[Nona -- I think you have captured some of the most important/necessary institutional changes above. My question is this: Many students have a sense of what changes we need (with varying biases and preferences), but isn't the problem that we haven't opened our eyes to the vast and endless seas before us (using Saint-Exupéry's image). It seems to me that the above changes are the planks and nuts that can be used to build the boat. But unless we yearn (as you say) for the immense, would these changes have any tangible effect on what distances we take our boat? The A-student (whatever that may mean), the B-student, etc. must all determine that these grades are meaningless for purposes in which they are used. Unless they understand the fallacy of it (by aspiring for the endless), wouldn't the reformed institution just create new meaningless standards? -- MohitGourisaria - 23 Feb 2010 ]

Mohit: I do not agree that everyone has to stop caring about grades, nor do I think they are a complete fallacy or meaningless. My point is not to make everyone yearn for what we could achieve without grades, but what we could achieve if we worked together in an environment that reminded us that we are worth something and that we can make something together. Eben's class does this for me, but I still care about doing a good job in his class and having that reflected in a grade. If the yearning and the grades were mutually exclusive I do not think that would be the case. It is more the dehumanization of people that weirdly creeps in here than the grade-based labeling system (which of course has its own flaws), and the fact that I can do something (however small) about it while I am here.

Nona- I see that you have a lot of questions within this page and your paper page. Hopefully, I can help by sharing what I think are some other important questions to be asking, and maybe try to shed some light on the ones you've already posed. I'll look at the Antione de Saint Exupéry question about how to build a ship. Without a deeper knowledge of Antione de Saint Exupéry other than Le Petit Prince to guide me, I think (in line with Eben's idea, if I'm understanding it correctly) that the suggestion here is that to achieve an outcome in practice (shipbuilding) we need to inspire the motivation to accomplish a certain thing (yearning for/exploring the sea) which will then instill the drive to build the best boat possible to achieve that goal. It seems to me that deep desires and wants will lead to the best outcomes: we work hardest when we know what we want and have a feeling of urgency to get it. But you've already got the yearning for the sea, and now you need to know how the ship gets built. I think the next step is to translate a general "yearning for the sea" into something concrete: maybe the question is a very simple one. What do you want to achieve? What is it that you really find important? I know you say you want to use your license to shape the institutes to which you belong. I think I have a similar feeling. And so maybe we're at the same roadblock: shape them how? Do something good in this world, but what? What is it that instills in you an urgent desire to change an institution or use your license to achieve a specific practical outcome? What is the problem in this world that you think needs fixing? Those are the questions that will help us figure out what exactly our "yearning" is. But then comes the boat. I don't think we can figure out how to build the boat until we know more about the sea. I think this all speaks to something Eben said in one of our first classes: (approximately) that the only thing you need to change the world is know exactly what you want to do and exactly how to do it. I think that the first part of this might be the hardest. Knowing what we want to do will help drive us to "build with all our energy" the machinery that will help us do it. Figuring out what we want is a hard question, because it isn't one that anyone else can answer or we can find out in some empirical way. But I think just constantly thinking about things we learn, trying to figure out what seems right and what seems wrong, trying to get a feel of our sense of justice and when it is misplaced or nonexistent, and what particular issues strike us the most can all help us formulate some idea of what it is we want. I'm realizing that this is all getting a little bit impractical and abstract, so I'm going to post this in the Talk page rather than the paper page. I hope that some of these questions are helpful for thinking about your ideas, but I also realize that they are kind of nebulous, so if you have any advice on how to refine them or turn them into something more concrete, I would love to hear.

-- JessicaHallett? - 23 Feb 2010

Nona, I find it is often easier to rip things down than to build them up (no value judgment, just an observation). I think this is because in building something, there is usually some kind of goal, which can vary, and which may be difficult to articulate. The same can be said of destruction, though it seems relatively a bit more inclined towards being an end in itself, i.e. destruction for destruction's sake. Though again, I'm sure there are many cases of construction for its own sake.

You've already decided to build (your boat), and your goal seems to be "pursuing a legal education and career that means something to me and the world." My question (as me) is do you expect to build this boat, or like Antoine de Saint Expurey, do want to encourage the building of boats (and perhaps in the process obtain a boat of your own)?

If the latter, the first question I would ask is, why am I encouraging to build? (Simply to build, or for some other reason? Is it to have a ship, or to sail? Do I expect to find something at sea, or am I trying to leave something behind on land? Is it for my men or for "the people", or for me? etc.) Obviously I snuck in several more questions, but the first one is so open, it will inevitably lead to more. You will probably (and maybe should) have several answers. I don't know if these types of questions help or not, but what I'm really saying is that I think a certain amount of awareness about why you are writing will help with how and what to write. Then again, maybe you already have obtained a satisfactory hold of that awareness, in which case you are much closer to your boat than I : )

I really like the Exupery quote, though for an entirely different reason than why you posted it. To borrow a little Kant, I think it captures the need to treat people as people, rather than as means to a certain end. The irony for me is that I generally operate under the former presumption. I dislike giving up control, and similarly, I don't delegate responsibility as well as I should. When I do delegate, it's for a specific task--I might explain what I want and what the goals are, but I'm basically asking for a mechanical task that serves a larger vision that only I have. I have people gather wood while I give orders. It's hard for me to imagine getting things done by inspiring those I lead to adopt my goals and setting them loose, rather than using them like chess pieces.

The quote could be a jumping off point for an essay on how to achieve things without using people. Just a thought :).

-- RonMazor - 19 Feb 2010

I think another interesting aspect of the Exupery quote is the implicit point that to persuade others to support an idea one needs a positive vision, not only a critique. Exupery's exemplary orator is not criticizing a landlocked life - he is offering an inspiring vision of an alternative. I think you can see this in Martin Luther King Jr.'s decision to structure his famous speech around a dream of racial unity, as a positive goal to strive for. This also relates to the "know what you want" part of Thurgood Marshall's advice about effecting change. One has to know more than what one doesn't want. Putting the two in dialogue, Exupery's advice about inspiring people with a positive vision may be part of the answer to Marshall's requirement that you know "exactly how to get it."

This is something I have given some thought to because the cause I work on most is environmentalism, and there is often a public perception that the environmental movement is mainly against things, not for things.

-- DevinMcDougall - 21 Feb 2010

Okay, so first I moved this conversation to the NonaFarahnikFirstPaperTalk topic, because you're just chatting, not helping Nona write the paper she's trying to write. Your talk may be relevant to what she's doing, but you're writing to do whatever it is you're trying to do, which isn't what she asked. Soon the page will be covered with chat, and she'll be responsible for turning it into a coherent draft of what she thought. Because it's got her name on it, she'll do that, but she shouldn't have to. Use Talk pages when you want to talk, please. And do understand that I consider collaboration to be commitment, and talk to be valuable only to the extent that it's creative and well-written. It takes no effort to write too long stuff that rehashes a familiar idea.

Now, on the substance. First, let's get an illiteracy out of the way. Referring to Antione de Saint Exupéry as "Exupery" is like calling Baltasar Garzón Real, "Real." Saint-Exupéry is a place, from which the family derived a surname based on a title of nobility, however minor, entitling them to call themselves "of" the place in which they were the owners or masters. He himself came from Lyon. Those who have not read the fable apparently for children called Le Petit Prince and always available in an English translation with his own watercolor illustrations have missed a masterpiece. His style in all his writing is elegant, as simple as Hemingway's, but lyrical and, as in the example here, profound as Zen is profound. I suppose he can be read as Devin reads him here—after all, the stated inference is correct, so logically the idea is there—but I think the reading is forced (the positive program, the building of the ship, is a given, and could not be accomplished by criticism, not matter how skillful—making the idea, to me, tautological), and is at any rate contrary to the themes de Saint Exupéry recurrently expresses. Ron too is offering an idea that is logically implied by the text, and using it (I ask myself, have I been here before?) as a bridge to talking about himself. His observations about himself are accurate, indicative of principled self-examination, and may be of interest to other risk-averse control freaks (as I have pointed out before, the target population of the admissions system and therefore overrepresented in every Columbia Law School entering class). But they have nothing to do with what Antoine de Saint Exupéry is actually about.

From Vol de Nuit to Le Petit Prince he writes always about the explorer's urge, the otherworldy empty places: over the immensity of the Sahara under starlight, between planets. Devin thinks he's talking about making people desire a common goal, and Ron apparently thinks he's talking about learning how to delegate. Nona understands already the importance of what he says to what he means, which neither of the alternate readings does: if you want a practical outcome, a ship, inspire in human beings a deep restless longing for the immensity, for the endless vastness, of the sea. Then they will devise and build with all the energy of their restless longing the engines of their exploration.

Nona has also grasped that this is what I do, in my practice: that I am the inventor of legal and rhetorical arrangements to harness this force in order to inspire the making of technologies that can ensure the future of human freedom. She gets that this class is my attempt to contribute practically towards making a curriculum that teaches other people how to make positive things happen in society by learning to inspire and harness the human restless hunger for the immensity of possibility. She's figured out all that and now she's asking the apparently obvious question: how should she build a boat? The least that someone could do who was trying to help her would be to help explain how to build a boat. The best that someone could do to help her would be to show her how to ask the right question.