thing that we don’t admit that we deserve any of them.
Remorse is one of the devil’s best ruses. Owning up to your weak points may be the first step on the way to correcting them. But it may just as well be the last excuse for not doing so.
Bad conscience is something that we judge our enemies ought to suffer from, though we suspect they don’t, and that we ought not suffer from, though we assume we do. And yet no one suffers much from it at all. And if we do feel conscience-stricken, we’re not about to give up what we have gained by the evil that we have done.
1 Conscience and magic
Some people have scruples but no conscience, as some have gaudy superstitions but no faith.
Superstitious people may feel more guilt for an unintended evil that they’ve done than for intentional ones. They justify their intended wrongs as fair retributions against those who have wronged them. But if they can do harm unwittingly, they fear that they in turn might be punished despite their blamelessness. They are ready to sponge every sin from their accounts. But their chance misdeeds seem like someone else’s doing, and so they are less predisposed to wink at them.
Conscience is feeble, except when it grows into a superstitious dread of real retribution.
You may feel less guilt for the wrongs that you have done than for those that you dread you might do, which you fear will meet with a proportionately indeterminate punishment. ‘Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.’
Guilt and remorse are like ghosts. Many of us claim to have been haunted by them at some time, but few show any lasting effects.
Conscience is a small homeopathic dose of mental discomfort, which we trust will keep off the real retribution that we fear.
2 The melodrama of conscience
It may be that people have crises of conscience only in books, though even in life they claim that they do. When cleft between one temptation and another, they feel that they are torn between desire and duty. Writers dramatize the moral choices which few of us have occasion to make in life.
Most conscience has its place in literature and not in life. And most guilt has its place in magic and not in morality. We superstitiously fear that a non-existent cause might recoil on us as a real effect.
Moral play-actors are as keen to take on a confected guilt as they are to shirk a real one. They force the note of their self-reproach, in order to play up their sensitivity.
3 Surface conscience
Wounds to our conscience heal overnight. Wounds to our social self may last till death. The sins that you hide don’t fester and poison you. They dry out, and crumble to dust, and do you no harm.
‘He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence,’ according to Blake. But those who do act let loose a far worse plague. They add a link to the chain of evils which will draw more evils on. We are creatures of the surface, and what we don’t act out soon fades and turns to dust.
SHAME AND PRIDE
4 Shame and conscience
The sanction of law is force, and the sanction of custom is shame.
Morally dainty people grow furtive and mistrustful of their own fine intentions. And they feel a secret shame for some of their best deeds, though they still hope to win praise for them.
Why do some people go to such lengths to avoid feeling the gratitude or guilt which wouldn’t oblige or inhibit them anyway? Pious monsters lumber themselves almost as heavily by pretending to be held in check by their scruples as they would if they actually were.
Shame, modesty and justice are forthright but shallow. And guilt, humility and mercy are deep but dishonest.
I own up to acts that have shamed me, to show that they are nothing to me and so ought to be nothing to everyone else as well.
Only failure wakens conscience, as Freud said, and since these days no one fails, conscience does not wake up at all.
5 Unforgiving shame
I don’t forgive those before whom I let my faults show. ‘You glimpsed his weak point,’ as Schiller wrote, ‘and he won’t forgive you.’ I pardon people for the wrong they do me sooner than for the stupid things that they see me doing. We are readier to forgive them for mistreating us than we are for witnessing us misbehaving. They are guilty of seeing me at my worst, and my shame gives them no quarter. ‘We often forgive those who bore us,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘but we can’t forgive those whom we bore.’ The worst fault that others can have is being aware of our own.
Those who do unconscionable evil feel more easy in their minds than those to whom it has been done. These it coats in a sticky scurf, which they fear is apparent to all, whereas its agents deem that they have dealt out a cleansing justice. It is the victims who wake with the clammy horror of guilt upon them. Evil is bold, eager to push its claims for justice, and keen to get the good things that are due to it. Innocence is shamefaced and knows that it is not innocent.
Those who feel that they have been shamed are prepared to act shamelessly to win back their honour. And then they deserve real shame.
6 The pride of conscience
You need to learn what you have the right to be modest about, what you have the right to judge, what to praise, and what to excuse. Do any of us have a right to feel penitent for the blood-soaked crimes of the past, if we had no part in committing them? To do so would be a mere self-glorifying pose.
It may taste as sweet to confess as it does to crow. And it may be as presumptuous to pardon as it is to convict.
Monsters of vainglory, such as Rousseau, love to show off their welts and sins. It’s only great egotists that feel great guilt. They swell the importance of all that pertains to them, even the wrongs that they have done. Saints lash themselves for their sins, but not one of them is humble enough to see that neither they nor their sins are of the least importance.
People must take some pride in the misdeeds that they willingly confess. Those who publicize their guilt must preen themselves on it. ‘We would rather speak ill of ourselves,’ as La Rochefoucauld points out, ‘than not talk of ourselves at all.’
7 The vanity of conscience
Bad conscience is the inflammation of our self-regard caused by a virus of disapproval from outside us.
We boldly own up to shameful acts that we would crimson to have witnessed. ‘People,’ as Canetti wrote, ‘love as self-recognition what they hate as accusation.’ We accuse ourselves of flaws that we would be incensed to be accused of by others, since we judge ourselves by our own strict standard, while they judge us by their lax one. ‘What I say to myself, what I din into myself,’ Valéry remarked, ‘I cannot bear to be said by someone else.’ I know full well that I am a fool, and I don’t mind too much if others think so. But I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should say so.
Conscience is indignant to be accused of the wrongs for which it pretends to feel guilty.
‘The human being,’ as Twain said, ‘always looks down when he is examining another person’s standard.’ We may see quite well that we are despicable, yet still detest those who dare to second our view. Those who make a show of their humility or penitence would fume if anyone else were to treat them as they claim to believe is their due.
CONVENTION
8 Conscience is the voice of custom
Conscience is not the voice of nature or of God. It is the dull hum of importunate custom.
The shortest way to stay in touch with popular prejudice is to listen to your conscience.
Custom and conditioning weave for us a fine mesh of conscience when we’re young, which our impudence and self-interest then unpick as we grow older.
There is next to nothing that conscience can’t be trained to condone or to condemn.
Conscience is like language. You are not born with it. You have to be taught it. It fluctuates from age to age and from place to place. Each of us speaks it with our own accent and intonation and with more or less fluency. And most of the time we use it to deceive ourselves and others.
Most people don’t feel the need to confess, as Goethe claimed they do. They confess only if they have been conditioned or constrained to. And they choose which sins they will own up to, and which they won’t, and to whom they do it.
Conscience plays the same part in our moral life as common sense does in our mental life. We think them instinctive and the same in all times and places. But they just keep us to the safe path laid down by custom.
9 Conscience, the guard of habit
Conscience stands as the guardian of our habits. It learns to salute the wrongs that you do each day. And it won’t meddle with you, so long as you don’t depart from your fixed ways. Wilde notes how ‘the sin that we had done once and with loathing, we would do many times and with joy.’
You cease to feel shame for deeds that should shame you, if you do them often enough. It’s the wrongs that you do only once in a while that make you feel uncomfortable.
The moral sense is a mirror. I gaze into it, and approve of what I look like most of the time, and fret only when I swerve from this.
If you do your duty long enough, it becomes a joy. And if you practise injustice long enough, it becomes your duty.
10 Power has no conscience
How could those who wield power afford to feel keen remorse? They want to control as much as they can, while feeling answerable for as little as they must. If you are the sort that can repent the harm that you do, then you are not cut out to do great deeds. Those who think themselves indispensable never hold themselves accountable.
No victor has an unquiet conscience. But a few have grown so rich on their depredations that they can spend a bit of their surplus on the pretence that they do. And no more do the defeated have a bad conscience, though they may not find it quite so easy to hold on to their faith.
Notorious reprobates, such as Speer, though cognizant that all curse them for their crimes and nerved to display their contrition, here and there let slip that they don’t quite grasp or recall what it is they are supposed to feel so repentant for.
CRAFTY CONFESSIONS
11 The yield of conscience
My conscience, like an attentive accountant, tots up the debts that others owe me to the last cent. A well-groomed sense of right and wrong is more respectable and profitable than none at all.
A clear conscience costs so little, who would be without one? And who would be at the expense of having a bad conscience, when a good one comes free?
The cudgelled are fond of recanting. It takes their mind off their defeat. And when their conquerors are moralizing, as most of them are, then they may profit by it as well.
Our conscience doesn’t trouble us much, so long as we judge that our bad deeds won’t harm our honour or interest.
12 Confessing to escape the consequences
It’s advisable to blame yourself for a small fault now and then, so that others won’t blame you for your big ones. I pity myself in the hope that others will do the same, and I accuse myself in the hope that they won’t. So I pretend that I can’t spare myself, as a bait to get them to spare me.
I grant facts, so as to muddy my motives. I acknowledge what I have done, as a ploy to misrepresent why I did it.
We confess in the hope of evading blame for the wrongs that we fear might be laid to our charge. I admit my misdeeds, not because I feel that I ought to be punished, but because I trust that I will be pardoned. So I own up to the derelictions that I know will be excused to the people who I know will excuse me.
We are calculating even in our confessions. In my unbridled lust to lay bare my sins I still take care to confide to those who love me too much to use my admissions to shame me or else to those who could have no occasion to do so.
I don’t confess my real faults, because I know myself so little, or because what compels me to confess knows the world too well. How mortifying to find out what were the real motives that drove me to repent or mend.
SELF-JUSTIFICATION
13 Ineffective conscience
I feel morally healthier for having caught a mild dose of queasy conscience once in a while. But my moral constitution proves more hale than I might have hoped. I’m too quick to recuperate when my fits of heart-burning are past.
To leave wrongdoers to the stings of their conscience is to let them slumber on a feather bed.
When someone has done you wrong, the last thing they feel the need of is your forgiveness. And the best thing you can hope for from them is that they will pardon you.
Conscience is a still small voice, because it has grown hoarse with repeating admonitions to which we pay no heed.
The pure and upright treat their foes with punctilious fairness, that they might be free to curse them with an easy conscience. Or else they claim to be encumbered by principles so much more stringent, that they have a right to act unscrupulously so as to even the odds.
Some few may have died of a broken heart, but are there any who have died of a guilty conscience? More incredible than any of the Gospels’ miracles is the tale that Judas killed himself from remorse.
14 Conscience does not constrain us
Our cowardice tells us that we are constrained by conscience more often than conscience makes us cowards.
My conscience likes to scold me, since it is too weak to stop me. I’m willing to lend it a hearing, on the proviso that it comes too late to hold me back from doing what I want to. I bear with its stings, but kick back when it tries to put a brake on me. And I chafe at its prohibitions, but lounge in its regrets. I leave it its teeth, but draw its venom. So when it bites me, I feel more righteous and more alive.
In the carrying out of our evil schemes, our right hand never knows what our left hand is doing.
15 The confidence of justification
People hide their mean acts and motives in the dark. And yet they have no doubt that they would be vindicated if they were judged by God who knows their secret springs. If he showed forth their true value they would be seated at his right hand. They may think that they want to be saved, but all they want is to be rewarded.
My scrupulosity must have the eyesight of a lynx, since it can make out none but my most minute flaws. It penalizes my small misdemeanours punctiliously, but my large ones leniently.
Having repented so often to no avail, this time I feel sure that I can make a fresh start. My imperfections reassure me that one day I will grow perfect.
If I feel contrite, then I must have a keen conscience. And if I have a keen conscience, then I can safely do as I like. I’m licensed to do what I wish, since I can count on the pricks of my compunction to hold me back from doing wrong.
16 The rationalizing animal
A human being is not a rational but a rationalizing animal. We strain our topmost potentialities to extenuate our lowest compulsions and to find fine pretexts to whitewash our foul desires.
The pure and upright, unlike boldfaced scoundrels, can’t bring themselves to do wrong if they don’t have a high-sounding rationale to make it seem right. But they never have to go far out of their way to find one.
We use our conscience to find rationalizations for our own sins and to smell out the sins of our neighbours. Those who have a strict conscience are never at a loss for reasons to excuse what they do or to condemn what their enemies do.
Our faith in our own clean conscience is incorrigible.
When someone dies whom I loved but left in the lurch, I take comfort that I did all I could to help them. I rarely reproach myself for the wrongs that I have done to one who is no longer here to reproach me.
17 Exceptions and exemplars of conscience
When people are deliberating on how they ought to act, they take it that they are exceptions to the moral code. But when they judge how they have acted, they feel sure that they are exemplars of it. ‘Every man, in his own opinion,’ Hazlitt says, ‘forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.’ And we judge that we form exceptions to the rules because we fulfil them so faultlessly.
We frame strict statutes of conscience, but then suspend their operation. We treat each of our needs as a state of emergency. And the need may spring from a crushing affliction or from a compelling ambition. We use all occasions to excuse us from abiding by the rules that we have laid down for ourselves. And we use our own destiny as a pretext to exempt us from the rules that the world has laid down for us.
I congratulate myself that I have such unique faculties, and excuse myself that I have common faults.
18 Conscience as judge and defender
Conscience ordains the code by which it is your duty to live. But it also acts as your advocate to abet you in circumventing it. If acute enough to arraign you, it will be astute enough to acquit you. Our conscience does not judge us, it justifies us. ‘The moral sense,’ Twain says, ‘enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it.’ Conscience makes casuists of us all. When we feel a slight uneasiness that we may have done wrong, conscience lifts up its voice to plead our case.
Our conscience is a corrupt police force, which we pay to cover up our crimes, so that we can go on getting richer by our wrongdoing.
We condemn others because we do not know them. And we acquit ourselves for the like reason.
Our conscience pleads our suit more cleverly than we know. But it rarely needs to plead it as cleverly as it does.
Conscience may lay an accusation against you once in a while, but it rarely comes to trial. Charges dismissed.
Righteous people are like intransigent autocracies. They have admirable principles but no division of powers and no dissent. Their remorse acts like a conscientious but compliant tribunal in a state where the executive supervises the judiciary. And the real guilty party is no doubt some hostile foreign power.
How could God be guilty, since who is there to punish him?
19 Conscience justifies us by blaming others
What we hate in others we love in ourselves. The ruthless self-seeking that we detest in them is the selfless assertion of the right on which we preen ourselves.
I try to blot out the wrongs that I do by reproaching others. I reconcile myself to the ill-treatment I mete out to them by believing that it is they who are to blame for it. Our conscience soon convinces us that we must be the victims of the harm we do to others, and that they are the cause both of our woes and their own.
Those who seem threshed by shame at their own acts are far more affronted by the vileness of others. Most of us keep a sense of blame parked where our sense of guilt ought to be.
If it weren’t for our fastidious conscience, how would we know who to blame for all the wrongs that we do? Each of us is more sinned against than sinning. If we were not, how would we justify all the sinning that we do?
20 Ferocious conscience
The fear of hell has held no one back from doing wrong. We are sure that it was not made for us but for our foes. And conscience eggs us on to make hell for them, since we don’t trust God to arrange things as they should be in the next life.
Guilt is a snare which the saints use to make the goats feel guilty.
We won’t lift a finger to see that right is done. But how we love to rail when others fail to do it.
I do my duty, and one of my most pleasant duties is to lash you for failing so egregiously to do yours. And I give my own back a stripe now and then, in order to justify flaying others.
If we had a real conscience, the moral gravity of the least of our acts would terrify us. So instead we use our false conscience to try to terrify others.
We, who are all guilty, blaze with indignation when the guilty go free.
21 Our conscience is strict with others
Those who live under the eye of their own unsparing conscience will sharply spy through the motives of others and find fault with them. Our scrupulousness makes us more punitive than forbearing. Self-accusers whip others’ backs far more spitefully than they do their own. If there is as much evil in the world as our conscience tells us we have done, then it must be a sinless Eden. But if there is as much as our indignation tells us others are guilty of, it must be the pit of hell.
Conscience trains us to be severe to others for their bad deeds, and indulgent to ourselves for our fine intentions.
I have no doubt that my conscience is strict with me, since it judges the rest of the world with such severity. I’ve trained it to bark only at strangers.
The self-righteous feel they have a duty to behave obnoxiously to those who are of no use to them, as a way to teach them how depraved they are.
Most of us are cynical about the motives of others because we are so sanctimonious about our own.
Our conscience magnifies our grievances as much as it minimizes our sins.
22 The satanic delights of self-righteousness
If to have an unspotted conscience is peace, then no one can be more at peace than an evildoer. The damned in the pit of fire will be refreshed by cool springs of self-approval, though they seethe with righteous fury at the unjustness of their fate.
What sore grievances I would scarcely feel, if there weren’t someone that I could upbraid for them. And what grave self-inflicted harms I would scarcely regret, if I can hold someone else accountable for them.
People do such cruel things, not when they try to act like angels, but when they assume that they are angels, and try to force others to live up to their own high pretentions.
The scruples of a prim swindler don’t stay silent, but rattle with righteous anger, like the press in nazi Germany.
23 The pleasures of indignation
We would rather reprove a few people a lot than a lot of people a little. We want to believe that people are luridly though sporadically cruel, but not routinely cold-hearted. And we flay a few scheming hypocrites, so that we won’t have to admit that most of us lie to ourselves all the time. Our indignation shines more bright and gives us more warmth, if it flames narrow and fervent.
For every gram of remorse in the world, there must be a ton of fault-finding indignation. And for every one person who feels the barb of self-blame, there must be a thousand who burn for retribution.
Beware of people who seem much concerned with good and evil. They are prone to think good of themselves and evil of others.
If we were to heed Jesus’ command not to judge, it would kill all the interest we take in questions of right and wrong.
24 Conscience makes us cruel
Self-righteous people don’t suffer from bad conscience. But how they make others suffer, so that they won’t have to. They act shamelessly, so as not to see that they should be ashamed of themselves. How much wrong they do, to prove that they are in the right. And they keep their conscience clean by doing dirt on others.
Conscience is not thwarted instinct turned inward against ourselves, as Nietzsche claims. It is our thwarted drives trying to take revenge on others. The thorns of conscience all point outward.
Only those who have, lies a very strong conscience are driven to do real evil.
Like all who have empty bellies, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are prone to have bad tempers. And they find it too bland, if it’s not spiked with the blood of their enemies. Get mixed up with the saints, and you can thank God it you escape with your skin.
One of the most solemn duties of the saints is to protect their flock by proving that their fellow saints are possessed by the devil and deserve to be damned.
Righteous people resent their own good deeds almost as much as others’ bad ones. You’re lucky if your virtues don’t sour your temper.
25 Indignant sadists
The most delicious way to feel moral is by lashing the faults of others. And that is the cruellest form of immorality.
There are few injustices that would much trouble us, if there weren’t some enemy whom we could tear to shreds for causing them.
Indignation is colic and conceit secreted as a moraline acid. And the righteous hope to ease their own discomfort by vomiting their bile on others.
Moral fanatics are sure that their victims will smart under the lash of their eloquent indignation. They must think that those beasts have the conscience which they themselves lack.
Our conscience grazes us so that we can gash others.
26 Flattering conscience
I accuse myself of the most gratifying faults. And I find myself wanting in the traits that no one would claim to want. I mutter that my worst flaw is that I am too modest, and that I lack the slyness to tell the lies that would serve my own needs. You have not completed your moral schooling, till you have learnt the trick of idealizing your own motives. Vanity sews tunics for our moral nakedness. ‘All a man’s ways are clean in his own eyes.’
If Jesus did invite the one who was without sin to cast the first stone at the woman caught in adultery, she would have been dead in an instant.
We may be frankly ashamed of ourselves, yet we still do all that we can to imprint the blotched image of ourselves on the world.
We don’t so much conclude that we must be good people because we do good works. Rather we take it that what we do must be good because we are such good people. So there’s no need for us to do much good at all. And we don’t so much love or hate others on account of what they do, we love or hate what they do because it is they that do it.
INNOCENCE
27 Goodbye to innocence
Why in the wake of each atrocity do we take refuge in the cordial lie that we were all innocent before it took place? How many times have we lost our moral virginity, and how many times has it been miraculously restored? The saints love to paw and slobber over lost innocence, so that they can anathematize the unclean who have robbed us of it and fire us up to take revenge on them.
Your moral childhood comes to a close when you find out that people may not be blameless just because they have been misused, and that the oppressed may behave as nastily as their oppressors.
People are too childishly pleased with the childish toys that they get when they grow up to mourn the loss of their childhood innocence.
A grownup has no right to be innocent.
It is the perverse who hold on to their childlike innocence. They have not yet found out how dear evildoing will cost them and how viciously the world will punish them for flouting decent worldly interests. Or else they are so mad that they don’t care.
If there were a true saint on earth, he or she would stink in the fastidious nostrils of the righteous.
Power, we say, corrupts. And since there is always someone with more power than us, we know that we must be innocent. And so we must have the right to go on exercising our brutal power.
28 Our crafty innocence
Innocence is a devious kind of ingenuousness. ‘Ignorance is not innocence but sin,’ as Browning wrote. Our sheepish innocence is a crafty ignorance, which spares us an appalled awakening to the harm that we do.
Innocence is the rude health of the soul, which does not know how sick it is.
You can’t be innocent if you are dishonest. And yet if you are honest, you would see that you are not innocent.
Each of us is shrewd enough to hold to a naive faith in our own innocence.
Anyone who has a clear moral conscience must have an underdeveloped intellectual conscience.
29 We know not what we do
We are all irredeemably guilty, since we know not what we do, though we so easily could. What absolution can there be for those who are so negligent? And while we may not know what we do, we know all too well how to get away with it. We pretend not to know, so that we don’t have to care. And we don’t want to acknowledge how much our deeds cost others, because we want to be free to keep on doing them.
We don’t care what real carnage we cause, so long as it is not set before our eyes. Our decency demands that we cover up the foul consequences of our deeds. A good society is careful to conceal the brutal force by which it has gained its wealth. But there’s no need for it to be so fussy, since its citizens are not much ashamed of it.
We all have a bad enough memory to keep up our good conscience.
How could an apology be more than half sincere? We don’t know what we are supposed to be apologizing for. And if we did, we might be less ready to apologize.
FORGIVENESS
30 Pardon’s the word to all
In the end all must be forgiven. Don’t we each need something or someone more than we are needed?
Even those who pardon their enemies may have their hearts parched by the day-to-day vexations of living with the ones they love.
We forgive people more for our own sake than for theirs. As Pavese said, ‘We forgive others when it suits us.’
When I have a deep personal motive to loathe someone, I’m glad when they furnish me with a fine moral pretext to mask it. I feel grateful to them when they put themselves in the wrong and give me a chance to drizzle on them my lofty forgiveness. And I resent them for their rectitude more than for their faults.
31 The virtue of despair
We must spare our fellows, not because they have it in them to do so much good, but because they have it in them to do so little. ‘The greatest forbearance with people,’ says Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘comes from giving up on them.’ The Lord remitted our sins, not because he hoped that we might mend them, but because he knew that the imaginations of our heart are evil from our youth. Mercy is one of the virtues of despair.
Some of us are forgiving because we care so much for principles or persons, and some because we care so little.
We forgive people either because they mean so little to us or because they mean so much, because we have no need of them or because we can’t get by without them.
To understand all is to forgive no more than half. You can find it in your heart to pardon those who have done wrong, once you have grasped that their past made them unable to do otherwise. But you can’t help but condemn them, when you glimpse that they were actuated by motives still more vile than you might at first have thought.
32 Coals of fire
The saints spare their enemies, as a farmer fattens hogs, to render them fit and seasoned for the everlasting oven. ‘For in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.’
We could afford to forgive our enemies, if we were sure that God would not. But we find it so hard to forgive them, because we fear that he might. Lukewarm christians might not have found it so hard to love their foes, if they had had more faith in the hell that they hoped they were on the way to.
It’s dismaying to discover what small gibes people will loathe you for, or for what dire offences they will forgive you. ‘An injury,’ Chesterfield points out, ‘is much sooner forgotten than an insult.’
Contempt may make you magnanimous, as confidence may make you modest. It is the heartless conquerors, such as Caesar or Alexander, that may be the readiest to set aside the offences of their enemies. They love to display their scorn for them and to emblazon the greatness of their own soul and victory. There is, as Billings notes, ‘no revenge so complete as forgiveness.’
How could you bear to forgive those from whom you have had to ask forgiveness? I repent most of my admissions more than the wrongs that I admit to.
Forgive your enemies, and they will heap coals of fire on your head.
33 Toleration
When people approve of me or bear with me, they show what a low value they set on me. I don’t matter enough to rebuke or to resent. We think too poorly of most people to impute to them grand faults. How could they be proud, when they have nothing to be proud of? And how could they be avaricious, when they have got so little? Why would they be vain, when, unlike us, they have no grounds to be?
If we don’t judge, in most cases it’s because we don’t care.
It’s not principles that are intolerant but the self that speaks through them.
The blight of intolerance bedevils the unbelieving no less than the bigot, the progressive no less than the paternalist, and the thoughtful no less than the unthinking.
Indifference may pass for tolerance, so long as it’s not asked to care. Then it’s clear that it’s just a single-minded absorption in our own schemes.
Impatient people feel free to waste your time. Those who take it that they have a right to the forbearance of others don’t see that they have a duty not to trespass on it.
34 ‘They ne’er pardon who have done the wrong’
There are some people whom we can’t forgive, not because of how much they have wronged us, but because of how much we have wronged them. ‘They ne’er pardon who have done the wrong,’ as Dryden, Tacitus and so many attest. We are ill-disposed to pardon those whom we have hurt. And we are least willing to pardon the ones who have not deserved the hurt. And we don’t pardon them in order to demonstrate how much they deserved it.
The closest we come to forgiving our victims is forgetting the wrongs we have done them.
When I slide in my victims’ blood or it splashes back on my robes of white, I curse them for making such a mess. But I have the grace to forgive my enemies the harm that I do them, so long as they don’t discern that it is I who did it.
We hate those whom we wrong. So it’s just as well that none of us sees how much wrong we do. But we see just enough to make us as nasty as can be.
35 We justify the wrongs we do by doing more
I loathe some people because I have done them so much harm, and others because I lack the power to do them the harm that I wish.
We don’t forgive people for the first hurt that we do them. And then we prove how right we were to do it by doing them more. ‘By aggravating a wrong,’ Hazlitt says, ‘we seem to ourselves to justify it.’ Our indignation with them excuses the wrongs that we do them. And when we wrong them a second time we grow all the more indignant with them. But timid souls pity those whom they wrong, so that they won’t have to see how much they have wronged them.