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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 315 economic system and reduce its population, so there is no irrationality in their insistence on this policy. But the Americans, who have the least to lose, are, under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson's previously published Fourteen Points, committed above all else to doing what is just and right according to that document. President Wilson then allows himself to be persuaded by Clemenceau that Allied expenditures on pensions and separation allowances count as war damages inflicted by Germany on Allied civilian populations, hence should be included in German reparation payments. The Germans justifiably protest that this is inconsistent with the prior terms of assurance implied by the Fourteen Points, and on the basis of which they formally surrendered. "But this," Keynes comments, was exactly what the President could not admit; in the sweat of solitary contemplation and with prayers to God he had done nothing that was not just and right; for the President to admit that the German reply had force in it was to destroy his self-respect and to disrupt the inner equipoise of his soul; and every instinct of his stubborn nature rose in self-protection. … It was a subject intolerable to discuss, and every subconscious instinct plotted to defeat its further exploration. Thus it was that Clemenceau brought to success, what had seemed to be, a few months before, the extraordinary and impossible proposal that the Germans should not be heard. If only the President had not been so conscientious, if only he had not concealed from himself what he had been doing, even at the last moment he was in a position to have recovered lost ground and to have achieved some very considerable successes. But the President was set. … it was harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him; for the former 6 involved his belief in and respect for himself. First, the mechanisms themselves. Rationalization: Wilson allowed himself to be convinced that having to pay one's own soldiers' pensions was a war damage that Germany had inflicted on Allied civilians, a case of doublethink funhouse reasoning if there ever was one. Dissociation: Wilson responded to the Germans' warranted protest against this bit of bad-faith sophistry by, in effect, closing down the psychological borders, by isolating and recasting his own failure of rational autonomy as "nothing that was not just and right," relative to the rational intelligibility of his morally inflected self-conception. Denial: And finally, in order to maintain his personal investment in his theory of his own virtue, Wilson simply denied the Germans the opportunity to dilate upon this reproach by denying them the chance to speak out against it at all, by refusing even to entertain further discussion along these lines. 6 The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2004; originally published by London: Macmillan and Co., 1920), 49-50. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
