Mick Hartley

Norm doesn't like the Theodore Dalrymple article I linked to: or rather, he thinks its central thesis, about the self-indulgence of leaders making apologies for crimes committed long ago, is "sociologically and philosophically indefensible".

Well….I'm not sure how much to defend Theodore here. I suppose when I suggested that it – the article – was good, I had more in mind the quotes I selected, about the way that people may assume political stances that show their moral rectitude while glossing over their more immediate failings, rather than the whole thing. He's a writer I read for for selected amusing aperçus rather than for the full thrust of the argument, which I always take with a pinch of salt. As, I tend to think, does he.

Nevertheless, I did say it was good, and there is a reasonable central point, I think, though you could certainly argue, as is usual with Dalrymple, that he overdoes it. It's the way that official apologies are so often proferred for events which are universally agreed to be shameful, and which, one can't help feeling, cause the person apologising no genuine feelings of remorse, but rather suggest a certain self-righteousness, since, by acknowledging a past crime, they've shown themselves to be morally superior. The crusades, the Atlantic slave trade, the Irish famine…these are hardly controversial areas.

I don't know if Dalrymple means to imply that such apologies are always necessarily self-serving. That's not how I read him. I think this is intended more as a criticism of the way that so many official apologies have in fact recently been made, and how that echoes a certain self-serving moral strain within Western society, rather than a argument that such apologies are always of necessity useless. I doubt if he'd want to argue that current leaders are never in a position to make meaningful apologies for the past histories of their countries: that, to quote Norm, he'd want to deny "that social collectivities are real", or that "such collectivities can have moral or legal responsibilities". I certainly wouldn't. An apology from an Arab leader for the Arab slave trade, or an apology from the Turkish Prime Minister for the Armenian Genocide, would be very significant indeed. And, at the moment, very unlikely.