Forgiveness is vital. Its angry and fierce absence within contemporary discourse has turned social media, and even the greater public conversation, into an increasingly cold and dark place. Whether it’s a circus-like glee at the fall of a celebrity, or the comforting pleasure of watching a stranger’s life unwrap and decay, this grim schadenfreude has all the subtlety of a mob with pitchforks.
Some will say it was always thus – and we only notice now because of electronic immediacy. But I’m not sure that’s true. A new puritanism seems to have emerged, and it has infected not just the extremes but also the mainstream. Past failings, sometimes from generations earlier, are dug up by people as though it was their main task in life to identify such errors. Characters are assassinated and futures smashed. How ironic that in an age in which sin is an unmentionable word, its accusation is ubiquitous.
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