Last week I finished Stephen Mitchell’s Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness. It’s a story about betrayal, humility, forgiveness, and faith. Joseph is a gifted visionary and prophetic dreamer who is betrayed by his brothers and sold as a slave into Egypt. Miraculously he winds up working as right-hand man to the pharaoh, not only because of his ability to see the meanings of dreams, but because he can speak truth to power about what it is that he sees.
Whereas other dream readers tip-toe about pharaoh’s ego, Joseph tells it like it is: Your dream means a famine is coming and you need to prepare. Disturbing a revelation as it is, Joseph is both sure of what he knows and sure enough of himself to express it. It’s a truth-telling of supreme importance that turns out to be life-saving for thousands.
Joseph’s development throughout the story has a lot to do with his deepening faith in the pattern of intelligence beyond what he can know in a given moment. For him, faith isn’t about trusting that a particular thing will turn out the way he wants it to, but acknowledging he can’t always see the best possible outcomes.
This faith does not make him passive. He strikes a good balance between exerting will and accepting. There are things that demand clear judgment and swift action, like when his brothers travel to Egypt to petition him for grain during the famine. Joseph provides it without question, despite the fact that they’d betrayed him years earlier.
One meaning of many to be made here is that however intelligent a larger pattern of unfoldings may be, some things—like starvation when food is accessible, or killing children, or genocide—are never okay and require urgent human intervention. Last week, the BBC reported that children in the north of Gaza have been “going without food for days, as aid convoys are increasingly denied permits to enter.” Around the world people continue to protest and demand ceasefire through actions great and small.
Forgiveness is a theme of this story, of course. A large part of me appreciated Mitchell’s poetic description of a forgiveness that doesn't rely on the harm-doers changing or even acknowledging what they’ve done. He writes, Joseph “wasn’t granting anything or even doing anything…True forgiveness, he had learned, is the realization that there is nothing to forgive. His brothers simply hadn’t known what they were doing. And given the violence of their emotions, there was nothing else they could have done.”
I enjoyed the book, but have felt troubled by Mitchell’s circling around this idea that there’s nothing to forgive when folks just don’t know better. I get that it’s an old idea, and some part of me does find it comforting. But there’s another part of me—having spent hours a day these last months, glued to my phone and social media—that has a tough time with it. Even if you’re on the opposite side of “the algorithm” from where I am, how can anyone not know what’s happening? And if you do know and aren’t moved, why is that?
I don’t have answers to these questions. I don’t think blame works. I don’t know what causes indifference to the mass murder, maiming, and starvation of children. I do think when something’s this troubling it calls for a way of thinking that could put at-risk what we think we know. And that’s exactly what philosopher Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic offers in her recently published paper “Indeterminacy in Emotion Perception: Disorientation as the Norm.”
While most theories suggest that values and social motivations are embedded in our emotional impulses—as in the ideas that shame inhibits anti-social behavior, or anger motivates us to bargain for better treatment in relationships—Munch-Jurisic argues that emotions are way more ambiguous than this.
For Munch-Jurisic, “disorientation and confusion” are actually the norm, and the meaning of emotions is socially imposed and proscribed, not preset. What emotions mean to us is dependent on the range of meanings and interpretive tools we have access to. And this relates to questions of knowing / not knowing, acting / not acting because people know—and are moved to act on that knowing—not only through rational means, but emotional ones.