|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 8 - 02 Jun 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| | | -- By MikeCarson - Edited 1 June 2017 | |
<
< | This course was as much about understanding subconscious thought as it was anything else. I saw in Veblen an argument that subconscious fear drives us. Over weeks I couldn't let it go. It felt immediately and intuitively true, and it seemed important. But while it the resonated with me, I wasn't sure where it should take me. | >
> | At times this course was as much about understanding subconscious thought as it was anything else. I saw in Veblen an argument that subconscious fear drives us, and over the weeks I couldn't let it go. It felt immediately and intuitively true, though I wasn't completely sure why. In Veblen's talk of “emulative efforts” and “predatory efficiency,” I saw the results of a fear that was adaptive and primal. It also suggested to me was the lengths a person will go to avoid the pain of subconsciously feeling weak. | | | I. | |
<
< | I've always been pretty deeply uncomfortable writing in a first-person, self-reflective style. It feels self-indulgent—and besides, I've never found my self-analysis to age well in print. But the last two drafts failed in part because I didn't care to delve into my own emotional prospective on the subject matter. That approach made them read like tortured and equivocated answers to a question no one was asking. | >
> | I think that I’m reasonably introspective but I've always been deeply uncomfortable writing in a first-person, self-reflective style. It makes me feel self-important, or even self-indulgent. But my last two drafts failed in part because I didn't care to delve into my own emotional perspective on the subject matter; Veblen seemed important because the idea of being motivated by unconscious fear resonated with me. | | | | |
<
< | Which is buildup to saying, here is how I think that talk of the subconscious made me I feel: it made me worry that over time I've reinforced portions of my self-conception to protect myself from feeling weak, even doing so might well be causing me harm. It made me concerned that I've let myself internalize some values (albeit not all the same ones) that don't help make me better or more productive, out of a subconscious effort to protect myself from some kind of imagined violence. And it left me wondering about what it would even look like to remake these parts of myself, or whether that's the right question to be asking in the first place. | >
> | Thinking about Veblen and the subconscious made me worry about the ways I might be afraid. It made me wonder how over time I may have reinforced portions of my self-conception as unshakable to protect myself from feeling weak, pushing insecurities out of my conscious mind as though ignoring them made me stronger. Relishing miserable work has always been one way I proved my worth and character to myself; I took a lot of pride in being able to endure more misery than anyone I knew. I thought about how much of my self-image was designed simply to block out subconscious thoughts; it left me wondering about what it would even look like to remake these parts of myself. | | | | |
<
< | To be clear, I don't feel disordered, or socially maladapted. I certainly don't think I'm remotely pathological. If some parts of the self-image I want to sell to myself aren't totally functional, I still feel productive and balanced on the whole. | >
> | To be clear, I don't feel disordered, or maladapted; it's often downright functional to shut out fears and concerns and focus on making marginal progress and winning small, manageable victories. If some parts of the self-image I sell to myself serve only to shelter me from having to feel self-conscious fears, I still feel productive and balanced on the whole. | | | | |
<
< | On the other hand, I do have difficulty writing a first-person essay without feeling preemptive shame at having to read it later. I have mostly failed to create any art in my lifetime more personal than a newspaper column with a firm news peg. I have sometimes (like some of Lawrence Joseph's lawyers) taken a perverse pride in being a professional hatchet man, and talked as though needing to feel good about the professional work you do is a personal weakness or handicap. And I've done those things even though I've known they're almost certainly bad for me. That part of me could use some work. | >
> | But I've also plowed myself into jobs I've hated, working for candidates I didn't believe in because I'd decided that doing unpleasant work without complaint was what made me who I was. I've let many personal relationships rot in order to give a few more hours to some election, because I'll be damned if I was going to ask for a break. | | |
II. | |
<
< | At first blush, I didn't feel a lot of connection to the idea that I was well-described a a “risk adverse control freak.” It's not just that there's no day planner in my life; much of the time, there's no plan. I made a living as a campaign rat in part because I liked living a few months at a time, committing totally to a task at hand with no idea where it might bring me next. | >
> | Still, when I first heard “risk-adverse control freak,” I didn't think it much applied to me. Its not just that there's no day planner in my life; much of the time, there's no plan at all. I made a living as a campaign rat in part because I liked living my life in tunnels a few months wide, committing totally to the task at hand with no idea where it might bring me next. | | | | |
<
< | But I reconsidered that when I recently listened to a serialize podcast on Bowe Bergdahl,the young American soldier who walked off a military base in Afghanistan and paid for it by spending the better part of five years locked in a cage by the Taliban. | >
> | I reconsidered the point recently, while listening to the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the young soldier who walked off a military base in Afghanistan and paid for it by spending the better part of five years locked in a cage by the Taliban. | | | | |
<
< | In a portion of the piece, Bergdahl discussed his thoughts about military life: “I wanted to be a soldier, but I wanted to be a soldier back then. I wanted to be a World War II soldier. I wanted to be an 1800s soldier. I wanted to be a samurai soldier, a fighter, warrior. I wanted to be...you know, more than anything, I wanted to be a kung-fu fighter. Honestly. I love the idea of just, basically, your hands and that's it. You know?” | >
> | In a portion of the piece I listened to, Bergdahl discussed his thoughts about military life: “I wanted to be a soldier, but I wanted to be a soldier back then. I wanted to be a World War II soldier. I wanted to be an 1800s soldier. I wanted to be a samurai soldier, a fighter, warrior. I wanted to be...you know, more than anything, I wanted to be a kung-fu fighter. Honestly. I love the idea of just, basically, your hands and that's it. You know?” | | | | |
<
< | In my previous draft of this essay, I mucked around with the idea that modern industrialized people carry around the vestigial fears evolved for a world more violent, chaotic and uncertain than our own. In Sgt. Bergdahl, I saw a young man who must have lived with that kind of fear writ large. By his own telling, both his enlistment and his desertion were conscious choices made in large part to live up to a sort of mythologized, stoic-warrior ethic he styled for himself. Bergdahl claims his motivation for walking off was to win an audience with senior military leadership in order to criticize perceived failures in leadership by his more immediate superiors. Perhaps. But the means he selected speak to a different insecurity: “Doing what I did is me saying that I am like, I don't know, Jason Bourne...I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing.” Bergdahl was so motivated by a fear that he wasn't strong and tough and competent enough, that he felt absolutely compelled to put himself into a situation that would absolutely prove it. | >
> | If Veblen is right that modern industrialized people carry around vestigial fears, evolved for a world more violent and uncertain than our own, Sgt. Bergdahl, is a young man who lived with that fear writ large. By his own telling, both his enlistment and his desertion were conscious choices made to live up to a mythologized, anachronistic ethic he styled for himself. Bergdahl claims his motivation for walking off was to win an audience with senior military leadership to raise concerns. Perhaps. But the means he selected speak to a eparate insecurity: “Doing what I did is me saying that I am like, I don't know, Jason Bourne...I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing.” Bergdahl was so motivated by a fear that he wasn't strong and tough and competent enough, that he felt absolutely compelled to put himself into a situation that would absolutely prove it. | | | | |
<
< | Bergdahl makes it clear that insecurities were a fundamental part of the conscious choices that ultimately got him captured, tortured, and nearly killed. As I listened to the program, it made me deeply uncomfortable to hear the way he channeled that insecurity into a kind of impossibly dangerous test that he was sure to fail from the start. I also saw enough of myself in the compulsions of Bowe Bergdahl to make me want to look away. | >
> | As I listened to the program, it made me deeply uncomfortable to hear the way Bergdahl channeled his insecurity into a kind of impossibly dangerous test that he was sure to fail from the start. I also saw enough of myself in the compulsions of Bowe Bergdahl to make me want to look away. | | | | |
<
< | If we believe his story, then what is Bowe Bergdahl if not a control freak? What could show more dedication to needing control than doing something almost suicidally dangerous in order to demonstrate to yourself the deepest possible commitment to not questioning your own principles? That's the kind of control freak I worry about being—someone so afraid of controlling feelings of weakness and helpless that I'll feel compelled to walk off into the desert alone to avoid them.
I have reason to think I can be resourceful and disciplined when I have a conscious objective. But so could Bowe Bergdahl. Ignoring fear or insecurity in the subconscious mind can be a true test of resolve. I hope to consciously strive to avoid taking it. | >
> | III. | | | | |
>
> | If we believe his story, then what is Bowe Bergdahl if not a control freak? What could show more dedication to needing control than doing something almost suicidally dangerous in order to demonstrate to yourself the deepest possible commitment to not questioning your own principles? That's the kind of control freak I worry about being—someone so afraid of controlling feelings of weakness and helpless that I'll feel compelled to walk off into the desert alone to avoid them. | | | | |
>
> | I have reason to think I can be resourceful and disciplined when I have a conscious objective. But so could Bowe Bergdahl. The will to press on to a conscious goal through emotional tumult can be a powerful thing. But even if it's willfully ignored, unconscious fears have a strong pull. | | | | |
>
> | Running away from one's own subconscious insecurity can be a real test of resolve, particularly when the cost of doing it is so obvious. I know I'm capable of wearing those blinders, of putting my head down to push through something difficult and unpleasant. I need to keep learning when to take them off. | | | | | |
| |
<
< | | >
> |
- #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = MikeCarson?
- #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest, TWikiAdminGroup?
| | | \ No newline at end of file |
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 7 - 02 Jun 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | Primitive: Fear in Veblen, and in lawyers | >
> | A True Test of Resolve | | | | |
<
< | -- By MikeCarson - Edited 26 April 2017 | >
> | -- By MikeCarson - Edited 1 June 2017 | | | | |
<
< | “I asked my partner what he thought of cousin Thorstein. Now this is a very socially aware young man, a very good lawyer I'm very fond of him. Do you know what he said?" Tharaud smiled. "'Cousin Thorstein was primitive.'” Lawrence Joseph, Lawyerland 125 (1997). | >
> | This course was as much about understanding subconscious thought as it was anything else. I saw in Veblen an argument that subconscious fear drives us. Over weeks I couldn't let it go. It felt immediately and intuitively true, and it seemed important. But while it the resonated with me, I wasn't sure where it should take me. | | | | |
<
< | I. Proxies of 'primitive' force | >
> | I.
I've always been pretty deeply uncomfortable writing in a first-person, self-reflective style. It feels self-indulgent—and besides, I've never found my self-analysis to age well in print. But the last two drafts failed in part because I didn't care to delve into my own emotional prospective on the subject matter. That approach made them read like tortured and equivocated answers to a question no one was asking. | | | | |
<
< | Martha Tharaud didn't misunderstand her partner when he called Thorstein Veblen “primitive.” Certainly he did mean that his philosophies were at least outdated and out of fashion, if not completely archaic. But he may also have meant more, | >
> | Which is buildup to saying, here is how I think that talk of the subconscious made me I feel: it made me worry that over time I've reinforced portions of my self-conception to protect myself from feeling weak, even doing so might well be causing me harm. It made me concerned that I've let myself internalize some values (albeit not all the same ones) that don't help make me better or more productive, out of a subconscious effort to protect myself from some kind of imagined violence. And it left me wondering about what it would even look like to remake these parts of myself, or whether that's the right question to be asking in the first place. | | | | |
<
< | The currency of the social systems Veblen describes (at least through the first few chapters of The Theory of the Leisure Class) is grounded in understandings of the most primitive kind: waste of time and money develop as useful proxies for displaying brute, destructive force. Veblen drains some of the blood from the his descriptions, but “prowess” and “prepotency”—the kind of strength signaled by successful exploit—stand in for displays of the ability to cause harm. Cousin Veblen's theories say at least in part that what drives our economic and social behavior is a pervasive need to signal the traits that makes us “better capable of a sudden and violent strain”—namely, the capability to crush one another. What could be more primitive? | >
> | To be clear, I don't feel disordered, or socially maladapted. I certainly don't think I'm remotely pathological. If some parts of the self-image I want to sell to myself aren't totally functional, I still feel productive and balanced on the whole. | | | | |
<
< | “The predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory efficiency are deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those peoples who have passed under the discipline of a protracted predatory culture. According to popular award, the highest honours within human reach may, even yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary predatory efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing in the community these means of repute have been replaced by the acquisition and accumulation of goods.” | >
> | On the other hand, I do have difficulty writing a first-person essay without feeling preemptive shame at having to read it later. I have mostly failed to create any art in my lifetime more personal than a newspaper column with a firm news peg. I have sometimes (like some of Lawrence Joseph's lawyers) taken a perverse pride in being a professional hatchet man, and talked as though needing to feel good about the professional work you do is a personal weakness or handicap. And I've done those things even though I've known they're almost certainly bad for me. That part of me could use some work. | | | | |
<
< | The emulative efforts of individuals are the outgrowth of this ancient respect for “predatory efficiency.” In a world with no buffalo to hunt and no tribal territory to go to war over, demonstrating wealth or leisurely refinement are the only ways left to demonstrate one's strength. | | | | |
<
< | II. Fear as a driver of emulation | >
> | II.
At first blush, I didn't feel a lot of connection to the idea that I was well-described a a “risk adverse control freak.” It's not just that there's no day planner in my life; much of the time, there's no plan. I made a living as a campaign rat in part because I liked living a few months at a time, committing totally to a task at hand with no idea where it might bring me next. | | | | |
<
< | In class, we talked about how one mechanism for ingraining the need to show these distinctions in sexual selection and romantic competition. But it seems obvious that the same instincts must have functioned also toward mere survival. In a world of exploit, broadcasting strength does more than bring social approbation and self-esteem—it also signals to rivals who isn't to be trifled with. Ability to emulate is just evidence of exploitative capability; pick a fight with the one displaying the most social status, and one is liable to find themselves “exploited.” | >
> | But I reconsidered that when I recently listened to a serialize podcast on Bowe Bergdahl,the young American soldier who walked off a military base in Afghanistan and paid for it by spending the better part of five years locked in a cage by the Taliban. | | | | |
<
< | To the extent this hold true, it fits with the treadmill of acquisition and waste which Veblen describes as requiring individuals to always aspire to the next class. Ambition is one thing; fear that someone else will come and hurt you is quite another. Societal approbation and self-esteem are the engine of the patterns of waste and consumption Veblen identifies. But fear is forced induction for that process, supercharging each individual's effort to climb ever higher in the parade of emulation that determines social status to try to scare away violent challenges before they start. | >
> | In a portion of the piece, Bergdahl discussed his thoughts about military life: “I wanted to be a soldier, but I wanted to be a soldier back then. I wanted to be a World War II soldier. I wanted to be an 1800s soldier. I wanted to be a samurai soldier, a fighter, warrior. I wanted to be...you know, more than anything, I wanted to be a kung-fu fighter. Honestly. I love the idea of just, basically, your hands and that's it. You know?” | | | | |
<
< | As Veblen himself points out, the increasing industrialization of society reduces the frequency and necessity of violent action. This makes the incentives for displaying exploitative prowess less clear in industrial societies. But many-thousand-year-old habits die hard in people. Even if new methods of display and new cultural and psychological tensions develop with the gradual decline of more “primitive” economic states, there's no reason to think that the old, visceral fears get left behind. | >
> | In my previous draft of this essay, I mucked around with the idea that modern industrialized people carry around the vestigial fears evolved for a world more violent, chaotic and uncertain than our own. In Sgt. Bergdahl, I saw a young man who must have lived with that kind of fear writ large. By his own telling, both his enlistment and his desertion were conscious choices made in large part to live up to a sort of mythologized, stoic-warrior ethic he styled for himself. Bergdahl claims his motivation for walking off was to win an audience with senior military leadership in order to criticize perceived failures in leadership by his more immediate superiors. Perhaps. But the means he selected speak to a different insecurity: “Doing what I did is me saying that I am like, I don't know, Jason Bourne...I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing.” Bergdahl was so motivated by a fear that he wasn't strong and tough and competent enough, that he felt absolutely compelled to put himself into a situation that would absolutely prove it. | | | | |
<
< | III. In defense of Thorstein's cousin | >
> | Bergdahl makes it clear that insecurities were a fundamental part of the conscious choices that ultimately got him captured, tortured, and nearly killed. As I listened to the program, it made me deeply uncomfortable to hear the way he channeled that insecurity into a kind of impossibly dangerous test that he was sure to fail from the start. I also saw enough of myself in the compulsions of Bowe Bergdahl to make me want to look away.
If we believe his story, then what is Bowe Bergdahl if not a control freak? What could show more dedication to needing control than doing something almost suicidally dangerous in order to demonstrate to yourself the deepest possible commitment to not questioning your own principles? That's the kind of control freak I worry about being—someone so afraid of controlling feelings of weakness and helpless that I'll feel compelled to walk off into the desert alone to avoid them.
I have reason to think I can be resourceful and disciplined when I have a conscious objective. But so could Bowe Bergdahl. Ignoring fear or insecurity in the subconscious mind can be a true test of resolve. I hope to consciously strive to avoid taking it. | | | | |
<
< | In the last draft of this essay (see revision history, but treat it as useful reading at your own peril) I made a lot of the gallows humor and and combative rhetoric of Joseph's lawyers in the opening chapters of Lawyerland. After Veblen, it seems clear to me that all three of the lawyers at the center of that draft are well in touch with their primitive sides. They feel fear, and they know how to cause it at their courtrooms and conference tables. They intuitively know their way around a nervous system forged in a few a few millennia of violence. | | | | |
<
< | I'm certain that it makes them better lawyers. I feel reasonable sure it doesn't help them feel less afraid. To differing extents, all three show they are in touch with this vestigial condition of fear, but dissociate it (or perhaps embrace it), rather than transcending it. They intuitively know both how to leverage that kind of fear and to cope with it, but still spend much of their psychic energy like most everyone else in the industrial world Veblen describes—either broadcasting their strength, or else balled up and hoping to avoid the kind hammer shot unlike to come in their economic era. | | | | |
<
< | As Robinson and Celia Day know better than most, violence and exploit remain in the modern world. But even that is of a different character: our interpersonal contacts tend to be more dense, our means of violence more efficient. The old saw says “God created man, Sam Colt made them equal.” Economic and social factors have a role to play too, but generally, any level of protection afforded by demonstrations of wealth and leisure become a less valuable form of protection in a larger modern surrounding. | | | | |
<
< | There is too much that's outdated in the instinct toward violence and the accompanying fear. It's powerful, and likely to cloud efforts to feel or to do good. I don't think it's a given that Tharaud's partner doesn't feel this, even if he might not say it. Veblen sees us left with primitive instincts difficult to cast off. A bright young lawyer might see rejecting those fears as helpful for doing good, or feeling good, in a world where they've lost so much value. | | | | |
<
< |
I don't think I understand, after reading twice, what the primary idea is. But it could have been stated right at the outset, instead of the textual explication from Lawyerland, which seems to be more packaging than product. Your earlier drafts were less effective at presenting anything other than Lawyerland material, so I take it that a process of refining away from the text and towards the idea has been going on. Why not try a draft without the literary background, stating what you want to say about fear, force and lawyering without the mechanism, so we can see the idea itself clearly, and deal with it not so much on the basis of where you came to see it as on the basis of what you have yourself made us see.
| | | | |
<
< |
I will be uploading the significantly new draft shortly, but because I like the revision history feature of the Twiki I felt compelled to comment here first. I felt that over the first two drafts I put up here, the literary background was basically the only thing that sometimes worked, and I could tell that I never quite found the glue to hold it together. Some of that was stylistic mistakes and suboptimal choices about to use the limited space, I think, but some of it was just that in order to make a short essay good, you need a fairly good idea to hold it all together. Trying to rework this for a third time, I still feel like the thoughts I was playing with weren't awful, exactly, but they also weren't really strong enough to hold together an essay like this. I felt compelled to give a reworking of the broad idea the old college try--it seemed against the spirit of the revision process to just totally scrap and start over with a brand new idea--but if I could start over twelve weeks ago I would do it with a different topic. It seemed like it might take me somewhere interesting midway through the first draft, but after spending a lot more time with those ideas, I still don't feel like they ever got me quite where I wanted to go.
| | |
|
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 6 - 02 Jun 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| | | I don't think I understand, after reading twice, what the primary idea is. But it could have been stated right at the outset, instead of the textual explication from Lawyerland, which seems to be more packaging than product. Your earlier drafts were less effective at presenting anything other than Lawyerland material, so I take it that a process of refining away from the text and towards the idea has been going on. Why not try a draft without the literary background, stating what you want to say about fear, force and lawyering without the mechanism, so we can see the idea itself clearly, and deal with it not so much on the basis of where you came to see it as on the basis of what you have yourself made us see.
| |
>
> |
I will be uploading the significantly new draft shortly, but because I like the revision history feature of the Twiki I felt compelled to comment here first. I felt that over the first two drafts I put up here, the literary background was basically the only thing that sometimes worked, and I could tell that I never quite found the glue to hold it together. Some of that was stylistic mistakes and suboptimal choices about to use the limited space, I think, but some of it was just that in order to make a short essay good, you need a fairly good idea to hold it all together. Trying to rework this for a third time, I still feel like the thoughts I was playing with weren't awful, exactly, but they also weren't really strong enough to hold together an essay like this. I felt compelled to give a reworking of the broad idea the old college try--it seemed against the spirit of the revision process to just totally scrap and start over with a brand new idea--but if I could start over twelve weeks ago I would do it with a different topic. It seemed like it might take me somewhere interesting midway through the first draft, but after spending a lot more time with those ideas, I still don't feel like they ever got me quite where I wanted to go.
| | |
|
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 5 - 07 May 2017 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| | | There is too much that's outdated in the instinct toward violence and the accompanying fear. It's powerful, and likely to cloud efforts to feel or to do good. I don't think it's a given that Tharaud's partner doesn't feel this, even if he might not say it. Veblen sees us left with primitive instincts difficult to cast off. A bright young lawyer might see rejecting those fears as helpful for doing good, or feeling good, in a world where they've lost so much value. | |
>
> |
I don't think I understand, after reading twice, what the primary idea is. But it could have been stated right at the outset, instead of the textual explication from Lawyerland, which seems to be more packaging than product. Your earlier drafts were less effective at presenting anything other than Lawyerland material, so I take it that a process of refining away from the text and towards the idea has been going on. Why not try a draft without the literary background, stating what you want to say about fear, force and lawyering without the mechanism, so we can see the idea itself clearly, and deal with it not so much on the basis of where you came to see it as on the basis of what you have yourself made us see.
| | |
|
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 4 - 16 Apr 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | NOTE: Eben, I've been working on a revamp of this paper to come at parts of this idea in a different/better/less meandering way, but it's not soup yet. By all means read this if you prefer, but if you are deciding between which pieces to read and it matters to you, know that I plan to drop in an edit in the next 24-36 or so hours if it seems to work better. - Mike | | | | |
<
< | Winners and cynics
-- By MikeCarson - 12 Mar 2017
“Some people call politics fun, and maybe it is when you're winning. But even then it's a mean kind of fun, and more like the rising edge of a speed trip than anything peaceful or pleasant. Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.” 1 Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers 120 (1979).
I. Grim words from malcontents
Whether it's an act of accurate sociological reproduction or simple storytelling choices, in his first three chapters Joseph gives us malcontents for lawyers. They're self-consciously vulgar and sharply critical. They have unkind words for other lawyers, and skepticism about the profession as a whole. It all gets a bit grim at times. The criminal law is “civilization's pathology.” The law is “chaos.” Lawyers are “liars.”
“It's an inherent part of the process,” Judge Celia Day tells us. “Lawyers know too much. If you know too much, how don't you lie?”
II. Marginal powers, absolute consequences
What makes Joseph's lawyers cynical (if not, one insists, cynics)? | >
> | Primitive: Fear in Veblen, and in lawyers | | | | |
<
< | The lawyers Joseph presents do different work, although each is “never far from evil.” Carl Wylie's deals are “going to ruin the lives of thousands of people and their families.” Robinson and Day's courtroom stories are full of murderers, callous defendants, unsympathetic plaintiffs—and lawyers eager to be positively vicious in retaliating for personal wrongs against them. | >
> | -- By MikeCarson - Edited 26 April 2017 | | | | |
<
< | Certainly some of the tough talk and gallows humor comes from these intimate brushes with “evil.” But if they need to take a hard-bitten stance to cope with evil—to dissociate it, perhaps—I don't believe it's just because they brush up against the bad folks and their victims. | >
> | “I asked my partner what he thought of cousin Thorstein. Now this is a very socially aware young man, a very good lawyer I'm very fond of him. Do you know what he said?" Tharaud smiled. "'Cousin Thorstein was primitive.'” Lawrence Joseph, Lawyerland 125 (1997). | | | | |
<
< | “Robert Jackson had it right—what we do is by force of our commission,” Day tells us. “We are forced to discern the law as we see it. We are forced to enforce it.” | >
> | I. Proxies of 'primitive' force | | | | |
<
< | Wylie points out that lawyers like him do whatever their clients want them to. But even for the ones who aren't “pigged-out on cash,” the roles Joseph's lawyers play are still dictated. Day points out that even if she wants otherwise, there's “not much room for mercy” if she holds up her end of the bargain as a judge. Even Robinson, the iconoclast, the weirdo, is left by the system to wait, to plead out, to brag because the mostly-harmless kid he's representing “only” gets a year in Rikers. Joseph's lawyers fill roles dictated by their legal surroundings while operating in a world with high stakes for the parties, and relatively low ability to bend the system of justice to fit any particular moral sense of their own. | >
> | Martha Tharaud didn't misunderstand her partner when he called Thorstein Veblen “primitive.” Certainly he did mean that his philosophies were at least outdated and out of fashion, if not completely archaic. But he may also have meant more, | | | | |
<
< | One expects that can be bad for the psyche. Being a lawyer is deeply embedded in the identities of each the main characters Joseph gives us. How could it not be? But gifted “elites” though they might be, Joseph's lawyers use their considerable skills to wield marginal powers, in a world of absolute consequences at the hand of the system. | >
> | The currency of the social systems Veblen describes (at least through the first few chapters of The Theory of the Leisure Class) is grounded in understandings of the most primitive kind: waste of time and money develop as useful proxies for displaying brute, destructive force. Veblen drains some of the blood from the his descriptions, but “prowess” and “prepotency”—the kind of strength signaled by successful exploit—stand in for displays of the ability to cause harm. Cousin Veblen's theories say at least in part that what drives our economic and social behavior is a pervasive need to signal the traits that makes us “better capable of a sudden and violent strain”—namely, the capability to crush one another. What could be more primitive? | | | | |
<
< | III. Love winning, hate losing | >
> | “The predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory efficiency are deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those peoples who have passed under the discipline of a protracted predatory culture. According to popular award, the highest honours within human reach may, even yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary predatory efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing in the community these means of repute have been replaced by the acquisition and accumulation of goods.” | | | | |
<
< | Before law school, I spent five years as a manager and consultant on political campaigns. I was good, in a small-pond sort of way. | >
> | The emulative efforts of individuals are the outgrowth of this ancient respect for “predatory efficiency.” In a world with no buffalo to hunt and no tribal territory to go to war over, demonstrating wealth or leisurely refinement are the only ways left to demonstrate one's strength. | | | | |
<
< | If the only good reason for a career in law is because one loves justice or hates injustice, then I'd suggest that the way to make a career out of politics is to love winning, or else hate losing. The back-and-forth of political discourse around elections is mostly nonsense. (And rarely well-mannered enough to be transcendental). The candidates range from well-intentioned but imperfect, to mean and stupid and horrible. The methods of delivering the messages are mostly blunt and crass; and even worse, they sometimes work. | >
> | II. Fear as a driver of emulation | | | | |
<
< | But if the old saw is that elections have consequences, campaigns often don't. It's the exception and not the rule where the forces of demography, partisanship and incumbency allow for an election to be close enough where the staff or strategic choices can hope to make any difference in the result. Of course when you lose, then real people get pounded, and lose their healthcare, or get deported, or are sent off to fight in wars. | >
> | In class, we talked about how one mechanism for ingraining the need to show these distinctions in sexual selection and romantic competition. But it seems obvious that the same instincts must have functioned also toward mere survival. In a world of exploit, broadcasting strength does more than bring social approbation and self-esteem—it also signals to rivals who isn't to be trifled with. Ability to emulate is just evidence of exploitative capability; pick a fight with the one displaying the most social status, and one is liable to find themselves “exploited.” | | | | |
<
< | In that environment, it's important to focus on marginal victories. Good campaign staff focuses on “winning the day,” and hopes that when the time comes, the capricious political winds puts a win within spitting distance on election day. Mostly that means blowing up the other guy, in a hope those inclined to support him skip his name in when going down the ballot. In the best case, it's worth a percent or two. Which might be enough. | >
> | To the extent this hold true, it fits with the treadmill of acquisition and waste which Veblen describes as requiring individuals to always aspire to the next class. Ambition is one thing; fear that someone else will come and hurt you is quite another. Societal approbation and self-esteem are the engine of the patterns of waste and consumption Veblen identifies. But fear is forced induction for that process, supercharging each individual's effort to climb ever higher in the parade of emulation that determines social status to try to scare away violent challenges before they start. | | | | |
<
< | For those staffers, the larger issues are beside the point. Good staff makes every dollar and every second of airtime do the work of hammering the negatives. Your worth is measured in large part in how effective you are at landing your punches. | >
> | As Veblen himself points out, the increasing industrialization of society reduces the frequency and necessity of violent action. This makes the incentives for displaying exploitative prowess less clear in industrial societies. But many-thousand-year-old habits die hard in people. Even if new methods of display and new cultural and psychological tensions develop with the gradual decline of more “primitive” economic states, there's no reason to think that the old, visceral fears get left behind. | | | | |
<
< | IV. Not beanbag, but not combat | >
> | III. In defense of Thorstein's cousin | | | | |
<
< | If you talk to most campaign staff lifers, they sound a lot like Joseph's lawyers, the same sardonic smile and ready bite. | >
> | In the last draft of this essay (see revision history, but treat it as useful reading at your own peril) I made a lot of the gallows humor and and combative rhetoric of Joseph's lawyers in the opening chapters of Lawyerland. After Veblen, it seems clear to me that all three of the lawyers at the center of that draft are well in touch with their primitive sides. They feel fear, and they know how to cause it at their courtrooms and conference tables. They intuitively know their way around a nervous system forged in a few a few millennia of violence. | | | | |
<
< | There seem to me to be similarities in the high-stakes adversarial nature of the two jobs. Sometimes your client will lose when they deserve to win. Sometimes, you work for the bad guy. But every time, you know the outcome will have big consequences—and that there's only so much you can do to change it. | >
> | I'm certain that it makes them better lawyers. I feel reasonable sure it doesn't help them feel less afraid. To differing extents, all three show they are in touch with this vestigial condition of fear, but dissociate it (or perhaps embrace it), rather than transcending it. They intuitively know both how to leverage that kind of fear and to cope with it, but still spend much of their psychic energy like most everyone else in the industrial world Veblen describes—either broadcasting their strength, or else balled up and hoping to avoid the kind hammer shot unlike to come in their economic era. | | | | |
<
< | In a professional word with clear winners and losers, it's easy to love to win. Even Robinson, thoughtful in his way, suggests a love of the practice as pugilism. Good practitioners love to do the thing. Respect goes to the ones who get wins. | >
> | As Robinson and Celia Day know better than most, violence and exploit remain in the modern world. But even that is of a different character: our interpersonal contacts tend to be more dense, our means of violence more efficient. The old saw says “God created man, Sam Colt made them equal.” Economic and social factors have a role to play too, but generally, any level of protection afforded by demonstrations of wealth and leisure become a less valuable form of protection in a larger modern surrounding. | | | | |
<
< | In Chicago, they say “politics aint beanbag.” But it's also not combat. Neither is law. This seems to me a challenge to a lawyer's theory of social action, though—to be first a trench fighter, instead of an actor with higher purpose. Surely it will make you a cynic, if you let it. | >
> | There is too much that's outdated in the instinct toward violence and the accompanying fear. It's powerful, and likely to cloud efforts to feel or to do good. I don't think it's a given that Tharaud's partner doesn't feel this, even if he might not say it. Veblen sees us left with primitive instincts difficult to cast off. A bright young lawyer might see rejecting those fears as helpful for doing good, or feeling good, in a world where they've lost so much value. | | |
|
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 3 - 14 Apr 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
>
> | NOTE: Eben, I've been working on a revamp of this paper to come at parts of this idea in a different/better/less meandering way, but it's not soup yet. By all means read this if you prefer, but if you are deciding between which pieces to read and it matters to you, know that I plan to drop in an edit in the next 24-36 or so hours if it seems to work better. - Mike | | |
Winners and cynics |
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 2 - 13 Mar 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| | | For those staffers, the larger issues are beside the point. Good staff makes every dollar and every second of airtime do the work of hammering the negatives. Your worth is measured in large part in how effective you are at landing your punches. | |
<
< | IV. Not beanbag, but not war | >
> | IV. Not beanbag, but not combat | | | If you talk to most campaign staff lifers, they sound a lot like Joseph's lawyers, the same sardonic smile and ready bite. |
|
|
MikeCarsonFirstEssay 1 - 12 Mar 2017 - Main.MikeCarson
|
|
>
> |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
Winners and cynics
-- By MikeCarson - 12 Mar 2017
“Some people call politics fun, and maybe it is when you're winning. But even then it's a mean kind of fun, and more like the rising edge of a speed trip than anything peaceful or pleasant. Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.” 1 Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers 120 (1979).
I. Grim words from malcontents
Whether it's an act of accurate sociological reproduction or simple storytelling choices, in his first three chapters Joseph gives us malcontents for lawyers. They're self-consciously vulgar and sharply critical. They have unkind words for other lawyers, and skepticism about the profession as a whole. It all gets a bit grim at times. The criminal law is “civilization's pathology.” The law is “chaos.” Lawyers are “liars.”
“It's an inherent part of the process,” Judge Celia Day tells us. “Lawyers know too much. If you know too much, how don't you lie?”
II. Marginal powers, absolute consequences
What makes Joseph's lawyers cynical (if not, one insists, cynics)?
The lawyers Joseph presents do different work, although each is “never far from evil.” Carl Wylie's deals are “going to ruin the lives of thousands of people and their families.” Robinson and Day's courtroom stories are full of murderers, callous defendants, unsympathetic plaintiffs—and lawyers eager to be positively vicious in retaliating for personal wrongs against them.
Certainly some of the tough talk and gallows humor comes from these intimate brushes with “evil.” But if they need to take a hard-bitten stance to cope with evil—to dissociate it, perhaps—I don't believe it's just because they brush up against the bad folks and their victims.
“Robert Jackson had it right—what we do is by force of our commission,” Day tells us. “We are forced to discern the law as we see it. We are forced to enforce it.”
Wylie points out that lawyers like him do whatever their clients want them to. But even for the ones who aren't “pigged-out on cash,” the roles Joseph's lawyers play are still dictated. Day points out that even if she wants otherwise, there's “not much room for mercy” if she holds up her end of the bargain as a judge. Even Robinson, the iconoclast, the weirdo, is left by the system to wait, to plead out, to brag because the mostly-harmless kid he's representing “only” gets a year in Rikers. Joseph's lawyers fill roles dictated by their legal surroundings while operating in a world with high stakes for the parties, and relatively low ability to bend the system of justice to fit any particular moral sense of their own.
One expects that can be bad for the psyche. Being a lawyer is deeply embedded in the identities of each the main characters Joseph gives us. How could it not be? But gifted “elites” though they might be, Joseph's lawyers use their considerable skills to wield marginal powers, in a world of absolute consequences at the hand of the system.
III. Love winning, hate losing
Before law school, I spent five years as a manager and consultant on political campaigns. I was good, in a small-pond sort of way.
If the only good reason for a career in law is because one loves justice or hates injustice, then I'd suggest that the way to make a career out of politics is to love winning, or else hate losing. The back-and-forth of political discourse around elections is mostly nonsense. (And rarely well-mannered enough to be transcendental). The candidates range from well-intentioned but imperfect, to mean and stupid and horrible. The methods of delivering the messages are mostly blunt and crass; and even worse, they sometimes work.
But if the old saw is that elections have consequences, campaigns often don't. It's the exception and not the rule where the forces of demography, partisanship and incumbency allow for an election to be close enough where the staff or strategic choices can hope to make any difference in the result. Of course when you lose, then real people get pounded, and lose their healthcare, or get deported, or are sent off to fight in wars.
In that environment, it's important to focus on marginal victories. Good campaign staff focuses on “winning the day,” and hopes that when the time comes, the capricious political winds puts a win within spitting distance on election day. Mostly that means blowing up the other guy, in a hope those inclined to support him skip his name in when going down the ballot. In the best case, it's worth a percent or two. Which might be enough.
For those staffers, the larger issues are beside the point. Good staff makes every dollar and every second of airtime do the work of hammering the negatives. Your worth is measured in large part in how effective you are at landing your punches.
IV. Not beanbag, but not war
If you talk to most campaign staff lifers, they sound a lot like Joseph's lawyers, the same sardonic smile and ready bite.
There seem to me to be similarities in the high-stakes adversarial nature of the two jobs. Sometimes your client will lose when they deserve to win. Sometimes, you work for the bad guy. But every time, you know the outcome will have big consequences—and that there's only so much you can do to change it.
In a professional word with clear winners and losers, it's easy to love to win. Even Robinson, thoughtful in his way, suggests a love of the practice as pugilism. Good practitioners love to do the thing. Respect goes to the ones who get wins.
In Chicago, they say “politics aint beanbag.” But it's also not combat. Neither is law. This seems to me a challenge to a lawyer's theory of social action, though—to be first a trench fighter, instead of an actor with higher purpose. Surely it will make you a cynic, if you let it.
|
|
|