What should certainly be a fascinating read, touching off an interesting debate – from the abstract of The Empty Idea of Authority:
The idea of authority is a fabrication. Claims of moral right to be obeyed owe their historic salience to the self-interest of claimants. When Enlightenment scholars demolished the divine right of kings, they should have disabused us of the right, not just of the notions that it came from the divine and belonged to kings. Their effort to salvage the idea of right to rule and to press it into serving as support for their favored governments was understandable but unjustified.
Claims of moral right to be obeyed have their origins in creationist accounts of law and government. This article presents an evolutionary account of law and government. The law of a human community is a self-generating, self-recognizing system of human communications that signals likely action within that community. Law is a signaling system that uniquely serves and symbiotically defines a human community. Autopoiesis, not authority, is the phenomenon that authentically animates law and government…
…Understanding law as an autopoietic signaling system frees us to discard the idea of authority.
And to the dictionary I go for, “autopoietic”: and come up with “no dictionary results”. So, how about “poietic”? Seems that the best I can gather is it means “self-forming”. Ok – I like to use a bit of odd vocabulary, myself, from time to time…but this presses the issue. Anyways…
A few quick thoughts about it:
How can something be self-forming if the only examples we have of it are based on the injunctions of law-givers who have no moral right to be obeyed? It seems to me that the author merely wishes to replace Moses with the author. Its a neat job, if you can get it.
“Creationist accounts” is a nifty way of denigrating the idea of Authority – you know, “those creationists who think that Adam and Eve kept dinosaurs as pets”, in the leftist meme about the very concept of creation. But to denigrate is not to refute. If Moses was making it up to benefit himself or his class, then why do his laws not actually do such a thing? The basics of Mosaic law – the Ten Commandments – are the most succinct expression of well-ordered liberty devised: to put it in rather quick and vulgar terms; don’t murder, don’t lie, hands off other people’s stuff, keep it in your pants, take a day off every week, don’t worship any thing or anyone other than God. If we were all to really follow the Commandments, the world would be a vastly better place and not a single person would be able to get over on any of us. These are not the laws of someone looking out for number one.
From my history books, I understand that the scholars of the so-called “enlightenment” were actually in favor of “enlightened despots”, had no faith in the common people and viewed the folks as mere clay for their social experiments. While those cobweb spinners might have knocked “divine right”, all they were doing was knocking a heretical idea long since denounced by that ultimate exemplar of Authority, the Roman Catholic Church. I’ll leave alone such scholarly pursuits as the September Massacres the last generation of “enlightened” scholars engaged in.
HAT TIP: Instapundit
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