Former Mondo 2000 editor RU Sirius recently launched two intiatives, the Open Source Political Party And QuestionAuthority. I've been working with him on the former, but this week I've been thinking conceptually about the latter – what the phrase question authority, seen by now on a bazillion bumperstickers worldwide, really means today, thirty years or more after it popped out of the Tim Leary quote, "think for yourself and question authority." (In fact, the concept of questioning authority is probably as old as the concept of authority. It was, for instance, a key aspect of Socrates' thinking and advice.)
A very serious RU Sirius characterizes the QuestionAuthority project as
an educational and advocacy project dedicated to defending and extending personal and civil liberties and encouraging free expression. Our goal is to create a broad-based coalition of non-authoritarian groups and individuals.
Note non-authoritarian, not anti-authoritarian. Important distinction: if you're anti-, you acknowledging authority as you oppose it. A non-authoritarian approach questions the conceptual validity of authority.
If the human race is in jeopardy because of decisions with large-scale impacts, then it's time to question authority – to question who has authority to make those kinds of decisions, and who can have an authoritative role in finding large-scale solutions.
I had a conversation Friday night with a friend, Austin Artist Kim Smith, ostensibly about climate change, but really about the question of authority. We were condsidering various related issues ... whether one believes that the climate is changing, that the change is a consequence of human behavior and can be mitigated by changing that behavior, how the question of climate change relates to sustainability, what the real economic impact of true sustainability and climate change mitigation might be, etc. These conversations inevitably lead to complex questions of science and sociology, including questions of authoritative knowledge. I was telling Kim that our heads aren't big enough to hold all the knowledge and all the issues and all the questions about climate, and we're in a context where there's little respect for authoritative sources, where the hierarchy of authoritative knowledge is challenged - "question authority."
Those of us who talk about the problem of climate change and the need for sustainable lifestyles and economies meet significant resistance from those whose economic interests would be challenged by sustainable approaches. At Worldchanging, we talk about the significant opportunities that such approaches would create, but for those who depend on profits from systems that are not sustainable, it is harder to consider new opportunities than to defend existing revenue streams.
What authority do we have to make the case for significant changes toward sustainable lifestyle, practice, and economy?
Can we assume that thinking will change? Our three-pound packs of wetware, the brains in our heads, can only handle so many facts, so much complexity. Not everyone is analytical, and even among those who are more scientific in their approach to issues and problems, there can be room for only so much real, in-depth thinking. So all of us, even those most brilliant, have areas that we care about where we lack expertise, and because we care, we form opinions that are often derived from sources that we consider authoritative. So much of what we consider our "knowledge" is really opinion that we've formulated based on conversations, periodicals, books, television, etc. Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads have a completely different world-view from avid Keith Olbermann fans. What do any of them really know?
While Kim and I were talking, I was thinking about the diversity of opinion about climate change; how there are so many voices, so many facts and varying interpretations, so many ways (on any side of the question) to get it wrong. In today's complex media environment, there are so many voices and so many claims to authority, and the sense we might have had, decades ago, that some sources are truly authoritative has been undermined by our evolving media literacy, in the robust and immediate online communications environment, where we can see more clearly the many errors, omissions, and outright falsehoods emanating from sources once thought credible. Questioning authority has become, for many of us, a way of life. Others have a desperate need to settle on some set of beliefs, however flawed or false, whatever the source.
Meanwhile there are critical decisions with large-scale impacts that someone has to make.
What would a truly non-authoritarian solution look like? Can we hope for someting more democratic, perhaps using Internet technology?
Doris Lessing, in her Nobel prize acceptance speech, was critical of the Internet, saying that "we are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers." She goes on to say that the 'net "has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc."
Certainties are questioned. Authorities are questioned. Lessing would definitely have a problem with RU Sirius' non-authoritarian politics.
What if we did propose, seriously (or Siriusly), a truly democratic system. I've debated with small-d democratic activists who think such a system of governance would be more effective – this just seems wrong to me, if only logistically. I don't see deliberative assembly and referendum facilitating decisions that are both efficient and effective, though I have to acknowledge that representative democracy can result in abuses \that might be avoided through the broader distribution of authority and power that democracy suggests.
The solution I've been favoring is more democratic representative democracy. "Representative democracy" really does seem to work relatively well. Winston Churchill nails it: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." We can make the system more democratic by encouraging citizen activism, giving citizens a better understanding of what they can do to have an impact on governance, and by pushing hard for transparency and responsiveness at all levels of government. A bit of a cliché, I know, and so much easier said than done.
Broader citizen participation and activism depend in part on the flow of communications. In the era of broadcasts politics, where the information flow was top down via a few broadcast channels, citizens felt remote from the process. In the Internet era, where there are many channels of communication and anyone can have a voice (however small) in the public forum, there is a growing sense of empowerment and an increasing tendency to use computer networks to facilitate access to government. And, of course, we dump more facts from more perspectives into our three-pound bags of wetware.
Meanwhile I haven't resolved for myself the question of authority vs non-authoritarian approaches that I've tended to favor. As I get older, I'm guided more and more by the old Firesign Theatre bit: "Everything you know is wrong." From a non-authoritarian perspective, maybe the argument is for us to stop making decisions, and let our karma chill for a while.
I don't think that's going to happen.
