A complex issue is the one regarding historical apologies. You know, things like the Crusades, or colonialism, or slavery and so on, and whether someone, if anyone, should apologise for them. Personally I’m not convinced about the usefulness of historical apologies, even though:
a. some of the people who don’t believe in historical apologies are not nice people, and I don’t really want to be associated with them (those people have their own agenda for opposing historical apologies, an agenda I do not share)
b. I can understand why many people demand apologies for historical events
Let’s take the Catholic Church, for example. I can assure you I’m not a fan. I don’t have to defend the Catholic. I don’t want to.
If we talk about recent events, like pedophile priests, then yes, absolutely, I do think that the people involved (either directly or indirectly) should apologise, aside from facing legal consequences, of course.
(Unless they’re not really sorry for what they’ve done, in which case they can keep their fake apologies. More on that later.)
But if we talk about past events, like the Crusades or the Inquisition, I don’t think the Pope should apologise for them. In fact, I don’t think he can apologise, even if he wants to. And that’s not because I think the Crusades or the Inquisition were not bad things. Clearly they were. We need to understand what apologies really are.
It’s not up to me to tell people what to do, but personally, if I’ve been wronged by someone, I never ask for an apology, even if I think I’m due one.
Don’t get me wrong, I value apologies very much. Apologies are important. They bring closure. They allow us to move on. Without apologies everyone would be walking around holding grudges, and that can’t be good. In my life I’ve apologised many times. But there’s an inherent contradiction in the very act of asking for an apology.
Apologies, in oder to be meaningful, have to be sincere. If one is sorry for what he’s done, he’ll apologise of his own volition. He’ll want to apologise. He doesn’t need to be told. And if he doesn’t apologise, then he wasn’t really sorry to begin with. Contrived apologies are no apologies. I have no use for them.
And because apologies have to be sincere, they’re also, by definition, personal. I don’t think anyone can apologise on someone else’s behalf, even if they want to. (Except, perhaps, in those instances where parents apologise on their children’s behalf. I guess that’s fine.) Apologies by proxy are no apologies. They’re something else altogether. Something important, perhaps, but they’re not actual apologies.
And maybe this is what this debate is really all about. Terminology. It’s important to agree on the terminology, otherwise you have people arguing about different things. It happens a lot. Maybe what we really expect from people in power is just some sort of recognition, and that’s absolutely fine.
Historical knowledge is important, and what people think about historical events is also important. Let’s take the holocaust, for example. While I don’t think anyone is in the position to apologise for it anymore, what current politicians think about it still relevant.
If there was a politician who thought that the holocaust never actually happened, or, worse yet, that it was just a good start, I think I’d be very interested to know that. And the same goes for things like colonialism or slavery.
People can express their opinion on things that happened a long time ago, and that opinion will tell us something about their ideas and their beliefs. And in that regard, there’s no limit on how far back we can go. We can even debate the Greeks and the Romans. Why not?
The anger many people feel about past wrongs (like slavery, for example) is real. Real and justified. We should be angry about injustice, even if it happened in the distant past.
All human beings find injustice odious, and that’s a good thing. You even see that in young children. One of the first things they learn to say is “That’s not fair!” When children think that they’ve been unfairly treated, they cannot stand it.
There’s a lot of ignorance out there, and if talking about historical wrongs helps us to understand what happened, then by all means I’m all for it.
