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PatrickCroninThirdPaper 18 - 04 Aug 2009 - Main.PatrickCronin
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< | The Importance of Contradiction in the Constitution of Political Bodies | >
> | The Importance of Nonsense | | | The Mob | | | Thurman Arnold explains that we need our leaders and the organizations to which we belong to reflect the contradictions we all feel. Bill Clinton was such a successful politician because, not in spite, of his foibles. Organizations need to reflect the full spectrum of forces acting between and through individuals: "Thus the American industrial organization is a hard-boiled trader, a scholar, a patron of modern architecture, a thrifty housewife, a philanthropist, a statesman preaching sound principles of government, a patriot, and a sentimental protector of widows and orphans at the same time." If nothing else, we need our organizations to reflect the full spectrum of our drives at all times. | |
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< | Organization and Constitutional Crisis | >
> | Organization | | | Things become more convoluted if you want an organization to work towards a practical goal. Your ceremony needs to strike a balance between holding a group together and directing their activity towards that goal. You need a creed or a constitution. Arnold argues that as the practical needs of a group and their ceremonial image of themselves diverge, bodies of metaphysical learning and split organizations develop. But different actual needs will always diverge. So what Arnold is describing is a pathological state where a society's ideal image of itself isn't succeeding in reconciling the contradictory needs that animate it. This pathological state leads to a constitutional crisis. | | | Music is an excellent tool for forming an organized group out of a mob. Music works because it doesn't obey the law of non-contradiction. Thus music can (temporarily) resolve the contradictions that run through a group -- unifying them. In fact, music can be understood as an art of pure organization. Composers create anxiety and satisfaction by approaching and receding from the edge of the tonal worlds they create. The tension produced in the middle of a classical sonata is the fear that the composer wont be able to successfully "bring it back" to the tonic, and that it will all "fall apart". The satisfaction is created by the composer pulling it off. But music is never played in a vacuum. The tension felt in the middle of a piece is also the anxiety and excitement created by the possibility that the audience will turn back into a mob -- a group of pure contradiction. The first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is an instance of this reverse transformation of group into a mob. | |
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< | What a Lawyer Can Do
Thought cannot directly create or even change groups of people -- since much of what we need is not logical: "Men--even learned men-- cannot 'think up forms of social organization". "The Politician does not attempt to change the mythology. He works with it unscrupulously to get results." Creeds and constitutions -- the glue that holds groups of people together cannot be created by any one person. This theory poses a problem for people who went to law school with the hopes of learning how to change the world. The world changes itself, and the most that lawyers can do is help facilitate that change. The law is supposed to hold groups of people together by mediating conflicts, but not one person can decide what those conflicts are going to be because they are the result of the natural contradictions that run through the social body. A budding lawyer cannot make up his practice out of whole cloth.
What we can do is keep an eye out for which conflicts are going to arise, and work to adequately reconcile the conflicting drives that animate them so that we avoid the pathological state that Arnold describes. There will always be contradiction and conflict. The goal is to skillfully work through the conflict as a musician keeps a crowd satisfied. Groups need tension. Lawyers can help to make sure all the contradictory voices in the social body are heard and more or less resolved. If the desires of a segment of the population are not being heard and ceremonially reconciled then the surface of the political body can become too lax and the social body will sicken. | >
> | The Law and Contradiction | | | | |
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> | Some people go to law school hoping to obtain the tools that will allow them to change the world. Their first year they are met with the full array of intractable conflicts that run through social groups. They come face to face with Arnold's insight that
thought cannot create or even change groups of people -- since much of what we need is not logical: "Men--even learned men-- cannot 'think up forms of social organization". There will always be contradiction and conflict and the law cannot eradicate them or even determine what the conflicts are. Furthermore, law school pushes everyone towards consistency and rationality. We are thrown into the heart of these contradictions, and then tasked with the Sysiphusian labor of rationalizing them. This work can be deadly because of its sheer volume, and also because it removes the aesthetic and ceremonial apparatus that normally softens the contradictions. Perhaps the extinguishing of spaces where these contradictions are allowed to coexist without being rationalized explains the rigid hierarchies and alcoholism in much of the legal community. | | | | |
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> | Lawyers need more nonsense -- both for their own sanity and also in order to be better lawyers. In order to get things done in groups of people, a healthy tolerance for irrationality and contradiction is essential. Groups are held together both by ceremonial nonsense and the actual satisfaction of the needs of their members. The nonsense element can never be eradicated, since people are always going to have contradictory drives. We need to be able to function on both planes in order to get anything done. | | | --PatrickCronin |
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