Siggy touches on his post about Atheism 101 the simultaneous utility and flaw of definition use. The problem of definition is one of those epistemological headaches that wakes me in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. “If you replaced all the parts of a boat, is it still the same boat?!?!” I scream into the stars. My partner, roused from her slumber, cocks her eyebrow from the pillow, mumbling into the fabric “Who cares?”
Credible dictionaries choose to be descriptivist–which is to say, they simply describe the way words are used. Contrast prescriptivist, which claims “this is the way a word is supposed to be used.” Ultimately a language puritan will lose in their argument but for the simple fact that once a phrase catches on, people will continue to use it, and your dictionary will rapidly be out of touch if you don’t keep up. The utility in providing a definition is to aide communication, ensuring everyone knows what we’re supposedly talking about if I suggest we debate garbledina. Misunderstanding of what definition of garbledina we’re using in a debate is typically how an argument goes south.
Following descriptivist logic, I don’t actually mean to argue the way most people use the word “authoritarian” is wrong. Rather I have found another way the word is used in a book that technically wasn’t recommended to me by Marcus Ranum, but I ended up devouring it from start to finish anyway. It’s called The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. That link is a free PDF hosted by the author himself. I at least recommend reading the first few pages–you might get sucked in, in part because the book was written in the noughties but practically describes Trump’s rise to popularity even though it didn’t happen for another 10 years.
Let’s start with a statement, like “The Pope and Donald Trump are authoritarians.” Most people use it this way to mean they throw their weight around but don’t substantiate their arguments with pesky empirical things like evidence. You can have economic advisers speak until they’re blue in the face about the wall Trump claims he will build and how bloody asinine the idea is, he won’t care. Trump is right because Trump is great, Trump is great because Trump is right. Used this way, authoritarian approximately means “someone who claims authority illegitimately by force of character rather than through knowledge or experimentation.”
For example, we might say PZ Myers is probably an authority on zebrafish, but unless he goes around bullying other researchers, we probably would not say he is authoritarian. But because he has performed research and can even communicate (albeit with jargon) why he believes x idea is correct about zebrafish, we can not only grant him authority on subject x but also claim that his authority is legitimate. If I were to step up to the microphone and tell PZ I disagree, and that I’ve got a better study (but I refuse to link to it), and that PZ is a stinky peabrain and that his beard looks totally untrustworthy, I am also claiming authority. Empiricists in the audience would be rightly suspicious of my claim, but there are some in the audience who would–through a bombastic performance and a certain conviction of belief (no matter how absurd)–find that my authority is more legitimate, simply because PZ being the good scientist he is includes qualifiers like “usually, probably, sometimes,” while I’m blasting him with “PZ is always stinky, always wrong, always untrustworthy.”
Altemeyer describes in his work a number of characteristics that people persuaded by such a performance share in common: 1) A high degree of submission to established authorities; 2) High levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and 3) A high level of conventionalism. He acknowledges that many people use the word authoritarian to describe the bombastic, dishonest, intellectually bankrupt ringleaders, but explains that his model of the concept “authoritarianism” requires authoritarians to be the easily-persuaded followers, and not the fascistic cheetoes whipping them into a frenzy (those he calls “social dominators,” described by another set of equally abhorrent characteristics).
Perhaps what I like most about Altemeyer’s definition of “authoritarian” is that it addresses an argument I’ve made before about anti-Queer actions and organized religion. My opinion has been, for some years now, that even if we removed every religious organization and their adherents from society tomorrow, we would still have massive problems. I’m sure the Amazing Racist would be thrilled to hear that his opinions on rape are corroborated by at least one Catholic priest I’ve had the displeasure of meeting, and that if you played one of TAR’s videos alongside this priest’s sermons, you’d probably lose track of who was saying what because they blend seamlessly into one another. Both TAR and the priest would claim to rebuke the other, despite the similarity in both their opinion and in the rhetorical device those opinions are wrapped in–weight, anger, and energetic hand-talking–but they’re pushing the same odious ideas at the end of the day.
It did not follow from this observation (as the first of many such observations) that religion per se was the source of my many ails, although a correlation was not uncommon. A complete observation on who antagonizes me for my many intersections had to account for the fact that many secular individuals have been every bit as hostile as religious ones. Altemeyer gives me a hypothesis, one I could even theoretically test*: My antagonists are authoritarians, as in people scoring high in submission, conventionalism, and willingness to engage in violence–not necessarily just the religious.
Another way of putting it: Religion is sufficient to create an authoritarian; but it is not necessary.
Altemeyer does discuss that religion frequently plants the seeds of authoritarianism by emphasizing qualities such as unwavering faith, unity, unilateral respect for parents, and deference to “God” (whom is conveniently represented by priests). But, thankfully, he also discusses that these qualities have many ways to come about even without religion.
And thus I have my explanation, my word. Authoritarian. This makes much more sense to me than the arguments suggesting I ought to spurn the progressive Christians who do more for my rights than self-important dudebro atheists who decided they were smart because they got the god question right. My problem is authoritarians, who may be religious but aren’t always.
-Shiv
*Altemeyer has a fairly lengthy explanation for his methodology, which will probably require a few more re-reads before I’ve fully grasped it.
I love that you’ve taken up this topic – it touches on two of my favorite issues: authoritarianism and linguistic nihilism, and it carries a side-order of epistemological challenge that can be applied to the social sciences.
Altemeyer’s doing something I actually hate, but find interesting: he’s using a scoresheet of attributes as a diagnostic tool. That’s a very dangerous and foolhardy thing, but it’s pretty much all the social sciences have to offer (except where they rub up against neuroscience, biology, and philosophy) At least Altemeyer is doing it relatively honestly: “people who exhibit these behaviors tend to also exhibit these other behaviors” He’s already at risk for being turned into an authoritarianism index, and you know what happens next: some company will start ‘testing’ prospective new hires with Altemeyer’s index and only hire people who score as authoritarian followers for some jobs and authoritarian leaders for others. Ugh. And after that, we can look forward to evolutionary psychologists publishing papers about authoritarian behaviors being evolved into our genome since before we were flounders… I do think a lot of Altemeyer’s work is interesting and thought-provoking, problems aside.
Religion is sufficient to create an authoritarian; but it is not necessary
I like that.
When I was reading Altemeyer I kept thinking of a line from some book (which I can’t recall) in which a character was described as “a knife looking for a hand to wield it.” That’s how the authoritarians feel to me: they want a cause to be passionate and maybe even violent about – and it doesn’t matter to them, really, if it’s fundamentalist religion of some stripe, political anarchy, or racism. Authoritarians scare me. They should scare all of us.
can even communicate (albeit with jargon) why he believes x idea is correct about zebrafish
A piece of meta-conversational judo I like to use on authoritarians is to switch away from the subject they are being authoritarian about, and start asking them how they formed their beliefs on that subject. It’s a subtle way of introducing the question of whether they have supporting arguments for their belief or are simply believers. It can be quite fun when you hit someone who streams their opinions from Fox news, because they start to realize they have a problem when they are explaining that they really believe X because “Bill O’Reilly said so.” Then you move for the pyrhhonian infinite regress: “why do you believe Bill O’Reilly?” When I eventually start writing my dialectical kung fu series, I’ll have to remember to go into this one…
Somehow I doubt this would produce the cognitive dissonance you want them to experience. One of Altemeyer’s observations is that rejection of convincing evidence to maintain belief in spite of it is a point of pride in authoritarian value systems. Conviction is more important than truth, feelings are facts, consciousness begets reality–you get the idea. Authoritarians are well-practiced in compartmentalization, seemingly capable of holding completely contradictory ideas at the same time, because one is always put into storage before accessing the other. It seems difficult to actually get them to hold both ideas up at the same time and at least arrive to the conclusion that one of them must be wrong.
As they say, reality has an anti-conservative bias, so maintaining many of these beliefs means committing to a determination to reject reality. Subsequently, the reality based community might as well be speaking a different language. I don’t think any amount of rhetorical technique or logical structure to expose weaknesses in their reasoning will work. They reject reason as a model of thinking.
Siobhan, aren’t you unintentionally misquoting Colbert’s famous quip “[…] [r]eality has a well-known liberal bias” here?
Also, no mention of Adorno et al. (1950), “The Authoritarian Personality”? That’s where the definition of “authoritarian” as the follower rather than leader actually seems to come from in the first place, after all. Or at least the book may have popularised this definition. Or at least it is evidence that the definition has been around a long time and is not Altemeyer’s invention; instead, he cites the book as a source in “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” (1981).
By the way, I wonder how strongly committed to authorities and rejection of evidence conflicting with their faith typical authoritarians are. If they can be persuaded to believe anything by force of authority, no matter how evidently absurd and self-defeating, all we need is an authority they believe in to tell them, for example, that food is a conspiracy and the cause of their suffering and mortality, while breatharianism is the key to bliss and eternal life. Beat them with their own weapons (though this may be unethical), or reveal that they do not always prioritise faith before evidence.
I did not claim Altemeyer’s work was the first ever to use authoritarian this way, merely that his work was the first I discovered.
A bizarre question to ask. It comes off extremely passive-aggressive to me. If it is unintentional, I wouldn’t be able to answer the question, as either yes or no would imply intention. Regardless, as with the first answer in this comment, I encountered the anti-conservative version first and was unable to relocate where I discovered it. So I’m not sure what you’re going for in this comment. “Colbert sourced the mirror version.” ? Does that matter to anything I was trying to raise?
Siobhan, I thought you might have heard of the 1950 book before, or encountered it while engaging yourself with the subject, as it is not only a key work in this field, but famous in the social sciences in general. So it was simply a question that popped up in my mind.
I am sorry that my Colbert question came across as passive-aggressive. I assure you it was not intended this way. It was essentially a rhetorical question; I should have worded it as “I think you are …”. Again, his quip is so familiar and much-cited in left-leaning circles that I am surprised to hear that it was entirely unknown to you.
Maybe you understand better where I’m coming from now. My remarks and their phrasing seemed quite innocuous to me and they were not intended as anything but informative. I see I still have to work on my communication and avoiding assumptions, though.
No, I haven’t. I do have an extensive body of experience dealing with people who I now understand to be authoritarians, which is what sparked my interest when I started Altemeyer’s work. He was giving me vocabulary to describe my problem. Even the writers on this network make lots of “religion poisons erry’thing” arguments and it never quite struck me as a complete concept of who these dingbats were. I was observing common qualities that didn’t require religious adherence (despite the strong correlation), and this field of work is giving me better words to describe those observations.
The actual idea of authoritarianism is relatively new to me, because I’ve been led down this trail of anti-religion everything instead of a broader, more consistent analysis of how dingbats come to be dingbats. As I said, my prior familiarity with authoritarianism was concerning those speakers who try to persuade through force of character rather than logic or observation.
I will add Adorno et al. to my reading list since it is now clearer you were making a book recommendation.