A Note to the Reader
As a companion piece to the essay I shared earlier this week entitled “Nietzsche, Emerson, and the Folly of Self-Consistency,” I thought you might enjoy this short poem that I wrote in college, which employs similar themes and, perhaps ironically, says in 63 words much of what it took me a couple thousand to say in that essay.

An apology

Forgive me, reader, all the lies
     contained within this text,
and the faults and incongruities
     which will confront you next,
for though I have not yet discerned
     where true and false divide,
it’s imperative my pencil keep
     my paper occupied,
so when mind my mind is old enough
     to penetrate the truth,
I can tell it with the poetry
     acquired in my youth.     

In 1886, as he approached the end of his working life, Friedrich Nietzsche did something most writers are too proud to do. Having bought back the publishing rights for a number of his earlier works—modern classics like The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, and Human, All Too Human—he sat down to write prefaces for new editions of each. But rather than extol the genius of his prior work, he set out to refute it.

Nietzsche titled his preface to The Birth of Tragedy “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” and the preface pulls no punches. He called his prior writing “a firstling-work, even in every bad sense of the term . . . affected with every fault of youth.”1 He derided it as “badly written, heavy, painful, image-angling and image-entangling, maudlin, . . . uneven in tempo, [and] void of the will to logical cleanliness.”2 “I shall not altogether conceal,” he wrote, “how disagreeable it now appears to me, how after sixteen years it stands a total stranger before me, before an eye which is more mature, and a hundred times more fastidious.”3

To the uninitiated, Nietzsche’s words might read as the rambling diatribe of a self-loathing misanthrope. But his Attempt’s creative self-destruction is just one example of Nietzsche’s practicing what his later philosophy preached: that having the capacity to reject one’s own prior pronouncements is not just important for maintaining integrity, but necessary for anyone who hopes to lead a vibrant and active life. To Nietzsche, a mind that is still alive does not stand guard over its old positions. It goes back to test them, to refute them, even to disown them—all in service of discovering something new.

II

It might be tempting to mistake Nietzsche’s approach as mere fallibilism, i.e., the willingness to be proven wrong. The line often (wrongly) attributed to John Maynard Keynes captures that more modest principle: when the facts change, I change my mind.4 But Nietzsche’s philosophy demanded something more. In critiquing his prior work, he was not principally concerned with correcting his past errors for the sake of maintaining credibility, either with himself or with his audience. He was worried about escaping a far worse fate: the curse of being trapped within his old ideas.

In Daybreak, Nietzsche observed that the snake that cannot shed its skin dies—and so, he added, do the minds that are prevented from changing their opinions: they cease to be minds at all.5 To Nietzsche, consistency was not merely a sign of intellectual indolence. It was a symptom of a mind that had stopped growing and begun merely to persist.

That helps to explain why Nietzsche reserved a special contempt for the “system-builders,” the philosophers who spent their entire careers trying to reconcile their thinking into a single unified theory.6 “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols, because he viewed their compunction to reduce all of their philosophy into a set of consistent principles as demonstrating “a lack of integrity.”7

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche put it more bluntly still: “convictions are prisons.”8 In Nietzsche’s eyes, the system-builder and the man of unshakeable conviction were the same contemptible character: a person who had decided that the highest of all virtues was simply to agree with himself.

At first, it might sound like that gets it backwards—is consistency not an aspect of integrity?—but Nietzsche rightly recognized that, unlike mere logical coherence, an insistence on personal consistency is stultifying precisely because it prevents us from considering new possibilities that would contradict our prior commitments or personal convictions, even if those new possibilities turn out to contain the truth.

III

While Nietzsche may have expounded that radical insight, he was not the first to discover it. He had a guide, and his name was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s Essays was the most heavily annotated book in Nietzsche’s personal library, with roughly 900 underlinings and marginalia, scribbled across a lifetime of reading and rereading that began when Nietzsche was a schoolboy.9 He called Emerson a “sibling soul,”10 and once wrote that he had never felt so at home in the pages of any other book.11 And it was Emerson who first alerted Nietzsche to the folly of such fealty to self-consistency:12

Most who quote that famous line stop there, hearing it as a genial shrug, a reminder not to fuss over insignificant details. But the fuller passage is sharper and far more cutting. A few sentences earlier, Emerson named the real culprit: “the . . . terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word.”13 We avoid self-contradiction, he explained, because those around us “have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”14

Consistency, for Emerson, was a shackle, born from the fear that the audience that watched us believe something yesterday will be confused when we change our minds today. And Emerson’s prescription was a dare: “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”15

When you insist that your new ideas remain consistent with your old ones, Emerson warns us, you quietly install a loyalty test at the front door of your own mind. And that test runs in only one direction: backwards. Every fresh thought must first prove that it does not embarrass its predecessors before it is permitted inside.

IV

Economists would recognize that sort of mistake at once, because they have given it a name: the “sunk cost.” In economics, sunk costs are time, energy, and money that have already been spent and can no longer be recovered. It is an iron rule of rational choice theory that sunk costs should count for nothing in deciding what to do next: what is gone is gone, and the only question that matters is whether the next dollar is worth spending from here.

The “sunk cost fallacy,” meanwhile, refers to our all-too-frequent refusal to obey that rule—the wrongheaded instinct to keep funding the failing venture, or to stay in the flailing relationship, in the foolish hope of justifying our earlier bad investment, either to others or, more commonly, to ourselves.

In Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s telling, our old convictions are little more than sunk costs, and our insistent adherence to them is a similar fallacy. We paid for them, both in the study and effort we dedicated to developing them and in the reputation we staked when we first announced them to the world—and having paid so dearly, we hesitate to write them off, no matter how costly it may be to keep them on the books.

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VII

The German edition of Emerson that Nietzsche read to tatters was titled Versuche—a word that translates as “essays,” but just as well as “attempts,” “experiments,” “tries.” The book Nietzsche loved most in the world was, as far as its German title told, a collection of attempts. And when Nietzsche finally sat down to indict his own first book, the word he used to title his preface was that same one: Versuch, an attempt.

So too, then, should we view our past commitments—and even our present convictions—as versuche, as “attempts,” as skins that we have worn so long as they have proven to be useful to us, but which we will be prepared to shed as the world around us changes, and as we outgrow them.

As Nietzsche professed in his posthumously published Ecce Homo—which he subtitled How One Becomes What One Is—our growing and changing, the errors, the detours, the abandoned enthusiasms and all, are all part of the natural process by which we become who we are today, and it is what keeps us free to become whatever the world may require of us tomorrow. And while we may leave our older skins behind, we need not feel shame for having worn them. The freedom to change your mind does not require contempt for the views you once held, as Nietzsche once exhibited in his Attempt. It merely requires that you refuse to let your convictions become the jailer of your future judgments.

IX

Conclusion. The challenge of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not easy, either to understand, or to carry out. Too often, our instincts favor vengeance, which we sometimes exact against others, and sometimes against ourselves. But as history has taught us, if left unchecked, vengeance will go on forever, with nothing to bring a conclusion to the otherwise infinite cycle of retribution. If guilt is endless, then man is incapable of redemption, and his capacity for rightful future action is sapped as well, which can lead only to further and harsher wrongs.

That is not to say, of course, that, where guilt has been adjudged, punishment is not necessary. As Arendt reminds us, punishment is useful so long as it attempts to do what forgiveness does, that is, “to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.”²⁷ Indeed, the whole point of punishment is in part to supplant vengeance by taking the power of retribution away from the victims of the wrong and giving it instead to the state, which, through courts of law, is capable of setting practical bounds on the toll that the offender must pay for his wrong.

But the setting of fixed punishment, or ranges of punishment, is not done primarily, as some have suspected, to give notice to the lawbreaker of the costs of noncompliance, ²⁶ but instead to ensure that a single incident, or even an extensive history, of wrongdoing does not deprive the wrongdoer of the chance to right—not the wrong, for that can rarely be done—but himself, that is, to reject wrongdoing in favor of virtue. That is the proper function not only of punishment, but of forgiveness as well, and it is something we must both give and receive if we are to retain our capacity for goodness, our spontaneity—which is to say, our humanity.

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²⁷ Arendt, The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 241.

²⁸ See, e.g., Weaver v. Graham, 450 U.S. 24, 30 (1981).

VIII

Is anything unforgivable?

There is one final knot for us to untangle. It is said that there is such a thing as an unforgiveable sin. The most notable such claim appears in Matthew, where Jesus is reported to say:

Several of the other biblical authors also recount Jesus’s condemnation of anyone who lures believers away from the faith, saying “it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.”²³ Elsewhere, foreshadowing his later betrayal by Judas, he says “[i]t would have been better for him if he had never been born.”²⁴

At first, these remarks may seem puzzling, especially coming from Jesus, who must otherwise be considered history’s chief advocate for forgiveness. But even the early Christian thinkers have always interpreted these passages to be consistent with the infinite mercy that God is described to have elsewhere in the Bible, and consistent as well with the description of forgiveness we have offered here.

The Catechism, following the view of Augustine, holds that dying in a state of impenitence is the only thing that can deny one God’s forgiveness.²⁵ Likewise, Thomas Aquinas lists, among the offenses against the Holy Spirit that are unforgivable, impenitence, obstinacy, and presumption, by which he means the seeking of pardon without repentance.²⁶ In each case, it is not the quality of the sin itself, that is, how “evil” it might be considered to be, but the quality of the sinner, i.e., his receptiveness to forgiveness, that determines whether he can receive God’s pardon for his wrongs.

While these interpretations have religious foundations, they are nonetheless consistent with the understanding of forgiveness we have set forth above. As we have said, we can always offer forgiveness, even for the worst wrong. What we cannot do, in light of his agency, is make our wrongdoer accept our forgiveness. That is something that only the forgiven may do, and only once he has acknowledged the wrongfulness of his ways.

Thus it would be better to speak not of the unforgiveable sin, but the unforgiveable sinner. Such a person may reject the offer, or even the concept, of forgiveness, perhaps thinking himself incapable of being forgiven, or perhaps because he mistakenly thinks that it is something that he has not yet earned—wrongly believing, as we disproved before, that it is something that can be earned.

In doing so, what he rejects is his own spontaneity, that is, his humanity, his agency, and in doing so puts himself in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacks the power to break the spell. By being unwilling either to accept the forgiveness of others or forgive himself, he traps himself in the unyielding clutches of guilt, defeating his own necessary and singular escape.

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^{proceed to part IX (coming tomorrow) »}

²² Matthew 12:30–32; see also Mark 3:28–30; Luke 12:8–10.

²³ Luke 17:2; see also Mark 9:42; Matthew 18:6.

²⁴ Matthew 26:24.

²⁵ The Catechism of the Catholic Church, art. 1864.

²⁶ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 14, art. 2–3.

VII

Although one cannot justifiably demand forgiveness from another, he can, contrary to popular belief, forgive himself, and indeed must do so to maintain his vitality and, in a sense, his humanity.

It is often questioned whether one has the capacity to forgive oneself. Arendt, for one, believed that it could not be done. She says, of forgiveness and promise-keeping:

And she claims elsewhere:

As with many aspects of the often-misunderstood concept of forgiveness, Arendt’s claims in this regard are not wrong, but not entirely correct either. There is a sense in which we are indeed dependent upon others for forgiveness. We cannot, without our victim’s participation, cause him to forgive us, in the sense that we cannot excuse ourselves from the consequences that follow from our actions. But we can forgive ourselves in the very same sense that the victim can forgive us, that is, we can acknowledge our own agency, our capacity to change, and thereby foreswear our wrongful ways and begin again by virtue of our spontaneous moral agency. And while this may be “a role played before one’s self,” it is one we must play if we are not, as Nietzsche warns, to “incurably bleed to death” over the mere prick of a rose.²⁰

That is because when we commit a wrong, we do not disrespect only the person we have wronged. We also have disrespected ourselves, that is, our Kantian selves, our humanity, by acting against the better angels of our nature. We have damaged our own moral character. And the only salve for that injury is the very thing that is required of us before we can accept the forgiveness of another—we must recognize the wrongfulness of our own actions and emphasize our own capacity for future righteousness over our past wrongs. The first of these steps, when I do it, is called repentance, and unlike my forgiving another, it is indeed a precondition to my accepting my own forgiveness.

Thus there is a limited sense in which one most certainly can forgive himself. It is true, that one cannot erase the injury to the one he has wronged. Even if one makes full restitution to his victim, and in that sense seeks to restore him to his position before the wrong, he cannot force the other to discount the wrong as an element in his judgments, and thus cannot demand forgiveness. But what he can do, and indeed, what he must do even after he is offered that forgiveness, is accept the fact of his own spontaneity, his capacity for rightful future action, or he shall not feel forgiven, either by his victim or by himself.

Forgiving ourselves is thus justified by the very same premises that justify our forgiving others: the spontaneous quality of our will; the otherwise interminable guilt that attends our actions; and the necessity of release from that guilt as a prerequisite for our future action. To do otherwise, to deny ourselves forgiveness, would be to deny our capacity for spontaneous future action, and thus to deny ourselves the prospect of goodness. As Nietzsche says of the unforgetting:

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¹⁷ Ibid., p. 39.

¹⁸ Arendt, The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 237.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 243.

²⁰ Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, op cit., p. 10.

²¹ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale trans., Walter Kaufmann ed., Vintage Books 1967), p. 124.

VI

Forgiveness is necessary for the happiness of the one we forgive. So while not morally required, it is justified as an act of charity.

Although it is not a moral imperative, forgiveness is so crucial to the happiness of those we forgive that it might, probably in many, many cases, be considered cruel to withhold it. As Arendt puts it:

Arendt thus identifies forgiveness as an important catalyst for reconciliation, calling it a “necessary corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from action.”¹⁰ Action, Arendt tells us, is by its nature irreversible, and thus a wrongdoer’s guilt, if left unforgiven and unpunished, is unending. Without forgiveness, “[t]he process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end.”¹¹

Arendt shows us that, just as our capacity for action is infinite, so too are the consequences that follow from those actions. And while we may be responsible for those consequences as a causal matter, we cannot, as a practical matter, be held culpable for them forever. Rather, Arendt says, “[o]nly through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents[;] only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something anew.”¹²

From this aspect, forgiveness bears a strong resemblance to Nietzschean forgetting, a term that has a distinct meaning from the conventional understanding of forgetting we considered before. Unlike the unwilling failure of memory discussed above, Nietzsche calls his forgetting an “active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression,”¹³ that is to say a deliberate disregard for one’s prior acts so as to enable his present activity. All acting requires forgetting, Nietzsche says, because in any given moment we cannot both contemplate the past and move forward into the future. Thus, Nietzsche claims, “there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.”¹⁴

Without this ability to release ourselves and one another from the influence of the past, we would remain forever slaves to its consequences, enervated, deprived of our capacity for spontaneous action. Thus, Nietzsche says, “the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present.”¹⁵ In Nietzsche’s view, the fact of our historical perspective presents us with the choice between two extremes:

Nietzsche finds the second of these archetypes preferable because of its capacity for action. “To be incapable,” he says, “of taking one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget . . . .”¹⁷

While Nietzsche’s forgetting differs from forgiveness in that it is entirely self-directed and neither involves others nor occurs for their sake, the two have in common that they aim to restore the wrongdoer’s capacity for spontaneous action by releasing him from personal accountability for the consequences of his prior actions. And so, although there is no duty to forgive, there is perhaps no greater gift one can give, insofar as it renews the forgiven’s power to act freely, that is, his personhood.

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⁹ Arendt, The Human Condition, op cit., p. 237.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 239.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 233.

¹² Ibid., p. 240.

¹³ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, (P. Preuss tr., Hackett Pub. Co. 1980), p. 57.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 58.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 10.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 39.

V

Forgiveness is not a moral imperative. It is a gift, which can neither be deserved nor earned, and which therefore cannot be repaid.

Which brings us to the question of whether it is morally incumbent upon me to forgive. Must I forgive—and if not, why should I? As it turns out, the answers to these questions are hidden among the premises we have already laid down.

Forgiveness is not morally impelled, for if it were, it would find itself eating its own tail. The one who is forgiven, remember, is responsible, and by that fact merits punishment. If, however, I owed a duty to the wrongdoer to forgive him, then my failure to forgive him would itself be a wrong, and his punishment would therefore not be merited. This reductio ad absurdum proves that I am not required to forgive, because I owe the wrongdoer no duty to do so. Quite to the contrary, to the extent the wrongdoer deserves anything, it is punishment, not forgiveness. Thus, Arendt says, punishment is “[t]he alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite.”⁸

But simply because it is not required of us in a minimal, Kantian sense of morality, that is not to say that forgiveness, when given, is not virtuous. Forgiveness is, as its very name suggests, a gift. Indeed, it is among the purest forms of charity, which likewise is not a moral imperative, but which few would say is not praiseworthy. As such, forgiveness can never be deserved or earned. To the contrary, it is given despite—and in spite of—the fact that the wrongdoer deserves punishment.

For that same reason, when one makes restitution to his victim by repaying the debt caused by his crime, he has not earned forgiveness; he has merely made account for the wrong. For him to be forgiven, by contrast, he would have to be excused by the one he has wronged, which may occur whether he has made account for the wrong or not.

As a corollary, forgiveness, once given, is not capable of being repaid. For the one who is forgiven owes no debt, and his efforts to make restitution after being forgiven are in fact gifts of his own to his victim, since his debt has already been forgiven. Any further account made by the wrongdoer then takes on the character of charity, making the wrongdoer himself now a fitful object of praise.

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⁸ Arendt, The Human Condition, op cit., p. 241.

IV

While one must seek forgiveness in order to be forgiven in a subjective sense, repentance is not a precondition to my forgiving my wrongdoer.

It is also sometimes said that, to be forgiven, one must first repent. But again, this is an equivocation, which is true in one sense and manifestly false in another. It is true in the sense that, even one who receives forgiveness will not feel forgiven, from a subjective standpoint, unless he repents. That is, again, because the one who is steadfast in the righteousness of his actions has no need for, and thus no capacity to accept, forgiveness: much as one who acts involuntarily is not culpable, the wrongdoer who thinks himself righteous has, at least in his own eyes, nothing to be forgiven for. He would think himself no different than a patient who had been given a prescription for an ailment when he feels perfectly well. Thus, from the perspective of the wrongdoer, it is quite true that forgiveness is impossible without repentance.

But from the standpoint of the one who forgives, nothing could be further from the truth. Forgiveness, as we said a moment ago, is simply the willful withholding of accountability from a responsible wrongdoer. Forgiveness is thus a choice made by the one who forgives, and he may make that choice whether the wrongdoer has repented or not. By the same token, the spontaneous character of the wrongdoer’s will, which is the justification for forgiveness, does not depend on his repentance; he possesses agency regardless. Thus, whether my wrongdoer repents or not, I may forgive him. If he has not repented, he may not accept my forgiveness, but I may nonetheless forgive him, insofar as I may refuse to punish him.

This is why Jesus justifies his killers’ forgiveness with the claim that “they know not what they do.”⁶ That does not mean they were unaware of their actions—for that would make them not culpable, in which case they would have no need for forgiveness—but rather that they lack the enlightenment to understand the wrongfulness of their conduct. As Arendt reminds us:

In other words, even when we are well-intentioned, we cannot always reliably predict what harms our actions might cause. Thus, the person who acts wrongfully but thinks himself righteous can only come to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions in retrospect, when it is too late for him to choose differently. And in some cases, it may even be the act of forgiveness itself which may enlighten the wrongdoer to the error of his ways.

_« return to part III | proceed to part V ^»

⁶ Arendt, The Human Condition, op cit., p. 233–34.

⁷ Luke 23:34.

III

Just as it justifies the punishment of a wrong, it is the spontaneous character of the human will that justifies forgiving the wrong.

Forgiveness thus relies, just as accountability does, on the postulate that our choices are not determined, but spontaneous, in the sense that they are freely made. In other words, it has both its genesis and its justification in the doctrine of free will. Supposing, for the moment, that we lacked free will, that choice was only an illusion, then no one could be held culpable for his actions, and thus, no one could be justifiably punished or forgiven. This is why, as Arendt tells us, “men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and . . . unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.”² Forgiveness only is possible if we assume that we have at least some measure of control over our actions, such that, when we abuse that control, it is a product of our free choice.

But, once our free will is assumed, it follows readily that the very fact of our free will is what justifies and rationalizes forgiveness itself. The fact (or we will assume it to be a fact) that my choices are not determined either by external factors or by my prior choices means that I am free, in my next choice, to act differently—that is, to make choices that are either morally consistent or inconsistent with my prior choices.

There is therefore a real sense in which I am not the same person today that I was the day before, or even a few seconds before, at least if that term is understood in a Kantian sense. As Kant famously argued, what makes us human, and thus distinct from “things,” is that we, by our very nature, are able to choose our own ends and rationally select the means to achieve those ends.³ As a corollary, as a person who acts for reasons, I have ever the capacity to reject whatever reasons impelled my prior errors and begin anew. Indeed, even if I do not repent, or regret, even, my prior actions, my future choices are not dictated by those prior actions. Rather, I may choose to act rightly today where yesterday I acted wrongly, and vice versa. As such, I retain the prospect of goodness by the mere fact of my humanity, i.e., my personhood, my ability to spontaneously exercise my will. This is what Arendt means when she says that, in forgiving, we forgive “what was done . . . for the sake of who did it:”⁴ we recognize that our wrongdoer’s capacity for the righteous future exercise of his will justifies our excusing his prior, wrongful exercise of that same will.

It is this infinite capacity for spontaneity that explains Jesus’s answer to Peter that he must forgive his brother “not seven times, but seventy times seven times”—that is to say, ad infinitum.⁵ For as long as my brother possesses agency, the capacity to act differently the next time, then he is worthy of—and in need of—my forgiveness.

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² Ibid, p. 241.

³ Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals (Yale University Press 2002), pp. 45–48.

⁴ Arendt, The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 241.

⁵ Matthew 18:21–22; see also Luke 17:1–4. (I know of no one who would seriously contend that Jesus’s response was intended to impose a 490-sin limit on forgiveness.)

II

Forgiveness is not forgetting, nor is it merely rationalizing or excusing one’s moral responsibility. To the contrary, it entails the total recognition and acceptance of the fact of a wrong, coupled with a release from its consequences: moral responsibility without material accountability.

It is sometimes said that one should “forgive, but don’t forget.” And that is true—but for different reasons than are commonly thought. If taken in its common meaning, the expression is nearly an oxymoron: it seems to instruct us to nominally “forgive” our wrongdoer in the sense of not holding him accountable for his misdeeds, while at the same time to let his wrong impact our future conduct towards him. The phrase is thus taken as being something of a caution—let this wrong pass, but don’t be so foolish as to trust this rogue in the future!

For reasons we will turn to shortly, this sentiment is sorely misplaced. But as we are only at the outset of our journey, our time can be better spent focusing on the relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. Indeed, in rectifying the equivocation commonly placed on the word “forget,” we will get our first glimpse into the mystery of forgiveness.

First of all, forgiveness is assuredly not forgetting, at least not as that term is commonly understood. In fact, it is incompatible with forgetting. When I forget something, I lose my memory of it. It is as if, subjectively, I never experienced it. So, when I forget where I left my keys, or forget what I had for dinner last Friday, I have suffered a failure of memory. Notably, such a failure, rather than being a product of my will, is in fact in active contradiction to it: I wish that I could remember, but I have forgotten.

There is another kind of forgetting, whereby one willfully avoids the experience of remembering. In its mildest form, this is called avoidance; in its harshest form, it is called repression. In either case, the purposeful objective of the forgetter is to put a memory “out of mind,” to reach the point where, if successfully accomplished, it is once again as though he never had the subjective experience of the memory. In that sense, this kind of forgetting is a sort of willful self-deception. In its essence, it is dishonest to one’s self, however necessary it may be, as may sometimes be true in cases of serious trauma.

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_« ^{return to part I} | ^{proceed to part III »}

¹ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (2d ed. 1998, Univ. of Chicago Press), p. 240.

I

Introduction. Forgiveness is not natural, but it is essential, and quintessentially human.

Forgiveness is unnatural. It is an act manifestly contrary to our instincts as human beings (or, more accurately, as animals), which tend mainly towards vengeance. Nor is it a function of any right or duty that comes from nature, human or otherwise. No, forgiveness is an invention, a device created by man to serve the purposes of man. But the fact that it is man-made does not mean it is not necessary, any more than medicine can be said to be unnecessary to human health.

Although it may not be natural, forgiveness is nonetheless a quintessentially human activity. It is a deliberate one, depending upon both the cognitive action of the mind and the exercise of the will. And while no moral imperative compels it, it is so connected with our happiness and the happiness of others that it must at least belong to a category of virtues that might be said to be not merely admirable, but very nearly essential.

To aid in our search for an understanding of this elusive concept, we will enlist the wisdom of thinkers of the past, many religious in their orientation. But the principles we will discover here do not have any supernatural genesis, nor do they find their justification in any dogma. Rather, the explanations that follow are derived from the nature of our human experience itself. Through our examination below, forgiveness will emerge not merely as a spiritual notion, but as a powerful secular answer to the otherwise inescapable guilt that lies at the intersection of action and responsibility.

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A Note to the Reader

My father passed away on November 17, 2005, at the too-young age of 61, when I myself was only 21. I wrote this eulogy the night before his funeral. God only knows where I found the strength to do so, but it remains to this day one of my proudest pieces of writing. Having recently learned of a pair of unfortunate losses in my broader circle, I thought I would share it here as a comfort to any of you who may be struggling with grief now or in the future—a reminder that we all follow in the footsteps of those who came before us, and that as long as we continue walking along the path they set out for us, we can always do honor to their memories.

To understand the below, you need only know that my father was the principal editor of the work of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, and that the quote at the end is taken from Yeats's poem "Among School Children."

My father was a man of few words, so mine will accordingly be brief.

Those of you who are my age, even those of you who now for four consecutive summers have spent nearly every night in my basement, likely heard my father speak not much more than a “hello” when you went upstairs for a drink or a brownie, as he sat in the living room in his night robe watching CNBC with his trademark glass of wine in his hand. Some of the more adventurous of you might have gathered enough courage to engage him in a conversation, and some of the luckier of you might have chanced to hear such a kernel of wisdom escape his lips as the now notorious “You should never take no for an answer when it comes to a toasted sandwich.” Others, who met him through his work with the Thespian Troupe at school, knew him best as the shining red light at the back of the theater, faithfully taping every performance of every show all year round. Even an examination of his scholarship demonstrates an economy for words: where some scholars elaborate so as to exasperate, my father’s notes on Yeats’s poems are succinct and yet thorough, probative without being too probing.

And even those who knew him best, among whom I count myself, my sister, and our beloved aunt Nora, also knew him as a man of few words. When something had to be done, his instructions were quick and thorough. When something had to be discussed, the discussion was brief and to-the-point. I cannot recall a single occasion on which I received a moral lecture from my father, and on the occasion that I would attempt to call him from school to check in, I would usually be greeted with a series of questions about why I was not spending that time studying. He was no great fan of small talk, and still less of empty speeches. Indeed, my father was a man of few words.

But to say that he was a man of few words is not enough: it would be better said that he was a man of few words, but those well chosen. If you ever spoke to my dad, you always left the conversation with unparalleled clarity about whatever it was you had discussed. Every detail, seemingly every word sometimes, was planned and intended, from the most important to the minutest. Yet perhaps it should come as no surprise that my father spoke with such efficiency and economy of language, for after all, that is the stuff of poetry.

The poet strives in his every word to capture the essence of the thing, its shades and its shape, as nearly as that can be done by words, and to say with each word what should be said and nothing more. Now, my father claimed once, when I asked him, that he hadn’t written a line of poetry in his life, or at least none worth mention, but that statement can only be true if we take him literally. And one should never take a poet literally.

My father’s poetry was a poetry more of ideas than of words, more of logic than of lines, more of soundness than of sounds. It was metered and exact; it was sustained and stressed. It was neither precious nor pretentious. It was both epic and epigram. My father’s poetry was less sonnet than drama, a drama into which he wrote himself as an esteemed scholar, a brilliant teacher, a cherished husband, a great friend, and a generous father, but in which roles he never saw the star of the show.

My father, who claimed never to have written a line of poetry in his life, lived his life a poem, and his writing is on all of us, and most especially on my sister and me. His lines are on our faces, his measures in our steps, his beats upon our hearts. And as through his poem the poet lives, my father has not died, but dances daily along the paths he has so graciously laid before my sister and me, and leads us well past this day. And so, as the poet said:

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In the summer of 2024, Jalen Brunson had a choice to make. Since joining the Knicks in 2022, he had proven himself to be worth far more than the $26 million a year he was making on average under his current contract. That contract was itself some $5 million less per year than he was eligible for when he signed it.

Now, two years later, he was only one year away from free agency, and his projected contract would have more than doubled his salary, earning him as much as $270 million over the course of the next five years.

For most NBA players, free agency is when their bargaining power is at its apex. And even though the salaries of the greatest athletes in the world may be mind-boggling for us mere mortals to contemplate, they are, believe it or not, still dramatically underpaid. Under the league’s collective bargaining agreement, the players as a class only receive about half of the total revenue the league brings in. That’s despite the fact that the players are the only reason anyone even watches the league to begin with.

The rest of the money largely goes to pay management, league executives, and yes, the owners. While in earlier ages the public may have groused about “spoiled” players being “overpaid,” modern fans have finally come to recognize that the entertainment value that players like Brunson provide is worth every penny of what they are paid, and then some.

The players have fought long and hard even to gain the right to make the fraction of league revenue they earn today. When the NBA and the ABA attempted to merge in 1970, Players Association President Oscar Robertson—the first black president of a major sports union and an all-time great player in his own right—sued to halt the merger unless the new league dropped rules that allowed a team to block a player’s efforts to change franchises. Otherwise, he argued, the proposed merger would eliminate competition for the players’ services and destroy the one source of leverage players had to negotiate higher salaries.

After six years of litigation, the players and owners entered into a settlement that not only allowed the merger to go forward to form the modern league, but also produced the first system of free agency in the history of the sport. Subsequent negotiations by the players union have strengthened those player protections and increased players’ leverage the longer they’ve been in the league.

When Robertson was fighting the league for fair pay, the average NBA salary was a little more than $100,000 per year. But in 2024, Brunson had the opportunity to capitalize not only on his hard work, but on the hard work of the generations who came before him, to make a payday more than 200 times what Robertson made in his best year.

All Brunson had to do was tell the team he wasn’t signing anything this summer, and they could make him their best offer when his free agency began in 2025. If he had done so and signed with the Knicks as a free agent, he could have become eligible for up to 30% of his team’s total payroll for the next five years, for an average of about $54 million per year.

But that’s not what Jalen Brunson did. Instead, he signed a four-year extension worth more than $100 million less than what he could have almost certainly obtained in free agency. He did it so that more of his teams’ payroll could go to his teammates, to help ensure his team could retain and recruit the talent they needed to compete.

Brunson’s decision turned out to be critical. The financial flexibility created by his contract not only allowed the Knicks to resign free agent OG Anunoby, but also to create the room to trade for former #1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns without having to veer into the dreaded “second apron,” where teams that try to outspend their rivals are subject to massive penalties and restrictions.1

It also ensured that Mikal Bridges resigned in 2025, for less than he likely could have, to stay with his former Villanova teammates, Brunson and Josh Hart. And the Knicks used the extra cap space Brunson generated to sign Landry Shamet, who wound up shooting an incredible 11-for-12 from three-point land during a pivotal stretch of the playoffs, and Jose Alvarado, who played crucial minutes alongside Brunson in Game 4 of the finals after Towns got into foul trouble.2

When he was asked whether his sacrifice was worth it, mere minutes after winning the Knicks’ first NBA title in 53 years, Brunson’s answer was instantaneous:

To normal people who will never have a million dollars in their checking account in their lifetimes, Brunson’s response might sound insane. The idea that the chance to compete for a championship might be worth giving up $100 million sounds, at first blush, like sheer lunacy. But in fact, Brunson’s sacrifice should be a lesson for us all.

On a professional level, Brunson recognized that his sacrifice could help promote his team’s success: he knew that simply getting every last dollar he could under the salary cap would, by definition, take away money from his current and future teammates. Not only that, but doing so would risk harming the competitive profile of the team that he had brought from infamy into relevancy. After all, it’s a team sport, and no single player, no matter how great, has ever won a NBA championship by himself.

But on a personal level, Brunson also had to recognize a far deeper truth: not all dollars are created equal. Once you get to the point where you are making the sort of money that Brunson is making, the difference between $157 million and $270 million is not really $113 million, no matter how the math might lie to you. An extra hundred million when you already have hundreds of millions in the bank is simply not going to have a material impact on your quality of life or your personal happiness. At most, it might increase the number of generations of your descendants who will not have to work for a living if they don’t want to.

Brunson’s decision reminds us of a principle long recognized in economics and philosophy, but too often forgotten in our modern world: the more money you make, the less it is worth. That may seem paradoxical at first, but it’s true, for a simple reason: the more money you have, the less money you need.

That principle has both moral and practical significance. From a moral perspective, once a person’s material needs and wildest dreams have all been fulfilled beyond any reasonable measure, then it becomes less necessary for them to hold onto their excess wealth when it could be usefully put to the benefit of others. (That principle is, in part, the ethical justification for progressive taxation schemes, which increase the effective tax rate for wage earners as their annual income increases.)

From a practical perspective, it also accounts for what economists refer to as the diminishing marginal utility of money— the idea a person who has excess cash sitting in the bank cannot put it to a personally beneficial use. Therefore, a rational individual who has such excess wealth will not merely hoard it, but instead will either donate it to charitable causes or invest it in profit-generating enterprises in the hopes of earning a return, which should also generate (at least in theory) social utility equal to the enterprises’ profits.

But at a more basic level, once someone has more money than they can realistically spend in their lifetime, it won’t do anything to benefit them materially. Or, even more colloquially: money can’t buy you happiness.

There are a few more things money can’t buy. One of those is an NBA championship. Another is the respect and adoration of millions of fans for your willingness to take less than you could for the good of the whole. But because of his willingness to sacrifice, Jalen Brunson has both.

No one compelled Jalen Brunson to take less money than the market would have paid him. And in the modern age of player empowerment, few would have begrudged him if he had decided to chase every penny that he could in free agency. But as Brunson said in a different postgame interview, that’s just not how he was brought up. Sitting next to his father (and assistant Knicks coach) Rick Brunson, he explained:

In the modern NBA, most players are not “programmed” to put their teammates’ fortunes ahead of their own. The too-prevalent mentality is to get as big of a “bag” as you can, regardless of how it may cripple your team’s competitive fortunes. But as Brunson recognized, sometimes the only way to win is to sacrifice for the good of the team—and when you succeed, “everyone eats.”

None of this is to say that a person who has earned an enormous amount of wealth does not have a valid legal, economic, and moral claim to it. Profits, after all, reflect the value an individual or company provides to society over and above the costs incurred in generating that value, i.e., what something is worth to you minus what it cost to get it to you. And many wealthy people worked incredibly hard to obtain their wealth—Brunson, for one, most certainly did.

But for those who are fortunate enough in life to even achieve a fraction of Brunson’s success, it can be easy to forget that success does not always come in the form of a check. When our time on this earth is over, we will all be remembered not by how much we kept, but by what we left behind.

Brunson’s sacrifice reminds us success is not just making all the money you possibly can. Indeed, in many, many more cases than we might care to admit, it may be the exact opposite. And Brunson’s ability to recognize that is what made him the real MVP of this year’s finals.

^{« return to Part Two}

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In the past decade or so, players, media members, and fans alike have taken to dismissing the usual emphasis on “ring culture”—the belief that, before one can be considered a great player, he must first win a championship. The critique views that claim as being reductive, overly simplistic, and ignorant of context. It’s a fair critique, as far as it goes. And at least among former players and a certain group of current fans, there’s a rich constituency for it.

Among the former players, you have an entire generation of stars whose prime years were between 1991 and 1998, when Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls went 6-0 in the finals, and Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets snatched the other two titles that were up for grabs during Jordan’s brief retirement from the sport. Meanwhile, you have a new generation of fans that grew up watching and adoring Lebron James, the self-proclaimed “greatest of all time,” who, somewhat incongruously with that claim, has a losing record in the finals.

For those strange bedfellows, winning can’t be everything, because if it were, none of the ringless stars of the ’90s could consider themselves great, and the postulate of James’s unequaled greatness would likewise no longer hold. Their camp would therefore have us ignore a player’s championship count and focus solely on his individual achievements as the barometer of greatness.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have the ring-chasers—a camp to which James, paradoxically, also belongs. These are the players who, in the much heralded era of “player empowerment,” buy so deeply into ring culture that they abandon already-competitive franchises in free agency to team up with other star players, just to bolster their chances of winning a title.

In the past, that was something star players rarely did before the tail end of their careers, like Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen teaming up to spend their aged-33 seasons playing together on the Rockets, or Gary Payton and Karl Malone joining the Kobe-and-Shaq Lakers at the ages of 35 and 40 to chase the rings that Jordan denied them when they were on the Sonics and the Jazz.

Historically (and in all of the above cases), ring-chasing generally didn’t work,1 so it was more chuckled about than frowned upon. But all that changed in 2010 when a 25-year-old LeBron James, already by that point a two-time league MVP, infamously announced he would be leaving his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and “taking [his] talents to South Beach” to form a “big three” with Dwyane Wade, who had already won a championship with Miami just three years earlier, and Chris Bosh, who, like Wade and James, was a top-10 scorer the previous season and very much in the prime of his career.2

Since then, multiple other players have followed in James’s ignominious footsteps. Most notoriously, Kevin Durant, just two years after winning league MVP, left the Oklahoma City Thunder for the Golden State Warriors, who had just won a title two years before and had a history-making 73-9 record in the prior season. The year before Durant’s arrival, the Warriors had narrowly lost to James’s Cavs in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, and Durant’s own Thunder had come within a single game of defeating the Warriors in those same playoffs. Rather than run it back, Durant decided if he couldn’t beat the Warriors, he may as well join them.

Durant’s decision broke the competitive balance of the league for several years, but it garnered him two rings alongside Warriors legends Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. Since then, Durant has repeatedly attempted to recruit other all-league superstars to his ring-chasing endeavors, like Kyrie Irving and James Harden in Brooklyn or Devin Booker and Bradley Beal in Phoenix, but with far, far less success.

So, on the one side you have the ring-culture-deniers, who dispute whether winning is even a relevant criterion for measuring success in the sport, and on the other you have the ring-chasers, who view a championship as an automatic admission ticket into the pantheon of greatness, no matter how much they had to stack the deck to get it.

And then you have players like the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson.

Brunson wasn’t originally regarded as a superstar. Listed at 6’2”, he is small by NBA standards, even for a point guard. Drafted in the second round by the Dallas Mavericks, Brunson spent his first three seasons coming off the bench as a backup for all-league first-teamer Luka Doncic.

When his rookie contract was running out and the Mavs declined to make him a competitive offer, the Knicks picked him up. Even then, he didn’t make his first all-star team until his sixth year in the league. For much of his career, the NBA has counted Brunson out.

But he’s always been a winner.

Brunson played college ball at Villanova, which had only once before won a NCAA championship some 30 years before his arrival. Yet in just three years at Nova, Brunson led his team to two national titles, collecting every available individual accolade along the way: the Wooden Award, the Naismith Award, AP Player of the Year, and USBWA Player of the Year, as well as the Bob Cousy award for being the nation’s top point guard.

Since leaving Dallas and joining the Knicks, Brunson has similarly placed the team on a winning trajectory that can only be described as historic. The year before his arrival, the Knicks went a dismal 37-45, finishing 11th in a weak Eastern Conference and missing not just the playoffs, but even the play-in game.

In the four years since Brunson joined the team, by contrast, the Knicks have won 62% of their games, and Brunson has propelled them to two conference semifinals (2023, 2024), their first conference finals in 25 years (2025), their first NBA finals appearance in 27 years (2026), and just last week, their first NBA championship since 1973.

Unlike many of the vaunted superstars of his era, Brunson didn’t go ring-chasing to get there. When he joined the Knicks, the only other player on the team in this year’s starting lineup was his Villanova teammate Josh Hart, who can at best be considered a strong role player.

Since then, the Knicks built a roster around Brunson that, at least before last week, was largely considered a group of misfit toys—Karl Anthony-Towns, who was dealt by the Minnesota Timberwolves after years of underachieving; OG Anunoby, who was an undervalued role player on the Toronto Raptors before being traded to the Knicks; and Mikal Bridges, another Villanova teammate of Brunson’s whose contract the Brooklyn Nets wanted off their books as they began a rebuild.

But Brunson’s leadership changed that. In the Knicks’ locker room, Brunson championed a team-first mindset and a never-give-up mentality that proved to be the key ingredient to the Knick’s historic championship run. After going down 1-2 in the first round of the playoffs, Brunson led his team on a 13-game winning streak, dropping only one more game in the final round before taking Games 4 and 5 to secure the NBA title.

Incredibly, the Knicks’ run included multiple record-setting comebacks, including a 22-point rally in the fourth quarter against the Cavs in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals and a 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the finals. The latter was the largest comeback not just in the history of the finals, but the history of the NBA postseason.

Not to mention that, in four of their other 14 playoff wins, the Knicks had to mount double-digit comebacks to win the game, and they came back from halftime deficits in all four of their finals victories. That is the stuff greatness is made of—and as a result, no matter what else happens in their careers, Brunson and his teammates can call themselves NBA champions.

That said, the critics of “ring culture” aren’t wrong. There are many great players throughout NBA history, from “Pistol” Pete Maravich to Chris Paul, who never won a ring but who still exhibited unquestionable greatness on the basketball court. In fact, of the 76 players on the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team, 19 of them are ringless, and that includes all-time greats like George Gervin, Elgin Baylor, Reggie Miller, John Stockton, Allen Iverson, and Knicks legend Patrick Ewing, just to name a few. As those players’ storied careers prove, you don’t need a ring to be a great player.

But simply winning a ring isn’t enough to make you a great player either. As even the ring-chasers know in the darkest recesses of their hearts, there is a massive difference between winning a championship when the odds are stacked against you—when you have to scrape and claw past other greats to even have the chance to win a title—and when you’ve stacked the odds in your favor long before tipoff.

In the simplest terms, it’s the difference between fighting in your weight class and being a playground bully. It’s the difference between earning it and buying it. It’s the difference between standing your ground and running for the hills when the going gets tough.

Brunson understands that difference better than anyone, and he understood it long before he won an NBA title. In February 2024, Brunson scored 40 points to lead the Knicks to another improbable comeback win in a regular-season game against the Indiana Pacers. After trailing 41-26 in the second quarter, Brunson rallied the team to a five-point victory on the strength a 12-0 Knicks run, spurred by back-to-back three pointers by himself and his Villanova teammate Mikal Bridges. After the game, with tears in his eyes as the fans at Madison Square Garden chanted his name, Brunson made them a promise:

It wasn’t a finals game. It wasn’t even a playoff game. It was just a run-of-the-mill home game in early February. The Knicks could have easily decided at halftime that it just wasn’t their night and spent the second half going through the motions. But winning it still meant something to Brunson and his teammates. And he was going to make sure that, no matter how high a mountain they had to climb, his team was not going to give up. They were going to fight for each other and for their fans until the buzzer sounded, long odds be damned.

Brunson kept that same energy Saturday night. when he gave a mirror-image of that heartfelt interview after he and his teammates ended one of the longest title droughts in NBA history:

It is no stretch to say that that never-surrender mentality is why the Knicks won the 2026 NBA title, and there is no question they richly deserved it. But even if the Knicks had not closed the deal, Brunson would have been remembered by Knicks fans and basketball fans the world over for being the great player he is. Because despite his small stature, he did not shrink from the challenge.

With the ring-chasers to the left of him and the ring-culture-deniers to the right of him, Brunson charged straight down the lane between them and fought till the bitter end. He did not cheat the game. He did not quit. He competed, night in and night out. And that—not the Larry O’Brien trophy, not a collegiate title, not any of his monumental individual accolades—is why Jalen Brunson is not just a player who won a title, but a great player, and a worthy champion.

^{« return to Part One}

^{proceed to Part Three »}

For more than half a century, their fan base—the largest in the league—had languished in the doldrums of failed rebuild after failed rebuild, with precious little to show for their undying loyalty.

But that’s all over now. The Knicks made history on Saturday night by besting the Spurs 4-1 to win their first NBA championship in 53 years.

That alone would be cause for celebration—and all over the streets of New York, it is. But even for those who are not fans of the Knicks (and ordinarily, I would not consider myself a Knicks fan), this team’s achievement gives us something unusual to celebrate in this day and age: for once, the good guys won.

Sports are often thought of as the ultimate meritocracy: give the teams a level field to play on, and the best team will win. Indeed, in his book The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel argues that the conception of sports as a purely meritocratic enterprise—and the notions of “fair play” that come along with it, which only consider the fairness of the game once the ball has been jumped at center court, not before—have dangerously infected other areas of public life where the analogy is not nearly so tidy.

Yet even within the context of sports themselves, merit is not always the criterion on which games are decided. Just to name a few others: there’s the luck of the bounce; the health of the players; the referees’ whistle; and—quite visibly in the case of Spurs center Victor Wembanyama’s eight-foot wingspan—natural physical advantages, all of which can be more decisive than the skill or effort of the players themselves.

Given those external factors, even with their best efforts, the Knicks’ victory was not at all the most likely outcome. The Spurs were favored going into the finals by a significant margin. And their superior regular season record (an impressive 62-20) meant the Spurs had home court advantage for the series.

The Spurs also had, at least on paper, superior personnel. Wembanyama, the Spurs’ 22-year-old star and projected future face of the league, unanimously won Defensive Player of the Year this past season and finished third in league MVP voting. And the Spurs’ years of purposefully losing (euphemistically called “tanking” by NBA fans) had not only gained them the first overall draft pick that snagged them Wembanyama; it also allowed them to draft second-overall pick Dylan Harper and fourth-overall pick Stephon Castle, all in the past three years.

Most fans would say tanking is unethical, but most teams do it anyway, believing that the end of getting a high draft pick justifies the means, however uncouth.1 The Spur’s questionable behavior, however, didn’t stop at the front office; it bled onto the court. The Spurs—and Wembanyama in particular—happily cast themselves as the villains in these playoffs through a series of dirty plays.

That included an intentional and highly dangerous elbow thrown at Naz Reed in the second round; an apparent hit put out by Wembanyama on his opponents in the conference finals; a second elbow to the head of Knicks forward Karl-Anthony Towns in the finals; and two uncalled flagrant fouls against finals MVP Jalen Brunson in Game 3 and Game 5.

The last of those fouls could have very well taken Brunson out for the rest of the series, as it did when an almost identical play sidelined Kawhi Leonard in the 2017 Western Conference Finals. If Wembanyama’s dirty play had worked, Brunson would have limped off the court and into the locker room, and if an injury to Brunson had cost them the series, the Knicks fans might have been lamenting their misfortune for the next 50 years.

The Spurs weren’t even the Knicks’ most likely opponent. When the playoffs started, the Oklahoma City Thunder were heavily favored to repeat as champions. Had that played out, fans of fair play would have been justifiably upset for a different reason: the Thunder’s incessant flopping and foul-baiting, which was so prevalent that it seemed the team had been expressly coached to fall down after every jump shot in the hopes of getting a whistle, merited or not. If the Spurs hadn’t narrowly won a game seven on the Thunder’s home floor, then the story of this year’s finals might have again been less about the quality of the champs’ play, and more about the ethics of it.

But none of that happened. Instead, despite turning his ankle after Wembanyama’s last attempt at a flagrant foul, Brunson made the shot, got up, limped down the court, and over the course of the next 18 minutes, scored an additional 19 points to end the game with 45, all while leading the Knicks’ comeback and ensuring victory in the series. And best of all, they did it fair and square.

The Knicks didn’t play dirty. They didn’t foul bait or flop. They didn’t even tank to build their roster—all of the players on the Knicks’ starting lineup were either acquired as free agents or through trades, and Brunson, the finals MVP, wasn’t even drafted in the first round, despite leading Villanova to two national titles in college.

Brunson even took a massive pay cut—upwards of $100 million—to give the Knicks the cap space to build a winning roster. That sort of sacrifice is all but unheard of in the modern world, let alone the modern sports world.2

And their run to the title was historic. After dropping two games in the first round, they went 14-1 to close the playoffs, winning their games by a combined margin of victory that dwarfs any other finals champion in NBA history—and their three losses were by a total of only six points. Their playoff performance was, by almost any metric, among the most dominant of all time.

Again, it didn’t have to be that way. A sprained ankle, a baited foul call, an elbow to the head—any of those could have derailed the Knicks’ title hopes and resulted in victory for another, less fair-play-minded team. But this time, justice was served.

In Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus challenges Socrates’s claim that it is good to be just, asserting instead that it is better to commit injustices if it achieves one’s goals. At the dawn of modernity, Machiavelli refined Thrasymachus’s might-makes-right argument, asserting that, at bottom, the ends justify the means. And Nietzsche famously pilloried what he called a “slave morality” that prioritized abstract virtues over one’s personal success. Scholars have debated ever since who has the better of the argument, but as an empirical matter, it would be hard to deny that too often in our world, fair play doesn’t always win, whether on or off the court.

But every once in a while, the stars align. The team that plays fair, that builds the right way, that follows the rules, that works the hardest, that sacrifices the most, is the one that comes out on top.

Not always, and definitely not often enough. But when it does, it’s a beautiful thing to behold. And regardless of who you root for, that makes the Knicks’ win something worth celebrating.

^{proceed to Part Two »}

To my surprise, all 50 were taken.

That’s when I just started throwing together random letters in frustration, ultimately typing in “errgh,” the first attempt that did not generate a “username taken” error. At that time, an AOL family account came with up to five screen names, so I told my dad I would change it to something else later. I never did. Three decades later, errgh still lives on as my instagram handle.

I was a bit more optimistic I might find a suitable name for my new substack, since it is still in the relative infancy of its popularity, at least as compared to AOL in 1994. (I was late to that particular party.) But I found myself repeating my childhood nightmare, furiously attempting every plausibly appropriate word or phrase I could think of into the subdomain-picker, getting the same error over and over, just as I had so many years before.

But suddenly, when I typed themeritsbrief, the error message disappeared. Shocked, I checked meritsbrief. It too was available. Surely, I thought, I cannot have been the first to think to name a blog The Merits Brief. But even a Google search turned nothing up. When I typed in meritsbrief.com and got a DNS error, I couldn’t have clicked any faster to register it.

Some of you already know the reason for my excitement—at least if you are roughly acquainted with U.S. Supreme Court practice. In legal jargon, the phrase “merits brief” (or more formally, a “brief on the merits”) refers to the first written submission each party makes once the Supreme Court grants review (called “certiorari” or “cert” for short), in which the party sets forth what she considers her most persuasive arguments for why she should win her case.

Supreme Court Rule 24 specifies the required elements for a merits brief, and the Supreme Court website provides links to download the merits briefs for every case in which it grants cert. In short, it’s such a commonly used expression in the world of the law, I cannot fathom how I was the first to investigate its availability.

Given that much of the writing I intend to do here will have a legal dimension to it, those qualities would be enough on their own to recommend The Merits Brief as the title of choice. But the phrase on its own carries a less technical meaning that is also peculiarly fitting for this project. Both within common legal parlance and more broadly, giving an issue consideration “on the merits” suggests a deep engagement with the topic, rather than a superficial or cursory critique.

“Brief,” by contrast, suggests brevity and economy of prose (though many Supreme Court briefs may run upwards of 100 pages in length). Thus, both in its literal meaning and its legal connotation, the phrase suggests a succinctly presented discussion on a complex or challenging topic—or at least one with which the writer has spent significant time engaging.

In other words, a “merits brief” is a “brief discussion of the merits of an issue.” I can think of no better description than that for the writing I hope to share with you here.

The time for thought granted by my recent paternity leave has allowed me to reengage with topics that a busy life as a practicing attorney had not left much bandwidth to contemplate: public policy, economics, philosophy, history, legal theory, music, chess, poetry—just to name a few. As a result of those ponderings, I have quite a long list of interesting pieces I hope to share with you in the coming weeks and months.

Not everything, of course, has to be so solemn. My notes and even some of my articles will assuredly run the gamut from deathly serious to utterly frivolous. But regardless of how urgent or unimportant the notifications you receive from me may be, I hope that you will find the pieces I produce for The Merits Brief a welcome addition to your reading list.

Everything I post to substack will be published here, but I recognize that some of my readers may find certain topics more to their liking than others. Thus, when you subscribe to The Merits Brief, you’ll automatically be subscribed to each of the following sub-publications, which will be more topically focused on the four major areas of interest I anticipate writing regularly about:

• lawbound: articles focused on issues of law, legal practice, and legal education;

• counter/claims: articles focused on issues of public policy, politics, and social change;

• Beneath the Byline: articles focused on (and mainly critical of) popular press coverage of legal proceedings, most especially cases in the U.S. Supreme Court; and

• The Moot Court Reporter: articles focused (quite narrowly) on law school moot court competitions.

All of my articles posted to those publications will be cross-posted here, but if you don’t want to be alerted to posts to those sub-publications, you can simply unsubscribe from any of those publications, and then you’ll only get email notifications for The Merits Brief and the publications you stay subscribed to.

Of course, not everything I write about will fall into those four narrow categories. When that’s the case, then The Merits Brief will be the only place on substack for you to read it—unless, I suppose, I develop a deep enough interest in some fifth topic that it comes to merit its own separate publication. But even then, you will be able to find those posts here as well.

To get the ball rolling, I am going to start by republishing here (and, when appropriate, in the other sub-publications) a number of items I’ve previously printed elsewhere, including in the pages of law journals, on facebook’s now-defunct “Notes” feature, and in other online fora. I also plan to publish some previously unpublished pieces I’ve written but never found a home for—until now.

Thus, in the coming days, you will have the chance to read some of my proudest pieces of writing—the eulogies I wrote for my father; an ode to my mother I wrote on the morning of the 2016 presidential election as I walked out to cast what I (wrongly) thought was a vote for the first woman President of the United States; and an nine-part essay on the concept of forgiveness that I have worked on for years but never before published. And soon enough, you will have the chance to read and engage with new pieces on some of the most pressing issues of our day—or whatever else happens to strike my fancy.

I’m very happy to be here. And I’m glad you’re here too.