We can be the prisoners of our mistakes, especially if we do not learn from them; but when we do learn from them we can be their beneficiaries. Which do we most tend to be? No doubt we all wish the latter. We console ourselves that to err is human, and that, as George Bernard Shaw once remarked, it is better to make mistakes than to do nothing.
Shaw’s point does not hold without exception; it depends on the nature of the mistake. Inadvertently leaning on the button that fires the nuclear missile is not preferable to having stayed in bed that day. Some mistakes teach lessons that come too late to apply.
In the larger spheres of life – politics and government, international affairs – it is less easy to regard mistakes as learning opportunities for the perpetrators. If government ministers start a war, get economic policy 90 degrees wrong, attempt reforms in healthcare, education or the armed forces in ways that turn out to make things vastly worse, we are naturally reluctant to entrust them with big responsibilities again. That is part of what elections are for.
Recently, Tony Blair made an outspoken speech about the dangers posed to global stability by militant forms of political Islam. Among those who think that he made a calamitous mistake in going to war in the Middle East are those who think his judgement should never again be relied on. A man who takes a nation to war on such a questionable basis does not deserve to be listened to.
Are they right? It depends. There are different factors at work in the matter of mistakes, even calamitous ones. At one end of the scale there is incompetence, at the other there is bad luck. In between there might be one or more of inexperience; unforeseen circumstances; pressures of various kinds; an assortment of motives some of which have the effect of clouding the vision or distorting the judgement. Can one conclude that someone is permanently untrustworthy because of a mistake unless one has looked at the circumstances of its making?
Compare it with how we think about people who have served a prison sentence. We say they have paid their debt, and we hope that they will be reformed by the experience, or at least disincentivised against repeating it. Can someone never recover from being the perpetrator of a mistake? In fact, is there not a presumption that – unless sheer incapacity is to blame – the perpetrator is less rather than more likely to repeat it?
If we never forgive and excuse, never allow second chances, we are not only being very harsh, we are losing the opportunity to benefit from what someone might have learned. If mistakes pave the road to insight, if mistakes are better tutors than always (and sometimes by accident) getting things right, then not giving second chances is a lost opportunity.
On the other hand, there is the question of risk. A perpetrator of a mistake has a known negative record. Is it not rational to act accordingly, by withholding trust? To do otherwise is to allow hope to triumph over experience (as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages). In relatively inconsequential things this might not matter too much. But in affairs of state? Of war and peace?
In Blair’s case one might be inclined to think that his experience, both negative and positive, and what he has seen and done since, might give him an entitlement to be heard. He is not asking to be prime minister again, so the case is not quite parallel to mistrusting a mistake-perpetrator with a second go at the same thing. On the contrary: you might think that the views he holds now on aspects of the sequel to his earlier actions are all the more worth noting, precisely for that reason.
If we turn inwards and reflect on our own mistakes and the fallibilities that prompt them, we are sure to hope that we will be allowed second and even third chances; that we will meet with generosity when we err. It has been said that the saddest of all words are ‘it’s too late’. Not wishing to hear them said to oneself is a reason for being diffident about saying them to others. For after all, as the great Cicero pointed out: not every mistake is a foolish one.
In its Greek root ‘apology’ means a speech in self-defence. We sometimes still use ‘apologia’ to mean this, with perhaps a nuance in the direction of self-explanation rather than self-defence. But today an apology is an admission of fault as well as a statement of regret and conciliation towards an offended party. Words change their meanings and acquire different freight as usage carries them along; a politician accused of some great crime – corruption in office, massive failure of duty in affairs of state, or (in today’s world) making amorous advances towards members of his or her staff – might have issued an apology in the form of a defence. To defend oneself now requires that one not apologise.
A major use of the concept of apology in Christianity’s early centuries was defence of its claims against the dismissive scepticism of educated people. This was apologetics, the finding, invention, arrangement and insistence upon arguments and putative evidence in favour of the faith. The church’s acquisition of temporal power rendered this effort unnecessary; once it became a capital crime not to believe, the effort of persuading people by argument and evidence was obsolete. Wherever the temporal power of religion has diminished in our world it is now the sheer weight of history that does the work of apologetics. A Mormon once said, on being taxed with the profound improbabilities of his religion, that ‘it will not seem improbable in a thousand years’ time’. He here hit the nail on the head: neither apologetics nor apologies will then be required, if the world continues in its present paths.
Politicians do not like to apologise for anything if they can help it, precisely because it involves admission of failure or guilt. Summon images of bowing Japanese prime ministers as they resign: figurative fallings on swords are there connoted. Another word that has acquired a negative cast in this domain is ‘responsible’: think of the difference between saying ‘he is a responsible man’ and ‘he is the man responsible’. Being responsible for something means that one has a duty of care or obligation in regard to it; being responsible for something that has gone wrong means that one must apologise. This is why politicians dislike apologising; obviously enough and naturally enough, they do not like admitting that things have gone wrong.
Apologies have become a kind of political money. Descendants of slaves demand apologies from today’s governments for the activities of two and more centuries ago. (They fail to recognise that every individual on the planet is descended from slaves and slave-owners: who apologises to whom, if we chase history back far enough?) But in one sense at least, they have a point. The psychology of the demand for an apology is that when one is wronged, one desires recognition of the fact as it applies to oneself, and acknowledgement by the perpetrator of the wrong done and the harm caused. There are good practical reasons for lancing the boils of resentment in this way, thereby teaching ourselves how to do better in future. In quotidian domestic life the giving and taking of apologies is a key regulator of affairs, like a thermostat or homeostatic device.
Our readiness to apologise to others for bumping into them in the supermarket or not seeing them about to enter the door behind us, is a marker of how right such philosophers as Mencius and David Hume were – despite large differences otherwise – in viewing human nature as more rather than less benevolent. For most people most of the time, the default attitude is an instinctive readiness to get on with whomever they encounter in the daily round. Because in our crowded warrens we have to navigate a dance of personal spaces and mutual adjustments, the reflex ‘Sorry!’ is a commonplace. It seems that it is only behind the wheel of a motor vehicle that this attitude changes to something different.
But politics is not a tube station or a supermarket. The rules of engagement are very different out there on the thin ice of political life. Occasionally a politician will apologise – the more easily if it is for something that happened centuries ago; indeed, he or she might get credit for bravely taking the rap for distant predecessors – but generally it is political suicide, or the next best thing, to do it in relation to a current matter. A game results: the less inclined a politician is to apologise, the more hounding by the press follows. The only invariable result of the game is that sooner rather than later it distracts attention from other things which might be, and (given what the press tends to hound politicians for) often are, considerably more important. When the press get it provably wrong, they print an apology. How easy that is: a little paragraph tucked away, sniffily implying the opposite of what it says, as it were rejecting while claiming to accept corporate blame.
There is something very unsatisfying about corporate apologies. The bigger the corporation, the less satisfying its apologies (for oil spills and the like) tend to be. This is why, I suppose, those who seek admission of responsibility from corporate miscreants prefer to have any resulting apologies in the form of hard cash.
Benjamin Jowett, the fearsome Master of Balliol College at Oxford in Victorian times, famously advised against ever apologising: ‘Get it done and let them howl,’ he said. In the very mixed alloy of real life this strategy has doubtful use – which is not to say that it has none: it can sometimes be appropriate, as for example when one has a clear view of the right thing to do and there is a gaggle of nay-sayers and enemies to cut through.
But since we are all fallible, we are quite likely to offend or do wrong at times, in lesser or greater degree: and then apology really is due. And the value of apology is immense, both for the apologiser and for any to whom his apology is owed. This is because the work that apology does is only partly about what happened beforehand. Its main benefit is what it does for the future, in relieving the feelings of all concerned and restoring relationships to a better footing.
A sincere apology involves a recognition of the wrong or hurt done to an injured party. It involves regret for the motives of an act as well as for its consequences. Often enough, people are not sorry for what they have done but only for being found out, and then their apologies ring hollow. Bankers and politicians are recent examples in this category; they can seem to be weepers of crocodile tears respectively over inflated expense claims and economy-wrecking greed. But what they are really sorry about is that they were caught; they are sorry only for themselves.
The point about recognition cannot be over-emphasised. Recognition that a wrong has been done is not only what makes an apology sincere, but is the key to the good that flows from it. That is why public apologies for major past wrongs such as slavery and forced child migration have a real value. They liberate victims or their descendants not from the injustice itself – time travel would be needed for that – but from the lack of closure that persists until a proper and fulsome public recognition of past harm has been written into the record.
One should never delay an apology when it is due. Humble pie is always better eaten warm, and there are few things worse than owing an apology and never being able to give it, as when an offended friend or a wronged fellow human being dies, leaving you with an uncauterised guilt. Feeling sorry does not come close to saying sorry from the point of view of making things better, or indeed from any point of view.
And there is another positive about apology: there is no better way of having the last word, even though you were in the wrong.