Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations
“Kingwell’s book is not meant to provide readers with easy answers for mending our nation’s fractured politics.”
Mark Kingwell is a gifted, multi-book author, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. A master of words who is well-versed in philosophy, political science, sociology, and psychology, he writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road. Though this is a serious book requiring thoughtful reading, Kingwell’s wit will make readers laugh out loud at him and at themselves.
Unlike many opinion pieces in these days of political unrest, Kingwell’s book is not meant to provide readers with easy answers for mending our nation’s fractured politics. It is about practicing a process of enlightenment, not in seeking answers. His goal is to make us want to dig down and think deeply about how we ingest, digest, and discharge news and information and how we can learn to think more effectively to narrow the great divide between political extremes.
This philosophical memoir is divided into five meditations with subsections: Before It Questions You; Trust No One; No, They Don’t Know Either; But Not Your Mother; and These Are Not the Droids You’re Looking For. The titles of meditations and subsections are meant only as guides to the subject matter, as Kingwell often wanders off the discourse trail with illustrative musings about his life and the odd and wondrous place we call our world. Unlike many authors, he uses statistics judiciously and only to make a point. The book is well annotated, but, because of the abundance of material, would greatly benefit from an index.
Kingwell examines trust and authority through the lens of film, TV, cartoons, books, art, science fiction, history, and his formative personal experiences to drive home his theme: Only when we can trust both ourselves and those in authority will we be able to shape a society that works for us all. He examines, among a multitude of subjects, how academia, the media, social media, organized religion, political ideology, science, public health policy, education, and artificial intelligence all contribute to our current dearth of trust in authority and the steps we might take to regain our faith in it.
The author unmasks the dangers of our misguided, excessive use of the word “stupid” as a descriptor of people who don’t think as we do by examining its roots and the self-serving need we have to slap labels on each other. He points out how foundational aspects of our culture—education, governmental bodies, news, social media, advertising, and our public role models—have unconsciously (or, worse, sometimes consciously) conspired to not only make us more stupid but encourage us to take pride in free-wheeling name calling. He nails it when describing our “addiction to conviction” or doxaholism, and the frisson of righteous pleasure we feel when calling out others’ wrongness and perceived stupidity. He also explores Mom and Dad as cultural archetypes and in-the-flesh examples of authority figures, both of which shape our trust in authority.
Kingwell’s major focus is teaching us how to use authority judiciously and reason conscientiously, with the goal of making the world a better place for everyone. His premise is the credo of LAPD detective Harry Bosch in the police procedural television series Bosch, that “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” Kingwell’s goal is for us to ditch our “us/them” mentality and replace it with a view of universal vulnerability to suffering. Then, and only then, he maintains, will we feel compassion for others. He proposes that we build a “commitment to the virtues of civility, compassion, curiosity and humility” because he is a firm believer that “reasonable people can disagree” by finding shared values beyond and in spite of whatever they fail to see eye to eye on.
He maintains that “unless we approach difference with a sense that there is something between us, some shared sense of what makes sense and what doesn’t, there is no ground to be gained.” His theory is that “disagreement needs a background of agreement to be meaningful at all.” Whatever the subject, in order to keep all of us from sinking the ship we call planet Earth, we must always hold sacred our shared humanity.
Kingwell describes how we easily slip into poor thinking habits, as we do with other addictions, and the steps needed to break them by taking a full and honest inventory of ourselves, then switching gears to be less of a wisenheimer with our enemies and more interested in wisening up ourselves. The goal is to shed the contempt and disdain we have for our perceived opponents and eschew thinking in rigid terms such as wrong/right, good/bad, and smart/stupid. He takes special pains to point out that in order to trust authority and ourselves, we must give up the delicious pleasure we feel in putting others down to pump ourselves up as well as the vapid, lazy reliance of having chosen others do the thinking for us.
Other changes he advises us to make to develop healthy trust and build a just world include developing a clear, positive vision of universal community where all are equal, seeking facts rather than opinions, embracing the process of knowing through curiosity a, questioning, and verification, holding people accountable for their opinions by asking them “How do you know that?” instead of trying to battle against their falsehoods, having self-compassion and apologizing for our mistakes while forgiving others for theirs, and being passionate seekers of truth and justice.
Kingwell ends Question Authority by reminding us of the joys of self-knowledge, the comfort and security of self-validation, the peacefulness that comes from shucking defensiveness, the pride in being a seeker of justice, the enlightenment of rationality and reason, and how being our best selves together feels better than being our self-righteous selves alone.