For several years, Americans Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy have been running a website, Sorrywatch, in which they rate public apologies for their effectiveness. Now they have expanded their purported wisdom into a very long book: Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case For Good Apologies. As I started reading, I was already vaguely aware of what pop culture would insist makes a good apology. You should claim responsibility for your action; avoid vague and weaselly phrases; show some understanding of the effect of what you did; don’t make excuses; and so on. Such therapeutic banalities have been knocking round the internet for decades, beloved of psychology blogs and adolescent girls looking for new ways to criticise each other on Tumblr. Essentially, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry reiterates this sort of received wisdom at great length, embellishing it with cherry-picked social science and a lot of heavy-handed irony and whimsy.

The book issues highly specific rules about when and how to say sorry. For instance, you shouldn’t use the words “Obviously”, “Regrettable”, “Already”, “Dialogue”, “Alleged”, “Positivity”, “Jesus”, “Journey”, “Self-discovery”, “If”, “But”, “Context” or “Unfortunate”. There are also rules about how and when to forgive someone who is saying sorry to you. Various celebrity apologies are scrutinised for flaws, including attempts by actress Florence Pugh to apologise for cultural appropriation (quite good, the authors pronounce); and by David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz for his serial-killing spree in the summer of 1977 (not good enough, apparently).

The background moral framework here is the standard-issue US bourgeois liberal one: transwomen are women, men are dogs, white people don’t listen hard enough. The book reads as if written by a pair of loquacious hippy aunts, tipsily cornering their nephew at a wedding to give him a lecture on life skills. There is a lot of spry perkiness. Acerbic asides disrupt the flow of almost every paragraph: “Yes, if we hold ourselves to a standard of utter crystalline perfection, we’ll always fail, even if we’re actually kind of superb. (Which we are! And we bet you are too!)” At one point, philosopher J.L. Austin’s concept of performative utterance is shortened to “perf uttos” because, as the authors put it, “we’re jaunty like that”.

As these examples perhaps suggest, the writing gets a bit wearing after a while. The authors tend to use an ex cathedra “we” — “We at SorryWatch believe in education and redemption” — except when they use the third person to pick out one of them in particular for a relatable anecdote (“Those of us who do struggle with depression, anxiety, and guilt — Marjorie raises her hand to you, reader, in a cheery, antidepressant-fuelled wave! …”).  They also spend a lot of time inventing bad apologies, some of which are so bizarrely specific and dream-like in quality that they beg for psychoanalysis. For instance:

“Consider all the ways you may have caused offence. If you grab someone’s Japanese naval officer’s sabre to open a stubborn jar of pickles and snap the tip off, well. You broke their expensive sabre. You also showed contempt for their collection. Maybe they care that you demonstrated disrespect for the Japanese Navy, maybe they don’t. But you need to take these matters into account when apologising. Simply offering to share the pickles may not be enough.”

As I waded through the book, feeling increasingly unforgiving about the prose style, I began to ask myself what the real rules of a good apology are. There seems to me to be only one: you should feel genuine remorse, and that should be your primary motive for saying you’re sorry. Whatever else an apology is, it at least should be a sincere communication between you and the person you wronged, offered because you regret what you did and wish to acknowledge your remorse to the person concerned. Weirdly though, recognition of this basic rule renders most of the argument in Sorry, Sorry, Sorry beside the point, and may even undermine the project of the book as a whole.

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For one thing, Ingall and McCarthy seem to want to motivate the reader to make apologies for reasons that apparently have little to do with remorse. They tell us that apologising makes you feel good. It is beneficial for your health. It helps in “trust-building processes”. It stops people suing you. (Forgiving is talked up in similar terms: “One 2014 review of 54 studies of ‘forgiveness intervention’ found that such interventions help people increase their feelings of hopefulness and decrease their feelings of anxiety, depression, and anger”.)  Yet to go through the rituals of apologising, motivated only by the thought of some separate personal or social good that might come out of the process, is surely to undermine the grounds of the action. You’re supposed to do it because you feel sorry, not because you have your eye on some other benefit.

That the book’s authors don’t really understand this is betrayed by the fact they seem to think there’s no big difference between interpersonal and corporate apologies. They write: “The rules are the same for institutions as for individuals: Say you’re sorry, name the thing you did, show you understand its impact, don’t make excuses or blame others, make things right to the degree possible, make reparations to the degree possible.” But corporations don’t feel remorse. And obviously, an apology launched into the public domain by a company for the benefit of onlookers is purely transactional, and primarily aimed at reputation-saving rather than the honest expression of a regretful state of mind. The only reasons the “rules” for corporate apologies look superficially the same as for interpersonal ones is because a simulacrum of remorse is being attempted, which depends on trying to grasp what a sincere apology would look like in the paradigm case, and mimicking that. When CEOs offer desperately contrite monologues to camera (for instance, here’s the boss of Domino’s Pizza, apologising for a video of his employees going viral in which they put cheese up their nose and farted on the salami), it’s authentic fear of shareholders you can hear in their voices, and not much else.

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Once it’s recognised that an apology should be genuinely remorseful, a further difference with the central claim of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry swiftly emerges, concerning whether the words of an apology must fit a certain linguistic form or else be judged deficient. Ingall and McCarthy certainly think so, and spend most of the book describing various dos and don’ts. They insist that good apologies never contain phrases such as “sorry if…” or “sorry but…”; should be in an active not passive voice; should always include an explanation of why whatever it was won’t happen again; should not “centre” the offender too dramatically; and so on.

But requiring strict forms of words on pain of failure seem to me to profoundly misunderstand the nature of an apologetic act of communication. If the main point is to express something meaningful and intensely personal to another human being, then ticking off a checklist of phrases you read in a book in the right order is likely to be a hindrance rather than a help. And in real life, how one speaker expresses remorse can differ wildly from another, depending on interaction with their respective background characters and personality traits — yet both can be equally meaningful. A mumbled and grudging “sorry if you feel hurt”, uttered by someone intensely proud who finds it overwhelmingly humiliating to face and admit his own flaws, should be worth just as much to the perceptive listener as a robotic parroting of approved phrases. More, even. “Bad” apologies reveal the deep humanity of a person — and in forgiveness, being put in touch with the offender’s humanity is precisely what matters, isn’t it?

But perhaps this book’s biggest flaw is its failure to appreciate that genuine regret can’t be compelled. If your goal is to allow for spontaneous feelings of remorse to be generated, then exerting heavy social pressure to apologise is counterproductive. After all, it’s supposed to be their moral compass doing the navigating, not yours.

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Of course, if the goal of demanding an apology from someone is rather to humiliate them, or to take revenge, or to wield power for the purposes of social control, such pressure may work very well. This was amply illustrated during the bloodletting of the #MeToo moment, when various public apologies were dragged out of humiliated men, only to be automatically judged by their accusers as wholly inadequate anyway. Some of those apologies turned out to be for things that hadn’t even happened. Even at the time, though, nobody seriously thought every apology being offered was sincere. Sincerity was not the point of this particular ritual, and nor was forgiveness.

Though Sorry, Sorry, Sorry gives an occasional nod to the idea that remorse can’t be forced, I don’t really think the authors mean it. For along with the associated website, the whole book can be understood as an extended attempt to cajole, pressurise, and mock the reader into giving apologies she otherwise might not make, in words she otherwise might not use.  Considered as a way of keeping intimidated readers compliantly in line with contemporary social mores, the entire project may very well be considered a success. But in terms of increasing interpersonal understanding and forgiveness in today’s pitiless moral climate, it seems to me to do precisely the opposite.

Pugh recalled how she hadn’t heard of “cultural appropriation” until a friend informed her of its supposed meaning and “the history and heartbreak over how when black girls do it they’re mocked and judged, but when white girls for it, it’s only then perceived as cool”.

After acknowledging her “white fragility” and “white privilege”, Pugh expressed how “truly sorry” she was for the “offence” she caused and “profusely” apologised that it “took this long” for her to realise her transgression.

If you are au courant with the latest trends in pop culture, then you would know that Florence Pugh has not been the only celebrity embroiled in charges of appropriating and defiling the culture of ‘marginalised’ groups. Over the past decade, figures such as Justin Bieber, Madonna, Katy Perry, Scarlett Johansson and Jamie Oliver have all been accused of being “culture vultures”. Recently, The Simpsons have announced they will no longer use white actors to voice non-white characters. Other white voice actors have recused themselves from voicing black characters on cartoon shows, saying they should be voiced by black actors instead.

White people aren’t the only ones who have been condemned for such cultural transgressions. Beyoncé was accused of “appropriating” from Indian culture because she wore a rather glitzy sari for Coldplay’s “Hymn For the Weekend”. The social media editor of Marie Claire lambasted Rihanna for allegedly “appropriating” the Chola aesthetic from Mexican culture for donning thin eyebrows — even though thin eyebrows have been used across the world, from southern Africa to 1920s New York.

One would be wrong to assume this nonsense is simply consigned to the absurd summits of celebrity culture, however — it’s trickling down to the whole of our cultural discourse. For instance, in 2018, American student Kenziah Daum was subjected to a vicious social media backlash, simply because she wore a traditional Qipao to a Prom night. In 2019, Indigenous musicians in Canada were at each other’s throats over the Cree artist Cikwes’s use of a traditional Inuit singing technique, because according to Inuit “spokespeople” she did not have “permission to… take something that isn’t hers and make an album, and put it on iTunes, and have it for sale”.

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“Cultural appropriation” is an academic concept that originates from the esoteric realm of post-colonial and decolonial studies, but has now become a pop cultural phenomenon and a mainstream political issue.

The argument is that exploitation of the cultures of colonised peoples by colonial structures is analogous to theft and plunder, like the lawless seizure of land, artefacts and treasures. As currently interpreted, it is also a form of erasure, emotional violence against the colonised subject, rendering them invisible, to cement total subjugation and control over all spheres of their subordinated existence.

Too often the argument has nothing to do with anti-racism or a critique of colonialism, but identitarian gatekeeping — the enforcement of customs of etiquette over who can use a particular cultural form in any particular context. This “cultural insiderism”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy, empowers self-appointed guardians to establish a cordon sanitaire around cultures and appropriate the right of license, hence entrench their own social power.

An irony of this argument is that most opponents of cultural appropriation proclaim, often radically, to be for diversity, immigration and multiculturalism, yet they are same people who bitterly resent the actual results of such a symbiosis. Tribally marking off permission rights over who can use what cultural form, or whose “voice”, and in what way is puerile.  It attacks the main benefits of living in a modern, culturally diverse, cosmopolitan society: freedom of expression, cultural innovation and experimentation and expansion of one’s horizons and liberation of the imagination.

No culture is pure, uncontaminated, hermetically sealed, existing purely within its own universe. “The history of all cultures is a history of cultural borrowing,” Edward Said observed, and that Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism, has often been invoked by the culture warriors to bolster their arguments is something he would be aghast at.

This point is effortlessly made about European or Western culture, but it is also true of non-white cultures. Jazz is commonly thought of as invented by black Americans and appropriated by white America — yet, jazz itself appropriated from European classical music. That was cultural appropriation par excellence and we’re all the better for it.

Cultural forms can certainly be utilised in a racist and exploitative manner, the sordid history of blackface minstrel performances being an example. Black music historically has been derided as “race music” and demonised for being violent, salacious and primitive, while white artists were showered with praise when they play similar music. So it is true that intercourse of cultures doesn’t always take place on equal or equitable terms, but can be shaped by racism, inequality and oppression.

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However, as Amiri Baraka once observed, the issue here is not that of cultural appropriation at all, but of material exploitation: “The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie [Johnson], I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture because that’s normal.”

The ubiquity of campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal how social struggles, anti-racism for instance, are increasingly framed in cultural terms, rather than political ones; how cultural radicalism has mutated from promoting cultural liberty and freedom of expression to cultural restrictionism; how politics itself has been culturalised, hence why the recent statue wars and the removal of “unwoke” TV episodes have dominated mainstream political discussion over the past few weeks.

A recurring motif one detects in the campaigns against cultural appropriation is a primitive and moralistic hostility to capitalism and consumerism. Often the outrage is over the commercialisation and commodification of cultural forms, that in turn are mass produced and sold for a profit. According to these cultural “radicals” this process is abuse. Cultures becomes diluted, reduced to musical tropes and clothing styles that have been evacuated of authenticity and soul by market forces.

But it is precisely this commodification that lays the basis for a new radical cultural freedom, allowing people to choose elements from a mixture of traditions and create a new culture for themselves. The same process also makes it easier for people to stray from their “original” identities and to integrate into modern society. Uncommodified cultures stagnate, closed to outsiders, and raise the costs for straying outside their walls. Humans make culture, not vice versa. Because of this, cultures are dynamic, evolving and always intermixing, so to erect borders between cultures and police them is not just inherently authoritarian but inane.

It is not a coincidence that many agitators against cultural appropriation are socially-conscious people of colour, second and third generations immigrants whose ties to their heritage is precarious. You may feel like a foreigner in your home country, yet might as well be a tourist in the country of your parents. The best you can do is take the bits of your heritage that you value and assimilate it in yourself to have any connection with it all. Even then it feels distant and instrumental.

I am empathetic to this myself as a British-Nigerian, the sense of alienation and deracination many of my cohorts will feel. But I see this deracination, this proletarian “rootlessness”, however paradoxical it may seem, as the basis for a new higher form of liberation. One of the hard truths of modern existence is that there is no such thing as a rooted, stable and authentic identity one can reconnect with after seismic processes such as colonialism, migration and globalisation.

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Which is why I find the most irksome aspect of this argument the noticeable but seldom mentioned assumption that only white people have the liberty to break out of their “roots” and become universal, worldly, cosmopolitan, mobile and protean. But “people of colour” are particular, provincial, rooted in their ancient cultural and spiritual traditions.

The culture warriors aren’t even trying to expand cultural freedom and possibility for non-white artists. No, they want everyone to be provincialised, white people included. This to me can only produce inane solipsism and break down the possibility of having a shared universal conversation that transcends colour lines and cultures.

Crusades against cultural appropriation are not progressive, they are reactionary. Not only does it constrain exchange, inhibit the imagination, and threaten to deaden cultural expression and innovation, they undermine precisely what is valuable about a diverse and open cosmopolitan society. For the sake of art, culture and the human experience itself, let’s take a stand for true cultural freedom and unfettered imagination.