Political Consciousness and Meritocracy Revisited

A little while ago, I wrote two posts on political consciousness and meritocracy, which I would like to revisit in light of a passage I came across just the other day. In the post on political consciousness, I observed that many today consider the attainment of political consciousness as necessary for an individual's maturation. Moreover, these same people often define attainment of political consciousness as the rejection of authority. Rejection of authority, then, becomes an essential condition of growing up. In the second post, I reproduced a quotation from Tocqueville, where he points out that meritocracy makes individuals free to pursue their own happiness without regard for others. While this phenomenon is usually praised for enhancing individual freedom, it does have the negative effect of alienating many individuals from society; in many cases, according to Tocqueville, this alienation ends in suicide or insanity.

It should not surprise anybody, then, that these two ideals of political consciousness and meritocracy together have devastated the family. It also should come as no surprise that all these individuals, once beyond their fathers' control, would devise new institutions to deal with their alienation. And without further ado, here is the passage:

Hierarchical, patriarchal, circumscribed families were being replaced [among Russian Jews and the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s] by egalitarian, fraternal, and open-ended ones. The rest of the world was to follow suit.

All modern societies produce "youth cultures" that mediate between the biological family, which is based on rigidly hierarchical role ascription within the kinship nomenclature, and the professional domain, which consists, at least in aspiration, of equal interchangeable citizens judged by universalistic meritocratic standards. The transition from son to citizen involves a much greater adjustment than the transition from son to father. Whereas in traditional societies one is socialized into the "real world" and proceeds to move, through a succession of rites of passage, from one ascriptive role to another, every modern individual is raised on values inimical to the ones that prevail outside. Whatever the rhetoric within the family and whatever the division of labor between husbands and wives, the parent-child relationship is always asymmetrical, with the meaning of each action determined according to the actor's status. Becoming a modern adult is always a revolution.

There are two common remedies for this predicament. One is nationalism, with the modern state posing as a family complete with founding fathers, patriotism, a motherland, brothers-in-arms, sons of the nation, daughters of the revolution, and so on. The other is membership in a variety of voluntary associations, of which youth groups are probably the most common and effective precisely because they combine the ascription, solidarity, and intense intimacy of the family with the choice, flexibility, and open-endedness of the marketplace.

(Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 142. Princeton University Press, 2004)

Slezkine's main idea here is that many of the most important institutions and ideals of the modern world are all tools invented to deal with the demise of the family. Once we (or at least, the truly modern among us) reject traditional authority, we are free--but we do not know how best to use this freedom. To make up for the loss of our family, the result of our self-emancipation, we form voluntary associations, especially youth groups, where those who have rejected parental authority can unite; or, we conceptualize the "nation" or "people" (in the 19th-century biological/racial sense) as our real family, with a greater claim to our loyalty than our own flesh-and-blood parents.

In the end Slezkine leaves us with a very perturbing question: How much of the modern world is really just our attempt to flee from authority?

Authority and Custom: No More Etymology

I must thank Aaron for a comment he made regarding my post on authority and power. He suggested that I think about the importance of the will and man’s fallen nature, in relation to authority. I will take him up on the offer, albeit indirectly, but decline his (hopefully only joking) invitation to do more etymology.

In my last post I emphasized that, in order to be effective, authority must be coupled with power. For example, when trying to figure out whether a given state has effective authority, it is useful to ask of its legal system: “Can this state enforce its judgments?” In other words, when a judge in this state declares by his legitimate authority that a man has committed a crime, it is not enough simply to make a declaration; he must have power to incarcerate the criminal. If the people recognize the state’s authority, the state will be able to use its power to prosecute and imprison criminals. Unfortunately, in our fallen state, such use of power by legitimate authorities will always be necessary at times.

However, authority must also speak to reason; indeed authority is even more effective when it speaks to reason. Authority must be able to convert its dictates into something more powerful than force. In an individual, that something is called sensibility, but in a group it is called custom. What prompted this idea was the following aphorism:

Man today oscillates between the sterile rigidity of law and the vulgar disorder of instinct. He is ignorant of discipline, courtesy, and good taste.

Gómez Dávila depicts two extreme situations in the first sentence. In the first situation there is authority which only has power over the will. The law has the power to punish, and so people fear the law, but they do not love it. Here fear is not the beginning of wisdom. The second situation is when there is not authority at all. Everybody does as he pleases, and nobody can stop him.

In the second sentence, though, Gómez Dávila calls for a golden mean, where authority appeals to the reason of each individual and induces him to discipline himself, to act courteously to others, and to restrain his passions. When individuals have internalized authority, it becomes a sensibility. Men begin to think in accordance with authority, not out of fear but because they have begun to understand it. More importantly, it has become a habit. When this sensibility spreads to many individuals, it becomes a general custom. Finally, we should keep in mind that authority, in the form of custom, is supposed to lead to human flourishing. It should not be sterile or rigid. On the contrary, it should lead to discipline, courtesy, and good taste. These virtues are the marks of true freedom and are the foundation of achievement. Finally, the need for the authority to wield overbearing power disappears.

In case you are inclined to dismiss this as some kind of utopian day-dream, or a nostalgic longing for the “good old days,” I would respond that discipline, courtesy, and good taste are actually very practical. For example, they are essential to the smooth functioning of our legal system. We Americans are known for our litigiousness. At first glance this seems to be a good thing—we acknowledge the authority of the courts and don't engage in private blood feuds. However, our love of lawsuits entails problems of its own. To begin with, the sheer number of lawsuits and appeals slows down the administration of justice. There are a limited number of judges with a limited number of hours in a day available to deal with all these disputes. When too many citizens sue, this means that cases take longer to be resolved, that judges can’t devote as much time to the significant and difficult cases, etc. That explains why all trial judges wish that parties and lawyers displayed much more discipline and courtesy (what they usually call “common sense”) and settle on terms acceptable to all, rather than force judges to impose terms which will probably end up pleasing no one.

This suggests a second point: The law is often a very Procrustean tool. It often pits two goods against each other, and forces one party to choose one. Or, it imposes what seems like an unreasonable solution to all. (For an example of just such a lose-lose situation, see this article.) At the end of a lawsuit, one party is almost always going to be displeased; but if parties refuse to settle, usually both parties end up displeased.

The lesson to be learned, then, is that authority with only power over the will is almost as much of a curse as the complete absence of authority. Authority must be internalized, first in the form of reasoned acceptance, and then in the form of individual sensibility and general custom.

Authority & Power: A Little More Etymology

When I wrote a week ago about natural authority, I left out an important aspect of the discussion: power.

Again, I will examine this question from an etymological perspective, and from the perspective of exousia in Rom. 13:1. If you look up exousia in a dictionary, you will find several possible definitions besides "authority," one of which will be “power.” Another way of seeing this is to think of the “authorities” in question as “the powers that be.” The two expressions seem to be functionally equivalent, at least in many circumstances.

If you look up the Neo-Vulgate translation of Rom. 13:1, you find the Latin word potestas, which means “power.” For instance, the power possessed by the tribunes of the people in republican Rome was called potestas tribunicia.

If you look up the German translation of the same passage, you will find St. Paul admonishing the Romans to submit to the state's Gewalt, or “the state’s power.” Gewalt, however, is much more than mere power; it implies violence. For instance, a derivate of this word, vergewaltigen, means “to rape.”

These three possible translations of exousia show that there is considerable overlap between the concepts of authority and power. On the one hand, authority and power are not identical. After all, might does not make right. On the other hand, authority and power cannot be completely separated. Indeed, authority without power is a joke.

Is there any way to understand power and authority? The neatest way of thinking about this is, I believe, as follows. Authority can be defined as the right to use force, and power can be defined as the ability to use force. These two terms, however, are not mutually exclusive; instead, power needs authority, and vice versa. They each complete the other.

My discussion is, of course, completely inadequate for such a complicated topic, so I hope some of you will contribute your insights.

Natural Authority: A Short Exercise in Etymology

One of the hallmarks of modern political thought is the denial of natural authority. Just think of the social contract theory. According to John Locke, authority is not something natural, but is rather created by individuals who freely give up their sovereignty. For Aristotle, on the other hand, political communities are originally made up not of sovereign individuals but of family units, organized as households. The head of the household already has some kind of authority without having to enter into any supposed social contract with his children. Where, then, does his authority come from? A look at the very word “authority” in a couple languages shows that authority has always been regarded as something natural.

The English word authority comes from the Latin word auctoritas. A person’s auctoritas depends on the fact that one is, in some sense, an auctor. The word auctor entered English as the word “author”; in Latin, however, it is not restricted to a person who produces a written work. A better translation would be something like “originator.” It is in this sense that we call God the “author of life,” auctor vitae. God, then, is an authority because He is the author of life. If we extend by analogy the notion of God’s authority to human society, we can quickly see whence a paterfamilias derives his authority: a father has authority over his children because he has made his children.

Interestingly enough, even though German adopted the Latin word as Autorität, there does exist in German a more literal translation of auctoritas: Urheberrecht. Urheber corresponds to the Latin auctor, and Recht is a cognate of the English word “right.” This word, though, has become a purely technical term for “copyright.” Nevertheless, it still retains the idea that one who makes something unique retains a special right—authority—over it.

The Greek word for “authority” is also very interesting: exousia. This word is a compound of two words: ex + ousia, meaning “from nature” (ex natura). For Aristotle and the Greeks, then, an unnatural authority was by definition unthinkable. The word also has an interesting parallel usage to English. The plural form of this word means “authorities” such as civic officials, just as the English term does. For an example of this usage, see Rom. 13:1.

All this etymology should at least raise the inference that authority is not something artificially created by men when they enter into society by contract.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the importance of the analogy of being. Properly speaking, only God is authority, while any authority we have comes from Him. What we have is not absolute authority, but we call it authority by analogy. This philosophical doctrine, I think, helps explain why (besides Greek idiom) St. Paul speaks in Rom. 13:1 of God’s “authority” in the singular, but of human “authorities” in the plural. Only God’s authority is absolute and utterly unique, and thus necessarily singular. No single man, on the other hand, can possess absolute unfettered authority, and so his authority must coexist with other men’s authority.

Personal Authority (Part II)

Yesterday, I tried to show that even in our bureaucratic age, we still desire personal authority, whether we realize it or not. Today I want to add just one more observation in connection to a book I recently read.

In Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, the story revolves around the protagonist (K) and his attempt to navigate a village’s labyrinthine bureaucracy so that he can go to work there as a surveyor. The village officials rarely go into the village, usually staying in the castle above the village. Each higher official has hordes of secretaries, many of whom seem to work at cross-purposes to each other. Many of their decisions seem completely arbitrary; letters are written, then stored away for years, and only sent years later after the whole affair has already been cleared up, causing more confusion than there originally was. Interestingly too, these bureaucrats are at times referred to as “the count’s officials,” but nowhere is the count given a name. And most disturbingly, many officials seem to have faces that don’t remain the same. This is literally authority without a face. And yet, the people of the village really seem to love these bureaucrats.

Kafka’s novel is obviously a nightmare about a bureaucracy taking over society, and it might come across to a reader skeptical of my thesis as just a clumsy exaggeration of the bad experience we’ve all had waiting on hold for an hour just to speak with an insurance representative or to an IRS agent. There is some truth in this objection, but there is a fact that most people don’t know: Kafka was a lawyer for an insurance company. Kafka knew the system from the inside. He dealt mostly with workplace accidents and improving safety guidelines for workers. He must have known the hardships—physical and spiritual—faced by a worker who finds himself unable to work and thrown upon the mercy of a bureaucracy. This sympathy with the ordinary individual must be what led K, in The Castle, to exclaim when he was most frustrated by the bureaucracy: “I feel that my very existence is threatened!”

All this is to say: Try telling an injured worker that the delay in his medical treatment is the system’s fault, and he won’t believe you. He needs a person, an authority, to blame (or to praise for resolving the problem). As much as we try to deny it and work our way around it, we can’t change the fact that authority needs to be personal.

Personal Authority (Part I)

Last Friday one of my law school classes took a field trip to the federal Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago to hear oral arguments. The second case of the morning involved a woman who was suing her health insurance company for breach of contract. The key issue was whether the insurance company had actually authorized the surgery. This may sound like an easy factual question to resolve—just look for a letter or some other record—but what made it difficult was the fact that even though the insurance policy seemed to state that it did not cover surgeries related to the woman’s condition, this policy was nearly impossible to decipher, a customer representative gave oral authorization for the surgery in question, and the insurance company had approved a surgery relating to the same condition just a year earlier.

The insurance company’s lawyer tried to make the case that this was an ordinary insurance policy; she even said to the three judges that this 50-page contract was probably just like their health insurance policy. This move backfired, however. All three judges looked rather uncomfortable at this comparison, and one of the judges even asked: “But, counsel, what about the ordinary person reading this contract? Would he know that this procedure wasn’t covered?” From then on, the judges’ questions seemed to indicate that they wanted to rule in the woman’s favor.

This made me wonder about two things. First, these three federal appellate judges appeared not to have read their own health insurance policies. They seemed uneasy—if I may extrapolate a bit from their reactions—with the realization that some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by contracts and regulations which even the finest legal minds in the nation have a hard time understanding. Health insurance, taxes, Social Security, probate, etc., these are all areas of law whose details are nearly incomprehensible to a non-specialist.

Second, lurking behind all this was the question whether a mere customer service representative can speak for the insurance company and whether a patient should rely on that representative’s word. This is a completely natural question for a vast bureaucracy, such as an insurance company or a government agency. When an organization is made up of thousands of people, many of whom do little more than answer phones and look up answers to simple questions on their computers, it’s obvious that not everyone can speak with authority for the entire organization. But, who speaks with authority then?

These two considerations, I would submit, point to the conclusion that one of the main problems with modern bureaucracy lies in the anonymity of authority. Authority is nowhere to be seen. When we deal with authority, we naturally look for a person to exercise that authority. But that’s simply not how the world works today. Rather, today we try to compensate for this lack of personal authority by weaving an ever denser web of contractual and regulatory obligations to give the appearance of authority, but don’t really succeed.

This is not to say that we should breach all our contracts or disregard state and federal regulations. All this means is that in a world of impersonal bureaucracy, supported by impersonal law, we will remain deeply dissatisfied because of the lack of personal authority. Laws and contracts are not enough, and can often make us unhappy, but it’s nearly impossible to rebel against just a law. Rebels and revolutionaries understand this quite well. They don’t fight against abstractions. What did American colonists do to protest the Stamp Act? They went out and tar-and-feathered the first British official they could find. What did they do to protest the taxes on tea? They dumped crates of tea into Boston harbor. Even today, when members of one political party in Congress express their opposition to a particular bill, they denounce “Senator X’s bill” or “President Y’s proposal.” The ad hominem attack may be bad logic, but it’s indispensable to the way people think. Authority needs to be personal.

Part II tomorrow...