A Boating Betabilitarian

-- By NonaFarahnik - 18 Feb 2010

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

The Sea

Eben understands that an institutional frameworks is important, and he does this in his job, and for us in the classroom. The music. The format. The wiki. The stories. The collaboration. The time and effort. It creates an aura. I buy into it. "this class is my attempt to contribute practically towards making a curriculum that teaches other people how to make positive things happen in society by learning to inspire and harness the human restless hunger for the immensity of possibility." This class gives form to thoughts that have always been floating in my head and new ideas too. It helps that the curriculum is strangely almost perfectly up my alley (or does it feel this way to everyone?) During Legal Methods I had this sneaking suspicion that when I was a kid I was a legal realist. This class confirms it.

My Boat

I am yearning! His work inspires me to build for the sea. But to build many boats. Tack in all different directions. A simple Sunfish to start and to idly drift in the water. A multihull trimaran so I can cut through the water at ridiculous speeds. A motorboat for when the wind is laying low. A yacht for when I just want to kick back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. And, I want to be so good at building boats that other people trust my judgment and so that I inspire them to build their own.

Creeds, Rituals, Myths. Arnold and Minarets.

Though we are all related, we do a pretty good job of using psychological/societal/physical aspects of our world to separate this from the other. For Arnold, we would call this the creed, myth, ritual, etc. People are mostly motivated to action by these systemic orders in unconscious ways. The thing is that it is hard for us to call the thing what it is, except in contexts where it is so blatant or in used in such a way as to make us uncomfortable about its effectiveness. That is reflected in the NY Times article.

The reality that we do the NY Times article every day though in more subtle and less identifiable ways leads to problematic and contradictory results: we see moral culpability in individual actions but shield our complicity and judgment even for state-condoned actions. The absurdity which we call collateral damage.

If we acknowledge that politics subconsciously moves us by creating some notion of the general will and asking us to suppress our particular wills in order for the general wills furtherance, than it seems to me that the task we are left with is creating institutional frameworks that fight for good and justice. How do we know what is good and what is just? I am a betabilitarian. I look at the world around me, I see things, I feel things, I am willing to bet on certain propositions and take the brunt if I am wrong I cannot measure our choices against a normative standard, the universe and people act a certain way, I have to predict those actions as best as possible, see how i fit into them in the pursuit of justice... The only choice i have is to place my bets and play. What degree of risk am I/are we willing to assume? That degree of risk defines the boundaries of my/our winnings (and losses).

(Beit) Tzedek Tzedek, Tirdof

We need to have our feet on the street. To remember that the marble is cold. We are putting our best and brightest into surgery and dermatology when we should all be going into preventative care. Professor Wu used a variant of this metaphor during crim last week. We have court-appointed defense lawyers who sleep during a capital murder trial, and pro-bono bigfirm high end partners taking the cases at the appellate level when we need them at the trial. The solution? Use whatever part of us our humanity to create institutional norms creeds rituals that tend toward our bets on good.

There is no time to wait! Where do I start? A. with my legal education. I am going to wring out every $ I put in and then some. I go to lunches and lectures and office hours all the time. As far as I am concerned, this year has already been worth more than 50k to me (People pay 7k to go to TED for a few days. This has been TED all year for me). There is a spectrum of how much you can get out of this education and the value of our tuition varies accordingly. Community- it doesn’t exist if it isn’t created. We have a great foundation for a community. I have had great professors, I am learning and will make an effort to learn more about my peers. I will commit to being in charge of a class list of permanent email addresses and to organizing a biannual reunion for all of us-- Put a link to a list here-- B. With my legal institution. I have a lot of ideas, big and small, about how to make CLS a better place overall. I believe that if my peers are doing better, I will do better. I believe that institutions can be shaped to bring out the best parts of our humanity, if we try and we get buy-in C. By representing people. I have advised friends my whole life. Took advantage of my job doing client intake at a firm called Beit Tzedek. We turned people away by the droves. There are always clients. I represented a family through the Homeless project. Continue to do that so that I can learn how to deal with people, what helps them get the most out of me. How can I give them the most?

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