Chapter the Fourteenth: In Which One Discovers That Love, Like Policy, Has Its Exceptions
Being a Treatise on the Remarkable Capacity of the Human Mind to Exempt Itself from Its Own Convictions
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of strong political opinions must be in want of their consequences — though one notes with some frequency that the want extends only so far as the opinions remain theoretical.
One reads with great interest the accounts now circulating in the national press of a certain gentleman from central Wisconsin, whose wife — a Peruvian woman he had married so recently that the honeymoon was not yet concluded — was detained by federal agents upon their return to American soil. The gentleman had voted, one understands, with considerable enthusiasm for the administration that detained her. He was asked, subsequently, whether he harbored regret. He did not. One finds this position philosophically coherent in only the most technically narrow sense of the term.
There is, of course, a venerable tradition in the study of human nature of distinguishing between the policy one endorses in the abstract and the policy one encounters on the jetway of San Juan International Airport. A great many arrangements that appear sensible on paper acquire a rather different character when one’s wife is separated from one at the gate and escorted to a holding facility in Louisiana. The intellect, confronted with this collision, faces a choice: revise the opinion, or revise the facts. The gentleman from Wisconsin appears to have chosen a third path — to hold both truths simultaneously, as one holds ice and fire, and to insist upon the temperature of neither.
This is not, strictly speaking, stupidity. It is something more architecturally interesting. Society has long organized itself upon the understanding that rules are for other people — that the legislation one endorses is aimed at a general class of person, not at any particular person one has recently married. The Peruvian wife is not, in the mind of the enthusiastic voter, the same creature as the immigrant. The immigrant is a category; the wife is an exception. That the law, in its democratic elegance, declines to share this distinction is regarded as a bureaucratic oversight rather than a feature.
One has observed similar arrangements in other institutions. The gentleman who campaigned vigorously against the lenience of the courts develops a sudden interest in prosecutorial discretion when the matter concerns his own nephew. The moralist who thundered at length about the corruption of institutions presents, upon closer inspection, a rather different ledger of personal transactions. The human capacity for self-exemption is not a flaw in the system; it is, one begins to suspect, the system.
What is perhaps most instructive in the present case is not the gentleman’s position itself but his certainty in maintaining it. He does not appear troubled. He does not appear to experience the cognitive dissonance that philosophers have long supposed to be the natural consequence of holding two contradictory propositions. He has, in this respect, mastered a technique that many students of persuasion spend years attempting to replicate: the ability to feel, simultaneously, the wrongness of a specific outcome and the rightness of the general condition that produced it. This is, one must admit, a considerable intellectual achievement, even if the direction of achievement gives one pause.
The polls, as they are reported, suggest his company is not insignificant. A clear majority of Americans oppose the deportation of immigrants married to citizens. Many of those same Americans voted for an administration that has deportation as its stated and amply funded purpose. The contradiction resolves itself only when one understands that a vote, like a marriage, operates in the particular — and that policies, like weather, were always meant to fall on someone else.
One does not wish to be unkind to the gentleman from Wisconsin. Marriage is, after all, a civilizing institution, and the instinct to protect one’s spouse is among the more admirable features of the species. One wishes only to observe that civilizing instincts, applied selectively, have a rather limited civilizing effect.
A principle sincerely held only until it arrives at one’s own door was never, perhaps, a principle at all — merely a preference, dressed for a public occasion.