Regrets, we’ve had a few
Tamas Pataki; Australian Literary Review, 2/7/08,
Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration By Charles Griswold; Cambridge University Press
The Politics of Official Apologies By Melissa Nobles; Cambridge University Press
The Politics of Regret: On Collective; Memory and Historical Responsibility; By Jeffrey K. Olick, Routledge
A useful appendix in Melissa Nobles’s The Politics of Official Apologies lists 72 public apologies offered by heads of state, governments, religious institutions and other organisations since 1965. Some of them are apologies only at a stretch: in 1984 Japanese emperor Hirohito told the visiting South Korean president that “it is regrettable that there was an unfortunate period in this century”.An apology, whatever exactly it is, clearly involves taking ownership of a transgressive act and acknowledging it as wrong, but moral ownership for Japanese atrocities was precisely what Hirohito strained to avoid. An ambiguity in the concept of regret — philosophers speak of a distinction between bystander’s regret and agent-regret — is all too evident. In 1992 pope John Paul II begged pardon for the Catholic Church placing Galileo under lifelong house arrest; and in 1995 he sought forgiveness for Counter-Reformation autos-da-fe. These gestures seem odd because neither the great physicist nor the victims of the stake or their descendants were around to forgive or pardon the church.
See: The Australian Literary Review; No Internet Text
At first blush this may make the pope’s gestures seem hollow, but a better conclusion is that political or official apology and forgiveness are dimly related to their interpersonal kin, to the kind of apology I issue for stepping on your toes, and the forgiveness only you can then grant me.
Typically, official apologies are offered by representatives not themselves responsible for some wrong on behalf of those who were; or on behalf of some entity substantially continuous with a responsible entity, as the modern church is with the medieval one. They may be addressed not to the victims, who may have long departed, but to the moral community, signifying acknowledgment of wrongdoing, an affirmation of shared values and, perhaps, repentance. More straightforward was German president Roman Herzog’s statement at a memorial for the Warsaw .uprising: “I ask your forgiveness for what has been done to you by Germans.” The survivors and descendants present at the ceremony created a context in which the granting of forgiveness was a real possibility.
Even these brief examples provide some glimmer of the complexity of the concepts of regret, apology and forgiveness, not to mention their close relations: excuse, pardon, mercy, pity, amnesty and reconciliation. The books under review illuminate various aspects of these concepts. Charles Griswold is an American philosopher who has written definitively on Adam Smith; Nobles is an American political scientist with an interest in race and indigenous affairs; and Jeffrey Olick is an American professor of sociology and history who has focused on issues of collective memory. Their methods and interests are, of course, conditioned by their disciplines and, in my opinion, the degree of penetration and understanding they achieve is also limited by them.
All three note the recent growth of reflective interest in these concepts. Of course, apology and forgiveness, at least in the interpersonal context, have been around for a long time. The Ancient Greek sungnome, a close cognate of our forgiveness that Griswold examines in revealing detail, was part of the conceptual equipment of the ancients well before its elevation in Christianity. It must be said, however, that the ancient philosophers hardly regarded forgiveness as an exercise of virtue. Their schools were mainly perfectionist, fleshing out the characteristics of the moral paragon. Neither the model Socrates nor Aristotle’s “great-souled man”, or the Stoic sage, would do anything requiring forgiveness; and given that a good man cannot be harmed, as Socrates had argued, not at any rate morally, and certainly not by his inferiors, there could hardly be opportunity for him to forgive transgressions. Christianity, of course, eventually tore down these paragons and constructed a moral tradition on the foundations of transgression, penance and forgiveness.
The recent secular interest in such issues, however, is largely a reaction to a much later development: the employment of apology, forgiveness and reconciliation to achieve political and social accommodations. Griswold refers to a new “culture of apology and forgiveness’, which he generally welcomes, though he is cautious of its sentimentalisation and descent into “contrition chic”. Olick, who writes as if he were perpetually discovering America, discerns a “new frontier for confronting past misdeeds — the politics of regret”, a politics he thinks has been elevated to a general “principle of political legitimation”, an “emblem of the times”.
These assessments of the contemporary roles of apology and forgiveness are probably exaggerated but it is true that a novel political dispensation did emerge in the decades following World War II. The Enlightenment discourse of human rights and developments in international law combined with the horrific lessons of the world wars and of the aftermath of Western colonialism to produce a new synthesis, a kind of moralisation of politics.
By and large, the earlier political remedies following conflicts — territorial confiscations, state reparations — have been eclipsed by a principled emphasis on restorative justice for the individual, embodied in the language of human rights and humanitarian law. It seems almost a priori today that when people are wronged — even in masses, as in wars — their moral restoration requires apology and often reparation, in addition to the exercise of retributive justice. On the other side, the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa demonstrated that forgiveness, too, can have a role in the healing of communities as well as in personal reconciliation.
That is the distant backdrop against which these works appear. Nobles’s workmanlike book is a study of official apologies and one notorious non-apology — given, or intended to be given, by governments and government agencies to indigenous populations in four former British colonies: Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. Nobles observes that many group claims and grievances can be addressed without apology. In what circumstances, then, do governments and their agencies find it desirable to apologise, and what, if anything, do apologies achieve?
Nobles takes herself to be constructing an empirical theory based on analyses of individual cases. The gist of this “membership theory of apologies” is that political elites — those who do the apologising — use official apologies to advance indigenous group rights with the intent of refashioning more inclusively the legal, political and emotional relationships between indigenous groups and the wider community. Political elites initiate apologies when they judge the need for reform. And when is that? Frequently, of course, governments are pressured by aggrieved indigenous groups and attract obligations under international law; and guilt, Nobles avers, has been “shown by research” to be a strong motivator. Fear of reparations and electoral considerations might also be thought to influence the elites.
But, unexpectedly, most of these factors are of secondary significance: “The prospect of electoral gains, the desire to avert reparations and other material compensation, and international norms and influence each fail to explain apologies’ emergence or the stakes attached to them”. Nobles concludes, somewhat tautologically, that “in deciding whether to apologise, political actors are guided most significantly by their ideological positions on group claims and their related understandings of national history and its moral burdens”. Why the elites’ ideological positions are judged to be insulated from the other considerations is not clear.
Officially, Nobles is not sanguine about what apologies can achieve. The one unqualified benefit she concedes is the re-examination of the historical record, which is the first step in any apology. Her narrative, however, paints a rosier picture. The US has had a policy of indigenous self-determination since the 1970s. In 1982 the Canadian government recognised indigenous rights to self-government. In the New Zealand parliament there are designated seats for Maori.
In these countries significant advances have also been achieved on the heels of apology. In 1998, in response to a scathing report on indigenous policy, including mistreatment of indigenous children in residential schools, the Canadian government released a statement: “The government of Canada today formally expresses to all aboriginal people in Canada our profound regret for past actions of the federal government.” Canadian polls showed 75 per cent support for the apologies. Subsequently, the government established a $C250 million healing fund. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper reinforced the apology in a speech to parliament last month.
In the US, an apology offered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2000 underscored the government’s commitment to Native American self-determination. In NZ, the Queen’s apologies have been highly significant. Apologies to the Tainui in 1996 and to the Ngai Tahu in 1998 led to $NZ340 million in compensation.
The record is not scintillating but it shows a sparkle of goodwill to indigenous peoples that by contrast renders the famous Australian non-apology all the ghastlier. After tabling of the Bringing Them Home report in 1997, some state governments and churches apologised for complicity in the de-racination and suffering of those who came to be known as the Stolen Generations. (The question of genocidal intent we can leave aside here.) Then John Howard expressed “deep and sincere regret”, in the manner of Hirohito, but steadfastly refused to offer an apology.
Nobles puts a generous, principled interpretation on his motives, noting that Howard rejected the report’s methodology and key findings, did not judge history to be the main source of present-day Aboriginal hardships, and so on. She notes also that according to the polls most Australians supported reconciliation but were strongly opposed to an apology.
Howard’s framing of the issue was remark-able for its malicious duplicity and effectiveness. “Australians of this generation,” he declared, “should not be required to accept the guilt and blame for the past actions and policies over which they had no control.” Indeed not. But the present generation’s accepting guilt and blame for past actions was never at issue. When John Paul II apologised for Galileo’s detention, he was not under the illusion that anyone alive at the time was responsible for it.
To apologise is to accept responsibility, but the question is, whose responsibility? The obligation on Howard was to apologise for the actions of past governments (or perhaps the state, given the anaemia of our governor-generalship), not for the actions of today’s citizens. The state, the government, the nation and the people at any one time are separate entities. The matter was plainly illustrated by representative Tony Hall when the US Congress debated a motion to apologise for its role in slavery: “No member of Congress today voted on measures to perpetrate slavery. But the Congress as an institution bears responsibility.”
Howard certainly had intellectual limitations but an inability to understand elementary political distinctions was not one of them.
His distortions succeeded marvellously. An obtuse Newspoll of the time found, unsurprisingly, that 57 per cent of those polled disagreed with the statement: “On behalf of the community, governments should apologise to Aboriginal people for what’s happened in the past.” Nobles concludes unsentimentally that Howard’s refusal to apologise marginalises “moral reflection on ‘what is justly due’ in light of Australian history”. But Australians had de-coupled reconciliation from apology and did not support the latter. They were, she said, unlikely to overturn Howard’s stance. The ink could scarcely have dried.
Olick’s chief interest in The Politics of Regret is collective memory and the means to cope with it, especially where, as in the case of Germany, remembering the recent past is not unproblematic. The first half of this collection of discipline-bound essays deals with collective memory. Olick argues that such memory is not just a sum of individual memories but “constitutes a social fact in and of itself”. The point is less abstruse then it may seem. It turns on the embodiment of memory in public festivals, ruins, museums and so on and the socially conditioned character of individual memory. Olick expresses programmatic hopes for a study of memory that brings together its varied aspects — neurological, cognitive, social, aggregated, collective — but little in that direction is achieved here.
His observations on the evolution of historical consciousness in post-war Germany are wide-ranging and insightful and lead into the second part of the book, whose subject provides its title. How does one deal with a recent past so difficult to own? Well, regret, apology, forgiveness, reparation and criminal prosecution will have important roles.
Olick says he is interested in what these things have in common and, failing altogether to consider whether they may have very little in common, turns swiftly to a historical account, bouncing from author to author, of some aspects of the way these notions, and related notions such as resentment, have come to constitute the contemporary framework he designates “the politics of regret”.
There is some interesting and uncommon material here, especially in his presentation of the work of Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, Max Scheler, Jean Amery and others on ressentiment. But the essays are more summary than substantive, and Olick’s indifference to distinctions and his hurried judgments mar even some of the substantive claims. His work, Olick modestly ventures, has presented a mere prolegomenon to the moments and mechanisms of regret in late modern life, and one is inclined to agree.
Altogether different is the rigour and careful philosophical analysis found in Griswold’s Forgiveness. This is philosophical work of high order and there is an air here, rare in philosophy, of real progress. The book appeals widely to the substantial literature, ancient and modern, but is deliberately secular. In addition to the paradigm cases, interpersonal and political, of forgiveness, apology and reconciliation, Griswold discusses “imperfect” variations such as self-forgiveness, matters such as “moral monsters” and the unforgivable, and auxiliary concepts, most notably of sympathy and resentment. Theological conceptions such as seeking God’s forgiveness are excluded, however, and I think that for clarity’s sake Griswold is right to shun such fantasies.
Both forgiveness and apology come with complex conditions attached. Forgiveness, for example, cannot be a mere gift, something achieved unilaterally, as Jacques Derrida has claimed, because its success requires commitments from the offender as well as the victim. There must be a mutual effort of transformation in which offender and victim, through their narratives, re-frame or alter their perceptions of each other. The forgiver must forswear revenge (not punishment, which is a matter of justice), moderate resentment (which is the rational response to injury) and commit eventually to relinquishing resentment altogether. In addition, they must endeavour to see the offender as a whole person, larger than the part responsible for the offence, as one with whom it is possible to consort.
Reciprocally, the offender must demonstrate that they no longer wish to stand as the author of the offence and express regret for the injury and due respect for the victim. The offender must commit to becoming the sort of person who will not repeat the offence and show that they understand from the victim’s perspective the damage done. As Griswold puts it, the offender must provide a narrative that explains to the victim “who is this person, such that she could have injured me thus? Such that she warrants forgiveness.”
In this process of intertwining narratives, forgiveness may fail, of course: the offence may be unforgivable, the relinquishing of revenge and resentment too difficult, the explanations and apologies of the offender too miserable. But, for us thinking reeds, apologising and forgiving remain inescapable travails. (They mean nothing if they come too easily.)
Forgiveness and apology mark human imperfection — our capacity to hurt others and to be hurt — and our ineluctable need for respect in a moral community. Apology, as Griswold well says, “expresses a respectful regard for the offended person, in that sense honouring her. The apology acknowledges allegiance to common norms, and thus offers the hope that cooperation is possible.”
Forgiveness recognises vulnerability as part of our lot and that resentment should be proportionate; a wrongdoer who has taken all the right steps to rejoin the moral community would be disrespected if forgiveness were denied. And not only the Other but, as Plato says, “the regime within”, is harmed when merited forgiveness is withheld.
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, GlobalAdd new tag, Reconciliation