Please, Sir?

Here is a news item you are unlikely to read anytime soon: “A recent survey reports that Canadians have increasing faith in their institutions. Trust in business and political leaders is at an all-time high. Confidence in the spread of solid, reliable information is on the rise.”

Those things could, in fact, happen. But trust is a story only when it is slipping away. It is tricky even to speak of trust without destroying it: ask someone, “Do you trust me?” and watch their brow furrow. Nor is it clear what happens to trust once it is lost. Can a person or an idea or an institution win confidence they have lost? Should people rely on authorities, even when reason, education, or experience has taught them to be skeptical of widely accepted truths?

Such probing shows the difficulty of Mark Kingwell’s undertaking in Question Authority. A philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and the author of over two dozen books on everything from Plato to trout fishing, Kingwell sets out to explain the relationship between authority and trust. He promises “philosophical reflection” but not “actionable insights,” though by the end he breaks down and offers a full chapter of practical advice. His two most important claims, not so much argued in the text as woven throughout it, are that people can be addicted to the belief that they are right and that a just society will be built only on a widespread recognition of “shared vulnerability.”

Question Authority is divided into five substantial parts, each circling around a type of authority: politics, academia, media, religion, and science. This is where the structure ends; it is impossible to address Kingwell’s analysis without explaining how hard it is to gain purchase on it. The “meditations” are so named because they are not straightforward arguments or expositions but long meanders in, around, and sometimes surprisingly far away from the topics at hand. Kingwell explains many existing quandaries. He presents conclusions. These are not necessarily related to one another.

At times, reading Kingwell’s prose made me feel as though I were at a very long dinner party, sitting next to someone intent on mentioning everyone he knew but also easily distracted from the conversation. He tends to dilute his sentences with parenthetical statements, some of which should have stood on their own, others of which should simply have been cut. He loves to throw in allusions to great works of philosophy and literature as well as to pop culture, but the reader who is not in his head might find the sheer density of these more confusing than helpful. It is enough to quote Juvenal’s “Who guards the guardians?” We do not need the add-on: “Or if you’re an Alan Moore fan, ‘Who watches the Watchmen?’ ” Kingwell will briefly introduce a movie, abandon it to wander in other pastures, and then casually mention one of the characters from it much later, on a first-name basis, like an old friend. Without an index, it is nearly impossible to place the reference without paging through the book again.

Then there are associative threads so mysterious that only an analyst could hope to make sense of them. Kingwell begins his meditation on religion with a disturbing discussion of maternal authority and how it can lead small children to commit suicide, touches on the films Psycho and Alien, leaps to Moms for Liberty and their attempts to censor school libraries, briefly nods to gender fluidity and tradwives, curiously insists that “mothers (and, for some, hence also wives) must be trusted implicitly, but they also cannot be trusted,” arrives at George Clinton and Parliament’s 1975 album, Mothership Connection, and from there slides into the trauma of losing “a mother religion.” Given that the religion most often mentioned in the ensuing pages is Christianity, a patriarchal faith if there ever was one, it seems an odd move to pin its failings implicitly on motherhood.

The net effect of Kingwell’s approach is to leave the reader guessing, struggling to decode what could possibly be meant by any given side reference or segue. It is telling, in a book about trust and authority, that Kingwell is so uninterested in thinking about the experience of his reader. If authorities are to be relied on by the public, then they might think about getting better at communicating what it is they do, what it means, and why it is valuable. Unfortunately, Kingwell takes the more classic approach of bombarding us with extraneous names and terms. After a brief discussion of the “cynical hilarity” of campus novels and their depictions of the absurdities of academia, he adds, “But it’s not all fun and games, as Cardinal Newman reminds us.” What is the point of this remark? Does it help to know that John Henry Newman was a nineteenth-century Catholic theologian who wrote The Idea of a University? It does not.

Other theoretical writers, such as Guy Debord and Émile Durkheim, appear on a one-off basis. Some authors are given a few pages of treatment but generally not enough for the non-specialist to be able to follow the point. I may not be a philosopher, but I have a doctorate in the humanities, have read many of the texts Kingwell cites, and can claim a passing familiarity with most of the others. Still, I found myself constantly confused. If I were reading a specialist monograph, I’d accept some perplexity, but this is a trade book aimed at a general audience.

The final thread in this weave is a series of memoir-like recollections from Kingwell’s life. These are scenes from his childhood and youth: Winnipeg winters; summers in New Haven, Connecticut; a downtown Toronto that resembles the one I remember. I found these personal reflections, paradoxically, the least self-involved. They are specific, evocative, often witty. Describing his monastic existence in graduate school at Yale, Kingwell remarks, “We photocopied chapters and journal articles endlessly, a magical act tantamount to reading them.” In a passage on his days working on a campus newspaper, he gets in a dig at a rival: “We were lefties at the paper, certainly, but we considered ourselves more realistic than the Marxist true believers at the McGill Daily, who rarely produced an issue, let alone a daily one.” I would read a memoir by Kingwell, and at times I wondered if that was what he really wanted to write.

I have spent some time on the matter of form because it is also related to several flaws in Kingwell’s arguments, as far as I can follow them. The first is that he tends to see the problem of decreasing trust in institutions as one that is to be solved by a change in the public’s attitude rather than by an overhaul of the institutions themselves. He is a sharp observer of many of the troubles in contemporary journalism and academia, but ultimately he puts the onus on those doing the trusting to change their ways for the good of society.

Another weakness in Kingwell’s case is one inherent in the problem of trust itself, at least at first glance. He knows that the intellectual tradition he works in values questioning received truths. He insists, however, that the incessant search for truth can lead to extremes, including the conspiratorial thinking that has become such a powerful feature of North American political life in the past few years. “Epistemic autonomy is an intellectual virtue, yes — thinking for yourself is generally a good thing! — but its exercise is fraught with peril, a kind of inherent vice of looming arrogance,” he admits. There is some logic here: to expand one of Kingwell’s examples, the patient who goes to her doctor armed with Dr. Google’s diagnosis might make the process of finding a cure harder and herself unreasonably anxious. On the other hand, surely at least part of the reason why patients try to inform themselves before heading to the clinic has to do with the ways medicine is now administered and practised. Long wait times, short appointments, and a culture of overconfidence among physicians are, I would argue, just as responsible for patients’ use of Google as any “arrogance” on their part.

This reluctance to consider generously why people might behave the way they do leads Kingwell to some rather absurd conclusions. “Sometimes the best pathway to truth is not thinking for ourselves, and sometimes (more often) our apparently autonomous thoughts are not really ones we have reached independently,” he writes. If it’s sometimes better for me not to think for myself, don’t I still have to decide when to do so and when simply to believe? And if I do agree that it is sometimes better to place my faith in an authority, what am I to do when established authorities disagree on the best course of action? Or to flip his claim: if the thoughts I think are original are in fact just copies of someone else’s opinions, wouldn’t that make them, by Kingwell’s reasoning, superior? His insistence that “good habits are often more effective guidance than reason, just as deference to authority rather than individual conviction is sometimes the right action,” comes across, in the end, as the ideal of someone who already enjoys authority, not as a reasonable guide to self-governance.

The shortcoming that I sympathize with most can be seen when Kingwell, who is left of centre, tries to express his frustration with the behaviour of both political extremes. He cannot help but point out the parallels between the far left and the far right but knows that this line of criticism will cause some to label him a right-wing partisan. This means the early chapters on political ideology and academia are particularly hard to work through, as he casts doubt on his own points the moment he makes them, then returns to try to claim them anyway. When he describes the phenomenon of Ivy League undergraduates who are trained in radical politics but graduate to work in finance or consulting, he immediately pulls back: “Outrage over this development, like moral panics about cancel culture, are often just right-wing bugaboos, but there is indeed a curious irony in having a comfortable and entrenched cultural elite that is officially dedicated to anti-elitism.”

Later in the same paragraph, he is more openly critical, noting that elites have given up on “ideas of quality or superiority” but still fight tooth and nail for economic success. It is only when he moves on to journalism that Kingwell is willing to present his views openly, without first undercutting them, as when he questions the limited way diversity has been defined in the media. “In fact, a wider range of views, not ethnicities, might make for better media,” he writes. “But nobody says that kind of thing in story meetings or faculty conclaves these days.” And he is clear on why this is the case, that “the innocuous phrase viewpoint diversity has itself become a coded label for the enemies of progressive politics.” The author seems half trapped in this quagmire too.

Kingwell is at his best when he does just what the book title promises: question authority. Although at times he seems allergic to the prospect of ordinary people thinking for themselves, at other moments he recognizes that the problem lies in the fact that many are not thinking for themselves rigorously enough. “We should be careful not to be overhasty even with belief,” he writes. “Belief is, and should be, hard won and precious, not a lazy default of idle consciousness.” Conspiracy theories, one might add, are not autonomous thought but a form of religion — totalizing descriptions of the world that allow for no accident or human error.

Ultimately, despite his odd insistence that authority must be habitually trusted, Kingwell has a compelling argument up his sleeve: that everyone, no matter who they are, needs to cultivate humility about what they know and believe as well as a level of sympathy toward others. “Our shared vulnerability, as long as we work to imagine it,” he suggests, “is a more reliable basis of good action than appeals to power.” This is solid advice, as are many of the suggestions he does wind up making in the final chapter. “Be humble; wage war on cliché; experiment with life; get some distance on your addiction; be a good neighbour,” he writes. “Be a citizen.” He does not exactly prove that these are salutary prescriptions, but I will take him on faith.