The culture of apology

...Politicians have shown a similar aversion to apologizing...

...In the Netherlands hundreds of German Christians gathered to apologize to the Dutch for Nazi atrocities in the Second World War, and in South Africa, in a ceremony attended by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dutch Reformed Church apologized to black South Africans for its role in providing religious justification for apartheid...

...Judith Martin's Miss Manners' Guide for theTurnoftheMillennium has eight differ ent entries under the category of apology...

...so too is the historical perspective on the deeds and words that are the subjects of the apology...

...In America our recent presidents have often seemed guided by the code of conduct John Wayne espouses in the classic Western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon...

...In Brazil the Catholic church, in a special ceremony on the beach where in 1500 the Franciscan friar Henrique de Coimba presided over the first Mass in Brazil, apologized for the sins and errors committed by its clergy against local Indians and the Africans brought to the New World as slaves...

...He acknowledged that the invasion had gone wrong at a press conference in which he quipped, "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan...

...The old notion that an apology can only make the apologizer vulnerable to further demands for public contrition has been replaced by a more complex set of beliefs...

...But we have come to see the difference that public apologies can make in our national life...

...But it ends with suspense over whether it will be accepted and what kind of amends it will require...

...sponsorship of a series of murderous regimes in Guatemala...

...NICOLAUS MILLS is a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self...

...The value of the new culture of apology is not that it makes utopia possible...

...It reflects the degree to which public apologies, historically a rare event in the lives of nations and institutions, have become a vital part of the global culture...

...Apologies do not guarantee reparations, but they make them a logical next step, and they give the apologizer and his or her successors (just imagine the pressure submarine commanders operating near Japan are now under) added incentive to avoid repeating the kinds of actions for which they have said they were sorry...

...Six days earlier the Vatican's International Theology Commission anticipated the groundbreaking nature of the pope's apology...

...We should not, however, allow the Chinese spy plane controversy to obscure a far more important and surprising phenomenon: the rise in America and the world at large of a new culture of public apology...

...If people raise a howl about my barbarity and cruelty," he wrote his fellow Union general, Henry W. Halleck, "I will answer that war is war and not popularity seeking...

...116 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...

...Whether it is the apology President Clinton made in 1996 to the survivors of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments who were used as guinea pigs by government doctors or the apology made just this year by the State Department and Navy Commander Scott Waddle for the loss of life caused by the submarine USS Greeneville surfacing under a Japanese fishing trawler, it is hard to doubt that we are better off as a people for the times we have said we were sorry and meant it...

...United's chairman, James Goodwin, quickly went on television, appearing in thirtysecond spots in which he told United customers, "This summer thousands of people had their travel plans disrupted while flying United Airlines...

...Then in 2000 the business world took apologies to a whole new level...

...In this post– cold war world, feelings and the display of caring have become, as much as policy, an inseparable part of winning politics, and victims, especially those whose suffering is bound up with their ethnicity or race, have acquired unprecedented moral status...

...The drama of apology begins with suspense over whether it will be offered and how it will be phrased...

...But in contrast to confession, in which the emphasis is consistently on the state of mind of the confessant, the apology is at its fullest a reciprocal act...

...In 1994 Intel apologized to consumers for producing faulty computer chips, and that same year, after selling a batch of bad beer, Coors ran a series of full-page newspaper ads under the headline, "We goofed...

...Lawyers regularly advise their clients to avoid apologies, unless they want to be held liable for their actions, and especially in matters of statecraft, apologies have been treated as anathema...

...as a Texan and a conservative, he was equally aware of the historic aversion we have to our leaders apologizing to foreign governments for their actions...

...Both Emily Post's and Amy Vanderbilt's current books on etiquette provide instructions on how and when to write a note of apology...

...Two decades later Ronald Reagan took a similar stance over the Iran-contra affair, despite evidence that, contrary to official denials, the American government had been part of an arrangement in which proceeds from secret arms sales to Iran to help secure the release of American hostages were illegally used to aid the contra rebels in Nicaragua...

...It is as if NOTEBOOK over the years those in power had come to accept at face value the Greek proverb, "From the time they invented I'm sorry, honor was lost...

...The wrongs of the past, even the distant past, are no longer dismissed as irrelevant...

...its role in the potato famine...

...They have been willing to go down to defeat for their deceptions and mistakes, but the idea of apologizing has seemed like surrender, even in longstanding democracies in which rulers, in contrast to those who govern by divine right or autocratic power, are assumed to be fallible and thus prone to the kinds of errors for which an apology should be natural...

...Soon after, the heads of Ford and Bridgestone/ Firestone embarked on apology campaigns as a result of tire failures...

...The apologizer, especially if a very powerful nation, gives up the notion that raw status conveys the kind of dominance that ultimately matters...

...What makes the pope's apology even more striking is that it does not stand in isolation as the act of a powerful leader defying expecta tions...

...In the United States the Southern Baptists, declaring "we lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery," apologized for the proslavery stance that led to their formation in 1845...

...There are even rules about the best way to apologize...

...Their residual impact, whether psychological or social, is treated as important, and in turn these past wrongs are seen as capable of being affected by current actions, which can either compensate for them or, at a minimum, create a context in which a victim's suffering is honored...

...In the past companies have acknowledged their failures—as Johnson & Johnson did in 1982, when, after a tampering tragedy, it destroyed thirty-one million bottles of Tylenol at a cost of $100 million—but apologies have been comparatively rare...

...This is not to say that in abandoning the John Wayne philosophy of never apologizing we should throw skepticism to the winds...

...It's a sign of weakness...

...In France Presi dent Jacques Chirac apologized to the descendants of Alfred Dreyfus and Emile Zola for the Dreyfus Affair...

...United Airlines led the way when a labor dispute with its pilots caused the company to cancel thousands of flights...

...A speech act once considered a sign of weakness, the tribute those lacking power traditionally pay to those with power, has in just over a decade emerged as a strength, a sign that one has the confidence to own up to mistakes...

...In Switzerland the government apologized to Jews for its wartime role as a bank for the Nazi regime...

...In recent years we have not witnessed a public apology as far-reaching as the one German chancellor Willy Brandt, who opposed Hitler from the start, made in 1970 when, on a visit to the Warsaw ghetto, he fell to his knees and bowed his head in a dramatic act of contrition...

...Generals have traditionally made it a point never to apologize for killing enemy soldiers or civilians...

...The Evangelical Lutheran church apologized for the anti-Semitism of its founder, Martin Luther, and for the harm done to Jews in his name, and the United Methodists apologized for the 1864 massacre of one hundred and fifty Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, which was led by a Methodist lay preacher in Sand Creek, Colorado...

...In a lengthy treatise, " Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past," the commission acknowledged that it could find few precedents in Catholic history for ecclesiastical authorities—the pope, bishops, councils—expressing regret for faults of which they themselves were guilty...

...These days the apologizer, whether a public figure or a nation, is humanized by apologizing in a way that a wrongdoer who remains silent and appears indifferent to public opinion is not...

...Neither Julius Caesar in his commentaries on the Gallic Wars nor Napoleon Bonaparte in his memoirs ever apologized for their bloody deeds...

...Among religious groups there has been an outpouring of mea culpas for the damage done to those who were vulnerable to their power...

...The critic Christopher Hitchens is right when he points out that in recent years we have been victimized by the rise of an apology and restitution business that makes the phony apology a substitute for social action and genuine accountability...

...The new culture of apology reflects the emergence of a post–cold war era in which public discourse has increasingly taken on the ethics and informality of private discourse and produced a different set of expectations from those we are used to...

...Even in the American Civil War, where the six hundred thousand dead were countrymen, apologies are conspicuously absent in the celebrated memoirs of generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman...

...What follows from this emphasis on reconciliation is a very different situation from one in which a nation that is defeated in war or a corporation that loses a judgment compensates victims without offering a sincere apology...

...Among governments there has been a similar pattern of expressing regret for historic misdeeds...

...But in public life, where they can affect untold numbers of people, apologies have been a different story historically...

...The effect of the modern public apology has been to make this aversion to expressing regret seem archaic...

...Faced with intense criticism for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and for concealing America's role in it, John Kennedy never came close to offering a public apology...

...In Benin President Mathieu Kerekou sent a delegation to the United States to apologize for his country's participation in the slave trade, and in the United States President Clinton topped all heads of state in the political apologies he made in the nineties, expressing regret for everything from slavery to U.S...

...HAT THE emergence of a global culture of apology suggests for America is that we need to look on the public apology differently...

...As cavalry captain Nathan Brittles, he continually tells the officers who serve under him, "Never apologize...

...The modern apology stands traditional notions of prestige and power on their heads by giving priority to the concepts of justice and mercy so that in the end what becomes most crucial is reconciliation...

...In this atmosphere even businesses have found that they cannot avoid apologizing for their mistakes...

...Typical is Sherman's disdain for complaints about his march throughout the South...

...In the last decade, however, corporate apologies have come with increasing frequency...

...We make them for coming late to a party as well as for serious matters...

...IT IS NO SURPRISE that this past April, after China returned the crew of an American spy plane that made a forced landing on Hainan Island following a mid-air collision with a Chinese jet, the Bush administration went out of its way to insist that it had resisted China's calls for an apology...

...Saying "I bow in humility before those murdered," German president Johannes Rau traveled to Israel to apologize for the HoloDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 113 NOTEBOOK caust...

...It is that it offers a way of freeing ourselves from the cycle of accusation and counteraccusation that wrongdoing inevitably imposes...

...We need only think of Japan's grudging apologies to the estimated two DISSENT / Fall 2001 n II 5 NOTEBOOK hundred thousand "comfort women" it forced into prostitution during the Second World War or the gratuitous apology that former Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea made in 1998 when they safely returned to Phnom Penh after years of hiding and expressed regret for the millions of deaths they had helped bring about in the 1970s...

...But it is not only the apologizer who is changed by apologizing...

...As such the apology is a speech act that fits comfortably into the give and take of our private lives...

...In the United Kingdom Prime Minister fore a congressional committee and announcTony Blair, acknowledging that Britain had ing, "I come before you, to apologize to you, "failed" the people of Ireland, apologized for the American people...

...The breadth of this new culture of apology could be seen in the Day of Pardon Mass Pope John Paul II gave a year ago when he apologized for the errors committed by the "children" of the church during the last two thousand years and declared, "The church, strengthened by the holiness that she receives from her Lord, kneels before God and begs for forgiveness for past and present sins...

...It is also hard to doubt that as a result of the apologies we make, we are more attuned to acting differently in the future...

...The president was not only under political pressure to stand firm on America's right to conduct surveillance flights off China's coast...

...Jacques Nasser, the president and CEO of Ford, took out television and newspaper ads in which he "personally" guaranteed that Ford would not rest until every recalled tire was replaced, and at Bridgestone/Firestone its CEO, Masatoshi Ono, was even more apologetic, appearing be 114 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 W W HAT MAKES this new culture of apol ogy so significant is not, however, just the governments and institutions it involves but the change in sensibility it embodies...

...Victims are not expected to forget what was done to them or to their ancestors, but what is expected, once an apology is accepted, is that victim and apologizer will not have the same relationship they did before an apology was offered...

...If you were one of them, I want to apologize personally on behalf of United...

...The victim, while not surrendering claims of compensation, gives up the idea of demanding still more apologies and creating an identity based on martyrdom...

...While accepting " full responsibility" for Iran-contra, Reagan insisted on defending his administration's aims and, like Kennedy, neutralized the most damaging attacks on him...

...As late as 1987 his only concession to critics was that a well-intentioned covert operation had been, in his words, allowed to "deteriorate...

...In our interactions with friends and family apologies are commonplace...

...He then insisted that he bore "sole responsibility" for what had happened, but that was as far as he went...

...At the core of the new culture of apology lies the idea that mechanically doing one's duty is bound to produce resentments that will undermine any short-term settlement of a grievance...

...The apology bears a close resemblance to the confession, which, as Yale professor Peter Brooks noted in his recent book Troubling Con fessions, typically concludes with an avowal of contrition...

...The apologizer—we need only think of how often an apology is made with a bowed head and lowered voice—acknowledges that, by its very nature, an apology cannot be offered from a position of moral superiority...