I read not long ago an advertisement by an American lawyer who (at an hourly rate of $650) provides seminars for companies on how to apologize without admitting legal liability. This allows a company to appear sensitive and progressive without going broke. Or, in the vernacular, to have one’s cake and eat it too.

The Anglican Church of Canada might have retained this American lawyer. Instead the church chose to apologize itself into bankruptcy, while feeding its own deep inner sense of self-contempt.

It remains to be seen what exactly will come out of our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So far it has been heard only pleading for more money. It is safe to predict that the final bill, when in due course it comes, will be astronomical.

The interesting thing about this worldwide pandemic of apologizing is that its common feature is the debasement of truth and language. Such apologies debase truth because the person proffering the apology is seldom the one who has committed any historical harm, as indeed the recipient is seldom one who suffered it. Such apologies debase language because, for an apology to be meaningful, contrition must precede regret. In these politically correct exercises, the person apologizing seldom has reason to be contrite, while the recipient has his sense of victimhood officially confirmed.

The plain fact is that such apologies are motivated not by contrition, but by political expediency. When Parliament unanimously apologized to native Canadians for residential schools, the apology was noteworthy not for its content but for its unanimity. Who can imagine unanimity among our politicians on anything remotely true?

Three centuries ago William Blake spotted the trend when he wrote:

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

Nor is our penchant for historical apologies unrelated to the feminization of our era. It is feelings, not thoughts, that are valued today. If I feel wronged, then I must have been wronged. If my life has not turned out as I had hoped, someone must be to blame and who better than the government?

Now, this is about the most inflammatory point one can make today. To our infantilized culture the act of apologizing is seen to be inherently virtuous; opposition to it is at best antediluvian, at worst racist. I learned this by personal experience. When I was still an Anglican I wrote quite often in opposition to the church’s decision to apologize itself into bankruptcy. I discovered that in progressive clerical circles I had committed an unpardonable sin. To call into question the church’s political agenda of “solidarity with our native brothers and sisters” put me beyond reclamation.

There remains, however, one glaring omission in our ostensibly progressive record of historical apologizing. I refer, of course, to those loyal individuals who for half a century and more have endured untold pain, humiliation and embarrassment as a consequence of an unshakeable attachment to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Where is their apology? Whither compensation? Perhaps we might be persuaded to forego an official apology. Instead a modest proposal: Brian Burke, Richard Peddie and the full board of directors of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment might be required to sit in the stocks some sunny afternoon outside the Air Canada Centre, there to be pelted by the long-suffering victims duly armed with rotten tomatoes.