Walking Away from the Parades

-- By JohnOMeara - 19 Feb 2016

Is This Your Doing, Sir?

A parade of law students, heralded by fanfares of drum-beaten shill stories and brassy bullshit, marches through Harlem. Fukuyama goose-steps at the head, twirling a baton. Atop tall floats, lawyers toss hard candy and business cards to the pavement. It is fun, and it is comforting. As students flock to the gutters, some of them instinctually separate the candy from the cards. Yet few can tell which would be sweeter to suck.

The parade proceeds toward Midtown. Later, one lawyer will return to complain about litter in the street. A blogger might note her intrepid spirit.

What Arnold Did, I Won't

The parade is far afield of Thurman Arnold's. That's fine. I won't comment on war until I've smelled its reek. Instead, I salute Arnold for provoking a deeper realization of my comfort dependency. I recognize that I rely on comfort daily, even hourly. My parade involves a different class of Thinking Men. It hints at the persistent misleading of flocks of well-intended, well-to-do people. I envisaged the parable from reading Herbert Spencer's critique of statism and civic marching orders in The Man Versus the State. (I am a bit unnerved by the ease and frequency with which war, hierarchical tyranny, illusory regimes and law school can be compared. Did I enlist in something? Oh, boy, did I.)

Herbert Spencer's Pajamas

Spencer is an interesting pairing with Arnold and Joseph. I came to read Spencer before Darwin because Spencer was a polymath, an autodidact and a lunatic. His manner intrigued me more than his ideas. Darwin said of Spencer that he was "twenty times my superior." Less important but intriguing nonetheless, Spencer often wore a woolen onesie, his "angry suit," when he was upset. Some of the best people I know are lunatics, and some of the worst...

Spencer's political philosophy predicted that the power wrested from post-Victorian English nobility would merely transfer behind veils to the once-liberalizing parliamentarians. Progress and change? No faster, no better. These politicians would clamor for good press and hoodwink their lower classes all the same, chiefly by propping up non-issues in heated parliamentary debate while veiling the churning gears of poisoned economics and law.

... and We're Wearing Them

Spencer's prospective ideas should sound relevant to today's American presidential campaigns because these tactics have worked for all-time. Upon the eventual demise of the House of Lords, lay people would notice no change but rich houses' drapery. Spencer wrote about this topic for 40 years, and it nearly ruined dinner parties for him. I doubt I'd ever ruminate as ardently for as long on this political theory. But I shouldn't tune this one out -- no one should. I've come to worry that I am unwittingly abetting a similar exchange in modern American political economy, though my nobles are populists and my veils are corporations. (Perhaps "unwittingly" is a lie directed to myself as much as to you; I type these words on an Apple keyboard. I'm complicit and comfortable.) Parades never stopped, and we're marching still.

We Could Be Better Than That

Some of Spencer's stories held up through the 19th and 20th centuries. He was fabulously popular for a few decades before he withered and died. For a time, then, if the output were carefully cherry picked, Spencer could sound like a prescient genius. He may well have been intelligent, but he was still a fucking nut, and so I think he's clothed in incorrect pajamas with patches of genius. The post-Reagan fracturing of American politics may hum a similar harmony, but the tune of the ideas is of a different timbre, played through different instruments. And yet the political sequelae of ever-modernizing society are no more acutely felt than they were in the 1860s -- the parades walk in the same ranks, the diseases and shells kill the same poor souls. Together, huddled, we're not particularly powerful despite the liberalized rule of law. This is in no small part because our lawyers seek to huddle. The parade is efficient, after all.

March Together

But, paradoxically, there is a measure of hope, not so much for lawyers but for humankind, in interconnectivity. Individual personhood stands to benefit from computerized interconnectivity. That, and some Robinsonian chutzpah to stand on one's own. I appreciate Eben's idea here: since the marginal cost of re-production and dissemination of information and ideas is negligibly small, the sense of self-determination and education could be essentially free so long as society were willing to forgive sharing and penalize greed. Instead of cost and ownership rights entrenching the ambits of social action and social enjoyment, we could enter the era of veil burning and gear uncovering -- to hell with them all -- so a purer human agency could breathe and grow.

March Alone

I share Eben's belief that law students must do a better job of seeking and embracing autonomy before pursuing weal and wealth. I should want to lead myself and help others. Robinson's appeal is that he wears that truism on his sleeve. Arnold, in his own way, probes for signs of extraordinary leverage of political will through one, the Thinking Man. If granted options, most people bend toward either the more comfortable tack or the one that promises a pursuit of riches. For that matter, Columbia Law abides consistently. Though I don't yet share Eben's outward disdain (presuming disdain is the correct word) for the corporatization of law, I simply don't want it for myself. Big machinery is out there, but I think I have the wherewithal to refuse it. I'll avoid the parade and begrudge it instead.

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