A changing of the guard

Just found out from my day job that Marc Okrand is retiring in two weeks. He's one of the billing/accounting/payroll guys, and he's been with the company around 34 years, pretty much since the beginning. 100% of my interactions with him are through e-mail, and the e-mails go like this:

Him: Romie would you please sign off on this program you forgot to sign off on so that we can process it for billing.

Me: Ack, sorry. Done. Sorry about that.

But my interactions with him also go like this:

Hey it's Marc Okrand! Hey! Hey! He wrote Klingon, and here he is sending me an e-mail! Hey! Hey Marc Okrand! Hey!

I have of course never said this to him, nor has he mentioned Klingon or any aspect of conlanging to me, because we are professionals and we have a job to do that doesn't involve Klingon. (Although if we ever did have to caption Klingon, we would be covered.) If we all went around Trekking out all the time, nothing would ever get done. Some of us already occasionally come to the office in Starfleet dress, and perhaps make comparisons between voice regonition software and the Enterprise, and perhaps have some ideas about how our committment to diversity and our mission to improve accessibility are in line with the vision of Gene Roddenberry - but we have to maintain a line.

Anyway, work is about to get a little less glamorous, if you consider it glamorous to occasionaly get e-mails politely letting you know you have accidentally inconvenienced the guy who wrote Klingon. Which I do.

The Non-Apology

Seems like I've heard or read a lot of santimonious non-apology this week. Don't get me wrong: I myself am bad at apologizing. I have this tendency, when I feel like I've messed up and done something horrible to someone, to be so horrified that I conclude there is no way a simple apology could fix it, so instead of burdening the other person with a rehashing of the late unpleasantness, I resolve to gradually rebuild trust through a series of deeds that reveal my true values and loving nature. Amazingly, this looks almost identical to pretending like I haven't done anything wrong. I know, right?

But sanctimonious non-apology is something else. You'll recognize it immediately, because although I'm sure that everyone who does it thinks it's individual and specific to a single incident, it doesn't really vary. In so many words (usually a lot of words), the sanctimonious non-apology goes like this:

"Somebody is mad at me for hurting them, and they've said mean things about it like that I'm a person who did something wrong. But I am a good person! And nobody is perfect! And I am so so so so so sad and isn't that punishment enough?"

The key thing to note here is that the sanctimonius non-apology is not addressed, at any point, to the person or group that got hurt. The sanctimonious non-apology is instead addressed to the public, to show how the non-apologizer is the real victim and the obvious person with whom to identify.

Notably, the non-apologizer usually comes from an empowered group and the accuser comes from a disempowered group - Orson Scott Card and gay people, Ryan Braun or Lance Armstrong and people they lied to and sometimes had fired, Paula Deen and black and low-wage workers, numerous politicians and numerous screwed-over constituents, bosses sexually harrassing employees - the list goes on.

So there's a subtext, likely invisible to the non-apologizer but very visible to the wronged party, which says "hey, I'm the one people like. I'm the one people should be identifying with. You're the one causing problems, and they're weird problems, and the real problem is that you're hypersensitive and don't get how the world works."

Meanwhile, there is a major deflection away from whatever the publicly condemned behavior was - some combination of pretending it did not happen at all (Braun), asserting that we should all put it in the past even if it's still going on (Card), reducing a more global complaint to one incident (Deen), and trying to shift attention to other people (Armstrong). Again, the people who were hurt are not mentioned, unless their hurts can be characterized as imaginary (as pressure they put on themselves, or ways they felt insulted rather than were insulted). Because the non-apology isn't about those people: it's about the public, the ones who are supposed to be on the sanctimonious non-apologizer's side.

As I've said, I'm big on not apologizing. I'm not only big on not apologizing because I'm bad at it; I'm also big on not apologizing because most of the time I'm pretty sure I'm right and can tell you exactly why. I am combatative and confrontational and cocky, and there is not a time when I'm going to conciliate just to reach consensus. The degree to which I refuse to back down is ludicrous. I will blow up jobs and relationships; I will tank projects; I will go on hunger strikes. I will make birthday parties really uncomfortable.

I will defend, defend, defend myself. I will talk nonstop forever about how right I am. Loudly and in detail. To stop hearing about it, you will pretty much have to either avoid the subject from then on or avoid me completely.

Thing is, if you do avoid me completely, fair enough.

Thing is, what I won't do is demand that you and everyone we know credit me as though I've apologized and agree that I wasn't wrong in the first place, nor will I act aggrieved when you're unfriendly later. And that's what the sanctimonious non-apology does. And it's everywhere.

I wonder a bit whether the researchers who found that people feel empowered by apologizing and empowered by not apologizing have looked into whether people feel doubly good if they feel they have accomplished both at the same time.