Bruce Levine, Resisting Illegitimate Authority (2018) — a book review

03 October 2019

Worthwhile, inspirational — but the title overstates the book's coverage

Psychologist Bruce E. Levine's — Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person's Guide to Being Anti-Authoritarian — Strategies, Tools, and Models — provides short profiles of some of the United States' historically more eminent resisters of bogus authority.

The book is a useful reference and motivator.

On the other hand, Resisting is not actually A Thinking Person's Guide to Being Anti-Authoritarian — Strategies, Tools, and Models.

At most, Levine's comes off as a psychologist's mildly probing salute to people who refuse to knuckle under to oppressors.

Resisting falls short of adequately explaining:

(a) the philosophical and political bases of social resistance

(b) what to resist — and how to prioritize what most needs opposition

as well as

Let's start with the publisher's inflated blurb

AK Press is an anarchist-oriented (and anarchist model) publishing house:

"A startlingly original book, one that prompts you to think anew about important aspects of the American character, past and present.” —Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic

“Levine’s writing simmers with a kind of optimistic rage meant to prod and provoke us out of our paralytic compliance with faceless authority.” —Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch

The capacity to comply with abusive authority is humanity’s “fatal flaw.”

Fortunately, there are anti-authoritarians—people comfortable questioning the legitimacy of authority and resisting its illegitimate forms. However, as Resisting Illegitimate Authority reveals, these rebels are regularly scorned, shunned, financially punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and even assassinated.

Profiling a diverse group of US anti-authoritarians—from Thomas Paine to Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Lenny Bruce, and Noam Chomsky—in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitimate Authority provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and vilification in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for “freedom” are often its most obedient and docile citizens.

Discussing anti-authoritarian approaches to depression, relationships, and parenting, Levine makes it clear that far from being a disease, disobedience may be our last hope.

Bruce E. Levine is a practicing clinical psychologist.

He is the author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy, and several other books.

According to the late Howard Zinn, “Bruce Levine condemns the cold, technological approach to mental health and, to our benefit, looks for deeper solutions.”

Book is much more limited than described

Rather than being a personal and strategic guide to a successful resistance, Resisting Illegitimate Authority is a somewhat clumsily chaptered series of short profiles in anti-authoritarianism.

Dr. Levine seemed (to me) unable to decide whether this was a political work about the virtues anti-illegitimacy — or (instead) a historically based, smattering of self-help survival book for anti-authoritarian personalities.

As a result, his chapters incorporate bits of both. Arguably to the cogent elucidation of neither.

Organization

Resisting revolves around vignettes of anti-authoritarian lives lifted from predominantly American history. There are, from my perspective, too many of them for thoroughness. The mini biographies suffer from "hit the high points only" coverage. They lack philosophical and psychological depth.

On the other hand, I suspect that Dr. Levine correctly estimated lay readers' limited patience. He probably made the correct compromise between profile depth and brevity's easier flow.

The book's historical greats include Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and Malcolm X.

Major modern contributors to the battle against illegitimate power include Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky and Edward Snowden.

The rest of the book's personalities are a polyglot mix that History has arguably passed over, without according them deserved recognition. Levine struggles to make this group thematically coherent. The profiles seem to become primarily illustrators of his various points about psychic health and personal integrity's spectrum.

This bundle includes Phil Ochs, Lenny Bruce, Ida Lupino, Henry David Thoreau, Scott Nearing, Helen Keller, Janet Jacobs, and George Carlin.

History has not remembered them as being as explicitly and furiously political as the members of the first pack.

Levine explicitly makes this point about Helen Keller. Whom, he points out, is recalled solely for her admirable ability to cope with blindness and deafness. Rather than for the disrupting political ideas that she was passionate about.

Most of Levine's advice for psychic survival is obvious — and yet not

Network. Relationships. Love, be loved. Know where to get money. Do not allow ideas regarding perfect morality, or perfect integrity, to become self-destructive arrows that take you down. And so forth.

Without being introduced (in detail) to the psychological mechanisms of the people he only briefly profiles, it is a bit challenging to see the real world benefit of Dr. Levine's health nuggets.

There is (in my judgment) a huge difference between the operation of psyche-boosters among:

(i) a sheep-like population (where most people live)

and

(ii) the isolated few, who hammer away at an Establishment that is trying to crush them on a daily basis.

None of Levine's profiles does an especially informative job of demonstrating how his assailed people perceived society's assaults upon them. Or how they talked themselves into continuing their resistance.

This is a where a more conventionally thorough case study method might have been illuminating.

In Levine's defense, it would probably have been impossible to do such, without violating copyright restrictions on previously published material.

My take away is that Dr. Levine did the best that he could with a very difficult topic.

An occasionally irritating lack of efficiently delivered clarity

Dr. Levine occasionally appears to struggle with comprehending that readers need to be provided a preliminary basis for understanding whatever he is in the process of dredging up.

I do not want to illustrate this in detail because the length of an extended critique would unfairly detract from Resisting's very real value. However, I can partially illustrate my point with a couple of elements drawn from Chapter 8.

Chapter 8 is entitled, "Political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological lenses for anti-authoritarianism." Some of its subsections discuss anarchism, Buddhism, the God of Spinoza and Einstein, and The Enneagram.

Levine makes decent cases for each as being psychologically supportive of his authority-resisting personalities. On the negative side, his ambling explanations, as well as his penchant for inadvertently playing "hide and seek" with basic definitions can be occasionally irritating.

For example, the "God of Spinoza and Einstein" is more familiarly called Deism in the United States. In his elitist-oriented title, Levine simultaneously confuses people, and then he leaves them hanging in the following text. Only eventually does he explain who this "god" is, sensibly resorting to the Deist definition. But even that explanation is historically and philosophically obtusely delivered.

The pages on "The Enneagram" also confuse. Levine does not initially explain what The Enneagram is. Instead, he ambles along, taking a few completely unnecessary pages explaining how he became familiar with it and why he now thinks it's great. This is a professorially oafish way to present a topic that few readers are familiar with.

The section on Buddhism provides an example of weak research. Levine's overview is lifted from sources that are either inaccurate (in philosophically significant ways) — or from which Levine draws sometimes misaimed or superficial messages. The section is not completely erroneous. It is just misleading. And therefore not as helpful to his chosen crew of resisters, as Levine probably intended.

With all that, Pete — is the book worth reading?

Absolutely. Supremely so.

Most Americans will not know who most of Levine's people are. The profiles, though short, may fuel an interest to learn more.

Second, Dr. Levine's mini biographies may inspire today's anti-authoritarians to emulate them. The people covered are superstars of oppositional courage.

Consider, for example, Harriet Tubman — and Levine's thematic use of her

Levine writes that Harriet Tubman probably helped at least 70 to 80 American slaves escape, over the course of 13 trips into slave-holding territory. She confined her efforts to the Maryland that she knew, using stars and river courses to guide herself:

That her fearlessness came from her religious beliefs is uncontroversial. Tubman spoke about "consulting with God," and she had complete confidence that God would keep her safe.

For Tubman, [biographer Kate Clifford] Larson concludes, "the root of her outbursts, visions, sleeping spells, and voices" lay in her powerful faith. Given her visions and the voices that she heard, it is a good thing that Tubman only had to watch out for slave catchers and not modern psychiatrists.

For Tubman, her faith helped fuel what modern psychiatrists would call hallucinations. Labeling visions or voices as a symptom of illness is an arrogant assumption, as there are many reasons why this phenomenon occurs. One reason is that when human beings experience extreme oppression, such visions and voices can be the only antidotes to psychological powerlessness.

The Tubman extract — demonstrates the strength and weakness of Levine's approach to his resistance topic

First, Harriet Tubman is over-the-top admirable. Just as many of the other people in the book are.

Second, the extract indirectly demonstrates one of Levine's explicit themes. Namely, that psychology pathologizes behaviors that the Authoritarian Establishment does not like.

How better to disempower someone (even in relationship to themselves) than to claim that they are crazy and need to be drugged or locked up?

Third, the extract illustrates how sometimes extreme Levine is. He implies that "visions and voices as a symptom of illness" are not such.

Elsewhere in the book, Levine poses a legitimately hostile critique of how medicine is often used to control and duplicitously categorize resisters. Including via its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Which Levine and I both think is predominantly control-oriented bullshit.

That said, my considerable family and professional experience with "visions and voices" are that these manifestations are, usually, signs of something that profoundly discomfits the experiencer.

Wanting to remove or ameliorate that personal suffering is not necessarily an evil, contrary to what Dr. Levine seems to be asserting.

Anti-authoritarian though I am, medicalizing aspects of personal psychic discomfort is not blanketly mistaken.

Especially so, given that such a small segment of humanity experiences hallucinations and the suffering (seemingly usually) goes with them. Remove the personal "pain" component, and a different question emerges.

Indeed, Levine probably should have distinguished visions from hallucinations. There is an operational and (arguably) spiritual difference.

This medical conundrum illustrates what I suspect is Levine's characteristically too abbreviated thinking. His statements (in the book) are frequently unsupported with evidence and/or qualifying explanations.

Consider more specifically, his statement that "visions and voices can be the only antidotes to psychological powerlessness."

What support exists for that insight?

Did Levine just make it up?

And how would the one person who uses hallucinations Tubman's constructive way, offset the presumably hundreds more, who find their hallucinatory burden unsupportable?

I think that Levine would have done better to toss a discussion of the personal suffering qualification. Followed by an examination of:

(i) proportionally how many hallucinators suffer

and

(ii) whether those who do not, pose a legitimate threat to anyone, including to themselves.

The "proper" societal balance between authority and resistance (to illegitimate authority) is not as clearly cut as most libertarians (of which Levine is evidently one) surmise.

Distinguishing between illegitimate authority and "good" authority is punishingly difficult. And it almost always also varies according to context and circumstances.

Our current fascistic era is blinding anti-authoritarians (I admit to being one) to the practical necessity of social authority of some kind. Especially so, among dense populations of ecosphere-damaging people.

Levine, to his credit, early on distinguishes between anti-authoritarians and anti-illegitimate-authoritarians. Yet Resisting reads as if he sometimes loses track of the difference. Levine consistently leaves readers uncertain as to how to distinguish illegitimacy from not such.

This is why (in my estimation) the book is not even a CliffsNotes version of a genuine guidebook to Resisting Illegitimate Authority.

Let me partially illustrate that last point

A legitimate resistance treatise (as this book sells itself) cannot dodge the historically based "violence is necessary" presumption.

Levine blanket-treats violence unfavorably. As do the Powers that Be that he opposes.

He profiles:

Alexander Berkman — who tried to murder Carnegie Steel manager Henry Frick in 1892

Leon Czolgosz — who killed President William McKinley in 1901

and

Ted Kaczynski — the Unabomber.

Levine correctly observes that violence (under most societal circumstances) brings the Establishment's much superior force down upon resisters.

Presumably then, violence is a not a strategically clever political strategy. Even disregarding death-dealing's moral questionability.

On the other hand, Levine makes no effort to discuss the fact that violence has been the only way that powerful establishments have ever been paradigmatically overturned. Think American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, by way of representative example.

In a book about anti-authoritarians opposing illegitimate authorities, one would think that a discussion about the necessity (or not) of violence would have to come up.

Levine dodges it. As does virtually every other American writer or talker on this subject.

So (again), who's molding our view of "reality"?

Us?

Or oligarchical Elites, who are afraid that violence-wielding masses will successfully turn them into mush?

One last (violence pertinent) indicator of the book's structural weakness — genocide

Levine inexplicably buries the genocide of Native Americans five sections down into Part Two of his book. It arrives only after Part One's definitions, as well as six of Part Two's biographical profiles.

Why would one not begin a book about authoritarian illegitimacy with its preeminent indicator, genocide?

This curious prioritization of topics is part of what I earlier meant by "clumsily chaptered."

No footnotes — but decent bibliographies and a reasonable index

Dr. Levine provides bibliographies for each chapter, instead of textually linked footnotes.

Though intellectually imprecise (as opposed to textually linked footnotes), these bibliographies are undeniably helpful. Especially so, if Levine's volume is to be used as a pointer to more specific works.

The book's index is more detailed than one might have anticipated. I found it helpful.

In closing — a good example of Resisting's intent and value

Ethics, for those who take them seriously, are difficult to practice in our allegedly "real" world. Dr. Levine provides authority-resisters with perspective-building quotes (in the moral regard) from Professor Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky exemplifies the quotable heart of this book. That may either be due to Chomsky's brilliance or, alternatively, simply a result of Levine's good fortune in finding pertinent quotations from him:

"I'm really a hermit by nature, and would much prefer to be alone working than to be in public."

"I knew that I was just too intolerably self-indulgent merely to take a passive role in the [Vietnam War] struggles that were then going on. And I knew that signing petitions, sending money, and showing up now and then at a meeting was not enough."

"I thought it was critically necessary to take a more active role . . . ."

For ten years, Chomsky refused paying a portion of his taxes, supported draft resisters, was arrested several times, and was on Richard Nixon's official enemies list.

"Look, you're not going to be effective as a political activist unless you have a satisfying life.

"None of us are saints, at least I'm not. I haven't given up my house, I haven't given up my car . . . I don't spend 24 hours a day working for the benefit of the human race . . . ."

Chomsky models an activist who does not self-flagellate about financial hypocrisies that are virtually impossible to avoid.

"As far as the moral issue goes . . . . It's not as if there's some clean money somewhere.

"If you're in the university, you're on dirty money . . . coming from people who are working somewhere, and whose money is being taken away."

Chomsky also realized that valuing family meant not only financial compromises but even an occasional philosophical one.

Chomsky, a non-practicing Jew and not a member of any synagogue, was faced with a dilemma when his oldest daughter wanted to get bat-mitzvahed [see definition here] but was unable to do so because her family did not belong to a synagogue; Chomsky relented and became a member.

In the area of electoral politics, Chomsky has recommended voting under certain circumstances for the lesser-of-two-evil candidates, which for some on the radical Left is seen as a violation of integrity, but which he sees as rational and politically astute.

The moral? — An eminently worthy book that falls short of its self-description

A more accurate title for:

Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person's Guide to Being Anti-Authoritarian — Strategies, Tools, and Models

would have been:

Summary profiles and basic definitions in resisting wrongful authority — a working psychologist's comments regarding healthy and unhealthy resistance

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Bruce Levine, Resisting Illegitimate Authority (2018) — a book review