The Unanswered Question of Personhood

Posted on April 19, 2006 in Ettiquette Reflections

The leader of the seminar stands next to a laptop. A finger presses a button. A Powerpoint chart comes up, with a new series of features. Features to be plugged into the head, committed to memory, chanted inside the skull’s cathedral until they become second nature. “Stop apologizing,” they say. “Stop apologizing.” So the unthinking members of the audience go forth and practice this. They turn mean, walk all over people. A few people remain in their seats, fighting the simple-minded formula. “But what if I am wrong?” “You’re never wrong,” the message might come back. Or the instructor just won’t have a coherent remedy for the obvious flaw in the wellness program.

Apologizing is the great untrodden frontier of self-help programs. Many intelligent people just can’t bring themselves to do it, either, because they think they’re giving in to mediocrity. This behavior only leads to self-destruction and, worse, if they attract disciples, societal destruction. The Fundamentalist and the fervent Humanist can be every bit as stubborn, every bit as unwilling to examine themselves because each is sure that S/He is Blameless.

I found a self-help book that nicely addresses the problem and offers a decent formula for living one’s life. Buried about halfway through Mary-Elaine Jacobsen’s non-bestseller Liberating Everyday Genius is a series of bulleted points that I think are worth sharing with you:

• Honor good intentions and expect error; separate maliciousness from mistake.
• When you’ve said or done something mean-spirited that has insulted or harmed someone else, accept the regret, make amends, and use it as a catalyst for growth, resolving to do better next time.
• Appraise yourself honestly and humanely according to realistic criteria, remembering that no matter how learned gifted people become, few of us are like Solomon or a savant endowed with unflagging wisdom.
• Discard the myth of starting over, since history cannot be rewritten by believing that if you were given a second chance, this time around you would act with the benefit of all the knowledge since gained.
• Surrender to the reality that although you may accomplish a great deal and perhaps achieve eminence, some goals and possible contributions must be sacrificed in favor of others, for not everything that captures the gifted mind and sense of duty can be realized by one individual in one lifetime.

This blog has often examined the rules for apology. Out of personal experience, I would note that you don’t have to apologize to someone for something you did to someone else. Think this is odd and unnecessary? It happened to me.

I started this some months ago. I didn’t finish it because of the pain of the story to come. Please don’t taunt me into sharing it. That is what they did.