I’ve been trying to be more honest. It’s not easy.
The social lie, the front, the slight prevarication these are the glue that make modern society function. We lie by omission all the time, particularly at work where very often our the personality, the face, we present to our co-workers is but a shadow of what we’re really like.
We tell little white lies to get out of social engagements because it’s just so much easier to say “I have other plans” than it is to say “I’m under slept and overworked and cranky and when I’m cranky even though you’re my friend I find you tiresome so I would rather pluck my eyes out with a dull spoon than have drinks with you tonight.”
In the modern era we have also mastered the art of the non-apology. When someone says “I’m sorry you feel that way.” you definitely haven’t received an apology and chances are that person feels absolutely no remorse. Cracked.com, believe it or not, has a fairly decent article on 6 types of non-apologies which include:
- the “Mistakes were made” – typically the province of someone in a leadership position who knows he has the ultimate responsibility but either didn’t actually do anything or let the organization go completely unsupervised, which is an error of leadership in and of itself;
- what I like to call the “pre-apology” – usually followed by the word “but,” as in “I’m sorry if this offends anyone but…” [insert highly offensive statement here]; often capped off with the phrase “I’m just sayin’.”;
- and my personal favorite the “I’m sorry you feel that way” – this one cleverly puts all the blame for any hard or hurt feelings on the person expressing those feelings and attributes nothing to the actions of the person doing the “apologizing.”
The existence of the non-apology shouldn’t be at all surprising; Merriam-Webster’s primary definition of apology is “a formal justification : defense.” Think about that: a formal justification or defense. We don’t get to responsibility until the second listing “an admission of error or discourtesy accompanied by an expression of regret.” It’s not until the tertiary definition do we even scrape the idea that an apology is a poor substitute for actually not acting like a jerk in the first place.
What all non-apologies have in common is lack of genuine remorse over the unintended effects of your actions, and they must be unintended whether through thoughtlessness or through a lack of understanding of the person receiving the apology. I can’t believe all non-apologies are the result of intended consequences combined with the apologizer’s need to either save face or maintain peace. Why would someone purposely hurt someone else and then pretend to apologize for it?
The concept of amends grows out of the addiction recovery movement (steps 8 and 9 of the famous 12, actually) and takes the apology one step further. Merriam-Webster defines amends as “compensation for a loss or injury.” According to Hazelden, which ought to know these things, amends do the apology one better by attempting to literally apply the dictionary definition of amends and have the person who committed the offense provide some sort of compensation. Their essay on amends provides for a bit of moral wiggle room for instances when attempting to make amends would actually do more damage than good and while I’m not entirely comfortable with the concept of “indirect amends” philosophically I can see how it might be possible if they were carried out with the right intentions rather than used a crutch to avoid the pain of having to take responsibility for wrong doing.
It’s usually pretty easy to know when an apology is due, whether you’re supposed to be giving it or receiving it. Snap at your spouse, stand a friend up for drinks, sleep with your brother’s wife, leave your nephew in the car while you spend six hours drinking in a bar, these are all situations in which the need to make an apology or amends is pretty obvious. What’s hard are the times when the person wanting the apology doesn’t speak up about wanting one.
I suspect that I’m in one of those situations now with a friend. We used to be close but lately our friendship has devolved into random comments on Facebook. While I know social media fosters weak ties, and some sociologists theorize actually makes those weak ties stronger, for me the transition between a close friendship (strong tie) and a not so close friendship (weak tie, aka “Facebook friends”) has been especially painful not just because of the change, or the changed nature of the relationship, but because when you’re the person who probably should be apologizing but aren’t sure for what there is no good way to find out. Unless you can figure it out on your own, you’re doomed to just let the relationship die, and that is eternally and unnecessarily sad.
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