The Case for Authority
It has become trendy to reject authority, but to do so is to reject something important about our human nature.
In a recent podcast episode, I talked about how the voice teaching industry has made a decisive shift toward student-centered learning models, and away from the tried-and-true master-and-apprentice model that has been a defining feature of our field’s pedagogical tradition for centuries. Justin Petersen also spoke about this trend in his excellent piece, “What If Apprenticeship IS Student-Centered,” linked here. There is no question that, in this specific sphere of the performing arts world, hierarchy and expertise have been erased or downplayed in favor of more egalitarian relationships between teachers and students, all in an effort, supposedly, to give students more agency and autonomy in their learning and prevent abuses of power.
I’m not going to reopen the voice teaching pedagogical debate in this article. Rather, I want to address the issue that I believe to be underneath it, and talk about how it is playing out across different areas of our society, often to undesirable or even disastrous effect.
I believe that what we are dealing with is a general anti-authority and anti-expert bias that, especially within the last decade or so, has wormed its way into our collective consciousness. This mentality posits that all authority must be regarded with skepticism, at best; all imbalances of power or knowledge are inherently abusive, oppressive, and toxic; and all “power dynamics” must be equalized.
First, I want to take a look at a few examples that I believe illustrate this cultural shift; then, I will discuss what I believe to be its broader implications.
I offer a disclaimer here: I am not here to judge anyone’s lifestyle choices or views. And I am certainly not invalidating anyone’s negative lived experience or legitimate trauma at the hands of any authority figure. What I am laying out here, instead, are manifestations of a broader cultural phenomenon that I believe has significant implications and consequences for our society.
Parenting
Take parenting, for example. Like many millennials, I was raised by parents who were of the generational mindset that they, as the heads of the household, reserved the right to make all family decisions, set clear and firm household rules, outline the consequences for breaking those rules, and enforce those consequences fairly and consistently. Children in my generation tended to have a very clear idea of what was expected of them, were brought up to think about how their actions affected others, and understood why obeying the rightful adult authorities in their lives was important.
Now, however, millennial and gen z parents have swung the pendulum in the complete opposite direction. They believe that the authoritative family and household structures in which they grew up were oppressive, and as a result, have embraced a more permissive child-rearing style in which the firm parental authority common in previous generations has been softened or eliminated in favor of an approach that places a much greater emphasis on the child’s feelings and desires. Consequences for undesirable behavior are “natural,” not imposed. Behavioral issues are seen as things to be empathized with rather than something to be addressed directly and corrected, and are often attributed to a child’s particular state of development, their feelings, or their state of “regulation” and therefore tolerated or even considered “normal.” Parents want their children to feel safe and have as much agency and autonomy as they deem reasonable, rather than act simply out of fear-based compliance.
I realize that these are generalizations, and I know some parents would disagree with some of my semantics here. I also know that many parents fall somewhere between these two models, which makes a lot of sense. It is a nuanced topic, and I do believe there is good to be found in both models.
However, there’s no denying that the gentler and more permissive parenting style is more popular today, and that it has changed the way children behave and interact with adults and authority figures in other formal settings, which brings me to my next example.
Classroom Education
Next, there’s classroom education, a field that intersects quite closely with parenting. The more egalitarian, child-centered ways students have been raised in their homes have found their way into schools, with both students and parents expecting teachers and administrators to mirror the more permissive, feelings-centered dynamics of their households in the way they teach and navigate behavioral issues.
My husband teaches a specialized subject to grades 5-8 in a private school, and has experienced all of this firsthand. He and his colleagues have been encouraged or required to adopt pedagogical models in their classrooms that, similar to some of the student-centered approaches seen in today’s voice studios, fundamentally alter the role of the teacher, relegating them from that of expert educator to mere facilitator of the students’ learning. These models emphasize exploration and collaboration, rather than “top-down” ways of teaching such as lecturing or presenting.
On the discipline front, the authority of teachers themselves to mete out just consequences for disruptive behavior in their classrooms has been significantly curbed, requiring them often to seek approval from administration to hand down harsher consequences such as detentions.
When there is an academic or behavioral issue of which the student’s parents must be notified, the parents will often “side” uncritically with their child, instead of being willing to hear the situation from the teacher’s perspective. The parents themselves, it seems, do not recognize nor respect the teacher’s authority, so it’s no surprise that their children do not, either.
While attempts to engage students with a variety of pedagogical approaches and honor different learning styles are noble things, attempts to diminish a teacher’s authority as an expert educator and limit the just disciplinary measures they are allowed to take are not. This would be less of an issue if students did not feel so much license to behave in ways that, by any objective standard, are considered unacceptable for the classroom, but many of them have been enabled and emboldened by the permissive environments in their homes, and don’t seem to understand the need to uphold basic societal norms. What results is a very inefficient and disruptive classroom environment that both impedes students’ learning and makes teachers’ jobs far more difficult.
Societal Consequences
Pope Saint John Paul II famously said: “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
When we consider all of this, it’s no wonder we see anti-authority trends playing out at various strata of society.
When we’ve created permission structures in the home and in school classrooms in which undesirable or unacceptable behavior in children is repeatedly tolerated or even validated, and when they are told that their feelings can justify their actions, we should not be surprised when they grow up and enter society believing that they can be their own authority when it comes to what is right and what is wrong, and that all other rules, laws, and authority structures are subject to this individual authority, rather than regarded as objective authorities in and of themselves.
When it comes to politics and civic engagement, we now have both leaders and ordinary civilians who believe rules don’t apply to them, simply because they don’t feel that the laws are necessary or justified. And rather than go through proper channels to change, replace, or repeal said laws, they simply appeal to their own inner, subjective authority and flout or ignore them, leaving those whose job it is to enforce the law in a very tight spot.
We also see it in how some people view doctors, scientists, and religious leaders (particularly Christian leaders, but that’s another entire discussion). In some people’s eyes, anything coming from the mouth of an expert is to be viewed with skepticism, at the very least, and utter disdain or contempt if it seems to brush against our beliefs, feelings, or lived experiences.
Authority and power structures that were always viewed as a given in an ordered, civilized society have been forced to give way to a new dogma: one that asserts that we, as individuals, can and should create our own realities. Reality is now a subjective thing that we define for ourselves, and its formally concomitant things, such as structure, objective truth, authority, rules, and consequences, have been filtered through a relativistic lens that allows each human to decide for themselves what is good and what is bad. We no longer need an authority or hierarchical structure to teach us this difference, because the answers have been inside of us all along.
As a result, this new dogma posits that all “power dynamics” are unhealthy, that all authority is inherently unethical and eventually leads to abuse, and that leadership is no longer about leading but about merely guiding and facilitating. Any structure that is perceived as “imposing” something upon someone is thought to squelch autonomy and agency. Objective authority is no longer seen as necessary, because the subjective authority of the Self has the final say in all things.
The Human Need for Authority
But we, as humans, can’t get away from the idea of authority completely, can we?
Despite our desires and efforts to reign over our own individual fiefdoms of the Self, there are still many instances where, for one reason or another, we implicitly view authority as necessary, or at the very least, a necessary evil, for maintaining cohesion and order in society, or for our own well-being: medicine, science, law enforcement (although these days, maybe not so much), the military, politics, spirituality, our workplaces, and many more.
We also choose, of our own initiative, to follow leaders and experts in fields of interest to us, by reading their books or consuming their online content, and sometimes even paying them money for their expertise or services.
We are anti-authority when an authority figure does things we disagree with; but have no problem with authority when a leader does something that we approve of.
We’re a very selective bunch, aren’t we?
But, as with many things in life, we can’t have it both ways. We are either for the idea of authority, or we are against it. We either respect the authority that a leader has, or we do not.
Note that this is different from being for or against certain authority figures and their respective beliefs, opinions, policies, or strategies. We are not required to respect these individuals as persons, if we deem them unworthy of respect. We are not required to respect everything they do or think. But, if they are in a position of legitimate authority, the position, and all of its concomitant and constitutive things, must be respected.
We are talking about the idea of respecting authority itself, which, if we’re being really honest, is a thing we as humans all acknowledge, deep down.
This is because, despite our clamoring for autonomy over ourselves in all things, we actually crave leadership, structure, guidance, and, yes, even authority.
We are, in fact, hard-wired for participation in hierarchical structures. It makes us feel safe, and fosters a sense of community and belonging, so we naturally gravitate towards it.
Humans are not meant to be completely self-autonomous beings. We are not meant to have the answers to everything, nor to make decisions about every single thing in the world in which we live, and we know it. While we all want control of our decisions when it comes to things in our day to day lives, we also know there are many things about which we do not have the tools, knowledge, skill set, or expertise to make decisions, and that we should defer, in those cases, to someone who does.
This is why, for example, there is research showing that authoritative parenting structures produce the best outcomes in children and adolescents, when compared with permissive or authoritarian parenting styles. Children crave autonomy and agency, yes; but they also crave a stable household structure, a guiding hand, and someone who will make decisions about things that are beyond their capacity to understand. (I think about all the adults I know, including myself, who experience “decision fatigue.” If adults are easily exhausted and stressed out by making decisions, why do we so frequently foist that responsibility on children, who do not yet have the tools or capacity to think through decisions beyond things like what they would like to eat or which shirt they would like to wear?)
What is true for children is true for all of us. This is why, from the dawn of time, humans have had leaders: those individuals who, for one reason or another, ended up in positions of power and authority, because someone deemed them capable of leading and of making decisions on others’ behalf.
How that leadership is chosen or taken on can be discussed and debated – and it should be. There have been moral, ethical leaders; as well as immoral, unethical ones. Leaders have been chosen by both fair and licit means, as well as unfair and illicit ones.
But there’s an important point embedded here, which is that bad leaders, or those chosen through unfair or illicit means, do not invalidate the very idea of leadership or authority.
Similarly, lawfully elected leaders who turn out to be bad leaders do not invalidate the laws that allowed them to ascend to power; nor do they invalidate the laws those leaders choose to enforce through legal means.
Most importantly, bad leaders do not eliminate the human race’s need for leaders.
When we choose to dismantle any kind of authority structure, we must be careful, as well as mindful and honest about what we are doing and why, because dismantling any kind of authority structure creates a vacuum that must inevitably be filled. Our job, as a collective, is to determine what kind of authority will fill it – not to eliminate authority altogether.
Human Authority as a Reflection of the Divine
Ultimately, the human need for earthly authority is a reflection of a more fundamental desire that has been placed inside every human heart: the desire to connect and commune with something higher than ourselves.
Humans have been reaching toward the Divine since the dawn of time, before widely-systematized, monotheistic religion was even a thing. Humans knew that there were things occurring in their natural world that were beyond their knowing or their control, which meant that someone or something else had to be “pulling the strings.”
All humans have been endowed with what can be referred to as a basic “religious sense.” All humans have a capacity for communion with the Divine (Catechism of the Catholic Church 28 and 44), and even a desire for it. How that desire is expressed and the means through which communion is attempted or achieved varies from religion to religion, but the idea remains the same: we are not the ultimate authority in our own lives, because there is someone or something that knows more than us and that has control over elements that we do not. We acknowledge that there is something out there that is more powerful than we are, and that there are cases in which we have no choice but to defer to that power.
Christians believe this reflects our deep desire to seek truth and happiness, which can be found in a relationship with the benevolent God who created and loves us. There are certain powers and attributes that we believe belong to God alone, but we also believe that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God, which means that our species has been uniquely endowed with certain attributes that reflect God’s nature: the capacity to create, the capacity for love, the capacity to connect and commune with others, and the capacity to exercise leadership and authority over others.
Even Jesus himself, the God-man, knew the importance of this. We see him deferring to earthly powers, such as in chapter 19 of Saint John’s Gospel, as he is being questioned by Pontius Pilate shortly before being sentenced to death by crucifixion.
“So Pilate said to [Jesus], ‘Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?’ Jesus answered, ‘You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above.’” (John 19:10-11)
We also see Jesus, again and again throughout the Gospels, deferring to the will of his Father in heaven. Jesus is God, yes; but he acknowledges and accepts that his role in the communion of the Blessed Trinity is to do the will of the Father in all things.
This is why Jesus doesn’t resist Pilate’s authority or attempt to overthrow or delegitimize it. He recognized Pilate’s earthly power as something that had been legitimately granted to him by God, and that it was God’s will that he submit to it.
But Jesus also knew he was a leader, with authority that had been granted to him by God as well, and he exercised that when it was in accord with the Father’s will. He spoke and taught with an authority greater even than the religious experts of his day (Matthew 7:29).
Being More Like Jesus
In a time when many are accusing Christians (sometimes justifiably, sometimes wrongly) of being very un-Christ-like, I think all Christians – and all humans, for that matter – can take a closer look at how they are leading and following in the different roles in their lives.
The reality is that most of us are leaders in some capacity: we are parents, teachers, business owners, bosses, coaches, pastors, and so much more. The authority that is constitutive to these roles has been granted to us from on high, and it is our duty and our responsibility to exercise that authority ethically. If you are in any kind of leadership position, take real ownership of it. Don’t take it lightly. Know that leadership involves being compassionate, but that it also requires firmness. Leading and influencing others is serious business, so be very careful and honest with yourself about how your words and actions might affect others.
And, similarly, we must recognize when authority belongs to someone else. We have to know when to lead, but we also have to know when to submit. “Submission” is a very unpopular term these days, but I believe it’s important, because it’s in submitting that we cultivate the virtue of humility. We recognize that, as much as we may have been granted power and authority in certain spheres, not everything is about us, our preferences, or our desires.
Sometimes we are asked to submit to authority that has been granted to really terrible people, just like Jesus was asked to do with Pilate. They might be terrible people, but they are still people – individuals who, like us, were created in the image and likeness of God, and, if their authority has been lawfully granted, it is our duty to respect that authority.
Again, it doesn’t mean we have to like them as people, or approve of what they do. But if we start being selective about which lawful authorities we do and do not respect, we are headed for a very chaotic and potentially dangerous place.