Power Corrupted

The Fate of Authority When Society Says No to Reality
by Michael Hanby

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.

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. This article is adapted from his talk given at the 2022 Touchstone conference, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Print &
Online Subscription

Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!

Online
Subscription

Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!

Give a Gift Subscription

bulk subscriptions

Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.

Transactions will be processed on a secure server.

more on conference talk from the online archives

36.4—Jul/Aug 2023

Nothingness Rules

Our Political Void & the Disintegration of Truth by Michael Hanby