Anger: I Haven't Missed It At All

My wife and I have taken the better part of July off this year. The plan was to take the entire month, but the feds got interested in a client of mine. I interrupted the vacation for several days to try to talk them out of an indictment. I still don't know whether I succeeded, but I suspect not. So as I write this, I expect to have one more week off, unless I need to spend another day or so locked up with federal agents and prosecutors. Then it is back to the law.

Today I found myself thinking that I do not want to go back. There is too much anger in it to suit me. I've not missed the fear, the rage, the anger of people undone by their situation in the world. For the past three weeks, I've simply let go of anger. It feels good. I am cleansed, refreshed, and lighter on my feet. Or so it seems.

Aristotle wrote of anger that it is difficult to be angry in the right way, to the right degree, at the right things and in the right manner. I wonder whether his concept of moderation sheds light on what Christians mean by sin. Surely, the love of the wrong thing, in this case anger, can warp a soul. How many are the lawyers I've seen sigh, some nearly on the verge of tears, when discussing their clients' rage?

My temper has certainly cost me much. Too often, I've perceived a slight where none was intended and then reacted in anger. I am quick to judge, and quicker still to attack, even if the attack is not justified. Some defect in my character or upbringing made anger a convenient weapon for me. I use it to defend, even when the only thing I need to defend against are the shadows I cast.

The law suits an angry man or woman. One can check concerns about the nature of truth or goodness at the courthouse door and navigate guided solely by a client's conception of his or her interest. The hard work of sitting cheek by jowl with a client and asking whether their desire is reasonable is also optional. Many are the lawyers who simply fight for what their clients want, regardless of whether the client's desires are wise.

I came to the law from other pursuits. I despaired of an academic career in large part due to a failure of nerve. I did not believe there were larger truths worth conveying in the form of teaching. Yet I realized that this realization was itself a larger truth of the very sort I thought impossible. Rather than work my way through this deeper contradiction and commit to principles I found acceptable, I succumbed to something like nihilism. I found the law liberating for the very reason that it did not require me to make epistemological commitments broader than the narrowly conceived interests of my client. The law had mere instrumental value.

That view no longer sustains, and I am once again forced to examine commitments and attitudes that make me uncomfortable. It is no longer enough to fight for the sake of fighting. I want to fight for something worth believing in. But cynicism and scoffing are old friends. Leaving them behind requires courage; it also requires turning aside from a form of anger that was cheap substitute for something more destructive. Anger, I conclude, is less damaging a sin than despair.

Every summer I vow to return to the law a better man. Late each summer I return only marginally chastened by the failings I have observed in myself. This year has been a long meditation on hope and love, lessons, paradoxically, I examine again and again through my dealings with our dogs. Come August 2, when I return to work, I will be challenged to find the same sort of warmth in the people around me that I find in my dogs. Of course, I know that a good deal of what I find in the dogs is what I give to them. Can I make the leap and give the same love and care to clients?

I genuinely do not know. I found myself thinking today that I have had enough of the law. There are so many young and talented lawyers out there, a small voice says step aside and let them bear the rage of strangers. But that seems somehow like a cop out, like letting sin win. I am not ready for that either.

So return I shall, chastened as always by a growing awareness of the presence of sin in the world, and struggling toward the grace necessary to survive a profession in which the worst we can to one another and to ourselves is our daily bread.

Even Madness Is No Stranger To Us

"If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us."
C.G. Jung

I keep reminding myself that Jung is right. The line distinguishing mental health from mental illness is thin. We are all up against the edge in more ways than we care to admit. We comfort ourselves in moments of inspiration that the line separating genius and madness often blurs; we keep silent the desperation that haunts in more mundane moments.

My law practice keeps me close to misery. Most of the folks I represent are terrified about what the future holds. Some of them are so angry about what has befallen them that they can no longer see straight. A few find themselves in the law's cross hairs because they themselves seem permanently out of focus. Each challenges me to translate the expectations of a legal system hobbled together by visions of what is rational into terms that resonate once reason flees. Nothing in my training as a lawyer prepared me for this task, and I am sometimes depleted and filled with a harrowing sense of inadequacy.

I've been asking for years now for the bar or bench to sponsor training in dealing with mental health issues. There has not been any meaningful response to the request. Yet everyone in the system knows there are serious mental health issues driving both the civil and criminal justice systems. We just prefer not to talk about it, and to pretend that reason governs. We prefer our own fictions to reality.

Instead or serving reality, the powers that be have set in motions imperatives that poorly serve clients and the profession. The Rules of Professional Conduct have been amended to require lawyers to play greater roles as counselors: it is no longer enough to identify a client's strategic objectives and to provide choices. Now, lawyers and clients are to work together to discuss and conceive appropriate tactical means of advancing the litigation.

This transformation from a paternalistic to a client-centered model of the attorney-client relationship sounded great in theory. Hadn't medicine made a similar transformation in the latter portion of the twenty-first century, adopting a more patient-centered informed consent requirement? Wouldn't it work well with clients and lawyers?

What no one paused to consider when the law adopted informed consent is that, unlike doctors, lawyers have no training in mental health issues. A part of every doctor's training involves the recognition of mental health problems. A physician whose patient is undone by the choices before him can be prescribed medication to help them cope; most insurance plans also cover psychiatric referrals. There are no such avenues for lawyers.

This is most jarring in the law's civil system. On the criminal side, a lawyer who believes his client cannot comprehend the nature of the proceedings or who cannot provide assistance in his or her own defense can ask for a competency hearing. In such instances, the proceedings halt while the court satisfies itself that the defendant is fit to participate. There is not such mechanism in the civil courts. A lawyer with questions about a client's competence must bring a separate claim to the Probate Court, where a determination about whether the party needs a conservator can be made. But what lawyer will risk such an action in all but the most extraordinary circumstances?

Lawyers are permitted to withdraw if a client's demands become unreasonably difficult to satisfy, or if the client's objectives become repugnant. But that hardly seems a satisfactory solution. The client still remains in need. I would be interested to see whether there are any statistics on motions to withdraw in those jurisdictions requiring more expanded roles for lawyers as counselors. I'll bet more motions are being filed by lawyers ill-equipped to deal with avalanches of sorrow.

The fact remains that character disorders, the netherworld of diagnosis ranging from borderline personalities, to explosive rage disorder, to narcissism and other related so-called "soft" diagnoses go unrecognized and untreated in both the civil and criminal courts. And lawyers are left alone with these intractable conditions to make the best of every bad situation that comes their way.

Jung's observation about the relationship of pscyhosis to normal psychic process reminds me that what distinguishes health from pathology is largely a matter of degree. In this regard, Aristotle was really right when he discussed the concept of the mean in his Ethics. As regards anger, for example, it is a sign of good judgment, or health, to be angry in just the right way, to the right degree, in the right manner and at the right things. Rage obliterates these distinctions and becomes the soul of the person consumed by anger.

Oddly enough, the Seven Deadly Sins have become a starting point for me in understanding the human agony that I see day by day. A resilient soul knows passion, can experience anger, enjoys his appetites and is capable of detachment: when possessed by sin, a person becomes lustful, is a glutton, revels in sloth, loses his perspective and yields to unreasoning anger. We are all, it seems to me, so much tinder for the passions: A well ordered soul keeps a flame flickering at the center of the soul's mansion, warming himself by considering best how to marshal that flame for the purpose of harmony. But each of us can pushed to the point of violent combustion given the right circumstances. Each of us can be consumed and made a caricature by unmeasured desire.

I remind myself of this on the eve of a week filled with challenge. I remind myself not to become the anger and fear I see, but to remain a counselor capable of lending a firm hand amid a storm. I can recognize the danger signs by keeping a close eye on my internal compass. How easy to let anger become a lodestar. How easy to lose one's way. How hard, often, to remain calm in the center of so many storms.

Sloth Might Be The Deadliest Sin Of All

This week's poll asks readers to select the most dangerous sin of all from among the Seven Deadly Sins. I'm sort of surprised that no one has thus far selected Sloth. Of course, I voted for Pride; vanity and I are close companions. But I hesitated before I voted. Sloth, properly understood, is as deadly as they come.

Dorothy Sayers once described Sloth this way: "It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die." Sloth, it seems to me, has an an address: Madison Avenue, where all the pretty people are.

Perhaps I am unfair to single out Madison Avenue, but I selected it as a symbol of what I shall refer to here as the Culture of the Bauble. We are surrounded by things, each one new, exciting and hawked with great fanfare. And when each new thing becomes old, we discard it. We are buried beneath bygone baubles.

Henry Fairlie describes sloth as despair of God's mercy. Count me slothful. Last year, I read a dozen or so books on the historical Jesus. Why this man? What about this itinerant Mediterranean preacher made him one of history's best known figures? I confess to being tone deaf to spiritual things. The other day I was at a stop light. A bumper sticker on the car ahead of me read: "Jesus is the answer." "Fine," I thought. "But what, really, is the question?"

It is not enough to say salvation. This simply invites another question. "Salvation from what?" Death is inevitable. And signs of an afterlife are matters of a faith that I cannot summon, or, if I summon something like it, I do so out of reverence for the limits of what can be known and in submission to the undeniable fact that necessary fictions make life possible. But salvation from what?

Sloth and I are old friends, and in the dead of night I grieve over the waste Sloth has laid to me. As an adolescent, the world was on fire. I read the New Testament, the young Marx, Augustine, Dostoevsky -- I read as much as I could for a period of ten or so years. I even prepared to become an academic. I spent a couple fruitless years teaching at Columbia and preparing a dissertation on David Hume.

But Sloth claimed me. I despaired of a larger truth that would make sense of the world. The academy was afire with post-modern chatter back then. Everything could be deconstructed, except, of course, the deconstructer, who stood naked in the whirlwind without sense to shudder. I fled from the vanity of it all, and sought refuge in journalism, eventually becoming a lawyer. But Sloth remained, and it terrified me.

For a couple of decades I was able to avoid the hold Sloth had on me by simply permitting the concept of a client's interest to occupy the vacuum left by despair. I may not have a larger meaning or purpose, but all this energy of mine, this rage to create, I can place it at the service of others, I reasoned. This response served and created a lucrative vocation, but it begs the larger question: What is my purpose? Am I no more than a moth drawn to another's flame?

Sloth is the sin whose emblem is the broken heart. I sometimes think that an intellectual history of the Twentieth Century can, and perhaps should, be written and organized around the theme of the loss of spiritual nerve and resolve. All we like sheep truly have gone astray.

The Deadly Sins are related, like a tapestry they are interwoven one into another. Sloth, or despair, can be transformed into gluttony, lust and avarice: the human spirit must be filled with something; if not hope, then why not a bauble, or a body, or a bundle of food? And pride and envy, these two flames flicker on Sloth's bonfire: with nothing beyong me toward which to aspire, do I not over-value myself, and hence distort the image of all I see? And anger? The easiest sin of all to explain: If all I truly am is myself and my circumstances then I am entitled to rage at that which threatens to extinguish me. The boundless quality of rage is really little more than the fear of extinction.

St. Augustine wrote of the City of God and the City of Man. The City of Man was varied; each separate municipality takes shape from the object of its desire. We become what we love, after all. The City of God, however, was something greater: it was suffused with the love of God. I wonder, now, well past the century that declared God's death, whether we were too quick to kill, or whether, having killed the God we made in our own image, there is room yet in the world for intimations of something other and yet real? I wonder, and then despair elbows its way into the chamber of a heavy heart, reminding me not to get my hopes up. This vale of tears ends only in death, despair counsels.

Somehow, something in me begins to evade despair's grasp. If my soul can be symbolized as a hand, what will happen if I open the clenched fist I have used for so long to club at all around me. What, indeed?

Anger and the American Rule

Most lawyers are not really honest about what they see day by day in their practices. They fear that if they told the truth, they'd have no more work. What most lawyers will acknowledge, privately, when only other fellow lawyers are around, is that there is simply too many of us. The result is that many lawyers are desperate for work.

And what do desperate lawyers do? They sue people. And why not? Access to the courts is inexpensive, and there is no downside. You might always hit a big verdict. And even if you lose, the so-called American Rule shields both lawyer and client from having to cover the costs of the winner. The American Rule has transformed the American civil court system into the equivalent of a roulette wheel. Why not spin the wheel when the costs of doing so are low?

But there is another truth that lawyers are even more reluctant to utter, and that is the world is filled with angry people. Anger drives a good deal of the civil justice system. If you doubt it, ask the next plaintiff's lawyer you know about the concept of client control. It's a notion untaught in law schools, but as as real as the ink on a dollar bill.

Client control means the ability of a lawyer to get his or her client to follow the lawyer's recommendation. A civil dispute works in the following way: A person who thinks they are aggrieved visits a lawyer. The lawyer listens, and, armed with the minimal comprehension of the law acquired to pass the bar exam, the lawyer provides a "diagnoses." In other words, a set of legal doctrines are summoned that define whether the client has a cause of action. The lawyer then engages, or should enage, the client in a discussion about reasonable outcomes.

Consider a client who has been modestly injured in a car accident. The fault of the other driver is clear. So, too, is the fact that harm was caused. The client can obtain some small recovery. Many clients listen to their lawyers at this point. Some do not. Many of those who do not claim the lawyer doesn't understand the magnitude of the harm. They want millions for a hang nail. A lawyer who accepts such a client has no control over the litigation: The client's expectations are so high that the lawyer has no choice but to tilt at justice's windmill. One premier labor and employment firm in Connecticut provides a continuing legal education course to lawyers designed to help them identify just which clients' cases are worth the investment of time and money. Angry clients drive a significant portion of the plaintiff's market for legal services.

As luck would have it, the vagaries of jury system make windmill tilting a sometimes profitable sport. I've from time to time "hit" enormous verdicts that I simply did not see coming. There are lawyers who specialize in angry clients. These folks will pay good money down for a chance at justice's roulette wheel.

I've learned to steer clear of blind anger. Indeed, I've learned to see limitless anger as a sin. As Henry Fairlie once noted in The Seven Deadly Sins Today: "[T]he love of justice is again and again turned into hatred of someone. Whenever love is turned into hatred, we know that sin has entered and wreaked its havoc." This sin may have moral causes, or it may be simple narcissism and no sin at all, but the fact remains that boundlessness, in this case boundless rage, is an emotion at the core of much civil litigation.

I used to think of sin as an antiquated notion, somehow dependent on a set of transcendent rules made obsolete by the virtual absence of God. I now know better. I see sin in myself, and the eternal vigil to keep in balance the raw emotions and desires that are never too far below the surface of things. Anger, it turns out, is an easy sin. I hear it often on the phone: A caller all but shouts into the line that their rights have been violated. Will I take their case? Often, the rights are nothing more than desires unrecognized by law. Fairlie notes: "To present as rights what cannot in the end be secured as rights, as well all too often do today, is as sure a prescription for Wrath as any other that could be proposed."

The civil justice system is overloaded with anger and rage. Mind you, I am not saying that there is no room for the pursuit of justice in the courts. There are cases that should be brought, and relations that can be righted by law. But in too many cases, there is simply the raw hatred of a party seeking some sense of validation the law can never offer. The civil justice system has no mechanism for screening the meritorious from non-meritorious cases. And so long as there is a surfeit of lawyers, there will be an incentive for the legal profession to bring claims lacking in value. The American Rule makes sure this will happen.

But what happens to the party sued in a case driven by sinful anger? This party will win the litigation in the end. Experienced lawyers have a pretty good eye for risk in most cases. There are surprises, but those cases are outliers. Most often, most cases are resolved more or less as expected by those with experience to know what they are seeing.

In cases driven by hatred, seething anger, or a need for validation unrelated to the merits of the actual claim, a defendant pays for his defense. And he pays dearly. And when he wins, the plaintiff and his or her lawyer walk away with impunity. It is simply wrong to permit this, and wasteful.

Defenders of the American Rule say that it provides all Americans with access to the courts, whether they have resources or not. I agree that it does, and I agree that it is a value that should be served. But I see no justice or fairness in requiring defendants, whether they be corporations or individuals, to pay unwarranted legal fees. Why shouldn't a loser be required to recover his costs?

Here's my proposal: Require all plaintiffs' lawyers to post bonds sufficient to cover the eventual winner's reasonable legal fees for all the cases they bring. This would protect the rights of all Americans to get justice in the courts. Plaintiffs would not be barred from bringing any claim they can persuade a lawyer to file. But defendants would also have the protection of recouping their fees when the roulette wheel comes up a loser for the plaintiff.

The proposal is not as far-fetched as it seems. Much like bondsman, who post bonds for released pending trial in a criminal case, a lawyer could be approved to float bonds up to the limit of the insurance policy he purchased to cover the bonds. A lawyer in this case would be free to take any case he wanted, and which his client was willing to pay for. The lawyer would be required, however, to pay the loser's costs from the bond posted.

This new regime could be flexibly applied. Make such a bond a rebuttable presumption in all civil cases. A judge would be free to relax the bond requirement for good cause -- call it a prejudgment remedy for defendants.

Such a rule would have an additional benefit: Once a lawyer was unable to secure insurance for additional bonds, he or she would have to decide whether to post his or her own assets as security. I suspect this rule would force a lot of lawyers to think twice before filing a frivolous writ.

I do not know how much money is spent in defense of civil suits each year. But I'll bet the sum is enormous, and I'lll bet winning defendants often lose big even when they obtain a judgment in their favor. They lose big because the American Rule is, frankly, an invitation to gamble with other people's fortunes. Frankly, that seems downright un-American to me.

The Seven Deadly Sins: A Fresh Look

Can a godless man conceive of sin? Frankly, I don't see why not; although I confess a healthy respect for God might help enliven the sense of one's transgressions. But sin as a sense of transgressing boundaries, however those boundaries are set, is alive and well.

I've been struggling of late with the forces unleashed in my clients' lives. There is so much destruction, and sometimes so much self-destruction. I wondered recently whether revisiting the Seven Deadly Sins might help. So I started by reading Henry Fairlie's lively The Seven Deadly Sins Today. The book really served less as a road map leading me to others, than a mirror forcing me to reflect on my own failings.

Fairlie's been dead now some 20 years, but his prose live on. Just last year, another book of his essays came out. He was a prodigious journalist and social critic, writing on both sides of the Atlantic. The Seven Deadly Sins Today was first published in 1978, and has been republished six times since, most recently in 2006. Sin, it seems, never goes out of style.

First, the big seven: Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust. The order matters, Fairlie argues. At the root of all sin is misplaced love of self. Pride reflects a sort of contempt for the world, a vaunting, over-reaching sense of our own superiority. It is a detachment from things held in common so as to glory, falsely, in the superiority of our solitary visions. Pride is the island no man should seek to become.

There is a quaint quality to Fairlie's rendering of pride, however. He tends to make all sin a failure of relations between man and man. Pride, the most persistent of our sins, fouls our relations to one another. Perhaps. But it seems far more than that. It is isolating precisely because its defenses against the world cut the proud off from any realistic sense of self: Pride is King Solipsism enthroned.

But all sin, Fairlie notes, "is our secret from others. Only we know where, and how deeply, it has taken root in us." Thus, the proud man cowers in the secret shadow shed by his conceit: Hell is the other not so much because we lose some potent sense of authenticity. The other is Hell because she is the mirror which reveals a nakedness the proud cannot tolerate. I am willing to bet that every good marriage can be explained in terms of how pride is managed.

I wished, as I read Fairlie, that he had chose to engage Sarte rather than Helter Skelter or I'm OK, You're OK. He aimed too low when he sought to remind us of the precarious nature of spiritual health.

Fairlie seems to strike the mark when he observes: "Th[e] solitude to which sin condemns us is partly a result of taking something in our lives, which has an appropriate place and value, and then lifting it out of place and exaggerating its importance to us. In the end, it is no longer a part of our lives but takes the place of living." Sin then becomes a departure from the mean, and Fairlee makes good use of Aristotle to show how easliy self-respect can be transformed into either pusillanmity or vanity.

Sin, then, is a carcicature of the human spirit: a part struggling to become the whole of one's existence; the violent effort to place at the center that which belongs at the periphery. Lust is so easy to see in these terms: When did the loving embrace become a cage?

I read Fairlie with a sense of shame and furtive relief. I saw without hestitation the presence of each of the sins in my own life. I live largely a reclusive life, my wife and I tucked away on a beautiful rural piece of property deciding when, and on what terms, to engage the world. Is not my preening, even on these pages, as a defender of those in need, a form of pride? Of course, it is. Even when I suffer I seek to make it exquisite, and therefore uncommon.

And envy, what of envy? Another man's pride bridles. Thus when Gerry Spence, to select an old hobby horse, announces that he is "America's Finest Trial Lawyer," and proclaims he has never lost a criminal case, I am reduced to a simmering rage. Of envy, Fairlie writes: "This gnawing fear that, if someone else gains something, [I] must be losing something, that someone else's good, material or spiritual, ... means [my] lessening...." How else to explain the secret delight when another stumbles?

Fairlie's account of sloth also forced me to turn an appraising eye on my attitudes. Sloth is not mere laziness. Of that, I am not guilty. I work long hours, and always have. But to what end this work if the effort merely deflects from a sense of despair? I saw myself in this attitude: "The world is evil, filled with destruction. Creation is evil, condemning us to die. Life is an absurdity, since we all end under ground. The evil of our societies, embedded in institutions so big that we cannot hope to control them is beyond our concern or correction. So we will retreat to our oases, and cultivate our Sloth.... We have made a religion of ourselves and, of all sins, we have come nearest to making a religion of Sloth."

These shoes fit. I walk in them. They yield a certain familiar ease, if not comfort. But how to transcend a sense of sin. Where to turn for grace?

Fairlie loses me with his theism. He writes from time to time like a crabby old man, one of the venal sins of all Tories. (When he goes on and on about the packaging of consumer goods as an example of gluttony I feel as though the village idiot is pining away for medieval simplicity.)

Fairlie makes reference to God's mercy, to the bounty of "creation," to abusing things "provided for our well being." An invisible hand haunts Fairlie's universe. The hand is God's, apparently. Yet the signs of this faith appear to be little more than rhetorical necessities in Fairlie's argument. The work made me nostalgic for a faith I have long since lost, and, sadly, it made me once again envy Joshua, whose hip, mind you, was broken in a struggle with an angel. Oh, to be transformed so by the reality of things unseen!

I loved Fairlie's book for the unsparing mirror it held before me. I am sin. And I know first-hand how every smoldering flame can erupt into an all-consuming fire. I loved the even treatment of Aristotle, and the fair-sighted, if undeveloped, appreciation of Augustine's City of God. "Every sin," Fairlie argues, "is a sin of love, misdirected or perverted..." We do become what we love. I confess to my shortcomings, and to my sorrow over not knowing how to find my way beyond the niggling contours of perception fueled by desire.

Oddly, Fairlie's book awakened a hunger to reread Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. As regular readers of this blog know, I have undertaken a psychoanalysis: it is barely one year along now, and what I have seen thus far has made a beliver of me in sin. Beneath the surface of every gesture is a seething cauldron of desire. I know the veneer of civilization is thin, but necessary.

So who shall deliver me from this body of death? Not the sermonizer's paper Jesus; byt those parables, there's power there, and some intimation of a more abundant life. I've been struggling through Jung's Red Book by fits and starts. Is there hope there in things unseen? Or is it enough merely to know that the world is other, and the only hope to avoid becoming trapped in my own sin is learn to love that which I cannot define?