10 September 2015
Sorry!
By Chin Chin
Every country has its meaningless expressions. In America it’s “have a nice day”, in Ireland “bejeysus”, in France “je vous en prie”. In Mexico they say “hey gringo” but that can’t be entirely meaningless as (if the films are to be believed) it is normally followed by a gunfight.
Here in England we say “sorry”. That is “sorry” in the apologetic sense not as in “I’m sorry I ever met you, you punk” where the use is subtly different. The word is often used where the speaker has nothing to regret at all. Perhaps a man has simply arrived at a doorway at the same time as someone else. He stands back and says “sorry”. The person to whom he has given way will probably say “sorry” too.
This tendency to over-politeness can be found at all levels of society. It does not come, then, from the public schools where manners are drilled into the pupils alongside Greek and Latin. Nor is it something that started with the working classes doffing their hats to the gentry riding past in their carriages. “Sorry to spoil the view, my Lord. Sorry if after working down the mines all day I smell a bit, your ladyship.”
No, it is rather a national conspiracy of good manners. Why are the British so polite? It isn’t because they are nicer than anyone else but because when you live on a small and crowded island society, you need more social lubricants than when you have plenty of space. Good manners is one of them, but there are others too. Watch the London traffic, for example. The roads are very crowded but however frustrated drivers may be they generally give way to those who need to cross their lane. Try executing a three point turn in a busy thoroughfare in rush-hour and you will be astonished by the way people give you space. It doesn’t cost them much, of course – their place in the overall queue remains the same – but try it in France, for example, and you will get quite a different reaction, lots of leaning on horns and waving of hand, shouts of “idiot”, “cretin” and even “Anglais”.
Actually, it isn’t just the French. Our wilder cousins in the less populated parts of the country are fairly aggressive, too. Try Devon and Cornwall, for example. No one will willingly give way to you there as they play their deadly game of chicken on their winding roads. No wonder that the place is underpopulated. Why their impatience? Are they a tad inbred? Have they been affected by radioactivity given off by the local granite? No. It is because there is little on the roads and politeness is not required to make the traffic flow easily. In fact, one of those cowcatchers they used to put on trains in the Wild West would be infinitely more useful.
The use of the word “sorry” then is often a lubricant, a politesse, a smoother of rough edges; something to damp down an abrasiveness which would be intolerable in crowded cities. A more interesting question though is what it means when it is used by politicians. What did Ken Livingstone mean when he “apologised” for the slave trade? What does Mr Corbyn mean when he says he will apologise for the invasion of Iraq?
Now if you look up “apology” in the dictionary you will find that there are two elements to it. First there is the acknowledgement of the offence and then there is the expression of regret for it, the apology being offered by way of reparation. That means that you can only apologise if you had a hand in what went wrong. I may be angry that Mr Putin sponsors revolution in the Ukraine but I cannot apologise for it unless the responsibility is mine.
As far as I know Mr Livingstone has never dealt in slaves and I would even take a wager that his parents didn’t either. Perhaps there was some Corsair Livingstone of the seventeenth century who was a particularly oppressive slaver but I rather doubt if Livingstone was apologising for him. Instead he purported to be speaking for the people of London.
There are moments when an apology by a national leader can carry force because it represents the national sentiment and the thing apologised for is so recent that the individuals who make up the nation are associated with it. Willy Brandt’s gesture of falling to his knees before the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto falls into that category. But the slave trade is more than 200 years ago. How is the current population of London associated with that? One might as well ask the Mongolian government to apologise for Genghis Khan.
Then what about Mr Corbyn’s suggestion that we apologise for Iraq? That after all is more recent. The trouble is that, although it has not turned out particularly well, by no means everyone thinks we were wrong to go in. Mr Corbyn does, but how can he apologise on behalf of those who don’t? Is every government to apologise for those things which the previous government did and with which it disagrees?
The truth is that an apology for something for which someone else is responsible is normally counterfeit currency. It can be done without any cost because the blame can be placed elsewhere. Worse still, it is usually done for political advantage. Where is the regret and atonement in that? There are moments when it is appropriate, but by and large one should watch the apologising politicians with a cynical eye. They apologise too much, methinks.
