[Nat]

Originally Posted by Hunter Green

I wish I could express myself better on this, but, I wondered if there was an actual scientific, or non-emotional, reason to be against revenge and cruelty, etc.

Like, could someone convince others, using nothing but logical debating skills or science, why revenge or cruelty is "wrong". For example, to my knowledge, animals do not partake in revenge, and they do not seem to particularly be involved in intentional cruelty. Why?

I thought I'd quote a bit more from that transcript, because it may be some of the meat you are looking for:

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Tippett: And then I guess what is especially intriguing about your work as well, and perhaps even more surprising, even kind of takes us out of our boxes, than the fact that revenge is natural is that you are really suggesting also from a scientific perspective that we have a forgiveness instinct, an aptitude for forgiveness, and that has been crafted by natural selection just like revenge.

Mr. McCullough: I expected to find, frankly, less research as I dug through hundreds of scientific articles on the naturalness of forgiveness but, boy, was I wrong. As it turns out, a lot of biologists have been trying to figure out what allows human beings to be the cooperative creatures that we are. We're cooperative with each other in a way that really makes us pretty unique among mammals for sure. You know, we cooperate with our relatives, but lots of animals do that. But we go further and we cooperate with people we've never met. We cooperate with people that we're not related to. And by virtue of our abilities to cooperate with each other, we can build magnificent cities and radio stations and do all kinds of wonderful things. But one of the ingredients you have to have to get individuals to cooperate with each other is a tolerance for mistakes.

Tippett: Hmm. Interesting.

Mr. McCullough: You can't get organisms that are willing to hang in there with each other through thick and thin and make good things happen despite the roadblocks and the bumps along the way if they aren't willing to tolerate each other's mistakes. Sometimes if we're cooperatively hunting — let's say we're some sort of animal, that we're some sort of animal that works together to hunt — sometimes I'm going to let you down. And maybe it's not even intentional, but I'm going to get distracted and I'm going to make a mistake. And if you take each of those mistakes as the last word about my cooperative disposition, you might just give up and so no cooperation gets done. So, really, our ability, and across the animal kingdom many animals' ability to cooperate with each other and make things happen that they can't do on their own is undergirded by an ability to forgive each other for occasional defections and mistakes.

Tippett: Here's a passage from your book — which, again, a lot of this just seems so basic, doesn't it, when you articulate it, but it's things we don't see or think about. I mean, you know, you said that everyday acts of forgiveness are incredibly common among people who know each other.

Mr. McCullough: Right.

Tippett: You know, we think of forgiveness as these heroic acts and there are always these heroic examples of forgiveness. But you said we think of it as this balm for great wounds. But you said, "Yet, in daily life, forgiveness is more often like a Band-Aid on a scrape and at first glance perhaps only slightly more interesting. But, of course, uninteresting doesn't mean unimportant."

Mr. McCullough: Right. And this, again, was part of my attempt to do violence, I guess, to this metaphor of forgiveness as this difficult thing that we have to consciously practice and learn, because we don't know how to do it on their own. I forgive my seven-year-old son every day. Right?

Tippett: Right.

Mr. McCullough: Because he's an active, inquisitive seven-year-old who sometimes accidentally elbows me in the mouth when we're cuddling and sometimes puts Crayons on the walls. And yet it seems demeaning to call it forgiveness.

Tippett: To even call it forgiveness. Right.

Mr. McCullough: Right. I wouldn't dignify it with the term forgiveness. It's just what you do with your children. You know, you accept their limitations and you move on. He broke my tooth once when I was drinking out of a water glass.

Tippett: Right. Right.

Mr. McCullough: I mean, parents have a million of these stories, right?

Tippett: Right.

Mr. McCullough: But you don't put any effort into forgiving. It naturally happens and you move on. And there's a great evolutionary story about why it comes so easy in those kinds of circumstances too.

Tippett: Mm-hmm. Which is pretty obvious, I guess.

Mr. McCullough: Yeah. I mean, evolution wasn't kind to individuals who would seek revenge against their genetic relatives, bottom line, right? So we have this natural tolerance for the misbehavior of our children. So it is at that level you're talking about incredibly mundane. We put no effort into it. It happens every day a thousand times. We would never even give it a second thought. And yet we do it over and over again.

Tippett: One of the most high-profile figures of public forgiveness in the U.S. in recent years was Bud Welch. His 23-year-old daughter Julie died in the bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Here's a statement Bud Welch made prior to the 2001 execution of Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist responsible for the bombing.


Bud Welch: The first month after the bombing, I didn't even want Tim McVeigh and Terry McNichols to even have trials. I simply wanted them fried. And then I finally come to realize that the reason that Julie and 167 others were dead is because of vengeance and rage. And when we take him out of his cage to kill him, it's going to be the same thing. We will keep the circle of violence going. Number 169 dead is not going to help the family members of the first 168.

Tippett: You do talk about some amazing examples of forgiveness, of public forgiveness, one of them being Bud Welch. But I sometimes think that those kinds of examples that do make the news, like the bombing, also exalt forgiveness as something that's really beyond the reach of most of us most of the time. You know, we kind of wish — we hope that we would be that gracious, perhaps, but it almost feels superhuman.

Mr. McCullough: Right. And if you look at Bud Welch and you look at that story from the outside and you ask yourself how can this man whose daughter was killed in this terrible explosion ever get over his rage, from the outside we have a really hard time imagining that. But if you look at the story of Bud Welch, actually what you find is he had a lot of help along the way. And if you look at the story very carefully, you can actually learn a lot about how the human mind evolved to forgive and what kind of conditions activate that instinct in human minds, because a lot of those conditions ended up falling into place for Bud. In fact, he doesn't talk about forgiveness even for himself in that case as having been some massive struggle.

Tippett: Well, it was incremental, also, wasn't it? I mean, it gets reported as an act, but in fact it was a process.

Mr. McCullough: Yeah, that's right. And along the way, there were events that he actually made happen for himself that turned forgiveness into one of these things that can be easier. For example, he actually sought out Timothy McVeigh's father and visited him one day at the McVeigh home and had this moment he describes when he saw Timothy's picture on the mantle. It was a high school graduation picture. And they were just making small talk and Bud said to McVeigh's father, he said, "God, that's a good-looking kid." And the tears just began pouring out of the elder McVeigh. And what he realized then was that here was another father on the verge of losing a son, of losing a child. And that immediate experience of sympathy and compassion went a tremendous way in facilitating the forgiveness process for Bud.

So right off the bat, this real human interaction starts to turn forgiveness from something difficult to do to something that's easier to do, because this compassion has happened naturally in the course of real human interaction and then suddenly forgiveness is a little easier.

Tippett: So this is getting to one of the really important points I think you make with your work, that if we can understand this forgiveness instinct and how, that even understanding in terms of evolution, that we can start to create conditions where it can be empowered.

Mr. McCullough: Right. The first is safety. Human beings are naturally prone to forgive individuals that they feel safe around. So if we have an offender that is apologizing in a way that seems heartfelt and convincing and has really convinced us that they can't and won't harm us in the same way again, OK, that's a point for forgiveness. A point on the forgiveness side. Again, the human mind evolved for forgiveness to be something worth its while, and any successful organism is unlikely to have a mechanism in it that says, you know, 'Just keep stepping on my neck. It's OK.'

Tippett: Right. Right. Right.

Mr. McCullough: Right. 'But if you can convince me that you're safe, that I don't have to worry about being harmed in the same way a second time, maybe I'm willing to move a little bit forward.'

Tippett: But it seems like that would be the hardest condition or assumption to put in place in the context of many of the worst cycles of revenge in our world.

Mr. McCullough: Sometimes safety comes through things like the rule of law, right?

Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Mr. McCullough: Sometimes safety comes through you as a small-business owner dusting off that employee manual that you don't think about anymore and asking yourself what is in here that would instruct an employee on what to do if they were being systematically harassed by a co-worker and that if there was a real serious infraction it would be dealt with in a way that restored that employee's sense of safety, right?

Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Mr. McCullough: What can you do in your associations? Your condo association, you know, when somebody has a grievance, when the neighbor has a band that he's hired for a party playing at 12:30 on a Friday night, that you know how to make sure that doesn't happen a second time, right? So that you don't then have to say, 'Well, I'm going to get back at that guy myself.'

Tippett: Right.

Mr. McCullough: 'I'm going to leave my garbage cans out all weekend long, which I know he hates,' right?

Tippett: You're talking about revenge in ordinary life, which is where I think we're more comfortable talking about it in terms of warring tribes across the globe.

Mr. McCullough: Well, the thing I like about these principles is they're scalable, right? So we can talk — actually, usually people when they ask me about the book, they're actually less interested in the geopolitical stuff.

Tippett: OK.

Mr. McCullough: But I can, you know …

Tippett: Well, yeah, we'll get there. So what's the second after safety?

Mr. McCullough: Value. We are inclined to forgive individuals who are likely to have benefit for us in the future. So we find it really easy, as I was saying, to forgive our loved ones or forgive our friends or forgive our neighbors or our business partners because there's something in it for us in the future. And the costs sometimes of destroying a relationship that's been damaged are just too high, because establishing a new one is so difficult to do. So relationships that have value in them are ones in which we're naturally prone to forgive.