When Deference Matters

My good friend is about to get a new dog, his second sheepdog, after his first one passed away last year.

Taking a walk in his neighborhood recently, my friend bumped into three neighbors with whom he shared his good news. He wasn’t expecting the response he received …

The first neighbor launched into a vigorous argument about why purebred dogs should be avoided; crossbreeding produces much healthier dogs.

The second neighbor quizzed him on the dog food he intended to use and cautioned him against feeding the dog anything but raw food.

The third neighbor strongly encouraged him to start crate training right away, and by the way, don’t neuter the dog for at least two years.

He told me this story, and said with a grin, “I had no idea I lived in a neighborhood of dog experts – all it takes is an internet connection.”

It’s true. We’re living in a post-expert world. There are no more experts because everyone is an expert.

Whether they’re talking about dog training, nutrition, fitness, investing, seed oils, or constitutional law … everyone knows best and they are more than willing to share their point of view.

More information at our disposal is useful. But equating information with knowledge is not.

Besides being annoying, and damaging the quality of discourse, it signals a loss of deference: to knowledge, expertise, science, and our institutions.

Deference means submitting yourself to something or someone that has more rank or authority, in some way. Typically, we view this as an insult to our agency, injuring our sense of importance and rank. But deference is important; it’s an ingredient in the mix, one that keeps us moving forward – as individuals and as a society.

Standing up for yourself, embracing your power, not going along with the crowd, and having an opinion and speaking your mind are also vital ingredients. And it’s true that too much deference is a risk. Too much deference, and we follow authority blindly; we don’t trust our own opinions; we don’t share our ideas when it would benefit others.

But one of the side-effects of being awash in so much information is that we’re losing our ability to defer. And some deference can benefit us in many ways:

Deference means respecting our past

The base of human knowledge has expanded exponentially. What we know now contradicts prior understanding, across many fields. Yet our current knowledge stands on the shoulders of past achievements; the out-of-hand rejection of theories that no longer hold up fails to recognize the fact that they constitute the foundation of our new understandings.

While the knowledge of the past might be outdated, respect for the past is a power: the experience of others before us, our elders and ancestors, can give us a better understanding of our world, and help us understand and navigate our current challenges more skillfully.

Failing to respect and see value in our own past leads to cynicism and hopelessness, as we’re adrift, cut off from our sense of lineage and continuity.

Deference is critical for advancing our knowledge

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance,” Confucius says. It’s simple. Learning begins by admitting you don’t know. Yuval Noah Harari wrote that the Scientific Revolution was not about knowledge but about ignorance, about admitting the limits of our understanding of the natural world.

Learning requires real deference; only by admitting what you don’t know can you truly learn and master a subject. Without deference, we don’t learn—we simply seek to validate our opinions and preconceived views rather than seek to expand our knowledge.

Deference lets us seek guidance

Asking for help requires deference. It takes courage and humility to submit to someone else’s experience or expertise. You have to humbly recognize the limits of your knowledge and that can be uncomfortable.

You worry that others will think you’re not intelligent, or less capable. Will others still view you as credible? Maybe you’ll lose their respect if you admit what you don’t know.

I recently had to seek advice from several experts in an area that I am unversed in. And I could feel the part of me that didn’t want to hear their guidance.

Not because their ideas weren’t good. They were in fact excellent. But because they required me to do new things, to adopt a different approach, and to practice new skills, all of which were unfamiliar, making me feel unskilled and incompetent.

I didn’t just feel unskilled; I was unskilled. It was a humbling place to be. But after the initial discomfort, I felt good. I even felt powerful because I felt I was on my way, and I felt I had helpers.

Deference is a bedrock of democracy

We think of democracy as self-government. As individual freedom. As the power of the people. All true. But another ingredient, one that is often overlooked, is deference: it’s the agreement that we will submit to the will of the people. We commit to law and order in society by deferring to the judgment of a jury of our peers. We defer to red lights, stop signs, and filing our taxes. Mostly.

There is a time and place to protest, to object, to not defer, but that is the exception and not the rule. Society, and democracy, miraculously holds together, barely at times, by the thread of compliance and deference, by agreeing to things we find hard, things we disagree with, things that are unfair, for the good of the whole.

It’s not an insult to our self-esteem to defer to other’s expertise, to our elders and ancestors, to the will of the people. I see it as a power, requiring forbearance and generosity, things we’re currently in short supply of. It’s an exercise in power to know when to step back, when to listen to others, and when to seek help when needed.