THE INAUTHENTICITY OF AUTHENTICITY

In the preceding article I wrote how people who pledge themselves to a standard of conduct are commonly and erroneously derided as hypocrites when they, being all too human, inevitably fail to meet that standard.  This misconception of hypocrisy not only drains it of meaning as a gratuitous entailment of any wrongdoing by people who are otherwise striving to live decently, but perverts the charge of hypocrisy into an assault upon the very idea of moral standards.  This is because hypocrisy has been deformed from a vice against integrity into a vice against authenticity, the cardinal virtue of our postmodern culture.  So let’s examine this virtue of authenticity and the antinomian creed behind it.

The postmodern man is antinomian, regarding no beliefs, principles, or standards as privileged over any others.  The idea of objective standards of morality is offensive to him, for he knows that all such standards are in fact nothing more than arbitrary social constructs designed to empower one person over another.  Hence, to illustrate one example, the postmodern phenomenon of feminism, an ideology dedicated to breaking the patriarchal chains of custom and tradition that enslave women to men.  That some of those customs and traditions may embody generations of accumulated wisdom about the complementarity of the sexes for the betterment of both is absurd to the feminists and their postmodern cohorts.

In this and many other ways, the postmodernists deny the universality of human nature and the human condition.  They deny the commonality of our form, our purpose, and our experience of the world around us.  For them there are no standards of conduct, decency, or morality applicable to all of us.  The only truth is the self, which can be true only to itself.  Therefore, out of this antinomianism arises the virtue of authenticity, the praiseworthiness of the self in pursuit of its true self.  The postmodern man enters this world in Rousseauvian splendor -- as his pure self.  However, he is soon polluted by a Eurocentric culture and the self becomes more and more encrusted with its grime.  But the corruption is not so deep that the postmodernist cannot become enlightened and cut himself loose of the arbitrary conventions of society that have repressed his expression of his true self.  He grasps the virtue of authenticity and begins his pursuit of the only truth he can know:  His true, pure, and unencumbered self.

So, what exactly is this authentic self that the mores of society, that of Western civilization in particular, have repressed?  Strip the postmodern ideologies of their rationalizations, and at bottom is the quest to unleash our carnal and visceral impulses without suffering any consequences from acting upon them.  Thus, feminists demand an unlimited abortion license so that women, like men, can sever sex from bearing children.  Gays demand the facsimile of marriage so that homosexual relationships are not just tolerated by society but given the stamp of approval.  Libertines demand the approbation of gratifying appetite as the highest good.  Civil libertarians demand absolutism not only in freedom of speech but also of conduct so that no form of expression, however vulgar, obscene, or profane endures any restraint.  Welfare statists demand the transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive so that no manner of living, however dysfunctional, is stymied by a lack of means to sustain it.  Multiculturalists demand no adverse judgment of street thugs, illegal aliens, and Gitmo detainees whose lawlessness is justified by our alleged oppression of them.  And we have yielded to the demands of the postmodernists.  We have done so, because we have uncritically accepted their claim that the authentic self is the true self.

But is that so?  No.  If it were, we would have to come to grips with the fact that a human being is a very ugly thing.  After all, we have loosed the postmodernists from our allegedly arbitrary conventions of social intercourse and let them indulge their carnal and visceral impulses for a generation now.  We have even joined them to a greater or lesser extent.  Yet, in all this celebration of authenticity, where is the beauty that the pursuit of the truth, therefore the good, should have discovered?  Nowhere, because there is none to be found by reducing ourselves to our “authentic” selves.  Strip us of our garments of rationality, decency, and morality, our garbs of civilization, we are grotesque creatures, mere beasts, clever enough to know how to indulge our appetites and impulses but lacking in the will to free ourselves from them.

The postmodernist virtue of authenticity is a falsehood.  That is because the so-called authentic self in not the true self.  A human being is more than his raw urges.  Even though he is born into this world as a clever beast ruled by his appetites and impulses, he possesses the reason that enables him to learn of the good that can come of refusing to gratify his urges today in order to work towards a desire that can only be satisfied tomorrow – and the will to do just that.  What he learns is the moral code requisite to creation.  By conforming to the objective standards of morality necessary to repress his raw urges and then direct himself to engage in the work of creation does a person become more than a clever beast.  Only as a creator can a person become fully human.  And it is this human self, once achieved, that is the true self.

Therefore, the human self does not exist except as a moral being.  It is that moral being, who chooses to repress the appetites and impulses of the “authentic” self that at best distract him from the work of creation and at worst lead him to destruction, that constitutes the complete self and so the true self.  An example of this is Mel Gibson and his recent drunk driving arrest.  Obviously intoxicated, he hurled anti-Semitic slurs at the police officers detaining him.  Many made the argument that in doing so Gibson revealed his true self as a bigot, for in vino veritas.  No doubt that in his drunken state, Gibson did reveal something true about himself.  He has some ugly ideas.  Yet, it is also true that when he is in full possession of his faculties, he represses this ugliness embedded in his “authentic” self and conducts himself honorably in regard to Jews.  Because a person’s will is a key component of his self, how he exercises that will is a better indicator of his true self than when he has lost control to his impulses.  It is a person’s moral standards that determine how he will exercise his will, and so only by taking account of a person as moral being can we understand his true self.

The authentic self, the clever beast shorn of its civilization, as the true self is a postmodern canard.  It is an inauthentic caricature of human nature.  By enshrining it as the only truth, it isolates a person by denying his commonality with his fellow man.  By giving rein to his appetites and impulses, he is enslaved by them.  By invalidating all objective standards of morality, he loses the only means to emancipate himself.  Thus, the postmodern virtue of authenticity is a black hole for the human soul.

Comments

[Jeff Cobb]

Very insightful. I forwarded this to a couple friends it so impressed me. There are a number of strains of intellectual degeneration happening in these times as we as a people shift our culture into unknown, uncharted territory.
This documents a cogent argument within a greater context.
I am reminded also of Robert Bork who wrote in Slouching Towards Gomorrah of two movements that operate unchecked in American and Western culture, Radical Individualism, and Radical Egalitarianism. He noted that the Founding Fathers, inspired by the great thinkers of their day took for granted external, and instilled internal constraints on the human psyche. There was therefore no perceived need at the time to balance the Bill of Rights with a "Bill of Personal Responsibilities." His hypothesis is that since the urge to continually push back all constraints and restraints on (what amounts to base) human expression will go unchecked, it will become necessary to enforce "politically correct" mores and norms, necessitating a totalitarian form of government, with ever increasing rules. Here is another example of ostensibly freedom-loving, seemingly liberal motives that will see at their end result oppression, and freedom lost; the exact opposite of the desired effect.
The results are so very paradoxical when people think they are wiser than all generations that ever were before, and in monumental presumption, assume their "wisdom" will create a brave new world. Indeed, if it is to mirror Orwell's, they just may get what they were seeking.
Humankind is more than its base instincts, to be sure, but it takes careful enculturation and training and more to raise man above his base self. Civilization has come a long way, but its gains must be guarded and preserved, and not easily or carelessly abandoned for utterly vapid intentions, that pose themselves in the guise of a new form of enlightenment.
The fallacy of "Authenticity" is in this category, and clearly shown for the empty philosophy it is.