"Justice", Memory, and Forgiveness

A lot of what I can say about justice and forgiveness is probably well-known. But I think I should still talk about it in the context of MSL.

What is "justice"? It seems like it usually means "paying someone back for something bad they've done" or "making someone do something now to undo their own bad past actions". Basically, that the wrong things people have done in the past matter still and must be dealt with in some way. For the sake of this post, that is what "justice" means.

Is the past real? What would it mean for the past to be real? It would have to exist in the present. How would that work? I've tended to think that the past exists in the present in the form of memories that God continually remembers. We are writing a book, and the past pages exist in the present and are being read by God all the time.

We can access the past as well, through memories or proxies for memories like books.

Why do we hold onto traumatic memories?

1. One reason is to try to teach ourselves to stop trusting people who are untrustworthy. When people traumatize us, we can't believe that they could be so bad, so we hold on to two conflicting images, of them as devil and as angel. People really can be mixes of devil and angel, but they are coherent, finite mixes, not superpositions of all-devil violently alternating with all-angel. The traumatic memories are the voice saying "do not see them as all-angel", and uses lurid imagery to make its point.

2. Another reason is because the other person enslaves us to them by traumatizing us, and the memory is their lingering power over us over the years. People set themselves up as gods over us with an imperious word, or an intimidating tone of voice, or maybe an act of violence or deception. They sometimes do these things deliberately and knowingly, to achieve some kind of purpose. Other times, they act instinctively in the moment, and perhaps forget the idolatry they've set up in someone else's mind, and are surprised to see its fruits. The memory is what was set up, and the memory (empowered by demonic influence) is what enacts their past selves' will, years upon years into the future.

3. A third reason is because we hate people, are looking for an excuse to hate somebody, and the fact that they really did wrong us gives us a good excuse.

4. Another reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to add to the ones above, is the affirmation of memory. Abusive people sometimes want to erase the past, and in the process will try to discredit people's faculties of memory, and the content of those faculties. If you can't trust your memory, you can't trust yourself very much. So you have to either put up a wall to keep out people who attack your memory (part of the process of figuring out if people are trustworthy), or you have to strengthen your own memory and self-trust so that you can push out people trying to lie to you.

(There could be other reasons I haven't thought of.)

The third reason given above is I think the point of the command to forgive (forgive that you may be forgiven). That's where you really do sin by not forgiving. The other three reasons are cases where it feels like you need to forgive (at least, the thoughts you have toward the person who injured or wronged you can be negative), but in your heart you are not unforgiving, the issue more is that you need to learn to not trust people who aren't trustworthy, or you need to get free of (be freed from?) mental slavery.

Is "justice" a useful idea? The desire for justice keeps the past alive. You think about the past traumatic actions and demand that there be justice. Something happened that should not have happened, and so there is a dissonance between what should be and what is. You will hear a voice saying "get over it" as though there is no dissonance between what should be and what is. This spits on the face of morality itself, and to accept that spit is to claim that morality has lost its legitimacy. It's to claim that humans are god, not morality. If we accept debasings of morality, our societies will degrade. So the voice of "get over it" is a temptation to despair, laziness, cynicism, and degradation. If morality is weakened, people will suffer and die young who didn't have to.

5. Maybe this is a fifth reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to defend the honor of right and wrong. I guess this is "justice", the accounting of past deeds for the sake of right and wrong, urging change.

If "justice" keeps the past alive, then it gives power to the people who set themselves up as gods. We may still need to keep the past alive to teach ourselves that people aren't trustworthy. But by keeping the past alive, we give power to the people of the past to keep enslaving us. The unfortunate side effect of us choosing "justice" is that it allows evil people to do more harm to us than they otherwise would have been able to.

Is there a way out of this situation? Can we affirm morality while not allowing past (or dead) people to rule over our minds and torment us with what they've done?

I think one path is like this: first, figure out whom you can trust and how much, establishing who can be in your life and how much. This enables you to resolve your concept of the person who wronged you. Second, let go of "justice" for a minute (if you can), until the past person no longer has power over you. Third, notice that you are in danger of letting go of the value of morality. Now try to find a way to affirm morality.

I've assumed in my writing that in order for God to be legitimate, he must be truthful, and thus remember everything. (There are exceptions, but certainly he must remember everything that was us making ourselves who we are, which includes all our decisions.) So every bad thing you or another person have done is kept stored in the book of the past. It will never be erased.

That book does not have to be unbearable for God to read. (Perhaps because the death of his Son balances out its injustice.) It can't be, or else he could never rest. But there is a sorrow that is bearable. When God remembers our pasts, he does so with a mixture of feelings, including sorrow, and he will do this for all eternity. If we are like God (as we someday must be), then when we look over the parts of the book of the past that have us in them, we will feel a similar mixture, or the same mixture, of feelings about what we have done. With this, we respect everything that we have done in our lives, see the good and bad, and fit it into our reason. We read everything in it without feeling the qualia of unbearability.

I think this goes some way (maybe some would be satisfied that it goes the whole way) toward alleviating concerns that we forget that morality really matters by forgiving / letting go of "justice". After all, wrong never stops being wrong, and right never stops being right. Memory and the truth are affirmed. (But some could object that some of the wrongness has gone away if the contemplation of it is not unbearable.)

Another thought to consider is: what does it take to repent? Some people (maybe all people?) will have to look at the bad things they've done in the past, each in its turn, and reject them. To relive your past accesses certain tendencies that are still in you, and once accessed, you can choose to reject the values you had in the past, and adopt ones which are better. I can see this being a part of the Millennium.

So there is some reason to think there would be a "day of reckoning" in MSL. But does this maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality?

God must rest someday, and God is morality. God must cause to cease to exist that which is unbearable to him. Therefore, morality must not find past injustices unbearable -- can only object to them in some way that they are not unbearable. (This is intended to be the same as what I had in mind above where God reviews our past for all eternity and feels sorrow among the other feelings he has about our past deeds.) The past is loaded in a bitter way, with an edge to it, but morality itself requires that that edge be taken away someday. Therefore, the "day of reckoning" mentioned in the previous paragraph does maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality.

When we think that morality (right and wrong, the moral standard), is impersonal, we can imagine it being infinite, mathematical, mechanistic, tireless, and without responsibility. But when we think that it is personal, we see how it itself pays a cost for maximal "justice", and thus maximal "justice" goes against morality.