Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations

(Paperback)

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Philosopher Mark Kingwell thinks about thinking for yourself in an era of radical know-it-all-ism.

Question authority, the popular 1960s slogan commanded. Think for yourself. But what started as a counter-cultural catchphrase, playful in logic but serious in intent, has become a practical paradox. Yesterdays social critics are the tone-policing tyrants of today, and critical theory that once augured emancipation has hardened into ideological enforcement. The resulting crisis of authority, made worse by rival political factions and chaotic public discourse, has exposed cracks in every facet of shared social life. Politics, academia, journalism, medicine, religion, scienceevery kind of institutional claim is now routinely subject to objection, investigation, and outright disbelief. A recurring feature of this comprehensive distrust of authority is the firm, indeed unshakeable, belief in personal righteousness and superiority: what Mark Kingwell calls addiction to conviction.

In this critical survey of the predicament of contemporary authority, Kingwell draws on philosophical argument, personal reflection, and details from the headlines in an attempt to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking for oneself. Defending a program of compassionate skepticism, Kingwell illuminates the connection between humility about human limits, including the limits of certainty, and the infinite project of justice.

Reviews

Praise for Mark Kingwell

Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher . . . His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world.
Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

Fail Better . . . is a ballpark ramble of memoir, lore and nostalgia. Its north star is baseballs time-out-of-timelessness, its leisurely Zen gaps between actions.
New York Times

Mark Kingwell has written a delightful book about baseball that combines metaphysics, personal memoir and anecdotes, literary references, and a limitless appreciation for a pastime that has brightened his life [Fail Betters] insights ring true.
New York Journal of Books

[On Risk] offers a slender, thoughtful, sometimes meandering disquisition . . . A host of cultural allusionsfrom Shakespeare to the Simpsons, Isaiah Berlin to Irving Berlin, Voltaire, Pascal, and Derridaalong with salient academic studies inspire Kingwell to examine the many contradictory ways that humans handle risk An entertaining gloss on an enduring conundrum.
Kirkus Reviews

Kingwell is dauntingly well-read . . . a gifted noticer . . . a lively writer [who] cites The Simpsons as often as Immanuel Kant. [Readers] are rewarded with neat, unexpected insights.
Globe and Mail

Author Bio

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harpers Magazine. His most recent works are Singular Creatures: Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism (2022), The Ethics of Architecture (2021), On Risk (2020), and Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (2019), which won the Erving Goffman Prize in media ecology. His columns and essays appear in the New York Times, Globe and Mail, Macleans, the Literary Review of Canada, Grays Sporting Journal, and Harpers, among others.