that will never be repeated—that is, that the action was unintentional or unavoidable or that the harm it did was unforeseen. Not coincidentally, these are the excuses that harm-doers believe about every harm they do, which is one side of the Moralization Gap. If that doesn’t work, he can accept your side of the story by acknowledging that he did something wrong, sympathize with your suffering, cancel the harm with restitution, and commit his credibility to an assurance that he will not repeat it. In other words, he can apologize. All of these tactics, studies have shown, can mollify a rankled victim.
The problem with an apology, of course, is that it can be cheap talk. An insincere apology can be more enraging than none at all, because it compounds the first harm with a second one, namely a cynical ploy to avert revenge. The aggrieved party needs to peer into the perpetrator’s soul and see that any intention to harm again has been exorcised. The devices that implement this born-again harmlessness are the self-conscious emotions of shame, guilt, and embarrassment.212 The problem for the perpetrator is how to make those emotions visible. As with all signaling problems, the way to make a signal credible is to make it costly. When a subordinate primate wants to appease a dominant one, he will make himself small, avert his gaze, and expose vulnerable body parts. The equivalent gestures in humans are called cringing, groveling, or bowing and scraping. We may also hand over control of the conspicuous parts of our bodies to our autonomic nervous system, the involuntary circuitry that controls blood flow, muscle tone, and the activity of the glands. An apology that is certified by blushing, stammering, and tears is more credible than one that is cool, calm, and collected. Crying and blushing are particularly affecting because they are felt from the inside as well as displayed on the outside and hence generate common knowledge. The emoter knows that onlookers know his emotional state, the onlookers know he knows it, and so on. Common knowledge obliterates self-deception: the guilty party can no longer deny the uncomfortable truth.213
McCullough notes that our revenge modulators offer a route to public conflict reduction that can supplement the criminal justice system. The potential payoff can be enormous because the court system is expensive, inefficient, unresponsive to the victim’s needs, and in its own way violent, since it forcibly incarcerates a guilty perpetrator. Many communities now have programs of restorative justice, sometimes supplementing a criminal trial, sometimes replacing it. The perpetrator and victim, often accompanied by family and friends, sit down together with a facilitator, who gives the victim an opportunity to express his or her suffering and anger, and the perpetrator an opportunity to convey sincere remorse, together with restitution for the harm. It sounds like daytime TV, but it can set at least some repentant perpetrators on the straight and narrow, while satisfying their victims and keeping the whole dispute out of the slowly grinding wheels of the criminal justice system.
On the international scene, the last two decades have seen an explosion of apologies by political leaders for crimes committed by their governments. The political scientist Graham Dodds has compiled “a fairly comprehensive chronological listing of major political apologies” through the centuries. His list begins in the year 1077, when “Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV apologized to Pope Gregory VII for church-state conflicts by standing barefoot in the snow for three days.”214 History had to wait more than six hundred years for the next one, when Massachusetts apologized in 1711 to the families of the victims of the Salem witch trials. The first apology of the 20th century, Germany’s admission to having started World War I in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, is perhaps not the best advertisement for the genre. But the spate of apologies in the last two decades bespeak a new era in the self-presentation of states. For the first time in history, the leaders of nations have elevated the ideals of historical truth and international reconciliation above self-serving claims of national infallibility and rectitude. In 1984 Japan sort of apologized for occupying Korea when Emperor Hirohito told the visiting South Korean president, “It is regrettable that there was an unfortunate period in this century.” But subsequent decades saw a string of ever-more-forthcoming apologies from other Japanese leaders. In the ensuing decades Germany apologized for the Holocaust, the United States apologized for interning Japanese Americans, the Soviet Union apologized for murdering