wanting to be right

Had a discussion with a friend about Japan's war record. Or rather, Japan's post-war record, its repeated denials of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in WW2.
.
i've always felt very strongly about this. Partly because i grew up listening to war stories. Stories of unimaginable cruelty -- babies tossed in the air and bayoneted as they fell, innocent thousands rounded up, brought to the beaches of Changi and Sentosa, shot, and left to die. And that was just what happened here in Singapore. The Japanese army under Emperor Hirohito did similar, or worse, things elsewhere, in China, in Korea. These things are not easily forgotten. And when there is a continued refusal to own up, take responsibility, apologise, it becomes even harder than ever to let the past go.
.
Until now, no one has ever challenged my indignation at Japan's lack of humility in refusing to admit its fault. When i talk about this with my Singaporean friends (not that this happens very often... but when it does happen), the feeling is unanimous: Why won't they just own up and apologise? It seems very simple, very black-and-white: we were wronged, and we deserve an apology.
.
But i think it goes deeper than just a strongly-held personal opinion about Singapore's national history. It's also got to do with a sense that wrongs cannot go unaccounted for. It's not about wanting punishment for the people who commit that wrong. If that was all it were about, then the two atomic bombs would have been punishment enough (or more than enough... how can these things even be measured and quantified, anyway?). But personally, i wish that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened. i have nothing against Japan's phenomenal post-war success; when the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear-plant disaster of March 2011 happened, all of Singapore rallied together to help in one way or another. We had nothing but the deepest sympathy for the Japanese people. It's not about wanting revenge.
.
It's not about wanting compensation, either. Maybe i can say this because i was not personally affected by the war, and neither were my family. Maybe people who lost loved ones, or whose hopes and futures were destroyed in some way, will feel differently. But Japan has compensated, financially, for the war. If it were about the money, everything would be fine and dandy. It's not about the money.
.
It's about wanting an admission of fault. Yes, that was what I did. I was wrong. I shouldn't have done that. I am sorry. Yet, this one thing has been withheld over the years -- and from the perspective of the victim countries, this just seems pig-headed, unreasonable, and arrogant. All we want is an admission of how our predecessors were made to suffer, an acknowledgement of our perspective, heck, our past, our stories, our voices, our existence. Because who are we, without the stories that we carry with us? Who are we, if not for the lives that are embodied in these stories?
.
In the last two years or so, i've been thinking about how conflict happens. And it's been interesting -- the whole 'Japan dynamic' seems to replay itself, over and over again, in all kinds of ordinary day-to-day conflicts. Someone offends Someone-Else -- whether intentionally or not. Someone-Else gets upset, wants an apology, sometimes even demands one. It is not given. But Someone tries to compensate by doing something nice for Someone-Else -- it can be anything: buying a gift, doing a favour, whatever. Sometimes the value of that compensation vastly exceeds the cost of that initial offence -- a glowing recommendation for a job, for example, to make up for a deeply-cutting insult made on the basis of false premises; or a series of determined kindnesses to atone for a single act of violence carried out in a moment of anger. But with no apology given, Someone-Else continues to feel aggrieved -- there is a rupture in the relationship, sometimes for a long, long time, perhaps (who knows?) forever. Sometimes, Someone ends up getting punished for that initial offence -- not by Someone-Else, but by circumstances, by life. And it is hard for Someone-Else not to feel that somehow, that punishment is deserved, which really ought to balance things out in the grand karmic scheme of things and cancel the original fault -- and yet, when no apology is given, the initial fault is still hard to forgive.

i believe in apologising when i know i've done something wrong. It's a fundamental value for me, and even if my track record is not altogether perfect, i do try as best as i can, and i try to apply this principle with everyone i interact with, even my students, and other people i have authority over. Not exactly a very 'Asian' thing to do -- we're so conscious of hierarchy and 'saving face', it's ridiculous. Maybe it's because i get so irritated when people in authority over me do not apologise for their mistakes, so i try to do unto others etc etc. But that probably also explains why i find it so hard to forgive people when they do not apologise. They can try to make up for the fault in a thousand ways -- heck, honestly, i think they could even offer me a million dollars in compensation and throw in a summer house in Norway, but if that "Sorry" is not forthcoming, i'd find it very hard to let go. Conversely, once the apology is made, everything is forgiven. No million dollars needed -- yes, i'm cheap that way.
.
It can get pretty ridiculous, if we think about it objectively and rationally. We all make mistakes, and we all have different ways of dealing with it. Maybe some people just don't see the act of apology as important. After all, what is a simple "sorry" when set next to, for example, a sincere effort to make amends by being nice to the person you've wronged, or, for that matter, a million dollars in compensation. i think what really lies at the heart of this, is a deeply-entrenched desire to be seen as right. To be acknowledged as right by the other person, and to have the other person admit to being wrong. Which is a problem if the other person sees the matter in a different light from me. We're so often always right in our own eyes......
.
i've discovered that the only solution for all of this, is Love. Cheesy, but so profoundly true. Love for the other person is the only thing that can soften my heart, make me relent enough to let go of a hurt, and, even more fundamentally, to let go of the desire to be right, and to be seen as right. Which gets rather uncomfortable, really, because in all honesty i do not love all people in that radical agape way. Some people i just love more than others.
.
Now this is where a pastor would say, we are to love everyone the way God loves us. And forgive everyone as we have been forgiven. That we are to remember that we are all sinners, and have no right to cast the first stone. That we are to take out the beam in our own eyes first, before trying to take the splinter out of our brother's eye. i used to think i believed in that, so very very fervently. It is why, for example, i've always found it difficult to be really angry at students who do stuff like not doing their assignments, etc, the way some of my colleagues seem to do. (Either that, or they just do a very good job of faking it.) i remember too well my own student days. But it's a different matter when i think that the wrongdoing is something i myself would never commit, or when i feel that i have been genuinely hurt in some way that really matters. That's when the Self really starts crying out for vindication. And when that cry sounds so much, so deceptively much, like a cry for justice, it is very difficult to let go of the desire to be right, and to be acknowledged as right. It is very difficult not to become a self-righteous prick.
.
i remember my first explicit encounter with the concept of "wanting to be right" -- that is, the first time i heard this human desire named (and blamed) out loud. It was in Morocco -- on that memorable backpacking trip in university with M and A. Memorable for so many reasons: because it's a beautiful country, because the people were so hospitable, because we did crazy things like accept offers of cross-country car-rides from almost-strangers who could easily have kidnapped us and sold us to some international human-trafficking ring (... or so i've been told by everyone i told this story to...), because the night sky in the Sahara is a blanket of stars, because i've never tasted mint tea like that anywhere else since, because sitting on the dirt floor of a mud-hut in a mountain village makes couscous and tagine taste ten thousand times better than eating the same food, probably better-cooked, in a posh restaurant somewhere in globalised Singapore. But it was also memorable because the three of us so did not get along. Or rather, M and A did not get along -- and i was stuck in the middle trying to make peace, and failing miserably.
.
Somewhere in the middle of the trip (or was it towards the end? i can't remember...), M told me, with a distraught look on her face, "I've realised that I always want to be right." And i remember thinking at the time two things: first, that it was true; and second, that i couldn't see what was wrong with it. Wasn't it only natural, to want to be right? Sure, it was what caused the conflicts between us to escalate and last longer than they had to, but i really couldn't see why M was getting so upset over this realisation. It seemed like such a very, very small thing.
.
i can't remember if things got better after that for our group. They must have -- maybe we quarrelled less; but my sense of things is that the disagreements continued all the way to the last day of the trip. i think that M and A were just fundamentally very different people with very different values -- there was no way they would have seen things eye to eye. But i think the conflicts did at least go underground, simmering beneath the surface, instead of exploding the way they did at the start of the trip. Still, that realisation about wanting to be right must have made a difference. i can't see how it could have been otherwise.
.
Because of course, now that i am so many years older and wiser, i can see M's wisdom. She has always been wiser than me (and thank God for that!). Wanting to be right -- it's the root of all human conflict. It's pride, of course, to use the old-fashioned word, the first of the seven deadly sins, the one that, in the Biblical accounts, got us kicked out of Eden, and Lucifer kicked out of heaven. No small thing at all.
.
i'm glad, no, more than glad, profoundly grateful, to have friends who will call me out on things when i go wrong. i've been worrying about this desire to be right as well... which is why this particular conversation was so timely; but it's been so mixed up with so many other feelings, and i probably did need someone to point things out to me, because i couldn't see clearly for myself. It's so hard, when wanting to be right gets mixed up with a sense of (self)-righteous indignation at injustice and wrong. And, like what happened in Morocco, i guess that being able to see a problem is really just the first step. The acting on it, the heart-change, will take longer.
.
Thankfully, God is a patient God, and doesn't expect instant change, and gives grace aplenty. The grace of mercy, and also, the grace that is redemption, the grace that changes the heart. Which is more grace than we can ever give, even to ourselves.
.
.