Authority: An introduction to a Way of Seeing
Bishop Ezra Williams of Bethel Gospel Assembly was drafted in 1951 and served in Korea. Long before he went overseas, he had to deal with the color line.
“All I knew until then was Harlem. I thought I was Harlem born, Harlem bred and when I die, I’ll be Harlem dead. Then, I was sent 3000 miles to Texas to one giant pot of human stew.”
“Here we were 50 men in a barrack with 6 sinks, 6 showers, and 6 commodes. Immediately, we went into our groupie acts.” He saw the world of boot camp in terms of the colors of one’s skin and culture.
“Over in one corner, the blacks sang the Rhythm and Blues. Over in another corner, the guys we called hillbillies with their harmonicas were singing sad songs like, ‘Someone stole my gal.’ I just had been engaged and I certainly didn’t want that song! The Mexicans were doing the mambo-jumbo. I wondered, how are we going to be united together to fight our common enemy,” Williams told me. It seemed like the force of Color was going to divide the unit and lead to disaster in battle.
“But Uncle Sam said you will work together!” There was at least one higher authority in the room. Could the soldiers learn to see each other differently and on the same team? Williams thought God was saying, what color is your idol? Would God lose out in the tugging and pulling between Color idols and Uncle Sam? What about Williams, who had faith that there was one God, one humanity?
The bishop was experiencing that our ways of seeing are authorized by our gods. All religions claim this statement as a proverbial truth. Religions identify the result of a conflict of one’s own gods as sight impairment or mental confusion. It is like wearing glasses with each lens having a different focal point. Imagine how dizzy it must make life. Probably, you don’t have to stretch your imagination because you have already experienced it.
The sacred texts are claimed to be the right prescription glasses. The treatises are on ways of seeing what we were, are, and will be. They offer ways to see life better, think more clearly, and live more peacefully.
The phenomenologists claim that we gather our perceptions into packets structured by our mind, society, and culture. As Hegel might put it, sacred texts are ways of recognition by which it bestows value and disvalue. The sociologist Max Weber claimed that “authority,” which is a complex, subtle intersection of religion, social interests, personal choices, and biology, is the basic building block of society.
We have explored the sensibilities of religion found at thousands of religious sites like Bethel Gospel Tabernacle in Harlem. We have found that among the religions of New York City, their sensibilities are shaped by the authorities of their faiths and those of other faiths, traditions, habits, social practices, and cultural languages.
However, you don’t have to look far to find terrible abuses done in the name of religious or non-religious authorities. Indeed, to our individualistic ears, “authority” can sound like the herald of oppression and cover-up of abuses. There is no more dangerous authority than taking God’s or some other ideology’s name as a cover for one’s own interests and desire for domination.
The uniqueness of the Abrahamic tradition is that it de-divinized the king and the state, unlike the practices of ancient Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. King David is an all-too-human character in the Bible, while the Pharaoh of Egypt was seen as a god. This original secularism, defined as the disenchantment of the king and state, opened the society to dialogue and critiques of the powers that be (at least theoretically).
In the Abrahamic tradition that encompasses Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the question of authority is phrased, God or idols? Some other religious traditions have analogous formulations. For comparison, we will inductively examine the Biblical tradition’s way of seeing with that of other religions. Their structures of cognition seem similar but the contents, of course, are different.
First, we will consider the Biblical mimesis (representation of reality). In New York City, this is by far the most common tradition of seeing and understanding.
The basic Biblical paradigm is that social and cultural life is the product of responses to God and idols. All peoples’ cognition is based upon a mixture of authorities, godly and ungodly; and conscious and unconscious. The characteristic effects of authorities are similar, which causes spiritual, psychological, and social contradictions.
To anticipate our table of contents, what follows will be an explanation of the key characteristics of authorities and their revelation in different religious traditions.
A way of seeing that is decades in the making and is still incomplete
This study of authority goes back a few decades. Personally, I was trying to make sense of how my renewed openness to God went along with a new openness to culture, people, and life. My friend Danny Thomas of the 13th Floor Elevators was drumming about a new way of seeing with the 13th Floor Elevators, the first psychedelic band,
Heading for the ceiling, I’m up off the floor
I’ve broken my horizon, out-distancing my door
High above the ant hills in among the planes
Swooping down to hear the sound and movements of the trains.
His psychedelic trance wasn’t mine, but the experience of widening horizons was. I mixed with the psychedelics, the Buddhists, Confucianists, Taoists, Kabbalists, the Black Muslims, and even the Republicans. I had a hearty love of all the people and cultures that I experienced. How could one understand the deep relations of all these things that marched under such different authorities?
Also, I had my share of experiences with the dark sides of life and religions. How often do personal disappointments also lead to the discovery of others’ kindness and love? How does the crushing of hopes and self-esteem become opportunities for the discovery of meaning, love, and personal regeneration? Authorities are the directional signals for living life, but my discoveries would have been a completely shambolic process if not for the visible and invisible help from others.
Eventually, in the late 1970s, I began to develop the paradigmatic understanding of Authority that I am outlining here. I started typing it up on the Apple II computer! Thanks to New College just off the campus of the University of California, Berkeley for lending me the use of the computer!
And thanks to Sinologists Wolfram Eberhard, who drove me wildly around campus while we discussed some of these ideas, and Michel Strickmann, a Taoist who once told me that my creativity made him slightly nauseous, and symbolic interactionist Herbert Blumer, who was benignly encouraging and Robert Alter, a Hebrew literature scholar who was inspirational, particularly on the silences and hiddennesses in the Hebrew text.
In fact, phenomenological-existentialist Stanford Lyman could understand these things better than myself and wrote an interesting essay on the hidden, mysterious “I.” Recognizing my lean into the sociology of religion, Lyman’s colleague Art Vidich put me into contact with Margaret Mead, who herself had undergone an awakening about the role of religion in society and was giving advice to the Episcopalians. I later worked as a researcher for his and Art Vidich’s American Sociology. Worldly Rejections of Religion and their Directions, published by Yale University Press in 1985. As we developed the history of “covenant” in the social sciences, I focused on the “gods” of the covenant. In the same year, I published Ancient Israel’s Analysis of Idolatry and its Impact on Contemporary Social Science Thought for the Center for Sociological Analysis.
Joseph Maier, one of the last of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School scholars, gave me constant feedback, and indeed, one of his last presentations at the Columbia University Seminar on Contents and Methods in the Social Sciences was on the book God. A Biography written by Jack Miles. It is a little-known fact that Maier was also a rabbi. By the 1980s, I was influenced by him to produce several papers on the Biblical roots of critical theory which I discussed and published with the “Critica” group at the New School for Social Research. Under the shadow of such thinkers, I was able to make some progress.
In 1991, I with some fellow travelers launched a journal called Areopagus, named after the place where the Apostle Paul talked about the commonality of cognitive aspirations of various types of religionists and of the non-religious. Before his sharp investigations of the state of the American family, David Ayers cast his gimlet eye of support and Bishop Ezra Williams gave me his take on the ideas based upon decades of experience in Harlem. Theology professor David Powlison, pastor Dick Keyes, and writer Os Guinness were supportive fellow journeyers. David first published his seminal article on the relationship of authorities and emotions in Areopagus. One time, Dick loaned me $50.00 so I wouldn’t starve in London, and Os (along with Francis Schaeffer) was an early mentor. There were many others that helped.
I also tried out this approach with the help of Russian and Chinese American sociologists and philosopher Paul de Vries in a series of social surveys and ethnographies in the Former Soviet Union, China, and the United States. At various times, I ventured these ideas about authority into the critical light of various journals, books, and lectures.
On April 13-15, 1992, amidst conflicts between police and Mayor David Dinkins, riots, deteriorating schools, and a vast scourge of crimes, several colleagues and myself, with the support of Pastor Tim Keller and college president Friedhelm Radandt, produced a major multi-racial, multi-ethnic conference in New York City to critically examine the relationship of racial and ethnic idolatries to the current crisis. The conference was called “What Color Is Your Idol?”
All this took place during the massive changes happening also in the Former Soviet Union and China. Various collaborators and interlocutors contributed greatly to my thinking, then and now. Udo Middelmann, a co-worker with Francis Schaeffer, sought mightily to make me think more clearly during the Medlar House discussions. Sociologist Robert Daniels and social worker Paul Shapiro showed me ways to be practical with this paradigm. Herbert Schlossberg was generous in his encouragement though we had different approaches. I am always asking myself if these ideas will seem sound or nonsensical to my close colleague anthropologist Sydney Greenfield. I hope that I will be able to give due respect to many others’ critiques and contributions.
My original objective was the modest one of bringing the study of authority as a topic to the forefront of sociological imagination. I was not alone in that endeavor. For example, cultural analyst Richard Sennett at New York University published his Authority in 1980. Sennett references Freud, while I lean toward the phenomenological processes by which Authorities are sublimated into self, culture, and society.
As a journalist, a big challenge is to embed all of this scholarly thinking into a good story. A Journey through NYC religions is a start, though our reporters have no obligation to help me with my task. They have their own ways of seeing which I benefit from all the time. Our common platform is girded only by the traditions of journalism expanded by “sympathetic objectivity.”
Bishop Williams discovered that his primary authority in the Army was to learn how to survive.
“On the rifle range, I noticed that those country boys who came from the hills could shoot. They made rags out of the bullseye. I thought, if I am going into conflict, I want this fellow who can shoot.”
“I realized that our survival didn’t have to do with the color of the skin but with the abilities of the men. My understanding became enlightened.” Williams remembers how his perceptions then came back to his religious roots, “As we got deeper into training, I realized that God is color blind. Uncle Sam taught me that in four months. Surely with the love of God in our hearts,” the pastor reflected, that God could overcome our racial idolatries and their long-term insidious effects on our vision and actions.
Religions are well-tuned to the way that faiths can create blindness, but also reassure that there must be a clear channel out there somewhere. You just have to learn how to change the dial. That is what the study of authorities might help us to do.
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