authority – GV Loewen

The Author: Persona Gratis

The Author: Persona Gratis (on the hyperbole of authority)

One would not imagine that any author, let alone one prolific and broadly based, would disclaim credit for his works, but I want to examine how the notion of ‘The Author’ has not only come about, but as well, how it has accrued to itself what I think is a too-bountiful accreditation and thus an over-generous genuflection. It is well known that publishers play on the names of best-selling authors, who, since the mid-nineteenth century, may not have written all of the titles upon which their name appears. Readers are attracted to a famous name, and anything published thereunder will sell, and far more so than that of an unknown figure. The name of an author is a autograph persona which is both free to the press – they get undue mileage from it if the author has himself sold well in the past – and presents a free pass even to the more discerning reader who has previously enjoyed books by this ‘same’ person. These two forms of gratis make the author’s name most welcome, for it eases the process at both ends of the productive-consumptive cycle for such products. The name of the author thus takes over the function of fetish for this kind of commodity, freeing the author herself to write, perhaps under another name, something else not as beholden to market interest. This third form of gratis is not as gratuitous as the first two, but it still acts as an hyperbole, extending the reach of the writer as an actual person, simply because this same person as author no longer struggles to make ends meet through her actual work.

It is always of interest when a singular concept iterates itself. The ‘author’ may be dead, in Barthes’ terms, in part due to the death of the idea of the work as Werke, and in part due to the death of God, the ultimate author, but this passing in fact has freed up the ‘writer’ – in terms yet wider than Derrida’s – to become an authority without relying upon authorship per se. One of Barthes’ motives arrives via a basic hermeneutics. Dorothy Smith, in her gracious dialogue with me many years ago, told me this: “When you publish a book, it is like writing a message and putting it in a bottle. You cast that bottle over the side and you have no idea where it will end up, or when. If it finds a beach at all you still can’t guarantee anyone will find it!” Certainly this is a wisdom, and indeed, the implication that one’s work will find itself rather shipwrecked on a reef or on the rocks remains a likely outcome, especially for philosophical books. This apt image speaks at first to the sense that the author loses control over ‘his’ work as soon as it is released, and for celebrity authors, perhaps sooner than this, when their avid editor and then marketer gets a hold of it. But historically speaking, if the book is read at all, the author in fact dies due to the function of the reader.

The reader brings her own life experience to the text, and interprets it thereby and therefrom. I have had a number of such experiences, mostly with fiction, since the interpretative latitude that fiction allows for is far wider than that of non-fiction. The interpretation of discourse is, however, a more profound movement in authorship, if not necessarily authority. Kant reading Hume is called to mind; certainly one of the most serious moments in modern readership and interpretation. Heidegger reading Husserl is another, the former taking apart his mentor’s work and moving from it. Far less profound, but somehow of perduring import nonetheless, are other like moments, such as Riefenstahl reading Mein Kampf andthen criticizing its author to his face about it. As with most such encounters with those he admired,Hitler laughed it off with the no doubt self-conscious equivalent of an ‘aw shucks, girl’. One is tempted to insert a Leonard McCoy line, such has ‘I’m an artist, Leni, not a politician’, but so it goes. As modern hermeneutics explains to us, the text is eventually the world itself, and so Hitler’s later brushing off with a grin and a chuckle his top fighter pilot’s sage advice regarding how to destroy the RAF ended up carrying a far more fateful weight to it.

The exegetical function of the reader broadens as readership did itself widen. However authoritarian and social class reproductive was the new bourgeois education from the 1820s onward, what it did produce was several generations of readers both apt and rapt, especially women, who ripped through a copious library of volumes, of pulp as well as of more precious paper. It is not a coincidence that the same decades saw figures like Schleiermacher and Schlegel break open the narrow scriptural definitions of hermeneutics and declare that its methods applied to all kinds of text. By the 1870s the ‘world as text’ sensibility, first associated with Dilthey, himself a profound student of textual revolution the early ‘post-Enlightenment’ period of the 1820s and 1830s – recall his first major work, the biography of Schleiermacher, widely hailed as a masterpiece and establishing Dilthey’s reputation as a major scholar even though its second volume was never completed – had captured the intellectual imagination as well as popular authorship, coming to its first nadir with Conrad and Wells. With some irony, given how hermeneutics freed itself from its lengthy roots in religious scholarship, the world as a text was in itself not a new idea. The medieval outlook had it that the ‘prose of the world’, to use Foucault’s expression, was literally written into the cosmos at large by the divine hand itself. The world was an autograph edition, not of itself, but indeed of the creation.

All authors, therefore, had their apical ancestor in God. The logoi of human writers was a species of the Logos, the text made in His own image kindred with the being itself. But not only authorship was at stake here. Authority was itself linked up to that divine, and so the author was able to accrue to himself a kind of meta-narrative: in the main, that authorial intent was understood to be the key to any rightful interpretation, and though Schleiermacher extended the scope of hermeneutics he did not deviate from this ancient sensibility. To read scripture, and later nature, was to understand the mind of God as an intentional structure. No one claimed that they could know the divine mind as a whole, of course, only what God deigned communicate to humanity. Still today, there are those who imagine that what the author thinks of their work is the standard by which all other interpretations must be judged. This is an error at a number of levels, not the least held within Smith’s image above. In fact, we know today the author to be simply another reader of the text, since the text has taken on a life of its own after publication, or, even after being written in the first place. For myself, I do not return to my philosophical works. They would require me to patiently study them again, for one, and the earlier ones are often too prosaic to provide any pleasure in their decipherment. I have enjoyed re-reading many of my fictional works, mostly to share them with others aloud, but even here, I find myself either not recalling how I wrote this or that part, or, more radically, that I myself even wrote them at all! This is more than the wiseacre writers guide’s ‘healthy distance’. I have changed in the interim, which is my much-wanted ‘intents’ must be taken with a grain of hermeneutic salt. I have changed, and my interpretation of ‘my’ work has thus also changed. Sometimes we hear a question, if the author is famous, along the lines of ‘would you have written this or that today, or in hindsight, what are your thoughts about…’. To attempt a response other than ‘that was who I was then’ or such-like, is to gainsay the life process and as well, perhaps avoid acknowledging the ultimate outcome of that selfsame process.

We as well sometimes hear of authors who tell us that they have ‘forgiven their younger selves’, but this is at best unnecessary and at worst a piece of personal sophistry. At the same time, authorial authority demands that I ‘stand by my works’, even though ideally any such work should be able to stand by itself. One can immediately understand how the historically inclined aura of the author casts a broad pall over both free interpretation as well as individuality, all the while allowing such persona to become both grander than they are as persons while at the same time losing their own textual freedom. From Barthes to Foucault and beyond ‘the author’ is a bad idea from the start. Derrida’s sense of it being ‘replaced’ or trans-substantiated into ‘the writer’ also did not hold up. For the writer too has both a pedigree and an aura – even the foppish but yet fashionable line, uttered in a Bohemian accent, that ‘I am a writer’, carries with it an indelibly clannish crest, declaiming a kind of cultural, but not at all necessarily cultured, elitism – and the former cannot provide nobility any more than can the latter become a halo. Perhaps the most an author should ever do, in responding to the effect of what he has written, is express an unfeigned caution about augmenting any interpretation through the use of authorial sources: ‘Yes, at one point I did write this book, and here’s what I like about it and here’s what I don’t’. One can consider this the author’s version of Richler’s deadpan, ‘I write books; some people like ‘em, some people don’t’. In this gruff but apt epigram lies the basic operation of both the writing process and the reception of the text itself, especially for fiction. Its very simplicity affords the listener all due freedom to work her own line. It is this hermeneutic space which in turn provides the very life of the work in question.

To counter the gratis of persona the concept of the author holds out to us, we must realize over against it the freedom to become the kind of reader the text does itself require: One, in its most understandable and necessary, a basic literacy, including that of one’s culture history, which I then bring to any text; Two, within the discourses, a growing and cumulative base of knowledge, know-how, and even experience that a more demanding text asks of its potential readership. Without any reliance on the author to ‘explain’ his works and, at the last, shedding the perfect safety also of the expert or specialist in this or that literary or philosophical genre, also often hyperbolic in both its presentation and its own vicarious persona – ‘did you know that Derrida was also a Joyce scholar?’ – the reader comes face to face with both her own limitations, but also her creditable self-improvements. The one is as valuable as the other, for in their face must I continue to become more literate and wise. The deeper meaning of the world as text is thus brought forth, through interpretation, as its ownmost and superlative historical gift: I am one person but to me is bequeathed the species entire.

G.V. Loewen is the ‘author’ of over 60 books and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Reign in Spain

The Reign in Spain (falls mainly on the king)

After having survived a quite literal mudslinging, Spain’s monarch must also have just as literally encountered the very ground of his rule. The sovereign, as a social role, is both the body politic and the territory, the land, whereupon his subjects rusticate. Bataille’s political sociology remains the best take on an anthropological history of the idea of the sovereign, but today we understand a ruler whose role is both archaic and even anachronistic to, perhaps with irony, work to get back to his earthy roots. A monarch today represents the people over against the government and other interests. They are a relatively free agent, apparently apolitical but not non-political, symbolic of a set of values of which all are supposedly supportive. Today, the list of such values which can be represented in this old-world manner is likely much shorter than it had been in the past, but we cannot be sure of this, mainly due to the fact that historic records are not only penned by the privileged, the literate, the cultured, but also preserved by them. We have an official line, prevalent in all types of history known by us, to the threshold that it would not be an exaggeration to imply that all history is, to a great extent, official history.

The sovereign was, however, not originally an historical figure at all. The position was an Aufhebung, not only propelled to the apex of the societal pyramid, but floating above that point. Like the third eye of the Masonic lore, it was held in space by its divine assignation in feudalism, by its being perceived as the worldly source of Mana in traditional societies, or by its having secured a rather happenstance superiority in resource access and distribution, as in early irrigation civilizations. Held in space by the otherworld, and conversely, held in place by our shared world over which the sovereign presided but also must exempt himself from, the ruler’s rule is one shot through with distanciation. Today, of course, the remaining monarchs have come down to earth, with the date of 1688 being important to that regard. 1789 would not have been possible without the movement from monarch to parliament. Yet it is 1789 and not 1688 which allows us to become nostalgic for the monarchy and, in regions where such persons yet exist, such as Spain, imagine that the sovereign has a populist responsibility, an authentic obligation to ‘the people’ which, in turn, is the only thing that authenticates his existence as well as the continued existence of the role itself.

Just as we have made God a fellow traveller, so the sovereign must also fall into that same worldly line. Lineage is now part of an antiquarian, even a dilettantish or yet Whiggish, history, and nothing more. A royal genealogy may be romantic, but it gives the current title-holder no moral purchase upon how responsible one is or what responsibilities one has. And the personalization of religion, which is easier to shoulder than that of politics due to the abstract and essential quality of the divine, is both a practice-run at making leadership itself worldly, as well as a hedge. The nautical phrase, ‘having one anchor out to windward’ applies to modern religion, especially Protestantism, in that we can still claim belief. We speak to a personalized godhead but we still have faith that someone is listening to us. Our relationship with sovereignty is muddier than this.

Apropos, today’s monarchs are philanthropists in every sense of the term. They work for charitable organizations, they lend their status to benevolent causes, they labor on behalf of non-governmental organizations, they travel the world for the cause of surface diplomacy – nothing important actually ‘gets done’ on such junkets; monarchs do not negotiate the brass tacks of contemporary geopolitics – and they make appearances at arts and cultural events. They are taxed by their abstract origin; they must appear to be everywhere at once. To be seen but not heard in this overtaxed manner makes the sovereign into a young child. The monarch has no voice in any case, and to ‘blame’ him for his nation’s woes, natural or cultural it matters not, is to mistake both his person and his role. In the capacity of the former, he is like any of the rest of us, covered in mud by mudslides, suffocating to death if in the wrong place at the wrong time. As to the latter, the monarch has no political power, no Realpolitik, if you will. And while many of us have imagined, perhaps as children ourselves, that it would be a lark to fling mud at a king no less, the act is itself symbolic, participating in that near-primordial order of affairs where the sovereign’s very being is lived on the land through and by myself.

This same land had betrayed its people, murdering them ruthlessly and anonymously. Ergo, the king had demonstrated that self-same betrayal. This was no mere matter of sympathetic magic; the sovereign is the land as well as is the people, and so in him, through a natural disaster, an internecine conflict occurred. The Lisbon earthquake was interpreted by some as evidence for the absence of God in the world. The world had, in that case, betrayed itself, shuddering to its foundations the culture that had grown from it, shaking in its essence with the parturition from the source of its own creation. There is no Erda in our contemporary narrative. Wisdom comes not from the earth but rather from the greater cosmos, the only remaining presence that can mimic both the distanciated being of the divine and its royal representative, as well as the abstract quality of the moral Mana necessary to keep everything in its static place. Just so, all populist politicians, none of them remotely royal or abstract, claim to be ‘the anointed’ – a recent report had one Trump follower referring to him using that exact phrase – and if one is loyal to them, they shall return the earth to its former order. The ‘again’ of these slogans is what is truly disturbing about them, not the idea of greatness.

But Bataille reminds us that an authentic sovereign had no need to make claims of any kind. Just as the one who possesses what possesses her, the person of faith, the one who has no need to express or expound that faith to others – her acts alone speak the voice of the greater being, which is why some faiths refer to them as ‘works’; a direct nod to the sense that the divine ‘works’ through us – the sovereign acts without having to take action, utters without speaking, works without laboring. No mere politician can accomplish any of these things, but neither should they try to do so. Self-sacrifice is the lot of the modern leader, for she remains a person even when occupying her lead role. Not only was the sovereign never a self, he had no personal relationships. The people were his embodied action in the world, the land his deeper hearth. ‘The world is deep’, Nietzsche intones, the seriousness of Zarathustra’s ‘Midnight Song’ given an oddly fitting sanctity and transcendence by Mahler setting it into his Third Symphony. Yes, the world is deep. Yet we have today chosen to live only upon it, and not within its embrace. This, for the mythologist, is the truer source of the climate crisis and the overuse of our shared ecosystem.

Divorced from the earth, our leaders no longer ‘earthly’ in that ancient sense but rather entirely worldly, we must alone confront the sheer scale of anonymous natural forces which can suddenly impinge upon our existence. The ‘natural’ disaster can sometime be avoided with planning and foresight, and this is the argument of the Spaniards who were made victims by the recently value-neutral earth. Insurance companies, ironically still comfortable with using the phrase ‘act of God’, cannot replace creation, only repair destruction, for they are not themselves Gods. Insurance can only take action, not render act. Because we are persons, our Gods personalized, our leaders elevated but not exalted, we must come to terms with both action and labor, ‘own’ our responsibilities but not author them, and leave the act to history and the work to the arts. Only a God resurrects; its representative, more akin to a mobile organ, presides over a ritual laying on of hands, acts as the vehicle for Mana, and wields it on behalf of the people at large. The sovereign sacrifices all that is merely human, and unknowingly, for from the beginning of his presence he will not be human. The Dalai Lama is perhaps the last vestige of the sovereign whom Bataille brilliantly analyses. Not a person, not quite human, he is gendered only for convenience, dressed only as a sign is dressed. His lot is no pillar of fire by night, but even so, the sovereign is expected to guide his people through his decisions. The body of the sovereign is culpable if other bodies fail; in this case, the earthly corpus lashing out, taking the people’s corpses into itself, in an excessive ritual of inhuman inhumation.

What of our own expectations? It is commonly said that we expect ‘too much’ from our politicians, and not only given the dynamics of office and how one attains it. But this hypertrophic trophy, the leader, cannot connote a victory other than one political. It is not that we expect too much of the person but rather of the position. The reality is, is that a politician is not a sovereign, a person not a God, the office of policies not a temple of wisdoms. So, when the earth reminds us of its own current status, forever now apart from the transformational cosmology of the social contract and, more recently, divorced from its ability to at least provide recurring subsistence as a ‘land’ does for its people, we shall suffer. It is part of our drive for Babel redux that compels us to lay our too-possessive hands upon the earth, but in this we mistake the relationship a God had with earth; that we imagine the earth was enthralled to the Mana of Being, rather than it itself existing as its own form of being. Just so, since we are not Gods, our beings must remain ‘in the world’ and not within the earth. For only do the dead make the earth their home.

The castigation of Castile is a case of mistaken identity. At once, the politics of identity is called into question: who leads? As well, the idea of identity politics emerges more fully: we shall seek to resurrect not ourselves – once again, only I as a God could do so – but instead our tribe; that which existed before there were either sovereigns or divinities. The question is itself recurring: can we manifest the community of the social contract on a global scale without descending into the mechanical solidarity which made society possible in the first place?

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Authorship and Authority

Authorship and Authority (Consider the Source)

‘Arguments from authority are worthless’, declares Carl Sagan, as he famously defined science near the end of the epic Cosmos (1981). This is surely an element of any research field, where there is not only always the next experiment and the next, but as well, the sense that our knowledge, however cumulative, is always both partial in the sense of being incomplete, as well as in that second, deeper sense of being biased. We are not only children of our own times and no other, we are also subject, as mortal beings, to the degradation of memory and the flight of fantasy. Beyond all of this local flavor, reality is, its ‘realismus’, itself subject to change given cosmic evolution. What once were constants have been shown to be relative and discursively, we cannot be certain that it is our own history that is at least a partial source of the enduring mysteries we encounter when we do inquire into the universe at large. The most obvious such link is that diverse antique civilizations and their moralities appeared to endure, almost timelessly, and thus in their worldviews, corresponding to their perduring quality as understood from the point of view of each short generation of mortal denizens, their ideas about the cosmos were also timeless. In a word, the politics of humanity spills historically into the human understanding of nature.

Sagan was himself an authority in both astronomy and physics, and he was a decent interpreter of history and culture as well. In spite of his credo, he too was a moralist, and in spite of the framework of his chief vocation which he correctly outlined in what remains the most watched documentary series of all time, he too mustered arguments ‘from authority’ from time to time, no less than in defining the merits of science as the ‘best tool’ humanity possessed. It is of more than passing interest that Max Weber, arguably the greatest authority and expert on society of all time cautioned us against relying upon expertise for any serious decision in or about that same society. What are we then to make of major figures who seem to bely, or even outright deny, their authority in matters we have already ceded to them? This is more than a question of modesty in the face of the vastness of cosmos and the daunting diversity of even our own species, parochial as it must be against the wider backdrop of indefinite infinity. To my mind, it seems more about the sense that when one does in fact dig into the human conversation, things quickly become more complex then one might have bargained for.

Which in turn begets the question of authorship as source. It is not so much that certain persons are not entitled to their opinions unbridled and unlimited, and thoughts remain yet free in at least the sense of being able to have one or the other pending one’s imagination and education. Rather, it is the recent ability for anyone to create his own venue, especially one digital, to broadcast such opinions far and wide and begin to construct his own authority out of that which is in fact mere authorship. Examples are, regrettably, far too abundant to enumerate, from misogynist bigots who happen to have Super Bowl rings, to anti-communist journalists who imagine they are experts in dialectical materialism, to Jewish comedians who are suddenly political scientists and experts in the history of the Levant. But by far the most dangerous authors who imagine they also have authority in some more profound sense are the many politicians who, because they wield power but that without non-legal authority, deliberately and diligently confuse serious discourse for mere politics. Here, names would be superfluous, because almost all politicians, whose very reason of being is to pander to any and all those who might vote for them – or, in anti-democratic conditions, support them either through their silence or their willingness to engage in precipitous conflicts upon their leader’s behalf – engage in the calculated conflation of authority and authorship. A fashionable favorite is that ‘parents know what is best for their children’, and apparently, everyone else’s as well. Teachers and mass media, the usual rivals to parental authority, have come more and more under fire, consistent with the parent-pandering craze – though with nothing else regarding the actual confluence of youth, anxiety, and hopelessness – and the ease of which targets can align against two fronts with which we are either generally suspicious – media sells things to us and little more – or have some resentment against – we all recall our poor teachers and perhaps too much so.

But teaching is, for one, a vocation, a trade, and a profession requiring training and expertise as well as the wisdom of experience, cliché as that sounds. Stating that ‘education should be returned to parents’ is much the same as saying that ‘gas-fitting should be returned to the parents’, or that ‘hydroelectric dam-building should be returned to the parents’, and so on. So far, I have yet to hear that my own vocation, philosophy, should be ‘once again’ a parental purview, but then such parents, who would certainly be incapable of even the slightest musings in that direction, would also likely baulk at the very idea. Not quite sincerely, however, as parenting, seen as a Gestalt of mentorship, guidance, resource allocation and even love, for goodness sakes, would certainly include much moralizing if never any real thinking of any note. Yet in spite of all of this faddish and hypocritical nonsense about ‘parent’s rights’, the wider question of expertise and authority remains. And when major authorities suggest that arguments from authority are either worthless – as they are in the experimental sciences – or to be taken with a grain of salt – as those emanating from the behavioral sciences – then, with some irony, we feel we must take such statements seriously.

I have chosen the two most important cautions that have appeared in discourse during the course of the twentieth century. Yet more well-known ones, such as Einstein’s ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ – Hawking reminded us decades later that he himself took ‘God’ to mean the same thing he understood Einstein to mean by it; the whole of cosmic forces as known to us and not as some inveterately anti-gambling moralizer – are statements of scientific position in the wider history of ideas. For Einstein, arguing against some of the more outlandish implications of the quantum theory at the time, this was simply his non-scientific way of refuting another such position, or at least, exhorting caution about it. But Hawking himself went further than this when he warned of extraterrestrial contact and the annihilation of the human species; this was an opinion uttered by a physicist who was anthropomorphizing alien morality; and as such one with absolutely no basis nor scientific evidence behind it. Hawking had made the mistake of playing on his bona fide authority in other areas; he was, in a word, borrowing status from himself.

When any discursive figure does this, no matter their contributions to other fields, they immediately fall from authority into mere authorship. Unfortunately, many of the rest of us do not at once make that vital distinction, or do not care to. Perhaps one is a Hawking ‘fan’, seeing the scientist in the same way as one holds any other kind of celebrity to heart. In this, we are being as dishonest as is the figure in question being disingenuous. How then to resist both the unguarded abrogance of the expert who is too-enamored of his own authority to remember its limits, often severe, as well as our own penchant for adulation which is born of, and borne on, the sense that this or that figure really is smart and thus anything he says must have some merit to it? One can begin to reverse this troubling trend by looking at oneself and those around us.

My father was a structural engineer and ended his career as the chief building inspector for the City of Victoria. He was a master carpenter and a decent renderer of still life and nautical scenes in oils and watercolors as well as an expert model-builder. He played golf and hockey until his mid-70s, winning his club championship at age 73 with a handicap of 10. He knew little of culture and nothing of thought, he had been propagandized during the war and as a veteran he remained so until his death. His surpassing weakness was that he rarely spoke of things he actually knew a great deal about, and yet would borrow from this tacit status – of which almost none were aware in any case – to issue declarations of the most ignorant sort upon almost any other subject. These were not stated as opinions but rather as if they had some factual basis, or, at the very least, the weight of ‘wisdom’ behind them. He was, as a parent, typically sound for the younger set, typically incompetent for those older. For his generational demographic, he was amazingly progressive and enlightened, as was my mother. As I have before japed, both my parents were philistines but they were not barbarians. My father was no discursive figure and never would be, but he nonetheless represents the commonplace error of mistaking one’s personal experience for actual knowledge. This almost-universal human error is grievous enough in itself – most of us find, as we live on, that our experience is itself often found wanting after all – but that this selfsame error is deliberately targeted by politicians as the best way to manipulate franchise is nothing less than a patent evil.

My father’s only son is a philosopher. But he is not a cognitive philosopher, or ‘philosopher of mind’, as this once wholly archaic designation has recently made a comeback, he is not an analytic philosopher of language, an epistemologist, an ancient scholar or a medievalist, he his not a philosopher of science nor a Marxist, nor is he by any stretch a logician. And so I do not, even within the genres of my own painstakingly studied vocation, assert any serious claims adhering to any of these departments and have never done so. The stuff I do know something about – phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics, critical theory, education and existentialism, religion – casts a broad enough net for any thinker to never want in topic or subject. Far beyond this, I do not spout off about gas-fitting, hydroelectricity, or even parenting for that matter – I have consulted as an ethicist for many families over the years and always explain to them that I am expert in human relations in the abstract and not a ‘parenting’ expert, whatever that last might mean – in order to maintain my serious game and nascent name within the wider conversation which is our shared species legacy. And though it may be the case that those lives deemed outside of circles meritorious are all the more likely, through ressentiment, to try to gain access to them through a combination of outright fraud and feigned ignorance as to their truer motives, it falls to the rest of us to exercise a more existential and ethical version of the caveat emptor in their face. Otherwise, we risk becoming as the politician alone, who, as a darling dapper doyenne of the system within which he must work, is compelled to become a huckster, a shyster, a conniver, a narcissist. Each of us has each of these and others within our breast, so this is not a matter of directing our disdain afar. Rather, it is more simply a matter of learning how to recognize the authorship-limitations of what we know today as who we are right now, and thence perhaps coming to a better understanding of the authority-limits of what we can know as a human being and thence as a species entire.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, social theory, religion, aesthetics, and health as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Customer is Always Wrong

The Customer is Always Wrong

Ever since the turn of the century it has been the basic weakness of bourgeois education that it has been the education of the educated class, building a wall of separation against the working class and losing the spiritual horizon for the universal problem of work. (Lowith, 1991:282 [1939]).

The distrust of expertise is built into the psyche of Protestant consciousness, and from the very beginning of the Reformation. Ritualism, the purview of the Catholic Church, was mistrusted as a manner of manipulation. Holding services in the vernacular was an attempt by the sectarians to reach out to the uneducated ‘classes’ – back then, almost everyone – and thereby return them to both the community of light and wisdom but also to exercise the suasion of soteriological doctrine much more directly. It was, perhaps ironically, the act of the expert to communicate his expertise to the layperson so that the latter could once again begin to trust the former’s authority. From the church to the school, by the first third of the nineteenth century, we see a similar attempt at communication. Before the advent of the child-saving movement – the first in a lengthy and still active lineage of ‘bored housewives’ benevolent associations; a contemporary irony is that the latter day inventions of this lineage are out to ban books and preserve physical punishment of children, both odd ways of ‘saving’ them – there was no conflict between education for different classes. The children of the working class were simply not to be educated at all. That this was altered by mid-century should not necessarily tell us that the history of our universal school system, given birth c.1850 and carrying on today mostly by its own inertia, is or was ever fully democratic in its ideals, let alone its practices.

The introduction of the illiterate classes into the classroom had the general effect of dumbing down the curricula, making them more accessible or even worldly. A similar though more minor seismic tremor was felt when cognitively challenged children were added to the already heady mix perhaps some thirty years ago. The response to this universalizing education was that wealth promptly excerpted its own children from that same system. Seen by the casual viewer as a ‘choice’ which parents ‘ought’ to have, the private school system or versions thereof called ‘charter’ or yet parochial schools is fundamentally anti-democratic and indeed to be so was ever its clearest intent. Wealth does not desire to mix with poverty, either in material or in ‘spirit’. The ‘bourgeois’ education of which Lowith speaks is itself the scion of the new wealth of the post-1789 age, that is, our own. Modernity is rife with the tension between the ideal of equality and the reality of inequality, and this around the globe, within every culture, and often enough even animating the interior of the individual person, who knows not whether to will only himself or to help others gain a semblance of human freedom.

And though the charter schools are sometimes created and thus delineated by ethnicity or even religion, the vast majority of them place themselves aloof to the public system by virtue of wealth alone. Indeed, in the enclave schools, families which are not as wealthy can count on growing their wealth through participating in the limited marriage pool, which is the chief principle of the private system: keep wealth among the wealthy. And with such wealth comes both power and privilege. The ‘blood’ of the yet aristocratic-aping bourgeois class must remain inviolate. In a symbology of envisioned violence, the ‘educated classes’ wage a chill war against any other who would attempt to gain their inherited privileges let alone their wealth. Governments, which after all are run by the elite classes or are at least told what to do by them, aid and abet the spread of private schools, thereby concentrating wealth and privilege amongst the few. Is it any wonder that the majority of us have a heightened mistrust of expertise of all kinds?

Those who are being schooled to become the next generation of experts trust the authority of those current without question. Hence the duplicity of the schools in general, wherein ‘questioning things’ is limited to either the technical or the historical; ‘why does gravitational lensing show us exoplanets?’ or ‘why did Spain hire Columbus the very year it expelled the Moors?’ and such-like. These are questions only in the most literal sense, and hardly that literate. In the private schools, there is, ironically, more of the real question, but this is precisely because the ultimate question of addressing the conflict that privilege has created and thence has attained is never broached; ‘why are we in this school and not our ex-friends?’, ‘why is there a private system at all?’, ‘are we really superior beings or is this an affect of social inequality alone?’. These kinds of questions are on the road to the truth of things and cannot remain in the technical realm. They are of course, also historical questions but they do not absent themselves from the present simply because we also need to know the pedigree of such current social formations. Every other apparent ‘conflict’ about educating today is a decoy: critical race theory, ‘wokeness’, subaltern genders, ‘traditional values’, civics, and sundry others. These fraudulent and fashionable contrivances serve only to allay a lingering sense that due to this family’s relative wealth and this other family’s relative poverty that their respective children will have glaringly different life-chances over the life course.

The final if not fatal irony is that any expert who points this out in a critical manner is himself automatically distrusted. Any pedagogue, any philosopher of education, any sociologist, any ethicist. Surely he too must have been a product of elite education? How could he then be betraying his own kind? It must be a trick. While it is the case that any partial critique that issues band-aid ‘remedies’ is an act of duplicity and betrayal – ‘let’s fund the two systems equally’, ‘let’s reward the best and brightest without regard to class background’, ‘it is a function of democracy to give parents a choice in educating their children’ (a false choice since it is based upon differential access to resources of all kinds) – what these lesser ‘experts’ achieve is but a blanket ban on understanding the key issues that backdrop the problem of knowledge in our contemporary society. To see them for what they are is, regrettably, to also see expertise itself as a mere rationalization for the existing social order.

This general mistrust of the expert appears in all contexts, petty and profound alike. I first experienced it later in my academic career when young students questioned the relevance of the history of consciousness, cited celebrities instead of thinkers, refused to read assigned texts, referenced popular culture tropes as the meat of critique and displayed a shockingly low level of literacy in all its forms. It was of interest that pending social background, this distrust of authoritative work was either fully present or equally absent. Most germane for our discussion here, was that the few working class students at the universities were keen to accept and learn and those from the bourgeois classes felt no need to learn anything but the technique presented for specific professions. The ‘ethnic’ students were of two minds; those from the sub-continent who were wealthy disdained all authority while those from East Asia genuflected to it in a kind of shallow supplication that made it look like they were the ‘best of students’. In marginal regions young people craved learning and understood their privilege in being able to have that opportunity. In urban and more wealthy areas, the students saw themselves rather as customers, ‘clients’, a sensibility only encouraged by the universities themselves, partly as a way by which to divide faculty from the student body and partly to attract young persons in the first place. This latter ploy played upon the quite righteous sense that an average eighteen-year-old is rather sick of schooling and needs be treated more like an adult. Ethically this is correct, and indeed, such mature and respectful relations should extend well back from the legal age of adulthood, perhaps to age twelve. But such respect must function both ways, as it were. Ultimately, there was no point in someone like myself continuing to be a professor in such classrooms as presented themselves, where students en masse behaved as if they had no interest in being present to learn anything at all.

But the insular academy is hardly the only place wherein expertise is in principle mistrusted or even denied outright. And the deniers are, to a person, those who hail from the bourgeois classes themselves. It is as if in attaining their own little arena of expertise, they can maintain it only by denying the authority of all others. Know a little know a lot, they must imagine. My wife, who is a veteran and senior advisor in the finance sector, brings weekly accounts of bank customers who tell her to her face that she is incorrect about very technical matters that no layperson would generally have a clue about. Our real estate agent told us of the daily occasions where she was told how to sell houses by buyers. Our brilliant contractor regales us with similar accounts of those who ‘tell him his job’, which is a concise manner of putting the problem. Similarly our wonderful mechanic, with whom I could not live without. In the corporation of which I am the CEO, our in-house cyber-security and marketing expert tells us of regular occurrences where his highly skilled and subtle expertise is denied by clientele, and add to this the perennial issue of parents telling teachers how to teach, patients telling doctors how to diagnose, analysands explaining their own psychopathology to counselors, and parents – once again – screaming at referees from the sidelines, insisting that officials’ calls were biased, and especially those indicting their own children, what do you know?

Is it odd that I, as an internationally recognized student of ethics, education, and aesthetics and as the author of fifty-three books, should have no issues at all granting others their authority and expertise? Should it not be the case that if ‘know a little know a lot’ is the general foible, that ‘someone like me’ should quite literally think that he knows it all? What my advantage is, is that I have been able to surround myself with those who really are experts in their fields, whether it be contracting, cars, property, finance, or caring for youth amongst others. I can do that because I know what it takes to become an expert, to gain the credentials yes, but the more so, to be able to learn to apply them in the world. At the same time, I flatter myself in knowing the difference between work well done and a sham effort, whether at the level of the individual or the institution. No doubt I cannot always be correct in my estimation of others, even of social structures and their widespread effects. No matter the experience, no matter the level of literacy, there will always be episodes, events and eventualities that defy one’s ‘expertise’. But this reality should not take away from the general sensibility that expertise and authority of the authoritative kind is a pressing necessity in these our shared times and this our shared world. It is almost as if the masses lie in wait for the expert to make his singular mistake, betraying himself as the naked emperor he always must have been. And it is the supposedly ‘educated classes’ who populate this ambuscade.

Even so, one also does not desire a society full of illiterate and obeisant servants who slavishly follow every ‘expert’ demand without question. Yet it is equally clear that in order to ask a serious question, a certain critical literacy must be attained, and schooling neither public nor private is geared into this goal. Indeed, there is no social institution as such that can afford this too precious level of literacy lest all loyalty to them be immediately absent. ‘Corrupting youth’ yes, to be sure. But it is not youth who primarily need educating to these regards, but rather the smug and self-assured middle class ‘adult’ who thinks he knows, if not everything, then at least what he ‘needs to know’ about all things. ‘Everyone an expert’ must be the battle hymn of this repugnant republic: ‘No one knows myself better than I’, ‘My children, my house, my rules’, ‘don’t tell me how to run my life’, and even ‘live and let live’, are its much chanted refrains. There is a certain anarchistic element to individualism decoyed both by the false choices of consumer media and the false democracy of the separate school systems. This impulse plays upon our general lack of control and authority in society as a whole. In fact, very few of us have the luxury to speak our minds freely and fully, and simply because this act is a function of my profession gives me a sense of authority far beyond the reality that the entire history of philosophy has encountered in its rare disseminations.

In seemingly an ultimate irony, Max Weber, arguably the greatest expert on society that history presents to us, stated that we must not trust the experts with anything beyond their expertise. Experts are tools alone. They cannot make decisions for us, especially those political, and thus they should be consulted only in times of true crisis, and thence put aside once again. Insofar as this is how a democracy must function in order to attain a reality beyond that in name alone, Weber is correct. The ‘expert’, of whatever ken, is after all only one person, a human like ourselves, fallible and even biased. Further, the expert cannot be an expert in all things, and so she is not merely like us, she is us, in all of our knowledge and ignorance, partial in both senses of the term. But insofar as expertise is sabotaged by ignorance within the selfsame person, we are jarred into a more general suspicion; if he is that stupid about this, then how can I trust him about that? The only working antidote to this gnawing doubt is to interact with others only within the bounds of their official capacities. All human relations are thus to be made contractual alone. Is this not why marriage is such a challenge for most of us? Only here do we confront the whole person and must trust her, eventually implicitly. Yes, there are even ‘marriage experts’, though one would think that the person who had been married and thus divorced the most times would be the greatest of these!

While Hume stated that ‘all knowledge comes from human experience’, Kant qualified by responding, ‘yes, but what does it take to have an experience?’ and by the twentieth century, other thinkers asked ‘what does it mean to have an experience?’. On the one hand, pending the event, such experience might not even be communicable to others. The vision is notoriously lost in translation, as William James pointed out. On the other, however, most human experience can be at least partially shared. The trick is to understand just how much the other has comprehended of the self, and the more so, vice-versa. We do know something of ourselves, but we also deny and suppress other aspects as important. Even with regard to our own spirits, we are but partial experts. Our shared humanity is unhinged if all imagine that what they know is ‘enough’ to live. True expertise comes in understanding rather the limitations of both selfhood, of discourse, of learning and even of human experience. Not that these limits are perennial, unassailable by a future consciousness or even a more precise science. Even so, our own living Zeitgeist has its inherent limits. Coming to know that when we approach the counter upon which is laid out the pleasures and desires of the spirit of our age that we are always at risk of being wrong about each and every one of them is the beginning of authentic expertise.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Who was that Unmasked Man?

Who was that Unmasked Man?

The concept of authority is a much troubled one for we moderns. In the previous age, power amongst human beings was certainly brandished in a more subjective fashion, often based on personalist traits including the apparently vanished ‘charisma’, which the social scientist Max Weber implied could not exist in modernity. There was a corresponding paucity of rational mechanisms for the exertion of power by way of achieved or accrued status. Heritable station, even caste, was enough to endow some and deny many the necessary stakes in social life with which to maintain a viable existence. Though we are suspicious of authority in all its forms, we do pride ourselves in leveling the field to an extent that most persons in wealthy countries can at least live without daily fear of sickness and death.

Why then, if we are aware of this transformation from what now appears to us as the patent unreason of a culture masking itself as a fraudulent nature – perhaps the final residue of this older worldview pertains to eugenics and ‘race’ theory, though any reductivist applied science skirts it at its peril; neuroscience, sociobiology, cognitive therapy – do we also consistently maintain an oft unreasoned skepticism regarding the space and status of modern authority? Why, given the seemingly obvious sensibility that an illness can be transmitted in this way or that, would some of us shun the equally obvious precautions? More than this, immediately declare that such passing modifications to daily life are a symptom of a deeper and darker recess within which authority conspires to dominate the world at large?

The ‘strange bedfellows’ of politics aside, the resistance to the wearing of masks and practicing the so-called ‘social distance’ hails from the margins of mass democratic statehood. Small time evangelicals, neo-fascist militias, conspiracy ‘theorists’ of many stripes and streaks, even some neo-conservatives who feel abandoned by their chosen political representatives populate this pastiche. Who, exactly, are these fellow citizens, and why do they appear to differ from the vast majority of us along these sudden lines? Is the anti-mask affair merely a convenient hitching post where a number of unrelated horses may be tied during a tavern tabernacle? Is it a question of metaphor; a mask denies part of our identity, for instance, or is likened to a political muzzle? It certainly hasn’t taken long for advertisers to take advantage of this additional apparel ‘accessory’, given many masks now sport logos of various kinds. If there is a semi-conscious sense that a mask inhibits my personhood, many people have taken to creative work-arounds that still proclaim something about themselves they think it is worth others’ while to know, kind of like a removable tattoo.

But not everyone. Authority in its contemporary issue is at once loosed from above and below alike. Above due to the apparent absence of godhead, and below, due to the problems of direct political representation. One the one hand, there is no ‘higher’ authority than the State, a difficult pill to swallow for many of us, myself as a thinker included. I would like to be able to say, ‘no, truth is itself the highest authority’, or more murkily, ‘art’, or ‘the good’. That the neighbor takes precedence over the socius, that my justice overtakes that of the law, that my ethical life exists beyond the general ken of rationalized morals, and so on. Aside from its claim to possess a monopoly of force, the State also declares itself to be the final court of both accusation and appeal. On the other hand, its presence, like the Leviathan, is to be taken as given and might only be indirectly questioned through regime change by way of the electoral process. Seen in its naked fraudulence, already less dressed than its predecessor the Church, the State is easy to unmask. That we understand our governments to wear the mask of responsibility – and sometimes even live up to this general theater in a convincing manner – is to also comprehend that they are not what they seem to be. So if the one who already wears the mask and is known to be other than it is demands that we too now don this same article, is that not to tell us that we must become yet more like the State in our private lives?

We do hear the cliché refrain about the ‘nanny state’ within the fragmented voices of the anti-mask huzzah. Ask the same people about EI and healthcare etc. and there might be a different response. But bracketing this ever-present irony, I think that these protesters must view the State as something that is mysterious, a persona like Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel, to use some old-fashioned examples, but one which is magnified into a monstrous form. The Lone Ranger, from whose juvenile script the title of this piece is paraphrased, is, with further irony, a persona who would in fact appeal to the anti-maskers. They appear to see themselves as more individual than the rest of us, more self-reliant, more heroic, and evidently also more immune, even to non-human forms of life. If we were merely jaded, the entire affair would appear only as an ongoing cliché, the evil state making yet more demands upon freedom-loving individuals.

Not only is this dull it is also dimwitted. One, no member of mass society can claim to be free in this way. Our individual freedom in the public realm is immensely limited, simply because of the existence of others. Respecting this is in fact an act of free will and a recognition of it as a principle of human life, as in doing so, we grant the freedom of others to also reassure us of our human status. To do otherwise is to set oneself apart from one’s fellows, however and otherwise strange they may be, and claim that only a certain few should be ‘free’ and the rest of us can go to the wall. Two, if there truly is a serious concern about civil liberties that too is addressed by not by making exceptions but by giving the other the courtesy to live with the best chance of being unassailed by health concerns. Freedom, in its ethical essence, consists of being a vehicle for the freedom of others.

That the State must demand this of us can only be put down our own lack of ethical awareness. But organizing a symptom of such interaction amongst citizens is not the same as defining what freedom is or is not. A mask is metaphoric also in this way; it does not pretend to be the reality of mass society, only its appearance; anonymous and impersonal, generally non-responsible and always flirting with authoritarianism. The reality of our existence remains, as ever, within our own conscience. No decisions are being taken from us. When I forget my mask in my car on the way to the grocery store I duly return and retrieve it. I have done so uncounted times already as we are creatures of daily habit. Why I do so is another matter. I want to be one momentary vehicle for the freedom of the other. I do not want to ‘set an example’, ‘toe the line’, mock the other or chide her for her own neglect. And I do not desire to make myself mysterious; indeed, I am the less so because others observe my action as consistent with the otiose demands of the day. I have nothing to hide in wearing a mask, in the same way I might wear clothes, or that I might drive defensively, or that I limit my glance at an ‘attractive’ woman to a good-natured and discreet one-off. Perhaps I could do yet more to this last regard and many others, but the mask-wearing should be seen in the same light as all the other trifling things we do to make life easier and to let others know that we’re on their side no matter how ludicrous the effect.

Freedom is itself a modern conception. One cannot imagine that modernity turns its back on its own native child. It is true that this birth, so cherished, has not lived up to its expectations, but what child does? Freedom is such a recent idea that one cannot expect it to manifest its historical genius overnight and over against the countless eons within which even its herald could not exist. I would suggest that anyone who has doubts about authority and feels his freedom impinged upon examine the critical threshold over which conformity becomes truly dangerous. I’d also like to say, ‘I’ll let you know’, but in fact each of us is charged with the task of confronting authority at every turn. It’s only the professional job of the thinker to do so; more profoundly, it is the birthright of all human beings. More than this, it is the working side of human freedom, which is absolutely not a given, as is the State, and which can only be made real through our being’s resoluteness, its being-ahead, and its receptivity to the call of conscience. Freedom, like history more widely, is both a gift and a task. The unmasked man of resistance in reality resists the work necessary for freedom to become authentic. Only in this authenticity can we in turn unmask any fraudulent attempt at truth, the enforced freedoms of institutions, for instance, or more personally, the beliefs we imagine overtake those same institutions, almost all of which arose in ages wherein human freedom was non-existent. The unimpressive irony of the anti-mask associates betrays its lack of historical consciousness precisely along these lines; that it seeks freedom from modern authority through the use of older and likely imaginary authorities that would, if left unconstrained, demolish every last bit of human freedom we have painstakingly attained over the past four centuries. Thus the mask I wear protects me from far more than just a virus.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, education, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.