Historical apologies

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 159 - 160.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Historical apologies

AT THE TIME OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese parliament considered apologizing to the United States, but decided not to. Meanwhile, President Bush apologized to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II. In 1992, Spain is supposed to apologize to the Jews who were expelled en masse from that country 500 years ago.

These collective apologies for historical actions taken by others may be seen as grand moral gestures by some, but in fact they exacerbate the already dangerous tendency to obliterate the crucial concept of personal responsibility. What possible meaning does it have, either logically or morally, for someone to apologize for what someone else did to a third party?

Are all people of Slavic ancestry to apologize to all Jews for the centuries of brutal anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe? And are all Jews to apologize to all Slavs for those Jewish slave-traders who, in earlier centuries, sold Slavs into bondage from Spain to the Ottoman Empire? What about all the atrocities of the Christians against the Moslems, or the Moslems against the Christians, during their centuries of warfare?

The list could go on and on. Historic wrongs can be found all over the globe. In fact, much of history consists of those wrongs. If all of us started apologizing to each other for all the wrongs of history, the noise would be deafening.

Many of those who emphasize the wrongs of history have a highly selective list of those wrongs, geared toward contemporary ideological politics. Thus, the wrongs of European imperialists against various Third World nations are to be kept alive as enduring grievances and—more to the point—enduring entitlements to largesse. However, the wrongs of any of these nations against each other, or against their own peoples, are passed over in silence, no matter how much worse they might have been.

Sometimes the argument is that we need to correct the contemporary effects of past wrongs. Seldom is any evidence either asked for or given to show that we know what those effects are. It is certainly not easy to know.

In many parts of the world, groups clearly mistreated historically have emerged better off educationally, economically, and socially than those who mistreated them. The Chinese minorities in various Southeast Asian countries have seldom had equal rights, but they have typically risen from initial poverty to a position where they are better off economically than the majority populations of Malaysia, Indonesia, or other countries in the region.

Much the same story could be told of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent who settled in East Africa or in Fiji, or of immigrants from Lebanon in West Africa, Italians in Argentina, and many others around the world. In a number of countries and a number of periods of history, it has been common for particular groups to take over substandard land left idle by others as "waste land"—and to become more successful farmers than others around them who were farming more fertile land.

We have barely scratched the surface in understanding why some groups prosper, even under bad conditions, or why others fail to utilize much better opportunities. Indeed, a whole tendentious vocabulary has arisen to obscure or bury such questions. Those who fail are said to have been "excluded" or denied "access." Those who succeed are said to have been "privileged." Again, evidence is neither asked nor given. This formula leaves out achievement—or even luck.

Would anyone (other than ideologues or intellectuals) say that Babe Ruth had more "opportunity" to hit home runs, when in fact he was the most walked batter in history?

This strange way of talking is not confined to a few fringe ideologues. It has caught on across the spectrum, and is now part of the mainstream mindset, at least among academics. Retired Harvard President Derek Bok, for example, said that to apply the same admissions standards to minority students as to others would be to "exclude them from the university." This was said more than a century after blacks began attending Harvard, entering and graduating without double standards during most of that time.

Much contemporary discussion of historic guilt is more than moral mush-headedness. Some of it is exploited quite skillfully by people whose careers depend on it. A whole class of "diversity consultants" or race relations specialists has come into existence to promote guilt among students, faculty and administrators at leading colleges and universities across the country.

At the University of Wisconsin, for example, an itinerant race relations specialist evoked "the repentant sobs of white students" at one of his workshops, which promoted the theme that virtually all whites were racists. Similar themes and similar techniques have been widely used from large universities like Harvard and Tulane to small colleges like Oberlin and Whitman.

Achieving justice in our own time is a task that taxes the resources of even the best societies. We should leave the past in the past.

_____________________________________________________________________________

12 May 2024