I have a friend who is a wonderful writer, well published, and a teacher. I took her workshop recently and she said at the end, “the two qualities that I think most writers need are vulnerability and authority.”
Authority, authorship, author. These are lofty sounding words, like creativity, creation, creator. They imply the origination of an idea, as if, somehow, ideas are separate from the eternal flow of life, of consciousness, of something greater than ourselves. Higher powers and omniscient beings aside, we mere humans are probably better seen more as curators or collagers of concepts. I find it very conceited to think that anything we think is truly original, except in the particular context that we place it.
I have been helping my son with his college applications, and we are working on his essays. This is a very particular genre, where you’re aiming (so our college counselors tell us), through not just the essays (of which there are more than one), but the grades, the test scores, the extracurriculars, a cohesive story about the applicant, what kind of character they have, what their potential is.
Enter AI. Chat GPT. How tempting it is to lean on this tool, as we are looking at 13 different institutions, and each one needs its own little tweaks. As of right now, he doesn’t want to use it. He hasn’t registered, and even though I’ve offered (and okay, I’ve done some samples, because I am totally using it in my day job for repetitive non-creative technical and business writing, yahooo! Frees my brain to do more of this), he wants to be the author of his own college essays. He’s really a terrific kid, I must say. So blessed. He should be allowed to think he is original, at least for now.
Anyhow, in my ongoing list of considering human values, I have mixed loyalty to authorship, both my own, and of others. I question Shakespeare’s authorship. I question the Bible’s authority. I generally question authority, but, at the same time, I respect it, and realize that we all need to recognize when someone has crafted a collection of ideas in such an elegant way that they deserve special credit, like the authors of the U.S. Constitution, or Steven Pinker, or Ursula K. LeGuin.
It might be that some of my personal self expression deserves some credit for being an authority on something. I’ve written plays that are novel. I did get a PhD in organizational communication, so I’m kind of an expert on that, although in the end I’m not sure that the field is actually very important after all, it seems esoteric and kind of under-theorized to have a lot of practical application.
And then, there is the issue of social and political hierarchy, and following authority for authority’s sake. This is perhaps the only way to understand why anyone would follow he who should not be named, because, well, because the crowd is sometimes blind about who they give authority to. Gustav LeBon already told us that, I’m afraid.
Jonathan Haidt researches moral philosophy, and one of his five core variables, a kind of big five test for morality vs. the big five test for personality, is authority. He explains how authority is part of what splits the right from the left, and that our inability to balance respect for authority with questioning of authority is part of what’s ripping our country apart. He has helped me understand it, but not yet to help me help to heal it.
So, I remain neutral myself on the importance of authority in my search for my own top core values. It’s too complex, too flawed, and in the reverse view, over-simplifed, to be a quality I’d want to build an enduring moral framework out of.
What do you think about authority?
Well, i would say the tension between authority and vulnerability is what drives good writing, especially personal nonfiction - it’s the basic cognitive dissonance between gaining knowledge enough to claim authority yet knowing you will never know everything - if a first-person writer doesn’t acknowledge some uncertainty about what they’re spouting, i find them less convincing. Like you, I don’t pay attention to authorities just because they’re famous or say they’re experts - I respond to genuine humility about a writer’s (or politician’s) place in the world.