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< | Personal Direction within a Distorted Society | >
> | This Is Why I Have Trust Issues | | | -- By KevinS - 19 Feb 2016 | |
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< | The Role of Direction | >
> | Why We Should Be Skeptical of Our Environment | | | | |
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< | After our first class, I left with an initial understanding of a lawyer, that lawyering is making change in society using words. And as a law student, I am in training to become part of the population that is charged with the heavy duty of directing that change. While one naturally picks up the technical "words" by simply being around other lawyers, I find the prospect of identifying a direction much more daunting and complex. Does the direction of social change point towards greater social programs or towards a fostering of independent liberties? Does the direction reflect a personal value, a community identification, or simply a result of path-dependent upbringing? One may preserve the inalienable right to pursue happiness, but can one's personal pursuit not be insidiously distorted by our surroundings? I admit that the direction in which I believe the world should change has personally changed for me several times in the past year alone. From what does one derive a personal compass and how much is it to be trusted? | >
> | In my very first class, I was told, "Rhetoric seeks to answer the question of 'what ought we to do?'" And to that extent, my life is embedded in a social fabric of rhetoric. Every moment and every second, there seems to be a multitude of external forces, applying pressure on what I should look like, how I should act, and what I should pursue. I don't refer to blatant advertising campaigns at the bus stops or on the sidebars; those can be easily discerned and considered appropriately. No, I refer to a subtler advertising campaign, in the form of the people around us, their goals, their role models, their actions. How often do I dress myself in the morning with some reference to the style I've seen other people wear? How much of what I say contain some phrases that I've adopted from other people's speech? How much of what I think is right or fair can be attributed to the notions of the people around me? These bits and pieces of our everyday lives - maybe better referred to as simply "modern culture" - are sources of external influences on our own personal actions, even though their justifications may be wholly irrelevant to our interests. | | | | |
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< | What should direction look like? | >
> | What's wrong with culture? | | | | |
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< | While reading the rant of Lawrence Joseph's character, Robinson, an initial impression is that this man knows what he wants and how to achieve it. Regardless of how dissatisfied he may be with the criminal justice system he operates in, Robinson shows no hesitation in describing the murderers he defends nor does he hesitate to point out the dotted line between criminals and attorneys. If not personally happy, Robinson is at least satisfied with the direction of his own practice and its effects in society. This is how I imagine what personal direction would be manifested in the legal sector. Robinson doesn't care to have his actions and skill set be utilized and beholden to anyone besides himself. On a aside note, it's also painfully clear how disenchanted Robinson is with the legal system. I can only wonder if such disenchantment is the natural result of a personal pursuit in a direction against the momentum of contemporary society. | >
> | I suppose an initial objection to this critique is, "But culture is natural and should be preserved! It defines who we are as a people." This may have been true when the human race lived in close proximity to each other, people knew their neighbors intimately, and culture did develop naturally and relevantly. However, in an era where anyone can communicate with us, "culture" is at risk of being developed artificially and deceptively. No doubt, it is certainly valuable that we can share new ideas and diverse perspectives but this value is received at the risk of being influenced by forces completely dissociated from ourselves. Boat shoes - and of course they must be Sperry's - are popular, but why are we wearing them when we live miles from the nearest boat? I sure like this pea coat from H&M, even though I live in a city that never falls below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Sure, these specific examples are only surface-deep aesthetic choices, but how is this different from a professor imposing his or her preferences on a class simply by deciding how the curriculum is taught? Or how a media source may choose to only show articles or stories that appeal to a particular audience's preferences or culture? | | | | |
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> | Wait, what did that billboard say? | | | | |
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< | How can we develop a personally satisfactory direction? | >
> | Upon rereading what I had written above, I noticed that I unintentionally - and mistakenly - dissociated myself from this culture in my first paragraph (" their goals, their role models..."). This perhaps highlights the most dangerous aspect of culture: it is ultimately self-referential. Other people may refer to and be influenced by my actions in a way that is not entirely relevant to them. And if my actions aren't entirely personal to me, then we're all going around the same mulberry bush for no damn good reason. We all end up pursuing an ideal that is completely disconnected from our reality. Hell, I can't even assert that these ideas are my own; Marx and Engels were similarly critical of ideology in The German Ideology, and the threat of a self-referential artifice is ironically a simulacrum of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. And if we follow these thinkers' line of reasoning, the implication of a culture that is arbitrary, or simply not firmly grounded in reality, is easy appropriation by an external force. See above. | | | | |
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< | How might one go about developing a direction that one can pursue with individual satisfaction, in the manner that Robinson does? Certainly, Robinson's character is well-educated and developed from a wide variety of experiences. Is one's personal direction necessarily a product of one's past experiences? | >
> | Lawyer Culture | | | | |
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< | Personal Experiences | >
> | To bring this discussion back to one that is relevant to our class, if certain fashion lines can mold our concepts of beauty, why can't certain law firms mold our concepts of success as a lawyer? As the next generation of people who make change in society using words, we and personal goals and future direction are likely to be targeted and persuaded one way or the other, maybe by the use of some successful lawyers in whatever particularly prestigious area of law. To this extent, I've very much appreciated the chapters from Lawyerland, which presents us with a diverse range of lawyer figures to whom we may refer. Individually, each model may be as deceptive as the next, but taken together and juxtaposed side by side, we can at least critically assess the different options available to us instead of tunnel visioning on the most accessible figure. | | | | |
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< | Developing a personal direction from personal experiences is only natural. We decide how we want the world to change based on how we've interacted with it. However, how much of this weight is unjustified and thereby must be counterbalanced accordingly? We may personally witness the mistreatment of a city's homeless population and calibrate our direction to resolve that tension, but we may just as easily witness a violent attack by the homeless person on a pedestrian. Given how biased personal anecdotal evidence is, the concern with developing a personal direction based on our experiences is that it's ultimately a matter of luck. While this may be true, I personally find this concept difficult to accept as a basis for how one develops a personal direction. One would like to think that the presence, or illusion of, agency would be crucial to the development of personal direction. | >
> | What type of lawyer should I be? | | | | |
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< | Discussions and Reflection | >
> | We now arrive at the motivating question I was concerned with in my first draft: how can we find a personal "direction" when what we experience and what we study can be so easily distorted by external forces with ulterior motives? More specifically, what type of lawyer should we aspire to be and how can we know that is who we want to be? At the time of my first draft, I didn't really have much of an answer, though to be fair I also didn't have too clear of an idea of the question either. After reading and discussing Edward Snowden, John Brown, and Tom Dudley in our classes, a tentative answer might be "a type of lawyer whom you won't regret becoming even if you get shafted by everyone else later." It's certainly a very tall order for any decision (when do we ever want to regret our actions?), but it seems that the answer must come from personal reflection. These three particular figures arrived at theirs after heavy consideration on the justice of their actions and with courage in face of the sacrifice it will require, regardless of what modern culture might suggest otherwise. | | | | |
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< | If personal experiences lack a sense of agency, another avenue may be through discursive dialogue and empirical evidence. Perhaps we never witnessed the plight of a needy individual, but we can be faced with numbers and statistics which give us an overall impression of the issues. Furthermore, we may indulge ourselves in discussions of the justification of charity on a philosophical basis. Eventually, after one has observed the discourse on an issue, one can begin to develop one's own opinions on which direction society may move towards. Ultimately, I also would have personal qualms with such an approach. Discourse on an issue, no matter how truthful or well-intentioned, is at the very least one degree of separation from the materiality of the issue itself. When discourse is further allowed to develop and expand, it runs the risk of developing into a distorting ideology, a creed that preys on the incoming generation. | >
> | Final Note | | | | |
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< | A Tentative Personal Conclusion | >
> | As of today, I have not yet found a cause or "direction" of whose justice I am so convinced as to make such a sacrifice. However, I believe - or want to believe - that this is only because I have inadequate information of such a cause and not that I wouldn't have the courage to make the right call. | | | | |
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< | Truthfully, I fear that I often fall into this trap. Surrounded by books and literature and thinkers, one can hardly be said to have room to think develop a direction that is personally meaningful. I admit that at this point, much of my thinking and reasoning will have some trace of what I have read or been told. Certainly, a "true" meaningful personal direction will be a goal that I will continue to pursue and seek, yet there is no shaking of the paranoia that one has not read or experienced enough. Or perhaps that one has read too much. If I had to choose, grounding a personal direction in personal experiences would be the lesser of two evils, but the result is a direction that frequently changes and sensitive to the present moment.
It's not clear to me what this draft is about. "Direction" in this
draft seems to mean "a sense of personal identity, an intention, a
purpose to one's life not assigned externally." The theme of the
essay appears to be that this "direction" is difficult to have, and
that its roots are unreliable. They could come from personal
experience, or from learning, or from both, but for some reason I
don't quite understand, our experience and our learning are "evils"
of which we are required to choose the "lesser" in order to have a
self.
Let's try to back up a step, determine what the theme of the essay
is, and put that central motivating idea in a sentence. Let's use
that sentence to start the next draft. You can then develop that
idea through the draft, showing how you came by it, what
difficulties or objections you think likely to be raised and how you
handle them, and where that idea might lead the reader, in
conclusion. With more clarity about the central idea and its
consequences, a much better essay should follow.
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> | Word Count: 998 (not including headings) | | |
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