Forgiveness should also extend to the living

A colleague’s wise words jumped out at me last Friday: “Reminder that it’s OK to mourn imperfect people,” she tweeted. Why do we so often seem incapable of mustering the same kind of generosity of spirit when it comes to the living, I wondered?

This followed the death that same day of two very different men: Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip, and the American rapper DMX. Yet, they did have something in common: both were, to use a popular term, “problematic” because of things they had said or done.

The shortcomings of both have been discussed, yet they have been more celebrated for what they achieved than chastised for what they got wrong. The same kind of forgiving attitude can be seen in much commentary on novelist Philip Roth, whom a new biography describes in a way some saw as proof he was a misogynist. Op-eds criticising alleged attempts posthumously to “cancel” Roth ran in a range of British media. Yet they seemed to be targeting a straw man: I can find little evidence of such a campaign.

Back in the land of the living, it’s a different affair entirely. We can argue over whether cancel culture does or does not exist. But what surely cannot be disputed is that we live in a world of moral absolutism and censoriousness, at least online, in which many fear doing or saying something deemed beyond the pale.

Why are we so often merciless towards one another when we are alive, yet forgiving of the deceased? Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, suggests this can partly be explained by our increasingly secular societies. In the past, we might have believed that those who deviated from our moral code would be sufficiently punished in the afterlife. But, as belief in God declines, and the idea of eternal suffering with it, many seem to feel a kind of duty to ensure sinners face retribution in this life.

“Religion, in theory, allows us to postpone judgments until the next life, but if you have a kind of a this-worldly approach to things, everything is about the now,” Hamid tells me. “You can’t postpone judgment because there is really nothing after this world, there isn’t any kind of broader metaphysical reality.”

Some may have few qualms about removing statues and stained-glass windows of historical figures now deemed unacceptable. After all, it can be hard to feel much emotion about, say, someone who died in the 18th century. Yet when someone dies today, our compassionate and empathetic instincts tend to override any desire to judge them.

“There is something powerful, visceral, sacred, mind-altering about death,” says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business. “Most cultures have notions of ‘death pollution’ or taboos around speaking ill of the dead. So it is normal that the death of a public figure — especially a leader or figurehead — puts most people into a more reverent mood.”

There is also the fact that once someone is dead, they lose their power and we generally lose the need to knock them from their perch. Social psychologist Debra Mashek compares this to the way presidents’ approval ratings tend to climb once they are no longer in office, suggesting that “once the person is no longer perceived as being able to harm you, they become more tolerable”.

Ironically, in our current hierarchy of moral transgressions, even pointing out controversies in the aftermath of someone’s death seems to be considered more dire than the lapses themselves. Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez was suspended last year for tweeting an article that contained details of an alleged sexual assault by Kobe Bryant in 2003, in the hours after he died. Shortly after her Twitter post, Sonmez was placed on leave. “A real lack of judgment to tweet this,” the executive editor wrote to her. “Please stop. You’re hurting this institution by doing this.”

In the end, humans are complicated, messy and hypocritical beings, who contain bad bits as well as good bits. We would all be happier, it seems to me, if we learnt to accept — even to celebrate — one another before we reach the grave. It seems a shame to reserve redemption for the dead.

jemima.kelly@ft.com