we often understand by authority… which is to say,
we use authority to help us understand our experiences…
we might use god or the bible or Aristotle or capitalism
or communism…all of which is authority…
and which is used to explain who we are and what
is our purpose…
but is authority really an good means to use when
understanding? for example, we have the authority of
the bible…and many still proclaim its priority in leading
our lives… but, but think about the bible…the new testament
was written 2000 years ago and the old testament is much older…the
old testament was written by rural, farmers and sheep herders…
now my life today has nothing to do with rural farming…
how can the authority of the bible explain our modern age?
it was written for a rural, farming community… not our modern age
of cars and the industrial revolution and Hiroshima and Auschwitz…
I used to love this show called “connections” which followed
connections from one event to another event…
these connections were often obsure and took many different paths…
but some events and experiences are so far apart as to defy
any attempts to make a connection…and the authority of the bible
is so far apart from my experiences that to be useless…
so for me to use authority to understand my life is to
use very tenuous connections to connect my life to
said authority……. for example, to use Aristotle to understand
my life is a rather tenuous connection…… it might work if
I understand that Aristotle wrote for a Greek society over 2500 years ago…
context is everything… and context means experience……
so for me to use authority is to understand that authority
in context for me…even to use, say Descartes as an authority
is to know/understand that Descartes wrote over 300 years ago in a totally
different environment…….
so which authority should I use then? Marx or Freud or Adam Smith or Nietzsche?
or should I use some ism or ideology as authority? Capitalism or communism or
fascism or democracy? which recent authority should I use? as a modern man,
I can see the failure of the ism’s and ideologies of today…when the history books
are written about today, they will comment on the total collapse of our current
ism’s and ideologies………they, ism’s and ideologies, have failed because they are
about context and experiences which don’t match our current situation…
in other words, our ism’s and ideologies are about context and experiences
that no longer exist today…for example, capitalism has clearly failed…
how can we use that authority to base our lives upon if it is a failure…
we cannot depend upon authority because our current situation
has no other precedent… we cannot look to the past for solutions
because the past has no examples of our current situation…
we are facing problems stemming from the industrial revolution
that have never existed before… and so the past or authority won’t
solve our problems because the problems didn’t exist in the past…
the solution or solutions must come from the context/experience
of our times and not from authority……………
for example, biblical examples like, “be fruitful and multiply”
are not only no longer possible, but downright dangerous for
us… given our current situation…… we must find another solution
besides “be fruitful and multiply”…in the context of our times,
one of the overwhelming problems is overpopulation and that leads
to massive pollution and massive use of resources and the extinction of
species that we need in order for us to survive…
but ism’s like capitalism lead us to forsake intelligent solutions
in the name of the authority of the past…….
holding to authority like capitalism or the bible leads us to
take actions that endanger our generation and generations after us…
so what is the solution? learn to forsake those authorities
that we are taught like the biases and myths and prejudices
and superstitions of our childhood…
Kropotkin