Tag Archives: Marina Cantacuzino

How to think about forgiveness in daily life

 

Marina Cantacuzino is telling me a story about two women, both of whom discovered that their partners were having affairs. For the first one – let’s call her Woman A – the infidelity, says Cantacuzino, “was seen as the act of ultimate betrayal, which not only ended her marriage but for the past 30 years has been the defining, obsessional, story of her life.”

As a result, her children, whom she had roped into the bitter, protracted war against her husband, more or less lost contact with their father.

Woman B was equally devastated to discover her husband’s affair, which came to light through text messages sent accidentally to one of their children.

But, over time, she decided that “These things happen, she was not going to let it ruin her life. The affair had to stop but it wasn’t going to be the big defining moment for her family.”

Some years later it was, says Cantacuzino, “as if it had never happened. There was no residue.”

Bitter marital breakdown. Estranged siblings. Adult children who “divorce” their parents. Friends who never speak again. Such all too common stories are a testament to the challenge of forgiveness in everyday life.

Extremes apart, almost everyone has a tale of an unthinking comment or unkind act (or several) by a family member or friend that can never quite be thrown off.

At the same time, none of us wants to be one of those slightly sad people with a long, knotted tale of deep resentment that is hauled out at every occasion, often over a string of seemingly minor incidents going back years: that person with a powerful investment in telling the story only one way – our way. Cantacuzino seems like an excellent adjudicator of such thorny issues. A former journalist with a calm, non-judging presence (she is a practising Buddhist), she set up the Forgiveness Project 10 years ago. A charitable enterprise, it has explored, largely through vivid storytelling, the many ways in which individuals deal with major trauma such as murder, sexual violence or acts of terrorism.

Her years as a journalist speaking to people about “the smaller injustices of their personal lives” meant that when she started collecting forgiveness stories she was ‘‘keen to avoid the ‘smaller’ and more personal narratives and concentrate instead on the more extreme stuff. I wanted to be more serious and engaged politically.”

The Forgiveness Project has done some remarkable work, bringing together perpetrators and victims from just about every serious war zone and area of conflict in the world, including Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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Melissa Benn