Modern thought resides in the realm of fantasy, perhaps nowhere moreso than on the question of authority. The Middle Ages are mocked for their constant appeal to authority, an appeal that Francis Bacon is supposed to have freed the human race from with his Novum Organon, an appeal to use the nascent scientific method of induction as the only source of truth.
But on what basis do we mock the Medieval thinkers for their submission to authority?
Somebody told us!
Authority to the modern mind seems to be a negative idea. We seem to think it is necessarily evil. But it is not. To the Medieval mind, authority was rooted in knowledge. To be an authority was to know what you are talking about.
It is the same to the modern mind, with this difference. We are so individualistic, so disconnected from reality, so controlled by manipulators, so eager to create ourselves, that we have created a vocabulary and set of practices that thinks and acts as though we can function without authority. We’ve driven the whole concept of authority into our subconscious.
Living in this condition leads us through all manner of emotional contortions. Many people will embrace an idea as long as the people in front of them don’t know where they got it. That’s easy to do now, because we spend so much time learning from people we don’t know that the impersonal nature of knowledge and authority seem normal to us. But intellectually and spiritually, we enter a state of confusion. We take on ourselves the existential burden of creating ourselves and the Cartesian burden of finding truth within ourselves, independently.
So we remain forever adolescent, constantly showing off our knowledge and abilities, perpetually terrified that people will discover the truth. We are emotionally bound.
And the solution is so simple. We simply need to admit that we know almost nothing apart from what authorities have discovered and told us. This is true in math, grammar, science, history, philosophy, the arts, and religion. But our distrust for authority is so intense that we pretend to not need any.
If we wish to remain moral and spiritual dwarves and loners, I suppose we don’t need any authority. But if we are going to grow, we need to learn from those who know so very, very much more than we do. This is common sense. It is necessary. The fact that authorities abuse their authorities cannot alter that fact. As the French Revolution illustrated, when you reject authority all you do is assert your own tyranny.
I am arguing for more clear-headedness on this matter.
Those who reject authority other than their own (Dewey, Keating, etc.) want us to pull the pages out of our text books and start over with a barbaric yowp. Now we have a culture letting out one long, extended yowp.
Those who accept authority other than their own recognize the need to submit to authority and the need for what the authority above them have to say. So rather than have their students practice primal scream therapy, they have them memorize the Bible, and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Shakespeare.
Students taught in that atmosphere of authority are give the resources they will need when they have to fight their own battles in the unjust world in which we live. They will not be abandoned to yowps and guns and roses.
