When I come home for Thanksgiving break, my mother is happy to see me. For about two seconds. Then, in classic Nigerian mother fashion, she begins ordering me around. In a matter of hours, I am cooking dinner for my whole family, cleaning my entire house and writing a detailed plan for what seems like the next 10 years of my life.
My mother’s authoritarian tendencies are annoying, but as I rush from one task to the next, they are also strangely comforting. After having to be my own taskmaster for the last three months, it is nice to have someone tell me what to do. I trust my mother unconditionally (and I am also a little afraid of her), so doing what she tells me to is easy, unproblematic and largely beneficial. By the end of my stay, the house is clean, my family is fed and I have decided what classes to take next quarter.
But when I return to campus, I am a little disconcerted by how much I seem to appreciate authority, how uncritical I am of it. After all, one of the glistening promises Stanford made me is that it would teach me how to think critically, how to pick apart every piece of information that comes my way, how to question authority and come to my own conclusions. And sure, I do that sometimes. But a lot of the time (maybe even most of the time), I just take things the way they are.
On a recent episode of “This American Life,” producer Diane Wu talks about this same problem. She tells the story of a talk she attended where lecturer Harold Kroto asked the audience how many people believed the earth revolved around the sun. Almost everyone raised their hands. And then he asked how many people knew the evidence for why the Earth revolves around the sun.
Wu – and almost everyone else in the room – was stumped. And, listening to that episode, I was stumped, too. I’m pretty sure that the Earth revolves around the sun, but how do I know that it does? I think, vaguely, that it has something to do with the position of the stars in the sky, or the way the sun rises and then sets, but if you gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, I wouldn’t be able to prove anything to you. I just believe it because someone important told me, and I took their word for it.
I do this with countless things in my life. I don’t really know how cellphones work, or what the Internet actually is. I’m confident that climate change exists, but I couldn’t tell you how scientists prove that it exists. A lot of reputable scientists have just said, multiple times, that it’s a real and pressing problem, so I just … believe them.
At face value, this might seem troubling. But, frankly, it’s unrealistic to expect people to know everything. That’s the whole concept of representative democracy – the citizenry gives a select group of people (our elected officials) the responsibility of understanding things that they don’t have the time to understand. Things like our complicated tax system, or how much money the social security fund needs to keep running every year. We elect these people, and with our vote, we give them our trust. We hand them the responsibility of undertaking the challenge of understanding – understanding the complex policies of the United States. And then, we trust them to tell us what we need to know. And this isn’t just with government officials – it’s with everyone who has any semblance of authority. Teachers, doctors, Nigerian mothers.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this kind of system, but it breaks down when the authority figures in question shirk their responsibility to understand. When it becomes obvious that they don’t, in fact, have a firm grip on the things they are talking about, the things that they believe. The unspoken contract between us and the person in question shatters. Suddenly, people that were once authoritative – like, let’s say, the president of the United States – become unauthoritative. We lose our trust in them, and, consequently, we stop believing the things that they say. Authority itself becomes hazy. Fake news abounds.
Often, when people talk about fake news, the solutions they give is focused on the individual. “You should research more,” they’ll say. “Be more critical when people tell you things.” “Make sure that you’re informed.” And these things are no doubt important, but the fact of the matter is that, at the end of the day, we can’t ask everyone to know everything. We all collectively rely on each other to know things, so when it comes to fake news, part of the impetus of the solution rests in authority figures taking the time to become well-informed, then disseminating their information to the masses. A climate scientist can explain to an astronomer why climate change is real and serious, and the astronomer can prove to the climate scientist that the earth revolves around the sun. They both have to be experts in one field, but neither of them have to be experts in both fields, because they have each other.
Authority isn’t something to be scared of. It’s not something to rebel against just for the sake of rebelling against it. But it’s a power that only works if the person holding it takes seriously their responsibility towards us. A responsibility to dive deep, to understand and to know.
Contact Adesuwa Agbonile at adesuwaa ‘at’ stanford.edu.