HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS: I recently read Ellen Willis’s Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll. It’s an essay collection showing Willis’s various journeys through rock journalism, psychoanalytic theory, individualist feminism, and what can perhaps best be called post-Judaism. (The final essay describes her stay in Israel, her brush with Orthodox Judaism, and her ultimate rejection of that faith.) There’s a lot to talk about there, but I’ll just blog about one recurring theme in the book–the relationship between individuality and authority. Willis tends to assume a hostile relationship between the two–authority squelches individuality, rebellious individuals battle tradition in society and its residues within their own minds. This really hasn’t been my experience.

I first became aware of a richer interplay between individuality and authority in college. I became a member of a philosophical debating society. (Wow, that description is totally inadequate–better summaries, which we used at the time, include “a party of lovers” and “a cult of the good.”) This society is steeped in ritual and eccentric tradition. It is organized hierarchically, and members who have attained the Chairmanship are accorded especial authority. (This is true even when the particular Chairmen are, uh, sub-optimal.) The society was one of six parties in the Yale Political Union (a.k.a. the onion, the bunion, the gorgon, the eunuch, etc.), and none of the others had as much respect for the structures of authority and the historical accretion of tradition. (The ones on the left tended to dissipate their energies into let-it-all-hang-out rulelessness and wandering; the ones on the right tended to oscillate between top-down quasi-dictatorship and egalitarian mocking of their hierarchies.) As a freshman, I never would have expected to be attracted to such an “authoritarian” society; like Willis, I believed that authority was repressive, and actually liking that authority was a sign of psychological imbalance or insecurity.

But I was drawn to the society because of the wild efflorescence of personalities among its members. So many of its members seemed to be more fully themselves than anyone else I’d met. Coming across a member was like finding a jaguar or a gazelle in the dining hall–it was an encounter with someone totally distinct from everyone else around him, including other members. I’d joke that I was drawn to the group because I like “distilled spirits.” The other parties certainly sheltered a fair crop of eccentrics–this is the Ivy League, after all–but it was very rare to find someone as intense, and as intensely different, as your average member of my own society.

Why this convergence of authority and individuality? Why this situation in which authoritarian structures seemed to either attract or encourage people who were so intensely themselves? (I quickly learned that both attraction and encouragement were involved–even people who entered the group as blurred carbon-copy Republicans or Objectivists or nice Southern girls were often distilled into strong and startling personalities.)

I think there were a lot of reasons. First, an encounter with a living tradition, in our age, is inherently startling and countercultural; thus it attracts rebels, provokes self-scrutiny, and stirs the imagination. Second, egalitarianism in a debating society typically means that you can’t get too deep into any one question–lines of thought are derailed from week to week as different members take the helm. Egalitarianism can lead to a focus on whether or not each member is actually being treated equally; and since that’s never true (someone will always make better speeches, have more friends, or whatever the relevant categories of value are), an egalitarian ethos can breed resentment. Third, authority–of both the society’s traditions and her leaders–forced people to have respect for institutions or members whom they would otherwise be tempted to dismiss. The society’s leaders bore much heavier responsibilities than leaders in other parties, and I think the authority accorded them made those responsibilities much easier to fulfill. And fourth (but probably not last–the longer I spent with the group, the more wisdom I found in its traditions and self-understanding), the idea that authority and individuality are at odds is just, you know, wrong. This is due to the distinction between power and authority. Power is forcing others to do stuff; authority is gaining others’ loyalty. Submission to authority always involves a degree of awe; thus it approaches the sublime. And an encounter with the sublime will necessarily draw people out of our usual submission to culture and to whim; it will change us and, under certain circumstances (such as a philosophical debating society that demanded personal integrity and rigorous self-examination), it will make us more our own than we could ever have been without that awe.