"How could you?"

Imagine for a moment that you've been accused of a heinous crime. No, not murder; worse than that, at least in the public eye. Much worse. It's nothing so sterile as treason. It has a haunting, clinging quality about it, like cobwebs coated in rancid grease. There's no death penalty for it, not even life in prison, but an awful lot of people think there should be. You've lost your spouse, you've lost your children, and your mother can only look at you through the little plexiglass window and say, "I love you, honey; I'll always love you, no matter what," with tears in her eyes and a quaver in her voice.

Are you innocent? Are you guilty? No jury's yet decided, but as the media lingers over every sordid detail of the allegations, its audience, the public, thinks it knows. The judge has expressed concern that the coverage may prejudice the jury. Politicians are making speeches. There's a bill on its way through the legislature with the victim's name on it, to make sure the law comes down harder, in the future, on horrible people like you who do these horrible things, because, clearly, the law is being much too soft.

The public perception is clear: you don't deserve the benefit of the doubt; what you've done is just too heinous.  You don't deserve protection. You don't deserve rights. Your guilt is obvious.

For the guilty, we call this justice, and grin snidely as we anticipate the malefactors' treatment at the hands of fellow inmates, who likely view the offense little more kindly than does the public at large-- and are in a position to do something about it.

For the innocent? Well, um, that's.... 

That's kind of awkward.

We have a handful of crimes like this in our culture, crimes so utterly toxic that to even be accused of one constitutes a kind of exile from the human race, crimes so poisonous that the mere allegation twists the accused into a kind of perverted imp in the public imagination.

And just how vile do you have to be to defend a creature like that? To defend a demon?

Even as the general run of lawyers goes, criminal defense attorneys do not suffer from an over-abundance of public support. Public defenders are maybe an exception, and there are others, but all too often the popular image of a defense attorney is a snot-slick scumball who wields base cunning and legal knowledge in combination with a contemptible lack of morals in order to shield the guilty from the righteous light of justice. 

I get asked from time to time why I would want to make my living taking the sides of monstrous people. Would I have defended Gary Ridgway? How about Osama bin Laden? Mussolini? Do I not think that heinous crimes should be punished?

In fact I do, yes, but I do not consider it my place to judge innocence and guilt. This system of ours, this legal system, in which I play a part, is a machine designed for that purpose. It is not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than my own judgment-- or that of any media-fed mob. Therefore I choose to play my part, and to trust it to produce the appropriate outcome. 

"But the system's so broken!" 

I dare you to come up with a better one.

That may sound like a cop-out, but I'm quite serious. When it works, the American adversarial system guarantees a two-sided argument before an impartial observer. Does it always work as it should? No. But for my money, the defense attorney is the absolute last part of the system you want to fail.

Consider the nightmare scenario above: again, you are accused of a heinous crime, community rallying against you, etc.  Now imagine one more person in the mix, one person charged with speaking for you to a court charged with trying your guilt; to a prosecutor fired up with righteous anger, eager to bring swift justice down upon your villainous head; and to a world roaring its approval of the prosecutor's crusade. 

This person, this one person, out of everyone in all the world, is charged to be your voice, speaking with an eloquence you do not possess; to be your guide, explaining your situation and options in a system of laws you do not understand; to be your advocate, bound to introduce no lies but to make your case before the court, as you would, yourself, if you could.

And this, your only champion in all the world, turns away in disgust, just like everyone else. 

For whatever reason, this fault, this absence, in your trial is never noticed, or is declared insignificant. They say you are guilty. If you are, your guilt remains untested, and you will be punished on the basis of this untested guilt. Perhaps this is only a small difference.

But oh, if you are innocent....

Splinters

By nature, we are a basically tribal species-- and not designed for particularly large tribes, either. That the human brain can only care for about 150 people at a time has been understood for a while, and now it turns out that even Facebook can't expand that number.

This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, considering the sort of limited success we've had as a society trying to convince ourselves to care about people starving overseas / in another state / downtown.

At base, it seems human beings are best-designed to live in small-ish, tight-knit groups. One of the largest challenges of civilization has been to try and extend our loyalty beyond our immediate circle of 150 friends. One of the first stages of a typical American education is to soak our children's brains-- positively saturate them-- in a shared American identity.

It doesn't always take. We have "retribalized" entities splitting off all the time, and now it seems we are in the process of tribalizing our whole political system.

Considering some of the ways in which human beings can act towards fellow humans who are not "of us," this is a potentially serious problem. Unfortunately, fracturing into tribal entities comes naturally to us, whereas bodies as large and diverse as nation-states do not, so much.

The late Marshall McLuhan made something of a career out of charting the forces that bring us together and tear us apart. Indeed, his phrase, "the medium is the message," refers to the psychological effects, the underlying "message," inherent to various forms of media. The written word (at least when using an alphabet, rather than pictograms) creates meaning-- lasting, durable meaning-- out of individually-meaningless units: letters. Reasoned arguments are assembled in this way using letters and words like the interlocking cogs of a Swiss watch, and when the medium becomes available to a wider audience through the use of the printing press, the written word soon ceases to be a tool only of the elite. It's a herald of rationality and, perhaps a little less kindly, rationalism.

Contrast this to the television, in which words flow by in an "oral" stream: ephemeral, impressionistic, emotionally effective (and affective), but difficult to pin down, hold still, and analyze. This makes it an absolutely gorgeous marketing tool. It does have its limits, of course. The recent Bush administration was absolutely masterful at using television (WMD's in Iraq, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and on and on), but found Hurricane Katrina too much to keep control of.

And then, of course, we have the internet: text-based, yet kaleidoscopic, uniting us as a single globe, yet so easily dividing us into rabid packs of (for example) feral PS3 worshippers and XBox cultists.

... Of course, it's possible to belong to more than one "tribe," and the internet doesn't place geographical limitations on where its tribes come from, which may make open warfare between at least some forms of internet partisan difficult.

Would that our political divisions in the U.S. were as geographically diverse: when tribe A views tribe B as evil, and tribe B sees tribe A as insane, living in separate enclaves seems like a good way to make the situation worse.

... I say as a liberal living happily in Seattle. Ah, well.

Who Says?

If the universe itself (as an entity distinct from ourselves) has little or nothing to say, where does that leave us? Who gets to decide the "right" and "wrong" of things if God hasn't got much to say?

The overly-easy answer is to say "no one"-- that there is no such creature as morality. This is the "obviously wrong" answer my philosophy professors always used to get into a snit about me playing devil's advocate for (and the one I presume people are thinking of when some pollster asks them whether atheists can be good people). It's the only moral code I've ever heard of whose logic is wholly consistent and universally applicable. Admittedly, that's because it has the same effect in moral logic problems as multiplying by zero has in mathematics: the product is always the same.

... Though frankly it seems to me that the lesson here is not to try to make a logic problem out of morality.

The better answer, and more in keeping with the fact that human beings do seem to have an innate moral capacity, is to take a step back and stop looking to the heavens for answers that will only ever come from the little bits of the universe walking around on two legs down here: the ape that stood up. Current thought on the subject analogizes the human moral capacity with our capacity for language: it's innate (absent a disability), but programmable. It's a biological "slot" that gets filled through cultural instruction and experience.

That this "slot" appears to exist should tell us something about the nature of human morality. Evolution doesn't work on the basis of celestial right and wrong; just go ask a tarantula hawk about the morality of using live tarantulas as larders for its babies (a process that makes gavage look positively humane). Evolution functions on the basis of what works. So, if our moral capacity is an evolved trait, that suggests that morality isn't about pleasing any god you care to name so much as it is about how we survive. We're social animals, so it's necessary for us to be able to function effectively as a group as well as looking out for our own personal genes. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how a group of proto-humans with no innate compunctions about stealing from, cheating, and murdering each other would have trouble surviving to reproduce.

In essence, morality is about not doing ourselves in.

So, if the universe "communicates" through consequences and the key consequence of immorality appears to be a tendency not to survive as well, why do I say that the universe is silent?

Although our moral capacity appears to be innate, there is still a lot of room for us to develop different culturally and/or legally-enforced codes and weigh moral qualities differently. Few, if any, modern societies regard outright theft, treachery, or murder as morally right, at least when applied within that group's own bounds (groups of religious extremists, and I'm not only talking about extremist Muslims, here, apparently just sharply limit the circle of people they identify themselves with). However, those same societies differ greatly on subjects such as who should pay how much for public projects; whether intentionally "standing out from the crowd" is a celebration of individual identity or an unseemly, even arrogant display; and whether man's best friend is best served high-grade kibble or served in a fortifying autumn stew.

I say the universe is silent because, when it comes to a great many of the questions we disagree on, it is. Human societies have the privilege, and the burden, of finding their own answers to these questions. Some may have good consequences, some bad; most will serve up a blend of both. No one will be right about everything, all the time; the world doesn't work like that.

I say the universe is silent, also, because in the process of working through our issues, of finding a balance of policies and ideas that serves our purposes in our increasingly complicated world, it is essential, absolutely vital, that we resist the temptation to assert the mandate of heaven.

We are beings of subjective viewpoint; we cannot be otherwise. We absorb information through our senses, but we process it in the context of our own inner universes. Beliefs as to what God wants create their own reality. They require no evidence beyond the foundational documents of the faith, and they reshape the believer's understanding of the universe until that which contradicts the belief is automatically a misunderstanding, an error, or even a deliberate deception.

I am not saying that religions that look to an outside source for moral guidance are "bad." I am saying that they filter the believer's perceptions, sometimes to the point where the believer and the secular world occupy, in effect, different universes that just happen to overlap. From a practical, secular perspective, the results are problematic.

Even if God exists, His desires are obscure unless you are lucky enough to have the exact "right" god-- and of course, all believers consider their own god to be the right one.

The American founders had the right idea when they separated church and state. Human culture and human law are worldly artifacts to be arranged in accordance (we hope) with the function of this world. The alternative is to craft our lives in accordance with a vision of the universe at least partially detached from the one we have to live in, and damn the consequences.

Suited in Seattle

Seattle, as a city, does not seem to put much stock in going nattily attired, choosing rather to make a casual dress-style into a badge of community. We've got our outliers, naturally, but, on the whole, we seem to like serviceable, marginally attractive, casual clothing. It fits in with our self-image as a community: educated yet egalitarian, practical yet relaxed. To a great degree, a casual style of dress is a mark of common identity among us, a way of declaring our common humanity. We're not here to "do business" so much as to make lives for ourselves. 

There's no better way to see this pattern than to try stepping out of it for a bit. And one need not step "down" to step "out."

There are communities within communities, and law is a conservative profession. Much as I'd love to grow my hair back out to the base of my spine and wear a Utilikilt to the office, and much as this is technically allowed (it's my hair and my office, dammit), there is a host of reasons why this isn't a good idea, chief among them that I would very much like to make some money some time soon. It's a matter of marketing: being a lawyer calls for looking businesslike, even in a city where billionaires typically wear fleece. 

The thing is, wearing a suit seems to edit me right out of that very same community.

Years ago, I used to make a habit of waving to strangers whose eyes I  happened to meet on the street. While I thought at the time that this was a nice and friendly gesture, recognizing our mutual humanity and so on, it yielded a harvest of odd looks, and for good reason: it was a violation of our social mores. Waving, as a friend would, at someone who is not a friend hints at a connection that does not exist, expresses a level of intimacy that has not been reached. It's like hugging random people in the grocery store. 

It makes you look touched in the head.

Nodding, now, that's the thing. Nodding at someone whose eye you catch is a simple courtesy, a recognition of the other's existence as a sentient being. It comes across to nobody as odd, and is commonly returned by everyone from bankers to the homeless (though you're apt to have a pan handled at you immediately after).

But, now, here's the catch: it doesn't work anywhere near as well if you're wearing a suit. Seriously.

Wearing a suit seems to put the wearer into another category of humanity, and anyone who thinks we're anywhere near a classless society even here on the West Coast needs to give this a try. To wear a suit, and nod, is to be more readily nodded at by other people in suits, less by casually-dressed Seattlites (to whom the wearer no longer appears to be "one of us"), and to be looked at funny by anyone within shouting distance of the poverty line.

The suit is a mark of status. It's a mark of Serious Business, an undertaking Seattlites seem to look at with maybe just a touch of scorn. It's a mark of wealth, and never mind whether the clothes are of good quality or bad.

It's also an invitation to resentment.

"Hey rich man! Can't you spare me five bucks?"

Not that I can afford to buy the local homeless lunch every day to begin with, but it's difficult to be subjected to this sort of reaction without beginning to regard the source less as a hapless fellow human being and more as a threat.

Designating one's self an outsider to some degree hath its advantages, however. Many a lawyer in the area dresses in a button-up shirt and sweater, staying closer to the "casual" Seattle look while still maintaining that businesslike image in part. It may be possible to generate more business through a "more professional than thou" demeanor, especially in the courtroom. I find myself looking forward to getting the chance.