Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Apologies all around

Is it possible to repent the sins of someone else? Can I take responsibility for the actions of my ancestors, or alternatively, am I owed an apology from the descendant of someone who wronged an ancestor of mine? Gorman Beauchamp in The American Scholar criticizes the practice of apologizing for the actions of other people in other times. For example [and he gives many more examples than this]:
The current lieutenant governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, personally presented the leaders of the Mormon church with a copy of his state legislature’s House Resolution 793, expressing “official regret” for the 1844 murder of Joseph Smith and the expulsion of his followers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The language asking for “pardon and forgiveness” was toned down when certain lawmakers protested that they could not ask for forgiveness for acts that they had not personally committed — a retrograde notion, apparently, of individual responsibility. Tony Blair, as British prime minister, apologized to the Irish for his nation’s insensitivity to the plight of the victims of the Potato Famine in the 1840s. A hundred years after the event, the U.S. Congress offered a formal apology to the Hawaiians for the overthrow of their monarchy in 1893. The French parlement unanimously adopted a law stating that “the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade, perpetuated from the 15th century against Africans, Amerindians, Malagasies and Indians, constitutes a crime against humanity”: the centuries of slavery before the 15th and the slavery of other peoples do not, apparently, constitute such a crime, at least in France. ....

Our mania for apology stems from a radical sort of “presentism”: the belief, in practice, if not fully articulated, that the actions and actors of the past should be evaluated, and usually condemned, by present-day standards. In our relativistic age in which advanced opinion notoriously eschews universals and absolutes, the criteria obtaining at the moment in Cambridge and Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, Austin and Madison seem to have more than contingent status. The criteria appear perilously close to absolutes, the sort of absolutes obeisance to which allows moderately competent graduate students in sociology or culture studies to relish their moral superiority to almost any denizen of the benighted pre-Foucault past. ....

Presentism wants not only to judge the past by the criteria of the present, but, in a complete failure of historical imagination, can’t conceive of the criteria of the future being radically different from today’s. ....
And earlier in the essay:
I would never denigrate any civilized response of anyone for harm he may have done or misbehavior he may have engaged in. But apologies offered by people to their contemporaries for actions taken long before any of them were born strike me as vacuous and more than a little exhibitionistic. [the essay]
In an age when everyone is a victim and when the idea of individual responsibility seems almost to have disappeared, in an age of moral relativism, it is curious indeed that we should be making collective repentance for sins we did not commit.

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the reference.

The American Scholar - Apologies All Around - By Gorman Beauchamp

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