Exit Lawyers: The New Yorkers' take on the New-York Historical Society interview
April 20, 2009
In the Talk of the Town section of the forthcoming April 27 New Yorker, John Seabrook provides a detailed account of Philip Howard’s March 26 interview with Sir Harold Evans at the New-York Historical Society.
“After Evans set the tone by informing audience members of all the things they were not allowed to do during the next hour—‘no spitting, no talking, no cell phones, no frowning, no smiling (except when a joke is intended), no coughing, no touching’—Howard laid out the gist of his book’s argument. Americans face a crisis of authority, one brought on not by too few rules but by too many….We now live in a society where ‘teachers, doctors, camp counsellors, and government officials can’t do their jobs properly,’ because ‘any time someone gets angry they can sue.’ The result is chaos—frivolity in the courts and paralysis in government.
He talked about ‘lawyers who hang out at the intersection of tragedy and greed’ and mentioned the recent case of a Washington, D.C., judge who sued a dry cleaner for fifty-four million dollars for losing a pair of pants.
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The good news is that everything is about to change. Howard, quickly limning two centuries of American history, pointed out that large social changes occur every forty years, and we are due for one right now. Someone from the audience asked, referring to his plan to reform society, ‘How optimistic can we be?’ Howard smiled. ‘With your help,’ he replied, and the old building seemed to whisper, Yes, we can.”
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