The "It Could Be Me" Factor

The nation's opinion leaders continue to brood over the nation's reluctance to follow them. For months, politicians and commentators have doggedly tried to transmit their indignation about Bill Clinton to the hinterland. It's slow going. "There's a lot of indifference out there," lamented Bill Bennett, the dean of Washington outrage, during a recent TV appearance.

Indifference? That's one theory. Another is--imagination. Imagination, after all, is our basic moral gauge. If you can imagine yourself doing what someone else has been caught doing, it's hard to recommend the death penalty.

I'm not saying that most Americans daydream about sex in the Oval Office. I'm saying that many Americans have enough experience with temptation, addiction in one sense or another and the little lies that become big ones to look at President Clinton and say, "There but for the grace of God go I." As a Democrat in Congress has put it, "People understand human frailty better than political pundits do."

An expansive moral imagination has much to recommend it--including the endorsement of Jesus Christ. (Among the tactical advantages of Clinton's prayer breakfast was getting reporters to quote clergy quoting Scripture: "He that is without sin, let him first cast a stone.") Still, however humane a generous imagination may be, it poses a problem: Once started, where does it stop?

Granted, most Americans don't have trouble setting limits on forgiveness. They can't imagine themselves being, say, bank robbers. So it's off to jail with bank robbers--justice has been served! But however emotionally easy it is to condemn a garden-variety criminal while forgiving an errant President, is it logically defensible?

After all, imagining ourselves in someone else's shoes often takes poetic license. Many women, mulling Clinton's sins, don't ask how they would have acted in his situation but how they would have acted if burdened with male genes--and, perhaps, with a sense of entitlement inflated by years of alpha maledom. Maybe, for enhanced accuracy, some women throw in any distinctive Clinton genes for large appetite--and maybe even formative childhood experiences. (He is reported to have once recalled being the "fat boy in the Big Boy jeans," before his rising social stature started turning ladies' heads.)

Anyway, whether or not women in Peoria have performed such elaborate thought experiments, people often take account of a perpetrator's genetic and environmental factors. The troubled child's genes for hyperactivity or his history of parental abuse earn him some leniency. To the extent that our knowledge allows, we try to ask, What if we really were in his shoes?

But of course, if you were literally in his shoes, you'd be him and would make the same choices. If you had been born with a bank robber's genes, into a bank robber's environment, then you presumably would have become a bank robber. Genes and environment, so far as science can tell, are all there is.

That's the trouble with letting your imagination off its leash. An untrammeled imagination--an imagination of true, unblinking clarity--drives home an uncomfortable point: it is always in some sense unfair for people to send other people to prison. There go all of us but for the grace of God.