Steve_Bamlett_blog

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

Authority is I suppose the right of the maker of something, an author in fact, to descriptively name and evaluate that thing they made. Milton wrote a great and long poem, Paradise Lost, though to show that even God gets his creation wrong and that other perspectives, especially equally hubristic ones like Satan, sort of take over unless you become retributive, as God in that poem definitely does. Even mitigated by Christ, such an attempt at authority always means the rest of you must suffer pain and mortality, women more than men, if God is to remain the one who is always ‘right’. God makes up the individual consciousness of the population of Twitter these days, or at least some participants so think themselves. Lol.

But joking aside, authority is in capitalist society nearly always an adjunct of ownership claims, and this genesis is caught in the history of copyright. The means that justify it are so endemic to capitalist society I freely see why real authors, Dickens being the nearest example to use without unintended offence, spend so long defending copyright as their access to an income, often inflated in some cases, as with Dickens.

So why should I claim authority in anything. I have experience that should validate my voice, in reading, social work and teaching, but this really only matters if it makes that experience meaningful to others. And, anyway, authority like this without power to implement one’s words will always be stymied by misinterpretation and deliberate opposition to those words. Mainly people want to be ‘right’, I think, to convince themselves they have a right to power or its appearance. In the latter case we call it intellectual vanity although since Trump & Farage, it is the populist non-intellectual variety that is uppermost in circles of power.

To want authority is to want control in fact and no-one is immune from such desire, sometimes for good, but more often (especially if the control is over-extended in time or space) not for good of any kind. Auden wrote a poem about the desires of a dictator that starts:

Perfection of a kind was what he was after ( I we quote from memory – probably incorrectly). Lol.

To want a voice is different. It is an essential of political democracy but we too often confuse speaking with a refusal to listen to other voices, even those contesting our egoistic impulses in our own mental system.

So, do I have authority? No! Do I act as if I think I had? Yes. That is not a bad thing provided you know when to let go of a thing that needs its freedom to develop in its own way for good or ill (we go back here then to Adam & Even in Milton’s garden of Eden). It really is a psychosocial conundrum, this thing of getting things right but a necessary conundrum. To rely on authority, or to vacate all space for one authoritative voice, either your own or another’s (perhaps that of a dictator), is to give up on oneself and the world.

Love

Steve