Prompt: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL

The well-being of a society is enhanced when many of its people question authority.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.

If people do not question authority, then the well-being of society suffers. 

~the well being of society suffers = the well being of society is enhanced

/: ~people do not question authority = people question authority

Trust is an important component of relationships.

Authority as title or legitimization of the fact

Facts and trust

In his essay “Was ist Aufklärung?”, the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant suggests that the enlightenment can be thought of as a way out of one’s self-imposed immaturity.  There are many ways in which this suggestion could be understood as meaningful.  I will argue that immaturity should be understand as the imposition of falsely irreconcilable either/or dilemmas.  One such dilemma is found in the idea maintained by the herd that when people question authority, the society’s health is encouraged and promoted.  This is based on the faulty assumption that society is composed of individual parts, some parts authority and some parts subordinate.  In what follows, I will consider a well-known experiment in developmental psychology and suggest a better way to understand society, concluding with a consideration of the free-speech movement, and why both questioning and being questioned by members of the group is conducive to the health of the whole.

According to most developmental psychologists, the establishment of healthy relationships begins in childhood with the bond between mother and child.  In one experimental condition, called the still face paradigm, mothers are instructed to engage a toddler in face-to-face cooperative play and joint attention.  During this period of the experiment, both mother and child engage one another through playful, loving facial and hand gestures.  After 60 seconds of engaging in the cooperative play with the toddler, the mother is instructed to abruptly turn her face away, returning back only to face the child with a completely still expression on her face.  In most experimental conditions, the toddler will attempt to reengage the mother, making  provocative facial expressions, and pointing to objects in the environment in order to reengage the mother in joint attention.  After noticing the unresponsiveness, the child begins to demonstrate behaviorally signs of distress, eventually even losing control of posture.  The mother, of course, is always instructed to return her loving expressions during the distressing moment.  What mother couldn’t?  This would normally conclude the experiment.  But, for our thought experiment, what can we take away about from this scenario?  What this demonstrates for most developmental scientists is the close and sensitive bond between mother and child.  I argue that society ought to be thought of in a similar way, as tightly coupled, affectively sensitive bonds between members of a group.  This bond is what we normally call, trust. 

Somewhat differently, however, adults in society are linguistically sophisticated, make claims about the factual nature of the world, and attempt to verify and dispute these claims about the world with and sometimes despite one another.  The nature of the legitimization of our claims about the world, how we go about verifying them, is almost always in a constant state of flux.  Some claim that the universe is expanding, and others believe in an afterlife.  But notice here that it is not so much the content of the claims that are changing so much as our ways of verifying our claims to truth.  In other words, our tools for reengaging one another, especially when the basic contents of our joint attentions in our trusts are in dispute, are shifting and changing.  One only has to remind oneself of the new technologies that have appeared on the scene of human history—the printing press for the written word, the telescope for the stars, the telephone for the spoken voice, the X-ray for our bones, the internet for communication, and now the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine for the brain—in order to see that our tools for verifying our claims continue to shift and change.  What would happen, then, if this constant state of flux, the negotiation to claims for legitimization, never ended in a trust between the participants? 

It is obvious that in a society whose many members question authority, there can be no return to the well-being of that close state of trust demonstrated between mother and child prior to the still face.  But, on the other hand, people ought to be able to question authority, to turn on their still face in the case of illegitimate claims to be an authority.  What we have here is one important paradox found in the free speech movement.  So the reasoning goes, I ought to be granted the authority to speak my mind; yet, at the same time, if my so called free speech is corrosive to the well being of the  group, then ought not the group limit my free speech?  The resolution of this quandary comes about if we reconsider the nature of authority.  Authority, it was assumed, was the whole of the group, the content of the claims to truth.  But, if we understood authority as the ways in which we go about reengaging one another in our mutual trusts, we see that our theory is not being doubted, only our ways of going about verifying our claim are disputed.  So, instead of questioning one another, we question our ways of verifying our claims to truth.  And in this way, members of the group are still engaged in a trust, the trust that at bottom we share a closely coupled, and affectively sensitive world with one another as both questioned and questioner. 

(PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ON ANOTHER BLOG)