We live in an age of apology and it is a puzzling phenomenon. Mass and individual acts of public contrition and remorse have become part of the background music of life. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has apologised to the Indigenous stolen generations to great acclaim. The Pope has apologised to victims of sexual abuse by priests and brothers. Even the athlete Jana Rawlinson (nee Pittman) has apologised for behaving like a “drama queen” when she injured a leg.

In law courts convicted criminals routinely apologise to victims and their families, although these apologies probably have more to do with trying to have sentences reduced than with genuine remorse. Even boofhead rugby players apologise to team followers when they lose a game.

This fashion for public apology, like the fashion for public grief, seems a fairly recent development in mass culture. Often it seems more connected to political and legal considerations than to the remorse and courtesy that used to elicit apologies.

These days an apology is often a public relations device dreamed up by political advisers to limit damage and take the edge off criticism generated by mass media and/or by growing public consciousness of historic wrongs. Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations, Jana Pitman’s superfluous mea culpa, and the remorse of rugby players, all seem to reflect this tactic.

At other times it is a legal device to try to reduce gaol time or financial penalties. This is what drives apologies from criminals, churches and the media. A media apology is never an act of contrition: it is usually advised and negotiated by lawyers to try to limit a defamation pay-out. (The danger, of course, is that the apology might be seen as an admission and result in more severe penalties).

One curious aspect of the fashion for apology is that it comes at a time when people seem generally coarser, pushier and less considerate in their public dealings. There is little time for conventional public courtesies. Jumping a queue, letting a door shut in somebody’s face, stepping on someone’s toe, rarely these days seems to produce a even a ritual apology. Saying sorry in these circumstances seems almost a confession of weakness.

And yet the population apparently wants acts of public contrition for perceived historical or institutional offences against selected victim groups. Concealing the political and legal motivations, these apologies are frequently justified in terms of “allowing the healing process to begin” or allowing people to “move on with their lives.” Such justifications are vacuous to the point of incoherence. What is this “healing process” and how does an apology allow it to begin? What does “moving on with life” mean and how does an apology enable the move to take place?

There was a time when an apology was anything from a formal show of regret for some small and inadvertent discourtesy to a genuine act of remorse for causing offence or harm. The first was evidence of good manners; the second was a mark of personal character in confronting and acknowledging more serious lapses. Now apologies have become public events, covered by the media, and beamed live to the nation. They are made in national parliaments, in churches, in courts, at press conferences. They are carefully scripted, checked by lawyers and analysed by journalists and sociologists. As a result apologies have become as vapid as the inane American invitation to “Have a nice day.”

Apologies have become feel-good gestures that play to the banal sentimentality of mass audiences that otherwise show little consideration to others in their rush through life. The idea, and virtue, of apologising is being leached of significance and meaning.

If apologies still have any value it is that they can focus attention on those who never say that they are sorry. The Chinese do not apologise for their brutality in Tibet; the Russians do not apologise for the war in Chechnia - and the Bush administration has not apologised for its disastrous invasion of Iraq and its economic mismanagement. And you never hear “sorry” from awful regimes like Burma, North Korea or Zimbabwe.

To say “Sorry, I was wrong” is to acknowledge a moral lapse even if the motive is dubious and the expression mealy-mouthed, and politics is much more about interests and power than it is about ethics and apologetics - particularly in countries like China and Russia. And in gentler regimes apologies are now ritual legal/political devices with substance sacrificed to sentimentality and to financial calculations. It is another small decline in civilisation.