Why I Love Authority

I like Friedrich Engels, but I have to admit that the couple of pages he wrote in 1872, which have come down to us as "On Authority," is one of his worst, sloppiest, most slap-dash, ill-conceived writings.  There are indeed good arguments for authority, but Engels's essay is not one of them.  Even in its own time and context, the essay was not particularly useful or convincing, and it has little or no application outside that context.  It is especially useless to us in the 21st century.  Perhaps some day, I'll refute his essay point for point.  But this hardly seems like an urgent task, since anyone who reads it can see what a stupid argument it is.  Instead, I'll try to outline what seem like more effective and persuasive arguments for authority.

Engels's tactic was to emphasize the pragmatic necessity of authority - which he merely asserted, without evidence, and without much of an argument.  It may be true that authority is a practical convenience under certain circumstances, but even if there were some hard statistical data to prove in some kind of quantifiable way that accepting authority is the cautious, sensible route, and that it is dangerous to stir up trouble by questioning authority, this would hardly be a convincing argument to an anti-authoritarian, because their objection to authority is not ultimately rational but emotional.  

Ultimately, I think, the anti-authoritarian impulse is rooted in adherence to the ancient ethic of honor codes.  Some people - disproportionately men - consider it dishonorable and even disgusting to submit in any way to any authority.  It is a perverse fact of human behavior that, even in such a social species, for many people, social organization of any kind feels gross or uncomfortable.  I consider this to be one of the dysfunctions of the disgust response in the brain, which are being studied by neuroscientists quite extensively right now.  That would seem to put the anti-authoritarian response somewhere in the vicinity of the category of a phobia, like the pathological fear of insects.  But if it is a phobia, it is a very unusual phobia, for rather than being an individual, idiosyncratic quirk, it has a very strong social dimension.  There's a kind of chain reaction involved: when one person flouts authority, other people will feel a social pressure to flout authority as well, to show that they aren't afraid of authority, and thus to demonstrate that they, too, are strong and worthy of honor.  Thus contempt for authority spreads through the population, and eventually most people succumb to conformity and at least superficially signal their resistance to authority, at least as a fashion statement - you know, Che t-shirts and the like.  There's even a kind of ramping up - when a larger group grows contemptuous of authority, some individuals, seeking greater honor, will distinguish themselves from the group by being even more contemptuous of authority, in increasingly intense and elaborate ways, portraying authorities in increasingly cartoonish stereotypes and concocting imaginative conspiracy theories about the authorities, which they may or may not actually believe, but which they feel a need to broadcast, as it seems to say something significant about their own identity.

To see what I mean, take the recent example of Anthony Fauci during the Covid-19 pandemic.  For many people in the United States, and across the world, obedience to his medical authority, in the form of wearing a mask, became perceived as weak or effeminate.  People were literally willing to die for the sake of elevating their own identity as someone who would proudly disobey a person who was increasingly perceived as a cartoon villain with an arcane and convoluted agenda.  I remember reading a meme that claimed that Fauci was trying to turn America Muslim by getting people used to wearing what the author considered to be the equivalent of burqas.

How can we overcome the prejudice against authority?  Rather than trying to prove the pragmatic necessity of authority using facts and figures, I think it's more effective to argue on an emotional level - to argue that a world with authority is more adventuresome and interesting than a world without authority.

Far better than Engels' weak and silly essay is the development of the concept of authority in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan - developed throughout the book, but especially in chapter 16, "Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated."  Hobbes highlights the obvious etymological connection between the word "authority" and the word "author".  A world in which authors exist is a richer, more creative, more compelling world.  The desire to rid the world of authors is the desire for numbness, for lack of stimulation.  In Hobbes's analysis, there are "actors" and there are "authors," but an actor can also be an author.  An actor is a person who performs an action, and an author is one who authorizes that action.  Interestingly, this puts the author/authority in something almost like a passive role.  It is the actor that acts.  The actor may act with or without being authorized by the author.  An example would be a child who has a legal guardian, or a person who hires a lawyer: the actor, the person who acts, is the guardian or the lawyer, and they act on the authority of the person they represent.  The passage is written beautifully, and is rich with literary allusion, to the Bible, to fiction, to the science of his time, with a great deal of wordplay whimsically careening up and down all of these connections, and of course it "goes meta," because Hobbes himself is one of the authors he is describing, which gives it a self-referential Gödelian twist.  We, as readers, are doing the action of reading, and interpreting; the author, Hobbes, merely haunts this act.  The reference to actors brings up the analogy of all the world to a play - in which we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.  The art of the actor is to interpret the work of the author as creatively as possible.  

It is possible, of course, to play without an author, so that the entire play is spontaneously improvised.  But why would we create a blanket prohibition against the existence of any author, or the capacity of any person to be an author (we call this capacity "authority")?  We don't have to choose between a world in which spontaneous play is possible and a world in which being an author is possible.  Why not both?  

Acting doesn't come very easily to me.  But I can speak with greater authority about the world of music, because that's much more familiar and comfortable to me.  I love playing music.  Now, I love playing spontaneously improvised music.  I've done this a lot, in many different groups, and it is one of my favorite things to do.  I also love it as an audience member.  There is something thrilling about a live performance of purely improvised music that can be missing from some performances of compositions. 

Having said that, do I think all composers should be banned?  Do I think they should be hounded to the ends of the Earth and wiped out of existence?  No!  Composition can be a beautiful experience in its own right, one that I would not steal from anyone or prevent anyone from experiencing.  Indeed, I have seen some incredible performers that can faithfully interpret a composition with all of the inventiveness and spontaneity and creative energy of an improvised work.  In fact, it is an open secret in the world of music that sometimes pure "jamming" can be just as stultifying to creativity as the most rigidly disciplining bandleader.  People who "jam" together (I know this from experience) can sometimes get stuck in routines and patterns of playing.  I would even go further: sometimes it is precisely the introduction of a work of composition that can break people out of their easy, complacent, conformist patterns of behavior into which they get stuck.

If we are free to explore, gradually we come to realize that even more exciting than freedom from all plans is... the freedom to plan, and to carry out those plans.  This is a freedom that has a greater dimensionality than forcing ourselves to be always absolutely spontaneous.

In part, I love authority because I consider it a challenge.  And I love that which challenges me, like a puzzle, or a challenging work of modern or contemporary art.  This is my aesthetic: I love everything that is challenging, and despise that which does not challenge.  And the more challenging it is, the more I love it.  Something that is challenging is startling, refreshing, brisk, bracing.  When I see something (a TV show, for instance) that fails to challenge my preconceptions, I lose interest.  If it is not challenging, then it is conformist, boring, weak.  A sense of authority can be challenging in interesting ways (though it is not always).  It can make a work of art, or a work of any kind, strong, effective, powerful, moving, affecting.  A sense of authority is a cold shower, a breath of fresh air.  It is awakening.

If you don't enjoy that which is challenging, that's fine, but you're missing out.  Do you want everything to be on the same plane, with no hills or valleys, just an endless flatness forever?  Then what you are saying is that you want everyone to be exactly like you.

Authority, in the final analysis, is another word for alterity.  One's relationship to authority is totally bound up with one's theory of Other Minds - one's emotional relationship to the outside world, and one's willingness to be vulnerable and receptive to it and curious about it and committed to it.  Authority is the fierce mask of the Other.  The challenge is not to be shaken by this mask, not to be driven by an automatic reflexive shrinking away from it, but to stand in serene and confident joy before it.

The person who is against all authority is a person who says that they want to play, but they don't want to play a game.  Or that they want to play a game, but that they don't want the game to have any rules.  Very well.  That's fine, and that can be fun, for a while.  Similarly, there can be poetry that breaks all of the traditional rules of verse.  I don't quite agree with those who say, "If art is everything, then it is nothing."  But I would say, if art is everything, then that includes all the old rules.  If you want to try writing a poem according to an old form, that can be quite stimulating and fun it its own right, and it may break you out of some habits of thought that you have grown accustomed to, perhaps without realizing it.  Try it some time.  You might learn something.

In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote his famous essay on the "Death of the Author" - perhaps the most anti-authoritarian essay ever written.  Barthes was obviously riffing on Nietzsche's writings about the death of God.  But... three things: first, Nietzsche would not agree with Barthes.  As Nietzsche writes in "The Gay Science," "Anyone who 'explains' an author's passage 'more profoundly' than it was meant has not explained the author but obscured him." Second, upon philosophical maturity, Nietzsche moved beyond his childish anti-God rhetoric.  He relates in The Genealogy of Morals that:

With a characteristic scepticism to which I confess only reluctantly – it relates to morality and to all that hitherto on earth has been celebrated as morality – a scepticism which sprang up in my life so early, so unbidden, so unstoppably, and which was in such conflict with my surroundings, age, precedents and lineage that I would almost be justified in calling it my ‘a priori’, – eventually my curiosity and suspicion were bound to fix on the question of what origin our terms good and evil actually have. Indeed, as a thirteen-year-old boy, I was preoccupied with the problem of the origin of evil: at an age when one’s heart was ‘half-filled with childish games, half-filled with God’, I dedicated my first literary childish game, my first philosophical essay, to this problem – and as regards my ‘solution’ to the problem at that time, I quite properly gave God credit for it and made him the father of evil. Did my ‘a priori’ want this of me? That new, immoral, or at least immoralistic ‘a priori’: and the oh-so-anti-Kantian, so enigmatic ‘categorical imperative’ which spoke from it and to which I have, in the meantime, increasingly lent an ear, and not just an ear? . . . Fortunately I learnt, in time, to separate theological from moral prejudice and I no longer searched for the origin of evil beyond the world. Some training in history and philology, together with my innate fastidiousness with regard to all psychological problems, soon transformed my problem into another: under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? Have they up to now obstructed or promoted human flourishing?

Third, the death of the author is very different from the death of God, in terms of its psychological motivation.  Nietzsche's "madman" clearly mourned the death of God, repented of killing Him, and feared for the godless future.  Barthes's attitude toward the death of the author is much more flippant - indeed, it's clear that he desires the death of the author.  More precisely, we could say that Barthes wishes for the death of the author.  And it's obvious why - because of Barthes's ressentiment toward the author, his anxiety of influence.  Barthes claims that the death of the author is necessary for the life of the reader to arise.  Now the reader will be empowered to read every text however he chooses, unconstrained and unconcerned with the intention of the author.  But what would be the result of such a reading?  It would mean that in every text, the reader only sees... himself, and his own thoughts, reflected back at him.  The entire history of literature would now be a billion xerographic copies of his own face.  What a boring world!  What a flat world!  What a lonely world!  A world without any other mind....

When I read a text, I don't want to read my own boring thoughts into the text - I want to discover a mind other than my own.  I love the author because I love the other.  When I sit down with my cello and I try to learn a piece written by Bach, I am trying to learn another mind.  I am learning the mind of Bach.  I consider this a form of time travel.  Better yet - it is like time travel, and like telepathy, but different from and better than both of them, because it is more creative.  In some sense, I am creating the mind of Bach.  I am painting a portrait of him, but it is my portrait, and everyone's portrait of him will be a little different.

Barthes's death of the author is the opposite of Nietzsche's idea, because Barthes was trying to eliminate everything that threatened him from his own consciousness (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil), whereas the essence of Nietzsche's project was universal affirmation.  When I say that I love authority, it should be understood that I mean all of authority, the whole thing - both sides of it.  I love people who have and exercise authority, but also I love those upon whom authority is exercised, even more. (It is the slave, not the master, that ascends, station by station, to absolute spirit.)

Then again, of course, when I say that I love authority, I don't mean that I love all authority equally.  To say that you love all authority equally is to say that you don't love authority.  Not all authority is equal.  Assuming equality is a naive, sentimental illusion.  Some forms of authority are simply better than others, and some people are better than others at exercising such authority.  Some authority is stupid, and worthless.  In a certain sense, such authorities are - not really authorities.  When I say, for instance, that so-and-so is an authority on Shakespeare, I don't mean that she is a stupid, worthless authority on Shakespeare.

How can you recognize a genuine authority?  This is a difficult question, perhaps an endless one - this recognition (Anerkennung) is, for instance, one of the central themes in the writings of Hegel.  I will not solve it here.  (To assert that you can recognize true authority implies that you are an authority on authority... and we're off to the races.)

One of the things I love about authority is that there are so many kinds of authority.  For instance, I love authority that bases itself on math, because it has aligned itself with mysterious key to the universe.  One of my favorite forms of authority is scientific authority.  But everyone is an authority of their own meaning....