A Boating Betabilitarian

-- By NonaFarahnik - 18 Feb 2010

“The actual habits and attitudes which operate under the banner of the creed to make the institution effective have a slightly obscene appearance. Nice people do not want to discuss them, except for the purpose of getting rid of them.”

For Arnold, institutions are a necessary corollary to our human sociality. Every organization--from a little league baseball team, to the US Coast Guard, to the now defunct Lehman-- appeals to that sociality through a unique institutional culture furthered by self-fulfilling propaganda. An easy way to see the functioning of these orders is when Potential New Members are being recruited by competing institutions: fraternity rush, admitted student days, law firm happy hours, etc. Once a member has been initiated, the institution can heighten its control by using its ordering principles to motivate its adherents and to sharply demarcate us from them.

Coupled with our sociality (and perhaps developed alongside it), is our desire for a world narrative with inherent meaning and order. That need for outwardly-existing (often divine) order stifles our ability to question reality and to recognize how more pervasive and ordering institutions can manipulate public attitude and thought. Thus, we recognize these forces only when the context of the institution's functioning is benign (Santa), or so blatant as to make us uncomfortable about its effectiveness (Nazi Germany). Otherwise, we operate as if these forces do not exist. This is reflected through the purposive content, but underlying ignorance of the New York Times’ Where Fear Turns Graphic.

We have a hard time recognizing the less identifiable and more difficult ways by which powerful institutions bombard us with particular attitudes and creeds. This ignorance perpetuates the separation borne of institutional identification, and leads to moral rationalization grounded in institutional folklore, not in reality. A simple experiment to witness this phenomenon can be performed by watching the Fox News Channel during prime time. Journalism today mostly serves to help obfuscate what is actually happening in the world around us (particularly from 2:45). We are often left unable to see how an institution functions and its direct relationship to how we think and function.

If institutions unconsciously move us by creating some notion of a general will whose furtherance demands the suppression of the particular, we should be focused on improving the frameworks of society's most basic structures so they are more just. My license will also be a membership to one of the world's most powerful institutions-- the American legal system. How can I use my membership to increase the share of justice in a world devoid of ascertainable moral standards? I will seek to be Holmes’ betabilitarian: I cannot measure my choices against a normative standard, but against my predictions on how people behave. The only choice I have is to measure risk and place my bets.

"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."

Tzedek Tzedek, Tirdof

My Feet on the Street (or Marble). Where Do I Start?

Professor Wu used this metaphor to illustrate something he experienced in his work as a Supreme Court clerk: we put our best and brightest into surgery when we need people in preventative care. We have court-appointed defense lawyers who sleep during a capital murder trial, and a pro-bono firm partner taking the case at the appellate level when the client is already on death row. I want to go into preventative care.

Building My Boat(s)

This class cultivates my desire to build my own fleet so that in the future I can tack in every direction. Right now, I am building a simple Sunfish that can sail--even if there is little room aboard and it cannot go very fast or far. I want to build a racing trimaran that can cut through the water at ridiculous speeds. I will build a motorboat for when the wind dies down but I still have somewhere to go. I want to build a yacht where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor. And I want to be so good at building boats that I engender trust from my clients, and can inspire others to build on their own.

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I think my point was that the institutions we belong to define how we think about ourselves and the world, and that changes in institutional culture can thus yield substantive change for the better/towards justice. Law is the ultimate institution. I want to use my time in law school to learn as much as I possibly can and to learn how to use my license to effectively operate within and against institutions. I want to use that license in a way so that I might be given the responsibility of managing institutions as well. I want to make things more efficient and more just and I kind of wanted this paper to be a little pledge to myself.

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To begin with, let's get the Holmes quote out of the way. It comes from a letter to Frederic Pollock:

Chauncey Wright, a nearly-forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that I must not say necessary about the universe, that we don't know whether anything is necessary or not. I believe that we can bet on the behavior of the universe in its contact with us. So I describe myself as a bet-abilitarian.

What this does or does not have to do with anything I leave to others to decide.

I of course have a particular problem in commenting on this essay. It is too much about me, and too much of that is flattering (if not flattery). I hope that eventually it will be clear whether some of the social processes I designed and set in motion justify the praise unduly lavished now on the minor phenomenon of a teacher merely but seriously teaching his students.

I am actually the fracture at the midline, and if I were removed, the remaining sections could come together more effectively. Arnold's analysis of the way in which organizations are held together is still appropriate, as you show. His understanding of organizational psychology captured much that would later become so overwhelming as to be (as you show) invisible, because he explicated mechanisms that mass broadcast media would mold into an immense organizational landscape literally unimaginable at the opening of the 20th century.

But the principles of social self-organization represented by the quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry are becoming powerful themselves in the 21st century, as the Net makes it possible to form collaborative organizations stretching across the whole breadth of humanity in the blink of an eye. My work and the work of hundreds of thousands of other people has shown that anarchic production in such communities can not only rival but surpass capitalist innovation, and that cultural distribution will be massively democratized, leading to the collapse of power-concentrating mass media, with equally profound organizational consequences as those that Arnold's writing partially described.

What all those boats are about might otherwise be described as the development of new forms of "institutional architecture" for young people such as yourselves to become masters of. Obviously you will have teachers, and evidently I will be one of them. But by the time you have come fully into your powers we will be gone, and the world to be made will be made as you are beginning to imagine making it.