At the beginning of the new year I resolved to leave off writing “old grouch” columns, columns that chronicle my inability to negotiate modern life. But resolutions rarely stand in the face of provocation, and so here I go again.
My bank has been bought for the third time and once again I wasn’t consulted, which was all right the first two times, but this time everything went wrong in what was euphemistically called “the transition.”
First, all the numbers on my accounts were changed and in the new order the people at my bank (the same people who were there before) have no means of retrieving the old numbers, which have been erased from their institutional memory banks.
Second, the old credit cards were canceled, which meant that some automatic payments weren’t made on time and I received a notice of cancellation from my insurance company. The worst of it was that while the new credit cards were sent, they were returned by the postal authorities to the bank for reasons that remain a mystery.
When I called the bank in the hope of having the credit cards re-sent, the person on the other end of the phone wouldn’t talk to me because I gave the wrong answer to a question. The question was, “Where did you open this account?” I thought back through the years and the various names “my” bank had gone by and confidently said, “Chicago, Illinois, the Broadway branch.” “Wrong,” I was told, and so I offered the name of the branch I’ve been using since moving to Florida. “Wrong again.”
Well, I said, maybe what you want is the branch I’ve been talking to in New York, where I’ve been spending a month. No, not that one either. But those are the only possibilities, I protested; one of them has to be right. “I’m sorry, sir, but the information in our records does not match any of your answers and I cannot proceed any further.” But your information is incorrect, I yelled. Needless to say I didn’t get anywhere.
After many weeks without a credit card, I found out what was going on. While I had indeed opened the account in Chicago, the computer record stipulated that the right answer to the question was “Indiana” (a state I had never lived in) because that was where my original bank, now existing only in memory, had been chartered. So I was being penalized for giving the true answer to the question I had been asked, where what I should have done was give the right answer, the answer required by the system, the answer I couldn’t have possibly known.
Thinking about this, I realized that the distinction between the true answer and the right answer operates in many aspects of life. Many years ago I took my first trip to Europe and purchased a car that I sent back to the States when my fellowship was over. (Those were the days when the exchange rate was so favorable that buying a car in this way was economical.) When I picked up the car in New York I drove to the local D.M.V., and presented my California driving license. I was asked, “In what state do you want to register this car, New York or California?” I sensed that the question was consequential, but I didn’t know in what way. I dithered for a while and finally said, “What’s the right answer?” She told me (I don’t remember what it was) and I promptly gave it. Problem solved.
I should have learned my lesson — always give the right answer, not the true answer — but last year I found myself talking to an insurance company about a claim I was making. The person on the other end asked me a series of questions (like when did the damage occur) and I answered them truthfully. She took pity on me and told me that those were not the answers I should be giving. I escaped from the conversation and called a private adjuster, someone who represents claimants and knows exactly what the right answers are. He told me that I should never speak to “my” insurance company, but instead refer everything to him. He was afraid I might say something true.
The right answer is the answer a system invested in its own machinery will recognize no matter what the true facts may be. The New York Post reported recently that in October a woman with a titanium rod in her hip passed through a metal detector at J.F.K. airport without setting it off. She immediately informed the appropriate officials, who had her walk through the detector again, with the same results. She was told by a T.S.A. employee, “I can assure you the tests are correct.” She protested that nonetheless it was true that a titanium rod was implanted in her (she knew it as I knew where I opened my bank account). When the same thing happened at the same airport in December she again alerted the screeners, and for her trouble the transportation security manager sent her this e-mail: “We are confident in the performance of the WTMDS . . . throughout the aviation security system.” Once again the right answer trumped the true answer.
This is almost always the case in the law, especially in a legal system like ours that privileges procedure over substance. Lawyers know that what they have to do is find the legal rubric that will allow them to frame an issue in such a way that when the system’s questions are posed, the right answer, not the true answer, will be generated. Courts sometimes explicitly announce that the procedurally correct answer is preferable to the true answer, which is, legally, of no interest at all.
In Herrera v. Collins (1993), Leonel Torres Herrera, found guilty of murder, claimed that because new evidence proving his innocence had emerged his case should be reconsidered. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, replied that innocence or guilt was not a question for his court to consider absent a demonstration that the original trial was infected by error. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a concurring opinion, agreed. Petitioner, she said, does not appear before us an “innocent man,” but as a “legally guilty person” who is not “entitled to get another judicial hearing” given his failure to demonstrate that the trial he received was unfair. The trial was fair, and the question of his guilt has been determined in a constitutionally correct procedure. That procedure provides the right (if not the true) answer to the question, “was he guilty?” (Herrera was later executed.)
Is this bad? Should we go off the right standard and return to the true standard? A nice idea, but one that imagines a world where the judgments reached by systems are tested against a truth that is independent of any system. Where would that truth come from, how would it be identified and how could the endless disputes about what it is be resolved? (The law’s project is to hold such disputes at bay.) It is because there are no answers to these questions that we will have to settle for the truths that systems create, deliver and validate in a sequence that may be reassuring but is finally without a foundation. You may know as I did where you opened your bank account. You may know the true answer. But you had better give the right answer.
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