Readings: F. Lee Bailey, The Defense Never Rests 7-8 (New York: Stein and Day, 1971); Diane Ackerman, On Extended Wings: An Adventure in Flight 3-14, 27-41 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1987)

Why does F. Lee Bailey think lawyers should be trained as pilots? In what sense, if any, is it helpful to imagine lawyering from the perspective of those who fly planes?

Diane Ackerman, unlike F. Lee Bailey, is not a lawyer. Does the excerpt from On Extended Wings: An Adventure in Flight provide lateral ways of thinking about what might lie ahead in your ventures in becoming a lawyer?

I have used the phrase "lateral ways of thinking" and it may need explanation. When told I don't see the world like everyone else, I sense I am out-of-step with my colleagues. As a result, I seek ways to explain the situation (at least to yourself). Lateral thinking is one way to explain, first, how I got out-of-step with my colleagues, and second, how I embrace different ways of thinking, and finally, how I attempt to make them central to my teaching. This isn't the place to offer a full account of this conception of "lateral thinking" and "lateral teaching" but some bits and pieces of the framework can be sketched out.

First, I am drawn to stories in which a protagonist realizes that he or she is just never going to be accepted as a ________ (and you can fill in the bank). At this juncture, the protagonist must figure out what to do. He knows there is a way of thinking and acting that allows most people to fit-in (or at least act as if they do). By fitting-in and not standing-out, constant censoring and monitoring of your audience, you can escape serious questioning (as Jean Baptiste-Clamence in Camus's The Fall, you can live as if you are above judgment).

Somewhere along the way, the protagonist begins to reflect on the conformity that patterns the way most of us think, a conformity which exists right along side the fierce pride so many take in being individuals who think for ourselves. In conversation with law students about the moral dimension of lawyering this individualism appears in claims that we are govern by a conscience that is personal and private and has little relation or connection to the world (expect through rather vague, ungrounded, notions that we get our ethics growing up and from our parents). There is a fairly common notion that when it comes to morals (if not ethics), we stand alone, autonomous selves, inhabitants on an island of one (an island we sometimes share with our immediate families and closest of friends).

When I began law teaching, I also happened to be reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (1974)(a book which I have sometimes used in law school courses and strongly recommend to those who have set out to be lawyers). The narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is just the kind of protagonist I have described, a man out-of-step, so much so he becomes dysfunctional and is treated as mentally-ill. But, as readers, we never lose sight of the fact that the narrator of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is driven crazy by the world he finds around him; he is crazy like a fox. Basically, Pirsig's narrator sees the world so differently that he fails in the ordinary roles he takes up, student, teacher, father, husband. But some failures are more instructive than others, and Pirsig's are meant to be of the instructive type. Pirsig provides this description of his narrator's failure, his thinking, and how it might be described as a lateral vision of the world:

His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap- wary about institutional truths. . . . He didn't see these things and think this way at first, however, only later on. . . .

At first the truths Phaedrus [the name Pirsig gives the narrator before he is becomes crazy] began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That's a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth. (pp. 121-122).

Lateral thinking can drive you crazy or it can be put to use as a valuable way of learning. Ellen J. Langer, a Harvard psychologist describes, a lateral way of thinking (and learning) she calls "sideways learning." She most certainly is not interested in seeing her students go crazy. This is the way Langer describes "sideways learning":

The standard two approaches to teaching new skills are top-down or bottom-up. The top-down method relies on discursive lecturing to instruct students. The bottom-up path relies on direct experience, repeated practice of the new activity in a systematic way. . . .

Sideways learning aims at maintaining a mindful state. . . . [T]he concept of mindfulness revolves around certain psychological states that are really different version of the same thing: (1) openness to novelty: (2) alertness to distinction: (3) sensitivity to different contexts; (4) implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and (5) orientation in the present. [Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning 22, 23 (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing/Merloyd Lawrence Book, 1997)]

Another example of lateral teaching and learning is that of Socrates, the patron-saint of legal education (known, I'm afraid as an icon and not as a teacher). This is the way one teaching colleague describes Socrates:

He antagonized those who opposed him not primarily because of his alleged disrespect for the gods of popular religion, but because he exhorted the young to seek self-knowledge, and to think for themselves, to learn how to discern what is and what is true as against what is deceptive and false, and, most important, to seek as guides for human conduct those virtues which mark out the "good of the soul," and make it possible for people to live together in civil society. Socrates, in short, was a teacher, par excellence, but he was a gadfly to his contemporaries because, instead of focusing on the acquisition of information about the world and the development of skills and crafts, he insisted on the absolute importance of the ethical quality of human life. [John E. Smith, "Three-Dimensional Education," in Douglas Sloan (ed.), Education and Values 160-167, at 161 (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1980)]

Lateral thinking makes way for what Huston Smith calls "education for surprise":

Education for surprise would begin with, and keep always in full view, its indisputable premise: In comparison with what we do not know, what we do know is nothing. Balancing our present assumption that education's role is to transmit what we know, education for surprise would not reject that premise but would add that it is equally important to remember how much we do not know. . . . [E]ducation for surprise would remind students that the more we know, the more we see how much we do not know: The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. [Huston Smith, "Excluded Knowledge: A Critique of the Modern Western Mind Set," in Douglas Sloan (ed.), Education and Values 23-49, at 45 (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1980)]

Other teachers describe lateral thinking and education for surprise in different terms. Consider the following comments by Mary Catherine Bateson, a professor of anthropology and English (and the daughter of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead):

The quality of improvisation characterizes more and more lives today, live in uncertainty, full of the inklings of alternatives. In a rapidly changing and interdependent world, single models are less likely to be viable and plans more likely to go awry. The effort to combine multiple models and risks and disasters of conflict and runaway misunderstanding, but the effort to adhere blindly to some traditional model for a life risks disaster not only for the person who follows it but for the entire system in which he or she is embedded, indeed for all the other living system with which that life is linked.

Adaptation comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we may need to deviate from cherished values, behaving in ways we have barely glimpsed, seizing on fragmentary clues. The improvisatory artist cannot be sure whether a given improvisation will stand as a work of art or be rejected as an aberration. Trusted habits of attention and perception may be acting as blinders. Resources we have relied on to shape our lives may turn out to be dangerous addictions or spin into new shapes as the earliest versions of emerging patterns. Essential themes are not clearly marked but rather visible out of the corner of the eye.

Under the pressure of the moment, needing to respond, it is easy to be captured by some central point of focus. . . . But there is always more in any episode, much of it at the very edge of awareness, most of it in flux, the relationships within any cultural tradition between old and new barely visible.

. . . . Rarely is it possible to study all the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seem to come from nowhere. [Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way 8, 9 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994)]

 

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