I think I meant to ask this on your last post, but it fits here too. Do you think Liberty can exist without order in a world full of so many people, people with mental baggage crammed with these positional notions of authority and material expectations? I guess I believe the answer is yes, but the timeline is on the scale of generations. Curious how you see it.
I wouldn't be an anarchist if I didn't think possible, what you are actually saying.
But it all hinges on what you are actually saying.
If by order you mean an order that is decided in advance, and rigidly enforced from above... Then no, I don't think liberty is an option. But order isn't what we have now, except if you are sitting on top of the hierarchy of global domination looking down at the chaos you sow.
If by order you mean an order that is cultivated without rigid expectations, and permitted to emerge in sometimes seemingly chaotic ways, then yes, I do think liberty can not only exist, but flourish.
I choose to believe you mean the second one.
I will not live to see a full global anarchist society. But we must not strive for the current moment. We must steward the moment for the 7th generation.
It's a monumental task that is fraught with hazards on every side, and we can't plan too rigidly, or we will fail because the universe doesn't share its plans with us.
But yes, I do have hope for a liberated future. I won't pretend that it's a likely future, and the likelihood is diminished with every passing day (as we watch the world descending into ruin), but the likelihood is never truly zero until the variable for complex society is destroyed, and we're not there yet.
I see what you mean. It's difficult to imagine order that cannot be easily documented in a chart or map because that's what my brain has been trained to think of as order! And yet I know the REAL world is a web of relationships, beautiful because it's messy. I have to unlearn to return to the wisdom of intuition.
When I think of everything I have subtly or violently rebelled against in my life, it's all flavors of hierarchical authority and order. Never saw this until now. My Marine Colonel grandfather wanted me to become a Marine, but I so wisely rejected that 😉because i knew I would hate being subject to all the rules and hierarchy. So I chose law school instead! Ha! I eventually dropped out of law school because I realized I'd never be able to honestly take the oath of admission to the bar. So I went into the corporate world! Hahahaha! Still a dumb child. I wound my way through the bowels of corporate structure for years organizing data and projects and people, something I was good at but truly disliked. I eventually accrued enough titles and credentials to transfer into a job doing something I cared about in environmental sustainability, only to realize it was a complete BS job. Of course corporations can't be sustainable, they're built around completely antithetical business models. When I realized this disconnect was at the root of my health problems I quit. I'm much better now, but still finding my way.
Anyway, it's disorienting when you realize you've been trying your whole life to work within definitions of authority that your body knows are just plain wrong. But it's grounding to be reminded of what i already knew - that natural order is a better model than anything I could ever write down. I really appreciate your perspective. It's very helpful.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. And see? If you, with all the possible indoctrination the world can throw at you, all the master’s tools used to get you to comply, still resulted in always feeling the wrongness of it, then I suspect that liberty is not such a miniscule possibility after all.
This is a wonderful essay. So much of what gets discussed under the label of power is actually authority.
For me though this excerpt sums up so much, "The division of labour fragments relationships. It turns authority into something abstract and distant. It replaces the bootmaker (whose authority was subordinate to the boot) with a system in which no one is responsible for the whole." So much this, we live in a world where we are all so constrained by authority and yet no one with authority takes responsibility.
Wonderful entry. I am wondering what your thoughts are on administrators in schools,universities, hospitals, etc. it seems the experience and expert teacher, professor, doctor are subjugated by people who lead these institutions. Often leadership agendas regarding metrics and outputs become the focus. It's not exactly like the bootmaker analogy but similar in a way that only one part of their work is extracted for value or as an indicator of value.
I think that it's very much like the bootmaker analogy. The administrator's authority is positional because it comes from the office they hold, not from their relationship to the work or the people doing it. The teacher, doctor, or professor has relational authority because it comes from their expertise and their care for the people they serve. But the system places the positional authority above the relational authority, and then extracts metrics from the relational work as if those metrics were the whole thing.
This is what happens when authority is separated from responsibility. The administrator is responsible for metrics, not for patients or students. The teacher is responsible for students, but has no authority over the conditions of their work. Authority and responsibility are uncoupled, and everyone loses.
Obviously reality is a little more fuzzy than this, but having the language to name the dynamics helps to clarify where the fuzziness exists, and where the power dynamics are skewed in favour of domination.
Excellent and interesting essay that raises some questions. Even though you separate this essay into two parts and give warning about your expertise,it is clear you trip benefited your analysis of different kinds authority. So I am going to conclude that a critique of the west’s views about authority is the whole subject.
You describe what are to me really personal anthropologies.
And from those experiences as well your reading you make conclusions.
When you discuss the boot it
In your discussions it comes up that a boot made now is not made by a single person, the parts are made separately, in effect there is specialization.
Now the conception of boot-making as done by single person, who is the author of the boot and therefore an authority. The authority which comes from the experience of boot-making is seen as a responsibility or a burden undertaken and you find that view disrupts the western idea authority.
How is this different than all the boot-makers in the west who made boots for ,we can easily assume , hundreds if not thousands of years?
When examining the rise of specialization in western production it is common to associate the rise of cities in the Middle Ages, especially in England, with this production change.
Is it the case that your understanding of specialization in contemporary boot-making helped you better understand how the west views authority?
Why is it that your critique of western regimes of authority gives such a truncated history of western cultural evolution and makes no attempt to account for how these systems emerged?
Do you have an account
Or is your account that among the rubble of western hegemony, you happened to find some appealing systems or views that at least in part persisted?
Do you judge these systems of authority to be more natural?
Do have any ideas about how the authority arrangements you admired and learned from,emerged and persisted?
I assume you are aware of social systems that have unique social arrangements alternate views of authority that have persisted within the US. Yes, seriously the center of the world’s present corruption.
I would also note that there were a lot more of these durable,primarily hunter and gathering societies, with egalitarian forms and alternate views authority that were documented by anthropologists in the 20th century. Many are either partially or fully assimilated by now. Interestingly 50 of these societies that were documented had no concept of what today we call private property. That review put another nail in the coffin of Locke’s imaginary story about the natural origins of private property.
You're right that I didn't address all the complexities. That was intentional. My essay is about the dominant conception of authority in the West, not about every alternative or historical exception. I'm aware there are other conceptions, and I'm not claiming the West is monolithic. I'm claiming the dominant conception is positional and that this has consequences.
My genealogy of Western authority was selective because I wanted to show the major developments that shaped that dominant conception, not write a full history. The essay length was already running long, and I didn't want to write a book. A fuller account would include the guild system, the rise of cities, and other developments, but that wasn't my aim.
My argument about relational authority is a hypothesis: authority emerges from social ecology. I'm not claiming it's 'natural' in any biological sense. I'm claiming it's adaptive and emergent. The systems I encountered were not preserved in amber, they were living systems that emerged from relational ecologies.
And I'm aware of the anthropological literature. But my essay is an intellectual memoir, not an ethnographic study. I'm sharing what I learned from my travels, not trying to replace the work of anthropologists. I am no authority on the subject.
Finally, you're right that alternative systems exist within the US. But they don't disprove my argument about the dominant conception. Exceptions exist everywhere, but they don't change the rule.
I appreciate you taking the time to engage with the essay more fully, and to think deeply about it's limitations. And I appreciate the time you took to write the longer response. These conversations are exactly how we shift from positional thinking to relational thinking.
I was just really asking questions .I agree that existence of other societies with alternative and durable systems of authority either current or past don’t invalidate your thoughts and observations
.
My particular concern of late is less the system and more the transition. In other words are there reasonable theories and /or evidence for a genealogy of the emergence various coercive power structuresI..
Some people advocating a complete devolution of hierarchy turn to what I consider to be a natural law or adjacent justification, From my view that’s the same mistake that capitalist defenders make. It is an assertion more than a theory. That made me curios about how saw thie alternative authority relations you encountered.
It seems to me that the relationship between authority and burden or responsibility persisted in the west particularly among crafts,ones that not easily succumb to capitalism logic. And that boot maker is a great example of this. I think before the rise of the mass marketing retail stores that this relation or at least something close to it persisted. Even my lifetime the shoe repair,the barber, machine shop etc still maimed relations that felt like that. However, and I think this has meaning ,the expertise of doctors went unquestioned. Teachers as well.The rather severe regimentation of the classroom was said to have been an influence the military.
It is quite difficult to to be living in the middle of this vast complex of hierarchies,dominated by a powerful and wealthy elite and to find a path out. My thought that is the alignment of endogenous belief systems including the antigospel Christianity and techno- religious ideology present a formidable blockade to meaningful change. Focus on them is strangely neglected.
I am completely with you on this. I have had a visceral dislike of positional authority for as long as I can remember which was closely connected with a fear of same and a compliant response - at least outwardly. Not that I would have recognised it as such. Conversely, I have always been drawn to people who demonstrate a level of mastery of their subject or skill.
Having (mostly) overcome my fear of authority in my later years I am now more curious about its origins. What drives someone to seek positional authority? This is a long essay in itself but I suspect it is what drives most behaviour which I am fairly certain is an infinite combination of tendencies we are born with and how those tendencies are shaped by our early experiences, particularly, and later our intellectualisation of a world view.
I restacked a great article on the psychological effects of the education system by Katy Purviance which put me in mind of your Learning Grove series and I can't help thinking this would go a long way to rebalancing the general view of what authority is.
Wow. I agree with Godfrey. Your writing is wonderful.
A few disjointed responses from me:
It is neat that you refer so substantively to Kaimaatara. We pink-grey Kiwis have much to learn from Māori and I feel out of touch but also deeply humbled living next door to the deep spirituality of Maori life, culture and thought. I wish I were not so ignorant.
Authority without anything about women? We are the authorities on authority. I'm being flippant. It wasn't that sort of essay.
I love the idea that authority is always of a relational quality. It's so obvious now you've said it.
Just thanks for writing it and making it so lucid.
Well, A, you knocked it out of the park again!! Yes, life is all about relationships and connections — to other life and the environment. There’s also the constructal law, which states the obvious hierarchical nature of complex systems. This hierarchy is natural, therefore relational. Your writing continues to be excellent, mixing personal experiences with your emerging thinking. Keep it up!!
I think I meant to ask this on your last post, but it fits here too. Do you think Liberty can exist without order in a world full of so many people, people with mental baggage crammed with these positional notions of authority and material expectations? I guess I believe the answer is yes, but the timeline is on the scale of generations. Curious how you see it.
I wouldn't be an anarchist if I didn't think possible, what you are actually saying.
But it all hinges on what you are actually saying.
If by order you mean an order that is decided in advance, and rigidly enforced from above... Then no, I don't think liberty is an option. But order isn't what we have now, except if you are sitting on top of the hierarchy of global domination looking down at the chaos you sow.
If by order you mean an order that is cultivated without rigid expectations, and permitted to emerge in sometimes seemingly chaotic ways, then yes, I do think liberty can not only exist, but flourish.
I choose to believe you mean the second one.
I will not live to see a full global anarchist society. But we must not strive for the current moment. We must steward the moment for the 7th generation.
It's a monumental task that is fraught with hazards on every side, and we can't plan too rigidly, or we will fail because the universe doesn't share its plans with us.
But yes, I do have hope for a liberated future. I won't pretend that it's a likely future, and the likelihood is diminished with every passing day (as we watch the world descending into ruin), but the likelihood is never truly zero until the variable for complex society is destroyed, and we're not there yet.
I see what you mean. It's difficult to imagine order that cannot be easily documented in a chart or map because that's what my brain has been trained to think of as order! And yet I know the REAL world is a web of relationships, beautiful because it's messy. I have to unlearn to return to the wisdom of intuition.
When I think of everything I have subtly or violently rebelled against in my life, it's all flavors of hierarchical authority and order. Never saw this until now. My Marine Colonel grandfather wanted me to become a Marine, but I so wisely rejected that 😉because i knew I would hate being subject to all the rules and hierarchy. So I chose law school instead! Ha! I eventually dropped out of law school because I realized I'd never be able to honestly take the oath of admission to the bar. So I went into the corporate world! Hahahaha! Still a dumb child. I wound my way through the bowels of corporate structure for years organizing data and projects and people, something I was good at but truly disliked. I eventually accrued enough titles and credentials to transfer into a job doing something I cared about in environmental sustainability, only to realize it was a complete BS job. Of course corporations can't be sustainable, they're built around completely antithetical business models. When I realized this disconnect was at the root of my health problems I quit. I'm much better now, but still finding my way.
Anyway, it's disorienting when you realize you've been trying your whole life to work within definitions of authority that your body knows are just plain wrong. But it's grounding to be reminded of what i already knew - that natural order is a better model than anything I could ever write down. I really appreciate your perspective. It's very helpful.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. And see? If you, with all the possible indoctrination the world can throw at you, all the master’s tools used to get you to comply, still resulted in always feeling the wrongness of it, then I suspect that liberty is not such a miniscule possibility after all.
This is a wonderful essay. So much of what gets discussed under the label of power is actually authority.
For me though this excerpt sums up so much, "The division of labour fragments relationships. It turns authority into something abstract and distant. It replaces the bootmaker (whose authority was subordinate to the boot) with a system in which no one is responsible for the whole." So much this, we live in a world where we are all so constrained by authority and yet no one with authority takes responsibility.
Wonderful entry. I am wondering what your thoughts are on administrators in schools,universities, hospitals, etc. it seems the experience and expert teacher, professor, doctor are subjugated by people who lead these institutions. Often leadership agendas regarding metrics and outputs become the focus. It's not exactly like the bootmaker analogy but similar in a way that only one part of their work is extracted for value or as an indicator of value.
I think that it's very much like the bootmaker analogy. The administrator's authority is positional because it comes from the office they hold, not from their relationship to the work or the people doing it. The teacher, doctor, or professor has relational authority because it comes from their expertise and their care for the people they serve. But the system places the positional authority above the relational authority, and then extracts metrics from the relational work as if those metrics were the whole thing.
This is what happens when authority is separated from responsibility. The administrator is responsible for metrics, not for patients or students. The teacher is responsible for students, but has no authority over the conditions of their work. Authority and responsibility are uncoupled, and everyone loses.
Obviously reality is a little more fuzzy than this, but having the language to name the dynamics helps to clarify where the fuzziness exists, and where the power dynamics are skewed in favour of domination.
Excellent and interesting essay that raises some questions. Even though you separate this essay into two parts and give warning about your expertise,it is clear you trip benefited your analysis of different kinds authority. So I am going to conclude that a critique of the west’s views about authority is the whole subject.
You describe what are to me really personal anthropologies.
And from those experiences as well your reading you make conclusions.
When you discuss the boot it
In your discussions it comes up that a boot made now is not made by a single person, the parts are made separately, in effect there is specialization.
Now the conception of boot-making as done by single person, who is the author of the boot and therefore an authority. The authority which comes from the experience of boot-making is seen as a responsibility or a burden undertaken and you find that view disrupts the western idea authority.
How is this different than all the boot-makers in the west who made boots for ,we can easily assume , hundreds if not thousands of years?
When examining the rise of specialization in western production it is common to associate the rise of cities in the Middle Ages, especially in England, with this production change.
Is it the case that your understanding of specialization in contemporary boot-making helped you better understand how the west views authority?
Why is it that your critique of western regimes of authority gives such a truncated history of western cultural evolution and makes no attempt to account for how these systems emerged?
Do you have an account
Or is your account that among the rubble of western hegemony, you happened to find some appealing systems or views that at least in part persisted?
Do you judge these systems of authority to be more natural?
Do have any ideas about how the authority arrangements you admired and learned from,emerged and persisted?
I assume you are aware of social systems that have unique social arrangements alternate views of authority that have persisted within the US. Yes, seriously the center of the world’s present corruption.
I would also note that there were a lot more of these durable,primarily hunter and gathering societies, with egalitarian forms and alternate views authority that were documented by anthropologists in the 20th century. Many are either partially or fully assimilated by now. Interestingly 50 of these societies that were documented had no concept of what today we call private property. That review put another nail in the coffin of Locke’s imaginary story about the natural origins of private property.
I know this long and if you read it, many thanks.
You're right that I didn't address all the complexities. That was intentional. My essay is about the dominant conception of authority in the West, not about every alternative or historical exception. I'm aware there are other conceptions, and I'm not claiming the West is monolithic. I'm claiming the dominant conception is positional and that this has consequences.
My genealogy of Western authority was selective because I wanted to show the major developments that shaped that dominant conception, not write a full history. The essay length was already running long, and I didn't want to write a book. A fuller account would include the guild system, the rise of cities, and other developments, but that wasn't my aim.
My argument about relational authority is a hypothesis: authority emerges from social ecology. I'm not claiming it's 'natural' in any biological sense. I'm claiming it's adaptive and emergent. The systems I encountered were not preserved in amber, they were living systems that emerged from relational ecologies.
And I'm aware of the anthropological literature. But my essay is an intellectual memoir, not an ethnographic study. I'm sharing what I learned from my travels, not trying to replace the work of anthropologists. I am no authority on the subject.
Finally, you're right that alternative systems exist within the US. But they don't disprove my argument about the dominant conception. Exceptions exist everywhere, but they don't change the rule.
I appreciate you taking the time to engage with the essay more fully, and to think deeply about it's limitations. And I appreciate the time you took to write the longer response. These conversations are exactly how we shift from positional thinking to relational thinking.
Hey thanks for the reply.
I was just really asking questions .I agree that existence of other societies with alternative and durable systems of authority either current or past don’t invalidate your thoughts and observations
.
My particular concern of late is less the system and more the transition. In other words are there reasonable theories and /or evidence for a genealogy of the emergence various coercive power structuresI..
Some people advocating a complete devolution of hierarchy turn to what I consider to be a natural law or adjacent justification, From my view that’s the same mistake that capitalist defenders make. It is an assertion more than a theory. That made me curios about how saw thie alternative authority relations you encountered.
It seems to me that the relationship between authority and burden or responsibility persisted in the west particularly among crafts,ones that not easily succumb to capitalism logic. And that boot maker is a great example of this. I think before the rise of the mass marketing retail stores that this relation or at least something close to it persisted. Even my lifetime the shoe repair,the barber, machine shop etc still maimed relations that felt like that. However, and I think this has meaning ,the expertise of doctors went unquestioned. Teachers as well.The rather severe regimentation of the classroom was said to have been an influence the military.
It is quite difficult to to be living in the middle of this vast complex of hierarchies,dominated by a powerful and wealthy elite and to find a path out. My thought that is the alignment of endogenous belief systems including the antigospel Christianity and techno- religious ideology present a formidable blockade to meaningful change. Focus on them is strangely neglected.
I am completely with you on this. I have had a visceral dislike of positional authority for as long as I can remember which was closely connected with a fear of same and a compliant response - at least outwardly. Not that I would have recognised it as such. Conversely, I have always been drawn to people who demonstrate a level of mastery of their subject or skill.
Having (mostly) overcome my fear of authority in my later years I am now more curious about its origins. What drives someone to seek positional authority? This is a long essay in itself but I suspect it is what drives most behaviour which I am fairly certain is an infinite combination of tendencies we are born with and how those tendencies are shaped by our early experiences, particularly, and later our intellectualisation of a world view.
I restacked a great article on the psychological effects of the education system by Katy Purviance which put me in mind of your Learning Grove series and I can't help thinking this would go a long way to rebalancing the general view of what authority is.
Wow. I agree with Godfrey. Your writing is wonderful.
A few disjointed responses from me:
It is neat that you refer so substantively to Kaimaatara. We pink-grey Kiwis have much to learn from Māori and I feel out of touch but also deeply humbled living next door to the deep spirituality of Maori life, culture and thought. I wish I were not so ignorant.
Authority without anything about women? We are the authorities on authority. I'm being flippant. It wasn't that sort of essay.
I love the idea that authority is always of a relational quality. It's so obvious now you've said it.
Just thanks for writing it and making it so lucid.
Well, A, you knocked it out of the park again!! Yes, life is all about relationships and connections — to other life and the environment. There’s also the constructal law, which states the obvious hierarchical nature of complex systems. This hierarchy is natural, therefore relational. Your writing continues to be excellent, mixing personal experiences with your emerging thinking. Keep it up!!