Sometimes the words of others frame our sentiments of appreciation. Here are five quotations that came to mind when thinking of a great teacher, Terry Schreiber.

There is more understanding required in the teaching of’ others than in being taught

Montaigne

I joined the Terry Schreiber Studio in 1980 and was able to stay in that marvelous community then meeting in a basement off of Washington Square Park until 1982. Two years doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but Terry and Jill Andre who were my teachers from the beginning and then through my elevation to his Master Class gave me wonderful lessons that have stayed with me to this day. Older than many of the other students in the first grouping at twenty-eight, my experience in the outside world allowed me to notice the extraordinary sensitivity and command of Terry. He took each of us on a journey. He was a powerful teacher while also being a gentle guide.

“You cannot teach a man anything: you can only help him to find it within himself.”
Galileo

Who am I to argue with the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science., but I think Terry did both: giving specific skills and techniques that he helped us to master while simultaneously leading us to a clearer understanding of how we might make theater live. The word education is rooted in a sense of leading the student to a new way of interpreting the world. Every class was that sort of an education; both in what each of us experienced with Terry when it was our turn to’ go up’ but also in watching how he worked with our classmates, which turned out to be a bonus class in stage direction.

“Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a friend of love.”
‐Antoine De Saint‐Exupery, Author of The Little Prince

The media tributes to Terry note facts that are worthy of that praise: one of the originating producers of the Off-Off Broadway movement, an adherent and developer of the solid approaches of Uta Hagen and Michael Howard, a three-time director on Broadway with one of those plays a Tony nominee, a teacher to a roster of actors including Oscar winners. But I think that all of the many people who passed through the studio would attest to another sublime accomplishment, which I would compare to Saint Exupery’s, “shared taste for the sea”. Terry gave all of us a shared taste for an authentic artistic life, one which valued collaboration, creativity, and purpose. He helped so many look past the inevitable rejections in auditions and the inescapable drudgery of straight jobs to that artistic life in which we all had the privilege to participate, that shared taste to create in our minds and hearts.

“We must teach ourselves to walk on air against our better judgment.”
Seamus Heaney

Every time an actor gets up in any class they take a risk. But when Terry had you up — as long as you had done your work, which was a non negotiable requirement —— he was going to patiently, carefully, teach us to walk on air even when our judgment was telling us maybe we should just beg off to the restroom. In song and movement and memory, Terry extracted from us abilities and performance that we didn’t know we had. And once they were there, he counseled us not to let them retreat.

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
Henry Adams

My own adventures after leaving the Studio included a turn to playwrighting and producing, and then three decades infusing what Terry taught me into other enterprises. In those lost years, producing, directing, and performing among casts of thousands in a mélange of corporate telenovelas and tragic, comic, melodramatic, and absurd organizational performance art (in other words, straight jobs), kept my children fed and clothed and my wife sane — most of the time, on both counts. Happily, later life allowed me to return as an OOB playwright and the lessons that Terry imparted to me are woven into whatever I’m able to create. His influence never stopped.

My son, Gifford Elliott, in 2010 was preparing for auditions to acting school, and he wanted to obtain some private coaching. I contacted TSS and they recommended a wonderful advisor, Bob Verlacque. My son ended up getting a bunch of admission offers and then an acting degree from Cal Arts.

But on the day that I was accompanying Gifford to meet Bob for the first time we both rode up in the old freight elevator to where the studio was located in Chelsea. The gate opened and there was Terry standing just a few feet away. We had not seen each other in almost 30 years. He pointed at me and said, “I know you. You were my student.” Pretty impressive given that most of my hair was gone and what was left had long since stopped being brown. I nodded and reintroduced myself. Smiling that wizardly smile, he asked me if I was still in the business. And I replied, “Terry, every day, every day. I’m use what you taught me every day. The stage may look like a corporate conference room, a factory floor, or an executive office, but what I learned from you and others at this studio has served me so very very well and I’m glad you’re here so that I get to thank you.” The smile grew wider. And then I left forever blessed by the serendipity of being able to express my gratitude to Terry.

I’m sorry that I never got to see Terry again, but like many others who might not have been able to stay strictly within the world of theater our thankfulness for who he was and what he imparted can be seen in the successes that we enjoyed because of having known him. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. The influence of Terry Schreiber and his studio will flow on for a long, long time. And so we wish to the man: Flights of angels, Terry, flights of angels.

Everything Donald Trump is doing in the United States reminds us that we cannot rely as much as we did in the past on self-restraint embedded in what Alexis de Tocqueville called moeurs—convention, custom and good manners. Yet if some of the threats are new, the ideas and institutions are familiar, and the task of standing up for them in dark times is one that liberals have often faced before.

Timothy Garton Ash

Ambition is a seed of authority. No one gains and then keeps authority without some ambition to do so. Whether occurring early or late, seeking influence that will be theirs to wield, a ‘strong desire to achieve something’ is an ambition for authority. There are manifold levels of authority across different spheres.

• Individual: the security guard requiring ID for the millionth time to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordering missile strikes
• Institutional: the prom committee picking the theme for this year’s formal to the Catholic Church issuing encyclicals shutting down any chance of women being ordained.

(Notice that possessing the authority doesn’t mean the decisions taken are correct; the prom committee definitely regretted their choice of Carrie as last year’s theme.)

While scope of authority obviously varies greatly, the ambition has a commonality (as noted in our first entry in this trilogy) “to evoke voluntary compliance or assent, on grounds distinct from coercive power or rational conviction.” Compliance or assent from whom to what? That depends upon the type of authority. In Garton-Ash’s quote above, the assent desired was to those de Tocqueville moeurs, to what he perceived as USA culture. In 1835’s Democracy in America, he expanded generously upon the connotations of that French word, moeurs:

• “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people”
• “habits of the heart”
• “the various notions that men possess”
• “the diverse opinions that are current among them”
• “the whole range of ideas that shape habits of mind”

The authority of culture — “the customs, practices, or behaviour typical of a particular social group or sphere of activity” — shapes our behavior and thinking automatically, invisibly. Paradoxically, Garton Ash’s use of the word ‘self-restraint’ suggests that the authority is both around us and within us. ; Evidence of its presence might be manifested by comments like “that is/isn’t the way we do things around here” that can occur in our self-talk or in conversation with others. This particular variety of authority also popped up in literature like James Fenimore Cooper’s Last Of The Mohicans series, sermons from a variety of peculiarly American religious sects, and newspaper broadsides celebrating these ‘habits of the heart’.

Of course, there were dissenters and diverters from this authority;  Slaveholders and abolitionists obviously disagreed on who Could be the property of another, but they shared commonalities included a strong attachment to the US’s brand of organized religion, the notion of America as God’s chosen land, and with notable exceptions for the first group and often the second, the golden rule. But what the French aristocrat — his full name was Comte Alexis-Henri-Charles-Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville — noticed was how powerful a particular belief about how things should be was already engrained within us as a nation. This is not something that could be said of the United States of America today. We are as the phrase has it ‘all over the place’. As previously discussed, one of the ways that fragmentation shows up is in our problems with authority.

For those who still require examples of our problems with authority consider these examples:

• A wacky California sheriff seizing ballot materials in defiance of state officials
• A USA Supreme Court that will likely reduce voting options despite the overwhelming majority of Americans wanting them and no evidence of serious problems associated with what was’ the way we do things around here for a long time through many elections
• A basely obsequious Republican congress seeking to take that movement of disenfranchisement even further
• A scurry of Democrats always asking for money and never answering what they did with it—$1.5 billion spent and you couldn’t get Kamala Harris elected?!?— while generally failing to even slow the degradation of our Republic because their ambitions don’t point in that direction
• A senseless war of which few approve in which again the least advantaged humans bear the brunt of deprivation and destruction

We cannot agree on who has the “Power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.” Our disputes on “moral, legal, or political supremacy” are profound. Those phrases and quotes are the very definition of authority. Our current situation provides ample evidence every day of our problems with authority. How would they diminish when the distrust of institutions that are supposed to be ‘of, by, and for the people‘ is accompanied by refusals of almost all comers to find ways in which citizens might rectify the perceived defects? For example, the previous US Congress passed fewer than 210 bills in its two years, compared to an average of over 389 in the preceding 32 years.

Consider again de Tocqueville and Garton Ash, the ‘moeurs—convention, custom and good manners’, the self-restraint, the commonality. Gone. The last time we had a failure to resolve our problems with authority a civil war resulted. Today a large segment of Americans slides from one side to the other every four years breeding governments that never solve the polarization and its deleterious effects upon our democracy.

Let me pass the baton to Kyla Scanlon to further elucidate our problems with authority:

Example A: “Confusion and nihilism are products, not symptoms, of this regressive world. The people selling “agency” benefit from a world where nobody trusts institutions, because distrust is the market condition that makes their product necessary.”

Example B: “The general lack of rules combined with the inability to take back control despite it being promised is the extraction part of a belief market. The gap between what participation promises (free yourself) and what it delivers (enormous losses and even less freedom than before).” [Emphasis added]

Example C: “Uber ushered in the era of rule-breaking that everyone else seems to be following. Just do what you want and pay the fine later. Rule-following becomes a signal of weakness or naivety rather than integrity.”

Ruing that condition, our collective problems with authority, my ambition became writing about this disastrous dissolution. Where did MY authority to do so come from, my”power derived from or conferred by another; the right to act in a specified way, delegated from one person or organization to another; official permission?” SubStack and the InterWeb: anyone can write about anything

But doubts did emerge on this journey into our national rejection and dismantling of institutional authority. The first part published here and here of investigating whatever happened to the centripetal authority that held the Republic together was the easier task. What had disappeared in our country is a common sense of right and wrong, a centripetal authority. Who could deny that assertion? The antonym of ‘commonalities’ is ‘differences’ and we are swathed with differences.

Proposing ideas for how we deal with our collective problems with authority stymied me. The first step to any solution would be that we admit that this loss of a common sense of right and wrong, of fair play, of honoring precedent, and respecting our fellows are all signs of our UNITED problems with authority but the only commonality amongst all of our riven groups is the belief that their enemies are the problem. That makes for a seemingly barricaded path to any possible change

Consider that above metaphor of a centripetal force of beliefs of the mind and habits of the heart about what was right and wrong that kept us enough together as a nation.

“Centripetal force (from Latin centrum ‘center’ and petere ‘to seek’^[1]) is the force that makes a body follow a curved path. . Isaac Newton coined the term,^[2] describing it as “a force by which bodies are drawn or impelled, or in any way tend, towards a point as to a centre” The citizens are the bodies; the Republic is the center. What happens when the force either goes out of existence completely or separates into smaller weakened entities? (Yeats’ declaration that “the centre cannot hold” proves again that sometimes poets are prophets.) If the force dissipates, the body goes flying. For our purposes, due to our problems with authority, the force shrinks and splinters and the American experiment is close to hurtling through the void like a drunk from the Tilt-A-Whirl who disdained the seatbelt.

Initially documenting that disintegration of authority in the first two parts of the trilogy gave me hope that all the finale required was to follow Richard Sennett and “imagine new forms of authority in society, to create after we have negated.” But Sennett writing in 1980 mainly prophesied the problem not the solution. Even then, he correctly sussed how the brakes of authority were going. He cannily foretold conditions currently in play on both sides:

Contemplate this description and compare to today’s behaviors : “There is a bravado way of losing one’s fear of authority. It is flat denial, simple insult.” Using the speech of nihilist Bazarov from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, which he considers “not only evil but bad psychology” as an example, Sennett paints a scene and method evident today: “The fear of the authorities Bazarov preaches involves pushing them outside making them totally external figures who excite nothing of one’s own feelings—save disgust.”

January 6, anyone? But also eruptions on the left have sometimes met this description.

Who would have guessed that the America that de Tocqueville and others praised would start to resemble the world that a rude sarcastic nihilist character in a Russian novel desired? But isn’t this rejection of all authority but our own a kind of nihilism that the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi also predicted?

Looking to what others have suggested as solutions didn’t satisfy me. A facile remedy proposed to this diagnosis by some is a return to religious authority. We all know how that’s worked out previously and I say that as an Irish Catholic with great respect for the role of spirituality in our lives and the recognition that religions telling people what to do has frequently proved dangerously flawed.

Those proponents of a solution of the government just reinforcing the Madisonian notion of the people as the authority fail to recognize the kinks in it as Sennett notes

“To say that the people are the source of all authority tells very little psychologically about how authority is made how, out of the acts of discussion and mutual decision making, some people are asked to be the protectors of others or forbidden to become their lords. A law can state this will occur but what makes it humanly possible? The tolerance—indeed the necessity—of periodic disorder which the Enlightenment Democrats envisioned is no longer entertained in law or practice.”

Written in 1980, true today. The notion that the people are the source of all authority is now broken, and by our actions it seems that our ambition is not to be constituted but to punish the other, to keep them from exercising their authority.

Progressives also do not endorse popular foundations for authority; they disdain majorities that fail to accept a mandatory reshaping of society in the name of identity and anti-racism and socialism. Sennett would argue that relying on the central government to sway opinions and actions to serve the interest of all was a bad idea, a tendency that would lead the way to despotism, to abuses of authority that would bleed over into coercion. Oops! Did that happen?

Some reading my connecting a quote of Sennett to our current leadership partisan, but check if the feeling reading these words written over forty years ago is eerie to you: “One of the most repressive beliefs a tyrant can arouse is that everything he does is clear and distinct. Look, what I do is straightforward, it all fits together, nothing is hidden. In other words, how can you resist me?” Sennett attached Hitler and Mussolini to this description: “The Fuhrer and the Duce were embodiments of what it is to be a strong person rather than a competent director of the legal order of government. A person can be simple, clear, and strong all at once, as a big bureaucracy cannot be. By appealing to the virtues of simplicity, authoritarian leaders attempt to wreck or abandon the ordinary machinery of government so that they can rule through force of personality alone.” What particularly disturbs about this description coming out of the past is that the adherents of the current government likely might agree with this characterization. Maybe they read these parts of Sennett too and made them a blueprint for their administration.

Appropriately for someone who would prove to be so prophetic himself, Sennett ends his book Authority by referencing Dostoyevsky. Strange? Not if you realize that the Russian novelist foresaw how the revolutionaries would behave when and if they came to power. He understood the conundrum of authority and freedom. Sennett uses Dostoyevsky’s tale of The Grand Inquisitor contained within the novel the Brothers Karamazov to depict our quandary. Very briefly: this story within the story is how Christ comes back to Seville, Spain during the time of the 16th Century inquisition, performs a few miracles, and gets arrested by the Grand Inquisitor who then berates him for offering mankind an impossible combination:

“The grand inquisitor accuses Christ of having offered the people a vision of authority and freedom combined. It was inhuman of Christ to do so, because the people cannot bear the burden of this combination.”

Ironically, we’ve ended up in a situation perpendicular to what Dostoyevsky portrayed. If as Sennett has it, “Something incontestable and certain, something which brings people together: this is the bond of authority”, in the America of 2026 everything is contestable by one group or another that ensuing division and feebleness constitutes our problems with authority.

What could alter our Tilt-a-Whirl country flying into the void? Sennett resorts to something Dostoyevsky remarks elsewhere: “The only answer to a mystery is another mystery.” We must imagine a response outside the terms currently offered. Such is the response of the Christ in Dostoyevsky’s parable, but you’ll have to read that on your own. Sennett argues that, “Whether or not the logic of repression is finally rejected depends upon how dissonant and how pertinent the response can be, like a painter being a whole new landscape by changing the position of his easel.” Sennett offers a paradox: freedom and authority must coexist, but how?

We will have to draw up some a kind of…

Hail Mary Plays for Our Society

Looking around the various spheres of communication from SubStack/ Medium/Patreon/Threads/RSS/Etc to Journals to Institutional Publications, there are other people who see these problems with authority and have imagined and devised approaches that are worth considering. Here are a few of them:

Ambition is a seed of authority:
Examine our ambition in this matter

Is our ambition here to solve with others more problems with authority? To restore some commonalities — like fairness, committee, honesty, kindness — that will serve as a useful foundation for civic life? Or is our ambition to have things the way we think they should be, to see our party triumph and our foes trampled? If it’s the latter, our problems with authority will continue. The numbers of people on both sides guarantee turmoil unless we turn to each other. There is no fantasy of unanimity but there must be a concentration on concord. Ambition is a seed of authority. A vengeful divisive ambition will yield a faulty ill-fated authority.

Release our illusions about the other guys

The U.S. was the only country in a worldwide survey to say most fellow citizens are bad people  That’s a place we can start to forge a new source of authority: bonds with our fellow Americans. Most of our fellow citizens who disagree with us politically are NOT bad people. Stop engaging with the polarizers and seek out common ground where feasible.

This is what Braver Angels have been trying to do and the authority we need now has to come from new groups of people who will look to what they can agree upon instead of what separates them. Erica Etelson  provides solid insights on ‘What can grow from common ground?’ Erica also presents strategies to combat authoritarianism in which she cites Susan Stokes on Depolarization  who “warns that autocrats feed off polarization, and she encourages depolarization efforts that can help restore the electorate’s faith in the democratic norms and institutions autocrats routinely disparage. (Stanford’s Strengthening Democracy initiative is an excellent source for creative, evidence-based depolarization strategies). That said, Stokes notes that polarization and institutional distrust tend to be higher in countries with high levels of economic inequality so, perhaps, the depolarization remedy cannot take effect without first addressing the economic drivers.” 

This will be difficult but necessary. The toughest issues in this approach are around abortion and gender identity. I do not pretend to have answers to those fights.

Think Venn diagram not Spectrum of Beliefs

As Etelson indicates above, we are not as citizens all at some mark on a line according to our beliefs and political affiliation. Surveys show a significant number of Americans are NON-ideological. Stop thinking right and left and instead build on new ideas. This group, similarity hub, echoes Etelson and allows us to think of convocations where ordinary citizens would dictate areas of agreement on a common basic culture, those widely accepted ‘mouers’ of Tocqueville about how we treat each other, how we trust in institutions, how we play fair. (HT to James Coan who offered additional resources to consider: common ground survey aggregator Americans Agree (americans-agree.org) and Voice of the People online public consultation surveys that show overlaps (vop.org/common-ground)

Treat morality as cooperation, and, therefore, find ways to cooperate with those in the middle 

Cooperation is the action or practice of working together, or with another or others, towards the same end, purpose, or effect. We have to find some purposes that matter to all of us, to exhibit a willingness to be of assistance as a start to that conversation. Out of these efforts, a sense of how people should be with one alter will create a new source of authority, a sort of equivalent to de Tocqueville’s moeurs, which will also accommodate degrees of autonomy.

This paper specifically focuses on leveraging the theory of Morality as Cooperation “which provides an increasingly supported conceptualization of morality within a cooperative framework. In essence, MAC posits that humans are social beings who have developed a variety of solutions to recurrent cooperative problems. These solutions are manifest in the form of instincts, intuitions, and institutions, which drive cooperative behavior and serve as criteria for evaluating others’ actions. MAC refers to this collection of cooperative solutions as “morality” and – drawing on game theory – has identified (at least) seven distinct types of cooperation, which give rise to (at least) seven domains of morality.” I found this hopeful sign. Now we just have to do it.  

Deal with the difference between authority and coercion 

Pollster Elliott Morris is kind of a realist optimist. “Being seen as tough is an advantage in a politics where voters want parties to deliver for them no matter what, but it’s likely not worth being called cruel and elitist. In our poll, Democrats lead the Republicans on the U.S. House generic ballot by 10 percentage points among registered voters. At least in the short term, that’s a worthwhile trade. 

But the Democrats’ weakness problem stands out as a particularly strong signal of intra-party dissatisfaction. When we look at how each party’s own identifiers rate their own party, the weakness gap for the Democrats really jumps out. Just 53% of Democrats call their party tough, compared to 80% of Republicans. And 31% of Democrats say their own party is weak — almost three times the 13% of Republicans who say the same about theirs. ” We must press elected officials in every possible way to reassert the authority of their institution without falling into the embrace of coercion.

Shake off our learned helplessness regarding authority 

Andrew Sullivan reminded me of that description in talking about what he correctly forecast as the then impending war with Iran. He called it “a learned helplessness in the polity”, a collapse of self-efficacy, a tendency to no longer believe in any ability to change things in the political world. Sullivan thought that could change by external events, by the corporate powers, lobbyists, and government pieces that sought this war going too far: “My bet is that if the administration goes to war with no Congressional vote or public debate, that learned helplessness will curdle into something angrier.” We are seeing how that bet played out in the near-term in the No Kings Protests this Saturday, March 28th. BUT… we have to move beyond protests that gather like-minded people only. March to actions that will make a difference around those areas of commonality.

An intriguing example of moving beyond — and Indivisible is doing this as well is Democracy2076 . This organization only formed in 2025 also noticed our collective problems with authority. They documented “a 25-year decline in public trust in institutions and optimism about the next generation’s future.” And God bless their optimism they sense that “We have an opportunity—with substantial and coordinated cross-sector interventions—to shape the next political realignment to ensure pro-democracy tenets are at its core.”

Back to Richard Sennett

As noted above, to state the identification of some certain solution for our problems with authority is beyond my ken and confidence. I can’t. I could fake it or suggest something that would prove to be illusory, but spending all of this time examining the dissolution of the former repositories of central authority in American society made me cautious about such tomfoolery.

Instead, we have to get serious about the difficulties posed by the dispersion of forms of authority that served us not perfectly but serviceably: The Judiciary, Journalism, Universities (and the science and other learning explored there), Medicine, even Government. We are still recovering from the cynical, idiotic statement (actually a borrowing from others) of Ronald Reagan that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” Tell that to a hurricane victim. Tell that to someone who managed to use their GI Bill Funding to gain an education and change their life. Tell that to someone who got mortgage assistance from the Feds. Tell that anyone who benefits from government services on any level.

But those things can’t happen without some kind of authority that helps to organize these responses and programs. And that requires a greater commonality within our polity. The government needs to become again one of our sources of authority, but one that we can challenge in constructive ways. 

The answer to our problems with authority begins with us. Righting of this ship requires finding the greatest number of people who can agree on the truth as a product of an ongoing rigorous dialogue and not something left untested. Close behind as a condition for rediscovering authority is return to a celebration of those who are good to their fellow citizens without any ulterior motive other than wanting to be good.  

Don’t believe me? Doubt my authority to say so? Let’s take that up in the comments.  

Authority itself is inherently an act of imagination

Richard Sennett

By definition, an assumption is a belief or concept taken for granted. Testing assumptions generally only happens when circumstances contradict that which we have presupposed as rules and realities of life. Or we want to make sure that our current plans under those assumptions won’t lead to disaster. Maybe we’re already there on that second scenario.

Part I of this three-part series recounted how the prolification of disorder, a spectacle impossible to ignore in our plugged-in world, provided a challenge to ideas about authority held for a long time, maybe my whole 74 years. The form in which authority exists today is locally erratically adequate, broadly good-for-nothing, and dependably bad for almost everyone. Disagree? Please educate me as to how authority is satisfying the “the attainment of ends“, which all of its observers and theoreticians posed as “the dominant
criterion of the validity of authority.” Besides not meeting that basic requirement, authority in our USA today is vicious, impaired, faulty, flawed, blemished, defective, bad; corrupt, impure, and debased.

That felt good.

Being against all authority would be a stupid move. One need not be a fanboy of authority to acknowledge its value, even needfulness, in a functional society. The question with authority always is the 5Ws : who, what, where, when, and why. Watching the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg last night, authority figures significantly: when is that power justified? What frameworks allow it to be fairly dispensed? What role do the people have in assuring that larger potencies — government, corporations, religions — neither amass reckless levels of power nor deprive others of their rightful authority. The back and forth between the Nazi judges on trial and Allied judges trying them reinforced what my initiator for this series, Richard Sennett, says about Authority : it is the relationship between the powerful and the weak. When it runs properly — legitimately — not everyone will be happy but most people can be safer, calmer, even happier.

My particular upbringing often produced skepticism about the bruited legitimacy of authority: we were taught to debate claims of authority, not just question them. This rendered the six Elliott children an affront to the nuns teaching us and a torment to friends unwilling to look things up at the library before offering any opinion. In other words, we were consistently annoying. Plus ca change… Yet within those doubts and complaints a belief abided that some types of authority would prove useful and reliable. The Elliotts were bandits, border baddies, reivers, but not actual anarchists; we talked a good game but growing up baptized our children, paid our taxes, and watched the news if only for the release of yelling at the screen.

Being Irish Catholic, the authority of the Church and indeed other religious institutions from Protestantism to Judaism held sway early, but by adolescence that confidence crumbled. That didn’t stop me from being Catholic, but it did make me question the authority claimed by those at the top. And this happened long before the revelations of horrific abuse and disgusting coverups. The combination of reading history widely and living it suspiciously will topple many a tenet even without scandals that prove how bad people claiming power really can be behind closed doors. Something about absolute power corrupting. But still I held out for some core of authority that stood untouched and would sustain individuals and communities if worse came to worse. Luckily for me, Catholic Leaders like Poep Francis and now Pope Leo turned the church back in a direction toward what Christ articulated, but there’s a long way to go. Elsewhere that’s not been the case with authority: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

When the most horrible depredations — January 6th, murders of civilian by ICE, cynical maneuvering and even crimes by those granted the public trust in both parties, sex trafficking for the wealthiest and best-connected, again in both parties, devastation of our Earthly resources — happened in our secular society,  it turned out that the core of our governmental, commercial, and journalistic systems had disintegrated, corroded by self-interest and double dealing. Authority was either missing, misused, or outright murdered. Confidence soured and decayed that some righteous and effective authority might appear to straighten out these messes. We have BIG problems with all realms of authority in our society.

I did not always feel this way. Assumptions about the authority of the United States governing system under our constitution were actually buttressed by Nixon’s 1974 resignation after Senate Watergate hearings and newspaper investigations. The result (despite Ford’s ill-advised pardon of the guy who was “not a crook“) seemed to confirm that both our political institutions and perhaps our most important social institution—journalism, the 4th estate—could exert accountability when needed. The Ronald Reagan years (Iran Contra, Savings and Loan Scandal , HUD Scandal , EPA Scandal, Wedtech Scandal , Operation Ill Wind) loosened and then educed a long erosion of that trust. It wasn’t just the way in which governmental bodies failed again and again whether through Bill Clinton’s misdeeds (he should have resigned) and George W Bush’s mistakes (he should have stuck to painting in Texas), but a realization that the media constituted a politics of its own if you consider politics at its most basic as the pursuit of interests. When the interest becomes financial survival, the NYT as an example decided with their famous innovation report that they “know what their audience wants and they know how to deliver“, but that strategy tilts towards SEO articles and clickbait and away from authority in the sense of “The fact or state of possessing credible information; power to inspire belief in the truth of something.” The internet’s inherent feedback loops fostered by algorithms are just as likely to find the crowd’s choices wacky as wise Authority loses a cornerstone when the press stops doing its job.

2016 due its revelations of the nature of a large swathe of my fellow citizens willing to vote for an illegitimate personality provided the moment when several assumptions about authority collapsed completely for me. I lived. 2020 provided a respite, what seemed like a course correction, but the margins of reassurance were slim. The behavior of individuals occupying functions of authority, however, worsened the undermining of my beliefs about where and how authority worked in this Republic. The clusterflock since then — Microsoft Word dictation doesn’t like me saying anything profane so we’ll go with that word, but you know what I mean—generated the final landslide of confidence in our systems. Only a cloud of dust remains.

Not every kind of authority is beneficial, but suffering through no kind of legitimate ultimate authority fosters disorder under which none but the wealthiest with their security forces and private islands may prosper. All that remains of my assumptions about authority is a bewilderment that they lasted so long and so wrong accompanied by a shame-faced Weltschmerz in finding out that Richard Sennett explained a great deal of the inevitable and dangerous erosion of Authority in his 1980 book of that name.

What appealed to me in that book during this assault by the wantonness of the executive branch,  the weakness of the legislature and Supreme Court, and the wooziness of the news media was its careful analysis of how the current situation was already foretold IN 1980. We have been lurching toward this moment since the 19th Century! Sennet’s guide to the subject was a welcome complement to my rereading a piece first encountered in the 1970s: Leonard Krieger’s magisterial entry on authority in the Dictionary of the History of ideas . I needed authorities on authority for as Anatole Broyard, the influential book critic of the New York Times, wrote in a reassessment of Sennett’s book three years after its publication, “Authority is a subject on which most Americans consider themselves philosophers. No other people talk so insistently about the nature and the limits of authority as it applies to various social groups.” Discussion doesn’t equal understanding and may in this instance allow us to kid ourselves about our understanding of, relationship to, and problems with authority.

What are those problems? As already mentioned, those repositories of authority upon which we relied have gone wobbly. A Supreme Court that says a president can’t be tried for crimes? A sitting president (looking at you, my dear Joe B) who lacks the savvy or humility to know he should have been a one-term wonder? A current president whose only talents are the manufacture of distractions and the obfuscation of truths? Legislatures that cannot legislate yet collapse before lobbyists? Elected representatives who make important promises repeatedly and then just as regularly fail to keep them? Public figures who employ weasel-worded excuses instead of honesty, fund-raising instead of raising standards? Corporations that have corrupted their own standards and embraced a strategy of what Cory Doctorow pithily calls enshittification? (Had to type that one myself; no way Microsoft dictation can handle that term.) Media that bows to censorship or just pumps out what its readers crave as confirmation of their own biases? They are our problems because we allowed them to happen. Again, the old Walt Kelly wisdom is pertinent: we have met the enemy and they is us. Sennett wrote that “Authority is a matter of giving power a meaning.” What exactly is the meaning of our own authority right now if we have both given so much of it away AND the people wielding authority are either incompetent or evil or both?

One of our problems with authority as evidenced now in every public space is how childish in many ways the SOP is: in choice, we must move within the circumscription of our corporate masters, in social relations, we are reduced to one side denouncing the absence of some power and the other denouncing its perceived presence when we are not sidetracked to games, circuses, and reality TV. Repeat endlessly without making a difference, without authority.

Sennet’s quoting forty-six years ago of Sigmund Freud sounds very 2026 to me:

the masses who are always in danger of regressing back to earlier phases, where they are at once ravenous for the comforts of a stronger person and in a rage against the very strength they desire.

• Sennett notes that “This reinfantilization of the masses is what Freud believed he was seeing in Europe in the 1930s when he came to write his last works.”
• That comment sounded chillingly familiar to others made this past year. One need not be a Freudian—I’m not — to appreciate the perception that the masses, which means all of us, are to various degrees, ‘re-infantilized‘ by and within the current culture.

Hang on. Don’t click out of here just yet. Deep breath. I know, who wants to admit that to some extent the way we do things, the environment and systems of our time, have infantilized them? The term rankles; no one wants to be called an infant, a baby, but infantilization conveys the way in which adults are condescended to, belittled, indulged, and patronized by the powers that be whether medical, government, finance, and/or especially corporations. They ply a sneaky authority akin to what Charles Perrow called second-order and third-order controls, not direct commands but steering and controlling by programs and routines, by means of assumptions and definitions that are taken for granted within the community. There are those damn assumptions again.

That doesn’t mean that such control happens without dissent, defiance, or resistance when their authority is seen as illegitimate, as ‘You’re not the boss of me‘. Sennett put it this way, “The dilemma of authority in our time, the peculiar fear it inspires, is that we feel attracted to strong figures we do not believe to be legitimate…. what is peculiar to our times is that the formerly legitimate powers in the dominant institutions inspire a strong sense of illegitimacy among those subject to them. However, these powers also translate into images of human strength: of authorities who are assured, judge as superiors, exert moral discipline, and inspire fear. These authorities draw others into their orbit, like unwilling moths to a flame. Authority without the legitimacy, society held together by its very disaffection” He goes on to admit that this configuration is an inversion of what authority was thought to be for philosophers like Max Weber who felt that authority at its core must be thought to be legitimate.

Sennet tracks this transition of societal authority in the USA back to the paternalism of the 19th century in which the boss became ‘the father’ and the authority of other institutions correspondingly waned. He pegs Adam Smith as a influential voice who by endorsing “the market idea… vanishes the authority of persons”; the buyer of things is in charge. While this view ignores other aspects of Smith’s thought that championed sympathy and charity, Sennett nails the way in which our problems with authority started with us giving it away, or more accurately exchanging one version, whether church or monarchy or family, for another—the market. Those at the mercy of the market, which was most people except for some experts — doctors, engineers, scientists, etc. —  who could call their own tune. (Even that’s a diminishing pool in 2026.) The nostalgic power of the individual flaunted in advertisements and popular entertainment is a myth for most if it was ever true.

Wealthy entrepreneurs took to the top then and have managed to stay there along with governmental figures who in many cases were not business figures but aristocracy. Being on top didn’t translate to appreciation as Sennett notes:

“The authorities promised protection or aid, but often did not make good on the promises. And from this gap arose the essential feature of modern authority lack authority: figures of strength arousing feelings of dependence, fear and awe —  yet the pervasive feeling that there was something false and illegitimate about the result. The personal strength of the authorities was accepted, the value of their strength to others doubted. Here the split between authority and legitimacy began.”

A recent visit to the Poster House museum in Manhattan for an exhibit of Italian propaganda art provided a telling quote from Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” The merger happened in the USA as well but with corporate becoming senior partner. We have finally flipped Vilfredo Pareto’s distinction in The Mind and Society,  between “a governing, political elite” on top and “a non-governing, non-political elite” below them in the authority hierarchy (Yes, that Pareto.) As Leonard Krieger noted in that entry on authority, Pareto assumed the rulers in the context of its authority over the nonelite, would constitute “the higher stratum of society, …their superior capacities were epitomized into what was suitable for “keeping them in power” and “exercising the functions of government” and what kept them “willing enough to use force” Who can claim that government enjoys that status today or that those in the highest positions are elite in the sense of “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society“? Pareto claimed that“History is a graveyard of aristocracies”, and the aristocracy that held authority is now sinking to six feet under.

We can mock those corporations and the governmental bodies now beholden to them, but even that action is part of the dynamic Sennett described:

“In modern society we have become adept at building bonds of rejection with authorities. These bonds permit us to depend on those when we fear, or to use the real to imagine the ideal. The trouble is that these bonds also permit the authorities to use us: they can exercise control of a very basic sort over those who seem on the surface to be rebelling.” One of our problems with authority is the way in which we kid ourselves about how even in its splintered form we are not manipulated by these other forces.

 Sennett saw this illusion when he wrote that, “The rebound in modern society has been that people feel ashamed about being weak. They use the tools of negation [disobedient dependence, printing a positive, ideal image of authority from the negative which exists, holding a fantasy about the disappearance of authority] to ward off these feelings of shame, and to defend themselves against the impact of strong people who seem malign. The subjects defend themselves by declaring the illegitimacy of the masters.” But a declaration without action lasts as long and is as significant as a passing breeze. Instead, we must fix our own ideas of authority. We need to investigate what we are doing or not doing that contributes to this situation. Yes, I know we are mere individuals, but that’s where this change has to start.

Sennett almost 50 years ago painted a picture of this difficult frustrating relationship with authority that is still clearly recognizable today:

Our problem is a problem within the domain of being free, and it is a real problem. The dominant forms of authority in our lives are destructive; They lack nurturance, nurturance—the love which sustains others—is a basic human need, as basic as eating or sex. Compassion, trust, reassurance are qualities it would be absurd to associate with these figures of authority in the adult world. And yet we are free, free to accuse our masters that these qualities are missing. The difficulty is that the very act of rejecting them builds bonds with them. Bonds based on fear of their strength, or the desire to glimpse some image of strength through defining their failings, attempts to rest from an unsatisfying set of images something which will satisfy that basic need for authority…. Surely a person with any sense would resent being in the hands of these elusive or deceiving authorities. But the trap of rejecting them is more than a matter of hoping finally to get them to care period no one person, no matter how well meaning as a personality, can ever give nurturance to another person as though it were a commodity. Nor do you earn care as though earning interest on an investment. But the illusion protects itself. The person who is unsatisfied, unhappy imagines that if only there were some one different in control then the unhappiness would end, one would feel respected by being noticed.

So, what do we do? Does Sennett offer any help or hope?  Can we reimagine authority in a better manner? That’s the question and maybe an answer of Part III, our final segment of this series about Testing the Assumptions About Our Problems with Authority and I hope you’ll join me for that in about a week’s time.

Notes

1. I saw the inside of journalistic slipperiness during my ‘straight job’ years as a management consultant when Fox News newly born on Sixth Avenue in New York City hired me to establish a performance management system. (Such a system BTW is an instance of authority and only as good as the process by which criteria are created and evidence then judged. In other words, most of them suck. And I was an authority on them obviously because Fox News hired me to make one.) Everybody was very nice during the years of working there despite the obviousness of my different political persuasion; liberal might as well be tattooed on my face. The slant on their side was evident especially because my time there coincided the Monica Lewinsky scandals and the 2000 presidential election. Scheduled to speak to the entire manager group in Manhattan on the day that Al Gore conceded the election allowed me to hear Roger Ailes powerfully provide marching orders for how the coverage was to unfold. “Gore is a bad guy” was his core message.
2. Even before that time having been a guest on other news programs, awareness existed that journalistic enterprises often started out with a preconceived idea of how the story should ‘taste’ and look and then proceeded to find the ingredients required for that recipe. And severe erosion happened with that authority source when the media infiltrated the public discourse frequently with stories that because of my own or others’ firsthand knowledge we knew to be biased, distorted, or outright false.

Part IA: AUTHORITY — Missing Person or Murder Case?

The end of the world as we know it bleeds endlessly through my screens and newspapers. The ‘times’ in end times is plural, so fixing one particular day as the finale is tricky and there might yet be a rescue, but some cliffhangers do result in the heroes falling off the cliff. (My friend Leo Bacica is hosting Cabaret for the End of the World at Arches Lane Theatre in London every Saturday night; Clever man who can read the room.)  No force appears capable of arresting the momentum of the disintegration of peace, security, science and truth. The people that in some measure we paid to take care of this angle have proved unfailingly failingly flailingly impotent. How they qualified for these jobs confounds me. HR has a lot to answer for. 

What’s missing is authority. For those recoiling at the word, please consider examining that bias.  Regarding authority, many of us resemble a very picky Goldilocks; we want it not too hot, not too cold, AND with designer flavors suited to our peculiar taste. We like some kind of authority, and no matter those personal preferences shouldn’t all of us be concerned that due to the lack of a larger effective countervailing authority on the national level our world is going to hell in a hand-basket, one probably not made in the USA?

Not every kind of authority is beneficial, but no kind of authority fosters disorder under which none but the wealthiest with their security forces and private islands may prosper, The stumbles, hobblings, and outright failures of what were once taken as reliable dispensers of legitimate authority are to me both irrefutable and irremediable in that always blurry foreseeable future despite what the performative screeching of social media might convey. (I would be delighted to be proved wrong on any of this.) The next vote is November 2026. Do the math on the damage done per week since last January. Treat it as a test question: if X can corrupt and destroy this many institutions in 390 days, how many can X further degrade and disable in the next 320 days, the time between today and 2027? Extra credit for predicting the exact form of voter intimidation to be employed along the way.

Proposing passivity and resignation is not my goal here. Nor am I satisfied in just adoptiing what for some stands as the only conducive tactic in these circumstances:  hoping actively that these enders of the world run out of gas or die; in the latter case peacefully, of course, a good death, as my mother would say. Instead of just waiting for the malefactors’ fuel tanks or lifespans to hit empty, examining our problems with authority could prove useful if we do survive until next year. Absent such a rethinking, we will likely end up in the same place again because it is our problems with authority that have landed us in this circumstance, a state predicted over forty years ago by , Richard Sennett’s Authority .

Why cite that book? In between  ruminating on the Substacks Chasing the Dead or Testing A Personal History and praying to St. Genesius, patron saint of playwrights, that the final two-hour episode of our civilization’s End Times won’t drop until after the run of my play RETROSPECTIVE at Baron’s Court Theatre in London May 14th to May 23rd,  a tower of books (that must be ‘dealt with’ according to the executive producer of the above named play, who also happens to be my wife) toppled on the office floor and Richard Sennett’s Authority slid my way. Reminded that this title word was supposed to be what kept things from falling apart. pushed the question to the forefront of my concerns and allowed postponing dealing with the rest of that pile of books.  Wasn’t some form of authority supposed to foil and thwart those people ending the world? Authority — the right kind — was definitely sold to my generation as part of the deal.  

As a boomer (the cohort probably to blame for this creeping catastrophe)  a feeling of responsibility to do something seized me in rereading the book and my scribbled notes from at least a decade ago in its flyleaves. Whatever happened to the centripetal authority that held the Republic together even through the Southern States war to retain slavery? That authority’s absence now appears like a missing persons case that might turn out to be a homicide, we should at least try to figure out why we let things get this bad. Is it our problems with authority that eroded the trust and effectiveness of institutions so that they now are too weak or incapacitated to stop this destruction of American society? Rackham’s translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has as its first sentence, “Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit or understanding, seems to aim at some good: hence, it has been well said that the good is that at which all things aim.” The aim of this series of posts is to take aim at our problems with authority, which I believe counts as some good.

Part IB: Establishing my authority to find out what befell AUTHORITY

What gives me the authority to lead such an examination on this subject? Despite ample evidence that few on Substack ever feel a need to justify their writings, I’ll answer the question. My roots of expertise in authority appear simultaneously obvious and obscure. Like the fish not seeing water or the polar bear not feeling cold, as Japanese Count Tadasu Hayashi once wrote. I did “not even think that anything which has been happening daily in (my) own immediate surroundings ever since their infancy can possibly be worthy of notice”. Not until comparisons with the environments of friends occurred did the paradox in which my siblings and I lived become evident. My schoolmates enjoyed a diluted or even absent atmosphere of command and power along with a reverence for the powers that be. We Elliotts were the opposite: the unusual strictness of the disciplinarian culture inside our home coexisted with a skepticism by our potentate — my father — for all other forms of authority. We adopted that attitude as a sort of ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ device to simplify things, skeptical of all authority except our own.

This absolutism put us against the world, but never (outwardly, at least) against our father. Therefore, this experience made me an expert on authority. 

Not. 

Or maybe. 

Depends if you accept my other credentials or if you even believe in credentials, those proofs of knowledge and skill. This is where our problems with authority begin: doubts in the pertinence or even existence of credentials are prime suspects in the disappearance of authority. Self-assertions of proficiency should be suspect, but rejection of all claims leaves us without guidance or insight into critical areas. We all know something of authority; whether dispensing or receiving. For me from that taut-ship home through the nuns who ranged from stern to sadistic to Jesuits who let their minds do the manipulating, my youth was soaked in authority.  But in 1978 at the age of 26. Doctor Sam Mastrianni made me the Executive Director of the  Saratoga County Drug Agency in upstate New York, an organization on ‘double secret probation’ at the time from the State agency.  Two years earlier, I was a teacher in a reform school, where authority comes in a variety of flavors. Mine was kind of French vanilla. Immediately before this promotion, I was an alcoholism counselor for the Mental Health department in the county, setting diagnoses and prescribing treatment regimens. Were they always followed? No. My clients were after all alcoholics. Were they always correct? Hell, no. Ascending to that job, I was after all twenty-four years old. Suddenly people worked for me. I promulgated policies and declared events. We escaped probation and avoided extinction. Authority? I was hip deep in the stuff. My primary learnings then about authority were:

• Knowledge mattered; As T.S.Eliot advised, “There is no method but to be very intelligent.”
• Back up your decisions with solid facts and careful decisions.
• A little goes a long way. If you must get drunk, make it on a beverage and not power..

Twenty-five years later, hobnobbing with powerful CEO’s and other C-Suite personages as a consultant and then Chief Learning Officer afforded me a front row seat on authority. No, It was more like an airplane jump seat where you’re next to the pilot and trying not to show your nerves. I saw large-scale authority in action. Decisions were made, often with my facilitation, that turned into orders and ultimatums for thousands of people not in the room where it happened. Most of them couldn’t even find the room, which candidly. tended to the tacky techno side with the scent of competition, mostly male, embedded in the knock-off designer leather chairs. 

These experiences showed me how authority happens and mishappens. My learnings from that first Executive Director job seemed less relevant. Tracing authority’s evolution in some organizations was easy after a while; A newcomer elbows existing bosses out of the way, boxes out rivals, scores point after point in never ending sessions spawning simulacrums of strategy.  

(Or is the plural simulacra because of the word’s Latin roots? Not claiming authority in that area, but I did have three years of high school Latin in the 1960s.) Simulacrums are things that “merely have the form or appearance of a certain entity without possessing its substance or proper qualities”. Many of the strategies produced fit that particular shoe. There is another OED meaning for simulacrum — a mere image or specious imitation or likeness of something, But that’s probably too harsh a judgment of those strategies.; After all, I facilitated those sessions and was reputed to be something of an expert on facilitation and large group decision-making. Back then expertise, prowess, adeptness, wizardry still conveyed some but not likely the highest authority in our best of all DoorDash worlds. 

Part IC: What constitutes authority?

This is where one end of the problem starts: the assumption of authority by self-proclaimed experts. In that manner, gradually a society loses a ‘cultural coherence‘ as to what constitutes authority. The Romans had that cultural coherence about auctoritas according to Volume one of the five volume set Dictionary of the History of Ideas. That first volume covered Abstraction to Design Argument. The entry on Authority spanning pages 141 to 162 marked my furthest progress in that volume. Leanard Krieger authored the analysis and as his NYT obituary documented he boasted what for most of the last 100 years were considered top tier sources of authority: Rutgers, Yale, Harvard, U. Chicago, Columbia. In his entry on authority, Leonard points out that authority is chameleonic; indeed, his first sentences state that “The idea of authority has no single historical definition. Originally, its dominant meaning was the capacity to evoke voluntary compliance or assent, on grounds distinct from coercive power or rational conviction.” 

There it is: Krieger gives us a big clue why authority as a bulwark against the demolition of institutions is missing in action. The capacity to evoke voluntary compliance has withered away. Everything is up for grabs. Science? Journalism? Religion? Government? The Courts? We’re skeptical of the other side including the side in the middle that doesn’t want to take sides. And when we have done with the internecine ‘you’re not the boss of me’ scolding and cursing then we turn skeptical intraculturally imposing sanctions and purity tests in those who mostly agree with us. True safety-net authority for a republic requires large-scale agreement. 

No idealized notions are imputed in citing Rome as an example of a usefully organized authority; a deeply hierarchical society with slaves is not to be emulated. But as Krieger notes, in Rome for hundreds of years “the correlative of authority was trust“, and that part deserves imitation. Krieger in that entry quotes ​Mom​ms​en who wrote of
au​ctoritas that it was ​”more than a coun​sel and less than a command; rather a coun​sel with which one could not properly avoid compliance​.” Think of the Republican Senators going to Nixon in 1974 and telling him the jig was up, which led to his voluntary resignation. Krieger continued ​”the Senate’s Authority was attributed to the actual binding force of its coun​sels​.” ​There had to be agreement on ​the reality and importance of that binding ​force or ​t​he whole structure shattered as it would eventually even before Caesar​’s actions. We are left with the play acting of authority. And proposing further how that came about will take us back to Richard Sennett’s book in Part 2 of this test of assumptions. 

Yes, my good and faithful readers,’ ‘writes’ is a word; Obsolete in most places admittedly and only used in northeastern Scotland as of 1974, but it’s a real word signifying ‘A written record or work; a book, a letter, a document, etc.’  Even if it wasn’t, however, who’s to tell you that you can’t use it? The writers of books on how to write, that’s who. Are there any of those plentiful guides that prove actually helpful? This is only a semi-rhetorical question because this post shares a few that appealed to me probably because they are less prescriptive than descriptive, enquiry of the act of written creation presented more as a quiet conversation in a cafe than a lecture over your shoulder. How does such a post fit into the boundaries of Testing: A Personal History? Well, first off, who said there were boundaries here? TAPH was just a good title for a Substack given my almost twenty year straight job at what was once the world’s foremost testing organization. Secondly, every time setting out to write something is a test, a very specific kind of trial of will and wit.

Many sources offer instruction on writing especially in the commercial vein. Social media platforms changed so many things about writing, but one of the most notable is the proliferation of advice and the proffering of tutelage about how to write. Carlos Greaves in McSweeneys smartly sends up the hucksterism of these ‘one neat trick’ impresarios who opine on platform presence and increasing followers while gliding past the essential question of why we are writing in the first place. The books that cover this subject are more useful and I realize that my experience with them now goes back sixty years. And yet this year, 2 books stood out for me in their approach. Reflecting on them and composing this piece centered me as to what matters most in writing. So, not a how-to from me, but more of a what made a difference in such books.

Elements of Style

The Elements of Style by Strunk & White was handed out to freshmen at Saint Peter’s Prep in 1965. Realizing now that this edition was only six years old when we received it seems strange because faculty acted as if this was some lost book of the Bible recently unearthed in a cave in Egypt. As with my experience of that weightier sacred volume, Elements Of Style worked for me by adhering to its commandments selectively. Today some wags carp about the whole book, but anything good attracts carp. For clarity; that’s carp as in “Carping speech, cavil”, not Cyprinus carpio or its various cousins under that name who have invaded the ponds, lakes, and rivers in the Midwest. As that previous sentence demonstrates, I don’t follow strictly what Strunk and White advise, And the critics don’t seem to get that. Use active voice, yes; use fewer words, maybe. Even EB White admitted that “late in the in game … he was batting .500’ in certain opportunities to follow Strunk’s imperative to ‘omit needless words’. (And I place punctuation outside single quotes if that seems apt to me; take that Chicago Manual of Style.) White’s take on his beloved mentor’s first principle retains the idea that, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

That’s good as far as it goes, but comparing writing to a machine bespeaks one particular mindset for expression and there must be room for others. We don’t want all our essays to hum like the well-tuned Stutz Bearcats of that time.  White recommended Strunk’s original guide’s intention to get writers to focus “the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.” Mission accomplished and kudos extended, but writing is not primarily about following rules. And as Arthur C. Clarke first admitted in his writing, ‘Rules were meant to be broken’.  (BTW, White in considering Strunk’s intent might be thought prescient about more than writing: “Unless someone is willing to entertain notions of superiority, the English language disintegrates, just as a home disintegrates unless someone in the family sets standards of good taste, good conduct and simple justice.” Ahem.)

But Strunk and White told us to read the best writing. My father told me when I was very young that Somerset Maugham said that the way to learn to write is to read and the way to learn to read is to write. (Later I figured Maugham like all great writers stole that from 17^th Century Francis Bacon who stated that  “Reading maketh a full man… writing maketh an exact man.” God knows who Bacon took that from.) So I read everything I could, which is a necessary but not sufficient cause for good writing whereas you could probably be a good writer and think that Strunk and White were linemen on the 1957 Green Bay Packers.

Modern English Usage

The dictatorial guides entertain and enlighten me, not via their fatwas and fussiness, but because of the fecundity of their examples. And they have such confidence in their opinions; e.g., A.B. Guthrie Jr., the screenwriter of Shane mandating that “Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.” Variety was too spicy for his literary life.

The most confident of these language martinets came to me because the previous owner of the house Marjorie and I bought in Tarrytown, New York in 1988 left a copy in the attic of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. He also left photos of him as an Olympic diver for Canada in 1936 posing happily with Nazis and nudes of his late wife, but we ditched those and embraced the Fowler for its 742 pages of eloquent harrumphing about things that are “hardly tolerable” but “not objectionable”. I love this decree that made it onto the OED:  “Excessive use of exclamation marks is..one of the things that betray the uneducated or unpractised writer.” Ouch!!!!

And here’s HW on the semicolon “the use of semicolons to separate parallel expressions that would normally be separated by commas is not in itself illegitimate; but it must not be done when the expression is so separated from a group that is to be separated by nothing more than a comma, or even not separated at all, from another part of the sentence; to do it is to make the less include the greater which is absurd.” The man expounds in this book on the uses of “that” and “which” for twenty pages: respect, but also an incitement to heresy if not rebellion.

As with so many other layers of my life, the reaction to this kind of writing guide stems in part from my own problems with authority. As a senior in college, that anti-authoritarianism, which with the heedlessness of youth I flaunted,  almost sabotaged my admittance to the writing seminar that poet John Fandel taught. My reputation as a wildly hirsute, wisecracking, freewheeling, convention shattering, class-skipping performer needed to shrink into the persona of a humble pilgrim in order even to get a screening interview. Seeking to enter a class where discipline and tradition reigned required genuflection from me and generosity from Mr. Fandel. Adherence to craft mattered and masters like Fandel determined what constituted craft. When poet Harvey Shapiro reviewed Fandel’s first book of poems in 1959 he described his style as “very quiet and very clear”, which also fit his method of instruction in that seminar.   My work was quite unquiet and maybe overly lush. Our assignments for the semester were weekly brief essays. (These short pieces were very much in the style of the pieces that for years appeared in the NYT by Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of ‘Several short sentences about writing’ which I also would later absorb. He would have done well in Fandel’s class.) Fandel was kind, wry, and generous, but the tenor of my work bumping up so insistently against his model led to his pronouncement in the final one-on-one granted each senior that my goal at the end of my life would be to produced one essay polished into a gemlike state, a piece that mattered, perhaps published in a minor literary journal. That’s poet speak for ‘Don’t get your hopes up, kid.’ Maybe he was just setting the bar low, but at twenty-one years old such a statement was not confused for an endorsement.

Thus chastened, my consumption of guides to writing began with an assist from the schoolbook depository of New York State. Fresh out of college as a reform school English teacher, that department’s offers of all sorts of books included guides to composition. I read them all and sadly for some of you to little effect.  A copy of one of them remains in my library. Perusing that paperback, Writing: Unit Lessons In Composition published by Ginn and Company, two reasons for its survival occur to me: the quoted sections are superlative ranging from Dylan Thomas and Stephen Crane to Thomas Wolfe and Herman Melville. Those excerpts are like really good… brief essays. Anytime I open those pages the enjoyment of encountering these pearls of literature returns. The other reason is that the recommendations for constructing a purposeful sort of language are amusing in their quantity and condescension; They represent a kind of time capsule of a certain way of explaining how writing should work.

Teaching AP English in a reform school made unlikely the prospect of taking my students through twenty-five chapters and 160 pages of how-to. But subjecting them to the way the book’s five high school teacher authors (three of whom were from the same district in Larkspur CA) chopped up the art of composition into chapters such as ‘Render Sensory Experiences’ and ‘Emphasize With Paradox’ was against my grain. (The latter section started off with this instruction: “One of the surest ways to engage a person’s attention is to say something that startles him.” Since some of my students were in the reform school because of convictions for mugging and stick-ups they hardly needed this tip.) The preface had an inscription by Richard Brinsley Sheridan that gave away the books intentions: “Easy writings vile hard reading.” The authors were determined that no one following their instruction would have an easy time of writing.

Sticking to the sparkling excerpts at the beginning of each chapter from Hemingway, Orwell, Forster and Conrad, however, gave my kids an idea of what was possible from stringing words together. (BTW unsurprisingly for a book published in 1965, which is why we probably got our copies for free in 1973, this guide only included selections from white males despite one of the authors being a Mrs. Louise Velt, of lovely Larkspur CA. In that class, I countered with Autobiography of Malcolm X and Claude Brown’s Manchild In The Promised Land as well as poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks. My classes were over 2/3 kids of color; we all want to see examples of how our people won at writing. And my guys then wrote their stories with massive amounts of embellishment, but what writer doesn’t do that? My teaching was imperfect but getting them to write was one good thing done for these teens already consigned to the margins. It was the best I could do because as Kupajo (Tom Whitwell ) noted recently “Writing forces you to tidy that mental clutter. To articulate things with a level of context and coherence the mind alone can’t achieve.” Writing makes your story — imagined, exaggerated, or actual — real.

 I didn’t restrict myself to those books available for free. Some of the titles turned to included Bird by Bird  by Anne Lamott for encouragement, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard for description, and On Writing Well by William Zinsser because William Safire in his NYT On Language column recommended it. And Safire despite his distressing politics in being a Nixon enabler had a sparkling wit and a sharp eye for good phrases. Being anti authority does not make one anti imitation.

And so, the homage to these handbooks has continued with various muses. I keep on finding them: just yesterday Xerxes Jeeves on Threads introduced me to the notion of Scene and Sequel from Dwight V. Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer. It’s not going to write anything for me, but such books when done well and originally carry the possibility of fixing a flaw or buttressing a technique. ‘When done well’ is the key but for each writer that criterion might be different depending upon where they are in their career. Here are a few permanent residents of my shelves that betray my attitude:

•  Rilke’s  Letters To A Young Poet for inspiration with maybe a touch of selection bias  (‘A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.’)
• Arthur Quinn’s Figures Of Speech for its compendium of ‘ways to turn a phrase‘ felicitously presented and blessedly unpedantic.
• Brian Dillon’s Essayism for its evocation of style as ‘the prize not a rule of the game’, And for displaying to me gems like William Carlos Williams’ espousal: “ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centers of stillness.”

• Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell for its explication of revision and rewriting in the context of creating a novel, which is something I haven’t done yet but if I do this book will prove a guide

Leah Sumrall in the review of Matt Bell’s book linked above makes a point that I think is critical to an appreciation of these kinds of guides: “I love craft books. It isn’t so much that I read them hoping to learn something new (though I almost always do), but that I enjoy finding new perspectives on what I already know about writing.” The problem with some volumes in this genre is that they mistake two types of knowledge — know what and know how. This take arises from my years in straight jobs especially Chief Learning Officer at ETS where the distinction mattered. I owe my deeper understanding of it to a mentor and friend the late great Larry Prusak. This snippet from an interview he gave says it all very succinctly:

All knowledge is tacit. Someone once asked me to write an essay on what I learned growing up in Brooklyn, New York. And I could never say enough, I mean, there’s so many – the smells, the sounds, the problems, dah dah dah. All knowledge is tacit. Some of it becomes explicit. But a better way of looking at those terms are “knowhow” and “know what.” Know what, for example, if someone’s talking about France, you would know that Paris is the capital of France. But knowhow, how to get around in France, how to act, how to speak, that’s knowhow.

CS Lewis sharing with humility some ‘know-how’:

The how-to write books are hooey when they fail to acknowledge the difference between ‘knowing what’ tips and ‘knowing how’ reality, the tacit stuff. You only get the know-how of writing by doing it, then reflecting on what you’ve done, then doing it again. Additionally, unlike learning tennis or heart surgery the latitude of what constitutes writing is so vast that no one book could serve as the definitive guide anyway. And aping the ways in which other writers went about their business isn’t likely to manufacture the right process for you. Mason Currey’s entertaining book Daily Rituals — How Artists Work is filled with purported  self-reports of how the great artists produced their great masterpieces. But understanding that Thomas Wolfe in trying to follow up the success of his first book, Look Homeward, Angel, began the practice of fondling his genitals while looking out his window so that it “fostered such a good male feeling that it had stoked his creative energies” isn’t going to work for most of us. And I say that from a theoretical rather than an empirical perspective. It seems mundane to hear about how Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22 in the evenings or Nicholson Baker isn’t terribly strict about his writing schedule even though he starts on a typical day around 4:00 or 4:30 AM only to go back to sleep a bit later and start working again in the daylight. A specific observation is made that he drinks coffee both times that he gets up. This is TMI, not even know-what. The best we can hope for from books about the subject is that they make us close them with a satisfied smile and go back determinedly to doing our own work.

With that precept in mind, two final books in this idiosyncratic survey might capture the attention and imagination of curious authors:

How To Draw A Novel by Martin Solares translated by Heather Cleary. With the plenitude of questions, cautions, and extracts from other novelists, Solares makes us think differently about characters and beginnings and structure. But he does so with the addition of  and unusual tool drawing, which should be obvious from the title of his book. He argues that these sketches help him to understand forms, patterns and direction. I think I like this book best because no one else has ever written anything like this about writing. In order to achieve that distinction, it seems that Solares has read closely all of the books that I think matter and many more in other languages that now I have to pursue. In the middle of his book, he produces six sketches that he entitles a timeline of the novel 8th century BCE to now.

Brilliant.

But my all-time favorite book on writing is Negotiating With The Dead  by Margaret Atwood, which figures since she’s also written two novels that would be on my top 100 list if I ever bothered to write: The Handmaid’s Tale (not the TV series)  and The Blind Assassin. Atwood steps back from the actual writing of a book or essay to engage with the idea of who a writer is anyway: “Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance—we hear a capital W on Writer.” There are useful insights about what it means that we have chosen to be writers whether anybody validates that choice for us or not. (One of my favorite quotes of all time on this subject is from Lorrie Moore who once said ‘validation is for parking tickets’.)

Atwood claims that “the mere act of writing splits the self in two” and that applies to playwrighting as well because people will confuse your characters with you. Many non-writers fail to realize  that as soon as you put something down on the page it cannot be any human being living or dead. (Guides to playwrighting where this principle also obtains will have to be a whole different subject because… plays are a whole different thing.) Negotiating With The Dead eschews the ‘how to’ but rather offers us  experiences of what being a writer has been like for Atwood. She emphasizes her initial discovery that “writing had a hardness, a permanence, that speech did not.” Therefore, the” act of writing comes weighted with a burden of anxieties. The written word is so much like evidence—like something that can be used against you later.” Ain’t that the truth?

Atwood enlightens us also as to the travails of being a so-called ‘woman writer’; her growing up in Canada in the 1950s taught some hard lessons first hand. Here’s a section on the difference: “A man playing the role of great artist was expected to Live Life—this chore was part of his consecration to his art—and living Life meant, among other things wine, women and song. But if a female writer tried the wine and the man, she was likely to be considered a slut and a drunk, so she stuck with the song; And better still if it was a swan song. Ordinary women were supposed to get married, but not women artists. A male artist could have marriage and children on the side as long as he didn’t let them get in the way… But for women, such things were supposed to be the way. And so this particular way must be renounced altogether by the female artist, in order to clear the way for that other way—the way of Art.”

In the final chapter of this book, Atwood reminds us that all writers learn from the dead:

“As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; You also feel judged and held to account by them.” Those words produced my ‘shock of recognition’, the realization of a beauty in which you feel a new commonality in another’s work. Not to imitate but ask, ‘Can I do that? Can my words shimmer and sing like theirs but in my own way?’ Writing is a test in which we ask ourselves all the time how wide the gap is between our aspiring and our actual writing.

In that same chapter, Atwood finally gets around to explaining her book’s  title, Negotiating With The Dead: “Its hypothesis is that not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all reading, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” In writing, we seek something. “The story in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going into a narrative—into the narrative process—is a dark road. You can’t see your way ahead. … The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards.”

So, there is no hope of a book on how to get there, no manual or FAQ, even though that would wisely states that, “All writers must go from now to Once Upon a time; All must go from here to there; All must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.”  And that ain’t hooey.

BTW Somerset Maugham definitely said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Check out our other Substack: Chasing the Dead – Amateur Adventures in Genealogy. Chapter 15 defends our right to call the 2010 Elliott  brothers genealogy trip an ‘odyssey’ even though we didn’t blind any cyclops or take any opium. Guiness, yes; opium, no.

“The authentic and pure values — truth, beauty and goodness — in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.”
Simone Weill

Eventually, this post will get to a strong recommendation for Henry Oliver’s book, but first we have to clean up some Fitzgeraldiana related to second acts. Like many other besotted English majors of my and other generations, F Scott Fitzgerald ranked very high on my list of influences. All of his books, even his failed play, The Vegetable, biographies, notes, and letters: they all enveloped me in my twenties.

This affection may seem odd given that Scott was a severe alcoholic for much of his adult life and my big job in my own twenties was as an alcoholism counselor (starting fifty years ago this August) up in Saratoga County, New York. But his writing — The Crack-Up, The Lost Decade, On Booze — served as an antidote against the glamourous notion to which many addicted to alcohol subscribe. (In Saratoga, my clients ranged from wealthy Fortune 50 execs to poor residents out of the foothills of the Adirondacks, but even the latter understood the Fitzgerald stories.) I used verbatim one of his final notes — ‘ACTION IS CHARACTER’ — as a guidepost to help many of the people I counselled. Fitzgerald that line in block letters (underlining the first and last words several times each) in the unfinished manuscript for The Last Tycoon . The relevance for those in the early stages of recovery came from an awareness that what you said in pursuing that goal was a lot less important than what you did. And that meant a surveillance of every action undertaken: where you went, who you saw, what you did. Fitzgerald was sober when he was writing that last book and many believe The Last Tycoon would have signaled the start of a second act for him. Tragically, shortly after making those marks on the page, he died of a massive heart attack. They say he was eating a chocolate bar, which is one of the most early recovering alcoholic things ever, God bless him.

That Fitzgeraldian immersion failed to stop me from misunderstanding for years one of the most cited quotations of the great novelist: “there are no second acts in American lives.” The problem for me (and according to this article many other people) is that we didn’t register the entire quote or its context. The full line from Fitzgerald’s 1932 ‘My Lost City’ essay actually seems to vouch for the presence of second acts in life and admit to the author’s discarding a previous assumption: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”

The line hit at me again while reading Henry Oliver’s instructive and inspiring book, Second Act What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life. Reinvention is not a new subject for me; seven years ago I posted some notes on the process gained from my own zigzaggy line of ‘straight jobs’ as well as the observations and consultations with others who were making real the reimagining of their occupations. In the spirit of this Testing: A Personal History blog and Substack, reinvention is testing yourself in the most immediate and consequential fashion. Henry Oliver takes a broad and rich look at this phenomenon with insights and eloquence that prompts me to recommend the book very highly.

Of course, being 74 years old and out of my last straight job six years ago at the end of this month, the subject of second acts is inescapable. Our 8th play in this ‘act’, Retrospective will get its UK premiere at Barons Court Theater in London this May and Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy bustles along as a Substack exploring the findings and foibles of digging through the roots of family.

Oliver looks at people like Katherine Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Audrey Sutherland, Samuel Johnson, and even Margaret Thatcher. (It’s a tribute to what Oliver has written here that the inclusion of the Iron Lady was not a deal breaker for me.)

Henry had me from the introduction in his book with his definition of a late bloomer as ‘someone who succeeds when no one expects them to’. That’s such an important characteristic because those negative perceptions actually can help those of us who have a constitutional need to prove others wrong. (Guilty as charged.) Other ways in which Oliver described this category were that they “tend to be smart (which doesn’t have to mean successful at school), self-educating and self-directing, they followed their own interests and take lifelong education seriously. They never stopped teaching themselves; Often, they set their own agenda. One early sign of a late bloomer is often earnestness, which can be off putting to many people. Another thing that characterizes many late bloomers is a period of withdrawal for reflection.”

Reading this passage did you have the sensation that your own life was being described? I did. My life has had more acts then a Shakespearean history play from teaching in a reform school to becoming the Chief Learning officer at ETS when I had just turned 50 years old. So, it registered that Oliver thinks what’s needed to be a late bloomer is to be prepared for luck, networked, resilient, persistent, energetic. It doesn’t hurt to have the advantages of natural intelligence and maybe some other resources or what people might call privilege in some cases. But that’s not true across the board. There are lots of second acts that started out in tough circumstances. A willingness to admit failure and to admit mistakes seems important too. But what seems most essential to having that second act is believing that you should have one.

But I don’t have to look so far to find second acts. by no means exhaustive (other second act exemplars, please tell your story in a comment), consider this list of friends and former colleagues:

• Gene Bouie Was one of the first people I met at ETS in 2001 and we collaborated on a lot of projects inside that organization. Now he’s authored a book— A City Worth Fighting For: Strategies to Lift Trenton and Its People —that combines his passion for the people of his adopted hometown with the wisdom acquired from his’ first act’ jobs. (Come to think of it. Writing this book might be the 4th or 5th or 6th act for my dear friend Gene.)

• Steve Sieck moonlighted as the music director for our early 1980s show Captive Audience while working his straight job as an influential strategy consultant and market research professional. But now he’s an accomplished songwriter who has managed to put together a brilliant album of his own works, Crazy That Way and performs regularly in the Los Angeles area with a network of superb artists.

• Irv Katz boasts 2831 citations according to Google Scholar on subjects ranging from Testing information literacy in digital environments to Authoring conversation-based assessment scenarios. His second act is writing a brilliant management book (and I don’t say that very often) Rules for Reluctant Managers.

• Lenore Skomal went from a career as  an award-winning columnist for the Connecticut Post to writing novels and biographies and then plays and now is cofounder of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival.
• Ida Lawrence after her long career leading the largest and most important psychometric organization in the world  to now imparting to citizens aspects of Education in America: Challenges Ahead
• Joe Raelin, My old friend and colleague, might not classify what he is doing today as a reinvention but if you go back to his earliest work of workplace learning he continues to reinvent our concepts of what leadership could be within organizations. He may be emeritus but he ain’t done yet.
• Linda Tyler , another colleague as a Vice President at Educational Testing Service, moved to Portland and started Gracious Vegan, “an all-inclusive place for anyone to enjoy great-tasting vegan cooking.”

Hans Sandberg  progressed from careers as a journalist and corporate communication expert to novelist and fascinating Substack author. His Substack publications include:

• The Nordic Link: A Substack for occasional reflections.
• A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974): Features excerpts and stories from his overland journey from Stockholm to Delhi in 1974.
• I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint – Harald Sandberg’s Path: Likely a publication related to his father the artist Harald Sandberg, as excerpts are found here.

• Marc Silver who literally wrote the book on interface design now dazzles us regularly with his wildlife photography including this prize-winning entry of a short-eared owl seen above
• I read in their holiday card  that Steve Lazer is teaching kids tennis “Steve Lazer” tennis program cape may and Terry Sanchez-Lazer started her second act as a master gardener earlier than many of us and it has bloomed. (Couldn’t resist)
• Ed Altman’s straight jobs early in his life impress mightily: Vice President, Senior Project Manager, Global Project Management. And then he walked away from that world back to his passion: acting. Now he’s making movies like Top Hate and The Dummy Detective as well as dazzling in three Knowledge Workings Theater productions. We don’t favor actual second acts in most of our plays, but Ed’s second act is powerful and hard-earned
• The same could be said to one of my favorite actresses in the Off-Broadway world, the delightful and very game Lucy McMichael. I don’t know what number act this is for Lucy, but she keeps on reinventing herself winning recently the 2024 Adam Hocherman Award for Excellence in Improv.
• Eddie Schroback, who I first met when we were 13 years old is killing it in his second act as “the oldest comic and only Vietnam veteran doing stand-up comedy in the Denver area.”
• My own life partner, Marjorie Phillips Elliott, became an executive producer of theatre seven years ago after being Chair of the Chamiza Foundation and on the Members Committee of Washington DC’s Phillips Collection. (And I’m enormously grateful for that second act of hers, without which my current one could not have happened)

Once I shifted into the business and management phases of my straight jobs, the self-taught aspect of a ‘second acter’ played a big role in my success. One of the most influential sources of that autodidactic grazing in libraries was the great management theorist, Peter Drucker. One of his quotes has stayed with me and remains relevant today:

If you talk of fifty years of working life… you have to reinvent yourself. You have to make something different out of yourself…

Henry Oliver’s book offers a guide and a goad for that reinvention. The curtains are rising, the lights shine, the audience awaits; your second act is ready to start.

Check out our other Substack: Chasing the Dead – Amateur Adventures in Genealogy. Chapter 13X with dead people trolling me just dropped at this link

My dear friend Zeineb Mahzouz sent me an article that drills into a subject that surfaces again and again in my stew of concerns that boil up on Testing: A Personal History — Meritocracy. Writing about the subject previously as in here insisting that most people fail to realize that our society is more a ‘ganglion of oligarchies’ than a pyramid of hierarchies, and saluting Sophie Callcott’s Excellent Essay Unmasking The Myth of Meritocracy. My posts have explored Myths of Meritocracy That Are Entangled in Myths about Testing and how Nepotism, Networks, and Nature Outgun Test Scores. I am not as certain as Freddie deBoer “that students are not equal but rather sorted into a distribution, and that at scale and in general students remain in a particular performance band for their academic lives“, which fact would make meritocracy a shell game. I don’t know enough, but if Freddie is even partly right, the notion of meritocracy would take a PR hit as such a reality would place ceilings on the potential achievements of many in society.

The idea in this blog is to not just to write about the tests that life provides for us, but to test the assumptions and beliefs accumulated over the years. (It’s my attempt to follow the Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey approach to continuous adult development right up to Stage 5 the “self-transformational stage, at which point individuals have the capacity to accommodate more than one ideology and are not threatened by criticism” I’m not there yet.)

Zeineb’s article by Herman G. van de Werfhorst of both the European University Institute and the University of Amsterdam provides the counterpoint in this case, the opening to paradox. Entitled ‘Is Meritocracy Not So Bad After All Professor van de Werfhorst reports “…that educational expansion over time, and the policies supporting it, are linked to improved intergenerational occupational mobility.”

That’s a big deal: as Jason Beckfield, a sociologist at Harvard, in a 2021 commentary noted that, “People evaluate their fortunes relative to their hopes and expectations, formed, for many, as a sense of what is normal or abnormal, possible or impossible, in childhood.” They mostly “are untroubled if doctors make 10 or 20 times what janitors make, as long as janitors’ sons have opportunities to become doctors.” If intergenerational mobility is down or static as shown in earlier studies, that could “foster a social class variant of the racial resentment … that makes sense of working- and middle-class whites’ resentment of nonwhites and the Obama presidency.” (I repeat he wrote this in 2021.) Downward intergenerational occupational mobility, Beckfield held “sheds light on current US politics in a way that the well-known trend of declining real wages among all but the highest paid does not.” Sound familiar?

But van de Werfhorst’s study found “increased mobility through expanded educational opportunities is not negated by a strengthening of within-education elite persistence in occupational status, suggesting that occupational mobility patterns can genuinely change through educational expansion.”

Let’s unpack the jargon. ‘Within-education elite persistence‘ in occupational status describes the situation where people have the same level of schooling, but children from advantaged backgrounds still grab more of the higher-status (and likely higher paid) jobs than peers lacking those ‘privileges’. Many studies like the one by Song et al that caught Beckfield’s interest show education alone doesn’t fully equalize outcomes. Cue my thoughts about oligarchies and deBoer’s take that there are no miracles in education (WARNING: read Freddie’s take on intergenerational educational mobility for clarity on HIS beliefs rather than relying on my impressions)

I like van de Werfhorst’s summary of how we got to this point in our understanding of meritocracy:

Societies became more ‘meritocratic,’ according to modernization theory, leading to higher levels of intergenerational social mobility, because (a) education expanded to meet the increased demand for skilled labor, (b) merits defined by education became the central distributive factor for reaching more advantaged positions, and (c) inequalities in access to education by socioeconomic background were contested to reduce the waste of talent.

But the criticisms have been going on since the term meritocracy was coined by Alan Fox seventy years ago and then popularized by Michael Young in a satirical novel intended to lambaste such a societal structure. I wrote about Young (who accepted the title of Baron from the royals in the UK!) midway through a 2019 post on this matter.) The complaints about meritocracy remain consistent:

• elitist
• personalizes success and failure,
• ignores society’s structural barriers to achievement
• legitimizes economic inequalities
• the rich families game the system to make sure their children get the spoils; e.g., “a ‘class ceiling’ that limits opportunities for nonelite children in high-level employment even within the pool of graduates of highly selective institutions

And that’s what made the article Zeineb forwarded to me so interesting because van de Werfhorst counters many of these claims with a very impressive research study design. The bottom line for me in his report (emphasis added) is this one:

the expansion of education did equalize opportunities. Equality of opportunity may be more damaged by anti-meritocratic tendencies that make it hard for children of less advantaged families to do well in school than by meritocratic allocation. For instance, economic inequality is likely to reduce social mobility.”

Going back to Beckfield’s comments, this topic requires attention for the good of our country. Downward intergenerational occupational mobility no matter its concrete effects creates a perception that hope is not warranted and the game is rigged against the many by the fortunate few. And such a perception leads to choices that imperil an increasingly fragile democracy. But what do you think? One way forward is conversation that leads to ideas and action. Please reply.

And on a different note, check out our new series — Chasing The Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

The subtitle of this book is The Science Of Who We Trust And What We Believe, and its purpose is to disabuse us of ideas about how we decide, who we can have faith in, and what we should accept as real. Mercier, research director at the CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, is of the opinion that we give far too much credit to most attempts at mass persuasion. He cites study after study to demonstrate that they are not what they’re cracked up to be and unworthy of the fear and attention that many people give to them. When I started this particular Substack, my focus was on a particular area of tests—those that measure some construct of our cognitive ability or non-cognitive features such as conscientiousness, resilience, extroversion. There is a connection between those abilities and the perceived mastery of being able to persuade By those at the upper reaches of the scales. I will admit that I subscribed to some of the myths that Mercier sets out to deflate. After reading this book, the capacity to engage and list a supposedly gullible public in following “demagogues and charlatans” seems less than I thought, but—and this might be good news—Mercier still leaves me with many questions as to how we have ended up with such a significant portion of the population supporting a man for the highest office in the land who is probably the greatest public liar of the last century—and this being the USA that’s quite a distinction.

One of Mercier’s foundational points (as explained in this video) is that “as long as there is a mechanism to exert a sufficient cost on those who send unreliable messages—if only by trusting them less in the future—dealing with costly signaling, and communication can be kept stable.” He ties this belief that as Lincoln said you can fool some of the people some of the time, but eventually they’ll get wise to your DS to an evolutionary standpoint. He maintains that human verbal communication is a costly signal and that those who do not keep their promises will pay eventually. I know. I know. That’s a tough one to swallow right now but let me lay out some more of what is in this book.

Mercier takes on the idea that receivers of communication especially in our current immersive digital environments “because they are exhausted or distracted, cannot use properly their most refined cognitive mechanisms, they would be defenseless against the senders more advanced cognitive devices, in the same way that a security software system that has not been updated leaves the computer vulnerable to attacks.” He refers to an evolutionary explanation in which “openness and vigilance evolved hand in hand as human communication became increasingly broad and powerful.” We might not like the reasons why people decide what to believe or who knows best, but their decision-making process differs from the most popular conceptions in his account.

To make his point, he goes to the behavior of baboons and the theorem of the Marquis de Condorcet. The latter (before he was forced to kill himself to escape the worst measures of the French Revolution) discovered in the late 18th century that the odds of an assembly of people choosing the best of two options was about 98%. Not a typo: Ninety-eight percent. Considering the baboons, their life traveling in “troops of several dozen members” requires constant decision making about finding the best source for food. Mercier reports on a study in which scientists “outfitted the baboons from a troop with a GPS allowing the researchers to closely track their movements.” The researchers could see through the splitting temporarily of the group a physical manifestation of making choices; one subgroup shuffles East, another North. But the whole troop eventually in almost every case followed whatever the larger group was suggesting through its movements. Mercier notes that, “if baboons and other animals living in groups have an intuitive grasp of the power of majority rules, it would be bizarre if humans, who rely much more on social information than baboons, completely neglected this rich source of insight.” It was at this point that I started to understand better the 2024 election. Pundits can postulate all sorts of reasons for that result, but I think what it came down to was this sort of majority bending. What was particularly telling was Mercier’s inclusion of a section on how difficult it is to resist the pull of the majority. One of the examples he gives is from Solomon Asch’s 1950s conformity experiments. In instances where participants followed the crowd many of them afterwards “admitted to having yielded even though they knew the group to be wrong.”

This can sound like an apologia for those people who voted in what many observers label against their own interests, or it can be an explanation that we really don’t understand people’s interests. That we need to test our own assumptions about what we know not only about how others think but about how all of us in general decide and act. I really like this quote from Mercier’s book on this point as he summarizes the findings of all of these research frameworks attempting to see how decisions are made in groups: “across all these experiments, a very small number of people genuinely believed the group to be right, and they relied on a variety of strategies to make sense of the group’s weird answer—…” Thanks to The Daily Show and other comic outlets like Kimmel or Colbert, many on the blue side of our national divide have heard this phenomenon play out hilariously. Jordan Klepper has interviewed so many people relying on ‘a variety of strategies to make sense of the group’s weird answer.’ But less than a year into this Presidential term and with a Supreme Court making sense and law of many weird answers, the laughter has more of an edge.

The other areas of Not Born Yesterday that intrigued me concerned whether gullibility might be maladaptive and the ways in which polarization emerges in any society. In a chapter entitled’ demagogues, prophets, and preachers’ he states that “evolution makes gullibility maladaptive. So as not to be abused by senders of unreliable messages, we are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that help us decide how much weight to put on what we hear or read.” But he then qualifies that statement by pointing out that the larger the audience the less chance that those cues will scale up sufficiently: “Argumentation is most efficient in the context of a small group discussion, with its back and forth of arguments and counter arguments. When aiming a speech at millions, speakers have to resort to common denominators, and they cannot anticipate the many objections that are certain to arise. Demonstrating competence to a wide audience is difficult: with limited knowledge and attention span, how are listeners supposed to know who is the most competent politician or economist?”

What did they look for in that demonstrated competence? You may not like it — I certainly don’t—but for many people in this country male automatically equals more competence than female in political positions. It ain’t true by a long shot — lots of examples suggest that the opposite may be accurate—but it’s out there. That the definition of misogyny stretches to include “Hatred or dislike of, or (my emphasis) prejudice against women” bothers me though. Lumping those together steers us in the wrong direction when trying to understand what is really going on in those situations.

Another sign of demonstrated competence might be establishing at least a perceived affinity for millenarian tendencies that Mercier cites from other historians: “Felt or experienced crisis — of oppression by a more powerful group, of extreme economic hardship, of fundamental social changes that leave particular social strata feeling threatened.” Intelligence officer Captain Jennifer Henderson in a paper held that  “Millenarians view the world in dualistic and monistic terms. It is dualistic in that it sees the world as two diametrically opposite and competitive ideologies: the holy vs. the profane, the oppressed vs. the oppressor” She was talking about Islamic extremists, but the description seems to fit many white MAGA supporters as well. Telling someone with those views that we are all in this together is more likely to come across as a signal of insanity than one of competence.

The issue of polarization is one where Mercier does admit to the dangers of misinformation “polarization does not stem from people being ready to accept bad justifications for views they already hold but from being exposed to too many good (enough closed parentheses justifications for these views, leading them to develop stronger or more confident views. Still, if people have access to a biased sample of information the outcome can be dire.” [Emphasis added]

With that in mind, Mercier makes a convincing case that our categories are wrong in looking at the political landscape. It’s not left right or progressive versus conservative. It’s extreme versus non extreme. There are groups of people who coagulate at the extreme ends of beliefs and desires for us politically and they both want everyone to conform to their views. They are the ones in the echo chamber. Mercier found that, “on most issues only a minority of respondents hold extreme views: for instance, little more than 10% of Americans polled said that there should be no restrictions on gun ownership, or that only law enforcement officers should have guns (in extreme opinion in the United states).” The fact that it’s a small group is borne out by other research that he cites that “only about 8% of the online adults… are at risk of being trapped in an echo chamber.” By and large people on social media mostly look at traditional, middle of the road news outlets; When they are exposed to extreme views, these views tend to come from both sides of the political spectrum.

The conclusion of the book provided a valuable consideration for me in looking at how we move forward, “we aren’t gullible: by default we veer on the side of being resistant to new ideas. In the absence of the right cues, we reject messages that don’t fit with our preconceived views or pre-existing plans. To persuade us otherwise takes long established carefully maintained trust, clearly demonstrated expertise, and sound arguments. Science, the media, and other institutions that spread accurate but often counterintuitive messages face an uphill battle, as they must transmit these messages and keep them credible along great chains of trust and argumentation.” That’s the movement I’m interested in joining and supporting, the one that tests our existing assumptions about our fellow citizens, rejects the extremes, and starts pushing those counterintuitive messages uphill in part by living them.

Don’t forget out other Substack: Chasing the Dead – Amateur Adventures in Genealogy.
Chapter Nine just dropped at this link

ARCHIVIO GBB/Alamy Stock Photo; Getty Images

Whether we share his faith or not, the words and actions of Pope Leo gain our attention for their sincerity and strength. While speaking with NBC’s Molly Hunter on Nov. 25, the Chicago native shared what he hopes people remember during the annual holiday:

I would encourage all people, especially with this beautiful feast that we have in the United States, which unites all people, people of different faiths, people who perhaps do not have the gift of faith, but to say thank you to someone, to recognize that we all have received so many gifts, first and foremost, the gift of life, The gift of faith, the gift of unity to encourage all people to try and promote peace and harmony and to give thanks to God for them and the gifts we can give.

Taking the cue, my thanks are many, too many to enumerate here, but my series fifteen thanks yous gets at some people whose influence upon my life continues to enrich me to this day That some of then are gone now does not lessen my gratitude for their place in my life. but none of then can match what I owe to my family — as I am sure is the circumstance for many others. What occurs today that diminishes the giving of gratitude is worrying, but maybe things are turning around in how we operate as a citizenry. I recommend Pope Leo’s advice to all of you and offer my own thanks to all of those who via conversations here and elsewhere have granted me the favor of their ideas and attention.

happy thanksgiving!