My own theory is that as long as Catholic leaders (and civil officials) are not willing to apologize for the innumerable violations of the natural law which they condone today—by which, of course, I mean all the sins that are now fashionable—I do not see a great deal of merit in apologizing for past sins that were fashionable in a previous day, but which no longer constitute a temptation in either mainstream Catholic or secular culture now. Moreover, I believe it is essential to recognize that the very same deficiencies in moral judgment express themselves in different specific acts as cultural interests shift over time.
This demonstrates the complete uselessness of moral relativism. When we look closely, we find a continuum of abuse; it’s just that different abuses are held to be right and good today as compared with yesterday, and that will change yet again tomorrow. In other words, what the dominant culture yesterday thought right and good is now condemned as abominable for no better reason than that the same faulty moral outlook has more or less randomly shifted to favor as right and good a different set of horrendous practices today. Consider the following continuum:
Large numbers of people in the dominant culture in a previous era approved of slavery, or at least thought it a necessary evil and so did not work against it. Nobody would dare maintain that position now. It is easy to apologize, on behalf of the dead, for slavery.
Large numbers of people in the dominant culture in a previous era approved of forcible assimilation of “inferior” native peoples, or at least thought it a necessary evil and so did not work against it. Nobody would dare maintain that position now. It is easy to apologize, on behalf of the dead, for this sort of “colonialism”.
Large numbers of people in the dominant culture in a previous era approved of forcible removal of babies born to the poor so that they could be placed with richer parents, or at least thought it a necessary evil, and so did not work against it. But now we are getting closer to our own ever-shifting moral outlook, for this tends to be handled through surrogate motherhood and financially-arranged adoptions today, indicating that we have not quite entirely abandoned the attitudes attendant on this practice. But our differences in technique still make it easy to apologize, on behalf of the dead, for what we might call plutocratic infant management.
So now, in this litany, things are becoming uncomfortable. Some aspects of what a previous era generally approved still strikes fairly close to home, such as the widespread use of medical “advances” to restrict the number of children bred by the poor; the exploitation of the natural resources and/or the environment in poor countries by the dominant Western interests; and many other practices which make our own lives more comfortable and which we notice only when convenient alternatives become available.
And so we morph into our present set of unnatural vices which also cause constant suffering to those incapable of resistance. We come into the full-blown ideological redefinitions of the nature of men and women and the relations between them, as well as the ideological fiddling-for-personal-convenience with the structure of the human family—both of which are dominant forms of the exploitation of children, not to mention the adults these patterns tear to pieces.
We come also to the ceaseless indoctrination of children in the government schools of nearly every wealthy nation on earth—an indoctrination which dwarfs that inflicted on indigenous peoples. We come, in other words, face to face with the horrors of our current situation in which marriage, family, sex and gender have all been degraded and destroyed, in which children have their psychological and spiritual stability undermined in the name of non-existent liberties, in which new forms of exploitation are invented almost daily, and in which innumerable social ills spiral upward along with drug use, self-harm and suicide.
My point is that this is the same old viciousness masquerading once again as virtue, and most people would rather be caught dead than apologize for it in the moment of its ascendancy.
So, no, I don’t care much for apologies for past sins that are found abhorrent today by those who have simply moved on to defend and propagate new-found sins arising from exactly the same source.
The worst evils are typically committed not by extraordinarily evil people but by ordinary people who have been caught up in the culturally-dominant banality of evil in their own time and place. The worst evils are typically committed, in other words, by the general acceptance of culturally-dominant lies as truisms.
. . .
Show me a person who has no rational capacity to formulate serious concepts of good and evil that go beyond the prejudices of the dominant culture, and I’ll show you a person who is heavily supportive of a whole series of grave evils that just happen to be embraced by that culture. Show me a person with no rule of life but what fashion generates based on the personal desires of our elites—no rule of life other than what “everybody who matters” says is acceptable or not acceptable—and I will show you someone who has no way to recognize and confess his own sins, let alone the sins of those who have come before.
So here is my advice to spokespersons: Work to understand the Good and foster it now; don’t apologize for what your stupid forbears did. That’s a never-ending cycle in which evils are very conveniently condemned only when they have ceased to be popular. If you don’t make a start toward the True and the Good in absolute terms now—if your morality changes from decade to decade with every cultural shift—then your descendants will surely be offering apologies for you which are just as shallow and glib and meaningless as your own apologies are today.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
