Juan Villoro
Every month, the anthropologist Natalia Mendoza publishes a splendid column in Nexos Magazine in which she analyzes new forms of behavior and the ethical and cultural consequences of contemporary events. In her January 2021 installment, she tackles a decisive but little-mentioned topic in public discussion: repentance.
To a large extent, the Judeo-Christian tradition is based on the forgiveness of sins; Confessing the damage is the first step to atone for it.
Today’s Mexico does not seem very prone to this behavior. We practice a culture of denial where excuses outweigh responsibilities: admitting a mistake is worse than making it. If the poster is not ready, the manager finds an external cause: “the press failed us”; politicians of all parties deny what they affirmed before (“these are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I have others,” Groucho Marx would say). In sports, the defeat is explained with an abstraction: terms.”
Social media has contributed to lowering the social value of regret. Nobody tweets to say: “I was wrong.” In the digital hive, reconsidering leads to discredit.
Does this mean that we have put ourselves on the sidelines of the “truth of the repentant,” as Mendoza calls it? In violent times, the anthropologist studies the role of the amendment in the confessions of criminals. A woman who tracks the bodies of the disappeared in Sonora told him about it: “We hope that some hitman will repent and want to speak.”
Information on certain crimes can only come from those who perpetrated them. The figure of the protected witness has become a pivotal resource to break the silence of impunity. To what extent can we believe who benefits from the complaint? “The cornered man becomes eloquent,” notes George Steiner. Between a rock and a hard place, we search for emergency words. Calibrating the value of denunciations does not depend on a legal but an ethical principle that gives credibility: repentance.
Mendoza recalls the trial of Tommaso Buscetta, who in 1987 convicted 457 members of Cosa Nostra. Until then, no criminal had accepted the existence of the mafia. In 2019 Marco Bellocchio reconstructed history in his extraordinary film The Traitor. The title alludes to the way Buscetta was perceived by Cosa Nostra. The capo broke the “pact of honor” of the mafia. However, according to Buscetta, the mafia itself had violated this behavior, killing their own with impunity. Judge Giovanni Falcone understood that the informer was something more than an apostate (his sincerity from him depended on a moral gesture: he had repented), and he paid with his life for believing in that testimony.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to the “heroes of the retreat” to define characters who transcend by modifying their convictions. From Saint Paul to Mikhail Gorbachev, there are examples of successful conversions. It is not about incongruous attitudes or the opportunistic search for new alliances but about the complete reconsideration of a belief system.
The protected witness and the hitman who makes an anonymous report are not “withdrawal heroes” who argue their actions. They help to repair an error, but their credibility derives from a paradox: “the repentant is in a particular situation concerning the truth,” Mendoza writes: “On the one hand, it is the one who has seen things more closely, the more you know, but also the less reliable. ” These are self-serving confessions: telling the “truth” lowers the sentence. “For his words to be used as evidence in a judicial context, it is necessary to produce a rare linguistic and moral subterfuge that has at its center the question of recognition.” Falcone gave Buscetta that recognition; the informer was not lying; he regretted it.
Confessing mistakes is a rare gesture in a world where lies are the main political currency, fake news sets the standard for planetary debate and hatred acquires communicational value on the networks (if a hater deposes his anger for a couple of days, he loses followers).
Presumably, regret still exists among us, but it has few forums to express itself. A cruel paradox of the time is that this sincerity seems the heritage of protected witnesses.
This was originally published in Spanish by Reforma, on January 8, 2021.
Comments:
Excellent article.
Totally agree with the conformist morality that describes us these days.
“We practice a culture of denial where excuses outweigh responsibilities: admitting a mistake is worse than committing it. Politicians of all parties deny what was stated before (“these are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I have others”, Groucho Marx would say)”
“Social networks have contributed to reducing the social value of repentance. No one tweets to say, “I was wrong.” In the digital hive, reconsidering leads to discredit.”
Accurate vision of our Mexico today
Thanks for sharing
J.A.U.R