Of all his official duties the President’s Pardoning of the Turkey is perhaps the most strange. It seems quaint and light hearted, something for the kids, a benevolent gesture to reassure going-on-being. And yet it is also oddly disturbing. If you’d dreamed that you were in the Rose Garden and the President pardoned a Turkey sat on a tray of vegetables you’d want a bit more analysis. Even more so if you were to discover the roots of such a ritual of forgiveness are way older than the more recent story of Roosevelt returning a gift, having been given more than he could possibly eat.
Of central importance to any group is the process by which grievances get settled. This makes rituals of forgiveness, the rules for when rules are broken, of utmost significance. Our modern conception of the power of pardon goes back to Constantine whose revolutionary and Machiavellian approach to forgiveness would create social control of such magnitude and stabilize the Roman Empire to such an extent that the coins he minted were valid tender for a thousand years.
When Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea back in 325AD he was after way more than the establishment of a unified church. Of course having Bishops all singing from the same hymn sheet was a bonus. It stopped any of them becoming too pre-eminent. Yet it was the small print in the minutes of that meeting which must have really got him excited. He had orchestrated a veritable coup of the collective psyche.
Constantine’s one pre-occupation was social control in an empire with a dozen frontiers. Military might and crippling taxes were a good start but he needed, in addition, to reach more deeply into the soft, pink, private lives of the populace and came up with a novel way of doing so which other kings hadn’t yet cottoned on to. He did this by creating fundamental changes in the way his subjects related to each other and how they were all to worship which affected the people’s capacity to depend upon and gain strength from each other. A population with strong internal cohesion through ties of obligation and mutual dependence, where support of one another is a sacred responsibility, is going to be tough to govern. The people have a nasty habit of sticking up for each other.
In a single stroke of ecclesiastical genius Constantine’s Council killed several birds with one stone. They not only divided up the holy books to date into two piles, one of which was now the undisputed word of God, the other for which you could summarily be broken or burned, splitting the collective psyche into a paranoid/schizoid regression. They also severed people’s dependence on one another by changing the means of personal salvation from charity and interpersonal forgiveness to faith and being forgiven by God.
This demotion of Charity dealt a great blow to interpersonal reliance throughout Christendom. You no longer had an obligation to your neighbor. Love him by all means but you needn’t help him. Look rather to God’s grace and have faith in the greater wisdom of that which smiteth. After all, if your neighbor is suffering he probably bought it on himself.
Likewise, Forgiveness of one another and the bonds of reparation forged in the process are substituted for the templated forgiveness of the other irrespective of contrition, leaving the bulk of the work again at God’s feet. The Lord’s Prayer, which is pre-Nicea, still carries, ‘as we forgive them who trespass against us’, demonstrating the importance of inter-personal reparation to the strength of social fabric that so worried Constantine.
In both Islamic and Jewish tradition, forgiveness still has this component. It is the offender’s responsibility to seek forgiveness by a public display of credible remorse. Christianity after Nicea requires no reparation with the aggrieved. Forgiveness is stripped of relatedness and the bonds of atonement created by authentic contrition.. The offense you gave to your neighbor and the means to its resolution are now supplanted by your offense against God and divine reparation. The few brief centuries in which God was immanent in the between-ness of I and Thou were over. The transcendent and less approachable Yahweh of the Old Testament was covertly ushered back in. This eroded the Principle of Relatedness and gave Constantine power over others which highly centralized powers wield to this day.
The rest of us buy into this arrangement because, in a strangely counter-intuitive way, there are perks involved. Most importantly you need achieve nothing. Your patriotism is success enough for the great power. You need not quest or wrestle with thorny issues. Dependency can remain infantile. Let your designated king be an outer representation of the individuated person rather than having to endure the terrible discomfort of the royal pageant being an inner process.
Rituals of Forgiveness in our modern world are rooted in these covert dynamics, none more so than the Pardoning of the Turkey.. Whilst our hearts might melt with collective sentiment at the magnanimity of great power, so too do we tacitly accept the arbitrary execution of justice not to mention the fact that the turkey never did any wrong in the first place. So our shared relief is not simply that the quality of mercy is not strained but that we, like the turkey, are governed by the whim of transcendent power which pays little heed to innocence or guilt, but who will cut you some slack for today. Your mate, however, will go to the pot.
This model of how we are to be with one another, one of diminished empathy and responsibility between the many with heightened god like powers for the few has ramifications which go way beyond economic in-qualities or a two-tiered system of justice. Not only are our relationships with others impoverished but so too is the connection between ego consciousness and the inner Other, the Unconscious, from which interaction the creative process is generated. The erosion of the Principle of Relatedness affects more than our outer interactions. It also gets in the way of inner processes and impoverishes creativity.
Someone asked Mozart, “How can I write a symphony? “Mozart replied, “Perhaps you could begin with a sonata.” “But you wrote your first symphony when you were 9 years old.” Mozart: “Yes, but I didn’t ask how”.
