Confessions, Tiger Woods & us

The act and idea of confession are both about fear and courage, about guilt and judging guilt. Those who admit guilt and respect honesty make confessions, but at the same time those who are enslaved by moral ideologies also confess. The matters of faith, humility, and repentance generally lead us to confession. Confession, however, does not necessarily make you a good person because the ritual of confession after all is a social construct. Despite such complexities related with confession, I like to regard it as a humble human act. It will serve my purpose to feel the Christmas spirit. There are elaborate ritualistic provisions of confession in Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, but I take the general idea of confession in terms with the admission of guilt and what I have read in Western literatures. I admit my limitations here.

There are thousands of examples of confessions whether it is Rousseau’s confession in his book or Tiger Woods confession about his infidelity, whether it is St Augustine’s highly religious confession or Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary of post-feminist kind.

In the very beginning of the book The Confessions, Rousseau writes: “I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that about myself.” Tiger has not written something considerable except his brief confession in the media: His acts of infidelity. Tiger Woods wrote: “Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.” But then Rousseau wrote more than 500 pages as a literary release.

How many have committed crimes against the people of Nepal and how many regret their acts?

Confession is a matter of conscience regarding what is right and wrong. Some would ask who determines what is right and wrong. Religious doctrines and legal codes? Communist Manifesto or Hindu discourses? For Nietzsche, conscience is about the relationship of the debtor and creditor: When a debtor fails to complete the terms of his contract with the creditor, the debtor is forced to concede morally, emotionally, and economically. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not humble in defining conscience: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought . . .” Hamlet reads contradictions between resolution and conscience.

Confession has ritualistic significance in Christian faiths in general. Hindus usually do not entertain confession in rigid moral ritualistic provisions except that there are Hindu approaches to confessions in yogic and scriptural textualities.

Political sins of moral kinds are rampant in recent Nepali history from killings to deceptions. Since the cliché is that everything is fair in love and war, Nepali political institution likes to stick to such ideas. The idea of confession came to me not necessarily due to the case of Tiger Woods, but by the recent article of Damakant Jayshi, “Human rights double standards” (Dec 12) published in Republica and the response to his ideas by UN representative Richard Bennett.

How many have committed crimes against the people of Nepal and how many regret their acts? I am thinking about private confessions in self-analytical modes. When you are alone and hence left to yourself in loneliness of memory and past, you may be more into justifying what you have done. We are very clever human beings said Vidur to Bhishma (The Mahabharata) after the Draupadi stripping episode: You are the foremost thinker of the time and you can justify your act of indifference towards the crime committed in the palace.

My point is that we are very clever to justify our acts of crime. The actions of human rights come late. Few act upon themselves to admit their wrong doings. Jayshi and Bennett represent the external moral institutions. They may raise their voices for humanity (I am not qualified to discuss their differences debated in the newspaper), but the problem lies in our institutional indifferences to bring people to confess.

I imagine a long confessional row of political people who will not confess about their sins but will confess about many wrongdoings and then retire from politics. No one will opt for such things because confessions need courage to agree to one’s guilt. Confession comes out of fear for a higher moral order. It is not important to judge that higher moral order despite the facts that all such orders are constructed by human social guidelines. We all are aware of such higher moral orders and their problems, but we have to live by believing that there are higher moral directions. Confession thus becomes a brilliant human act of humility to check and curb our sins.

To fear is necessary, to fear your mother, your guru, a god, and to some lines of ethics: It is necessary to remain cultured. I respect Tiger Woods for considering polyamory behavior as betrayal to his family. I am not concerned about polyamory becoming the norm of the day in times to come, but in given circumstances he confessed and that is why he is a good athlete. Who are such athletes in Nepali political arena?

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