Bloody Lawyers

There are too many lawyers in politics. Blair was a lawyer, a barrister in fact. Roughly a third of the cabinet are lawyers, or trained as such, and this distorts the way in which the cabinet functions.

Allow me to explain. Our legal system, in which lawyers are trained, is an adversarial one. Two advocates take opposing sides of the argument and each one tries to make their case in support of their side to the best of their ability. This is a reasonable where the question to be answered has a yes/no answer, such as in the case of guilty V not guilty, so long as both possible arguments have advocates. That's something our legal system guarantees.

But the risk with this approach is that when you choose your position too soon, you can become blind to other, better, alternatives. We've seen it with government policy over and over again, they propose some action, and then look for arguments to support the policy. When they are presented with evidence that doesn't support the policy, rather than reevaluating the policy, and looking for ways to improve it they instead try to discredit the evidence or frequently, to discredit the source of that evidence. This makes it impossible for them to move beyond their own prejudice, to find better solutions to the problems the country faces.

The alternative is the scientific process. Scientists work by developing a hypothesis, and then develop experiments which will reveal evidence to either support or disprove the hypothesis. The important point here is that there isn't a strong attachment to the hypothesis. It's the evidence that matters. So if the evidence says the hypothesis is wrong, then it's time to get a new one.

To ignore evidence which opposes your preconcieved ideas is foolish, arrogant, lazy, and leads, inevitably, to poor decisions. And the way lawyers are trained to work makes them more vulnerable to this way of thinking. Since in a trial someone else has the responsibility of taking the other point of view, it's less of a problem, but in defining policy there may not be a balancing voice, and even if there were, these are not simple yes/no questions, so it's not possible to represent all possible views. Given that, the scientific process is more appropriate and safer than the adversarial one.

We need leaders who have the intellectual honesty to see when the evidence tells them their ideas need to be revised, not leaders who hide the evidence and ignore it. We need leaders who can look at all the evidence and listen to what it is telling them. At the moment too few have these skills, we have too many lawyers and not enough scientists (or other rational thinkers).

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