The Tyranny of Authority

Joseph Dana Miller

[An article written in response to statements made by President Calvin Coolidge in an address delivered at Georgetown University. Reprinted from Land and Freedom, November-December 1926]

President Coolidge stated: "I would not venture to say what our country most needs from its educated young men and women. But one of its urgent needs is a greater spirit of loyalty which can come only from reverence for constituted authority, faith in things as they are."

The final arbiter of all intellectual truth is the mind; of all moral truth the conscience. These are the real authorities, and the duty of subjecting all things to the test of reason and conscience a man owes to his fellowmen, and to God. It is the most solemn of all obligations, for truth is the most valuable of all earthly possessions. How great a wrong then he commits by a slavish subservience to authority. The fallibility of human reason is not to be disputed we hear much of it, certainly too much. But the fallibility of authority is of an infinitely more tenuous nature. We may decide wrongly by following our own mental processes. But ultimately the path if persisted in leads to truth. To the rational processes of the mind there is no other destination. But Authority is the rock in the way of intellectual and social progress. It is a tyranny that keeps kings on their thrones and fakirs in high places; that moves armies across the prostrate bodies of peoples; that sends Conscience that should rule the world quaking and trembling into dark corners.

What credentials has Authority beyond its apparel, insignia, gold lace or sounding titles? Can it "point with pride" to its record, or "view with alarm" the results of disobedience to its commands? Has it such achievements to its credit that justify the suppression of conscience and the reasoning faculty to its obiter dicta? Read the record and decide. For instead of being usually right this most worshipful Authority is nearly always everywhere wrong. Its history trails with blunders, bristles with fallacies; it is even now pompous with theories long exploded; everywhere it has cheated, humbugged and tyrannized over reason and conscience.

Look at the long record of Authority in every department of human activity. Authority supported slavery; it guided the whip in the hand of the overseer as it fell upon the quivering shoulders of the black; it sounded in the boom of cannon whose dreadful messengers brought death and sufferings to millions of men; its voice is forever on the side of war. And how has it treated the great ones of the earth? To Socrates it gave the poisoned draught; the Grachii it stoned; Garrison it drove thru the streets of Boston; Giordano Bruno it burned; Christ it crucified.

It was Authority that threw Roger Bacon, the ablest man of his time, in prison. It was Authority that in the person of Calvin put Servetus to death. It was Authority that lit the Smithfield fires, that presided over the horrors of Siberia. It was Authority that exiled DeCamoens, and the glory of Portuguese poetry saw the light on an inhospitable Chinese coast. Authority has denounced the teachings of the prophets of all the ages as heretical, from the Hebrews to those of the present day. What a biting poison it is should be obvious to those who reflect how instantaneously and completely a man is transformed when its mantle falls upon him, and how strikingly it effects a metamorphosis from humility to arrogance.

It is the tyranny of Authority that keeps the Arab sheik of today like the sheik of Abraham's day; that has petrified Chinese civilization ; that in the Middle Ages desolated western Asia from the Bosphorus to Jerusalem. It was Authority that hissed "Jacobin" to every proposition for social reform as now it shrieks "bolshevik." In Egypt Authority enthroned the cat and made sacrosanct the crocodile. It has been polygamist, monogomist, polyandrist, as suited its purpose. It put kings on white elephants and clothed them in mail of precious stones. It has invented all kinds of evil spirits from Belzebub to Hobomoko for men to bow before and industriously they have made obeisance. They have yielded to Authority as did men in fabled Athens to the bed of Procrustes, to which they have accommodated the proportions of such independent judgments as they were capable of forming.