The Mystery of a Genuine Apology

In our culture of performance and simulation, have apologies become anachronistic, mere formulaic gestures?

Sometimes, it appears so. In our public life, all we often get are caricatures. “Rectitude, it seems,” the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, once wrote, “has given way to contrition chic, a cheap way to get publicity, sympathy, and even absolution.”

Disgraced individuals, organizations, and whole nations offer up “apologies” and express remorse that often feels contrived or coerced. Their words appear to be little more than self-serving efforts at impression management and image restoration. They seem to seek not genuine forgiveness but to save or bolster their reputation, status, celebrity, or job. They give “apology” a bad name.

Or consider a recent article on the BBC website.¹ The author plays a trick (a “rather deceitful social experiment”) on some relatives and acquaintances to see whether a human-written or an AI-written apology “was most effective.” A “good apology,” he writes, “seems like something that requires feelings, which robots presumably don’t have.” But “if apologies are formulaic on some level, that’s just the kind of thing the statistical machines of AI should be able to handle.” He also quotes an AI expert, who says, “social intelligence is something that AI can already fake to a certain degree.” So why not an apology?

Why not? Is an “effective” apology just a formula that even a machine might successfully mimic? Or is it something incomparably more?

Source: Eva Michálková from Pixabay

My Apology Project

Some years ago, I initiated a research project on apologies. I had been studying the literature in sociology and social psychology on “accounts,” which is a term of art for the kinds of things we say when trying to correct for something we did that was wrong, offensive, or injurious. Apologies are a type of account, but I found the discussion deeply dissatisfying.

In one of the earliest (1968) and preeminent papers, for instance, simply titled “Accounts,” apologies are not even mentioned. The only types are “excuses” and “justifications,” which are basically techniques—verbal devices—to neutralize blame for an offensive, harmful, or inappropriate act and prevent status loss. Excuses and justifications explain our actions by shifting responsibility to others or placing it on circumstances beyond our control.

In subsequent work, researchers enlarged the taxonomy of accounts with additional categories. Apologies was one of them. In an apology or “concession,” unlike an excuse or justification, offenders admit to full or partial causal responsibility for their actions. They then offer an expression of regret and perhaps an avowal not to repeat the offense and, though seldom applicable, an offer of restitution.

In the academic literature, apologies, along with the other account types, are classed as “failure management techniques.” They are described in shallow and behavioristic terms. Apologies do not appear to require any inwardness, any sorrow or regret that moves the heart of the person giving the account. To the contrary, like other accounts, they are spoken of in a pragmatic language of “strategies,” “negotiations of identity,” “image management,” “postures,” “stances,” “facework,” and the like.

Additionally, there is a body of research on the conditions under which accounts are likely to be honored or not. For apologies, certain key variables have been found to be predictive—both the minimal elements, such as admission of fault and expression of regret, and other features of the encounter, such as the relative status of the persons involved.

But, again, the interchange is conceptualized as a formulaic transaction that serves social functions. Nothing truly personal or painful or of moral consequence is a necessary feature of the explanatory picture.

It was this “thin,” depthless conceptualization that my project sought to address. Surely, there is something unique about apologies, a regenerative power they possess that is quite different than an excuse or justification. That power was what I wanted to explore.

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The Mystery of a Genuine Apology

As it turns out—and, mea culpa, after a lot of work by my then-research assistant Susannah Myers—my apology project never got off the ground. We couldn’t figure out how to collect “data” on such private and episodic experiences. Then a good thing happened: I discovered Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation by Nicholas Tavuchis.² Here was a book to learn from.

Tavuchis provides both a rich conceptualization of apology and situates this practice within larger questions of social membership and moral life.

Although we think of an interpersonal apology as simply between two persons, he notes, there is more to it than that. An apology not only has the capacity to heal personal relationships but to also confirm our shared membership in the moral community.

“We not only apologize to someone,” Tavuchis observes, “but also for something.” When we name the offense, we affirm the objective wrongness of what we did. And we reaffirm our commitment to the legitimacy of the moral standards whose integrity our misdeed has called into question.

Personal apologies, Tavuchis shows, are completely unlike excuses or justifications. “To apologize,” he writes, “is to declare voluntarily that one has no excuse, defense, justification, or explanation for an action (or inaction)” that has failed or injured or wronged another.

Other types of accounts always aim to shift attention away from us by appeals to external, mitigating forces like incapacity or accident or ignorance. But not an apology. In apology, we stand exposed, unarmed, seeking forgiveness for what is “unreasonable, unjustified, undeserved, and inequitable.”

Crucially, in very many cases, an apology is the only way to “cleanse and heal social rifts.” If we insult, mistreat, or lie to another person, excuses and justifications are not going to cut it.

Perhaps the offended reluctantly accedes to such an account. But while the whole episode may get pushed into the background, the social rift will not be cleansed through forgiveness or healed through reconciliation. Regret and sorrow, the heart of a genuine apology, cannot be forced. Without apologies, social harmony is undermined.

Which brings us to the mystery of an apology. Put paradoxically, it undoes what cannot be undone. Tavuchis explains:

"If the major task of apology is to resolve conflicts and somehow restore an antecedent moral order by expunging or eradicating the harmful effects of past actions, then at one level of reality this is manifestly impossible and doomed to fail… An apology, no matter how sincere or effective, does not and cannot undo what has been done. And yet, in a mysterious way… this is precisely what it manages to do."

When we apologize, he continues, when our “remorseful admission of wrongdoing is converted into a gift that is accepted and reciprocated by forgiveness, our world is transformed in a way that can only be described as miraculous.”

No mere performance, however skillful, or scripted speech, however clever, can bring this wonder about. Only the truth and courage to tell it.