How to question authority

21 August 2009
For my generation, now so slow to lumber off the stage, a rallying cry was “Question authority.”* It is still a sound principle, and I continue to advocate skepticism ; but our current culture of credulity intermingled with skepticism has turned “question authority” into “there is no authority” or an equivalent, “every man his own authority.” This troubling tangle was on my mind as I read this week Paul McHugh’s Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (Dana Press,