Two fundamental featureds of social life
Max Weber defined authority as the complement of power. Power means the ability to get people to do the things they don’t want to do; authority is the ability to influence people so that they will come to want to do the things you want them to do. Power is an objective feature of a situation. A judge can sentence a criminal according to guidelines set out in the law. A parent can discipline a child although the law limits a parent’s discretion in doing so. Authority, on the other hand, is in the eye of those upon whom authority is exercised. The Catholic Church holds its authority because its believers accept its view of itself even if there were times when the Church could turn heretics over to the secular arm for punishment. A professor exercises the authority he or she has been given by the university to act as someone who knows what he or she is talking about even though that provisional authorization has to be supported by convincing students that he or she is indeed knowledgeable or at least has the charm that makes students not care whether he or she is knowledgeable. That is apart from the power of the professor to award grades.
Authority is, however, not a single emotion that is held by all those who follow one or another of all the kinds of authority there are. There are many bases of authority: law, custom, personal magnetism, religion, standing as a member of a profession or the holder of a craftsman's certificate, and so on. That means that there are multiple feelings, any one of which may incline a person to do what the authority advises, to take what the authority says as what they want to do rather than just what they have been commanded to do. Those feelings include awe and admiration and respect for expertise or a desire to be loved or approved by the authority or the feeling may be the self-respect that comes from doing whatever is dutiful. Those feelings can be considered moral virtues in that they are emotions which people do not merely prefer but think to be the proper or inevitable way in which people act.
Authority is ubiquitous in social life. That is why Stanley Milgram was so wrong in his famous social psychology experiments where he got students to think they were administering pain to subjects just because the people posing as scientists instructed them to-- even though the students were correct in their judgments that they couldn’t really be doing anything bad. Daniel Bell was right at the time when he said that we all defer to authority all the time, to doctors and other professionals, just to get through the day.
There are, in fact, three kinds of authority that operate at all times and for all people. There is the authority of those who hold authoritative positions, vested by their appointment or election to make interventions into the lives of others that lay people would not attempt. Doctors can not only cut into people; they can tell patients not to eat red meat and how to handle problems in their sex lives. Lawyers can not only draw up wills; they can tell you what provisions are advisable or not and how to weather a divorce. Teachers can tell you how to parse a sentence but also how to conduct yourself as a middle class adult would. Politicians and preachers can tell you what to think about any number of matters.
Another kind of authority arises in interpersonal relations. Some friends and acquaintances and loved ones are more authoritative than others in that their opinions get deeply considered or taken seriously, while the opinions of other people just don’t take. Who has the gift of imposing their definition of a situation is not clear. The person doesn’t have to be charismatic or particularly knowledgeable. Sometimes the people who are most opinionated are less well informed than are others who hold to their silence. But some people do become influential in forming the political or religious or cultural opinions of others. A professional has to have a bit of this kind of personal authority because it is not just the diplomas on the wall that make a doctor credible; it is his or her manner that a patient is called on to judge. Does the doctor say credible things or seem warm or just have a bit of charm or have the manners of someone of a higher social class?
A third kind of authority is internal. It consists of the moral principles and adages that have been absorbed as the supposed laws of moral life and which a person consults so as to decide what to do though, as C. E. Moore said, there is always a gap between the principle and the particular application so that the person has to decide whether a principle fits the particular situation. Whatever may be the case as to whether moral laws are in fact possible, it is true that many people think they are consulting moral laws when they consult what they have learned in church or in synagogue or in some naturalist theory of ethics about how to conduct themselves. People externalize onto abstract law those decisions they make as if they could not decide otherwise. Insights are vouchsafed as having come from God not the recesses of one’s own mind. And so authority is consulted even when it would appear no authority has been consulted.
The opposite of the idea of authority and the various feelings associated with it is the idea and feeling of equality. Unlike authority, equality is to be sought in both matters of power and matters having to do with ideas or disposition. While authority can always be understood by the metaphor of higher and lower, the authority having influence over an inferior, equality can always be understood by the metaphor of units not above or below one another but alongside one another. Being “equal” or, what is much harder to grasp, not subject to authority at all in that each of the units in a group make up their own “minds” as to what is to be done, is a term for something other than power which is also complimentary to authority. Supreme Court Justices are equal in power in that they each have one vote in a decision. That is an example of equality as that is established by institutional laws and customs. Senators are similarly equal, even if some of them can influence other Senators by sending campaign contributions their way. The citizens of a democracy are equal in their ability to elect candidates, even if some do not choose to exercise that option or are easily swayed by one authority or another.
The citizens of a democracy, however, are also equal in a more spiritual sense. They not only have power; they also are free of authority in that they each are perported, at the least, to have equal holds on volition. They are all entitled to self respect and the respect of others, especially from the officials they have elected because the citizenry, or just about all of them, have a right to apply their judgment to the election of officials and because the laws are set up so as to honor and allow people to exercise their judgment about any number of things. Individuals, in the modern world, are equal in the sense that each person is regarded as a bottomless pit of distinct consciousness which takes onto itself any number of attributes that do not diminish the essential singularity of a consciousness. Lovers are equal because they are so totally committed to one another however many naysayers will claim that a particular love affair is not between equals because in one way or another one partner dominates the other or has attributes not equally present in the other partner. Friends are equal because they have or at least feign to have equal respect for one another. Indeed, for a long time it was thought that there could be no friendship between people who were different in social class.
Equality is a key concept of the modern world. It took preeminence for the Founding Fathers as both a political issue and a spiritual quality. Searching for the sources of equality is as old as political thought. Aristotle placed it in the fact that people are pretty much equal in strength to one another and so some few of them can gang up on another person and get the better of them. That is what made society and the politics that go to the government of society necessary. Other versions of this idea of equal capacity as making human association what it is focus on biological capacities. People have similar though clearly not identical innate dispositions. They have the same complement of emotions and the overwhelming majority have sufficient intellect to figure out where they belong in the social sphere. The idea, though, that their natural endowments may differ substantially is ended in, among other places, John Dewey’s “Human Nature and Human Conduct”, where he argues that even if people begin with different endowments, those are so swamped by the way people are nurtured that one’s actual capacities can become more or less equal if upbringings are the same or similar.
A second approach to the naturalness of equality is to rest it on the nature of human interaction rather than on natural capacities. There is something about the way people relate to one another that cannot help but make them seem equal to one another. Any time, for example, people are in communication with another person they are offering themselves as people who can become explicable to that other party either as a transmitter of information or of a feeling tone. The mystery of dialogue as the well spring of human relations is as old as Plato, whose character Socrates insisted you could explain anything to anyone if they would be patient and hear him out. It is also as modern as Martin Buber who insisted that a relation with God is personal because it is a form of communication and so in some sense God and man have to have something in common. More contemporary interactionists focus on the intricacies whereby language is pliable enough to provide us with ways to say whatever we want to say and therefore become comprehensible to one another, all this aside from and prior to any politically generated equality.
A third kind of equality is imposed on social life rather than arises from it. That is the equality that springs from the modern nation state which is founded in some set of guarantees about what the various powers in government can do so as not to operate in an arbitrary or capricious manner. People have rights in that whether subject or citizen a government cannot treat a man’s house as other than his castle or imprison him without due process of law. People are equal before the law in that people are subject only to penalties for crimes they have committed as those have been proven in a court of law. Indeed, one can suggest that the pedigree of equality is even older than the time of the development of the modern state. A Roman citizen had the rights of a Roman citizen wherever he was, and that included the idea that it might take the might of Rome to enforce the rights of their citizens everywhere.
It is to be emphasized that equality and authority are not just matters of political theory, though that is usually the arena of social life in which they are evoked. Rather, the two are ubiquitous concepts that are used to describe all features of social life. Can friendships be sustained between people who are not equals? Can a contract be negotiated between people who are too unequal in their powers to bargain? Are ethnic groups inherently equal in that they all deserve respect? Who has the authority to settle disagreements between friends or marital disputes? Popular music makes clear that even such a non-political emotion as romantic love plays around with the ideas of equality and authority. Jerome Kern, in “Someone to Watch Over Me”, defines love as giving over authority over one’s own life to a beloved, as if there were no other way than subjection and trust to look out for oneself. Irving Berlin, in “I Can Do Anything Better” might seem to be suggesting that boy and girl are in a competition and so each one strives for superiority, when the joke of the song is that the two soon to be lovers are united by their equivalent passion for success and so are “meant for one another”.
The two opposing ideas of equality and authority can hardly be regarded as a team of ideas, a yin and a yang, where one is the opposite or the absence of the other. It is characteristic of the two ideas that those who favor one do not readily recognize the existence of the other except as the bad negation of what is either necessary or progressive. The Israelites were unable to understand the viewpoint of the Canaanites. The two groups lived for some extended time in the same country, the one believing in its very distinctive God and the other following one or another of their multiple, local gods. That should remind us of the present moment in America, when Conservatives and Liberals can live in the same country and even in the same neighborhood and yet have very little understanding of one another. Democrats and Republicans just do not understand what the other side is getting at rather than just think that the two sides each represent a partial truth or an alternative truth.
Like all other moral qualities, equality and authority are emotions and rational ideals that are at the same time enforced by social structure. Kant thought that only justice had this set of characteristics: a person feels some actions to be just and has a conscience that recognizes the reality of that sense and there are law courts to enforce justice. That would make justice something very special to distinguish it from other moral feelings, such as honesty or fidelity, which are only enforced as a matter of personal volition. But Kant was clearly mistaken. Honesty is enforced by the fish eye of those who think a person is untrustworthy as well as by courts of law, and that is also the case for fidelity, which is enforced by the fear of the anger of a spouse and by legal action as well as by a sense of guilt.
The triple enforcement of moral qualities is independent of whether the moral quality is of recent or ancient invention or is regarded as having in some sense always been with us. Romance, supposedly a medieval invention, is a feeling with which most people are acquainted; it is a social structure in that it is considered a considerable asset in courtship, at least in the modern world, and as a euphemism or intensifier for affectionate intimacy, it may go much further back than that. And the strictures that govern romance, which include forced marriage and a premium placed on virginity or inexperience are also very old. The idea of the alienation of affection goes back at least to the reciprocated love of Jacob’s child Dinah for someone not from her tribe. He shouldn’t have enticed her and his tribe pays dearly.
Even minor virtues are triply visible and triply enforced. Friendliness, a moral virtue described by Aristotle, and to be distinguished from friendship, a much more serious virtue, is known in our time as “amiability” or reduced to being “a social skill”, which suggests that to be adept at ingratiating oneself with people is only or largely a matter of calculation and training rather than the expression of character. Some people are better than others at being likable, and that can be the result of their “animal instincts” or the result of long practice at overcoming shyness. Whatever its source, friendliness is something other people notice; it is a good in and of itself whether it brings any advantage; it does bring advantage in that it helps a salesman get a door open and helps a doctor put a patient at ease; it convinces jurors that a witness is telling the truth; it is recognized in law as a requirement for the management of joint custody; and it makes a person feel good when it is exercised. People who are friendly have an edge on the rest of people, therefore, in their own feelings, in the way they are regarded by others, and in how judgments will be made of them by others. Friendliness is objective even if different people are friendly in different ways in that some people accomplish it by being humorous or flirtatious or because of a certain lilt in their voice. But everyone knows who is friendly and who isn’t.
Equality is also triply visible and triply enforced. People are equal before one another in that they have the respect of themselves and of others and are thought lacking in an essential quality if they do not think well of themselves or do not think they are thought well of by others. At least someone should be your friend. Equality is objective because people know whether or not they are being treated with respect, a person praised in the Nineteenth Century for being “democratic” in his expression of regard for someone who is a social inferior. Equality of any number of sorts is guaranteed by laws during the course of the Twentieth Century.
There is even a name for the fact that equality has this triple character. We say of people that they are “free” when their rights are respected in law, when all or some segment of the population is regarded as possessing rights as a matter of right rather than just as a matter of law, and also when they are free in their relations with others in that their feelings about other people are not tainted with being obeisant. People are free when they are capable of treating one another as engaging with one another as a matter of choice rather than compulsion, though it is thought a violation of custom for people to be overly free with one another, which is to say that they presume greater intimacy than has been granted. Fancy ideas of freedom having to do with national independence come down to that: a nation waves its flag freely and presumes all the entitlements of a nation much more powerful than it is, such as representation in the United Nations or at the Winter Olympics, because it is equal to other nations at least in name and so long as it can afford to deploy ambassadors.
Authority is also triply visible and triply enforced. People feel themselves to be in authority, to be authoritative and to have been authorized to do what they do by a moral or legal code or by their own consciences which, for this purpose, is seen as an internal law giver and so the volitional expression of the externality of authority. That is aside from the fact that authority is also enforced by law, which enhances the authority of an authority. If Job’s God created the universe, then he has to be right on moral issues; if a criminal is prosecuted, then he likely as not is guilty. It is also aside from the fact that authority is as authority does. He or she who is authoritative is known by the fact that people find the person to be that way. There are people who offer their opinions with such forcefulness or sweet reason or certainty that it is difficult to think of them as other than being correct, while there are other people who, as the expression goes, get no respect in that people are dubious about whatever opinions they offer.
There is also a name for the fact of authority being tripled. That is called “obligation”. You have a sense of guilt if you do not comply with an obligation; there are reasons to be offered as to why you are obligated; and obligations can be enforced in a court of law. You are obligated to care for your aged parents. You are obligated to return a borrowed book to the public library. You are obliged to tell a prospective lover that you have a sexually transmitted disease. You are obliged to fall in love with someone to whom you are married or merely betrothed. In all these cases, a categorical externally enforceable influence is internalized as a feeling and is also experienced as a call of conscience. In general, an obligation is like a contract in that one has given one’s word in a way recognized or recognizable in public to undertake certain actions however one may wish to hedge on carrying out one’s promise and that a failure to do so will result in a pang of conscience and perhaps even the intrusion of the police.