OCTOBER 9 / Dalrymple on false apology syndrome

THEODORE DALRYMPLE is the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels, perhaps the best British essayist of the age, possibly the best anywhere.

There is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanors of their ancestors, or at least their predecessors. I think it is reasonable to call this pattern of potlical breast-beating the False Apology Syndrome.

Mr. Blair, the then British prime minister, apologized to the Irish for the famine; one of the first public acts of Mr. Rudd, the Australian prime minister, was to apologize to the Aborigines for the dispossession of their continent; Pope John Paul II apologized to the Muslims for the Crusades. . . .

. . . .

This inevitably leads to the false supposition that the moral life can be lived without the pain of self-examination. The locus of moral concern ecomes what others do or have done, not what one does oneself. And a good deed in the form of an apology in public for some heinous wrong in the distant past gives the person who makes it a kind of moral pride, at least in his own estimation, against which he can offset his expenditure of vice.

. . . .

[T]he demand for an apology for the Atlantic slave trade is a demand that people with no personal responsibility for it apologize to people who have suffered no personal wrong from it. From the point of view of morality, this is avery strange demand.

It isn't difficult to discern what lies behind it: money, and lots of it. . . . .

An apology of this kind, then, or even the supposition that such an apology ought to be forthcoming, exerts a liberating, that is to say loosening, effect upon personal morals. For what can I do wrong to compare with the wrongs that my ancestors suffered at the hands of your ancestors? How dare you even mention it, you hypocrite!

The neat division of populations into victims and perpetrators, oppressed and oppressors, sinners and saints, that public apologies for long-past wrongs both imply and strengthen means that all sense of human tragedy is lost. The situation of the Aborigines in Australia, however, was and is tragic, and would still be tragic even had the settlers behaved from the first in the best possible or morally ideal fashion. . . .

There is no obvious or easy answer to the problem of Stone Age people who come into contact with a vastly superior material culture. Neither total assimilation nor preservation in what amounts to a living ethnographic museum is a complete or satisfactory solution; probably such a solution does not exist, which is the tragedy. . . .

. . .  .

False Apology Syndrome . . . is a . . . rich but poisonous mixture of self-importance, libertinism, condescension, bad faith, loose thinking, and indifference to the effects it has on those who are apologized to.

Read it. Then polish it off with this useful essay by Gerald Early, a professor of black studies:

We have used [black victimizaion] shamelessly -- especially those who are least entitled to do so [meaning the black elite], as we have suffered the least -- hustled it to get over on whites, to milk their guilt, to excuse our excesses and failures. Being the victim justifies all ethical lapses, as the victim becomes morally reprehensible in the guise of being morally outraged. Being the victim has turned into a sucker's game . . . .

The essay is far more complex and nuanced than this one bit of text may suggest, but this quote fits so perfectly with what Mr. Dalyrmple says that it had to be mentioned.

UDPATE: Thanks for the link from Lose an Eye.