From a reader:
Jonah,
Actually lawyers are secular priests. Looking at the way many ancient societies worked — specifically the Old Testament Jews even up to the time of Christ the Levitical priesthood had access to the law and were the experts in the law. As laws have become more accessible to everyday folks and we’ve move away from theocracy — despite the hysterical vapors of the Kossack crowd — to secular governments (in the West) lawyers have become (very) secular priests. We don’t have the cool uniforms and organizational structure of the RCC though. Actually — we’re more like the Pardoner from The Canterbury Tales.
Me: I think this a good point and I’m actually very sympathetic to this sort of analysis. For example, I think political correctness is a secular version of sumptuary laws and manners (that doesn’t mean I’m a fan of political correctness). But, while I like many individual lawyers, and there is a great deal I admire about legal culture, I deeply dislike the effort to make lawyers into priests. The law is immensely important, it is vital, it is necessary and all that jazz. But it ain’t a religion and its practitioners are not soothsayers, shamans nor priests. Once you make secular law a religion, you make the State into a God, or at least His emissary on Earth (if you’re interested in this point you simply must buy my book. If you’re not interested in this point, you still must buy my book, but I understand if you’ll be less happy about it).
It is, for example, absurd that we’ve decided the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of morality in this country and it is even more cockeyed that, having arrived at this absurd place, we continue to appoint lawyers to the court on the assumption they are the experts best qualified to adjudicate not merely the law (which is fine, of course) but right and wrong and all of the mysteries of metaphysics and meaning. Why lawyers? Why not priests, doctors and philosophers too — that is if they’re going to be deciding when life begins and when it can be ended?
I’m reminded of the horrible rewriting of the book The Firm for the movie. In the book, the protagonist was a man first and a lawyer second. His loyalties were properly aligned to his family, his friends and his personal integrity and what the most moral course of action was (within human limits). In the movie, Sindey Pollack changed the ending so that Tom Cruise could remain faithful to the Ultimate Good: The Law!
Sounds good, right? Except in order to do so, he needed to end up protecting the Mafia from criminal prosecution. And the audience was supposed to believe this was the highest moral ending possible: Protect the murderers so we may keep attorney-client privilege sacrosanct! Pathetic.