The Usefulness of Uselessness

 I was reading the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi this weekend. And one of the themes he returns to time and again is the idea that there are advantages to being useless. He notes that the most ugly, useless, and cumbersome animals are the ones least likely to be killed and eaten, or stripped for their beautiful fur. The most useless trees, likewise, are seldom cut down for their wood. 

 Likewise, he introduces a human character named Outspread the Discombobulated (according to the Brook Ziporyn translation), who is so mixed up and uncoordinated that he is no good for anything. But precisely for this reason, Zhuangzi observes—when the military recruiters came to conscript people into the army, he was passed over. 

Outspread survived because he was so useless. Whereas all the useful, skillful, and well-coordinated people were picked up and drafted for the front lines. Usefulness, it turns out, can be a curse. "How fortunate the man with none," as Brecht would put it. Whereas uselessness can be a blessing. Not enough people, says Zhuangzi, appreciate "the usefulness of uselessness." 

This idea struck me as profoundly reassuring, in the context of law school. After all, I have often been forced to realize here that I am a terrible law student. I have been made to confront the fact time and again that I will never amount to anything as a lawyer. But—I now realize—this uselessness on my part has certain advantages. At least I won't be useful in an evil cause. 

At least, that is to say, I won't end up as a useful well-honed tool for the Big Law firms serving corporations. At least I won't be some government attorney who's very useful at coming up with clever ways to strike down people's valid civil rights complaints by citing "qualified immunity" and "claim preclusion," regardless of "the right of the matter" (Masters).  

And even more reassuring than that: I will never be one of those whip-smart attorneys hired into the DOJ honors program, thinking they are about to serve their country—only to be forced to violate their conscience, their oaths, and their professional integrity each day by trying to defend the Trump administration's summary deportation of Venezuelan asylum-seekers without due process. 

Because I am useless, because I am Outspread the Discombobulated, I will never find myself in a courtroom trying to pervert the law in service of the U.S. government's deportation of innocent people to torture and abuse in some dark dungeon in El Salvador—or having to knowingly lie or at least obfuscate the truth about whether the White House has violated a direct court order by doing so. 

Thank God for my uselessness, therefore. It has proven to be quite useful. 

I may just end up as an old "foolosopher," i.e., a good-for-nothing—as a character puts it in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. But that's better, he argues, than ending up as a servant of "the State."At least, as a lousy lawyer, one will never be of use to their diabolical State. "I've refused to be a useful member of society," as O'Neill's character puts it. 

There's a passage in Mencius—another ancient Chinese philosopher—in which he is asked whether arrow-makers are bad people. Mencius says no—but they do measure the success of their craft by how effective they are at hurting people. Therefore, as Mencius says, "One can never be too careful about one's choice of profession." (Paraphrasing from the D.C. Lau trans.) 

And so too, to be a good lawyer means to be good at defeating one's opponents regardless of the truth; at zealously advocating for one's client, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. 

As Anthony Trollope puts it in The Warden, of an attorney character: "It was very clear that to Sir Abraham, the justice of the [opposing side's] claim or the justice of Mr Harding's defence were ideas that had never presented themselves. [...] Success was his object, and he was generally successful. He conquered his enemies by their weakness rather than by his own strength[.]"

Plainly, then—one can never be too careful in one's choice of a profession. And it is better to be useless than useful if one's profession is to harm others. God grant us more unskilled arrow-makers, then. And God grant us more useless lawyers.