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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.

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Monsters

Weirdness

17 October 2024

6 min read

Bled dry: some red flags for those who hope to date a vampire

A philosopher's guide to undying love.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A modern vampire stairs at the face of his girlfried.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in Twilight.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s undying passion for all things gothic. In the first of a two-part series, he asks what is so irresistible about vampires, what do we want from them, and what’s the deal with the armadillos?

Historians point to John Polidori’s The Vampyre as that vital moment in Western vampire lore when the grisly undead creature becomes instead a Casanova. London, 1819. Lord Ruthven, the suave vampire in question, seduces young women and orchestrates chaos in the lives of others—all for his own carnal pleasure. Importantly, he does this by way of persuasion, not rote coercion, which illustrates a key aspect of the modern vampires’ modus operandi. They prefer romance to compulsion, seduction to force. They prefer thrall, almost to the end, at which point the monster fully emerges and the victims fully grasp that their good senses have been compromised. But by then it is too late.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Goethe once observed. Similarly, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe themselves to be dating vampires.

To resist, however, is easier said than done. Even Buffy the vampire slayer succumbs to thrall, so much so that she invites Dracula to bite her. And he happily obliges, if “happily” is possible in the mind of a vampire. Later, having sobered up from the ordeal, Buffy stakes the villain, but we are nonetheless left with an uneasy feeling. Despite all her experience, despite all her kung-fu knowhow, Buffy still crumbles in the wake of thrall, at least temporarily, putting herself in grave danger and eliciting from us a pressing set of questions. How could this have happened so easily? Will this happen again? Are women attracted to men in capes?

Much like kryptonite, vampire magic also affects Superman. Two vampires have so far succeeded in hypnotizing him. Crucifer, not fortunate in name, enthralls our protagonist and sends him on several errands, until the Man of Steel has a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics call it, at which point he punches the ancient vampire through the heart. Dracula, too, disguised as an aristocrat named Rominoff, charms our superhero rather easily and then bites him on the neck, only to explode—hilariously—on the premise that Superman’s blood is tinged with sunlight. A moment of dream logic used to subvert the expectation that superblood might somehow benefit the Count.

Lord Ruthven of Polidori fame also wanders into the DC Comic Book Universe and, per usual, charms his way through problems, until he inadvertently skewers himself on a war memorial. Before this happens, however, we get the strong impression that Ruthven could beguile Superman with ease, if given the chance: that pens are mightier than swords and always have been.

On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves.

Psychoanalysts observe that to empathize with sociopaths is to negate the self most dangerously. They are right, I think, and right—too—that self-erasure proves difficult to recognize at times, because it feels like love. Such is the predicament of those who hope to rendezvous with vampires. Perhaps they have a death wish, some will say, or maybe a savior syndrome, as if they are to save the brooding scoundrels. As if they can. Regardless, the monsters have another plan entirely. As an early church father once explained, those who dine with the devils should bring long spoons.

Not that vampires are particularly good at banquets. They inevitably exaggerate, like the Macbeths as they welcome King Duncan to the castle: “All our service,” the lady says, “in every point twice done and then done double.”

Or recall the embroidered hospitality of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, caught between silent film and sound: “I bid you welcome,” he says, acting out the part as if the audience must see the motive on his face. A perfect moment when the silent cinema and talking pictures conspire to produce the quintessential vampire ethos, an overstated affectation framed for the modern age. The bow of pretended humility, the elongated gesture, the monumental gravity. The outfit.

Some speculate that if vampires were able to see themselves in mirrors, they would reconsider their wardrobes. We have reason to think otherwise. Of course, the true gothic is not the vampire aesthetic, because the true gothic always points to Heaven, as in Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, or Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves, incurvatus in se, which signals not grandeur but rather self-apotheosis. In essence, vampires are their own cathedrals, and with this premise proceed accordingly, candelabras in tow.

Longinus, in On the Sublime, uses the term “frigidity” to describe the emotional effect produced by such false grandeur. He means to convey both rhetorical and metaphysical coldness, as does Dante, who places the Devil in a block of ice at the Inferno’s gaudy center. As does Stanley Kubrick, too, who freezes the possessed Jack in the maze at the end of The Shining. And somewhere near the frozen middle of Hell we find the vampires, those who betrayed the strangers in their midst and preyed upon the lonely and the desperate. But now they only devour themselves. We are punished by our sins, not for them.

On a side note, and concerning the vampire’s many choristers, the opening scene of Lugosi’s Dracula features three armadillos. They wander about the castle and mind their own business, it seems, as wolves howl and spiders weave their webs. On how they got there we do not know, but the armadillos further confirm Longinus’s additional point that the ridiculous and the sublime bear a family resemblance.

What, then, are we to make of the vampires who sparkle and the vampires with souls? Or, if not in the direction of the dreamy, then in the theater of the absurd: Count Chocula, the mascot for a popular breakfast cereal, or the puppet Count von Count from the children’s program Sesame Street, who teaches viewers how to add and subtract—hitting all the numbers with his heavy Transylvanian accent. We might deem these manifestations too unserious to be taken seriously, but in fairness to the spirit of Count Chocula, perhaps something else happens here. Namely, we find more variations upon the culture-making effort to rehabilitate the demonic, and the almost demonic, as the case might be.

If the vampire could only find pleasure in chocolate, if he could laugh with children, if he could be loved like Bella loves Edward in The Twilight Saga, then maybe there is hope enough in the world for all of us. Indeed, maybe some vampires have grown tired of being vampires. That said, we do well to heed the old Transylvanian proverb, lest we over-empathize with the villains: the sane would do no good if they made themselves monsters to help the monsters.

A recent meme depicts the real Dracula in the company of Count Chocula, Count von Count, The Twilight Saga’s Edward, and several other less-than-scary princes of darkness, at which point Dracula laments that the vampires have lost their edge.

And, true, I have yet to comment on psychic vampires and flaming extroverts, which is an oversight to be sure. As a corrective, and by way of conclusion, I observe the following: for twenty-seven dollars, one can buy a beaker of psychic vampire repellent from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Store in Beverly Hills, California. The Paper Crane Apothecary makes the product, which—with an essential blend of rosemary, lavender, and juniper—protects against the fiends who corner people at parties. At present, however, shipping will be difficult: the website tells me “This item is sold out.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.