The age of apology
The strange fixation of our age with saying sorry all the time is brilliantly anatomized by Gorman Beauchamp in the current American Scholar:
History, that is, offers so much to apologize for that the question is not where to start but where to stop. We could save time, energy, and the risk of invidious specificity by just apologizing for history itself … its annals are overrife with horrors, crimes, and cruelty. Except for reasons of political expediency and publicity, how would we cherry-pick from this long and dismal record which enormities merit apology?
A round-up of the leading current apology stories:
- Rudd will apologize to Aborigines - ‘Newly elected Australian leader Kevin Rudd renewed a commitment Monday to apologize to indigenous Aborigines for past indignities.’
- Christian leaders ask for Muslim forgiveness - ‘we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the “war on terror”) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbours.’
- Queen should apologise for slave trade - ‘The Queen of Britain should apologise for the evils the British inflicted on Ugandans during the colonial era, the chairman of Africa Leadership Institute, a think tank in Kampala, has said … “If she does not apologise to the Africans then she would suffer severe punishment from the creator”.’
- Bishop offers apology over Church’s role in bloody civil war - ‘On many occasions we have reasons to thank God for what was done and for the people who acted, [but] probably in other moments … we should ask for forgiveness and change direction.’
The above cases, wretched as they may be, are pretty tame stuff, really; it isn’t that long ago that a Danish government minister was apologizing for the behaviour of the Vikings.
