After Such Knowledge

The British Psychoanalytic Association invited me to address its Poetic Mind seminar on Eliot, shame and environmentalism.

The lecture was recorded: Passcode 578*pL!L

Abstract Many writers have examined humankind’s remarkable failure to act to avert climate breakdown and social collapse, even as their likelihood becomes ever more evident. I want to approach the question not as a failure of information or of political will but as a failure of narrative: the absence, within our prevailing discourse, of any credible path to forgiveness. I begin with T.S. Eliot’s question from “Gerontion” – After such knowledge, what forgiveness? – and I take the poems as my chief instrument, because I do not have the authority to instruct this room on its own ground, and because I believe poetry reaches where argument cannot. I shall suggest that ecological knowledge is less a matter of guilt than of shame: not “I did a bad thing” but “I am a bad thing, and now it is known.” Shame, unlike guilt, cannot be repaired, only hidden – unless there is some way back into the moral community. Where no way back can be imagined, defensive activity rushes into the gap. I want to give particular attention to one such defence: manic reparation, which repairs the object in phantasy while leaving it damaged in fact. And I want to end with a question that Eliot and the Buddha answer differently, and to wonder whether our thoroughly non-Buddhist civilisation may need the answer that Eliot, in the end, could not do without.

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1. The poem and the question

I want to begin not with a thesis but with a poem, because the poems are what I have brought into this room, and because I suspect they know more about my subject than I do.

“Gerontion”, 1920

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.

That is Gerontion – the name itself means little old man, “an old man in a dry month,” a consciousness that has accumulated knowledge but no grace, history but no redemption. He knows too much and can do nothing with it. I have come to think that he is the representative figure of our moment, and that his question is the one our whole civilisation is failing, at present, to answer.

Let me say at once what kind of person is asking. I am not an analyst, and I shall not presume to instruct you on Melanie Klein, whom you know far better than I do. I trained long ago as a Gestalt Therapist and never practised. I work as a software developer and a community organiser in North London. I am a Zen Buddhist, a performing poet, and a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance. I bring you, then, not clinical authority but the poems, and a particular angle of approach, and I hope that is enough, because it is what I have.

The question I want to explore is not why climate change is occurring, nor what can be done, but why human beings appear so unable to respond proportionately to what they already know. The difficulty is not ignorance. It is not lack of information, and I no longer think it is even, at bottom, lack of fear. The science was settled before many of us came of age. The projections have been refined, the graphs redrawn, the conferences convened, and still the line on the chart climbs. We hold the knowledge and we do not metabolise it. We carry it the way a patient carries an interpretation given too early – correct, perhaps, but unusable, set down somewhere out of sight.

A few years ago I thought, as many did, that the core problem was information: that if more people knew more, the right action would follow. I now think almost the reverse. We know as much as we can bear to know. Eliot put it in three words that I shall keep returning to:

“Burnt Norton”, 1935

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

That is the whole of my problem in a sentence, and a good deal of my argument is only an attempt to say why it should be so – why reality, here, is so peculiarly unbearable, and what the mind does instead of bearing it.

A colleague of yours, David Morgan, has written with great force about a neighbouring failure: the gap between seeing and witnessing. We see suffering on our screens in real time and we do not let it transform us; neutrality, he argues, is not objectivity but an active defence. His question is: we see – why do we not witness? Mine is close to his but not the same, and I want to be careful to keep them distinct. Mine begins one step further on. Suppose we have witnessed. Suppose we have let the knowledge in, and found ourselves implicated in it. Then the question that arises is Gerontion’s: after such knowledge, what forgiveness? It is forgiveness, not witnessing, that I want to follow, because it is the term I find missing wherever I look.

Detached inquiry is essential to us here, but it risks losing the force of our emotional connection to this question. That is a risk I wish to avoid, so I shall use Eliot’s starting point in “Ash-Wednesday”. His despair. His declaration of spiritual bankruptcy. He does not know what to do. He appeals for help.

[Read §1 of “Ash-Wednesday]

2. The good guy and the committee in the closed room

To see why ecological knowledge should be so hard to bear, I need to say something about the kind of animal we are, and I shall do it as quickly as I can, because this is machinery, not the heart of the matter.

We are the supremely collaborative animal. Our advantage over every other species lies not in strength or speed but in collaboration of a subtlety and scale that nothing else on the planet approaches. But collaboration always coexists with competition, and here is the catch on which a great deal turns. The welfare of my group depends on how well its members collaborate. My own share of that welfare depends on how well I compete within it. So I must do both at once, and the two pull in opposite directions. We are, you might say, overt collaborators and covert competitors: we present ourselves as honest and helpful, and we conceal the greed and the deceit, which never quite disappear.

To live in such a world, each of us needs a constructed self – the oath-keeper, the good neighbour, the reliable colleague. And we must not merely be good collaborators; we must be seen to be good collaborators, because membership of the group is open only to those who are known to be trustworthy, or close enough. My constructed self, you might say, has one job: to present me as a good guy. Our lives once depended on that standing quite literally, for to be cast out of the band was to die; and something in us still treats the loss of reputation as a threat to survival, because for most of our history that is exactly what it was. Shakespeare’s clinical exactness:

Othello, the Moore of Venice, 1603

But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

Now here is the part that an analyst will find familiar in another vocabulary. This constructed, self-justifying “I” is not, in fact, the thing that makes our decisions. Our most important choices are opaque to us. It is as if they were made by a committee in a closed room – and “I” am not in the room. I submit suggestions; I learn the outcome; and then I must account for the outcome, presenting it to the world as the considered choice of a good guy. Philosophers call the weak form of this idea epiphenomenalism; the neuroscience of decision-making keeps pointing the same way, finding the act underway before the awareness of choosing arrives. But you do not need the laboratory. You have all watched a patient act and only afterwards assemble the reasons, dressed for company. We do it ourselves. The interpretation we are most pleased with is sometimes the one we most need to examine.

I am fond of the stage hypnotist who plants a suggestion and commands the subject to forget receiving it. At a signal the subject opens an umbrella indoors, and asked why, does not say “because I was told to” – he has no access to that – but says, perfectly sincerely, “I wanted to check it still worked.” The public-relations department handles requests all the time. It was not in the room when the decision was taken. Its task is to account for a decision it did not make; and what it does not know, it invents.

This matters for one reason only. When the gap grows too wide – when the distance between what we have done and the story we can tell about it can no longer be bridged – the result is shame. And shame is where my argument really begins. Guilt says: I did a bad thing. Shame says: I am a bad thing, and now it is known. Perhaps the most menacing sentence one human being can speak to another is simply, I know about you. There is always something to know. The whole work of the inner PR department is to make sure that what there is to know is never assembled into a single, unanswerable indictment.

I dwell on this because climate knowledge is precisely such an indictment, and one the mind cannot file away. It is the thing known about us that we cannot un-know, and that no story quite redeems.

A self that expects only condemnation eventually protects itself by refusing further evidence. Endless accusation therefore produces not repentance but defensive closure.

3. We have met the enemy

Critics within the environmental movement – Manu Bazzano among them – have observed that most attempts to mitigate ecological damage leave wholly intact the culture that produces it: a culture of extraction, of exploitation, of empire. Call it, for shorthand, the Triple-E civilisation, the one that has eaten the world. The objection is that mainstream environmentalism is forever trying to push the toothpaste back into the tube – to soften the breakdown without touching the form of life that drives it.

As knowledge accumulates, that hope becomes harder to sustain. Recycling will not undo the industrial revolution. Electric cars will not restore a collapsed fishery or a cleared forest. There is no version of the life we have called normal – sort the bins, drive a cleaner car, take fewer flights – at the end of which everything turns out to have been all right. The coffee I drank this morning sits at the end of a long chain of extraction and harm that runs through many hands and many countries, and our whole world is built of such chains. The more I understand how it is organised, the more I see what other people, other species, other places pay for the comforts I was raised to think of as ordinary.

And so something shifts, and it shifts in a particular direction. We begin, most of us, as activists of a mild and respectable kind – reformers, people doing our bit, the good guys. Then, as we learn, we find that the way of life we took for normal rests on systems of exploitation spanning the whole planet and several centuries, and that we are not outside the problem looking in with concern, but inside it, sustained by the very thing we deplore. The narrative self of the last section – the inner account in which we are the good guys – meets a piece of knowledge it can neither absorb nor refute. There is no way to spin it: we are not the good guys.

Nietzsche:

Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

When you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Yeats:

“The Second Coming”, 1919

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

The centre that cannot hold is not only the political order. It is the narrative self. This is what I mean by moral exposure: the situation of a person shown, beyond appeal, that he is complicit in a vast harm to something he ought to love, and who has no ready story by which to become innocent again. Notice that this is shame and not merely guilt. Guilt would be answerable – I did this thing, I can make amends for it. What confronts us here is closer to a verdict on the self: not a deed to be repaired but an identity to be hidden. Eliot knew the exact texture of it, and named it, late, in “Little Gidding”:

“Little Gidding”, 1943

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
  Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
  Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
  Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Which once you took for exercise of virtue. That is the cruellest turn of the screw – to discover that the very things one did as a good guy were part of the harm. We were the developed nations, leading the less developed into a future like ours.

In the consulting room you know what a mind does when faced with the unbearable: it does not simply sit with it. It defends. There is straightforward denial – it is not happening, or not because of us, or not as bad as they say. There is rationalisation – someone will think of something, the market will provide, the next generation is clever. There is dissociation, the strange split by which a person reads the report and books the holiday in the same afternoon. All real, all everywhere. But the defence I want to follow is the most active, the most attractive, and the most easily mistaken for health.

4. The manic solution

You will know the Kleinian distinction far better than I, so I shall not labour it; I want only to hold it in view. There is reparation that proceeds from the recognition that we have damaged something we love – sober, accompanied by guilt and mourning, not assuming that everything can be put back, working slowly in the knowledge that some loss is permanent, and depending in the end on something like the object’s forgiveness. And there is its counterfeit, the manic version, which repairs the object swiftly, completely and triumphantly, precisely in order not to feel the guilt, not to know the extent of the damage, and not to depend on anyone’s forgiveness. The first is slow and humble. The second is fast and grandiose. Its hallmarks are omnipotence, denial, triumph – and, cruellest of all, contempt for the very object it claims to be saving, which it treats not as a loved thing whose loss would be mourned but as a system to be optimised, a problem to be managed, an asset to be brought back onto the balance sheet.

Once you have the shape of it in your eye, you see it everywhere in our response to the crisis.

Consider geoengineering: the promise that we will inject aerosols into the stratosphere, seed the oceans, build machines to suck the carbon back out of the air, and so cancel two centuries of combustion without altering the life that produced it. Here is omnipotence in its purest technological form. The wound to the biosphere is not a wound but a control problem, and we are the controllers. Notice the absence of grief; notice the heroism of the rescue; notice, above all, the contempt – the living planet reduced to a malfunctioning machine awaiting the right intervention.

Consider the carbon offset. I damage here and repair there; I take my flight and plant my trees; the ledger balances and my conscience with it. This is manic reparation rendered as accountancy. The harm continues unchanged while a phantasy of repair is purchased alongside it, and the two never actually meet. The forest that is notionally planted does not undo the fuel that is actually burned – and at some level everyone knows this, which is why the language of offsetting has acquired its faint, anxious unreality. We are not repairing the object. We are repairing our relationship to our own guilt, and paying cash for the privilege.

Consider the corporate pledge of net zero by some safely distant date – 2040, 2050, a year by which most of those making the pledge will have retired or died. It has every feature. It is triumphant: announced, with a logo, at a conference. It is omnipotent: it commits to total repair, zero, nothing left over. And it is very often contemptuous of the reality it invokes, since the path to the target is left vague, the interim emissions continue, and the number does the emotional work the action does not. The phantasy of total restoration licenses the continuation of the attack. That is the precise structure of the manic defence.

Consider, too, the billionaire who will save the world – electrify everything, and keep Mars as a spare. There is something bleakly comic in the spectacle of the very rich flying private jets to a mountain resort to discuss how the planet might be rescued, but the comedy should not blind us to the structure: reparation fused with self-glorification, the repair of the object inseparable from the glory of the repairer, grandiose, allergic to mourning, and – this is the tell – unable to imagine that the damage might be beyond its powers to fix.

And consider, finally and most uncomfortably, the humbler version most of us in this room are likelier to practise: the diligent recycling, the quiet satisfaction of the electric car in the drive, the canvas bag, the small virtuous abstentions. I do not say these are worthless; at the margin they may do some good. I say that the little glow that attends them – the sense of having done one’s bit, the quieting of conscience – is frequently manic in structure. It lets us feel that the object has been tended, that we are among the good, and so spares us the recognition that against the scale of the thing our individual virtue is almost nothing. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube, and the canvas bag does not change that. But the canvas bag helps me not feel it.

I want to be careful here, because contempt is exactly the wrong response to the manic defence – that would be to enact it. The person in its grip is not a fool or a hypocrite, or not only those things. He is someone who has glimpsed the abyss and cannot bear it, and who has found in frantic, optimistic activity a way to keep the grief at a distance. The trouble is not that the activity is wicked. The trouble is that it cannot work, because it is organised around not knowing the very thing that would have to be known for real reparation to begin: the extent of the damage, the likelihood that much of it is irreversible, the fact that we did it, and that we cannot undo it by being clever. To know that would be to mourn. And mourning is the thing the manic defence exists to prevent. This is why so much environmental effort is curiously sterile. It is not that people do not care; it is that the caring is routed into activity designed to avoid the pain that genuine care would bring. We are working very hard in order not to feel – and work in the service of not-feeling is restless, repetitive, unsatisfying, and leaves the wound where it was. It is, in the old sense, manic, and it oscillates with its opposite, despair, the high of the new initiative giving way to the crash of its failure, which gives way to the next. And the line on the chart goes on climbing.

Eliot has the gesture exactly, in “Ash-Wednesday”:

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew-trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

Affirm before the world and deny between the rocks. Is that not the precise structure of the manic defence – the pledge, the conference, the announcement before the world, and in private, between the rocks, everything continuing as before? And are terrified and cannot surrender. Surrender is the word. The manic defence is, at bottom, a refusal to surrender: to give up the omnipotent position, to admit we cannot fix this ourselves, to enter the recognition that some things are lost and must be grieved.

5. The way back

If the manic path is false, what would the true one require? It requires, I think, something our culture is peculiarly bad at providing: a credible way back into the moral community. Let me hold two distinctions side by side, because the argument turns on how they line up.

The first is the familiar distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt concerns what one has done; because it is about the act, it can be addressed – confessed, amended, repaired. Shame concerns who one is; because it is about the whole self, it cannot be repaired in the same way, only concealed, and when concealment fails it tends toward something close to annihilation. Guilt tends toward reparation; shame tends toward hiding.

The second is the distinction I have been drawing between reparation and its manic counterfeit. And I want to suggest the two distinctions map onto each other. Guilt, when it can be borne, opens onto genuine reparation: I did this, it was wrong, I grieve it, I will make good what can be made good and mourn what cannot. Shame, when it cannot be borne, drives toward the manic solution: the self is too threatened to tolerate the slow work of repair, and reaches instead for the omnipotent fix that will make the whole question disappear. Manic reparation is, in a sense, what reparation becomes once it is contaminated by shame – once the damage to the object has fused with a verdict on the self, so that to face the damage honestly would mean an exposure the self believes it cannot survive.

This is why the question of a way back is not sentimental but structural. The capacity to bear shame, and so to make real reparation, depends on there being a community to which one can return. If exposure means permanent expulsion, then no one can afford to be exposed, and everyone is driven either to deny the wrong or to perform a manic repair of it. If, on the other hand, there is a credible way back – if one can be known, in all one’s complicity, and still be received – then the wrong can be admitted, the damage faced, the grief felt, and reparation begun. Climate Justice could begin.

There is a Zen story I have always found illuminating, and it is, at bottom, a story about bearing exposure without losing one’s centre. A young woman in a village becomes pregnant and, to protect herself, names a local monk as the father. The indignant villagers bring him the child and demand that he raise it. Is that so? he says, and takes the baby, and cares for it. The village shuns him. Years pass. The woman, unable to bear it any longer, confesses that she lied. The villagers return, mortified, to apologise and take the child back. Is that so? says the monk, and returns the boy. And when they come once more to beg his forgiveness and his blessing, he says only, Is that so?

The story is not about innocence; the monk never protests his innocence, even when he could. It is about the capacity to be wrongly known and not be destroyed by it, because one’s centre does not depend on the village’s good opinion. The monk has no need of a triumphant gesture, because he has no need to prove himself innocent. He can simply do what is required – raise the child, return the child – without spectacle, without contempt, without the frantic optimism of the manic repairer. That quiet Is that so? is the exact opposite of manic reparation. It is reparation without grandiosity, action with no need to be seen as good.

I want now to tell you something nearer home, not as evidence but as illustration, and because the argument I am making is not, finally, an abstract one.

My father rose from a barefoot childhood to own a small hotel in a seaside resort, in the days when people still came to the seaside for their holidays. He was president of the locally important Hotel and Restaurant Association, a town councillor for years, and was expected in time to become an alderman and serve as mayor. He had made himself, by effort and charm, into a respected man. And then it went wrong. From what I could piece together later, he had debts he could not pay; he was suspected of embezzlement. He took his own life rather than face the reckoning.

“The pot-boy’s story”, 2022

He might have been safe
on a cliffed coast, secured by our love
but he wasn’t. The sea
is always with us, and he sank

I lost him to shame. For years afterward I wrestled with guilt – at not having been there earlier, when love might have helped, at turning away from his suffering. While he lay dying in a hospital bed I imagined another ending, in which he survived and I supported him through disgrace and rehabilitation, through the long unglamorous work of being received back. It marked the fragile nineteen-year-old I then was, and left me alert to the suffering of others, and to how little we can do for one another, and how very much that little can mean.

Love roots in grief
for the drowned
who slipped out of sunlight

I tell it here because it sits at the exact junction of my themes. My father was destroyed not by guilt but by shame – not by what he had done, which might have been survived and repaired, but by what he could not bear to have known about him. He had no way back. The moral community he had so carefully found his way into had, in his mind, no door through which a disgraced man might return, and in the absence of a way back, exposure was annihilation. Shame can guide us to change course; it can be the beginning of reparation. But only if there is someone, or something, to which one can return. Without that, shame does not repair. It kills. Not metaphorically. Literally.

What was missing for my father is what is missing for us, collectively, in the face of what we have done to the world. We have the knowledge. We have, increasingly, the shame. What we lack is the structure of forgiveness within which the damage might be faced rather than defended against. And in its absence we do what whole societies do all too readily: we reach for the manic alternative. We affirm before the world and deny between the rocks; we announce the pledge, cut the ribbon, plant the offset, and steer on for the waterfall, because to stop and to know would be to face an exposure we believe we cannot survive.

6. Eliot and the Buddha: two answers

So we arrive at the question, and at the two great answers to it that I want to set against each other – because the difference between them is, I think, what I have to offer you that is genuinely my own.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Eliot was drawn, early, toward the East; he read Sanskrit and Pali, and “The Waste Land” ends, you remember, not in English but in Sanskrit – Datta, dayadhvam, damyata; Shantih, the peace that passes understanding. But Eliot, confronted by the mess he had made of his personal life, ran into a wall, and the wall was accountability. He could not finally accept a path that seemed to him to dissolve the very self that must answer for what it has done. He came to insist on personal accountability, and on the impossibility of redeeming oneself through one’s own works – on the necessity, that is, of grace. You cannot repair your way back into innocence. You can only be forgiven, and forgiveness is precisely what cannot be earned or engineered; it can only be received. That is why “Ash-Wednesday” does not end in a programme of action but in a prayer, and an uncertain one:

Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

Those who chose and oppose. I sit down each morning with a cup of coffee at the end of that long chain of harm; I want to renounce the violence done to the earth and I participate in it before breakfast. I am one of those who chose and oppose, terrified and cannot surrender. Eliot’s wager is that for such a person there is no exit through effort – that the manic repair is doomed exactly because it is works, the self trying to buy its own absolution – and that the only way through is to give up the omnipotent struggle and wait, in depletion, for a grace one cannot command:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

It sounds a lot like Buddhism. But now hear the Buddhist answer, which is actually different. The error is to be regretted and amended – there is atonement, there is the long discipline of putting things right – but the craving for redemption, the hunger to be made innocent again, is itself a form of grasping, and grasping is the root of suffering. The self that so desperately needs absolving is, on this view, not finally real; it is the constructed self of my second section, the spinmeister, the Head of Public Relations, taken for solid when it is anything but. The treatment is not a verdict of forgiveness handed down from outside but the slow exposure, through meditation, of the one who needs forgiving. See the self as the process it is; cease to defend its standing; and the question “what forgiveness?” loosens its grip, because the fixed, separate self demanding to be acquitted is no longer quite substantial. Absolution, from this angle, is a shortcut – and a slightly suspect one, a way of keeping the precious self intact by having it pardoned rather than seen through.

Buddhism dethrones the self that requires forgiveness. Eliot redeems the self without denying its continuity.

There is a dance I was introduced to last year called butō, devised in Japan by dancers who found after 1945 they could no longer dance merely pretty forms. It begins with a figure struck by lightning, and its first movement is the Ash Walk: the figure steps forward and becomes a pillar of ash. When I danced it on retreat, something in me opened and I wept, quietly, on my cushion for two days. I offer it because it is the Buddhist gesture made visible – not a repair, not a rescue, but a consenting to be reduced, to walk forward into the ash and let the defended self fall away. It rhymes, of course, with another wednesday of ashes, and with dust thou art; but where Ash-Wednesday turns, at the last, to petition a grace beyond the self, the Ash Walk simply keeps walking.

I am not going to pretend I can reconcile these two answers, and I am wary of any quick synthesis, which would itself be a small manic gesture. But I want to put a proposition to you, and it is the one I most want you to take away.

The Buddhist path is real, and it is long. It is the patient work of a lifetime, and it asks of the practitioner a degree of formation that our civilisation neither offers nor, for the most part, wants. You will see what it shares with psychoanalysis. But we are not a Buddhist society. We are a society of constructed selves frantically defending their standing, and we are running out of time. And it may be – this is my wager – that a society such as ours cannot get to the depressive recognition by the long road of seeing through the self. It may need the shortcut. It may need, that is, exactly what Eliot in the end could not do without: a credible narrative of forgiveness, a structure within which one can be known in all one’s complicity and still be received, so that the damage can be faced before it is too late to act on it. Absolution may be a shortcut; but a shortcut is what you reach for when the long road runs out of daylight.

This is, after all, what religion once supplied. The word itself is suggestive. My first Zen teacher, pressed by her raised-as-Christian students on whether Buddhism was “really” a religion, sent us to the etymology – re-ligere, to bind back, to reconnect – to bind us back, she said, to something larger than the tiny agendas of our subjective consciousness.

Suffer us not to be separated

That reconnection is exactly what reparation in the depressive sense requires and what the manic defence refuses, because the manic self does not wish to be bound back to anything; it wishes to stand above, the omnipotent repairer, dependent on no one’s forgiveness. Religion, whatever else it was, offered a path back: confession, penance, absolution; or, in other traditions, the long work of purification and return. It held open the possibility that the harm one had done was not the final word about who one was.

Procesión del Santo Entierro, Bilbao, Holy Week 2025

We have dismantled that structure, for reasons good and bad. There is philosophical materialism – the conviction that nothing exists but matter and energy under impersonal law, Laplace’s “I have no need of that hypothesis” – which, as Rupert Sheldrake observes, is less a finding than the default faith of educated people, held the more firmly for being mistaken for the absence of faith. And there is the immense record of harm done in religion’s name, which leaves many of us rightly unwilling to look for grace where it was once found. Both objections are serious. But the need religion met does not vanish when religion is refused. And so we are left in Gerontion’s exact position – knowledge without forgiveness – and that, I have been arguing, is precisely the soil in which manic reparation grows. Manic reparation is what shame does when no absolution is available to it. It is the secular, can-do, technological substitute for grace.

7. Reparation without triumph

I want to end with a question rather than an answer – but I hope I have sharpened it.

If human beings need a credible hope of forgiveness in order to sustain genuine moral action, what happens when no such hope is available? What happens, I have suggested, is manic reparation: a frantic, optimistic, omnipotent activity that has the form of repair but the function of avoiding grief, and that therefore changes nothing while exhausting everyone. Our discourse is very good at the first half of the problem. It tells us, correctly and relentlessly, that we are complicit. It is much less good at the second. It is largely silent about how we are to live with that knowledge, and into that silence rushes the manic defence, because the alternatives it leaves us – denial and despair – are even less bearable.

The way out, if there is one, does not lie in working harder in the same frantic register. It lies in something harder than work: in mourning. In the capacity to know that we have damaged something we love, that much of the damage is permanent, that we did it, and that we cannot omnipotently undo it – and to grieve. Reparation that proceeds from that place looks quite unlike its manic counterfeit. It is humble rather than triumphant. It does not announce itself. It does not assume it can fix everything, and so it is not paralysed when it cannot. It can do the small real thing – the planting, the protecting, the refusing – without the inflation of believing the small thing saves the world, and without the despair when it does not. It is, in Eliot’s words from “East Coker,”

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

It is the monk’s Is that so? – action without grandiosity, without contempt, without the need to be seen as good.

But mourning of this kind is almost impossible alone, and almost impossible without some credible hope of being forgiven. That is the deepest reason the manic defence is so prevalent among us. We have the knowledge and we lack the forgiveness, and so we oscillate, as a civilisation, between despair and a triumphant busyness that leaves the wound exactly where it was.

I do not know what a forgiveness modest enough to be credible to people who can no longer believe the old kinds would actually look like. I am fairly sure it is not to be found in the manic register, in the pledge and the gadget and the heroic rescue. I suspect, with Eliot, that it cannot simply be manufactured by our own efforts – that it has, in some sense, to be received. And I wonder, against my own tradition, whether a society like ours may need to recover some structure of absolution, some secular descendant of the path back, before it can put down the manic defence and grieve. The Four Quartets do not end in triumph. They end in fire, through loss, in “a condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything,” with a consolation that is not engineered but given:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well

I do not ask you to share Eliot’s theology. I ask you only to notice the shape of the consolation, and how completely it differs from the manic kind: not a rescue that denies the damage, but a peace that has passed all the way through it.

And so Gerontion’s question returns, transformed, and I leave it with you, who know this territory better than I, because I think it is the question our moment is failing to answer, and because I do not believe we will begin to act until we can bear to ask it without flinching:

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Envoi

And that is where I stop. Eliot has the last word, so we may feel the full force of his anguish in the “Ash-Wednesday” prayer for redemption, a child’s call for its mother.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Bibliography

1. Bazzano, Manu “The Keys to the Prison: On Necroliberalism’s Survivalist and Suicidal Missions”, Coils of the Serpent 13:60-72, 2024
2. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, Collected Poems 1909–1962, Faber & Faber, London, 1963
3. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, “Ash-Wednesday”, 1930, read by Stephen Taylor (MP3, 26MB)
4. Morgan, David, “Three Letters, One Crisis: Neutrality, Witnessing and Institutional Failure”, Psychoanalysis And Social Justice, 2026
5. Reps, Paul (ed.), Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings, Penguin Books, London, 2000
6. Sheldrake, Rupert, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Yellow Kite, London, 2012
7. Taylor, Stephen, “The Pot-boy’s story”, 2022

Recording

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