*clapping*
Actually, Paul, you and I have had remarkably similar career tracks. While I practiced law for a few years in between law school and grad school, I chose a ph.d program in the medical humanities in large part because of what I perceived (correctly, as it turns out) to be the character-building aspect of the humanities.
Given that the Renaissance and medieval humanists were obsessed with arete, it is unsurprising perhaps that my learning about the humanities and their relevance to contemporary medical practice has been so meaningful for me personally.
In any case, welcome to L&L.
What a great post to enter with! Of course, it's easy for me to say that because I sympathize strongly with it.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had left law school on the various occasions that I had doubts regarding the compatibility of law practice and my personality, but then I encounter the effects of GHASR. (Thanks for putting that into words.) I have a dual problem: law practice is not my passion (and I don't know what is), and some of the traits that make me good at law practice make law practice bad for me -- most notably, a detail-oriented strain of perfectionism.
Now I've got the debt and the family obligations, so I can't flutter around chasing the shiny things. But I should probably still try to spend some time looking around.
I'll look forward to your later posts!
You can't just sit around and imagine what might make you feel fulfilled and happy in life, and you can't just rely on the experiences of others. You have to go out and do it yourself.
And so you might be wrong, really wrong, any number of times.
Daniel: Thanks! As you can probably tell, I'm slightly obsessed with arete myself. I'm curious: what do you think it is about the humanities particularly that has that character-building aspect? Is it just that -- the discussion of such questions? Or something else?
Tim: Thanks to you too! If it's any consolation, the detail-oriented perfectionism might be better, enjoyment-of-the-practice-of-law-wise, than the alternative. I say this as someone who is far on the opposite end of the detail-oriented spectrum. Those rough first learning-curve couple of years in the practice get a lot scarier when you're worried about having forgotten stuff/occasionally have a terror-filled rip through the piles of paper on your desk looking for the evidence...
Ben: you're an inveterate cynic, but I like you anyway.
What you describe requires an economic safety net that the vast majority of people, including most law students do not have. Moreover, the existence of privilege is dependent on the lack of privilege for others. I do not think the answer is for do-gooders to "help" while maintaining their positions. They will actually have to give up something and very few are willing to do that.
Hey Paul,
Sure, I have some definite ideas. You can peruse my own blog, where I discuss the importance of rhetoric to the humanists. The basic idea is that the humanists were in no small part reacting to Scholastic pedagogy, which was dominant. The Scholastics privileged logic among the seven liberal arts, and the humanists grew frustrated because the disputations of the Scholastics in the cloisters and universities seemed to have little relevance to everyday people's daily lives.
The humanists wanted to help people cultivate virtue in the moments of their lives, in their practices, and they sought to use ancient erudition in the service of that virtue. Their model is crucial for contemporary academics, IMO, who would do well to understand that layering abstrations upon abstractions generally does not excite the cultivation of arete, IMO.
More so, as Petrarch recognized, it is not logic that moves people's hearts. It is rhetoric, and I therefore try to think deeply about what poetics will move myself and others engaged in biomedical culture to the practice of virtue.
There's much more, of course, but this is a core idea, and one that has been deeply meaningful to me. The other major idea comes from Montaigne, who is a personal hero of mine. Ruthlessly skeptical, yet wholly pragmatic at the same time, Montaigne would have scoffed at the universalizing, objectifying tendencies of modernity. He was quite comfortable with subjective, local, particularized ways of knowing.
These ideas are central to my own personal identity, as well as my professional identity. (My diss is on pain and pain management, and in some sense is a defense of subjective knowledge).
Even the title of Montaigne's most famous work is meaningful to me: the Essays. In French, of course, "essai" means "to try," "to attempt," and that is of course what Montaigne is doing: trying and attempting 'himself.'
One of my credos, then, comes from Montaigne: c'est moi que je peins, or "It is me that I paint."
Social networks are more connected to wealth than any other factor (including hard work, intelligence and education), I'm not sure how that can be changed.
However, many people can follow your suggestions. Working as a paralegal pays more than a lot of other things. More than being a law student.
The change in suggestions that I would make is to suggest that you take time while in school to explore things. While a student you have more free time than you probably will any other time.
Rather than waste it on beer, television and pretzels, there are a lot of other things you can do. Many mistakes, obviously (did I really need to earn a brown belt in a martial art?); but wrong roads taken are part of finding the right one.
I strongly disagree that it's good for people to go searching for our passions, to join in the upper-middle class American quest to find what truly makes us happy in life. In fact, this looks to me very much like a cultural sickness--an ugly form of narcissism, which, while it promotes endless unnecessary consumption, ultimately works to make people miserable. Why? Because we haven't got any passions locked up inside of us, as the myth goes. And happiness, when it's treated as a subjective internal feeling (as opposed to, say, Greek eudaimonia or "human flourishing"), is ultimately arbitrary, meaningless, and fleeting.
Moreover, I doubt that the quest to find one's personal happiness is aided by "a broad and deep education, long-distance travel, exposure to role models in a variety of careers and lifestyles, socialization and encouragement to define one's own model of success and bring it about." In fact, these are all things which today typically make one's passions and real inner happiness show up as a problem in the first place. Many poorer people (certainly not those in poverty, but those who live rather below the mainstream middle class) are probably happier than those who've been entrapped in the narcissistic quest after one's own passions. Many of them know what sort of person they should be, know what makes them happy, and have cultural traditions stable enough that they don't have to join in the ridiculous and self-defeating journeys of self-discovery so emphasized by the upper-middle class.
You seem to be aware of the hardships this quest--this cultural way of being--has caused you. Why would you want to expand it to those not already caught up in it? I'm all for character development, but I should think this quite opposed to trying to find "your own idea of what it might mean for your life to go well."
Charles, I think you miss the gist of my remarks. The idea is not to pursue a shallow kind of happiness -- the sort that comes from the "endless unnecessary consumption" that I find just as distasteful as do you.
The idea is rather that human flourishing manifests different ways in different people. (I think this is the strong intuition expressed, among other places, in chapter 4 of Mill's Utilitarianism.) And one way to find the way of life in which one flourishes is to promote additional experience.
I don't see much to value in the contrary idea that you express -- the idea that those who are in thick cultural contexts and lack the resources to pursue their own sense of the good are better off. If nothing else, it leaves you no place to stand in critiquing middle-class lifestyle. That is, if there isn't a best life for people, independent of their cultural context (if the standard communitarian critique of the disembodied liberal person is true), then on what basis do you say that the life of the poor-but-happy person is better than the life of the middle-class-consumer/greedhead? Each simply represents a different place in the culture, or a different culture.
If, on the other hand, you think there is a best life for people, then you've got a big epistemic burden in showing that it's the one that happens to be lived by the poor-but-happy people. It's much more plausible to think that people know what's best for themselves. And it's a short step from that concession to "everyone should seek out the way of life that is most congenial to them," which was my position in the first place.
(Also: hardships? I wouldn't change a thing.)
I suspect something like communitarianism is what I was after in that rather silly post I just made... (I'm not really deep enough in academia to know whether that would be an accurate way of putting it.)
But one thing I'd say is that there's certainly room for cultural criticism. If it makes sense to talk about an upper-middle class culture and a lower-class culture in the way I was suggesting, this needn't mean that the two are equal, and there's nothing more to be said. One could very well hope to argue against a culture by appealing to its own values and discourses.
Also, personally, I don't find it plausible at all to think that people know what's best for themselves (I'm still waiting to meet one). But I can't see much reason why we should be arguing about it. It seems rather absurd to me that I've written anything here at all...
Not absurd at all. Really interesting discussion, and thanks for commenting. I'd say something myself, but I am not very good at figuring out the happiness equation. I've been reading lots of happiness studies from the cog psych people though. They are kind of depressing.
Regardless of where one stands on the philosophical happiness discussion, I just have to say it is so nice to find someone else with the same thoughts about the law school and legal job world. I was one of those fools who went to law school because I didn't know what I wanted to do and a JD is "such a valuable and marketable degree, even if you don't want to be a lawyer." I am now seeing that as the load of malarkey that it is. I heartily agree that people should take a breath and do some test runs before committing the next 20 years of their loan paying lives to law school.
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