Fighting Myself

-- By MichaelHolloway - 24 Apr 2009

A Reminder

The other night I crossed Amsterdam Avenue to hear a man named William Gass speak on the topic of "baroque prose." Keenly aware of my law school affiliation, I ducked into the small auditorium and picked out a spot off to the side, feeling like I'd wandered in from the wrong side of the tracks. But soon enough I settled in and Gass began to speak.

Gass spoke of the conflict among Puritans, Anglicans, and Catholics in England around 1630, and how these sects' differing manners of speaking and writing reflected the broader social conflicts of the time. He spoke of the sermons of John Donne and Jeremy Taylor, and how their "baroque" prose style later found its way across the Atlantic to influence Emerson and Henry James. He spoke of the fundamentally oral/aural nature of language, and how the best prose, like poetry, must be heard aloud to be fully understood.

After a while he stopped and took questions from the audience. I watched the familiar academic back-and-forth, the man on stage thoughtfully answering questions, sometimes pausing at length or simply trailing off mid-sentence, always with the warmth and self-ironic wit peculiar to certain old men, and I realized I felt at home in a way I hadn't in months, maybe years. Here were people I felt I understood, people I could relate to, who cared about and laughed at the same things I did.

A Past Life, Reemerged

Why am I in law school? Many of my posts to the wiki really boil down to this question. Thus far, it hasn't proven a very congenial fit. I don't enjoy arguing, even playfully; conflict makes me nervous, and I take pains to avoid it. I am not even slightly a "career-driven realist," and I don't relate well to them. For me, being here involves a kind of psychic split. While I'm learning what I came to learn (which has little to do with the official first-year curriculum), I'm often ashamed to admit I'm a law student. People get the wrong idea.

I came to law school because I identify with people who struggle in the contemporary economic order, and I want to know how to make the world a better place for them. Earlier, with the same ambitions, I began a doctoral program in political science. But I went on leave of absence in 2006, two years in, because a career as an academic political theorist felt ineffectual for a would-be radical.

But that's not the only reason. Due to faculty retention problems, I had no stable advisor. My absolute inexperience with the social, political, and economic structures I meant to attack undercut my confidence in my work. And, most importantly for me, two semesters as a teaching assistant made clear that I was a disastrous teacher. I lacked confidence in front of a class, feeding my penchant for obscurantism. I meant well, but I foisted off a lot of bullshit. On top of that, I resented many of my students for what I saw as their easy affluence and self-entitled mediocrity. In short, I was a failure across the board.

I disagreed with friends who said I needed not worry about undergraduate teaching. Political theorists exist only to teach; they have no other social value. If I couldn't perform adequately at my sole social function, it was time to move on. The trouble is that, teaching aside, academia suited me very well; I'm in love with ideas. I own shelves full of books by people like Foucault and John Dewey, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. My years in grad school were two of my happiest. I haven't found a life even remotely as congenial since.

The (Vindictive) Good Son vs. the Layabout Intellectual Elitist

At our second class meeting, we heard that none of our personal introductions invoked duty or responsibility as motivations for studying law. This may have been true, but I'm not sure these motivations are entirely absent. For many of us, the fact of the world's sheer brutality implies a duty to do justice. Moreover, my privilege in receiving a world-class education creates the responsibility to use it for good. From those to whom much is given, we rightly expect much in return.

But while I aspire to be like the saints, there's also a vindictiveness to my worldview. Some deep personal pathology, maybe, or maybe something to do with my father. His vindictiveness, as best I can tell, springs from jealousy and learned helplessness; mine, from watching him suffer at the hands of plant foremen and, later, HMO administrators. Labor relations and healthcare in the U.S. have very real and very serious problems, but I worry that my motivations might get in my way as an advocate. In truth, my ego identification with people who suffer leads me to desire helping them less than destroying the people getting rich on their backs. But this seems a hopeless battle; the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, after all.

Anger or wonder: which is the better motivator? Maybe it depends on the person. If the latter, then perhaps I ought to steer in a more academic than activist route. Just reading the fictionalized accounts of labor and healthcare lawyering in "Cerriere's Answer" and "Transactional" left me feeling angry and hopeless; academia promises a career without the internal strife and moral compromise. Then again, picturing myself as an academic leaves me feeling guilty, like some kind of class traitor. What could be more self-indulgent than sitting around in cafes reading Adorno all day?

An Uncharacteristically Upbeat Ending

In my optimistic moments, I remember that meaningful careers don't come neatly pre-packaged, and that many people successfully combine advocacy and academic work. Thankfully, I have the rare privilege of two more years to spend working through this conflict, finding teachers and developing the expertise I need to fashion a career both fulfilling and just.

• I think this is a very interesting and deeply-felt essay, Michael. I think people would benefit from seeing it for any number of reasons, but what you do with a personal statement of this kind it is not for me to say.

• From my point of view, you are unnecessarily troubling yourself about the matter of motive. Hatred of injustice and anger at those who benefit from it are troublesome not because they are morally wrong, or inappropriate as sources of energy with which to work to improve the world. They are problematic, but primarily as all other hatreds and angers are problematic, because we hurt ourselves with them even when we hurt nobody else. Over time, if we are both lucky and capable of change, we do more to integrate the personality states within us that are angry and feel hatred, bringing their energies and insights to bear on our lives, but in a more tranquil way. We don't wait for that to happen to begin living and working, however, and there is no reason why we should. The tempering process that comes with age is not a precondition to, but rather the outgrowth of, our adult experiences in the world.

• Similarly, I think the sense of dislocation you take from wanting to be a working agent of social change in the company of intellectuals is more distressing to you now from unfamiliarity than inherent conflict. I've gone in my professional life from being a legal historian primarily focused on what happens inside the university-centered world of knowledge production to being a legal strategist and popularizer, coordinating activities and originating messages primarily focused on making social change on a global level involving hundreds of millions of people. That's affected greatly how I spend my days and what I talk about. But it hasn't changed what I read, or think about in my slight spare time, or altered my intellectual temperament. If you put yourself inside an organization which pays you a salary in return for all your mental effort, and which has an incentive therefore to squeeze all it can out of you, you will have difficulty maintaining the continuity of your intellectual life. But if you avoid creating relationships in which it is to others' benefit to reduce your breadth of thought, you will be fine.

• I would suggest the value of increasing your reading of history. This is often a problem for political theorists, as you know: the raw material is copiously available, but theorists have tended to eschew all but a narrow part of it. For a working lawyer attempting to make large-scale social change, I have found, capacious vicarious experience of the contingencies of human social behavior is the most important resource. I have been lucky to work on behalf of clients whose time horizon was far longer than those of the commercial organizations with whom they cooperated or struggled. The Free World cares about the fate of technological liberty a century hence, not the performance of any or all firms three quarters out. But my clients' desire for long-term change would not have been sufficient without also bringing to the table a long historical perspective in which to understand the current events in which we participate.