When speaking about politics and political systems, there are two other words which come into play: authority and legitimacy. Authority means “power to enforce obedience” and “the right to command.” The English word comes from the Latin verb augere, “to make grow, originate, promote, increase.” Politicians are invested with the authority – that is, the power – to make people do things that they would otherwise not want to do.
But power comes from somewhere. This is where legitimacy comes into play. Legitimacy comes from the Latin verb legitimare, “to declare to be lawful, to cause to be regarded as lawful.” Legitimacy determines how an agent with authority has that authority. In some instances, legitimacy determines whether or not an agent should have authority. We use the word “illegitimate” to describe a political leader whose authority is in question; if illegitimate, his authority is not lawful.
Political authority means, “Who has the power to tell me what to do?” Political legitimacy means, “How does the person with that power get that power?” Here is a small table of political legitimacy:
| |
Legitimacy |
Authority |
| Monarchy |
God |
King |
| Military dictatorship |
Force |
General |
| Democracy |
People |
People |
| Republic |
Constitution |
President |
| Anarchy |
No one |
No one |
Some of these are merely examples, of course. And the table above is focused primarily on European and American systems, hence “God,” “King,” and “Constitution.” These could easily be replaced by any number of other words – “Deity” for God, “Chief” for King – but the concepts remain the same. Under a monarchical political system, a single person and his descendants are invested with authority. They are legitimated by God, who has chosen them and only them to be given authority. This only works as part of a larger religious social framework in which the subjects of the king believe that he has authority given to him by God. Under a military dictatorship, a military leader assumes control based on the threat of violence. His ability to inflict violence makes his rule lawful. Under a true democracy, like that practiced by the Athenians, the people[1] are in control of the entire political system. They have the authority and they legitimize it because they are in charge of it. A republic, like the United States, derives its legitimacy from a written document, like the Constitution, and invests authority in a president (although there are others who have political power). Finally, under anarchy, there is no government, therefore no one has authority and no one has any legitimate claim to authority.
Historically, there has been a political trend toward republican governments. It is no coincidence that this trend began during the seventeenth century. The trend toward republican governments follows a trend toward republican epistemology that began in 1450. The invention of the Gutenberg movable-type press allowed the masses who could read to read the Bible on their own. Previously, reading the Bible had been the office of priests, who were the only source of knowledge of the Bible and the only source of interpretations of the Bible. Once lay people could read and interpret Scripture for themselves, there was no longer a need to rely on priests; indeed, the entire hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church was questioned. Knowledge itself had become more open to the masses, as political systems would become more open to the masses.
Knowledge follows rules of authority and legitimacy as political systems do. Authority in the case of knowledge means the ability to say what is true. Legitimacy means the same things it does in politics: how an agent with authority has that authority. Here’s a table of epistemology:
| |
Legitimacy |
Authority |
| Catholic Church |
God |
Priests |
| China |
Force |
Communist Party |
| U.S. Media |
“Objectivity” |
Journalists |
The Catholic Church has the power to claim what is true because God endorses what the Catholic Church says. Of course, if you don’t believe in God, then this presents a problem for legitimacy: the Church no longer has any. The legitimacy of its authority rests on the same kind of thing that U.S. money does: the “full faith and credit” of Catholics that (1) a God does exist, and (2) the Catholic Church represents exactly God’s opinions about particular human issues. In China, or even the former Soviet Union, the Communist Party’s power to disseminate truth is sanctioned by force: either you like it, or we’ll run you over with a tank. Finally, in the United States, the ability of journalists to disseminate truth is legitimized by their perceived objectivity: what they report must be true, since they wouldn’t lie to us; they’re objective all the time, after all.
It is the authority of epistemology that I really want to talk about. As Gutenberg’s printing press made it easier for anyone to be a disseminator of truth (and harder for an established authority like the Catholic Church to be one), so too has the Internet made it easier for anyone to be a disseminator of truth. History works in cycles, and the group of people that was once full of rebels – the journalists – has now become the authority. A new group of rebels is calling the journalists’ authority into question. They’re bloggers, and like the pamphleteers of seventeenth-century England, they’re out to disseminate truth without anyone giving them permission.
It’s very hard to make a newspaper that large numbers of people will read. It requires a huge investment in equipment to make millions of newspapers. If you wanted to make your own TV show, first you’d need another huge investment in transmission equipment, as well as several thousand dollars for an FCC license. New authorities have been created since 1450. It used to be the king, but now it’s the people with the printing press. They are the new kings, the people that hold the keys to the gates of public discourse. Bloggers today do what English pamphleteers did three hundred years ago: they bypass the gates altogether and sneak in through the back. Blogs are essentially free: for the price of an Internet connection, you have access to the millions of people who have access to the Internet, a virtual public forum. The great thing about virtual forums is that the physical limitations of space, cost, and time, which exist here in the real world, don’t exist in the virtual world. The Internet is composed merely of lots of computer servers hooked to each other. They get data from a few hubs around the world, but by and large, the network’s structure is very decentralized. There is no place that you can call when you want to call the Internet.
The decentralized physical structure of the Internet has led to a decentralized authority structure. Since there is no one in charge of the Internet, there is no one in charge of what is true on the Internet. Anyone can – and does – say anything with impunity, regardless of whether or not it is factual. Truth is another issue. Most “news” websites out there, especially blogs, don’t just deliver news. They deliver facts augmented with the fact-teller’s own opinion.
And so we come to Wikipedia, the Ur form of the democratization of knowledge on the Internet. No one is in charge of Wikipedia except those who contribute to it (Wikipedians?). For the uninitiated, Wikipedia is a collaborative, online encyclopedia with no editors and little oversight. Wikipedia allows users to create encyclopedia entries about anything, and while this is good for the democracy – it gives the people control of knowledge – it is bad for the knowledge itself.
Last November, Robert McHenry, formerly Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, criticized Wikipedia on many fronts:
- Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
- Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.
- Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
The thrust of McHenry’s problem with Wikipedia was its lack of authority. Anyone can post anything to Wikipedia regardless of whether or not that thing is factually correct. If the information is incorrect, then Wikipedia relies on other users to point that out and correct it. These other users may or may not be authorities on the information they are correcting, so no matter what, there is a high degree of uncertainty that the information is incorrect. McHenry himself sampled a Wikipedia entry about Alexander Hamilton and concluded that, after errors of fact, grammar, and problems with vague language, “the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best.” Who is writing Wikipedia articles? High school and college students, some knowledgeable, others not, and few “experts.”
Of course, we can always call into question the “expert” nature of the people who work for real encyclopedias, but they have been accredited as experts by places given the authority to do so. Their expertise is legitimate because it has been sanctioned by an external body; no one has dubbed Wikipedians “experts” in anything, unless they have degrees. Opponents of this idea will suggest that not all people accredited as experts are really experts, and there are some people who can be considered experts who have not been accredited as such. I do not deny the existence of such people, but I posit that there are more experts who have been validated as such and non-experts who have not been validated as experts than there are expert non-experts and non-expert experts. If Harvard were accrediting idiots, then Harvard would lose its reputation and authority. If Stanford medical school let anyone be a doctor, then no one would take Stanford seriously as a medical school and would not want to accept Stanford graduates. In some cases, authority can save lives. That’s why we have medical schools and bodies like the FDA: ostensibly, they know more than we do about what a good doctor is and what safe drugs are.
And so we have come to the democratization and decentralization of the Internet. The Internet’s physical structure is decentralized, and so is its epistemological structure. There are no authorities.
But that statement is false. There are authorities on the Internet, and such advocates for information democracy follow the rules of these authorities, whether they are aware of it or not. One of these authorities is called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a group that creates standards of compliance for Web markup languages. Standards are what make the Internet work. If everyone used a different communication protocol, there would be no Internet. Fortunately, everyone has agreed to use TCP/IP, and thus the Internet works. Such standards assure that when I create an HTML document, it will look the same in all Web browsers (of course, the reality of standards-compliance is that no web browser adheres completely to all W3C standards, and sometimes different versions of the same browser – IE 5 for Mac and IE 6 for Windows – behave differently).
Here’s another example of authorities on the Internet. When I go to Amazon.com to buy a copy of Ann Coulter’s latest book, Amazon asks me for my name and password so that it can establish a secure connection. But what ensures that my connection is really secure? Certainly not just an assurance from Amazon that the connection is secure. I want more than that to make certain that someone doesn’t steal my credit card number and buy copies of Al Franken’s latest book. Another company, VeriSign, certifies that when I am establishing a secure connection to Amazon, the connection is (1) really to Amazon and (2) really secure. If there were no third-party certifying that my connection was secure, I wouldn’t use Amazon for my business.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has recognized this problem with authority. Even if Wikipedia contains correct information, says Sanger, it is not perceived as authoritative by the public at large. One of the reasons for the lack of perception of authority is the lack of experts to certify that the information is correct. Wikipedians have balked at the very idea that anyone with credentials should review their work. “Project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now,” said Sanger. Wikipedia will never be an authority because Wikipedians do not want to involve authority.
Aaron Krowne, writing for Free Software Magazine, wrote a reaction to McHenry’s piece in which he tried to frame the debate in terms of money:
In brief, the goal of FUD [Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt] is to make money when the free software competition cannot be defeated fairly in the marketplace. This can be done by scaring consumers through wild propaganda, or more recently, confusing courts through more subtle arguments.
Krowne would have us believe that McHenry is part of a larger conspiracy which is actively trying to stop free information from being disseminated. “The Man” doesn’t want “The People” to create their own information. The motivation for this is money: McHenry, a representative of The Man, is afraid that Britannica will lose customers to Wikipedia. But is this argument true? This is not an issue of open information vs. free information, but rather an argument of correct information vs. suspect information. McHenry, an academic, is not pragmatic enough to be concerned with money. As with most academics, McHenry is concerned with the information itself and the information’s integrity. Like a Supreme Court justice making a ruling against homosexuals in Lawrence v. Texas, he is not concerned with actual oppression of information (or people); he is concerned with the integrity of the information (as Scalia was concerned with the integrity of the law – though this is not an endorsement of Scalia’s opinion in that case, which I think was a wrong one).
My cardinal fear in writing this was that it might appear to be an endorsement of tyranny. My constant statements that we need “authority” might lead readers to think that I believe that political authority is best vested in an autocrat. This is not so. In the United States, we invest our leaders with authority to act on our behalf. Ideally, we know in what direction we want the country to go, and we elect leaders who will take us in that direction. The specifics of getting there are not up to us, necessarily. The law is an esoteric institution with its own processes and vocabulary that non-lawyers don’t always understand. Regular people are not experts in the law; therefore, they hire people who are experts to get their agenda done for them. In the United States, of course, this has turned into something nefarious, as lawmakers themselves set the agenda, not the people. The people have become the unwilling servants of politicians who are acting in their own best interests, not the interests of the people that they serve. This does not mean that we should abandon the republic style of governance altogether, for it is the best system for a country of our size, traditions, and institutions. A complete overhaul of the system would be morally wrong for the United States, since it would result in the loss of life and property for a whole lot of people.
My point in writing this was to show that (1) the Internet is not void of authority, and (2) there are instances when authority is good, even necessary. We need it in our politics, because that is the nature of politics. Rousseau said that the first social contract was made when the first farmer fenced off his land to keep his animals in and other animals (and people) out. He surrendered some of his freedoms to an authority who would ensure that his property was protected from encroachment by others. Likewise, when searching for information, we must occasionally submit ourselves to an authority who knows more than we do about the information we’re looking for.
If Michel Foucault were around, he would point out that authorities can misrepresent information for their own agendas. In examining the history of insanity and punishments for insanity, Foucault concluded that the definition of “insane” was not clinical, but determined by whatever was outside societal norms at the time. These norms were determined by authorities who wanted to forward a particular agenda, using their authority for moral evils, not for moral good. Indeed, the very nature of discourse makes it such that whoever is in charge determines what discourse is and what it is not. This is the problem with authority: we must trust it not to become tyranny, although knowing when that has happened can be hard. The only comfort I can offer is that sometimes authority is necessary and sometimes it is not. We may not know whether authorities are lying to us or not, but we usually have a good idea of when authority should be present. And authority should definitely be present when it comes to information. Information may want to be free, but if it is the wrong information, then that freedom is a pointless exercise.
Notes
[1] Under the Athenian system, of course, “people” meant “male citizens.” A citizen was any person who was born in Athens; thus, foreigners were not allowed to be part of Athenian politics.
