76. SOME PEOPLE SAY I'VE GOT A PROBLEM WITH AUTHORITY - So What?

Noam Chomsky once said, when discussing the absurdity of political parties: “where there is direct participation in self-management, in economic and social affairs, then factions, conflicts, differences of interest and ideas and opinion, which should be welcomed and cultivated, will be expressed at every one of these levels. Why they should fall into two, three or political parties, I don’t quite see. I think the complexity of human interest and life does not fall in that fashion.” I have always liked the bit where he says such “conflicts” and “differences of interest and ideas and opinion…should be welcomed and cultivated”. After all, although I differ with his conclusions greatly - and especially his politics, one of my philosophical heroes is Socrates, that “gadfly” of Athenian life, going around and asking difficult questions which exposed troubling issues with people’s existing and hitherto unquestioned beliefs. “The unexamined life is not worth living” and all that. Or, as my former punk band, Bullet of Diplomacy, put it: “resist the unexamined life”. Punk, of course, has a grand tradition of questioning authority and sticking two fingers (or one, depending on the continent) up at edicts from on high (see if you know the NOFX song I borrowed this post’s title from?). I have therefore never been one for accepting something simply because it has been decided by someone higher up the hierarchy. Hierarchies are anathema to an anarchist. At least hierarchies for hierarchies sake. Hierarchies based on status unearned or arbitrary. As anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously put it: “does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bookmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer.” But the caveat from an anarchist perspective is recognising that such authority is limited and specific. The bookmaker, the architect or the engineer is no better or higher in status than anyone else; their authority is limited to the domain of their particular expertise, and is an authority based on tangible evidence of that expertise. The bad bookmaker, architect or engineer would not be consulted for their thoughts on boots, buildings or construction. The anarchist, for example, would defer happily to a doctor regarding medical advice…so long as the doctor’s advice was sound and the authority demonstrably deserved. We are not talking here about treating experts with conspiratorial suspicion. The anarchist is not asking these people for a CV and proof of ability before deferring to their authority. What they are doing is acknowledging that the authority is given, not taken, and is done so as a form of social contract. The authority is given only on the assumption that it is deserved and if the advice/ instruction/ work of those the anarchist chooses to defer to proves to be poor or misguided then the authority can be taken away. I will take the medicine my doctor gives me - but if the medicine makes me sicker, or fails to make me well, I am well within my right to ask questions about their authority and seek another doctor.

This week I have grown weary of authorities and the notion of insubordination. Frequently I am someone told that I am “brave” (or “stupid”) for asking questions of those supposedly in charge of me. Be it my bosses at work, my country’s government, or any person who believes simply telling me to do something is sufficient for me to assent to doing it, I have never been afraid to state my “differences of interest and ideas and opinion“ if I feel the instructions are wrong-headed or misguided. In the spirit of true philosophical dialogue such gad-flying is not done from arrogance because I believe I am always right and wish to bend the decisions of those in charge to my own personal will (although the insecure in charge, not used to such interrogation and unable to engage with it usually, falsely, believe that to be the case). It is done with a desire for us to reach a mutual agreement. Often I will discover my concerns are ill-founded. Perhaps there is information I don’t have access to, or a viewpoint I haven’t considered. I have always been happy to back down and change my mind if sufficient reason is given to change it. The problem always comes from the approach - sadly endemic amongst teachers - of believing “do it because you’ve been told to do it” is sufficient justification for action. It is not. And you don’t have to be an anarchist or prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials to know that “I was just following orders” is not a legitimate stance for any moral agent to take. “Do it because you’ve been told to do it” can be shown to fail as an independent justification - even if the person who told you to do it supposedly has “authority” over you - by simply considering the case of the priest who uses the phrase to sexually assault a young parishioner in their charge, or the teacher who sets their class homework to go out and rob a bank. One must always be capable of scrutinising the demands of those in supposed authority over them precisely so that we don’t ever end up again with people unthinkingly shepherding a whole race of people into gas chambers simply because the people with the higher rank said that it was OK.

Once we accept that “do it because you’ve been told to do it” is insufficient to justify acting on the orders of a supposed authority we recognise that the burden of justification now lands on the person or persons in authority to give reasons for why they have told you to do it - and such reasoning will always be open to “differences of interest and ideas and opinion“. However, instead of such differences being “welcomed and cultivated“ we find more often than not those differences are shut down, and those who dare to express them punished.

Again - such refusal to engage with debate and dialogue around decisions made is an example of intellectual cowardice and perhaps an admission that the grounds on which the decision has been made are shaky. After all, with the right justification even something as seemingly problematic as “do it because you’ve been told to do it” can be willingly agreed to. For example, within the army, on the battlefield, the concept of “operational efficiency” recognises that the life-or-death situation of armed conflict requires soldiers to obey all orders (“do it because you’ve been told to do it”) because if the critically minded philosophical soldier responded with questions to their higher ranked general’s order to “duck” they might well be dead long before the debate could begin. So you are not merely doing it “because you’ve been told to do it” but because not doing what you’ve been told to immediately in this context might put you in danger. It is the same reason that, were I in hospital in a critical condition, I wouldn’t question what the doctor tells me I need to do to get better - I would do it because I was told to. But not just because I was told to, rather I would do what I was told to do because to not do so would likely be to put my life in danger.

Potentially, therefore, any time where not doing what you are told might bring you physical harm, there is a good further reason to obey. But it is worth noting that even here there remains room to disagree and choose resistance instead of compliance. “Differences of interest and ideas and opinion“. After all - the same is true of the person held at gunpoint and told to do something terrible “or else”. While we might understand the reasons for the coerced person’s actions, that doesn’t necessarily make them right, and it remains possible for the victim to refuse, albeit a possibility likely to end in their death. History abounds with heroic tales of those who sacrificed themselves in such circumstances rather than allow themselves to be coerced into doing something they believed to be morally wrong. The point here being that even when justified there is room for the edict delivered “or else” to be discussed and perhaps refused. If the same coercion to “operational efficiency” which might save a soldier’s life turns out to be more likely to promote the same kind of blind obedience to authority that led to Auschwitz, or even the illegal and illegitimate invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, then perhaps there is a further argument to be made that a few rebellious soldiers who lose their lives by not ducking on time is a price worth paying to ensure all soldiers retain the moral autonomy to say no to orders they find unethical?

But most places where we are told to “do it because you’ve been told to do it” are not life-or-death war zones or hospital beds. They are the everyday mundanities of the workplace and the school. Parents, teachers, bosses… And these people seem to forget that their authority is a gift we must choose to bestow; one for which they have to give us good reasons. For anyone ever told they have been “insubordinate”, the question must be asked: what damage did this insubordination do? If the answer is that it caused no damage other than to erode the seeming authority of the hierarchy, then so what? Such authority should be scrutinised and brought into question. We should be constantly reminded that it is merely temporary and there to serve a particular cause. The person who asks the questions those in authority are not interested in answering, or refuse to follow final decisions because they disagree with their wisdom, are doing no damage of any importance and may even be doing us a favour by pointing out things not seen by those in charge and demonstrating alternatives beyond the parameters of an ongoing narrative. If what they do does cause damage of some meaningful sort, then this needs to be explained and demonstrated. They are then not being asked to “do it because you have been told to do it” but because doing what they are doing is causing specific damage X. If the damage is legitimate, then only a fool would continue to do it. If the damage is contestable, then the contest should be “welcomed and cultivated” as it shows that perhaps the final decision of those in authority may, in fact, be mistaken. “When the conflicting doctrines, instead of one being true and the other false, share the truth between them”, John Stuart Mill tells us, “and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part” the problem is that “very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners”. This is why Chomsky is right that developing more minds capacious and impartial - open to criticism and willing to debate - should be “welcomed and cultivated” rather than shut down and disciplined. “However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false”, says Mill, they “ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as dead dogma, not a living truth.” Too often there may not even be a truth under dispute, merely a decision made, of which a hundred variations are equally valid approaches. If someone in authority is saying you must take the approach they have chosen, not because it is better or worse than any other but because it is their approach which they have decided upon, then we are in the realm of ego, not justification. My way or the highway. Such situations should not be struggles “between combatants fighting under hostile banners”, but harmless disagreements where different individuals take different approaches to reach the same mutual goals in a plurality of ways. They only become struggles when they become about showing deference to authority, with divergence and refusal from those above you in a hierarchy perceived as a wrong in itself, which it is not.

If there is anything the UK government’s handling of the pandemic can show you (bearing in mind the over 120,00 dead and millions infected in this country compared to, say, New Zealand’s 26 deaths and less than 3,000 cases showing that these numbers are nothing to do with the natural effects of a virus alone and everything to do with the decisions made on how to deal with it) it is that those supposedly “in charge” can frequently get things disastrously wrong. We meet the edicts of authority with blind obedience at our peril. We question, we criticise and we reject to our great credit - philosophers interested in doing what is right, not simply what we are told.

And if anyone has a problem with us doing that then it is up to them to find a convincing and non-coercive justification to make us stop.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.