The sorry state of saying "I'm sorry"

The “perfect” apology, if there is such a thing, can be whittled into three pieces, each of which is well illustrated in a letter that Emily Post dreamt up for 1922’s Etiquette. 

Dear Mrs. Neighbor,

My gardener has just told me that our chickens got into your flower beds, and did a great deal of damage. The chicken netting is being built higher. They will not be able to damage anything again. I shall, of course, send Patrick to put in shrubs to replace those broken, although I know that ones newly planted cannot compensate…and I can only ask you to accept my contrite apologies.

Always sincerely yours,
Katherine de Puyster Eminent.”

First Mrs. Eminent expresses that she feels bad about the state of things. The chickens are running wild, the shrubs are ruined. This, she says, simply won’t do. Next, she accepts responsibility. It is, after all, her fault. Finally, she expresses her willingness to remedy the situation. Had Mrs. Eminent acted differently, the chickens would gaze longingly at the sagebrush quivering in the breeze. But she acted the way she did. The netting was too low. Havoc was unleashed. The shrubs are gone. 

The chickens have been loose all year. Gubernatorial also-ran Creigh Deeds apologized to a female debate moderator he called “young lady.” He later accepted the apology of businesswoman Sheila Johnson, who mocked Deeds’ stutter at a rally for his “o-o-pponent,” Governor Bob McDonnell, who earlier this year apologized for uttering the f-word on a radio show. 

David Letterman apologized for a lewd joke he made about Alex Rodriguez and Willow Palin (Bristol is fair game) and for his own lewd workplace conduct. Around that time, Senator Joe Wilson apologized to President Obama for yelling “You lie.” Nobody demanded that Obama apologize to Kanye—whom he called a “jackass”—and who himself apologized for stealing the microphone from Taylor Swift at that MTV thing. Kanye wrote, “I’M NOT CRAZY YALL, I’M JUST REAL. SORRY FOR THAT!!!” And then Swift apologized for posing for a picture with a man wearing a gigantic swastika on his T-shirt.  

You’d be hard pressed to find a newspaper, or an hour’s worth of TV, that doesn’t mention a verbal snafu, outburst or even policy error for which an apology is being demanded or offered. While guilt, shame, regret and sorrow have always been part of the mistake-prone human machine, one can’t help but think that, with so many people so filled with regret, something must be wrong.

The apology as we know it hasn’t always been around. The word comes from the Greek roots apo, which means “from” or “off,” and logos, which means “speech.” These together formed the word’s traditional meaning: a speech in defense of something. Plato’s Apology, for example, is his version of the speech Socrates gave to defend himself against accusations that he worshipped false gods and corrupted the youth of Sparta. But it was a different kind of apology back then; in the Apology, Socrates never goes so far as to say he’s sorry. He was found guilty, and forced to commit suicide.

Perhaps it was for the fear of such brutal retribution that, by the end of the first millennium, people began ingratiating themselves to God in the form of apologies. Penitent Jews have continued to express to God their guilt on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. The Roman Catholic Church incorporated the Confiteor prayer into mass, a sort of Cro-Magnon apology wherein the devout confess the fundamental sinfulness of mankind and beg God’s forgiveness. Here originates the phrase “mea culpa”—which, augmented with “maxima,” conveys a heady brew of guilt.

But each is missing some of the essential elements of Post’s formula. It wasn’t until the 16th century that the word “apology,” now in English, came to include the apologizer’s specific admission of wrongdoing and regret, and a desire to prevent some negative thing from happening in the future. Perhaps it was through some combination of old-fashioned Catholic guilt and the Victorian era’s bloated proprieties that we get to Post’s formula for the apology. Hers is the most sophisticated apologetic conceit: The apologizer doesn’t like the state of things, takes responsibility and has a plan to prevent such things from happening again.

In its modern form, the apology has various effects for giver and recipient. For both parties, psychologists have found that the apology re-establishes empathy between the wrongdoer and the wronged. That, in turn, mediates forgiveness and promotes mental health of each party. Children tend to feel responsible for unpleasant circumstances, which can breed shame. But when a parent apologizes to a child, the child’s permanent feelings of shame recede to manageable feelings of guilt. If a parent forces that child to apologize, however, the lesson of an apology is often lost—feelings of shame return. In court, lawsuits are settled more quickly when a thoughtful apology is involved, unless the apology is court-ordered, in which case it means less to the recipient.

It’s worthwhile to note that until as late as the 1970s, the sincere apologizer was limited to face-to-face apologies, awkward telephone calls, heartfelt notes and prayer. But our plugged-in world has thrust the apology into a new direction. Now, when people seek forgiveness, most don’t seek out God or whomever they wronged; they often shout it into a piece of technology. This likely started in the early 1980s, with the artist Allen Bridge, who began a conceptual art piece centered on the topic. He posted fliers around New York, soliciting anonymous apologies from petty thieves. The listed phone number fed calls to an answering machine, where callers safely recorded apologies for acts that ranged from petty larceny to matricide. The apologies were transcribed and released for a short-lived publication, Apology.

The trend was modernized in the Internet era through PostSecret, a blog so famous that it’s been released in print form. Its author, Frank Warren, solicits secrets from anonymous parties, that have been described, decorated and submitted on 4"X6" postcards. The site brims with well-formed apologies that Post might have hung on her ice box—would that they were sent to the person who was wronged. Instead these confessions, mea culpas and apologies offer anonymous parties the chance to apologize into the ether, perhaps as practice.

PostSecret and the Apology Project offer examples of public apologies intended for private use, a phenomenon peculiar to our day. It is a breed of apology for which there is no past analogy. One recent message on that website read, “I’m sorry if raising me kept you from wanting to be the artist you wanted to be.” Heavy. In another post, red scrawl reads, “I was texting”—across the photos of two totaled cars. Before the Internet, this concept would have been absurd, akin to a guy who pens an apology to his girlfriend and submits it for discussion at a meeting of complete strangers.

None of this is to say that good apologies no longer exist. Even as the Internet has undermined the institution, in this year alone, the world’s powerful have staged a minor renaissance of self-reproach: In June, the U.S. Senate issued an apology to African-Americans for the slavery and racial segregation that colored the first 350 years of African-American life. Last month, the Senate recommended that the president apologize to Native Americans for a history of “ill-conceived policies.” The British and Australian governments apologized last week to the 500,000 aboriginal children, known as the Stolen Generation, many of whom were abused in mandatory foster care. Locally, Charlottesville City Council apologized for its role in Massive Resistance, when two schools were closed in response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ordered racial integration of public schools.

“It really is a powerful statement, because we’re acknowledging there’s a wrong,” said Charlottesville City Councilwoman Holly Edwards. The operative idea of these apologies is that they shift culpability, so often assumed by the victim, to the apologist’s shoulders. And for the apologizer, the first step to overcoming your problem is to admit that you have one—and the legacies of slavery, “ill-conceived policies” and Massive Resistance are alive and well.  As for the fact that there were no reparations? Well, Mrs. Eminent might not have offered to replace those shrubs if the chickens had escaped during an economic downturn. Even if none of these bodies put its money where its mouth is, still the apologies represent a constructive reading of history. And when it’s been learned, history is less likely to be repeated.

Still, some are concerned with the prevalence of the public apology. Counting apologies for Japanese-Americans in 1988 (in addition to $20,000 in reparations for each person detained) and Hawaiians in 1993, the federal government has now said sorry to over 13 percent of the American population. One concerned party is likely 2012 presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who will release a book early next year called No Apologies: The Case for American Greatness—an insane kind of title that riffs, of course, on one of Romney’s central criticisms of the Obama administration: its willingness to apologize.

Romney repeatedly called on the President to end his “apology tour” this year, accusing Obama of dropping sorries across Europe and the Middle East like so many breadcrumbs. At a Heritage Foundation-sponsored speech in June, Romney elaborated, “It’s not because America hasn’t made mistakes—we have—but because America’s mistakes are overwhelmed by what America has meant to the hopes and aspirations of people throughout the world.” Romney’s words here sound sort of like those of a Greek, rather than a post-Post American, who instructs injured parties to seek solace in the strength of the American argument. And for all the pomp and aplomb in Romney’s call, the era of no apologies would likely be a throwback to a more recent past: the one of semantic whodunits like “mistakes were made.”

If we can use Socrates as an example, the Greeks, who invented the word xenophobia, stood their ground in a relatively homogeneous society and, in doing so, faced retribution. But things aren’t so simple in America. Culture is a melting pot—albeit one that cooks an insipid broth at low temperatures. There are so many digital toes to step on in digital worlds. What’s more, those that once represented the moral authority—e.g., white people, the federal government—are increasingly willing to cast light on their darkest deeds. So if mistakes were made, why not apologize?

When I was a young man who did and said many things I’d later come to regret, my mother would always remind me: “In life, there are no erasers.” But with an apology, you can smudge things to your liking.