It's so ironic.
I both have far more respect for the role of governing authority, generally, and more appreciation for the limitations of particular figures of authority, legal, political, and organized authority, generally, and more of a sense of my own independent thought, choices, and free will, than I had before I began my thinking and writing and teaching work.
I respect individuals. I also respect their strengths and their limitations, with more understanding, today, how their limitations and the limitations of a culture, generally, make it more or less vulnerable to making serious and too often tragic mistakes in the ways that people treat one another and the ways they use government to do so.
Winston Churchill is right. Democracy is not at all a perfect system. Because it reflects the limitations of those who lead it, vote in it, and make up its culture (a fact of liberal democratic existence that liberal democratic people need to better account for in their thinking and behaving in their politics and their dealings with one another). Democracy is the least worst form of governance. What would make it better is a much more humble appreciation for its power and the limitations of those who advocate for it, vote for it, and wield it.
I no longer have any political heroes that I trust without serious appreciation for both their weaknesses and their limitations, and the single most important limitation of liberal democratic countries being the propensity of its people and political leaders to turn to power to solve problems, many of which it could not possible solve and many times power makes far worse for its use.
My respect for the role of authority in our lives has definitely improved over my adulthood. Someone has to make decisions around self-defense, defend us and establish and maintain security. Someone has to make sure that people who murder and rape and commit the most violent offenses are contained while they learn to take responsibility for their behavior and until they can be trusted to not hurt people in the future. Someone has to make the important decisions that affect our lives, especially those that leave us freedom and room to make them ourselves. Someone has to decide how freedoms should be preserved and justice done. Someone has to be responsible for churches and schools and universities and all of the places where we learn our most important values. Someone must do this work to make the strongest liberal democratic life possible available to all of us.
The irony is that while my attitude about these things has changed, my trust for authority figures has also waned. I am more skeptical of authority - any and all authority - than I was when I was younger. I see better its limitations and the limitations of individual authority figures. I am more aware of the self-righteous and polarizing tendencies of those who seek power, and the ways this undermines a more genuine, honest, broad-minded, empirical, and decent vision of the world, and how that undermines their capacity to make wiser judgments. I am more aware of the small-minded and futile tendency by so many to turn to authority to solve problems many of which it doesn't understand enough to solve. I am more aware of how arrogant those with authority and power can be, including myself, assuming that they can or should solve more problems than they actually can or should with their authority and power.
I am more aware of just how arrogant we all are, these days. I see better the limitations of myself and others to solve problems that they don't really have genuine solutions for because they haven't figured them out, as of yet.
And I have much, much more respect for those who engage in the rigorous and difficult task of trying to figure out solutions to our most serious problems, not just out of civic duty but out of a decent sense of self-interest that solutions to problems should be real and sustainable and not just popular in the moment.
That is what I respect about serious thought most. I respect that it looks beyond the immediate moment and looks to a time when popular notions of expended themselves because they have failed, sufficiently, to persuade those who use them to look to better solutions.
It is tragic that so many of the failures in humanity's history involve death, imprisonment, unnecessary pain and poor treatment, and inequitable and unfair treatment of so many people. It is more tragic that we so often fail or wait so long to finally take responsibility for this treatment of people.
But the hope of liberal democratic societies, especially, and of humanity, generally, is that it eventually gets these things figured out. Because we have failed substantially enough to lead us to reevaluate our path and reconsider our direction and our choices.
Sadly, as an empirical fact, we have always have freedom. Free will, after all, is the basis for moral responsibility and the foundation for every faith, religion, and moral, legal, and political institution that we have originated. The tragic part of that fact is that we have, so often, abused that freedom and used our own freedom to limit that of others, often to validate some form or another of some self-righteous notion of how the world should be, even if the merits of the debate warrant more appreciation for our freer and responsible thought to resolve many issues. It does not, always, which is what makes us so skeptical that it might. And yet there is no substitute for that thought, no matter how much we might look elsewhere. It really doesn't matter how much we try to substitute force for thought. It just could never ever replace it, because force cannot think through a solution like thought can.
And I am much more skeptical for the ability of authority and authority figures to solve more problems than they are actually capable of solving, anymore. And I am quite convinced that many uses of force make those problems far worse, ironically and tragically.
And yet we invest our confidence in it, here at the beginning of the 21st century, even as it fails us. Because facing that failure leaves us vulnerable to a notion that I suppose scares us or that we just can't bring ourselves to believe: that our existences are either won or lost by our thoughts, our consciences, our commitments, our efforts, our courage, our love and respect for one another, and our capacity to use those to solve our problems more effectively. Nothing else will save us. And anything else that might doom us is subject to solution only insofar as our thoughts and consciences and commitments and efforts and courage and love and respect and capacity for problem solving bring those solutions into our lives.
Maybe that scares us. Maybe we just haven't thought about it long enough to realize this. Maybe we've just created our own trap by making one another too nervous or scared to have discussions that might think our way out of our present problems that more fear and threats and sanctions will certainly not solve. Maybe we just foolishly believe that all that force and aggression really always has made the difference. Maybe, as Mike Judge lampoons, we are just too stupid or cowardly to face our limitations in this and most arenas.
I don't know, is the truth. Maybe it's all of these things. Maybe it's our failure to appreciate any of them enough. Maybe it's our pride that we don't need such wisdom, and that all we really need is a strong hand and a clear set of rules. It's the same pride that has animated humanity far longer than historians have kept track of that history.
And this question, this question of the role of authority, has problably plagued us more than any other question that we faced in that long, long history.
We do seem to get it more wrong than right most of that time. And yet we persisently pride ourselves as getting it more right than we ever really have. That is true both in terms of governance of one another and in terms of each person governing himself or herself. We peristently rationalize and romanticize that we have governed ourselves and one another far more effectively and decently and respectfully and without harm than we really have.
And the reason why I respect historians and social and political scientists and other students of human history and nature is that they are, generally, the most honest assessors of humanity's more honest and genuine history and nature.
There isn't a consensus among historians and social and political scientists that authority should be approached with skepticism for no reason. It is the clear and abiding consensus because authority so frequently fails us. And we so frequently fail our leaders and our values, including respect for the law and the purposes of the law and our own aspirations with the law and with one another that it is the saddest irony of history that we perpetually come back to an affirmation of the infallibility of our use of authority that ultimately undermines respect for its use.
It's the strangest and most paradoxical fact of human history and existence, I think. And, yet, it is so. Political polarization and efforts at forced religious, political, and legal conversion inevitably are the lightning storm that remove the ground for authority, end in failure and the slow unravelling and entropy of authority's credibility and result in a rethinking of our cultural values. Our ground is found in our solid relationships between people and our better ideas for how our most important problems can be resolved. And power can sometimes serve those efforts. But its use beyond its limitations cannot sustain our confidence because it so clearly fails to resolve the problems we want it to resolve. Many people profess a belief in God or religion to provide divine intervention into their problems. But they generally look for God or religion to be solutions they often cannot be, as a matter of empirical fact, rather than questioning whether they are right or wrong about that fact. Power works similarly. Wealth also works similarly. And yet, no matter how much these paths fail to offer solutions that people want, they still seek them, because the central mistake or distortion continues to fail them. Greed does not sustain wealth, and yet people are tempted by it because they become convinced that it does or that it might. And, similarly, power does not sustain the values of a culture, and yet people give into that temptation regularly as a fuction of their fears rather than as a function of their more genuine faith.
My respect and skepticism for authority, I suppose, must derive from a respect for the institutions and the individuals that are responsible for it despite my skepticism for this flaw and so many mistakes of judgment that individuals, institutions, and even cultures are subject to in the course of humany history. The idea that freedom and liberal values can be replaced by force as the guiding principle that animates human socieities and liberal democratic societies, in particular, is a very sad and serious mistake indeed, and our most serious failure of conscience, during this political moment and over the entire course of human history. It is the mistake by humanity that has needlessly cost the most lives, oppressed the most people and repressed the most freedoms, created the most cynical realities of human life, and is responsible for the most unnecessary tragedy that the world has ever witnessed.
It's captivation of our hearts and minds wanes. Slowly. Too slowly. And yet it wanes.
Because there is no replacement for more genuine and committed thought to solving problems. Everything else is fiction and fantasy.
And no culture could survive long whose penchant for fiction and fantasy ignored the patent reality that our most important human endeavors and institutions are founded and sustained ultimately on thought, and with aggression and force subject to that thought and the wisest engagement of that thought.
How much wiser and less tragic would we be if so many more of us took such thought more seriously. We would all be wiser and better served by that world, even if we would not all be equal on every matter of merit, but where we could all benefit from the varied and diverse merits of one another. We would all benefit where a world of merit rather than a world of politics and power held sway in the world. And God knows we would have much better quality lives as a consequence.
That is the life I seek. I can only hope that I can find it or see the way toward creating it.
Love,
Ben
