Social animal

Law school's a grind. But even with a competitive curve (where my academic success depends on others' failure), it does not have to be the ruthless me-first environment it's presumed to be.

David Brook's essay, "Social Animal," in the New Yorker reminds me why that's so important.  It's an antidote to my past reflections on the pursuit of happiness. I wrote that happiness is not all it's cracked up to be, that we should stop treating happiness as an end.  It eludes those who seek it, so ignore it if you can.  Treat it as the byproduct of a meaningful life.  Yep, just try to live a meaningful life.  But what is a meaningful life?  And its corollary (dare I ask): What is the meaning of life?

David Brooks, citing social psychology research, takes a crack at it:

Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures.

Brooks illustrates the point through an archetype, named Harold.  Snippets:

[Harold] didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks.

By the time Harold was in his mid-twenties, he was well on his way toward a happy and fulfilling life, and the building blocks of his happiness had little to do with the lines on his résumé. ... According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associated with happiness are social—having sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends. Many of the professions that correlate most closely with happiness are also social—a corporate manager, a hairdresser.

Harold had the sense that he had been trained to react in all sorts of stupid ways. He had been trained, as a guy, to be self-contained and smart and rational, and to avoid sentimentality. Yet maybe sentiments were at the core of everything. He’d been taught to think vertically, moving ever upward, whereas maybe the most productive connections were horizontal, with peers.

The world spins

It has not been a good week to have law school exams.  The world did not stop spinning.

In Georgia, thousands of prisoners across seven prisons sat down in their cells to nonviolently protest their slavery-like conditions.  In the words of the 13th Amendment, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States."  Hidden in the ellipses, however, is an exception: "except as a punishment for crime."  It seems prisoners have had enough.  I bet prisons across the country are clamping down, lest others get ideas.  An Ohio prisoner I once interviewed spent months in solitary confinement for trying to organize a work stoppage.

In London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange became perhaps the first person to spend a week in jail for "questioning" related to sexual assault.  Apparently no charges have been filed (yet).  WikiLeaks has sidelined the sexual assault issue, but nuanced writers have managed to criticize the politically motivated prosecution without trivializing the seriousness of sexual violence.

In Washington today, the Senate voted against the DREAM Act and in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," finally answering the question of whom the Republicans hate more: immigrants or queers.  So, congratulations, queers.  Now you too can forcibly occupy foreign lands - or at least do so openly.  Nothing says "empowerment" quite like the opportunity to oppress others.  Half-joking aside, of course I support the repeal.  The military changes hearts and minds - if not in Iraq, then here at home.  African Americans once turned to the military to assert their own social rights.

I finished exams in torts and Constitutional law.  Last up: property.

Reaching for the stars

"What are you going to do with it?"  They mean a law degree.

I usually say I want to protect the civil rights of incarcerated people, or defend the poor as a public defender.  Or if I am trying to startle someone, especially someone who's judged me by my short hair and tucked-in shirt, I might say that I want to defend the guilty from the abuse of the state.

Regardless, every time I answer, I build up expectations that I will actually undertake such a career, because if not, I'd have to admit that I had deluded myself and misled others.  Answering the question is thus a shield against any temptation to follow a more lucrative path of lesser resistance.  And yes, it also makes it harder to simply change my mind.  But that's a risk I'll take.  If we're not devoted to something, even an evolving something, we're devoted to nothing.

At the very least, if I do change my mind, I can always say:

Is law school a trade school?

I hope so, because I want to be useful to people, esp. people in prison, prison facing prison, and people dumped from prisons to homelessness. We can't be just a bunch of anti-somethings - anti-imperialist, anti-racist,  etc.  We must actually work toward the dream of shared prosperity.

A friend Chelsea gave me an essay, titled, "Leveraging the Academy: Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad School," by Chris Dixon and Alexis Shotwell. Graduate school, they write, "often creates exhausted, insecure, status-consciousness people who distrust their own judgments."  It's not surprising then, that "[t]hough radical ideas sometimes show up in academic discourse, they almost always originate elsewhere." Somewhat comically, the authors write in academic jargon - for example, describing the university as "a nexus through which systems of power manifest." (Ha, there's no simpler way of saying that? It doesn't bode well for me if even these self-identifying radicals get swept up in the temptation of trying to sound smart.)

Anyway, the point is to screw thinking for its own sake.

Albert Camus expresses the idea beautifully, as usual.  From The Plague (119):

"Do you believe in God, Doctor?"
Again the question was put in an ordinary tone. But this time Rieux took longer to find the answer.
"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original."
"Isn't that it - the gulf between Paneloux and you?"
"I doubt it. Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth - with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence."

Torts, property, Constitutional law, oh my!

After four years in the workforce, I am going back to school.  Law school starts tomorrow.

I've been preparing for a struggle, for the discomfort of immersing myself a fairly narrow way of thinking.  In the ivory tower, we're tempted to believe that everyone shares our middle-class sensibilities, that it's all about the law, its procedures, its hierarchy.  It becomes easy to normalize injustice, to lose the outrage, to feel entitled to the lucrative careers that already have our names on them.  So part of me feels that the next three years will be Eli v. Law School.  But I also think that it'll be fun, that law school can be empowering in good ways.  Law school and I can be on the same team.  And with that optimism, I hope the gulp in my throat is just adrenaline hiding out.