We Are All Tradesmen Now

I should start by saying that I am a professional, not a tradesman. I have no children of age to advice about career trajectory. All my observations are general.

That said, I have found myself more and more sympathetic to the call of mainstream conservative who recommend young men, even very intelligent young men, join a trade and stay away from the professions. For all my pretentiousness and pride, I wonder if I could go back fifteen years and advise myself if I wouldn't prefer to go into a trade, one that provided more freedom and autonomy, that better prepared me to start a family and pursue the things in life actually worth pursuing.

By professions I think of the four traditional professions: Law, medicine, the clergy, and teaching, though I’ll skip over the last two. Outside of small classical schools, education is a lost cause. And the state of the clergy depends entirely on the state of one's denomination, specifically how ready they are to allow women to preach. In the Catholic Church the clergy has improved tremendously over the past three decades, but an all-male celibate clergy is sui generis. If all the professions could be limited entirely or largely to men, there would be no problem. It is because of the admission of women that the professions have been ruined, for the native servility of women cannot coexist in the atmosphere of freedom and autonomy the professions are meant to foster.

First, it's important to understand what a professional was compared to a regular worker. A doctor was presumed to have a holistic understanding of health just as a lawyer was presumed to have a general understanding of the law, apart from any particular expertise or practice area. This general understanding is an intellectual one, one that comprehends the intrinsically difficult fields with which the professions deal. This general understanding the gestalt of the field, and differs from mere technical knowledge, and it must, for the purpose of professional training was to give the professional the ability to act. Technical information is still useful, and a doctor or lawyer well-versed in the latest studies and innovations of his profession is, ceteris paribus, better than one who isn't. But ultimately the practice of medicine comes down to action, not knowledge. There are simply too many theories to be known, too many data to be accounted for, and the good practitioner is the one who can make an actionable synthesis from them. A good doctor—the one who is best able to heal—is ultimately one who can synthesize this information and make it resolve in right action, i.e. treatment of the patient.

A good practitioner is someone who knows how to act. If you asked him to explain his actions on an intellectual level, he could give you a broad overview of his logic and methodology, but in the end he must rely on something that transcends the purely logical and theoretical. Call it a knack. Either you have this knack or you don’t. It is this knack which distinguishes the professional from the book-learner, and what makes professional work particularly rewarding; it is the cultivating of that skill that we have professional institutions and professional classes at all.

But that special quality of professional work, that melding of intellect and action, that has been eaten away by the current institutional regime. Professionals today are not really professionals as they would have understood themselves in the past. They have no really special autonomy as practitioners. They are simply another group to be brainwashed by general left-wing propaganda and to muddle about in the technocratic state. 

The modern doctor has transformed from individualized practitioner to a particularly slimy social engineer. I remember being surprised by the fact that doctors are not bound by the Hippocratic Oath. It is only appropriate for the kind of work modern doctors actually do. When your doctor recommends your day-old baby get a vaccine for a disease experienced only through intercourse with crackwhores, clearly he is not adhering to non nocere. Their regulation is “standards of care,” which are the creation of tort lawyers and insurance companies, not the primary question of medical practice, which is care itself. Applying the scientific and logical aspects of medicine to a particular patient is what makes one a real practitioner and professional, not simply imposing baseline standards. The one is the true act of a professional, the other is just social engineering and pharmaceutical profiteering. 

This is not to go too hard on doctors. In the real of law, the process of legal reasoning, of applying general principles to concrete situations, has been weakened if not totally eradicated. The LSAT can eliminate logical reasoning because modern lawyers are taught to regurgitate the statements of authority; the number of lawyers who can derive principles from them, or see the necessity of logical coherence in those principles, is vanishingly small. Basic legal reasoning is basically dead. It is because of this that new fundamentals of equity and racial justice have consumed the profession, however intrinsically incoherent they may be. When you encounter, say, a group of people trespassing on Capitol grounds as part of a peaceful protest, a good judge, in normal times, would weigh the democratic right to make grievances to the government against the minor infractions committed. But when one's foundation is "racial justice," the act of white men trespassing in the halls of government takes on a new significance beyond peaceful protest or misdemeanor trespass. 

Many rightists think that their adversaries are being Machiavellian in locking up their opponents, and maybe they are in part. But the true difference is in the fundamentals. It isn't that the lawyers and judges in these cases are setting aside their scruples to keep innocent men in confinement. If this were the case, stocking the bar with right-wingers might conceivably make a difference. No, these lawyers and judges are operating on a very principled basis, it's only that the principles are corrupt, and cannot logically exist next to the principles that until yesterday formed the basis of our law. And where those corrupt principles dominate, there is not much one can do against them. If you are a "conservative" lawyer or doctor, you can do good by fits and starts. But you cannot change the fact that the institutional structure you're working in is corrupt at its base. 

An example I can't avoid: In Republican Georgia, the right to citizen's arrest was eradicated following the Arbery case. The basis for citizen's arrest lay with the fact that the law is universal. The government may give this universal law concrete application, but it does not create the law out of whole cloth. This is a weak statement of natural law, such that all Christian jurists believed, such that Blackstone noted and all lawyers implicitly understood into the Twentieth Century. Even men like Holmes, in recognizing the common law's defects and absurdities, could not argue against the premise that justice predates the state. And yet with the eradication of citizen's arrest, we arrive at the conclusion that only the state can make and give the law effect. This is a complete upending of the basic premises of our law and all real republican government. But who has even noticed? 

This is true in the criminal law. It is true in any realm of law you could find. Any corporate lawyer running into civil rights complaints is similarly bound to institutional irrationality. He can subtly tilt things away from benefiting diversity programs and affirmative action hires, but he cannot change the system. I repeat: If you're a right-winger within these systems, you can make marginal, almost accidental improvements. But any attempt to return to solid, logically-coherent principles will ultimately and necessarily fail. You might sometimes find an attorney versed in the old bases of the profession, but where logical incoherence is the rule, not the exception, there is not necessarily much that can be done. Make a sound, thoroughly reasoned argument and you'll find it means nothing when all around you are functionally illiterate with regards to the basic terms of the profession.  No matter how sound the justification, it will fall on deaf ears. 

We need to get "our guys" in the legal profession—this you hear from everyone claiming that the right's abjuration of the professions would make things catastrophically worse. These people don't truly grok how leftist politics work. The left does not operate by merely filling spots with cronies and allied party hacks. John Marshall, Roger Taney, and Samuel Chase were all party hacks, to name an illustrious few, but no one thinks of their appointments as besmirching the greatness of the Supreme Court. No one can accuse these men of being absolutely incompetent to the tasks put before them. But affirmative action hires are chosen specifically to be incompetent. This was the purpose of the Civil Rights Act: To destroy the unique autonomy of any institution and meld its standards with those determined by regulatory fiat. The purpose was not only to fill posts, but to destroy the autonomy of the institutions themselves. 

If you want to get into the professions for their own sake, beware. For if you actually care for the work, for the fraternity you are joining that stretches back to the beginning of human civilization, you must be prepared to have your heart broken. The stereotypical country lawyer or doctor of 1900 had better understanding of the foundations of their fields than the highest practitioners in 2023. Maybe, for the time being, you can still make ample money in the professions (until white men are completely driven out of them). But any effect you have on the profession as a whole will be extremely marginal. The good work you do will be done by virtue of "cheating" the system as it currently stands. In any case, you can't take back the honor of the system you've entered. 

This is not to say the trades are immune from the effects of the Revolution either. You still have to deal with diversity codes, the administrative state, and all other aspects of our bureaucratic hell. But you can at least see the benefits of your work. You possess more freedom. You're still able to take individual pride in your work, to develop your own standards and codes and live by them. The virtues and benefits of this retreat may be just as effective as the enigmas of power and respectability to be gained in dubious battle.

Everyone who says, in general, that we need more of "our guys" in the professions speaks generally. They cannot point to specific instances of our guys prevailing against the general decline, because there are none. If you can't get your trespassing client out of solitary confinement, you've failed as a practitioner. Or if you can’t follow your conscientious judgment to not charge three innocent men without facing prosecution yourself, you’ve failed as a professional. Or in the field of medicine: If you can't get cheap, effective and readily available treatment to a patient because of insurance regulations, you have failed as a professional. And given the institutional structure of the professions, you have no choice but undergo such failures, again and again and again. 

You can still make good money in the professions, and if that's what you want (after decades of mostly useless education and unfathomable debt), go ahead. But don’t delude yourself in thinking you can positively reform them. If the institutions are going to be changed, it is going to come from without, not from within. All your personal actions to reform them will result in nothing but censure and weariness of spirit. To put it another way: I'm sure there were nice, principled people in 1940s Russia who thought about joining the professions, perhaps ameliorating some of the most brutal aspects of the regime. But anyone thinking he could reform that regime is a person so stupid you wouldn't want him handling your affairs anyway.

Moreover, if you want to be intellectually and personally satisfied, you might very well be better off joining a trade. Being involved with the greater institution makes you dumber, not wiser. Mike Rowe's well-read plumber can likely get more satisfaction and gain more real knowledge in reading Blackstone or Story than legal practitioners can get within the field. This is the contradiction between reality and the present regime, that by being "well-educated" you make yourself dumber than if you had no education at all. And this is the heart of the crisis.