A prophet in springtime

A visit to a spring, surrounded by marks of belonging, prompts Andrew Rumsey to consider the purpose of property.

Andrew Rumsey

Andrew Rumsey is the Bishop of Ramsbury. He is also an author whose writing centres on themes of place and local identity.

An oak tree stands over a field and fence, behind which, in the distance, rises a man made hill with a flat top.

Swallowhead Spring with Silbury Hill in the distance.

Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

After weeks of winter the land awaits its consolation. Unfurling woes roll out so regularly that media feeds read like lament, a psalmody of untethered sorrow. The temptation is to withdraw into immediacy, of course, and purely field the incoming as if sat in a gaming chair of perpetual reaction, spotting and batting away the next insurgent.

When we cry for strategy perhaps what we really mean is prophecy – strategy being inorganic, mechanistic, hardly adequate for the times. After all, how do you map a scene that is constantly changing? Our present panic seeks good words from the world to come, where no one but God has been. But in an age that sniggers away divine possibility the Lord is afforded the past tense alone. We shall, I suspect, come to regret being so confident of our own purposelessness.

What if our absent-minded land were a place of promise, and we had simply forgotten?

What characterizes this world is a kind of dogged amnesia: collapsing past and future into a monotonous present. ‘There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after’. Like the rivers, he suggests, that run into the sea before their ascension and condensation start the cycle again. But what if repetition is not our destiny, and we inhabit instead an ecology that is radically open? What if our absent-minded land were a place of promise, and we had simply forgotten?

What is clear, however, is the enduring need to mark territories where meaning or identity has been found: our arrow-hearted initials notched into the bark.

Prophecy returns to the origins of things in order to seek and sketch what is to come. So, after its overflow last week, I am drawn to revisit Swallowhead Spring, near Avebury in Wiltshire, where the River Kennet rises and begins to drain down into the Thames. Like many such sites round here, the signage indicates conflicting claims on this landscape. A ‘Pagan Britain’ sticker has been slapped upon an anti-littering notice and the trees are frilly with ribbons and dangling dream catchers, the symbolism of which escapes me. What is clear, however, is the enduring need to mark territories where meaning or identity has been found: our arrow-hearted initials notched into the bark. Lovers and villagers would apparently come to Swallowhead Spring for Good Friday picnics, before shinning up the then-accessible Silbury Hill. When I last visited in October, it was just a dry basin with a slightly sludgy brook, but now I can hardly approach for the cataract.

Back home, a bubble-wrapped book has arrived, being the proceedings of the 1941 Malvern Conference: a source I am exploring for clues to the current and future condition of the beleaguered English Church. Under the shroud of total war, Archbishop William Temple gathered an eclectic range of prelates, poets and politicians to devise a route by which the Church might offer a lead to society in the new world that would, at some point, emerge. It is immediately striking in its erudition and reach, addressing the fundamental concern that ‘the true end of man’ had lately been obscured by the pursuit of wealth.

The purpose of work, and education, therefore, needed recovering – but with personality, not product, at its heart. Progress was, however, almost derailed by a Christian Socialist attack on private property, which T. S. Eliot, among other conservative delegates, rebuffed. Hard, perhaps, to imagine the same debate stirring such feeling today, although any consideration of social justice surely must. As H. G. Wells once observed, from the earliest times society was a mitigation of ownership – the mutual recognition that co-operation needed to override competitive possession if humanity was to flourish. The matter was finessed at Malvern in fine Anglican style, with the following resolution:

It is a traditional doctrine of Christendom that property is necessary to fulness of personal life; all citizens should be enabled to hold such property as contributes to moral independence and spiritual freedom without impairing that of others; but where the rights of property conflict with the establishment of social justice or the general social welfare, those rights should be overridden, modified, or, if need be, abolished.

This was synthesis, not fudge, I choose to think – and helpful in reaching a similar conclusion lately, while trying to locate my true north, politically speaking. The conservative in me tends towards continuity, local institutions and the Parable of the Talents, in its acknowledgement of unequal gift and yield; the radical abhors squandered privilege and exploitation of the poor for personal gain. Naboth’s vineyard may be the place, therefore, given that I am firmly in favour of covenantal ownership, which either serves the common good or is reckoned to be in deficit.

The conservative fallacy is to recycle the sins and sinecures of our forebears and call it tradition; the equivalent on the Left is to be perpetually uprooting and call it liberty. Amid their own peculiar failings, the Christian has – somehow – both to belong and not belong, to possess all and yet nothing, in search of a country that is forever ahead.

Column

Character

Confession

Culture

Psychology

18 September 2024

8 min read

‘Yet All Shall Be Forgot?’ Saying sorry has never been more difficult

Acknowledging wrongdoing is vital for any society to flourish. So why do we find it so difficult to apologise, especially online?

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

On a street, two men confront each other face to face.

Darwin Boaventura on Unsplash.

People in the UK don’t like to apologise. At least that’s what a recent poll reported by the Daily Mail claims. Of a thousand British people surveyed, about forty percent of them claimed they didn’t like to apologise because they were never wrong! At least that’s what the headline said. When you actually look at the survey itself, things get a bit more nuanced. 18 per cent don’t feel ‘comfortable’ making an apology. 15 per cent don’t like admitting they’re wrong. 23 per cent feel embarrassed at the thought of apologising. Sorry does indeed seem to be the hardest word. And Elton John seems to be the hardest person to avoid quoting whenever these things come up. Which they do - a lot!

We shouldn’t really be that surprised by the findings of this study. Contrary to the popular belief that the world is divided between goodies and baddies, upstanding citizens and immoral rotters, the ethical picture is much more complex than that. The line between good and bad, as Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted, runs through people not between them. Many moral qualities like kindness, forgiveness, gratitude, humility and so on, are trait-like. There are relatively few pure saints and absolute villains, most of us linger in the muddy moral middle, neither exceptionally good nor reprehensibly evil. And this is what the survey indicates. Despite all our reservations about apologising, the average 20 to 50-year-old says sorry about three times a week, totting up an annual total of 150 apologies per year. We may not like apologising, but we get there in the end.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as all that. Because while we may apologise, we don’t always mean it. If the need to apologise is a spectrum it not only includes those who NEVER apologise, but also those who ALWAYS apologise. If the non-apologisers sit at one extreme, the super-apologisers dwell at the other. These are the people who over-use apology, who never stop apologising for their existence. According to this survey, 41 per cent of us are first to apologise whether or not we think we are in the wrong, and 38 per cent apologise without meaning it. Ever found yourself inexplicably blurting out a sorry to the person who bumped into you at the supermarket? or gratuitously apologising for your emotions in an attempt to appease the workplace bully who caused them? I have. If that’s you, please pull up a chair and join me at the table of compulsive and unnecessary apologies- assuming you can sit down without apologising for taking up the air space.

With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

It does seem, from this survey at least, that people are a bit confused about the nature of apology. ‘Sorry’, is a necessary part of the social vocabulary that makes community life possible. To say sorry is to acknowledge that we are embedded within a rich social network upon which we rely for our existence and without which human life would be untenable. It belongs alongside other basic words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, that recognise our social dependence. This applies everywhere: at home, at school, in the office, down the high street, at church. When we say Please, we acknowledge that there are things we cannot do and cannot know without the help of others. When we say Thank You, we accept that even our greatest achievements were team efforts, not wholly down to us. And when we say Sorry, we accept that this community of trust, this web of promises and fulfilments, is fragile. We can act in ways that fray or even break the threads that connect us to others. Sometimes we don’t show up when we said we would. Sometimes we lie to avoid shame. Sometimes we take far more than we should from those who can’t afford to give. Sometimes we are rude, hurtful, even hateful. Saying sorry is the way we recognise, renew and repair our damaged connections to the people on which our lives depend.

One of the most interesting findings in forgiveness research is that as people get older they generally become more forgiving. Now we can all think of exceptions to this - we all know people who seem to have become bitter rather than better with age - but that’s not the rule of it. Most of us will mellow and become more tolerant as the years pass. Partly because the passing of time diminishes our energy for grudges and plotting petty retaliations. But mainly because the older we get the fewer friends we have left. If young adulthood is awash with weddings, then later life is filled with funerals. To put it bluntly, as we get older more people we know have died. We increasingly realise that our connections to family and friends are priceless and irreplaceable and hardly worth severing over minor grievances. With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives.

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This by contrast sheds some light on why it might be that some people (the maligned 40 per cent of the survey) simply do not apologise. Admittedly it is likely that the tendency to offer apology varies alongside other personality traits like Agreeableness- our general tendency to get along with people. Those high in Agreeableness are more sensitive to ruptures in their relationships and therefore more likely to resolve these with a well-timed apology. And given that women tend to score more highly than men in measures of agreeableness and social intelligence, it seems equally likely that the league of super-apologisers who say sorry too often (like me) is predominantly populated by women (unlike me). By contrast those who do not apologise are likely to be at the tough-minded end of the personality spectrum, more ferociously individualistic, less emotionally aware, and not particularly sensitive to the fabric of social life into which they are inescapably stitched.

The apologiser and the non-apologiser then inhabit different universes. If apology belongs to a social network that needs to be tended, then the refusal to ever apologise is to deny the relational fabric of human life. Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives. Anyone can trawl the elephant’s graveyard of our online history and find things we said or did in our least thoughtful moments. And if they do, no amount of apology seems sufficient to rectify the mistake. Online apologies cannot erase online offences. It’s hard to imagine a better system for teaching us the futility of saying sorry.

There‘s a timing issue too. Quite often people who do not like to apologise assume their apology will result in humiliation. If they admit to being wrong, they will be publicly shamed, not restored to connectedness but excommunicated. As a result, if they ever do get round to apologising, they do so reluctantly or halfheartedly or under duress or just way too late, and consequently receive exactly the kind of vicious reaction they assume apologies usually receive. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we believe our apologies will be met with hostility, we tend to apologise in ways that make hostility more likely. It’s no wonder some people don’t see saying sorry as a viable social strategy.

To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength.

It is a pity, because for those who care to look apology can address the deepest needs of the human soul. Apology restores us to the human community, reweaves the threads of trust that connect us to family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. It assumes there is an invisible world we can rely upon, in which we can place our faith, and to which saying sorry can restore us. This is not just the logic of social apology but also the logic of spiritual apology, or to use the more traditional term, confession.

Just as we seem to be confused about apology, we are also pretty confused about confession. For many of us it belongs to movies where gangsters seek forgiveness for heinous acts through the screen of a confessional booth. Or even worse to the humiliation of being forced to publicly reveal our most shameful character flaws. But these are caricatures.

Confession, like apology, ultimately belongs to a benevolent view of reality. A view suggesting that, at all times and in all places we are in the presence of an utterly attentive, absolutely constant and unfailingly loving God. A God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. A God who cannot help doing whatever it takes to close the distance between us, whose gentle presence hugs the contours of our lives the way the sea hugs the shore. And this divine reality is so permanent, so consistent that, like white noise, we live in complete ignorance of it most of the time. We tend to think that we are here and God is elsewhere, but actually it is God who is here and we who are absentmindedly elsewhere.

In this universe we don’t confess in the hope that our abject humiliation might possibly eke out a morsel of compassion from an otherwise indifferent deity. No. When we confess we acknowledge that while God may be unfailingly aligned with us we are less so with Him. We don’t seem capable of flying in formation with Him. If He moves in straight lines, our lines waver. To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength. If apology restores us to a wider social reality than confession restores us to the deepest reality of all.