The demonising of authority

I heard an interview with the Battle of Britain fighter ace Ginger Lacey the other day. Since it was recorded in the enlightened 1970s, the interviewer felt it mandatory to ask if Lacey had ever had doubts about the justness of the war, and consequently whether he had been troubled by strong emotions of hatred, or alternatively guilt, about shooting down and killing German airmen.

Lacey’s reply to the first was, in today’s zeitgeist, interesting. “We always did what our parents wanted, back then. So when the government said they had declared war on Germany, it became our enemy.” He had already confirmed the first part of that reply in describing how he had come to be a flyer. As a teenager he’d wanted to fly rather than to follow the family in farming, but his father refused, and opted for his training in some suitable profession. Lacey was not happy in that, but not long afterwards, his father died, and his mother gave her blessing for him to join up. What hadn’t happened was a big family row and a defiant act of rebellion. Aggressive pilot, but obedient son – paradoxical, isn’t it?

In fact Lacey was of the (largely correct) opinion that young people at the time of the interview rebelled as a matter of social conformity, and went on demonstrations mainly as a fashionable past-time. Who will deny it? His description of the willing acceptance of parental authority resonates with what I know of my father’s youth, for I never heard him describe any conflict with his parents over the direction of his life. On the contrary, his working class parents helped him fight for the chance of a scholarship to the local grammar school, whilst he quietly accepted the impossibility of their funding him to university. I note in passing that, though we have come to see teenage rebellion as a biological fact, both Old Testament and New Testament teaching accord far more with Lacey’s description.

Traces of that normality remained when I was a child. I remember one older boy who, whenever we met him walking the dog in our local “rec,” addressed my father as “Sir.” This chuffed Dad no end, and I noticed the respect with which he, in turn, conversed with the boy. Even then it was unusual in a working-class neighbourhood. In 2024, unimaginable… if only because of “safeguarding concerns.”

I, too, got on pretty well with my parents, but in the light of The Times They Are a’Changin’ even I had far more of a sense of breaking away from their way of life than of tranquil continuity. Long hair, loon pants and rock music (together, I must add, with stridently Evangelical faith) were at least a nod to what had become the norm of youthful rebellion, even though I thoroughly agreed with my folks on the folly of drug abuse, violent anti-war demos, and the like.

My parents’ (and Lacey’s) generation was, to be honest, transitional, for the seeds of rebellion were sown during the Enlightenment, and were trickling down from the elites, denouncing traditional authorities, to the masses. My mother, although having a similar compliant career course to my father, learned at her girls’ grammar school to marginalise the Evangelical faith she’d been brought up in, parroting liberal scepticism whilst, paradoxically, getting astrological readings done and learning about interpreting tea-leaves in Every Woman’s Luck Book. Dad’s family had been pretty agnostic anyway, but though, on his own admission, the Christians at his Crusader Bible Class were some of the best people he ever met, sophisticated Enlightenment books like Richard Garnett’s The Twilight of the Gods gave him permission to buck God’s authority as “hypocrisy.”

To return to Lacey, though, you will ask if blind acquiescence to government, as to parents, is not the very fount of deception and bigotry. Actually, not so much. Lacey mentions the German atrocity stories put out by the government, and says he recognised them as propaganda, and didn’t believe a word of them. He fought for the simple truth that this was his land, and that whether the Germans were devils or not, they had no right to take it over. And that, despite revisionist history, was probably also the dominant motivation of the government from Churchill down.

As a result Lacey had no particular hatred towards his airborne enemies as people. Conversely, anyone who has been involved in violent death, not only as a warrior but in professions like the police or emergency medicine, will recognise that distancing himself from empathetic feelings as he pressed the trigger was necessary in warfare. But unlike so many of today’s armed forces, the bloody reality of conflict was not compounded by the lurking suspicion that a cynical government had only sent him to kill and to die for the sake of the profits of the Military Industrial Complex or oil and real-estate corporations. I have a strong suspicion that our high rates of military PTSD have a lot to do with (justified) doubts about the legitimacy of authority.

Compliance with corrupt authority is indeed a very dangerous beast, as the very enemy Lacey faced – National Socialism – proves (not to mention our own experience of manipulation over the last few years since COVID). But that danger depends entirely on the content of the authority structures, and how they are imposed, rather than their existence. The world has experienced a multitude of corrupt cultural worldviews: ancient Moabites brought up to sacrifice their children to Chemosh, mass ritual immolations of war-prisoners and crucifixions of women in Benin, children in Gaza indoctrinated from birth to murder Jews for salvation, primary schools in England teaching children to doubt their very biology and get castrated. The spirit of rebellion, sadly, seems to produce little generational resistance to these, in practice.

But Lacey’s generation had long been immersed in a culture of Christian values, which I need not enumerate here. Of course there were tyrannical fathers and reprobate children, but overall children obeyed their parents because (in the words of Hebrews) “they disciplined us for a little while as they thought best.” Parents loved their children, sought their good, and had more knowledge of the world, so that their authority was not seen as power exercised for its own sake, any more than obedience to it was seen as servility to raw power. Respect worked both ways, and spread out into all relationships.

And the truth is that when an entire society was based on such values, there is every likelihood that its authorities, from King George VI to Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, were primarily motivated by the same values. There were certainly political grifters, just as there were criminal fathers, and since sin is ubiquitous, no doubt both ministers and aircrew sometimes looked out for their own interests. But a high-trust society, where virtue is valued axiomatically, makes authority structures generally beneficial, and avoids the kind of polarised anarchy that has become the norm now. The schools in our anti-authoritarian society don’t tell parents their children are changing gender (and neither do the children), the government rules by behavioural psychology rather than by truth, and “the pundits lie to ministers, and the media lie to me” (to quote myself). And nobody is happy.

I suspect the rot mostly began when Western governments, after the war, started to take a leaf from the Communists’ and Nazis’ playbooks by refining propaganda from “Germans bayonet babies” to the subtle mind control that is the basis of our entire society now. Legitimate respect for authority began in the family (based on the Church’s teaching, of course) and spread upwards through business (“An Englishman’s word is his bond”) to government (“I will to my power cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all my judgements”). Selfish manipulation spread down from the top, the last bastion of truth being the family – which is, of course, why the powerful want to abolish the family.

This has to have been deliberate, and ideological, based on the idea that only the powerful and “educated” are qualified to make decisions for the cattle of society, by any means available. I’ve even seen it suggested that the “cult of youth” of the 1950s was a deliberate ploy to invent the rebellious teenager in order to promote such an agenda. This is not that implausible, given what we know of the “Long March through the Institutions,” and there’s no doubt that the 1960s protest movement of The Times They Are a’Changin’ was a direct product of Communism. In my university social psychology course there was great stress on Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, a book by one of the Frankfurt School whose main purpose was to demolish trust in authority, and hence make Ginger Lacey, and his entire society, look like deluded dinosaurs.

But me – I think they possessed something vitally important, that we have lost through a delusional corruption of “liberty.”

Family Garvey, c1928 – my dad squinting, but not rebelling
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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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2 Responses to The demonising of authority

  1. shopwindows says:

    We’ve heard that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and if we’ve got reverence, recognition that creation takes a lot more effort than demolition, we have a real reluctance to meddle with that we don’t understand? But is that a thing any longer?

    Tell me and I forget,
    teach me and I remember, (what to think)
    involve me and I learn. (How to think)

    Being classed as a minor is not something we meekly accept, we eagerly await or jump the gun on doing the things which age licences, but addressing revered adults from whom one might just learn as sir is not meek deference but seeking an audience with wisdom?

    Distillation into as few words as possible is generally the aim but IMO among the most dangerous words ever are freedom, liberty, equality. What do they really mean? To anyone in particular. Reading Solzhenitsyn doesn’t convey the meaning, one has to be in the gulag, hence the saeculum “idea” however potent is really no substitute for experience, a thing so derided, that QBE is in the contemporary environment never accorded the licence of the technocratically examined. One of the lesser consequences of this is unwarranted student debt, one of the greater is hubris.

  2. Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

    Tell me and I forget,
    teach me and I remember, (what to think)
    involve me and I learn. (How to think)

    Yesterday a teacher, struggling with the educational environment after 28 years’ experience, was telling me how in every school she goes to, lessons are taught by centrally produced Powerpoint, the teacher having a script to make sure that both educator and educated become compliant parrots to the State narrative.

    It’s no wonder if the universities churn out a stream of gender-confused eco-warriors incapable of dealing with the real world. Once again, here is an opportunity for churches to shock and thrill the young by adapting the old Musician’s Union slogan, “Keep Teaching Live!” You never know, the kids might even get a taste for looking up to their teachers again.

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