is there any point saying sorry?
Being sorry can never go far enough in breaking out beyond language towards sincere truth.
It is well known that the US presidential election which pitted Al Gore against George W. Bush was a close run thing, and people dispute the outcome to this day. Less well known is the movement that was born as a result. It’s called ‘Sorry Everybody’, and its website still reads:
Some of us — hopefully most of us — are trying to understand and appreciate the effect our recent election will have on you, the citizens of the rest of the world. As our so-called leaders redouble their efforts to screw you over, please remember that some of us — hopefully most of us — are truly, truly sorry. And we'll say we're sorry, even on the behalf of the ones who aren't.
Setting the politics aside, I’m not sure you can say sorry ‘even on behalf of the ones who aren’t’, or, for that matter, on behalf of ones who are. Like taking a medical, going for a jog, and even, according to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, dying, saying sorry is just one of those things that no one can do for you, so getting someone to apologise on your behalf is a cop-out. It is an experience of your own being, which can’t be delegated. Hence the solemnity of saying sorry: you are called upon, you present your naked soul, you speak the words, and you are witnessed. Saying sorry is a ceremony.
Which all sounds terribly serious, considering nothing really happens when people say sorry, and it makes no tangible difference. We don’t even make convicted criminals say sorry. In fact, we have a justice system partly because we don’t want them to: if they started saying sorry, it might let them off the hook too fast. You could argue that the entire justice system depends on the guilty not having to say sorry, because every apology has the potential to short-circuit the punishment that was being devised. Prescribing a punishment to fit the crime is a more rational, less emotive system than giving convicts the option of apologising. So what’s the point?
The truth is that even in the justice system, things are creeping back to a middle ground where showing remorse can be added onto the scales of justice, to alleviate a sentence. Sorriness has emotional weight, and can be used as currency to offset some of the otherwise objectively-measured debt to be paid. You might not literally pay anything back, of course, because it’s not about money per se, but you are squaring things up again. It’s apparently free to say sorry, but it costs.
Which means saying sorry belongs, along with gifts, to what anthropologists call a ‘symbolic economy’. Apologies and gifts pretend to stand outside economic considerations, but because they are part of an unspoken give-and-take, they are just as economic as anything else, even if no money changes hands. And if saying sorry is about paying a debt from the past, it’s also a way of asking for forgiveness in the present. Forgiveness, like mercy, can be ‘bought’ with apologies. What’s interesting for those anthropologists (Marcel Mauss is the main man), is that to forgive someone, to accept their apology, is to show how big you are. That way you retain the power, just as in many societies, power is granted not to those who take the most, but those who give the most away. Of course, you have to have a lot, to give a lot, but still the act of giving - and forgiveness is giving squared - proves that you are the Daddy.
But no matter how much guilt you put onto the scale (and yes, the word ‘guilt’ is related to ‘gold’), the best you can achieve by saying sorry is to even things up again. If saying sorry is an admission of guilt, it is no more than a plea to wipe the slate clean, to get back to where you were, to just be seen as innocent again. And you’re either innocent or not – you can’t be really, really innocent. Not that innocence is bland: on the contrary. Another German philosopher, Bert Hellinger, says innocence is the feeling of belonging and that, conversely, guilt is the awful sense that you may have given up the right to be included. So saying sorry is a way of saying ‘let me back in’, like a toddler who has been sent to the naughty step. You only say sorry from the edge, and as you say it, your right to belong is being assessed.
That’s one of the reasons that sorry seems to be the hardest word. Another is that when you say sorry you’re conceding a truth, which can be hard in itself. To paraphrase Hellinger, you are ‘acknowledging what is’, and it was the principle behind South Africa’s renowned Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to come to terms with the crimes perpetrated under Apartheid. The Commission never punished people, it asked them only to confess - which is the other extreme of the justice system, the opposite of disinterested punishment. Grown men were reduced to tears, even though they knew they weren’t to be punished. Why? Because punishment, although terrible, relieves you of saying sorry, and saying sorry, although preferable in most ways, is in other ways much worse. It’s as if punishment, despite being so humbling, is also about saving face - not avoiding the truth, of course not, but expressing the truth in a second-hand and rather formal way. Interestingly, the Commission, now disbanded, had an ‘Amnesty Committee’: the word ‘amnesty’ comes from the same Greek as ‘amnesia’. The committee’s very name implied that if you say sorry we will forget you, we will grant an amnesty, because to forget is to forgive. But so long as you don’t apologise, we will remember what you have done.
So saying sorry is hard, but how hard does it need to be? The trouble is that, far from involving a painful stripping-bare of the soul, saying sorry can appear all too easy. Most of the time, you only need to say it, after all; you don’t need to do anything, like go to prison, or do community service. And that means that rather than being a token of the truth wrenched from within and laid out with contrition, saying sorry might be a grand deceit. And even if you say sorry in good faith, isn’t it still a bit easy? As long as you’re allowed just to say it, isn’t it possible that you’ve not been sorry enough? Will you ever free yourself from the suspicion that it didn’t cost you enough, that it could have been a bit more difficult? It might just come across as the soft option.
But if you follow that logic, even the most heartfelt apology will never be good enough, because saying sorry, which can be so very hard, is ultimately so easy. A more authentic option might be to keep quiet, and not be seen as taking the easy way out. Saying it might betray you, so better not say it at all, and avoid suspicion. Best of all, shun the state of sorriness altogether in favour of doing something concrete that proves you have already reformed - but run the risk of annoying those people who just needed to hear you say the word.
When it comes to saying sorry, it seems hard not to lose, let alone draw. The problem, at bottom, is linguistic, and the philosopher of language, J.L. Austin, can help us through it. He drew a distinction between ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ utterances. Constative are plain statements of fact, like ‘I am standing here.’ Performative have an extra something over and above their immediate meaning, like ‘Look at me!’ If you want to be performative, you don’t just say ‘I am standing here’, you say ‘Look at me!’ because that has a theatrical effect.
Unfortunately, saying sorry, for all the sincerity it may be soaked in, is a performative utterance, because it doesn’t refer to any objective fact. ‘I am sorry’ is a very different statement from ‘I am male’, for example. The second statement is susceptible of proof; the first is just a claim, and only ever will be. All you can do is perform your sorriness, you can’t prove or touch it, and because you can only perform it, it’s merely performative. Your most earnest intentions will never supply the phrase ‘I am sorry’ with indisputable believability. It’s like pointing at your trainers to prove you’re a good runner.
What’s worse - though Austin never went this far - even constative utterances, plain statements of fact, can’t be totally purged of performative elements. Even to say ‘I am standing here’ involves a tiny element of performance, of gesture, attraction, persuasion, confidence, and so on. A purely constative utterance is probably an illusion, which may sound depressing, but helps us to appreciate the phrase ‘I am sorry’ all the more. For if all language is an alloy of the constative and performative, ‘I am sorry’ is the ultimate sentence: it brings sincerity and pretence together in a particularly neat way, and so provides an excellent example of how language works, always at a remove from reality, and never completely to be trusted.
So what’s the answer? Is there any point saying sorry? Go ahead, but no matter how sorry you feel, the moment you say it, there’s a chance that you won’t be believed.
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