Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we have exchanged the authorities we are supposed to appeal to. The Enlightenment was all about abandoning appeal to authority and replacing it with discourse. Instead we have replaced the clergy with scientists. Some would say this is for the better… because now we listen to professionals. Before we took as the authority people who believed in a fairy tale. To them, I would ask, if professionals are always the best authority, why did so many die at the hands of professionals in the twentieth century? They used to say it was 100 million, now with better records, the number is climbing closer to 200 million. Of course, people were oppressed to death before as well… but that was the point, to get away from appeal to authority in the first place, and stop the oppression.
Appeal to authority is when someone claims the mantle of authority and so debate is no longer acceptable. This was done before the Enlightenment all the time. It was a way to silence people who asked uncomfortable questions. Someone would ask, “Why must the world be flat?” To that they were harangued with appeals to authority. Because they say it is! Appeal to authority says that discourse is unacceptable because the authority has spoken. It is a means to silence dissent, stop innovation, insure group think and allow a people to go insane. This is why appeal to authority was discounted hundreds of years ago… in favor of discourse as the true authority. Because, if an authority cannot do combat in the arena of ideas, he or she is not an authority… but a huckster.
Today, led by new class progressives, the very people who should be defending the advances of the Enlightenment, have brought appeal to authority back into fashion. Not only is it chic, it has a whole new angle to manipulate people into silence, group think and insanity. The new and improved, will make you a prettier woman or a more hansom man, appeal to authority is backed by science! It is now no different than the math that allowed mankind to go to the Moon! You don’t have to think, scientists will now do it for you… for free! Just keep your pretty mouth shut, and accept whatever the “scientists” tell you, and everything will be okay. Well, it didn’t for that almost 200 million in the last century, but it probably will for us this time.
The singular example of today’s infatuation with appeal to authority is the global warming crowd. Discourse is not allowed nor questions or inconvineint facts, like the lack of correct predictions. The Catholic church, for example, has a rule that if a prophet is wrong one single time, he or she is not a prophet. Scientists have no such stringent requisite however… especially climate alarmists. Question not the authority, they are scientists. So far, climate alarmists are batting zero for thousands of predictions. Now, this level of accuracy is unacceptable in religious circles, but apparently is perfectly acceptable for “scientists.” Today, the authority doesn’t even have to have a single correct prediction under his belt, just, you know… science and stuff. It’s the consensus. They took a vote.
The most dangerous thing about appeal to authority is that it allows societies to go off the rails. The Mayan’s polluted their own drinking water with the bodies of their human sacrifices. I imagine someone thought, “Maybe putting rotting corpses in our drinking water might be what is making us sick?” But dared not say anything, the gods had spoken. All authority must be questioned, all decision of theirs must be debated, otherwise people end up drinking water polluted with rotting corpses. The more adamant the “authority” is that they be followed unquestioned, the more important it is to question them. Science is never settled, paradigms shift all the time, and so even scientists cannot be an authority we appeal to. Instead, listen, debate, think, sleep on it… then answer for yourself.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
