Power Corrupted
The Fate of Authority When Society Says No to Reality
It has become obvious to all but the willfully blind (which seems to include just about all of us from time to time) that there is a crisis of authority in the once-Christian West. The signs are all around us. We see it in the collapse of the fragile social consensus that undergirds every society; in the disintegration of the rule of law and the dissolution of our cities into dangerous cesspools of squalor, drugs, and crime sloshing around between islands of obscene wealth; in the destruction of the natural family and its technological and ideological reinvention as a merely functional entity; in the invasive intervention of the state and its proxies in the intimate details of family life; in the wholesale replacement of humanistic education by ideological conditioning; in the troubling undercurrent of impending violence that seems to be bubbling just below the surface of things, waiting to erupt anywhere, anytime.
Just get on an airplane. Or try driving in D.C. Or go to Target, where products are increasingly either missing or under lock and key. Who knew that hair trimmers and body wash would be so popular among marauding bands of criminals? And it is apparent in the mutual surveillance of all against all—in the vast, decentralized surveillance and security apparatus that is necessary to police all this, to terrorize us into conformity, and to hold the fragments together. It is obvious that the common experiences that once created bonds of solidarity and forged some kind of political community are rapidly dissolving. Basic social and governmental functions go unperformed. It sometimes feels as if the whole society were being held together by duct tape. One wonders, in fact, whether we really live in a society any longer. And if not, what is this new thing we are living in, as we careen towards a totalitarianism that seems to be on autopilot, circumscribing within ever tighter bounds the nodal points of human judgment and decision?
Conflating Power & Authority
One of the surest signs of the breadth and depth of the crisis of authority is how we understand it. Reducing authority to moral authority or mistaking authority for office, we are tempted to lay blame for the crisis on our hypocritical political leaders or on the once revered institutions that have in various ways betrayed us: the government, the media, even—perhaps especially—the church. And it is true that almost all of our institutions have forfeited their claim to our trust.
Seeking a reprieve from human caprice, we look to science, and we have a long tradition of portraying “the scientist” as an exemplar of disinterested moral and intellectual virtue. The frequent calls, especially during the pandemic, to “follow the science” reflect what historian Stephen Gaukroger called “the reduction of all cognitive values to scientific values.” But such simplistic appeals to the authority of science have rightly lost their power to move many thinking people, since they are often little more than poorly concealed attempts to mask naked exercises of political power. Moreover, anyone who has thought seriously about the nature of science or who has passing familiarity with an inglorious history that includes eugenics, phrenology, “gender affirming” medicine, and fantasies such as in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) begins to suspect that “ideological corruption” is a feature and not a bug of modern science.
Such suspicions are warranted. The power of science is indisputable, as are the many wonders it has given us. But science, which empties the world of inherent meaning and measures truth by power, is the preeminent anti-authoritarian institution, undermining the ontological conditions for authority altogether. It is a sign of the crisis of authority that we look to science as a singular authority in matters of truth, a sign that reveals the confusion at the heart of this crisis. And that is the conflation of authority and power.
While it is natural for authority to take institutional forms, the crisis of authority is much older than contemporary moral hypocrisy and much deeper than the ideological corruption of our institutions, serious as that is. Already in 1954 Hannah Arendt was lamenting that “authority has vanished from the modern world” and is no longer even intelligible to us. Yet I believe this is only half-true: it is true that we no longer understand authority, but there is a limit, however elastic, to our ability to do without it. Still, this should not detract from the seriousness of the crisis. Augusto Del Noce, writing in 1975, called the eclipse of authority one of the essential characteristics of the contemporary world. Both diagnoses point to something cataclysmic beneath the surface. But what kind of cataclysm is it? And how should we understand it?
All the metaphors used to describe the eclipse of authority, says Del Noce, can be summed up in one: “the disappearance of the idea of the Father,” which affects every sphere of life. This is undoubtedly truer than we realize, and while the theological sense of this truth is no doubt the deepest sense, it is also too easily and hastily arrived at. Nietzsche understood that the “disappearance of the Father”—or the “death of God” as he put it—was compatible with the continuation of Christianity. Even now, there is nothing to prevent us from invoking Jesus or the Holy Spirit with all sincerity as a pious gloss to an apprehension of the world as essentially atheistic, or cynically to baptize the exercise of raw political and ecclesiastical power. None of us are immune from this sort of anonymous atheism, nor have Christians of any persuasion historically been immune from conflating authority and power. The crisis of authority is not external to the church.
An Ultimately Theological Idea
Joseph Ratzinger once wrote that beneath the deep division in the modern church over individual doctrines was a still deeper division in philosophical presuppositions. It is at this level that we begin to reach the heart of the crisis. Arendt and Del Noce offer remarkably similar diagnoses, up to a point. Both recognize what we might call the “symbolic” character of authority, which is why authority “naturally” expresses itself in institutions. To say that authority is symbolic is to say that it represents an order beyond itself, making visible in time and space what Hans Jonas calls “a non-spatial invisible pattern” that holds the visible pattern together in a meaningful unity. When a child, recognizing his mother, first says “mama”—the first and most basic affirmation of authority—he is responding to this intelligible pattern, not to a collection of meaningless quantities extended in space, and affirming through his babbling speech a real but invisible order that exceeds his cognitive grasp.
Del Noce will therefore write that the question of authority is in fact “the relationship between man and the invisible” and that “affirming authority is the same as affirming the primacy of the invisible.” Similarly, Arendt says that
the source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power; it is always this source, this external force which transcends the political realm, from which the authorities derive their “authority,” that is, their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked.
Each thinker therefore recognizes that authority is not fundamentally a political but an essentially metaphysical and ultimately a theological idea. The concept is first thematized in Plato’s doctrine of the ideas, but its universality is confirmed by its presence in primitive societies, which is evidence for Del Noce that “the metaphysics of being is immanent within ‘common sense.’” Authority is natural to us; indeed, it follows from the intelligibility of nature itself. Each thinker also recognizes an essential difference between authority and power, with Arendt distinguishing authority from both coercion by force and persuasion by argument. It is only after authority and power are conflated—once the meaning of authority is lost and all claims to authority are seen as masks for the exercise of power—that we mistakenly regard authoritarianism and totalitarianism as synonyms.
It is here that the two begin to part company in their analyses. Being principally a political philosopher, Arendt traces the history of the concept of authority from its foundation in Greek metaphysics to its development in Roman political doctrine, where the Greeks themselves become auctores—authors and founders of Roman theory, philosophy, and poetry—and authority (auctoritas) comes to mean “faithfulness to the founding.” We still see traces of this idea in certain strands of conservative American thought, which is unsurprising considering that the American founders styled their young republic as a “New Rome,” complete with Roman temples along the Potomac. After the collapse of classical metaphysics, Del Noce says, this Roman sense of authority continued in an irreligious form; American legal positivism, which severs law from any foundation in being or nature, is one distant example of this.
But authority as “fidelity to the founding” does not exclude a divine origin; indeed it was Virgil’s task to unite them in the Aeneid, and Christianity, which unites being and history in the person of Christ, the eternal logos of God, holds both the Greek and Roman senses of authority together. It is through this Man—the Image of the Father, who speaks with authority and not as one of the scribes—and the historical tradition he initiated at this moment in time, that we come to see what is eternally true.
Nevertheless, in contrast to Arendt, it is the Greek sense of authority that for Del Noce most reveals what we might call the “essence” of authority—as distinct from its historical sense—and it is here that we can really begin to see just how fundamental authority is and how it fundamentally differs from power in the modern sense of force.
The Most Certain Principle
At the metaphysical foundation of the idea of authority is the concept of evidence, which Del Noce calls the great discovery of Greek metaphysics. We can look at this notion of evidence both objectively and subjectively. Objectively, it denotes the given order that precedes us: an ideal pattern that is real and that we do not create, but that we recognize, acknowledge, and respond to, as when the child first says “mama.” Precisely because this pattern is given, because it precedes us as something we recognize and acknowledge, and because what we recognize is not parceled up in the seeing, it is common to all. Truth, St. Augustine recognizes, is what we have most in common, and it is the basis for our inhabiting a common world.
Del Noce puts it theologically: “participation in this uncreated wisdom is the foundation of the world common to us all.” This given order that precedes and occasions our thinking is the foundation for Aristotle’s concepts of substance and nature, the basis for the so-called principle of non-contradiction, which he considered the “most certain principle of being.” All our thinking is a response to this reality, to “what is,” and all our thinking in recognizing “what is” affirms that a thing cannot both be and not be the same thing in the same way at the same time. Thus, Aristotle says that this most certain principle is something we can’t not know, something understood by anyone who understands anything at all, even if we never think of it or we deceive ourselves into thinking the contrary. Which is a fancy way of saying that we cannot outrun or outwit reality.
Subjectively, the concept of evidence denotes this recognition, an acknowledgment of this order that is simultaneously willing and compelled, and that therefore possesses a special kind of binding strength. According to Arendt, Plato discovered that “truth, namely, the truths we call self-evident, compels the mind, and that this coercion, though it needs no violence to be effective, is stronger than persuasion and argument.” This is why she will say that “authority precludes the use of external means of coercion” and that “where force is used, authority itself has failed!”
Del Noce writes similarly that “the submission of the mind to evidence is more radical than submission obtained through force or persuasion,” and yet, at the same time, precisely because truth has a super-human character, “dependence on it coincides with liberation from domination by other men.” We hear an echo of this in the words of Dignitatis Humanae: “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”
Making Something Grow
Bearing in mind both the objective and subjective senses of evidence, we can begin to see how authority and its power differ from power in the modern sense of mechanical or coercive force. Auctoritas carries the sense of initiating, founding, beginning, creating—hence the authority of a city’s founders, or of the gods, or of the father—and we find this reflected in the English words “author” and “authorship.” But the primary meaning of being an auctor, like being a father, is being one who makes something grow (augere).
In the ecstatic “other directedness” of being an auctor, we see a sense of power—dare we say, a patriarchal sense of power?—that is pervasive in ancient thought. As a father’s paternity is only realized “outside himself,” so to speak, in the child, so, in Plato’s Republic, a techne or art like medicine or horsemanship is perfected or actualized not in the physician or the horseman, but in the patient or the horse. Aristotelian dynamis, at least insofar as it concerns kinesis rather than energeia, is actualized not in the source but in the term of the movement: the art of the builder is realized not in the builder himself but in the coming-to-be of the house. As Hans Boersma showed in “Dionysian Power” (Touchstone, March/April 2023), the power of the higher levels of Dionysius’s celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies is manifested in anagoge, in lifting up the lower levels.
What Hans-Georg Gadamer says of Aristotle applies to all these examples: there is something in them akin to organic growth (The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 1978). But unlike power conceived on the model of a mechanical force, which operates exclusively from without, growth, though actuated from the outside in—by rainfall, or the nutrients in the soil, or the light of the sun—is a movement from the inside out. I can feed and clothe and educate my children, all things that truly can be said to cause their growth and without which they will not grow. But I cannot grow for them or on their behalf. My “causing them to grow” is inseparable from their own proper intrinsic activity in growing. The activity of the cause and the activity of the effect form what Aristotle calls “a single actuality of both alike.”
Authority and its power are like this, and they differ from the mechanical force of modern physics and the coercive power, modeled upon it, of modern politics. I can give my children a musical instrument. I can teach them to play it. I can even compel them to practice. But I cannot learn to play an instrument for them; much less can I love music on their behalf. And I certainly cannot beat this knowledge and love into them, tempting though it may be to try.
Love is like respect. It cannot be coerced; it can only be given in response to something first received. For my children to accept what I teach them as authoritative, for them to recognize its truth, make it their own, and be moved by it, something else must happen, and it is in this “something else,” something akin to “making things grow,” that the true power of authority consists. I do not deny that compulsion is sometimes necessary; no doubt I will often have to force my kids to practice; I only mean to indicate the essential difference between true authority—the authority of truth and beauty—and power in the modern sense.
In contrast to a mechanical force which operates solely from without, truth operates from within, intrinsically as well as extrinsically, by virtue of the splendor that we recognize and often experience as beauty—veritatis splendor. For my children to accept what I teach them, to be moved by it, they have to see it, which means that it has to create its own opening in them, a wound of sorts, that lays claim to them and elicits recognition, acknowledgment, and consent from the inside out.
I am not making the democratic point that consent confers authority but rather the ontological point that authority elicits consent, or better still, that consent—con-sentire, a “thinking with”—is at once this showing forth and my own act in yielding to it. In eliciting consent, the splendor of truth does not compel extrinsically by force but obliges by virtue of its own self-evidence; in recognizing and consenting to it, I yield to this evidence as authoritative in an act of willing surrender. This is true of every act of obedience, insofar as it is not just something that happens, but something that we do.
A Crisis of Truth
As I have stated previously in Touchstone (“Nothingness Rules,” July/August 2023), authority in the ontological sense is the foundation of every properly political community and the precondition for a politics that is anything other than civil war conducted by other means, because the acknowledgment of authority is the recognition that there is a true and binding order of things to which we all belong and in which we all participate. Authority rests on a real order of truth beyond itself. Truth—reality—is the basis of authority. Where there is no acknowledgment of truth, there can be no authority; where there is no authority, there can be no real political community. For where there is no common truth, there can be no common world. Where there is no common world, there can be no common good. And where there is no common good, it becomes necessary, as Hobbes said, “to erect a common power to keep [men] in awe.”
But the problem with the Hobbesian view is that the real efficacy of law, its capacity to bind, is not derived from power in this sense, but from authority. The law obliges, and we generally follow it without the threat of coercive force, because we recognize in it a true and just order that elicits our obedience. In a Hobbesian world of power relations only, a world without truth and therefore without authority, the law can compel obedience only as far as the state or its corporate proxies can extend their power of coercion. Otherwise, I have no reason to obey it, which is the position our society now seems to find itself in. In the absence of authority and its capacity to elicit this internal obligation, coercive power, and the fear occasioned by the threat of its exercise, must be extended infinitely in all directions, which is also the position our society now seems to find itself in. This is inevitably totalitarian, and it occurs not because authority has become absolute, but because it has been abolished.
We can now begin to see what the modern crisis of authority really amounts to. There are, as I noted, many faces to this crisis. But beneath the surface features and the pervasive sense of meaninglessness they reflect, there lurks the deeper and greater danger that we are losing our collective grip on the reality of our common world. The crisis of authority is a crisis of truth, a failure to recognize any longer the common reality undergirding our humanity, the reality that makes political society—and indeed ordinary bonds of human solidarity—possible.
Now, dehumanization is nothing new. The atrocities of the last century are without parallel in their barbarity, though we have seen things—such as Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Jews—that rival them. The human capacity for cruelty is apparently boundless, and it is astonishing that the most depraved brutality can fail to elicit even basic human sympathy. I do not wish to minimize this, nor am I attempting to draw a hyperbolic comparison when I say that there seems to be something qualitatively different about our present predicament—something colder, perhaps, more clinical or antiseptic.
The concept of de-humanization is privative; it presupposes some kind of human norm, at least the residue of a human nature, whose defilement we can still recognize. But what becomes of society when this residuum of human nature becomes unintelligible? When we can no longer recognize defilement? What sort of reaction should we expect then? (How are we reacting now to the systematic, “scientific” mutilation of a generation of children?) The American experiment looks increasingly like an experiment in whether it is possible to sustain a society with nothing more in common than a common antipathy to reality—and the experiment is failing.
A Metaphysical Revolution
This failing experiment has been a long time in the making. Its roots can be traced to the origins of our liberal and technological society, which together amount to a two-pronged attack on authority and its metaphysical foundations. Modern science commences in what Galileo approvingly called a “rape on the senses,” negating or setting aside the world as it presents itself to our experience, which is necessarily a world of meaning, for the sake of the “real world,” the measurable and manipulable world of matter and motion lying behind it. The meaningful world that appears to us is then relegated to the realm of “mere appearance,” where it no longer possesses the authority to elicit our consent or provide a criterion for measuring the adequacy of our theories about it. There is no need to “save the appearances” when appearances are inherently deceptive.
It was only a matter of time before these mere appearances would be regarded as masks for the exercise of power. Meanwhile, the so-called real world, the world reduced to a collection of dumb, mute, manipulable stuff lurking behind these deceptive appearances, is itself reconceived in terms of power—of force, in a term common to both modern politics and modern physics—with our knowledge of it measured by the various kinds of control we are able to exercise over it. This is the meaning of the famous Baconian equations of truth and utility, knowledge and power, which now determine what it means for us to think.
All of this represents a subtle but far-reaching inversion of “the metaphysics of being,” which for Del Noce underlies the reality of authority. Whereas in the older view, “what is” provided the measure and limit for what was possible, today, “what we can do” has become the measure and definition of what is, which is another way of saying that reality is measured by the limits of human power, which perpetually transgresses them.
If scientific and technological order presents one face of this metaphysical revolution, liberal political order, which presupposes and perpetuates this view of things, presents another, premising the real world on an unreal world and making possibility or power the fundamental unity of reality. Liberalism is so unlikely and fantastic, as John Milbank observes, because it invents a wholly artificial human being that has never actually existed—that is conceived in abstraction from his gender, birth, associations, and beliefs and that is equally indifferent to whether he is a creature of God, a rational animal, an accident of evolution, or a puddle of genes—and then imagines that we are all instances of such a species. Such an individual is not only asocial, he says, but a-psychological: his soul—if he still has one—is unspecified in every way. To this blank entity one attaches rights, little penumbras of indeterminate power or possibility, which it is the state’s purpose to protect.
The effect of this is to transform the given antecedent realities of God, nature, the family, the moral law, and history—realities that define us and constitute the actual world into which we are born and in which we live, move, and have our being—into possible objects of choice. The state then exists to protect us from the prior claims of these realities and their capacity to define us prior to our choosing, which insinuates the state as mediator into the heart of all human relationships. The state becomes absolute in the name of freedom, its power and scope only growing with the invention or discovery of each new right.
The Domination of “Identity”
It was inevitable that the political impetus and the technological capacity for self-definition, theoretically united at the metaphysical origins of modern social and political order, would eventually fuse in practice. Perhaps it was just as inevitable that these forces would converge at the point where reality most threatens to define us in advance: our embodied human nature as men and women, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. In place of these given, universal realities, there now stands the concept of “identity,” which dominates our politics and functions above all as a “conversation stopper,” a limit beyond which all judgment, rational adjudication, or even speech is deemed violent and illegitimate.
But the concept of identity, especially in the sphere of sex and gender, varies according to political need and rhetorical context. It denotes both the deterministic givenness of a meaningless mechanistic order, the realm of mere “biology,” and the capacity for free self-expression, inviting and indeed necessitating technological intervention and control of the biological mechanism to bring it within the sphere of freedom and to extend the controlling power of the disembodied self into the mechanical realm. And this brave new world of fluid genders and functionalist families can only be brought into being through an ever-expanding regime of bioengineering.
By a combination of biotechnical power and tortured legal reasoning, phenomena that are one and undivided in reality are redefined on the basis of abstractions. What we can do, or think we can do, becomes the measure of what is. We would never have imagined that a man might “really” be a woman if we didn’t also imagine that we could transform him into one by biotechnical means. As a result, we no longer are men and women but rather identify as men and women, superimposing our felt identities back onto a meaningless “biological” substrate from which those identities have been artificially extracted.
The Technologically Contrived Family
The family is similarly redefined on the basis of our capacity to intervene, disaggregate, reassemble, and redistribute different aspects of the undivided acts of procreation among various combinations of people. So the “natural family,” an idea that makes no division in human inheritance between its physical, cultural, historical, and educational dimensions, is bifurcated into “biological” and “legal” aspects, until the former is eventually subsumed by the latter. “Kinship,” another idea that expresses familial relations in their fullness across generations, is replaced by “genetic connections” and similar notions that disguise the fact that it is not two genomes but two persons, two histories, and two lineages that are materially bound together by this connection.
The abstract thus becomes the basis of the concrete, the possible the basis of the real. It is as if “genetic material” were the “really real,” the meaningless material substrate upon which culture and law merely supervened, rather than an abstraction from the actual human context in which these transactions take place and the actual human beings whose “genetic material” it is and between whom it is exchanged. It is like saying that conception is what “really” happens under a microscope, and sometimes it also happens to take place inside a woman’s body, a prospect, under the impetus of this logic, that is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Motherhood” and “fatherhood” are undivided human realities. Nursing a child, after all, is not merely a biological act, or caregiving function, or a social construct. It is an undivided human act with numerous aspects that can be distinguished in thought. Our philosophical ancestors knew better than to confuse a distinction in thought with a division in being. But on this bifurcated view of reality, the undivided realities that come first in experience and in time are reconceived abstractly as “biological, dual-gendered parenthood.”
Motherhood is disaggregated, both in practice and in thought, into the technologically contrived functions of “gamete donor,” “gestational carrier,” and “caretaker,” and fatherhood is reduced to a “supplier of genetic material” before the excluded “human” elements are superimposed back onto the newly contrived reality, which is now the archetype by which the original will be defined and judged. The fragmentation gives rise to even more Orwellian descriptions even further removed from reality, such as the distinction—my favorite of the genre—between the “medically infertile” and the “structurally infertile.”
Insulating Law from Reality
The unreality of our technological reasoning is mirrored in our legal reasoning, especially in landmark cases like Obergefell and Bostock, which deploy equal protection and substantive due process as a kind of “universal acid” to dissolve in law distinctions and differences that matter in reality for the purpose of manufacturing legal sameness between things that are different—like the “medically infertile” and the “structurally infertile.” After all, the difference between, say, being a man (and not a woman) and being a mother (and not a father) is not principally a difference of function but a difference of kind—a difference in what things are. To deny that such differences matter is to say that what things are—reality, in other words—does not matter, and that so-called sortal properties, like being a man (and not a woman) or being a father (and not a mother), can make no cognizable difference in the eyes of the law.
But if traditional, pre-theoretical terms like mother and father are insufficiently “precise” to describe the complex realities of “alternative family structures”—a complexity imposed by various combinations of tragedy and technology—that is because they are substantially different realities. And the only way to assert that both sets of “procreators” are “similarly situated” is to annihilate what makes them different, namely, reality itself.
Thus insulating the law from any given order of reality, our technological reasoning and legal reasoning conspire to reconstitute nature as a blank canvas devoid of meaning. Once nature is reduced to “the biological” and the technological exception becomes the archetypal norm, the mere attempt to name reality—to say that men and women are real, for example, or that the ordinary pre-ideological recognition of them that is the basis of our common life and language is trustworthy and true—can be dismissed as “stereotyping” and decried as an ideological attempt to “establish” an arbitrary norm, an argument that is all the more successful if it can be associated with the irrational prejudices of religion. This is more or less the winning argument of Bostock.
The Disappearance of the Father
Here Del Noce’s idea that the eclipse of authority can be summed up in “the disappearance of the idea of the Father” takes on added meaning beyond even his prophetic foresight. The disappearance of the Father does not only refer to the “death of God,” as if that were not serious enough, or to the demise of the family as a sociological entity, though this, too, portends dire societal consequences. Rather this attempt at patricide is tantamount to the annihilation of the common origin at the base of our common humanity and our common world, at once ontological and historical, and a renunciation of our capacity to reason together about it—which is what the war on pronouns really is.
The disappearance of the Father means that our eyes are lying, that neither our parents nor we are who we seem to be. The disappearance of the Father is the disappearance of that experience through which we are first admitted into a world held in common, the most universal and mundane of human experiences, the experience of being a son or a daughter. This disappearance thus excludes from the outset the possibility of receiving a tradition of human wisdom—now an unintelligible and obsolete category—and a culture that humanizes us, that “makes us grow,” by forming us in the wisdom of our fathers. For fathers and mothers, as Del Noce points out, are true “authors” in a sense that is at once physical, cultural, and educational—that is, human. For the undivided human beings that we truly are, the physical womb of the mother is spiritual; the spiritual womb of family and culture is physical. Human culture is natural, in other words, and human nature is cultural, or at least it was.
To negate all this so that we may become our own origin and re-create ourselves—an achievement that my colleague Margaret McCarthy likens to committing suicide without dying—is to negate the very principle of reality. Inscribing our patricide and the abolition of man and woman into law compels each of us to become the author of ourselves while remaining illiterate, because you cannot redefine human nature for just one person. And it compels each of us to affirm as true what we know to be false, to deny the evidence of our lying eyes, and to renounce the authority of a pre-theoretical knowledge that we drink in, quite literally, with our mother’s milk.
The Indestructible Foundation
This rebellion against reality is the logical outworking of the deepest premises of our culture—which is why the crisis of authority in our politics and our society is not just a political and social crisis, but a metaphysical and religious one. And yet the speed and ferocity of its triumph seems to have taken everyone by surprise, not least the Supreme Court, which finds itself in the embarrassing position of having asserted in Obergefell that sexual orientation is “immutable,” only to discover in Bostock that sexual and gender identity apparently are not. But the Court is not alone in its bewilderment; the list is long of those who never saw this coming.
That we have been caught so unawares by events of the last decade suggests once again that despite the continuity between the original premises of modern civilization and its present condition, this latest development in the rebellion against being presents us with something qualitatively different and new. It has always been a question for liberalism whether politics need bear any relation to reality. We are now confronted with the question of whether there is an order of reality that politics might relate to. All of the most contentious arguments in our culture are proxy arguments for this question, which our most “authoritative” form of reason, natural or now artificial, will not permit us to ask.
I have a friend who describes himself as a hopeless optimist because he believes things always can—and will—get worse. I prefer to think of myself as a hopeful pessimist. I am pessimistic because I simply do not know how a society can recover from answering “no” to this question, and not just because this answer, once codified, requires violent destruction of the whole edifice of law, culture, morality, and language built up over centuries on the foundation of our shared world and our common nature. It is rather that negation of the principle of reality leaves nothing—or as I suggested in “Nothingness Rules,” leaves only the Nothing—upon which to try to reason our way back and rebuild from the ruins.
Great deeds take time to be felt and heard, as Nietzsche recognized. When a stone is dropped in the middle of a pond, it takes time for the rippling waves to reach the banks. Perhaps we’ve already destroyed our civilization, and we just don’t know it yet. Time will tell. While we wait, we work, we think, we speak, we fight, we suffer, and we pray.
But I remain hopeful despite my pessimism because the destruction of a civilization, if it should come to that, and the destruction of the reality upon which all civilization depends are not the same thing. This is why I think Arendt is wrong to say that authority has vanished from the modern world. Authority can be given; it can be recognized; it can be lost or perhaps even forfeited, but it cannot be created or destroyed, at least not by us. Because the reality it represents, which we did not create, compels our assent even in our attempts to deny it. It is the indestructible foundation of our very attempts to destroy it. This is a comforting thought at a time when even the church often seems bent on renouncing its authority.
God & Grammar
I have always held, and I think that the tradition is on my side here, that there are ultimately no real atheists, no real nihilists, not even any real Darwinians, because none of us are capable of following the logic of meaninglessness through to its conclusion. Our possibilities are limited by reality, however elastic the limits may be. We can never fully elude its authority and live as if this nihilism were true. And because we cannot, we do not, although this hasn’t stopped us from trying.
Succeeding would require an impossible escape to an Archimedean point outside the ordered reality that is creation. To renounce fully the authority of truth and goodness, their built-in claim upon our thoughts and actions, would be to deprive thought and action of their reason, reducing the former to an incomprehensible word salad and the latter to an unintelligible spasm. A man who did this, Aristotle tells us, would be no better than a vegetable. Not even the education-industrial complex, big tech, and the media have succeeded in stupefying us to this degree.
Aristotle also tells us that “being is said in many ways.” He does not just mean by this that the word “being” has many senses, but rather that the order of reality and the reality of order manifests itself in logos, in the structure of thought and speech. We hear an echo of this, perhaps, in the words of Nietzsche, who said, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” To really wage war on the authority of the Father, the war on pronouns would have to reduce every part of speech to a kind of inarticulate grunting. Even woke activists droning on in an endless feedback loop of ideological muzak, impervious to reason, continue to use nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, to predicate qualities and activities of real things that cannot both be and not be what they are at the same time. Even our nonsense, conceived in a frantic attempt to escape the given order, continues to manifest that order.
While we face an enormous fight to recover this order and rediscover its lost authority, and while we may have to wait for this fateful rebellion to run its course, reality is on our side. In the meantime, we hope for the grace to remain on the side of reality, to accept the evidence of our lying eyes and the wisdom to call things by their proper names. •
This article is adapted from his talk given at the 2023 Touchstone conference, The Crisis of Authority
Michael Hanby is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of two books and numerous essays and, as part of the movement to renew Catholic education, has co-authored the curricula for two schools.
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36.4—Jul/Aug 2023
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