The Question of Authority Pt 2

In the previous post, I described the overall phenomenon of authority as well as the specific context of academic or scholastic authority. In this post, I would like to examine political authority as well as ecclesial (Church) authority--specifically wherein the authority lies, who acknowledges this authority, what is good or bad about it and how we ought to be aware of these things.
The state has been the subject of much philosophical thought and writing. Philosophers from as far back as Plato to even contemporary political scientists and philosophers have taken up the task of understanding political authority. Most college students are familiar with, even if they haven't read, works such as The Republic, Leviathan, Treatise on Government, The Communist Manifesto, etc. Nearly every "Civics" student has read the Declaration of Independence as well as the US Constitution and probably the Magna Carter as well. It would be pointless and futile to attempt to discuss what all of these documents state, but let it suffice that they all treat of proper governance.
All history (written history) speaks of the existence of political powers. However, what is not made clear by much history is how or why political entities exist. What is much more clear, based on histories about wars or revolutions, is that governments are subject to overthrow or replacement if occasion arises and necessitates. Such occasions are usually a matter of unjust governing, though sometimes they are mere facts of more powerful entities entering into conflict with the powers that be.
Suffice it to say, then that no single government, as history has shown us, has been unimpeachable. The revolutions in France throughout the nineteenth century as well as the rise and fall of Communism in Russia in the twentieth are two recent examples of this fact. Our own nation seems stable and solid. It is, however, important to realize first that the United States is only 235 years old (give or take) and that if there is anything to be learned by assassinations, political protests and riots, it is that we do not live in a utopia. Granted, we are not undergoing political unrest like Egypt is currently, but that is no indication of the permanence of the relative peace we have.
It should be acknowledged, then, that political authority is arbitrary authority. The fact of it is that the people ruled by the powers that be accept it as authoritative. As previously mentioned, from time to time the people reject the forces in power. When this takes place on a large enough scale, revolution is the general course of action. Political authority, then, lies, in a certain way, in the complacency of the people.
However, in the United States, unlike many other nations, national identity is of chiefest importance. The notion of "being American" is one of the most widely touted virtues of our society. The War in Iraq was a highly controversial military campaign in which anti-partiotism was a chief charge used against those who would not support the invasion. Similarly, radio, TV, and billboard ads suggest that we ought to vote, join the military, pay our taxes and do other things that connect us with the state. We don't always realize it, but this subtle psychological manipulation shapes our attitudes and our dispositions. Being "un-American" is almost the worst thing a person can be in our society. The question we ought to ask, however, is why that is the case and what exactly it means to be such.
There is also a bit of intimidation in practice. Normally when we think of political intimidation we think of tyrannical "democracies" (such as the political structure in Iran) or fascist regimes.We should also think of any case of police or military brutality. Even without the brutality, is it not true that we often obey certain laws, not because we believe they're correct or just, but merely because we fear the consequences?
The effect of the state as authoritative can be seen most clearly in American culture. As I said above, patriotism is, perhaps, the highest virtue in American popular consciousness. Because of this, certain positions taken by the state or actions done by state agencies can be justified in the name of patriotism. The "Patriot Act," for example, is an instance in which Americans allowed their privacy and freedom to be restricted in exchange for a sense (note: no guarantee) of safety. Similarly, at US airports, passengers trade their sense of decency and privacy for an imagined peace of mind. True, there are some protests, but the voices are nearly muted.
Additionally, any skilled rhetorician can appeal to patriotism with the vigor of Cicero and use it to bolster his case, however unsound or irrational it may be. Take Glenn Beck, for example. This talk show host never attempts to provide real evidence or logical arguments for his positions, yet he constantly attacks "left-wing nutjobs" as being inherently anti-American (and often with the implication that some dramatic course of action ought to be taken against the targets of his rage).
Furthermore, we can lose sight of our other virtues or values if we attend to closely to our allegiance to political authorities. Take, for example, the Cold War, wherein the entire American psyche was focused on building more armaments than our supposed enemy, the Soviet Union. How many people questioned the fact that the US and the USSR were enemies? What was the ground for the dispute? Was an economic system really a viable excuse for threatening the debilitating and dehumanizing act of war? Finally, was there any viable excuse for building enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy the entire world? Few were the voices of protest during this time, and often they were blacklisted or otherwise shunned. The rational mind SHOULD have realized that the political structures in place were a liability to not just Americans or Soviets, but to the entire human population.
The risks, then, of adhering too closely to political authority can range from a mere wrong order of virtues to the much more pernicious risk of global annihilation. Often a voice of dissent is in order. John Locke, one of the foremost thinkers on political theory suggested that should a government become a liability to the people, the people are obligated to overthrow it. On the other hand, for the time being, many governments help bring peace and order to certain regions. It is important to remember, however, as I have stated in previous posts, that anarchy itself is not necessarily an evil, though chaos, some of which exists within, and sometimes because of, political structures, is.
Much of what has been said about political authority is applicable to ecclesial authority. There are a few points to be observed, however. While history AND political theory agree that political power is subject to the agreement of the people, as far as ecclesial authority is concerned, history suggests it requires agreement while theology, canon law and ecclesiastical documents suggest otherwise.
Ecclesial authorities claim that their authority is divinely imbued. Religious figures, such as popes, prophets, caliphs, archbishops, high priests and dalai lamas all claim a privileged authoritative role granted by supernatural powers. The extent to which people follow a specific religion or at least adhere to the religious leaders of their faith shows how much they believe their specific ecclesial authorities have this divine call.
Ideally, a person will follow a specific faith because, after rational inquiry and investigation he finds that the faith provides for him whatever it is he feels he needs in his life. With his conversion, a person will also grant his religious leaders a certain amount of authority. One does not become Catholic if he thinks the pope has no credibility.
However, more often than not, people are born into a specific faith, and, because of their upbringing and the amount of indoctrination they experience, the authority of religious leaders will be a result of psychological manipulation. The unquestioning Catholic, for example, who thinks every word from the pope's mouth is the word of God, is a product of this psychological manipulation. Fortunately, many religions are increasingly emphasizing informed dissent and genuine investigation of authoritative positions. Thus, Catholics are encouraged to follow their conscience, even when it stands against official Church teaching, and are also advised to question any magisterial teaching. Unfortunately, some religions, such as Mormons and Evangelicals, believe that the leaders of the faith must be correct 100% of the time and to doubt their veracity is a grave sin.
Which leads to the use of intimidation in authoritative positions for religious leaders. While religions don't often use actual violence, especially in the last couple centuries, to reinforce authority, they do often use soteriological (salvation-oriented) intimidation. Points of faith that must be taken as undeniable or infallible for one's salvation illustrate the use of intimidation as a tool of retaining authority. The very notion that the pope can be infallible is enough to keep many Catholics from questioning magisterial teachings. No one wants to go to Hell. Some religious leaders, however, use the threat of Hell to give weight to their teachings or positions.
Of course, there are also many who are simply complacent in their faith. I've met many Jews who maintain their Jewish faith as part of their ethnic identity as well as a marker of who they personally feel that they are. Many Irish Catholics stay Catholic because of this, and many Utah Mormons also fit in this category. Family history and tradition can be a major influence on one's trust in one authority over another.
Religious authorities increasingly seek to promote rational thought and dialogue over unquestioned obedience. The Catholic Church, since Vatican II has encouraged questioning. The Dalai Lama has consistently promoted rational and informed decision making. Protestant churches, since the time of Martin Luther, have always questioned the notion of being unquestionably correct. There is nothing wrong with informed obedience. As followers of whatever faith we follow, it is our duty, as rational beings, to try to understand the tenets of our faith.
On the other hand, blind obedience can have detrimental effects. One has only to think of David Koresh, Jim Jones or the Heaven's Gate Cult to realize how blind obedience to religious authorities can have deadly effects, even today. Because of instances like this, or Imams encouraging their faithful to perform "suicide bombings," many have turned a skeptical eye towards religious authority in general, some even labeling it as wholly destructive.
It is important to understand that if we believe that God COULD have given authority to a certain person or institution, we also ought to believe that God endowed us with a spirit of discernment and rationality. If something seems to be counter-intuitive, it ought to be questioned. If something flat out rejects the precepts of reason, it ought to be rejected. If something seems right, it might be. Just like a political authority there are times when we ought to support the authority and follow it, and times when we need to realize the error of choosing such a path.

The Question of Authority Pt 1

If there is anything that most non-Catholic Christians accuse Catholicism of wrongly being, it's excessively papal. The Magisterium is, for many Protestants and Orthodox, a stumbling block and a scandal. The fact that most Catholics believe that "infallibility" means the pope is never wrong and that everything that comes out of the Vatican is the word of God only helps make this problem worse. This raises, for non-Catholics, the question of authority. Many Catholics, myself included, even question the authority of a body of old, celibate, European clerics when it comes to life in the regular world.
It is my goal to look briefly at examples of authority and attempt to make sense of what really goes into them. This post will examine both the nature of authority and discuss intellectual authority. The next post will discuss political and ecclesial authority.
There are many factors that contribute to what exactly authority is. Different disciplines would even give different definitions and different explanations for it. The political scientist would provide an explanation of power dynamics. The social Darwinist could explain strength and how different attributes, such as brute force, intelligence and charisma affect authority. We will begin our discussion, however, with a look to political philosophers.
John Locke and Thomas Hobbes place the authority of governing structures in the human necessity for protection. For Locke, the authority of a political structure only lies in its ability to successfully benefit the populace. For Hobbes, the political structure necessarily requires authoritative figures to protect us from ourselves. For Friedrich Nietzsche, authority is much more complex and is attributable to several competing factors. One such factor is brute strength and violence, an attribute he gives to the now infamous "blond beast" of ancient Europe. Another such factor is cunning and intellectual manipulation, which he attributes to the "weaker" faiths of Judaism and Christianity.
It seems to me that Nietzsche is partially right, at least when it comes to the intellectual portion. People see some agency or person as an authority because they see that person as well-versed and competent in whatever it is he or she is doing. This attribution may be due to intimidation, psychological manipulation, rational evaluation, or simply complacency.
Intimidation, or fear-based authority, is respect for a person or organization due to what one is afraid that person or agency might do. For example, I might consider the king's authority to be legitimate because he killed the previous king, and if I refuse to cooperate, he could kill me as well. Similarly, a child might be afraid of her parents' anger. This is often the authority that binds more vicious people to the law, but can also be seen in examples of harsh teachers, whom students might not respect intellectually but might fear poor marks, or some preachers, who might preach Hell and damnation for disobedience.
Psychological manipulation, it seems to me, is the most common form of authoritative respect. Buzz words to look out for in this style of authority are "brainwashing," "propaganda," "peer-pressure" and "coercion." While intimidation relies on threats and fear, psychological manipulation does better and relies on people actually believing the authority of a subject based mostly on words. The proper way to garner this trust in authority is rhetoric. Generally, a person we trust, one whose authority we already have established, shares with us her trust in another person or institution. Because we respect the judgment and the authority of the person who tells us this, we, in turn, begin to trust the authority of whatever it is she is promoting. Commonly, one hears, "Becky swears by it," or "Joe says she's a great professor," however it is not strictly limited to choosing an authority. Once we have placed our trust in an authority, the rhetoric of that authority, as long as we have no reason to doubt it, will only strengthen its authoritative power over us. This, then, is the arena that people often find patriotism, ecclesiastic loyalty, partisanship, and brand loyalty. Often the authority is not a person, but a group, thus, it holds more sway by sheer numbers.
Rational Inquiry is the most basic form of trust in authority and occurs mostly on the level of persons. As I get to know a person and his or her ideals, I begin to question whether or not he is worth my confidence. As happens sometimes, this could be prevented by my trust in other authorities, perhaps because I belong to a certain religious of philosophical school and he belongs to another, or because our political views are influenced by different political camps. This, then, is the tragedy of the psychological manipulation mentioned above. If our cultured biases interfere with our ability to rationally judge the veracity of a supposed authority, then we have failed to truly understand what authority is. Notable examples of this are Conservatives who dismiss the authority of Ecologists or atheists who dismiss Christian Ethicists. A truly rationally curious approach would examine the technique and the motivation of the authority. A talk-show host who utilizes irrational accusations, baseless claims and appeals to the Ethos is most often less trustworthy than the biologist who utilizes the scientific method and produces results open to scrutiny and replication. The problem, however, of rational inquiry is that it requires a discerning spirit as well as a hard work.
Then there are instances where people are not swayed by appeals to the Pathos, Ethos or Logos. Due to laziness, confusion or apathy, some people attribute authority to those whom they think "probably just know better." This is often the case with people like the lapsed Catholic or the discontent American. He might not agree with the Church on many issues, but because he feels a certain loyalty to it, he will follow regardless, and likely not attempt to reconcile the cognitive dissonance he feels. Similarly, he might regard the decisions and politics of the government as foolish and futile, but going to the ballot box he'll choose the candidate that he thinks will be less likely to make a mess of things. This is the trust of the pessimist. He thinks nothing good will arise, but he sees no preferable alternative.
These four sources, it seems to me, are the main ways in which we decide which authorities to listen to. They appeal, as previously mentioned, to the Pathos, the Ethos and the Logos and often struggle against other competing voices.
In the intellectual world, our trust in authority often depends on matters of psychological manipulation and rational inquiry. We trust a person or an institution as an intellectual authority usually because we have studied its tenets and found them reasonable. We distrust others because we have found them lacking, or because we have been convinced by other authorities that they are wrong.
In academia, this is most often found in the subjects of philosophy and theology. Theologians often have differing theologies, many of which are incompatible with others, but the average theologian will attempt to achieve "balance" by not decrying those of differing mindsets. However, due to the breadth of theological query, which covers two thousand years of thought and most cultures of the world, there are many times when theories compete. Philosophers, on the other hand, are less likely to gingerly talk about their opponents. Since philosophers are usually not operating under a pre-determined set of doctrines or rules, they experience much more freedom to outwardly deny other philosophies and to freely label other philosophers as fools.
Disciplines where one does not usually see competing schools of thought tend to be the hard sciences, though physicists often argue about string theory versus quantum mechanics versus special relativity. The arts and humanities, such as literature, psychology and linguistics often have differing and opposing views, but, at the end of the day their differences aren't of the same sort of soteriological (saving) or eschatological (end of the world) significance as philosophers and theologians tend to think of their differences.
Often times, when a person decides one school of intellectual thought is right for her, she normally decides so on the basis of what she is used to, what seems most rational or simple to her, or what seems to validate her experience. The mystic is less likely to embrace a purely rationalistic theology than he is an ascetically oriented one, and the existentially curious reader will be more likely to read Sartre than Jane Austen.
Of course, as mentioned before, there is also a great deal of psychological manipulation that influences our decision in intellectual matters as well. Someone raised in a staunch, conservative Baptist household is probably not going to give much credence to the radical Catholic theology of Michael Baxter. On the other hand, a student raised to value empiricism and scientific methodology is more likely to respect Thomas Watson and Albert Einstein as intellectual authorities than he is to respect Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham.

Pathos (parvae animae I ex III)

Humans have always seen themselves as more than simply bodies. We often talk about our social, psychological, emotional, and physical needs. We separate our souls from our bodies. In the Classical period, depending on whom you asked, you would hear a different set-up for who we are. The Romans saw us as corpus (body), spiritus (life-essence), and anima (soul). The Greeks devided who we are as people even further: pathos (emotion, and base feelings), ethos (character and morality), and logos (intellect).
The Greek divisions are still obvious in our common dialectic. We speak of logic, a purely intellectual faculty. We speak of ethics, those things that tell us who we are as people. And we use words such as sympathy (feeling the same), pathetic (something emotional), and telepathy (distant feeling).
Today, I should like to investigate the idea of pathos more fully.
As previously mentioned, pathos would be what we would label today as emotion. Ancient rhetoricians, and even rhetoricians of today, often appealed to pathos in their speeches. Orators appealed to the people's emotions, striking into them fear of their opponents, pity for themselves and pride for what the speaker is referring to.
The great Cicero often appealed to the Pathos of his listeners, conjuring up such stirring anecdotes that his audience, often the senate or other politicians, would feel compelled out of emotional duty, to side with him. After reading countless speeches about how evil and menacing Cataline was, it was obvious why the Cataline conspiracy was such a big deal in Roman history.
Similarly today, we are appealed to pathetically by our entertainment we enjoy. We watch a movie where a character faces insurmountable odds and comes out on top and we feel elation. No person back in 1976 who saw Rocky could have watched the dramatic ending without feeling inspired. Movies like Rudy, Remember the Titans, and Radio all make us feel a certain sense of euphoria and determination to fulfill our own possibilities. Stories such as Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, or Oedipus Rex, on the other hand, make us feel miserable and give us a sense of dysphoria.
Elementary, Middle and High Schools, corporations and other social groups hire "motivational speakers" who speak strictly to our pathos, inspiring us by giving us feelings of our own possibilities.
Similarly, in Ministerial circles, the pathos is commonly evoked (as are the ethos and logos, but more on those later). A priest, pastor or minister often times preaches sob stories, or inspiring tales to get us to make a change in our behavior. Does this work? Of course it does. Who, when reading about the faithful servant who worked all his life and felt unaccomplished was revered by large masses post mortem, or the disadvantaged child whose faith was rewarded, can help but want to be a better person?
Is this wrong? Should our sermons and homilies draw us to change based on our easily swayed emotions? Personally, I should think that we ourselves can make ourselves more immune to this kind of rhetoric. However, I do acknowledge that if the world is already driven by pathetically inclining people to adhere to one's specific ideologies, then those who are in the congregation are just as viable subjects for pathetic rhetoric as any other people.
So, yes, we are often swayed to be better servants because of our emotions and feelings. However, this is not wrong. In fact, I would argue that the tool of pathetic rhetoric is aptly fitted to reach out to those who are highly inclined to pathological suggestion.