I’m not good at making mistakes graciously. When I play soccer, for example, every bad pass, every fumbled play and every wide shot is accompanied by an apology and a self-deprecating remark or gesture. In music, if I make a mistake while performing, there is always a facial twitch that accompanies it.
I think I’m too self-conscious. I’d hate for people to think that I’m under the impression that I’m doing all right. I feel in those moments that the only thing less forgivable than making a mistake seems to be to continue apparently unaware that I have just made a mistake.
This is, of course, very unprofessional. Even the greatest will make mistakes, even completely unforgivable mistakes, but they need to have the inner fortitude to continue without a public display of regret or self-chastisement, to let the past be the past and be willing to appear the fool.
Now imagine how it is in larger areas of my life – sins, injuries, injustices I commit. I feel that I have a moral obligation to refuse to simply pick myself up and move on after failing.
Any quality we have can be made to take on the appearance of virtue to ourselves. I lived for years believing that at least I hadn’t gone completely to the dogs – at least I was hard enough on myself to not simply shrug off and justify my mistakes. I lived as if it were my duty to kick myself around. I feared that if I didn’t do that, it would be a sign that I don’t take my sins seriously enough, and next thing you know I’d be living the debauched life.
Many people live this way. They understand that no crime is so bad that remorselessness can’t make it even worse, so they nurse their regret as a prized treasure and safeguard against evil.
So the same force that causes me to lose my temper with myself when I play a wrong note condemns me much more severely for, say, breaking my word. I considered this force to be one of the best things that I had, and I was right, because it is our moral sense. I would not simply ignore it – I was too proud of my standards and too afraid of becoming a bad person. I would feel like a weasel if I tried to worm my way out of this condemnation. But I could not bear it, either. I could not live under it and still enjoy life.
Since we have to live with ourselves, we undergo strange compromises. You’d think that someone who’s hard on himself with his errors in a soccer game or a piano recital will be hard on himself in the important moral and ethical issues of his life. But it turns out that as you grow more meticulous about little things you can start to ignore large and real faults. We can only bear self-condemnation to a certain point. Our threshold lowers as we become more exacting with ourselves, and when that threshold is breached, we must deflect the self-condemnation to remain alive.
Jesus said that the Pharisees “swallow a camel and strain out a gnat.” When moralists warn against numbing your conscience, they usually imply that it is by swallowing enough gnats that you desensitize yourself to the prospect of swallowing camels, but they neglect to point out that sometimes it is by straining out the gnats that we lose sight of the camels we swallow whole. You can numb your conscience by listening to accusations just as you can numb it by ignoring them. I cannot live with the unmitigated force of my conscience. I have to numb myself to it to survive.
This is where legalism leads. It is the Catch-22 of trying to live a moral life. It is the reason why every uncompromising attempt to live a life of justice and virtue must end in either hypocrisy or despair.
At first glance it does seem like the remorseless have it easier. And, if once you recognize your own despair and self-condemnation as a sin and not a virtue, it seems that the remorseless (who are free from this sin) even have the moral high ground. Is that what really lies behind the professionalism involved in moving on after messing up, behind the sanctity required to "forget what lies behind and press on toward the mark"? Or is it, in the end, just a question of lowering your standards, of being easier on yourself?
Again, if you were to assume that, you’d be wrong. We all know that this can't be the answer. The real answer lies elsewhere.
