Rules and Their Limits

Injustice is the space between the rule and the real world.

When you go to a good school. (Photo: Getty)

Rules protect the world the way it is. Therefore it is impossible to change the world without breaking the rules. This is often framed as a quandary for the people that the rules bind. In fact, it is only a quandary for the people who enforce the rules. When the world has left the rule behind, the onus is on the enforcers to move with the world, and not to be imprisoned by the rules.

Rules are not real. They do not exist the way the rock or a tree exists; they exist the way that religions exist, created by us, in service of us, and subject to our own revision as we grow wiser. A set of rules is everywhere and at all times a work in progress. Thousands of years of mankind’s best bureaucratic efforts have not altered the inconvenient fact that time is always moving, yet a rule, once made, is static. Laws are constantly being revised in a ceaseless effort to catch up with the nonstop evolution of reality. The moldy, barbaric nature of the laws of the past gives you a clue to the flaw in the belief that rules must always be followed. It is not just bygone rules that can safely be considered crude, outdated, counterproductive, or unjust. We have plenty of existing rules with those qualities as well. Because of this, the most valuable quality in someone charged with enforcing rules is not certitude or fanaticism, but humility. Wisdom, in the moment, lies in the ability to recognize the gaps between the rules and the demands of the world, and to wield the rules as useful tools rather than as deadly weapons.

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Speed limits exist for a reason. But the man with the pregnant wife whose water just broke will exceed those limits as he drives to the hospital. We judge him to be in the right for doing so. The rule, even if broadly useful, was not suited to the particulars of the situation. The man in the car had more perfect information than the people who made the rules. His judgment, in that moment, was better than theirs could be at great remove. They could not anticipate every exception to the rule that the world might spit up. The policeman who pulled him over to write him a leisurely ticket would be seen as a tyrant and a fool, due to his decision to consider only the rule itself and not the rest of the facts at hand. In this example, these dynamics are easy to see. Yet the enforcement class has a much harder problem seeing the same dynamics when the rules are more to their own liking.

Recognition of the shortcomings of rules, of the constant need to measure them against the complexities of reality, is one of the basic insights of being an adult. The urge to caricature this insight as chaos, anarchy, or riotous disregard for the common good is more childish than the insight itself. There is quite an enormous space between “No rules,” which would certainly pose some difficulties to the flourishing of human life, and “follow all rules to the letter,” which would imprison all human life in a cage of absurdity and contradiction. We spend our lives being socialized to believe that failure to follow rules is harmful to society. Less remarked upon is the equally important fact that overzealous, unthinking enforcement of the rules is just as harmful to society. Inflexible as rules are, they cannot function effectively without the ability of their enforcers to compare their text to the fluctuating exigencies of the real world. Small-minded determination to use rules as the final word on all human conduct is characteristic of goons, acting with the desperate meanness that comes from the need to have an easy club with which to beat back the imposing intricacy of life.

Indeed, people with this personality type often wash up in positions of authority precisely because those positions offer them a comforting cocoon of rules to retreat into to protect themselves from having to think too much. It is much easier to bring down the hammer on anyone bold enough to violate the rules than it is to wrestle with the knotty question of how much the rules deserve to be followed in the first place. The quasi-religious worship of order above all grants its adherents the same blissful freedom from doubt that all religions tout. The price for this is a retreat into blinding stupidity. Does the ongoing murder of tens of thousands of civilians with weapons provided by our own government trump, momentarily, the rule against camping on the grass? The Religion of Rules has a straightforward answer.

It is a supreme irony that the leaders of colleges and universities, the places most eager to lay claim to the glory of deep thinking, are today giving us the most vivid demonstrations of the opposite. While the students align themselves with the mandates of morality, many institutions doggedly fight to be free of the need to ever glance up at the dreadful big picture. Though presidents at Wesleyan and Brown have demonstrated that peaceful, thoughtful engagement with peaceful, thoughtful protests is a productive path, most of their peers have done the opposite. From California to New York City, riot cops have been the blunt response to students who are trying to put the things they learned in their history and philosophy and sociology classes into practice. If any young people were in danger of graduating without being appropriately cynical about how America really works, their schools are making sure that they get a good lesson at the end of the semester.

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Here is an interview with the superintendent of the Indiana State Police—the man who has been tasked by the leadership of Indiana University with crushing the protests on its campus. In it, the superintendent cites unnamed “hate speech” that he heard as justification for his militaristic tactics, and refuses to engage with repeated questions pointing out that even if such hate speech exists, it is legal. He then points out that pro-Israel counterprotesters “were very complimentary of us,” as if equal protection under the law were dependent upon how graciously you can compliment the various police surrounding you. That a highly placed cop is dull and self-serving is not really news, but the dictatorship of men like these is exactly what college presidents have decided is preferable to the annoying process of genuine negotiation with their own students. The love of knowledge and learning and truth that schools splash across their marketing materials does not burn so bright in the administrative offices.

We do not live inside of rulebooks. We live in a grand world of complexity, which we modestly hope to navigate with righteousness as best we can. It should not be necessary to be reminded to “look at the big picture.” The big picture, after all, is reality—failing to keep our focus on it means by definition that we are misleading ourselves. Much of the world’s injustice lives in the gap between the rules and the reality. Those who insist on clinging stubbornly to the letter of the rules are content to allow the tide of justice to flow away from them. Do not feel too compelled to spend your life trying to satisfy such pompous little despots. Let them float in their tepid pools of rules and satisfy yourself with everything else. The oppressed people of the world tend to find themselves placed on the wrong side of the rules. All of us have a responsibility to help them. Barriers to that task deserve to be broken. As a rule.

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• Related: College Is an Education in Bullshit; Young Morality and Old Morality; Don’t Make Your Voters Step Over Dead Bodies.

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