Legitimacy and the Politics of the Knowable (RLE Social Theory) by Roger Holmes

Author:Roger Holmes [Holmes, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138979703
Google: eleaDAEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-10-17T05:00:33+00:00

SCIENCE AND THE IRRELEVANCE OF AUTHORITY

Any discussion of ‘authority’ is a discussion of the invisible powerful. The authority of principle is the pivot that allows of organized internal restraints and of the acceptance of the legality of the status quo. Even where rejected, as with our ‘Communists’, authority could still be ‘used’ as a framework that allows society to survive within. Such an ‘authority’ is crucial to our understanding of social behaviour. Crucial, but not sufficient.

Two other forms of association are also possible. There is, as already mentioned, the primal relationship of ‘shame’ between those that have found no common committal to take up the slack of their suspicion. This form of association, I have suggested, can be seen in animal studies of territoriality. A more latter–day example is perhaps the behaviour of nation states, at least to the extent that any supra–national authority (the Papacy in the Middle Ages, the UN today) is weak or non–existent. It is also the basis, I would suggest, of our preoccupation with those visible forms of assertion – fame, status and dress.

This pre–social relationship is really but a set of conflicting narcissisms. The second form of additional relationship possible is, in a sense, the opposite. It is post–social rather than pre–social. It is a form of relationship that springs from the relation of older children – the causal, empathetic, egalitarian relationship of those that are aware of the context of the other’s acts.

From about the age of five, peer groups of children can gain some insight into the mind of the other. They can come to know of others ‘like them’ in a world they both share. Now, for the first time, they can ‘understand’ the other, for they can see the other as acted upon, not acting. Thus it is we come to think and understand. Piaget argues that in the last resort children can only learn from children, since it is in the elaboration of a shared framework that we come to the higher orders of abstraction. This could be called a ‘cognitively pure’ effect. We can also talk of a ‘socially pure’ and finally a ‘cognitively social’ effect.

First, the ‘socially pure’: being more aware of causes, we are more tolerant of the short–comings of others. Retribution (‘an eye for an eye’) depends for its attractiveness on the assumption that the other’s behaviour is ‘inexcusable’ – pointless, wanton and avoidable. Where there is a shared framework, and hence insight into the circumstances of others, this may collapse. We will accept the other for he is not free. He too is impelled by forces he cannot control, forces we recognize in ourselves. Deprived of this mystery, we cease to fear. Hence the greatest of all consequences, the ‘cognitively social’. The whole superstructure of the corporately asserted, morally preemptive – the ‘law’, in other words – collapses. Gone are others that ‘exist’ but as formal categories, organized in a legitimating authority that allows the loyality and so the enhancement of those that accept the validity of its claims.

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