The wicked comfort of living by the rules

It has been a long while since I last wrote here precisely because, as I mentioned in the past, life in general is full of chaos and complexity and mine is not different. My new position has demanded of me both more time and more attention, which has repeatedly left me drained of any creative juices that could get me writing. There have been a number of occasions when I was piqued by an idea, but failed to gather enough strength to sit down to write. Luckily, today I have had a favorable moment and I will be able to put some words together.

The occasion was a discussion I had with my friend Pavel a couple of days ago about an intern that he has been suffering for two long weeks. The intern in questions is a very dedicated young woman, but by Pavel's account she constantly emanates an pungent body odor that permeates the working spaces that she inhabits and persists long after she is gone. Being summertime and with the reliability that one can expect from decades-old air conditioning units, there are substantial constraints to the measures she can undertake to solve this situation, so my friend argued that his best chance is to endure it with patience and not to say anything to the intern. When asked why he would not discuss the options with her, he pointed out to a "30-second rule" that apparently has become viral: if the shortcoming that you are pointing out on someone cannot be solved in 30 seconds or less, then it is better not to mention it at all.

Foto: Anka Albrecht

Confronted with this rule, my first reaction was of open skepticism, but I decided to give it a more detail analysis in case it had some merit. It is true that there are many situations where this rule can be happily applied in the positive sense: if someone's fly is open or they have food residues among their teeth it is probably OK to let them know so that they can solve it promptly. On the other hand, it is also true that making negative comments on permanent personal conditions is pointless: a short person is likely to eventually make fun of their own stature, but it is not OK to mention it before they do. On the one hand, they already know that they are short, so mentioning it is just stating the obvious. On the other, there is nothing they can do solve that other than using a step in situations where people of average height would not need it. But they would continue to be short, so they are probably already used to taking that kind of measures.

However, between those two extremes there is a whole spectrum of situations where conflicts could be solved or at least mitigated if properly addressed. Admittedly, this rule was originally meant for fourth-graders (9 year-olds), so it is somewhat understandable that it is formulated in such simple terms: the cases that it allows can be done almost without a thought, and the ones that are not allowed would also teach the valuable lesson of learning to live with something that bothers you because there is not much you could/should do, as is often the case in the real world. Still, I find it troubling that my friend adopted the rule so keenly.

As a long-time philosopher and rebel, I have two fights to pick with the general concept of rule setting. The first one is that rules (or laws, the case is the same) are issued by and applied to different groups of people. Lawmakers' decisions will be chiefly driven by their own experience, which might not overlap well with that of the ruled ones. If all senators live in houses with garden, they might be inclined to approve a law to make lawnmower ownership mandatory. However, the big majority of non-senators do not have a garden or even live in a flat, where a lawnmower would be completely out of place. Even if they make their best efforts to produce fair law, they are still a small group of people establishing what everybody should do. This is what we called "arrogance" before. 

The second problem of rule setting is that it turns the ruled ones complacent: once there is a rule, devoted citizens will feel proud to use, and to use it as often as possible, without questioning the general justice of the rule or its applicability to individual cases. People are often so scared about not knowing what to do that they would blindly follow the rules just to feel they are doing the right thing. And what is worse, even if they any spark of doubts about the rule, they can always defer the responsibility to the lawmakers, who were the ones that issued such and unjust law.

Coincidentally, I recently listened to a podcast (which, sadly, I have not been able to find again) where they discussed the conflict between two different approaches to moral reasoning. Prior to the Age of Enlightenment in 17th century, the dominant practice was "narrative ethics", where directions on how to behave were explained by means of the examples set by good and evil people, showcasing in great detail the context in which a certain action was good or bad. However, when the rationalism set itself as the reigning philosophical current, lawmakers started to look for rules that could be applied by anyone and regardless of the context, limiting the content of the law to "do this" or "do not do that" in what we now call "normative ethics".

Luckily, there has been a recent resurgence in the support for narrative ethics because many people have finally realized that pure normative solutions frequently end up being simply unjust. They fail to cover the variety of situations that life can present and bureaucracies, possibly in an honest attempt to issue rules that are just, end up with very complex edifices of law that are unwieldy to follow, to the point that the people ends up serving the law instead of the law serving the people.

It is indubitably easier to apply an explicit rule than to judge a case with all its complexities. It is also much more unfair, and will also not help to revise the rules if they become unfitting or obsolete. Applying our own judgement is a difficult and effortful endeavor, but it is the only way to ensure that we make the possible choices, at least on the important occasions. Have a nice evening.