I forgive David Brooks

Rigorously. [Update: Hello fellow Frogponders! And thanks, Boo.]

Buster Keaton in The Electric House, 1922. Via SisterCelluloid.

Or rather, that's what he'd like me to do, forgive him preemptively, without waiting for him to notice he's done anything wrong:

Martin Luther King Jr. argued that forgiveness isn’t an act; it’s an attitude. We are all sinners. We expect sin, empathize with sin and are slow to think ourselves superior. The forgiving person is strong enough to display anger and resentment toward the person who has wronged her, but she is also strong enough to give away that anger and resentment.... 

In this view, the forgiving person makes the first move, even before the offender has asked. She resists the natural urge for vengeance. Instead, she creates a welcoming context in which the offender can confess.

There is no evidence that King ever said anything quite like the saying popularly attributed to him, usually in the form "Forgiveness is not an occasional habit; it is a permanent attitude" or "Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude" or a number of other variations. Nobody has ever found a source for it, and I think it's safe to say that he didn't say it. In fact he would most likely have disagreed with it. One of the authors Brooks cites today (or names, rather, there's nothing cited) on the subject of forgiveness, L. Gregory Jones, shows explicitly from the "Loving Your Enemies" sermon of Christmas 1957 that King thought of forgiveness as a singular act or action within the context of loving our enemies:

From L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness:

Nor is there any requirement in King's view that forgiveness must be "preemptive", though he does seem to think that a preemptive forgiveness is possible:

The wrongdoer may request forgiveness. He may come to himself, and, like the prodigal son, move up with some dusty road, his heart palpitating with the desire for forgiveness. But only the injured neighbor, the loving father back home can really pour out the warm waters of forgiveness.

Also, Brooks says,

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, trust doesn’t have to be immediate, but the wrong act is no longer a barrier to a relationship. The offender endures his season of shame and is better for it. The offended are free from mean emotions like vengeance and are uplifted when they offer kindness.

King did not say that at all, though he did use eight of its words in almost the same order; it's clear that to him forgiveness is an offer of trust, a fresh start and the cancellation of a debt:

Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the canceling of a debt.The words "I will forgive you, but never forget what you have done" never explain the real nature of forgiveness. Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing totally for his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, "I will forgive you, but I won't have anything further to do with you." Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. (bolding by Wikiquote)

Refusing to trust your enemies, holding them under suspicion and demanding that they endure a "season of shame", is the mental block that prevents your forgiveness from being the real thing. It's the smug pseudo-Christian's display of a superior attitude as, in his heart, he relishes the sinner's suffering; it's the forgiveness that's designed to make the forgiven feel bad and forgiver feel good, even as he cherishes his vengeance. Brooks is practicing a kind of anti-plagiarism, where you make up the quotes to support your own idea, a really slimy use of King's name with spurious or decontextualized citations to make a point with which King would rigorously disagree.

As would Hannah Arendt, whom Brooks also names as one of his authorities but doesn't actually quote, who insists on forgiveness as a spontaneous, astonishing act, quite different from the drawn-out shaming process Brooks describes, and emphasizes its liberatory character, in terms that harmonize with King's trope of the canceled debt:

Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.... In contrast to revenge, which is a natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.

I'm not really interested in arguing with Brooks on the theological or moral issue itself (Steve M gives him some of what he deserves). I'm certainly not interested in arguing about the TV person Brian Williams, whose self-glorifying falsehoods for NBC are the pretext for the discussion. (To my way of thinking Williams works for a deeply corrupt and useless organization, one that, as Brooks notes, spends a lot of money on him as well for all those Meet the Press appearances, and his self-fictionalization, however deplorable, doesn't really disserve his audience—as Jon Stewart was pointing out, he's telling lies not about the Iraq war or Hurricane Katrina but about his insignificant self. And what kind of idiot watches NBC News anyway?)

This morning I've heard an interview with the delusional homicidal maniac Bashar al-Assad (no, I'm still opposed to bombing him); and a story about idolator Judge Roy Moore, famous for trying to force Alabama to bow down to his graven image of a text that says, in part, "thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image..." and now ordering his state's legal establishment to defy federal law on the subject of same-sex marriage, as George Wallace once did in an earlier civil rights case; and a story about the European Union forcing Italy to cancel its Mare Nostrum rescue program for migrants lost in the Mediterranean and replacing it with the inferior Triton program, totally failing to slow down the number of migrants, which is what the EU said they wanted to do, but succeeding in getting a lot more people killed at sea. There is a lot more interesting evil all over the place than Brian Williams.

Brooks, in that connection, may not be a lot more evil than Williams—to me it's a big difference that he has used his position for a much more serious kind of deception, in advocating wars in the Middle East and the slashing of taxes and budgets at home, but he isn't even capable of recognizing much of that. But he should be able to see that his deceptive citing of authorities he hasn't read, his fast-and-loose playing with famous names like those of King and Arendt to recruit them into his philosophical party under false pretenses, is just as unethical in and of itself as Williams's conduct (and of course his flirting with plagiarism is a lot worse), and he's not very well positioned to stand in judgment of Williams one way or another.

I'm totally ready to forgive him, too, but he has to acknowledge it first.

Gloria Swanson in Manhandled, 1925.

Driftglass, focusing on the vital subject of hypocrisy, barely touched on here, confirms as usual that there is too much wrong in the typical Brooks column for one or two critics to handle on their own.