Three Career Vignettes: Changes, Defeats and Offenses. Pondering personal defeats in the modern world and what they mean. . . maybe.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive! 

Marmion, by Sir Walter Scott

1.  Victims of discrimination, or just of history?

If Discrimination is an offense to justice, and it is, when does reverse discrimination operate the same way or is the larger social aim worth the smaller afflictions it imposes, like, I suppose the draft?

There's a real reason I pose this question.

An eclectic friend of mine has long worked in a certain branch of his profession and has risen to the top of it.  He's well respected and frequently consulted by members of that profession.

But he's odd in it, in a way (maybe lots of ways) in that part of his success is frankly that he's never been particularly mercenary in a field that is highly mercenary and will admit that his position within a field that has many subdisciplines is largely accidental.

Now, throughout his time in his work, he's hoped to advance to a certain position within it that would involve a substantial reduction in his income and which requires an appointment to acquire.

He won't be getting it.

He won't be getting it even though others in his profession including those who have occupied the position he has aspired to have urged him again and again to aspire to it.

And the reason he won't, at least in part, is because he's male.

The position he seeks is one which has traditionally been occupied by men.  Indeed, until recently, by which we mean the last 40 years, very few women ever occupied it.  And because of that, as part of an official but not officially stated policy of those who administer the appointment, it's been skewed towards women for the last decade.  Again, while nothing official has been stated, unofficially those responsible have been very open that they sought to balance things out through female appointments.

Which means now that because of age and geography a well qualified male, urged to try for the position and regarded as eminently qualified to occupy it never will. Which in his mind, while he keeps it to himself save those who know him well, is a bitter defeat.  He feels the fool for trying for it.

So, the question.  Is operating on a larger social scale to balance out a perceived past inequity, which in this particular case is subject to a set of larger social influences, just if it works an injustice on individuals?

And if it is, when does that actually stop?  In 2019, most types of legal discrimination, save for this type, are illegal and there's no practical end to the social balancing a person might try to impose on an imbalanced world.

Victims of discrimination, or just of history?*

2.  A victim of legitimate criteria or of the tyranny of certification?

Another eclectic friend of mine just tried to make a late career, career change.  And by career change, I mean a radical one.

Officialdom stopped it in the form of certification.

This individual had sought this position decades earlier, but as he was in a position of having to support a young family at the time, when it was finally offered to him, he couldn't take it.  Economics dictated his choice.

But now with his family grown he reconsidered.  He'd never lost the desire to do the other job and after a long and successful career in something else, he decided to reapply.

In the interim, the rules had changed and now the position he was offered so long ago, which hasn't changed in its nature at all, requires a degree he doesn't have, and as he can't really just cease working, he can't get it.  And not only can he not get it, if he was to attempt to, at this point, the natural advance of age would put him in a category that, no matter what, he wouldn't be hired as people do discriminate on the basis of age, no matter what they say.  Indeed, this individual is so cognizant of that, that he questioned if he'd get the open position in the first place and credited discrimination on the basis of age to be legitimate in regard to that question, a view that few would hold.

So he's stuck too.

A victim of legitimate criteria or of the tyranny of certification?

3  Lost vocations?

When I knew her she was a Lutheran, but she'd been born into a Methodist family and baptized by a Methodist pastor as an infant and raised in that faith.

She'd converted to become a Lutheran due to the influence of a college friend, and in some ways that characterized her personality.  Highly intelligent, but very insecure, and adoptive of her friends influences.  Her faith was no doubt sincere in depth, but in expression a person would have later cause to wonder.

She became a lawyer, and was undoubtedly a genius, but a genius with a highly awkward personality that is difficult to describe.  Perhaps for that reason, she was always relegated to small time law, sometimes as part of an agency, and sometimes on her own.

After law school she married and became a Catholic to do so.  The marriage did not last long.  At some point thereafter she was expressing the Episcopal faith.  A conservative in earlier years when her friends were conservatives, now she was a feminist liberal, with feminist liberal friends.  She became a Deacon in the Episcopal church and is now set to be ordained a priest.

Lost vocations?**

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I actually know at least three people who have experienced this, although I know only one well, and one somewhat well.  Oddly, maybe, in two of the instances the choosing entity was completely forthright about how it made its choice, after it made it.

**I can think of at least four lawyers I know who became clerics of one kind or another, one a Catholic priest, one a protestant pastor, one a Jewish rabbit, and this last instance.  At early common law, fwiw, the clergy and the law were both "learned professions", which is where the term "professional" comes from.

Vae victis

Woe to the Vanquished

Brennus

Brennus statement, made as a Gallic conqueror, is true in more sense than one, not as a brazen command upon the defeated, but as an existential fact.

Of course, in keeping with the nature of fate, which we've had some quotes on recently, while Brennus sacked Roman and generally acted like a bady, his troops came down with the trots in the city and the Romans ended up tossing him and followers out rather effectively somewhat later.  That may say about as much on this topic as the quote itself.

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me

No, you can't always get what you want 

You can't always get what you want 

You can't always get what you want 

But if you try sometime you find 

You get what you need

The Rolling Stones, You Can't Always Get What You Want

So say the sages Jagger and Richards.

 

I posted this earlier today:

“You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream . . ."

C. S. Lewis did not say.

That's right, that statement, frequently attributed to C. S. Lewis, is something he didn't say.

And that might be because you can indeed be too old to achieve a goal or dream.  And at some point, while you may dream it, it's a species of regret.

Not that we don't all have regrets, and indeed we should have regrets.  Edith Piaf did say "I don't regret anything", or rather sang it. . .in French. . . but that's not a very sound way of viewing things, quite frankly.  "I don't regret anything" might as well mean "I haven't learned anything", unless we don't regret our errors as we learned from them.  Even then, a person ought to rationally regret our trespasses, as the Lord's Prayer counsels that we do.

I have occasion to ponder it, and therefore I'm expanding on it.

One of the great American myths is that you are never too old to achieve goals.  Baloney.  Age closes doors on you without a doubt.  Depending on the goal, some close earlier than others.

You may have been a stand out high school baseball player.  After high school, if you figure yourself good enough to get into pro ball, you have a few years to do it. But let's face it, if you aren't picked up in those few years, you aren't going to be.  Age will close that door.

And the door closing won't necessarily be done so fairly.  There's a lot of reason that these things can happen. A person might have all the talent in the world and end up on a team where the coast is busy playing tetris all day and chooses never to field you.  Or your team might have a loosing record and therefore you are tainted with it.   

Lots of life is that way.  Sure, most people talents show through to some or indeed even a great degree, but that doesn't mean that they'll rise to the top even if a more just fate would have decreed that.  There are colonels who would be better generals than the generals serving at the top. There are city councilmen who would be better governors than their state's governors and governors would would make better Presidents than any one President.  The whims of fate keep them down. That and the operation of politics of all types, great and small.  Who you know remains a better indicator of success in many instances than what you know.  Your personal associates may believe in you and champion your call but that doesn't mean that they have the political muscle to see that you achieve what you should.  

Which brings us to another matter.

My wife is fond of saying "things happen for a reason".  And many things do happen for a reason.  Maybe all things happen for a reason.  But her simple Protestant faith on that varies considerably from my Catholic one.  Things may happen for a reason, but that doesn't mean that they're all beneficially decreed by God.  A lot of things happen for bad reasons.  In Catholic theology many would say that God allows these things to occur, and brings good ultimately out of them, but that doesn't mean that in all things God wills that they occur so then they do.  Conversely, all Christians would believe that God does cause some things to develop.  

Which brings us to the next thing, frustration.

God's ways and man's ways are not the same, and figuring out the mind of God is not something that human's can do.  Indeed, part of the proof of the smallness of the mind of man and the existence of the God is the vastness of all things and that something can't come out of nothing, but we close our minds to that so that we can grasp the tiny little sliver of that which we actually can slightly grasp.  It can be hard at times, however, not to question God on the direction of things, which of course puts us in the position of Job.

Indeed, in modern life, for average people, one of the most frustrating of all questions is to wonder why a person might have certain strong legitimate desires (we all have strong illegitimate desires) that a person cannot act on. Why would a person love baseball and not be able to become a baseball player? Why would a person desire their entire lives to be a farmer in the field and not be able to do it.  Why would a person have the talent to go to the top of their field and then be kept for doing so while lesser men and women surpass them. Why do some people get close to a goal again and again, and are urged to keep pursuing it only to have it repeatedly removed from their grasp?

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.

Well, I wasn't there and none of us have the understanding.

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Sometimes, that's the answer in and of itself

Seeing the common threads

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Sunday, September 16, 2018).
Lectionary: 131

Reading 1 Is 50:5-9a

The Lord GOD opens my ear that I may hear;
and I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.
I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;
my face I did not shield
from buffets and spitting.

The Lord GOD is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
He is near who upholds my right;
if anyone wishes to oppose me,
let us appear together.
Who disputes my right?
Let that man confront me.
See, the Lord GOD is my help;
who will prove me wrong?

Responsorial Psalm Ps 116:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9

R. (9) I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
or:
R. Alleluia.
I love the LORD because he has heard
my voice in supplication,
because he has inclined his ear to me
the day I called.
R. I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
or:
R. Alleluia.
The cords of death encompassed me;
the snares of the netherworld seized upon me;
I fell into distress and sorrow,
and I called upon the name of the LORD,
"O LORD, save my life!"
R. I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gracious is the LORD and just;
yes, our God is merciful.
The LORD keeps the little ones;
I was brought low, and he saved me.
R. I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
or:
R. Alleluia.
For he has freed my soul from death,
my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
I shall walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.
R. I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
or:
R. Alleluia.

Reading 2 Jas 2:14-18

What good is it, my brothers and sisters,
if someone says he has faith but does not have works?
Can that faith save him?
If a brother or sister has nothing to wear
and has no food for the day,
and one of you says to them,
"Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well, "
but you do not give them the necessities of the body,
what good is it?
So also faith of itself,
if it does not have works, is dead.

Indeed someone might say,
"You have faith and I have works."
Demonstrate your faith to me without works,
and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.

Alleluia Gal 6:14

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord
through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel Mk 8:27-35

Jesus and his disciples set out
for the villages of Caesarea Philippi.
Along the way he asked his disciples,
"Who do people say that I am?"
They said in reply,
"John the Baptist, others Elijah,
still others one of the prophets."
And he asked them,
"But who do you say that I am?"
Peter said to him in reply,
"You are the Christ."
Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days.
He spoke this openly.
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples,
rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them,
"Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it."

The Depressing Issue of the state bar journal and institutional blindness. Patch 'em up and send 'em back into battle.

 

Some time last week the most recent issue of the state bar journal arrived.

I always read it, although it doesn't always take me long to read it.  There's usually some interesting articles in any one issue.

I usually don't read it right away either, for whatever reason.  It's one of those magazines that hang around for a few days before I get to it, usually.  I sort of wish I hadn't read this issue at all.

The magazine is usually centered around a theme, and several articles will be on that month's them.  When this issue came the cover asked if you "Can imagine a world without lawyers?"

Now, first of all I'll note that I don't like articles that take that theme as a rule, and I've seen more than one. Usually articles like that by any one person in a field they're writing about approach some state of hagiography (this one included).  And it's really a straw man argument in the first place in regards to lawyers. There's no earthly way you have a world without lawyers as every society has some sort of role that is equivalent to lawyers even if they're not called lawyers, and in the modern world they're normally called lawyers.  The Soviet Union had lawyers, for instance, and its not exactly a society that we imagine had a lot of really independent court action.  So you really can't imagine a society without lawyers as society by definition has lawyers.

Shoot, even if you've played Monopoly or something like it as a kid, somebody was some kind of lawyer. ..  the one who knew the rules.

Additionally, the article was written by the prior law school dean, whom I'm a little miffed at.  That dean ended up in a spat with the then president of the university as the president of the university took the position that UW should have a special legal focus on law in the energy sector.  In looking at things that way he was not proposing "no more tort law" or something but he was alive to the fact that smaller land grant schools, and we are one, need to be pretty concentrated on what the heck we're doing or we loose out to bigger universities.  What's special about the UW law school, in other words, that will attract people to it?  He had a concept.  There needs to be one for the academic departments of smaller land grant schools in an era when there's not exactly a shortage of universities and colleges.

This is particularly true of law schools, I'd note, as they're in real trouble (and there's a rosy article on that in this issue, more on that later) and need to have a reason to exist. Since the state boarded the barque across the River Styx by adopting the Universal Bar Exam there's nearly no reason to even have a law school in Wyoming anymore, and the president was giving it a survivable focus, maybe. The the then dean opposed it, and the students, naive to what the UBE means for them in the state, backed the Dean.  It was short sighted.

Anyhow, seeing the cover title,I figured that was what the theme of the issue was.  It clearly wasn't, however.  I'm not sure what the them was, but if there was one, it would seem to be that "things are bad for lawyers."

One article in the magazine was by a lawyer I well know, as we share a common set of relatives. We're not directly related ourselves, but we share so many cousins we might as well be.  I have a set of near relatives in town that fit that definition and if we're not quite family we're something other than simple acquaintances or friends in the conventional sense.  That article was disheartening as it dealt with her adopted daughters struggle with addiction and depression, which caught me by surprise.  I should have known that, but I didn't.  In mentioning it to my son, who was only a year or so behind that individual in high school, he was aware of it and was surprised I wasn't, which is good I suppose.  The article closed with advice to young lawyers to "love deeply", to grow from pain, and not to judge.  The advice to all lawyers was to support other lawyers who need help and to cherish our clients. All good advice, in context, I suppose.

As an aside, I'll note that the article reported that her daughters descent into depression was brought about by marijuana.  I'm not surprised by this, but I am tired of the repeated articles I see by weed fans that there's no risk to it at all.  Baloney.  It's dangerous, and can be very dangerous.

Going back towards the front of the magazine there was an article by the State Bar Counsel, who has an article in every issue. This one, however, was deeply personal and detailed that our bar counsel, who had a very long career prior to taking up that role as a practicing trial lawyer, had been back east at a conference on lawyer well being only to find out that a friend of his, a law school colleague who lived in that state and whom he was going to meet with, had killed himself just days prior to the conference.    Pretty shocking and very sad.

The article concluded with an admonition from that conference about how every lawyer needs to take a role in lawyer well being and to overcoming what the conference holder apparently asserted was denial of a problem.  The article closed with the request that we, i.e., the lawyers, get to work on this.

Well, I don't think lawyers deny there is a problem in the profession.  Indeed, I've heard some lawyers speak of it very, very openly.  But I don't think we're going to do a darned thing about it and I don't even think we can.  If reform is coming, we're not the ones who are going to do it, as it would require a massive reform of the very system itself.  We have no interest in that whatsoever and can't imagine any other system anyway.  It's not that individual lawyers don't have an interest in it, but the system that's eating practitioners alive right now developed over a long course of time and it isn't going away soon.

Indeed, it will take the passing of the entire Boomer generation of lawyers and the one or two that came after them to make it pass and even then that's doubtful  The Boomer generation famously rejected materialistic pursuits, or so they claimed, in the 1960s but they took up the banner of materialism ferociously in the 1970s and have never let go.  It's that spirit that dominates the profession and that's not going to change.  The discussion isn't even about attempting to change it.  All of the discussion about the profession is instead about patching up the wounded to send them back in the battle for the bucks.

Wounded in New Guinea, World War Two.  This soldier likely didn't go home, he likely recovered and went into combat.  Whatever psychological wounds he had he likely carried for the rest of his life.

Its not just the conversion of the legal field from a profession into a materialistic pursuit that created this problem and I don't want to suggest it is, solely. That made it worse.  The very nature of American jurisprudence is very high stress and that leads to the problem of stress induced collapse of all type.  That's my point here.  State Bar programs tend to be addressed towards treating the symptoms and, when the suffering individual is sufficiently able, to send the sufferer back out into practice.  I've never seen any suggestion in any of these articles that the root cause of the problem should in any way be amended.  That is, the articles often note that being a lawyer is "high stress" but I've never seen any article, ever, ponder why the profession of law became so high stress.  Never.

Indeed every single program state bars or big bar organizations have to address what they all now acknowledge is a crisis in the field works this way.  On the occasions in which they run stories about program successes that feature testimonials they tend to be from brave lawyers who are willing to admit that they went through such a problem and went back into practice.  The only other articles we tend to see are the ones from lawyers who flamed out and met with a bad end.  We rarely see American articles from lawyers who crashed and recovered by getting their discharge from the field of combat, although I have read just such an article from a Canadian lawyer who ended up disbarred (or maybe suspended), lost his family, etc., etc., but was actually happy that his career had been terminated.

More often than that, we just deny that anything is going on, which is why nothing will change.  We accept the conditions, whether we should or not, and therefore ought to be pondering what we can do to arm people against them, rather than bemoaning the losses and suggesting that patching the victims up is the solution.

 King David of Scotland knighting a squire. This is, in a way, the way most law careers start out, in the minds of the newly minted lawyers, and in the myth of the law.  But in reality a lot of knights ended up dead, and some went rogue.  If we believe that men in the Middle Ages were like men now, no doubt some lived in horror of what they'd seen and probably some were glad when the Welsh archers found their personal mark.

A strong aspect of this is that we have an adversarial system of justice.  Only nations that have justice systems that descend from English Common Law have this system, and most haven't' taken it anywhere near as  far as we have.  The Common Law trial system itself, as I've noted before, was a substitute for trial by combat and lawyers are substitutes, in that system for Champions, who were (let's admit it) mercenaries.  I'm not criticizing lawyers today when I say that our trial system is a species of combat and lawyers are mercenaries in those battles.  That's the truth of it.  Another truth of that is, however, that being a mercenary takes a toll on the mercenary.  People admire mercenaries only if they're Soldier of Fortune fanboys or the viewers of odd movies, like The Wild Geese or The Dogs of War.  In reality, few people are really thrilled if a mercenary sits down to eat lunch with them.  Same thing is true of lawyers. And fighting for money is corrosive on your personality no matter who you are. There are lawyers who are saints, to be sure, but there are a lot more than are pretty dedicated sinners.  No wonder addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography and vice of all types is so strong in the legal field.

 

Mercenaries in the Congo, with rebel troops, 1960s.  Lawyers have more in common with these guys than we'd care to admit and in more ways than one.

And just as patching up a mercenary and sending him back into battle is perfectly possible, just doing that really doesn't address the bigger problem and there's no way within the field to do it.  What are we going to do, as lawyers? Say, geez, this system that we've told the public is the greatest legal system on Earth really isn't?  We're not going to do that.  Most of us don't even know that this isn't the only really functional legal system and would be amazed that most Western nations don't use anything like it and yet have fair legal systems.

There are other advanced legal systems which are fair, just and not adversarial in the same fashion.  We don't know much about them and we aren't going to do anything, myself included, to suggest that adopting them or elements of them would be a good idea.  Nobody is going to stand up, for example, in the next Iowa state legislature and suggest that Iowa model its trial procedure on that of France.  Nope.  Not going to happen.

Not that I won't pitch a few ideas, mind you.

The article by the State Bar President in this issue came about due to an ostensible conversation with his young son, in which that child asked his parent what sort of law he did.  That article starts off with a joke from the President reminding the child that the family needed more doctors, but not lawyers.  I've now heard that joke too many times for me to take it as a joke and I think it reflects conversations that really take place in many households.  Indeed, one lawyer I know with young children keeps a list of other careers taped to his refrigerator for his children to view.  That taps back into another aspect of this, which is the now tired idea that we must make absolutely sure that our children are doctors or lawyers.

Indeed, I know plenty of lawyers who think just this way. "Be a doctor", the advice consistently is. Funny thing is that I hear a lot of doctors complain that their profession ain't what it used to be either, and I believe it.  If there's any profession that has been taken over more by the Siren Call of Money than the law, and I doubt there is, it would probably be the medical field. Be a doctor and make a lot of money is the common theme there.

Of course just saying this makes me sound like some sort of raging radical who would have been in the Petrograd Delusional Club in 1917, which I would not be.   I am in, I suppose the Chestertonian-Beloocian Public House Meeting Society by default.  And in that, I think the evolution of the modern economy as done a huge disservice to mankind.  I'm not in the camp that would urge any child not to attend university as its clear the modern economy has evolved to where that's a practical necessity unless you are the benefactor of a being in a family that's retained some sort of business you can run without doing that, and even then I'd still counsel you to go.  It's unfortunately, to say the least, as we've developed a whole range of jobs, which if statistics are correct, most people actually dislike.  As we've said here before, 70% of Americans dislike their jobs.  Pretty shocking.

In other words, Mike Rowe has a point, but it's a point that most people don't listen to for societal reasons.

Don Quixote, knight errant, which has some analogies to the topic being discussed here today.

Which doesn't equate, I'd note, with what the bar magazine is discussing.  The articles aren't speaking about lawyer satisfaction rates, they're writing about the practice of law eating lawyers alive and urging a Quixotic effort to take that on which we aren't going to do.  Indeed, we frankly aren't even going to look at the things we could do, even those things that wouldn't require a massive overhaul of the justice system itself. Patch 'em up and send them back in. . . everything will be fine.

Indeed, we aren't going to do the one thing that would be really easy to do, which would be to limit entry into the field and attempt to make sure that those entering it know what they are getting into and appear to be psychologically and temperamentally prepared to take what is coming their way.  We don't do anything of that type whatsoever..  We should, but we're not going to. Which takes me to the comments published by the current law school dean in this issue. The dean relates how applications for entry to law schools across the nation have declined over the past few years (which is supposed to be bad) although their up a bit now, but that this is a really good time for people to apply to law school, he says, as it should be easier to get in than ever.

A fine example of how law schools are making the practice of law worse.

This isn't the only way they're doing that, I'll note.  Law school support for the Uniform Bar Exam is widespread and that's massively detrimental to actual practitioners, which most law school graduates ultimately become.  Both stem from the systemic philosophical failure of modern law schools which is the logic that; 1) we need to stay in business no matter what; which means 2) we need to keep churning out graduates at the same rate and; 3) they need to be admitted to some bar no matter how ill prepared, in every since, they are to practice real law.

 Tire production line. . . pretty much the same way law schools view their students.  Not enough demand. . . well somebody needs to buy more cars. . . .

It's a disservice to their students and a disservice to the profession.

And it need not be so.

When I was in basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, Sgt. Ronald E. Adams, one of our drill sergeants, informed us that he intended to break us down, if at all possible, both physically and psychologically.  He intended to do this, he declared, not because we were bad people if we failed, indeed he said quite the opposite, but rather because if we were going to fail, he'd rather it happen at Ft. Sill in basic training than in combat where other people could be killed when we broke down.  That logic should apply to law school.

It did basically apply to my undergraduate field of geology. 

 

Optical mineralogy lab at the University of Wyoming, circa 1986.  This was the last lab in this major a lot of students in the field would ever take, and not for a cheerful reason.

When I was a geology student at the University of Wyoming we were required to take Optical Mineralogy which was, we knew, a "weed out" class.  It was required for the major and you could only take it twice.  If you didn't get by the class with a grade of D, you were out of the program and could never get a degree with a geology major.  On the first day of class, the professor, Dr. Meyers, asked how many students were taking the class for the second time. A smattering of hands went up, including a couple of hands from graduate students that hadn't had to take Optical Mineralogy in their undergraduate programs from elsewhere (almost no graduate student in the geology department was from UW as UW didn't favor admitting its own students into the graduate program).  Dr. Meyers then noted that these were the people we had to watch as "we fail half this class".

That statement wasn't a joke. The grade in the class was curved and 50% of the class was made to fail no matter how good their grades were.  So grades of C and the like on tests were basically failing grades and even grades that were normally in the B range were barely in the D range.  The grade scale was designed to wipe out half of the enrollment in the class, more or less, considering that quite a few of the people who failed would just give up and not attempt a second chance (grad students had little choice but to attempt it).  Yes, I passed the class.

That wasn't the only geology department class that was a "weed out" class, however.  We had electives in the program we could take, but no matter what we took, at least one additional class would be a tough weed out class.  In my case, it was Invertebrate Paleontology, which I liked a great deal but which had a lab that was a nightmare.  Others took similar classes.  The point was that the geology department wanted to make sure that the students who came through the program stood up to academic rigor before they went out in the field or on to graduate school.

Law schools do nothing like that.

Contrary to what people tend to think, the hardest thing about modern law school has just been getting in, and even that isn't that hard.  The hurdle of getting over the baby steps of the LSAT are regarded as horrors by most law students who have never been through a more rigorous program.  Taking the LSAT twice in order to improve a score is very common when it should be the rule that you get one shot and one shot only.  The LSAT only tests logical thought, that's it, and if you have to actually study for that, you have no business in law school.

For that matter, law schools are a shadow of what they once were in terms of academic rigor and that's been followed up on as state after state has reduced the rigor of their bar exam with many now doing what Wyoming has done and having adopted the Uniform Bar Exam with no state test.

The concept that law school is really tough is common, but it's a breeze.  It can be really interesting, as the law can be really interesting, but  it is not hard, and its less tough now than ever.  At one time students had to worry about the long walk in law schools.  Not much anymore.

The long walk is something that also had an analogy to basic training and the geology department.  They had their own long walks.  In basic training, the long walk was an actual long walk.  When I went through basic training we had three long marches.  The first one was about seven miles, not bad. The next one after that was around fifteen, which is quite a hike with full pack and rifle. But the last one was thirty, which is a really grueling long march.  It started off early in the morning, like about 3:00 a.m., and ended up around 17:00 or so.  If you fell out of the march, you were done for good, discharged or recycled to a basic training unit that hadn't gotten to that step yet.  The concept was to see if you were physically able to endure the physical punishment of being a soldier.

In the geology department the same treatment was meeting out during Summer Field Class.  In that class we worked outdoors on various projects every day, making maps at night.  Part of the class involved following around Dr. Boyd, the same professor who taught paleontology, as he walked at high speed.  He was not a young man at the time, in his seventies if I recall correctly, but he could walk people in their twenties into the ground.  You didn't dare not keep up with him, let along because you needed to be wherever he was when he stopped to lecture.  A certain walk up a hill in the class was legendary and had acquired the nickname, in years prior to when I took it, of "the Bataan Death March", recalling that horrible event from World War Two.  While much of that was simply because Dr. Boyd was incredibly spry for a man of his (or younger) age, it was also to make the point that geology was an outdoor profession and you had to be able to endure the outdoors in order to work in it.

Law school, as noted, has nothing like this.  It should. And at one time, as also noted, it sort of did.

Law school is taught by the Socratic method, which basically means that its taught by debate. AT least it was when I was in law school, but I'm told now that this is increasingly rare and often professors just lecture, which would be incredibly dull.  At one time, students who were not prepared to engage in a debate with a professor were made to march out of the classroom, which was universally regarded as embarrassing.  By the time I was in law school, however, this was extremely rare, although I can recall it occurring at least once.

When I was in law school, however, it was still the case that a student had to be prepared to debate a professor and defined his own views of a case.  And there was sort of a weed out class in the form of some required classes that students took their first year in law school.  Only one of those classes, Contracts, was really hard, but that was only partially be design. The other reason was that the professor was awful.  At any rate, I'm told that today, the lecture style is just that, a lecture.

How boring. . .and ineffective in more than one way.

Okay, so what am I getting at?

We're starting to see a lot of articles about how the problems some lawyers develop later in practice can be traced all the way back to law school.  If law schools exist to train lawyers and prepare them to practice law, they ought to also exist to keep those who should note be doing that from doing it.  But instead they pitch to prospective students with absurd "you can do anything with a law degree arguments, allow a testing entry procedure in which applicants can defeat the test which they take to gain entry by taking it multiple times, encourage applications when they know that the number of jobs are down, and encourage the dilution of bar admission standards by arguing for the UBE.  In short, law schools are graduating students who have no business being lawyers, temperamentally, and they really don't care.

Law schools are not going to self reform any more than lawyers are going to demand a reform to the system of law we are trained in and work in.  If anyone could do this, it would have to be state bars, but they are headed in the opposite direction, drinking the Koolaide of  UBE.  If state bar entrance committees got a clue (not likely) and wanted to act on this problem, they could.

They could do that by requiring, first of all, that only graduates of ABA accredited law schools could apply for admission to the bar of their state, something our bar already does. But beyond that they could have real state specific bar exams that were rigorous and on the law of their states. There's no reason whatsoever that the passage of those exams should be much above 50% and there's no reason that an applicant should get to take it more than twice. . . ever.  And there's no reason to have reciprocity with other states.  That would reduce the number of lawyers to be sure, but (and we'll get to that) that would be a good thing.

That would basically reverse things to the way they were as recently as ten or fifteen years ago in most states, but going beyond that an applicant should have an undergraduate degree in some real academic field and something like "general pre law" or some undergraduate degree with "law" in the title doesn't cut it. Those degrees serve only to get a person into law school and are otherwise fairly worthless if the student fails to gain admission or later seeks to get out of law or must get out.

Likewise, the flood of bogus degrees with no application, including anything that has "[fill in blank here] Studies] is not useful.  How to sort these out is would be chore but a group of smart people like lawyers (assuming that's still the case, and given the flood of applicants and ease of application over the past couple of decades that is not necessarily true) ought to be able to figure that out.  Science degrees, engineering degrees, the classic liberal arts (history, English) etc. would count.  Weight out to be given in application to the hardest undergraduate degrees, say a 10% boost by implication in your LSAT scores.

And, and here's a real kicker, at least 10% of the faculty of any law school from which a student seeks admission from should have practiced law within the past five years.  Law schools tend to be a refuge from the practice of law and are packed with people who don't really know what practicing law is like.  Law school professors should be licensed in the state in which they're teaching, under the criteria noted above.

Finally, in my view, a lot of law schools can just go if they are just churning out graduates. For state land grant colleges like our own, if they aren't serving a need for the state, they can go. And I'm saying that about a school I graduated from.  I'm not saying it isn't serving the needs of the state, but right now I have very real doubts about it.

Would that cure the Lawyer Blues problem?  Probably not entirely.  But a much more rigorous academic program, more difficulty in getting in, and more difficulty getting admitted, would serve a lot of the same purpose that basic training does in the military.  It's a lot better to have students weeded out or broken down while they're at Square State College than it is to admit them and have them melt down while representing clients.  And I've seen that.

Will this occur.  No.  I wouldn't be surprised at this point to see a law school dean argue for admission for everyone who graduates from "Ol Big Square", along with a state provided comfort cat and a box of Twinkies to go with it.

And so, while I"m using on the problem, what else could we realistically do, but we're not?  That is, if we, the lawyers, are watching this train wreck, and we're urged by our state bar to do something, what else could we do, assuming that we're not going to argue for a change in the system of law itself, which we are not going to do (indeed, we're going to do nothing at all, but that's somewhat besides the hypothetical point).

One thing we could also do is require a readmission to the bar at some point.

Now, I'm not suggesting that lawyers retake the exam after a period of time, or at least not the full exam. But I am suggesting that perhaps after a decade or so, and then repeating every decade after that, something be done.  Perhaps a lawyer should have to honestly readmit and with certain representations.  Has he suffered a bar discipline and why?  Has he been having medical or psychological, or legal, troubles?  Is he/she actually practicing law?

Truck drivers and pilots have to have medical certificates to do their jobs.  What about lawyers?  That might be a good idea as well.

Policemen do with most agencies anymore, and they have to undergo, quite often a type of psychological examination.  I know, for instance, that applicants to be game wardens in Wyoming must sit through an interview with a psychologist.  If that's the case for game wardens, why isn't it for lawyers on a decadal basis.  Indeed, why isn't it at the point of admission.

Our state bar doesn't even have applicant interviews anymore, which used to be the final stage of admission.  But ti was deemed to serve no purpose and was long ago omitted. Omitted, I'll note, before the state specific test was omitted.  That probably ought to be brought back. And with it, why not require an interview with a psychologist?  If game wardens and policemen have to do it, why not lawyers?

Well, because we're a self policing bar, that's why, just like most others. And so we will not subject ourselves to that.

And indeed, over time, we've gone to a system that's basically designed to get people omitted, no matter what, after they've gone through a school training ground that's designed to churn them out and keep them in.

And then we wonder why things go wrong?

We recruit them to a field that's very high stress and a species of substituted combat based on lies that a person with a law degree is qualified to do something else, fail to test of their suitable, in any fashion, for the combat we're throwing them into, and fail to check up on them after they're engaged in it. When some fail, we patch them up and throw them back in. 

And we wonder why things go wrong?

Maybe, instead of congratulating ourselves on our wonderfulness on imagining how horrible the world would be without lawyers, we ought to wonder why we put so many of those wonderful lawyers into conditions that a lot of them, just as wonderful people, can't endure.

But we're not going to.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Postscript

If all of this seems somewhat strident, and it likely does, let me note that if I had been at the same conference as our bar council and that question had been asked, I would have had to raise my hand.

That gives me a pretty strong set of opinions on this.

A few years ago I was handling the defense of a client in which the plaintiff was represented by a well known and highly respected plaintiff's attorney who was probably in his early 60s at the time.  I'd known of him, but hadn't met him, prior to that case.

I was surprised in the case by how disheveled he seemed to be.  I was also surprised that he wouldn't attend any of the out of state depositions, which isn't the norm for careful practitioners.  But beyond that it didn't seem to me that anything was really alarming about his behavior.  Then, one day, he called me up, after calling a lawyer who was handling the defense of another defendant in the action, and asked for the vacation of a set of dates.

I really debated granting the extension.  It seemed like an odd request and the case was heading relatively soon towards a set of motion hearings.  But usually we cooperate with each other on things like that, so I reluctantly agreed, although I felt really odd about it.

The next morning the other defense counsel texted me early in the morning. The plaintiff's lawyer had gone home that night and killed himself.  I didn't see it coming.

But maybe somebody could have.

And maybe he shouldn't have been in the profession, or have been allowed to stay in it.  Learning a little bit more about him after that, it seemed that it was well known that he was suffering from depression and he'd lived a truly tragic life.

Self policing bar indeed.

Some comments about Justice Robert's comments

Supreme Court Justice Roberts recently delivered some graduation comments.

No, not at Harvard or Yale, but at Cardigan Mountain School.  Apparently his son was in the graduating class, if you can consider a 9th grade class passing out of a school to be graduating.

Now, let me first note, I hesitate to make comments regarding his address.  I so hesitate as I read his delivery first in Time and one of the first comments was some from self important twit who had a fit over  the line that "You’ve been at a school with just boys. Most of you will be going to a school with girls. I have no advice for you" and went on about that, reading a lot more into it than was obviously intended.

Oh grow up, you self important snob.  It was a joke.  Yes, maybe a lame joke, but not every comment to 9th Graders is supposed to be earth shaking, you twit.

I'll note that a lot of the press commentary, in contrast, was highly favorable to the speech, even fawning.  At least one writer found the theme to be a implied rebuke to the nature of Donald Trump, which I suspect is going a bit far.

Well, amyhow, with that I tread into comments myself.

First, the remarks:

Thank you very much.

Rain, somebody said, is like confetti from heaven. So even the heavens are celebrating this morning, joining the rest of us at this wonderful commencement ceremony. Before we go any further, graduates, you have an important task to perform because behind you are your parents and guardians. Two or three or four years ago, they drove into Cardigan, dropped you off, helped you get settled and then turned around and drove back out the gates. It was an extraordinary sacrifice for them. They drove down the trail of tears back to an emptier and lonelier house. They did that because the decision about your education, they knew, was about you. It was not about them. That sacrifice and others they made have brought you to this point. But this morning is not just about you. It is also about them, so I hope you will stand up and turn around and give them a great round of applause. Please

Now when somebody asks me how the remarks at Cardigan went, I will be able to say they were interrupted by applause. Congratulations, class of 2017. You’ve reached an important milestone. An important stage of your life is behind you. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you it is the easiest stage of your life, but it is in the books. While you’ve been at Cardigan, you have all been a part of an important international community as well. And I think that needs to be particularly recognized.

Now around the country today at colleges, high schools, middle schools, commencement speakers are standing before impatient graduates. And they are almost always saying the same things. They will say that today is a commencement exercise. ‘It is a beginning, not an end. You should look forward.’ And I think that is true enough, however, I think if you’re going to look forward to figure out where you’re going, it’s good to know where you’ve been and to look back as well. And I think if you look back to your first afternoon here at Cardigan, perhaps you will recall that you were lonely. Perhaps you will recall that you were a little scared, a little anxious. And now look at you. You are surrounded by friends that you call brothers, and you are confident in facing the next step in your education.

It is worth trying to think why that is so. And when you do, I think you may appreciate that it was because of the support of your classmates in the classroom, on the athletic field and in the dorms. And as far as the confidence goes, I think you will appreciate that it is not because you succeeded at everything you did, but because with the help of your friends, you were not afraid to fail. And if you did fail, you got up and tried again. And if you failed again, you got up and tried again. And if you failed again, it might be time to think about doing something else. But it was not just success, but not being afraid to fail that brought you to this point.

Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

Now commencement speakers are also expected to give some advice. They give grand advice, and they give some useful tips. The most common grand advice they give is for you to be yourself. It is an odd piece of advice to give people dressed identically, but you should — you should be yourself. But you should understand what that means. Unless you are perfect, it does not mean don’t make any changes. In a certain sense, you should not be yourself. You should try to become something better. People say ‘be yourself’ because they want you to resist the impulse to conform to what others want you to be. But you can’t be yourself if you don't learn who are, and you can’t learn who you are unless you think about it

The Greek philosopher Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ And while ‘just do it’ might be a good motto for some things, it’s not a good motto when it’s trying to figure out how to live your life that is before you. And one important clue to living a good life is to not to try to live the good life. The best way to lose the values that are central to who you are is frankly not to think about them at all.

So that’s the deep advice. Now some tips as you get ready to go to your new school. Other the last couple of years, I have gotten to know many of you young men pretty well, and I know you are good guys. But you are also privileged young men. And if you weren’t privileged when you came here, you are privileged now because you have been here. My advice is: Don’t act like it.

When you get to your new school, walk up and introduce yourself to the person who is raking the leaves, shoveling the snow or emptying the trash. Learn their name and call them by their name during your time at the school. Another piece of advice: When you pass by people you don’t recognize on the walks, smile, look them in the eye and say hello. The worst thing that will happen is that you will become known as the young man who smiles and says hello, and that is not a bad thing to start with.

You’ve been at a school with just boys. Most of you will be going to a school with girls. I have no advice for you.

The last bit of advice I’ll give you is very simple, but I think it could make a big difference in your life. Once a week, you should write a note to someone. Not an email. A note on a piece of paper. It will take you exactly 10 minutes. Talk to an adult, let them tell you what a stamp is. You can put the stamp on the envelope. Again, 10 minutes, once a week. I will help you, right now. I will dictate to you the first note you should write. It will say, ‘Dear [fill in the name of a teacher at Cardigan Mountain School].’ Say: ‘I have started at this new school. We are reading [blank] in English. Football or soccer practice is hard, but I’m enjoying it. Thank you for teaching me.’ Put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it. It will mean a great deal to people who — for reasons most of us cannot contemplate — have dedicated themselves to teaching middle school boys. As I said, that will take you exactly 10 minutes a week. By the end of the school year, you will have sent notes to 40 people. Forty people will feel a little more special because you did, and they will think you are very special because of what you did. No one else is going to carry that dividend during your time at school.

Enough advice. I would like to end by reading some important lyrics. I cited the Greek philosopher Socrates earlier. These lyrics are from the great American philosopher, Bob Dylan. They’re almost 50 years old. He wrote them for his son, Jesse, who he was missing while he was on tour. It lists the hopes that a parent might have for a son and for a daughter. They’re also good goals for a son and a daughter. The wishes are beautiful, they’re timeless. They’re universal. They’re good and true, except for one: It is the wish that gives the song its title and its refrain. That wish is a parent’s lament. It’s not a good wish. So these are the lyrics from Forever Young by Bob Dylan:

May God bless you and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
And may you stay forever young

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
And may you stay forever young

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay forever young

Thank you.

First, I'll note, for the most part, I like this speech.

Most of the commentary on the speech has been on his "I hope you fail" type of comments.  I'm not going to comment on those really.  I get his point.  No, what struck me was this line:

 I’m sorry to be the one to tell you it is the easiest stage of your life, but it is in the books.

That's really true.

People rarely directly acknowledge these things, but they do in a romantic fashion.  For most people, childhood remains a cherished, if sometimes painful, memory in their adult years.  Part of the reason for that is its the only time in our lives in which things are actually mostly easy, for most people.  Other people take care of your basic needs, you have free time, and possibilities seem endless.

Right about the time Justice Roberts addresses things begin to change, but subtly.  High school is harder than earlier years, but then you also have more freedom so its not so obvious.  Once you are past high school, however, things really start to get harder and harder. The heavy weight of decisions and the import begin.  The impact of decisions you make became increasingly irreversible.  Doors slam shut.  Some like to claim that whenever a door is closed another opens, but that isn't true at all. Some just slam shut leaving the entry way or exit way forever barred.  College is portrayed as an endless party in the popular media, but its far from it and failing in it is life altering. Completing it is also life altering.

Rarely noted by career counselors and the like, almost every adult career, and almost every adult must have one, is burdened by real difficulties.  Manual jobs, no matter how skilled, are typically burdened by the danger of obsolescence and the struggle for decent pay, as well as the agony, usually, of working for another, rather than yourself.  The professions, often imagined by parents to be a ticket into high wages and no work are in fact enormously burdened by the nature of their work.  Law, for example, imagined by some to be easy and lucrative has a depression rate second only to dentistry, which is another profession that people imagine for some reason to be easy.

This doesn't mean, of course, that adulthood is unending misery. But it isn't one sit com moment after the next.  "Marty" probably portrays the average adulthood even now better than, for example, "Friends".

Finally, while this is a 9th Grade "graduation", so a speech is a bit odd, but then this is a prep school, and frankly, I can't help but find the entire notion of a preparatory boarding school extremely odd, and partially in the context of what I've referenced above.  It's odd to think they still have them.  Which takes me to this line:

Two or three or four years ago, they drove into Cardigan, dropped you off, helped you get settled and then turned around and drove back out the gates. It was an extraordinary sacrifice for them. They drove down the trail of tears back to an emptier and lonelier house. They did that because the decision about your education, they knew, was about you. It was not about them. That sacrifice and others they made have brought you to this point. But this morning is not just about you. It is also about them, so I hope you will stand up and turn around and give them a great round of applause. 

I suppose dropping kids off like that is a sacrifice, but it's one that I can't admire except in extraordinary circumstances.  It focuses a theory of education above everything else usually.  There is, in my view, something deeply wrong with it.  Boarding school?  Eee gads, that's weird. Parents dumping off the children they claim to love to be raised by somebody else, there's something really wrong with that.

Now, granted, there are big exceptions, which goes with big burdens.  In some instances the need simply to educate an individual demands this be done, but those are rare.  And in others a unique aspect of the child's character requires it.  In some unusual circumstances the child desires it and the wish is granted. But in most instances like this, sending a kid to a school like this is usually to help to stack the deck in the future.  For most, they'll go from this prep school probably to another one, and then on to an Ivy League university. Their privileged present is being mortgaged, basically, for an even more privileged future.

Now, I'm not against private education.  I'm not a product of it myself, and the opportunities around here for it, while real, were limited.  But be that as it may, I really get it when people who live in cities in which there is a good private option go for it.  I fully understand why, for example, parents send their kids to the Madeline school in Salt Lake, or the Polish Catholic high school in Denver, or the Catholic high school in downtown Houston whose clean cut students I see on the streets right about the time school gets out.  I'd likely do the same.  But to ship a kid off to boarding school?  Man, that bothers me, except in the noted rare instances.

Where have all the farmers gone?

Recently we posted an item about a conference in Wyoming seeking to address the increasingly high age of farmers and ranchers. Naturally, in this day and age, the conference seems to be focused on technology as the solution.

It isn't.

Land prices are the big problem.  Technology, oddly enough, is also a problem.  But land is the huge one, with prices driven up and up by various conspiring factors in our economy, improvements in transportation, the concentration of wealth, and the enormous increase in population over the decades.  I.e., in 1916 a person still needed a pretty substantial investment to get into agriculture, but it wasn't impossible and you could still homestead.  Now, you might be able to scrape and invest for the tools of the trade, but land is priced so high, there's no earthly way in much of the country you can actually make a living at it, if you have to buy land.  This is certainly the case for ranching anyhow.  You can't buy a ranch, if  you want to be a real rancher, and ever pay the land off or even make a living on it.

That's what agricultural conferences address.

Wringing hands over youth not entering agriculture won't solve any problems at all.  How can they, really?  Unless their family has land, and the family is already dedicated to staying in agriculture or at least not selling the land, their task is daunting and they have to accept never being able to own what they are working.

Not that the golden alternatives are all that great, they're just more obvious. Those "good" "town jobs" that are so often the alternative have plenty of their own problems.  In the ones where you actually own things, there are all sorts of problems associated with them, they're just less obvious and you have to really be a part of them to know what their downsides are.  Your dentist, doctor, lawyer, accountant, or whatever, isn't going to really tell you the bad sides of what  he's doing.  His incentive is completely in the opposite direction.

Not that it has to be this way. This actually can be addressed, we just won't do it.  Land prices for agricultural land could be depressed overnight by restricting the ownership of it to people who make a living from it.  That would change it, as most of your out of state executives that fly in to "their ranch" aren't going to walk out of their offices for ever to take up the life of a real agriculturalist.

The problem with that, however, is that doing this is deeply contrary to the American concept of "I can do anything I want" and "I can own anything I want".  Those values made a lot of sense, quite frankly, in the world of 1916 for the US. They're pretty obviously false in the world of 2016.

Mid Week at Work: Jose de Sousa Magano

Caption from Library of Congress:  Jose de Sousa Magano, 35 Aetna St., Fall River, Mass. Born in Fall River, June 2, 1901. Left for the Azores at 8 years of age because family moved back. Cannot read or write in his own language or in English. Never been to school. Returned to Fall River in May 1916. Applied for employment certificate June 17, 1916. Refused on account of not being able to read or write. Will have to attend school until he is 16 years of age. Presented baptism certificate from Santo Christo Church, Fall River, as evidence of his age. Sister had to talk for him. Could not understand or speak English. See 4192. Location: Fall River, Massachusetts / L.W. Hine.

Defeated People: The Old Believers

 Church of St. Nicholas, Old Believer (with clergy) church in Nikolaevsk Alaska.

As the very few readers of this blog know, I was recently in the Homer Alaska area, and I happened to enter one of the small communities there made up of Old Believers.  That there even were Old Believers in the area came as a surprise to me, so being curious of mind I looked some stuff up about them.

Not that I wasn't previously aware of them, or unaware that there were some in Alaska.  They fit this category nicely.

So, who are the Old Believers?

To understand this story requires some familiarity with Russian Orthodoxy. Given as this isn't a theological article, and as even it were it would have to be written by somebody other than me, I won't discuss that at length, but what I will simply note is that Russia was Christianized by the Eastern Christianity.  That isn't, I'll note, the same thing as saying that it was Christianized by the Orthodox, as that was prior to the Great Schism.  The Russian branch of the Eastern Church became autocephalus in 1589, however, which was after the Great Schism had occurred, and after the periodic efforts to repair it ultimately failed.  It's a complicated story, and it wouldn't be true that all Russian bishops have always been outside of communion with Rome, but most have been and that is all a separate story.

Anyhow, between 1652 and 1658, the  Russian Orthodox Church made a number of reforms, most of which, quite frankly, seem quite valid as they corrected errors between Greek and Russian translations, and the like.  Some of the differences in practices changed were so slight, that modern readers can hardly believe that they would have caused a schism, but they did, and the Old Believers were having none of it.  They were fairly immediately repressed with their refusal to go along declared an anathema.  

Now, to many in the western world today this story would seemingly play out with this group causing a splinter, but that being principally the end of the story, except of course to them. But, in 17th Century Imperial Russia, this could not have been the case, so they were accordingly repressed.

"Vasily Surikov - Боярыня Морозова - Google Art Project" by Vasily Surikov - ogHGQgd1Ws9Htg at Google Cultural Institute. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.  Created on 31 December 1886.  Published before 1923 and public domain in the US.  T his work depicts noblewoman Boyaryna Morozova at the time of her arrest, depicting in her hand the old way of giving the sign of the cross, rather than the new way, one of the sticking points of the Old Believers.

So there were arrests and repression.

But they kept on keeping on, and in fact, although a minority of Russian Orthodox, they kept on keeping on all the way up to the Russian Revolution.  And this in spite of the fact that no bishops went with them, which meant  that what clergy that did go with them died off within a relatively close time to the schism, leaving them it what would seemingly be a true crisis for a member of any of the apostolic churches.

They even kept on after the Russian Revolution during which time the Russian Orthodox Church was enormously suppressed.  At that point, some fled, going to China, and ultimately from there to South America.  While some remain in South America, many later relocated to the United States, with some subsequently relocating to Alaska.

Cafe in Nikolaevsk, Alaska, an Old Believers village.

They're still around, although this story has evolved a bit in the last forty years.  Some groups around the world have reincorporated clergy, being satisfied, in their view, with the orthodoxy of at least some bishops.  The Russian Orthodox Church has, for its part, issued an apology for the early repressions of them, although that has not served to bring them back into the Russian Orthodox fold.  But the modern world has been a challenge for them, in retaining their ongoing viability.  Some villages remain extremely isolated and exclusive, while others do not.  It'll be interesting to see what becomes of them.

Be that as it may, if the much more numerous Amish have managed to remain a distinct group, one would suppose the Old Believers will as well, unless the solvent of modern western life, combined with a reproachment with Orthodoxy, causes things to slowly break down, and perhaps even provide redress, for their complaints.

Defeated People

Some time ago I started an entry here on "defeated people", but because it seemed so negative, which was not my intent, I never published it.

It wasn't intended to be at all. Rather, the thread intended to look into the "post defeat" lives of the defeated.  We so rarely do that, but generally, people pick themselves up and move on.   But rarely does anyone look at that.  One of the reasons I so liked Cornelius Ryan's book is that he always included an appendix in his book listing where the principle individuals he interviewed now were, which was often illuminating.  Even badly defeated people often got back up on their feet and carried on.

This past week, as anyone who might stumble past this blog, I was in Alaska.  And in the course of that, stumbled across a community of Old Believers.  No matter what else a person might think of them, they're champions in this category as they've persevered against the odds, and defeat, for centuries. This caused me to reconsider adding this as a topic, rather than a single thread, so I'm going to add it as an occasionally recurring topical feature.