On “machine law” and a new caveat on “when ya gotta go”

I just concluded an elegant book by F.H. Buckley entitled The Morality of Laughter, which makes the case that laughter provides instruction on how to live the good life by pointing out extreme aberrations from virtue. It’s an excellent read, but I cannot do Buckley’s thesis justice with just a sentence or two, so let me just recommend it highly and move on to the rest of my post.

Buckley provides a chapter on “machine law,” which is an extension of Henri Bergson’s “machine man,” one whose code is too rigid, to mechanical, to navigate the obstacles of life dexterously. They appear risible to us just as the man who cannot navigate a patch of ice does. Machine law is an application of mechanical, rote rules; nevertheless, such “nonsensical legal doctrines survive because we have lost the knack for laughter. … The expansion of victim rights and the extensions of federal power are defended by liberals and opposed by conservatives with the same heavy seriousness. But in throwing away the self-correcting powers of laughter, they have conspired to produce the most comic jurisprudence.”

All that was already fresh in my mind when I encountered this news story:

Jesse Huffman insists he didn’t do it on purpose, but the toilet he left plugged after “nature called” at this border crossing in north-central Montana has him facing criminal charges. Toole County authorities charged the 19-year-old college student from Great Falls with criminal mischief after a border agent accused him of intentionally clogging the toilet.

“I didn’t think they were serious at first, I was just laughing so hard,” he said. …