Conviction and Authority

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

This video is something I ran into on my way to setting up the links and logistics of this blog on day-one, its message lines up nicely with some of what I brought up earlier so I thought I'd bring it into the discussion.
-D.A.


When I was in high school, my good friend Ian and I had a rule. The phrase "but I dunno" was disallowed. While exceptions could be made for designating an uncertain level of precision if the question was on the level of "What time of day did you leave the house?", we realized that we would frequently expound for minutes (and occasionally hours) on deep matters of politics, philosophy, social commentary and belief only to shoot ourselves in the foot at the last moment by undermining the authority of our statements and give ourselves a cowardly loophole to not defend ourselves if proven wrong forced us to take a stand.

If you think about it, it's rather pathetic. It's not that we don't have opinions anymore. No, one only has to turn on the radio to hear a whole host of pundits and talk-show hosts, to go online and find thousands of blogs similar to this one, and even go to coffee shops or wait in line at a theater to hear how one person is convinced that they could run the word better if only everyone else understood what they did. But there's something else missing, too. As we can see, it's not that we don't have opinions. It's that our opinions don't really matter.

To quote one writer that I respect, "Contrary to our popular self-conception, we are not a culture that values learning. We are a culture that values opinion, and opinion as entertainment..." Opinion in the dominant culture of public discourse is more an avenue of entertainment than it is of actual engagement. We have opinions for everything, but if were were to be honest with ourselves we'd have to admit that we so rarely act on them.

Talk, as they say, is cheap.

Now it's at this point I'd like to return to that video. I liked what the poem had to say at all points, except for the final couplet. This is a minor quibble, but I'd like to bring it up nonetheless. I would suggest that there is a difference between speaking with conviction and speaking with authority.

I am all for speaking with conviction as frequently as possible, but this does not make you authoritative. Remember, everyone has those opinions. The shame in it is not that we have them, it's that we don't hold ourselves to any standard in sharing them with consequences. It is therefore so easy to whine about how the system (any system) is broken, but we so rarely hold ourselves responsible for attempting to fix it. Authority, on the other hand, would be to correctly identify the problem and possibly to demonstrate the power to fix it, or at least address it.

Opinions are intrinsically selfish, limited in scope, and very subjective if not outright relative. Convictions are perhaps the elevation of those opinions to the point where we are willing to take a stand for them, and defend them as applying to more than just our own perceptions, but to something larger.
Authority is that circumstance where the conviction is proven true and is shown to be applicable to all of us, and most importantly, that we must face it and conform it in one way or another.

One final point. As one engages with these ideas, as one attempts to scale further along the spectrum from superficial opinion to appeal to authority, the public disdain and unpopularity of such a move is justly earned if they approached without humility. I do not think that it is the assertion that something is true that offends people so much, I think it's when people try to use that "truth" as a weapon to elevate themselves. However, the true appeal to authority should be one which is paradoxically self-less, as it ought to admit to ourselves and others that we have very little influence over the reality of the situation. We are admitting to something larger than ourselves. And that should humble us, not puff us up.

And so I would draw this conclusion: we all ought to speak with conviction, bravely and definitively to the best of our ability, but always do so humbly, realizing that by doing so we are also acknowledging an authority to which we will all be measured.