Questioning Authority

The '60's --- that is, November 22, 1963, to August 8, 1974 --- gave us many things. One of those things was the advent of what one wag referred to as "bumper sticker philosophy," the posting on automobile bumpers of pithy statements of (allegedly) deep meaning: "One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day" or "War is unhealthy for children and other living things" or "I"ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands," to cite a few of the more memorable.

One of the most common of these was the one that demanded, "Question Authority." And apparently it was not just a popular bumper sticker. I've seen it described as a fundamental tenet, a kind of rallying cry, for only a fairly large but very influential group of young people, most of them undergraduates at our most prestigious colleges and universities.

In context, given the high level of moral condemnation of the Vietnam War and, by extension, the moral condemnation of the government that was waging it; and the behavior of local and state governments in response to various activities of the civil rights movement; and the Watergate scandal that seemed to demonstrate that all previous skepticism about the federal government in particular and authority in general was not only justified but understated, such an attitude is understandable, maybe even inevitable.

There are dangers involved in giving in to that level of distrust but that's another topic for another day. What I want to poke at today is the elimination of the notion of authority from the ways that we understand, think about, and talk about all manner of personal and institutional relationships.

In the academic and intellectual conversations that I have in which the concepts of "power" and "authority" are pertinent, I have seen two epistemic and psychological phenomena come up over and over. The first is the conflation of the two terms. I know very smart and highly educated people who believe that the two terms are synonymous; that "power" and "authority" mean exactly the same thing.

The second is that even the possibility of authority is seen by some people as leading inevitably to patriarchal oppression of women and racial submission of blacks and stigmatizing of homosexuals and so on. To these people, even allowing the notion of authority is to put in danger all the social, cultural, and political gains we have made over the last century.

So, one at a time.

There are serious problems that arise from conflating "power" and "authority." "Power" resides in the ability of one person (or group) to force another person (or group) to do what the one with the power wants even if they don't want to. A crude example is when Ralph has the gun and I don't. Ralph can insist that I do something that I don't want to do because if I don't he will kill me. But any time an individual or an institution or a bureaucracy creates a situation in which someone has to do things he doesn't want to do or suffer, it is a function of power.

There is no question that power is necessary in the world. Power is, as I see it, morally neutral. The question of importance is how power is used, for good or ill.

"Authority," on the other hand, is something else entirely. Where I can take power if I get the gun away from Ralph, I can't take authority; it has to be granted to me because I have earned it. Authority is granted because of expertise, good character, or a particular kind of revered status --- the Pope or the Dalai Lama, for example.

We grant authority of various kinds to the doctors who diagnose and treat us; to the lawyers who represent us; to some teachers and professors; to some clergy; to tennis coaches; and so on. The important point is that we grant it and we can take it away. Authority is conferred upon those others who deserve it, or who have convinced us that they deserve it.

The notion of "authority" has always been at least a little tenuous in the United States. The concepts of royalty and aristocracy, based on heredity, never took root here and, as time passed, even the watered down versions of those concepts lost their influence in the way that people thought about themselves and their relationships to others. When Quakers refused to doff their hats when passing "the better sort" on the sidewalk it was a harbinger of a process that would move faster and get bigger and more influential.

Democracy, at least as it has been practiced here, always skates perilously close to egalitarianism and sometimes a crude egalitarianism (if that isn't redundant) is incapable of separating the notion of equal rights from the notion of deserved authority. It seems apparent to me that we are living in a moment where a kind of simplistic belief that "I'm just as good as anybody else" has moved over into something like "no one is any better than I am and so no one deserves to be treated as an authority."

It is probably true that "this, too, shall pass." But in the meantime, having removed a properly understood "authority" from our understanding, our thinking, and our talking, we are left with only "power," and that is highly dangerous. If we frame everything in terms of power, we are driven into selfishness, self-protectiveness, and ultimately into what Hobbes called "a war of all against all."

The problem with the bumper sticker, or perhaps with the way that the bumper sticker was interpreted, was that it established a false dichotomy: either one "questioned" authority or one was a mindless (even cowardly) conformist.

"Authority" was something to be wary of, even to fear. Now we see this being played out in the attitude of children toward their parents; students toward their teachers and professors; patients toward their doctors; employees toward their employers; congregants toward their pastors.

There are those who don't see this as problematic; who see it, in fact, as a great step forward. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so. I think we need --- and I use the word advisedly --- to let go of this mass vanity and re-establish "authority."

Which gets us to the second phenomenon, the fear that allowing any version of "authority" into the conversation will lead inevitably into the submission of anyone who is not a rich white man. It seems obvious to me that this is a false dichotomy: That we can have either freedom for all or submission to authority. Democracy allows for, even requires, a variety of personal and institutional relationships, some of which can be egalitarian, some meritocratic, and some based on a voluntary and contingent submission to authority.

We live in a time where many people who we need to be worthy of being granted authority are not worthy of it, especially in the worlds of politics and organized religion. And it is also true that we --- all of us --- have turned into our idols a bunch of people who are most certainly not worthy of being granted authority.

There are two things necessary to get out of this. The first and more necessary is that we --- all of us --- demand the behavior and character that are worthy of being granted authority. The second and just as important is that people who take positions which by nature involve the possibility of authority manifest those behaviors and characteristics that deserve to be granted authority.

But the very first step is probably bringing back into the conversation, bringing back out of intellectual exile, the concept of authority.