An Apology is a Phoenix

In the skeptical community, people have been talking about apologies. We’ve been working on being open about when we’re wrong, valuing the apology, and discussing what constitutes a good or a bad apology. What is more fascinating to me than these practical discussions is the question of how apologies actually work. What is it about saying two words that can change the nature of a harmful act? What are we doing when we apologize?

 

The place to start might be when you should apologize. In general, an apology is expected when you harmed someone and you could have acted differently, particularly if you harmed them intentionally. An apology usually implies that you will change your behavior in the future and that you can see you should have acted differently. Oftentimes we might say “I’m sorry” just to express sadness or sympathy. That is not the same as an apology. This is the type of thing you might do with an accident, although if the accident is bad enough you may apologize with the intent of improving your behavior in the future, especially if you were reckless or careless.

 

In college, I had a professor who likened apologies to the lifecycle of a phoenix: you kill off a small part of yourself and are reborn better and stronger. I think that this conception of an apology is important: an apology is more than simply saying words. It is a speech act: you are doing something with words. You can threaten someone with words, you can question someone with words, and similarly you can apologize. So what are you doing when you apologize?

 

The image of a phoenix is particularly pertinent to an apology, because a good apology is one in which you identify a piece of yourself that you want to kill off or change into something new. An apology that truly understands what you have done wrong and seeks to right the wrong will want to distance the new self from the self who did the harm. Each of us spends our whole lives choosing which parts of ourselves to cultivate and which parts to cull off. When we apologize, we clearly identify a type of behavior or attitude that we want to kill off. When we do that, we open the way for a new behavior that is more positive and more in line with our values.

 

What I find the most interesting about this is that it helps to explain why apologies are so painful and often difficult. We have to clearly identify something about ourselves that we don’t like and that we want to change, openly get rid of it, and then somehow try to come out with new life and growth from the experience. It hurts to change, it hurts to realize that you dislike a part of yourself, and it’s painful to try to remove something. The very image of the phoenix is one of violence towards the self, but it also explains why apologies can be a great thing; only by burning away the mess can you turn into something better.

 

And when we use this image to understand what someone is doing in an apology, we begin to understand why it holds the power that it does. When we’re talking about our identities and how we form our identities, the most we have are metaphors, symbols, and words. No one can see our identities or our personalities, and so the things we do with words are often the most important. When we apologize, we are doing something to ourselves even more than we are doing something for another person: in front of witnesses, we are killing off one piece of ourselves and committing to the growth of another piece. We are allowing others to see a process of change in ourselves, which is something personal and difficult. The intimacy of an apology is something that is rarely discussed, but I believe it plays an important role. We could go through the same process of recognizing that we are wrong and committing to change our behavior without telling anyone, however the fact that we do it in front of others and as reparation for the harms that we’ve done makes it a kind of justice.

 

In the atheist community we don’t like to talk much about the power of metaphors and symbolic acts but let’s be real for a minute: symbols mean something. People wouldn’t hold on to them so hard if they didn’t mean things to us and if symbolic acts didn’t mean things. And so the symbolic act of an apology does more than simply let someone know you’re sorry and sad for what’s happened. It illustrates to them that you’re willing to distance yourself from someone you used to be, perhaps even to the point of destroying that part of yourself. Apologies are powerful symbols.

Metaphors: Privilege and Spoons

There’s a thing in the disabled community called the spoon metaphor. This was developed by a woman with lupus as a way to explain how her disease affects her, even when it’s not visible. While I don’t have a physical disability, I do have mental illness to deal with, and so sometimes I feel more comfortable explaining things to people through this kind of metaphor.

There are other metaphors like this, for privilege and for being able. Metaphors about difficulty setting, smoke, and even My Little Pony. The most basic is a bases metaphor: when you have privilege you start at first or second base, and when you don’t have privilege you start at home and have to work harder to get all the way around. I’ve found metaphors can be extremely helpful, both for explaining things to other people and for reframing things in my own life. One of the most important things that metaphors can do for us is to help us move away from charged language (like privilege) and move into a place where we can start to assess the parallels of situations instead.

In general, we think in metaphors, often unconsciously. Most of the abstract language we use began as metaphor. The metaphors we use can change how we approach things (those who view time as linear often approach their lives differently than those who view it as cyclical), and metaphors can help us lay down different paths in our mind that are almost like intellectual shortcuts.

Each of these metaphors gives us different aspects of privilege. They highlight different things, whether it be starting with less resources as someone who is not privileged, or having something to help you along when you do have privilege, or the fact that you don’t notice privilege when you have it. That’s one of the things I love about metaphors: each one brings something new to the table. Of course things means that we always need to incorporate a variety of metaphors in order to have a well rounded understanding of any concept.

I feel that privilege is a place where intersubjectivity is extremely important, and all of these metaphors together highlight it. I’m a skeptical type person and run in many atheist and skeptical circles. Often in these circles I hear cries of “objectivity!” shouted out about how we should approach the world. If something can’t be objectively verified, then it’s useless. These have always rubbed me the wrong way, since true objectivity is pretty damn impossible (you’ll never escape your own perspective, or the distortion your own senses create: we’re always trapped in our own subjectivity), and I generally prefer intersubjectivity, which is the process of incorporating as many subjective viewpoints as possible to come closer and closer to objectivity.

Privilege is a beautiful place to do this. Privilege is an experiential thing, just like discrimination. These metaphors point towards the experience of being aware of someone else’s privilege and your own lack of privilege. This is not something you can measure, or objectively point to, but rather we can build up a picture of it through intersubjectivity. If we each try to take a stab at defining how we see and experience privilege, then we can add more and more pieces to how we view it, build it up into a more cohesive whole that has dimension and depth. Metaphors are a beautiful way to do this because narratives can’t give us concrete elements to focus on. Metaphors pull certain pieces of the experience and highlight them. So each individual might have a preferred metaphor that rings true to them, and whose particular elements embody and sum up their experience. These give us more discrete elements to combine.

I think that the importance of metaphorical thinking is lost in many other places. We forget that it allows us to view our knowledge in a different way and allows us to highlight certain things that can be brought together. The importance of multiple metaphors is certainly not highlighted. I think that these could be important tools in science, in politics, or even in pop culture. I wish more people would use their metaphors.