Apologising is a good thing, isn’t it? Not when it is a substitute for the harder, more searching work of reflection, contrition and restitution.

 

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Another day, another apology from the government. Yesterday Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia issued a heart-felt and sincere apology to those Australians who had been sent to the country over the course of 50 years under the Child Migration Scheme . 150,000 children went to Australia, with the promise of a better life, but some (how many? all of them?) found instead a life of misery, uprootedness and abuse. This is of course “a Bad Thing”, and our governments, concerned to protect us from Bad Things, want to make it right. The first step in making things right is to issue an apology. It is strongly rumoured that Gordon Brown will be next to apologise to the Forgotten Australians in the New Year.

This should not be a surprise. The government of which Brown is a part has made a habit of apologising for the activities or inactivities of its predecessors. Tony Blair apologised for the Irish Potato famine (1845-1850; the government of Lord John Russell, a Whig). In 2006 he apologised for the slave trade (abolished in 1807 under the government of the Duke of Portland – Tory). Gordon Brown recently apologised for the treatment of Alan Turing, the computer scientist, who killed himself in 1954 (Winston Churchill, Conservative).

It is easy to see a pattern in these apologies. They are all for things for which our elected apologists cannot possibly be held accountable. There is no direct or indirect connection between the government of Gordon Brown and William Cavendish-Bentinck in the 1850s, and not even Gordon Brown can be held responsible for decisions made a hundred years before he was born. Properly, these apologies are meaningless. Popularly, however, is a different thing. The apology to Turing came after a petition. The apology to the Forgotten Australians was the product of a similar campaign. People seem to think that a big, symbolic, expression of contrition is right and necessary, even when those making contrition have had nothing to do with the wrong. Almost twenty years ago, at the time of the anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, the travel writer Jan Morris stood out against the fashionable call for an apology from the European nations for discovering America. To apologise for Columbus’s discoveries is no different from taking the credit for the Renaissance or accepting thanks for the Enlightenment. In other words, it is a meaningless piece of posturing, an action of cheap political stunt-making, nothing more than modish morality.

Part of growing-up, being and acting with an appropriate maturity, is acquiring and showing the recognition that the decisions we make have consequences, for ourselves and for others. Growing-up requires us to reflect on and measure those consequences, and whenever bad comes out of our decisions to show contrition and make restitution: in other words, to say and show you’re sorry. The parable of the prodigal son shows this process: “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son’”.

If this pattern of reflection, contrition, restitution became common (it will never become popular!), then perhaps we would see governments, and others, apologising for things they have really done.