Too many apologies cheapens the sentiment
Move over Invasion Day. The Australian yesterday:
Victorian Labor MPs and members will consider scrapping Australia Day celebrations on January 26 in favour of a new date on May 9 at the party’s state conference this weekend.
The Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young, operating at full revisionist speed, gets her captains in a twist. The Australian, yesterday:
“Despite an important national debate about changing the date of Australia Day away from Captain Cook’s landing at Botany Bay, the government has decided to spend taxpayer money it is stripping from the ABC on yet another monument to Captain Cook on the land of the Dharawal people,” Senator Hanson-Young said.
The eyes of the world are on us. Kevin Rudd’s 2008 indigenous apology rates as one of the world’s “Top 10 national apologies”. Others in Time magazine’s 2010 list:
Bloody Sunday, the Holocaust, Argentina’s Dirty War, American Slavery and Jim Crow, Apartheid, Internment of Japanese-Americans, The Code Breaker (Alan Turing), the Galileo Case, Japanese Sex Slavery.
Sorry! John Paul II said it, Tony Blair said it, and Bill Clinton did, too — but the Canadians are in a league of their own. CBC News, May 19, 2016:
Justin Trudeau, speaking in that earnest cadence of his, rose in the Commons Wednesday and, speaking on behalf of all Canadians, apologised for an event no living Canadian had anything to do with. Further, he directed the apology to people who were not alive at the time it happened (more than a century ago), most of whom, in all likelihood, never met the ancestors who received the shabby treatment for which Trudeau is now officially sorry … (Canadians) tend to say I’m sorry constantly, which is perhaps why there have been so many official apologies from Ottawa.
Trouble is, the more you apologise, the less it works. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2015:
Dramatic increases in the issuance of political apologies over the last two decades mean that we now live in the “age of apology”. But what does this surge in frequency mean for the effectiveness of intergroup apologies in promoting forgiveness? In the current research we propose a paradoxical “normative dilution” effect whereby behavioural norms increase the perceived appropriateness of an action while at the same time reducing its symbolic value.
There are good arguments against politicians’ apologies. The Independent, November 28, 2006:
They never apologise for things they’ve actually got wrong, only the mistakes of dead people, who can’t answer back. You can’t judge the moral culpability of the past by the very different standards of the present … politicians use apologies about the past as an excuse for inaction (now) …
Official apologies invite satire. National Review, June 27, 2016:
Official Press Release from the Office of Pol Pot: It is unfortunate that my statements on the importance of a unified Democratic Kampuchea have been misconstrued as an attack on intellectuals, academics, teachers, those who can read and write and do simple math, those who wear eyeglasses, and, probably, your parents. The media keeps repeating the phrase “parade them through the streets and write the future in blood and a mountain of skulls” because they need to sell papers. Sad. The reason I am experiencing tremendous success everywhere I go with sellout crowds is because I tell it like it is and I am not politically correct …