The Modern Notion of a Public Apology

It has been exactly a week since Pope John Paul II, declaring “we humbly ask forgiveness,” surprised the world with a Lenten sermon in which he apologized for the sins committed by the Roman Catholic Church against Jews, fellow Christians, women and various indigenous people over the last 2,000 years. This was not the first time John Paul II had apologized for the failings of the church. In his 1998 document “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” he addressed the failure of many Catholics to help Jews during the Holocaust. But nothing John Paul II or earlier popes have done constituted an apology on the magnitude of last week’s.

In his plea for a “purification of memory,” the pope has done more than move the church into new territory. Rather, his actions have brought into focus the degree to which the public apology has become part of contemporary culture.

In the United States, what has helped to pave the way for this development is the surge in popularity of the talk show and tell-all memoir. These entertainments have made the most humiliating personal revelations commonplace and, in turn, made the public apology seem far less jarring than it was for earlier generations.

But just as important--for America and the world at large--is the combined impact of two historical developments. The first is the Holocaust and the principle established at the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 that leaders are accountable for the actions of their governments and cannot avoid moral responsibility by saying they were taking orders. The second is the rise of multiculturalism and the wide-spread acceptance by both blacks and whites of how pervasive racism has been in the West, especially in the United States. As a consequence, the public apology has gone from an action no government leader or politician would think of taking to an action that seems consistent with contemporary reality.

The significance of this change cannot be overestimated. In our private lives we take apologies for granted. We make them for breaking a promise or arriving late for a dinner party. But public apologies are a different matter. Historically, they have been few and far between. It is as if over the years we had come to accept at face value the Greek proverb, “From the time they invented ‘I’m sorry,’ honor was lost.”

Generals traditionally made it a habit never to apologize for killing enemy soldiers, or even civilians. Neither Julius Caesar in his commentaries on the Gallic Wars nor Napoleon Bonaparte in his memoirs ever apologizes for his bloody deeds. Even in the U.S. Civil War, where the dead on both sides were Americans, apologies are conspicuously absent in the celebrated memoirs of such leading military figures as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.

Apologies are also absent in the great confessional literature of the past. From St. Augustine to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, any number of writers acknowledged the awful deeds they had done and, in the process, begged forgiveness from God. But these same writers did not make it a practice to apologize directly to those they hurt. Instead, they contented themselves with apologias--explanations quite different from apologies--for their bad behavior. We don’t find in these public confessions the kind of direct apology to a wronged individual that occurs in a novel such as “Huckleberry Finn,” for example, when Huck, after playing a mean trick on the slave Jim, makes the decision to “humble” himself and say he is sorry.

Despite the fact that we have no shared, historic code on what constitutes a genuine public apology, we still believe we can tell one when we see it. Particularly over the last decade, we have come to regard a public apology as authentic when it has the following qualities: First, the apology is not self-serving. It does not come when the apologist is under such pressure to acknowledge his faults that an apology leaves him better off. Second, the apology is directed at whomever has been damaged and does not allow the apologist to save face by a generalized admission of wrongdoing or confession to a higher power that substitutes for a personal apology. Third, the apology is accompanied by reparations or, if they are not possible, by an implicit promise to halt the conduct that made the apology necessary.

We have, nonetheless, not come to treat all public apologies as equal. For example, voters were particularly skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s apology for lying about his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky. After months of doing his best to conceal his relationship, the president’s apology seemed little more than an attempt to get out from under public criticism. The same widespread skepticism is also true of the reaction of baseball fans to Atlanta pitcher John Rocker’s apology for his comments about hating the idea of taking the subway to Shea Stadium in New York, because it would mean sitting next to gays, immigrants, welfare mothers and people with AIDS. Rocker’s tepid apology seemed designed only to allow him to continue his baseball career and minimize his fine and suspension by the baseball commissioner.

On the other hand, in the last 15 years public apologies far more complex than Clinton’s or Rocker’s have gained acceptance. Near the end of his life, Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace abandoned the racism that had characterized his political career and, on the 30th anniversary of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, apologized for his past deeds. His repentance was accepted by many civil-rights leaders he had hurt, including Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who praised Wallace for trying to mend the fabric of America.

The same pattern is true on an international level. In 1990, Czech President Vaclav Havel made history by apologizing to the 3.25 million Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II. It was a subject on which Havel might have been quiet, given Nazi atrocities, but in apologizing for what tiny Czechoslovakia had done, Havel was, essentially, making the point that no nation can claim purity.

Nine years later, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a similar admission with regard to the United Nations and the genocide it failed to stop in Rwanda. He declared, “On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse.” Annan’s apology promised to do little good for the U.N.’s international standing, but it reflected his desire to reach out to the Tutsi victims of genocide and acknowledge that even an organization devoted to peacekeeping can be guilty of great ethical lapses.

What remains open to debate is how far back in time a public apology can extend and still be credible. It is one thing for the Catholic Church to apologize for the sins its “children” committed over a span of 2,000 years. But Havel’s example notwithstanding, for nations and public figures, apologies for the wrongs done by previous generations are difficult--especially when they impose a burden on the young. The question becomes, “Just what does the current generation owe?” In recent years, for example, it has been hard for the Japanese to deal with new revelations about the crimes their soldiers committed in World War II during the “rape” of Nanking. They have not wanted to apologize to the Chinese and reopen old wounds. Similarly, in the United States, the idea that the country should apologize for the wrongs of slavery, as TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson argues in his recent book, “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” by paying reparations to African Americans, has drawn minimal support, even in liberal circles.

What is certain, however, is that, as long as there are groups who believe they can trace their current difficulties to wrongs done in the past, the public apology will occupy a central place in the culture of the new century. *