“I would never denigrate any civilized response of anyone for harm he may have done or misbehavior he may have engaged in,” writes Gorman Beauchamp in The American Scholar. “But apologies offered by people to their contemporaries for actions taken long before any of them were born strike me as vacuous and more than a little exhibitionistic.”
He asks:
[W]ho are we to apologize? We assume, as I suggested, something like absolute validity for our current values, which gives us a sense of moral superiority to the benighted past. Is it justified? Charles Sanders Pierce, the American pragmatist philosopher, once defined a belief as a disposition to act. That is, you believe what you do. And what have we done, we apologizers? The 20th century, argued the poet Louise Bogan, was the worst century so far. Isaiah Berlin likewise regarded it as “the most terrible century in Western history.” Even if, like most of my students, we relegated the first half of the 20th century, with the mass carnage and destruction of its two world wars, to the realm of ancient history, the evils of the last half century, well within the lifetime of most of us, appear quite sufficient unto the day. “Never again!” became the resolve after the revelation of the Nazi genocide, but the world has since witnessed, more or less passively, appalling crimes against humanity again and again: in China’s Cultural Revolution, in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the genocidal ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia, and today in Darfur.
Read it all. The section on reparations for slavery is probably the most controversial.