By Chris Satullo
I’m not Bill Maher – and glad of it – but even so I’d like to propose a New Rule:
Don’t demand an apology unless you intend to accept it.
(At least, any apology offered in good faith.)
Don’t demand an apology if your purpose is to turn around and use it as a club to beat the other person over the head. Don’t demand an apology if your main goal is to gain leverage in some larger societal argument, treating the offender merely as a means to an end.
Don’t demand an apology if you don’t care whether the other party learns and grows; if you don’t have any interest in restoring or creating a healthy relationship with him, her or them.
Don’t demand an apology if even a sincere and deeply considered one would do nothing to quell your anger or quench your thirst for revenge.
If you do such things, your intransigence and insincerity just breed insincere apologies from the other side. This undermines the concept of genuine contrition and apology. It bleeds a little more civic capital out of this troubled republic of ours.
And, so far, I’m just talking about apologies demanded for actual offenses, whether minor or grave.
Right now, we also have an epidemic of histrionic grievance-mongering, with some folks having their heads on a swivel and their antennae quivering for any hint of a slight or misstep. Ever ready to take offense – and to display their wokeness – they’ll pounce, Twitter claws bared, upon anyone or anything who says or does something that’s slightly off, that makes anyone feel offended or uncomfortable. Particularly frustrating are the incidents when someone is judged wanting by today’s woke standards for something done 10 years before, when the current norm didn’t exist and when, in some cases, the person was a teenager.
In this country, we have long had highly stylized – and utterly unsatisfying – rituals around public apology for offenses both real and imagined. The rituals vary across time, class and geography, but they share one trait: They misunderstand the true goals of apology: to help the offender learn and improve, and to restore – or, in some cases, create – a healthy relationship between people or groups.
The fault lies on both sides of the apologetic transaction. Sometimes the transgressor refuses to grasp the nature and extent of the wrong committed. (Looking at you, Cuomo.) He simply wants to get past the ritual of insincere apology and get back to what he was doing before.
Just as often, though, those demanding the apology don’t have any intention of forgiving the transgressor, no matter how genuine their sorrow and shame. They simply want to enjoy the other party’s self-abasement, then use it as fuel for a pre-existing agenda.
That agenda may well be just and overdue, such as MeToo or Black Lives Matter.
But those urgent causes are not really aided when people try to boost them in unjust ways. Particularly when the method is to assume the worst and demand the harshest punishment for people simply because of who they look like or what “privileged” group they belong to. That, of course, is a form of bias – and it’s an odd way to go about healing the nation from the myriad evils done by its durable, oppressive biases against people of color.
Payback is just payback, not righteousness. Turning the tables may make one feel powerful, even giddy, but it does not weave justice.
A toxic feedback loop exists, of course, between these two poles of insincerity. The more it becomes clear, as a vengeful Twitter mob bays on your trail, that no apology, no matter how genuine, is going to save you, the more likely you are to toss out a crafted, pro forma one. You’re just playing the apology game, hoping you’ll pull it off well enough to persuade your boss or your tribe or your sponsor to let you stick around. No authentic examination of conscience required, no real reckoning with what you might have done wrong.
Worse, the more these infuriating pseudo-apologies get tossed into the social media hopper, the more unlikely it becomes that the aggrieved would be able to recognize and accept a genuine apology – if by some miracle one should be offered. The offended often seem to be impatient to get the half-hearted apology out of the way, so that they can ritually decry it and resume demanding further investigation, punishment, penance and flipping of the old power arrangements.
Still, the worst situations, as noted by Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic in her recent excellent piece on “The New Puritans,” arise when the supposed offender hasn’t really done what he or she is accused of, and the grievance-hunting crowd has misread intention or even the basic facts of the case.
A prime example (not cited by Applebaum) came last year at a West Coast business school, when an international business professor was trying to explain to students the importance of understanding common idioms in the spoken language of the nation where you’re trying to do business. He cited, as he had many times before, a common Mandarin Chinese phrase that serves as a conversational tic in China, much as “you know” does in America. Unfortunately, this well-known Mandarin phrase sounds somewhat like the N-word. Black students, including some who had not even been in the class, claimed to be traumatized by having to listen to such a racist prof and demanded his head.
The newly minted dean of the school (a man I actually know and greatly respect) surprisingly caved and the prof was removed from the class.
I will confess (pun intended) that my urgency about this epidemic of insincerity around apology stems in part from my Catholic upbringing. In the Catholic sacrament of confession, one is supposed to conduct an unsparing examination of conscience, freely admitting to even the worst of your sins while showing a sincere intention to do better. You are given penance to perform, to prove the sincerity of your sorrow. You are bolstered to do your penance by the prospect that your sins, while not forgotten, will then be forgiven. Do what you should to repent and reform, and God’s mercy and grace will flow to you.
How unlike the merciful Almighty are today’s implacable demanders of apology.
I do understand some of the roots of their implacable anger. No so long ago, we had another, very different Kabuki ritual of public apology, one that tended to cosset privilege and celebrity, not scald it.
Not that long ago, any number of preachers, singers, actors, politicians and athletes who did some truly grievous things (most often to women) were expected merely to perform an elaborate, on-camera rite of self-abasement, the more tearful the better. If the offenders sufficiently entertained a celebrity-mad culture with their weeping and groveling, they were in short order allowed to get back to what they’d been doing. After all, The People wanted their miracles, their mix tape material, their touchdowns.
One big problem with those transactions of ersatz forgiveness: They often involved only an offender and his fan base and corporate sponsors. Left out of any apology, reparations or healing were the actual victims of their misdeeds.
The MeToo movement changed that for good (in both senses of the phrase). Now it is clear: The proper target of an apology is the person or group that was truly harmed.
And sometimes, absolutely, the proper response to an offense is jail time, permanent loss of job or public shunning. It’s clear Harvey Weinstein, for one, was a monster; no apology should spare him jail time. It’s clear Andrew Cuomo, clueless and insincere, did not deserve to hold for one more day the high office he’d been privileged to hold.
But those occasions should be not the rule, but the exception. The thirst to cut off people’s heads, to take away their jobs, their careers, to cast them, shunned, into the wilderness, needs to be tempered by more attention to facts, proportion and nuance – and perhaps even a little spirit of mercy.
We’re some distance still from being clear about how to genuinely accept a genuine apology, how to calibrate the demanded penance to the actual dimensions of the offense, how to let the particular facts of a particular case help us sift the frivolous or partisan claims of harm from the all-too-numerous real ones. We’re not yet to the place where our rites of apology foster real contrition, mutual understanding, healing or acts of restorative justice.
We have a lot to apologize for in the way we’ve been handling apology. But that’s OK. We’re only human and, as long as we admit our error and work to do better, we deserve a second chance.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia