Americans have in the last few generations increasingly sought “authenticity”–authenticity in things such as food and music, but most especially authenticity in others and in themselves. Twentieth-century philosophers and scholars of popular culture have noticed this growing pursuit of the authentic. We can even put numbers on it. Phrases like true me, real self, and authentic self appeared much more often in American prose at the end of the twentieth century than they did a century earlier. In contrast, the phrases better me and better self became scarcer–a comparison to which I will return.[1]
The O.E.D. presents many definitions of authentic, but states that its “usual sense” these days is “genuine,” and particularly, with respect to people, “truly reflect[ing] one’s inner feelings; not affected, unfeigned,” or more generally, “the condition of being true to oneself.” This definition assumes that there actually is a stable, core, distinctive “oneself” to which one could be true.
Such an assumption is novel and strange in human history (even if mouthed c. 1600 by the buffoonish Polonius in Hamlet, which at that time likely meant “look out for number one” rather than “find your true self”). Globally, people have typically understood most individuals to be parts of the social organism rather than as unique and autonomous agents. (See this earlier post.)
Nonetheless, Americans, long heavily engaged in self-perfection, have been lately searching more and more for this elusive true self–a pursuit that has affected our politics up to and including the 45th president.
From Better Selves to Truer Selves
Americans have been concerned with working on their “selves” going back to the maxims of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century and then forward to seeking salvation in the evangelical churches and pledging sobriety in the temperance movements of the 19th century, all the way up to the popularity of self-help books, TV shows, and phone apps today.
The last couple of centuries have seen two deep changes in this characteristic American pursuit. One change is its democratization. Previously largely restricted to the well-bred and leisured–such as young women of affluence penning self-absorbed diary notes and passionate letters in the mid-1800s–self-work became a wider pursuit. It showed up, for example, in the popular press with advice columns and in self-help programs such as AA.
The other deep change is the gradual shift, accelerating in the last half-century, from fashioning and presenting a better self to finding and expressing a true self. Earlier, the self-absorbed sought to repress their impulses to, say, spit, yell, or laugh out loud, and sought to instead put on a good front in public–to, say, show “a Chearfull Countenance” or display learning, whatever they may otherwise have felt. And certainly, those who declared themselves “born again” or who hopped on the temperance “wagon” were eager to be better people. Even in the 1950s, the best-seller The Power of Positive Thinking meant to help train people to act happier and thus be more effective.
While self-improvement remains a theme in self-work materials–particularly, I think, in religious ones–finding one’s true self and expressing that have become more important than ever. Noted philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out that until the late eighteenth century, when Romantics such as Rousseau introduced the “idea that each of us has an original way of being human” unsullied by society, “no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance.”
In 1976, sociologists Daniel Bell and Ralph Turner separately reported an acceleration in the search for authenticity. Bell wrote that, under the influence of consumerism and 1960s cultural rebelliousness, modern American culture fostered a quest for the self’s “unique, irreducible character free of the contrivances and conventions, the masks and hypocrisies, the distortions [supposedly created] by society.” Turner proposed that people understood their “real selves” either in terms of their institutional roles (the real me is the hard worker and the generous neighbor)–or in terms of their impulses (the real me is the life of the party and the guy who won’t hesitate to punch out an annoying jerk). Authenticity was thought to be, as explains one analyst, “about acknowledging deep and primal forces, even allowing them on occasion to destroy social norms, so as to create altogether new ones.”
Turner saw a cultural shift over many decades toward defining the real self as the impulsive self rather than as the institutional one and he suggested a variety of explanations for the change, ranging from the demands of industrial society to Freudianism. There are indeed some fragments of empirical evidence from sources such as diaries and self-help books in support of the idea that Americans have increasingly understood (and valued) an authentic self, one which precedes and contests the socialized self.[2]
There is also evidence from contemporary psychological studies that Americans–well, at least, the American college students in these studies–value authenticity, that they feel better when they feel “authentic,” that they appreciate others and things more when those people and things seem “authentic.”[3]
Odd, No?
So, American self-fashioning has shifted toward the ideal of unearthing the authentic self buried deep inside, free of society’s fashioning, polishing it up, and behaving accordingly.
This is an odd pursuit in a few ways. For one, the very idea of a truly natural, unique, and un-socialized self is, as I noted above, strange. Even the newborn has already been influenced by, for example, the diet and voice of her mother, and will be quickly trained to sleep sometimes and not others, to have some food tastes and not others, and so on. Finding an identity unshaped by society is improbable.
Another oddity is that a one true self implies a consistent self; how else can it be true and authentic? Yet, are we really so consistent? Sociologist Jay Livingston, in commenting on the Justice Kavanaugh hearings, pointed out the consistency assumption behind many defenses of him. Kavanaugh’s associates said, in effect, “How could he have been a sexual predator as a 17-year-old party-goer when he is not one as an adult judge?” The argument presumes that people’s true selves–as in their sexual or drinking impulses–are remarkably fixed across time, space, and situation. Can people be so fixed? And do we even want to be so fixed? Should we behave at home as we behave when, say, rushing to jam onto a crowded train or when rooting loudly for the home team?
Third oddity: Expressing authenticity is, like all expressions, socially constructed. As one leading scholar of the topic, David Grazian, notes, “authenticity itself can never be authentic, but must always be performed, staged, fabricated, crafted, or otherwise imagined.” We see this in how people look for ways to display their real, untutored selves but end up looking like others’ true selves–similar in everything from picking creative children’s names (that then turn out to be commonplace in kindergarten) to getting tattoos and wearing pre-shredded jeans.
Finally, what if the seeker finds out that her authentic self is unpleasant? As one advice-giver wrote, “Nobody wants to see your true self. We all have thoughts and feelings … that are better left unspoken.” If your unguarded moments reveal an impulse to bully or to manic depression, would you prefer be true to that impulse or prefer to alter it, to make yourself a less authentic person but a better person? Probably the latter.
Politics
And so to politics. Selling a candidate as “authentic” is an old tactic. After all, Lincoln ran as the “Honest Abe” the “Rail Splitter,” not as A. Lincoln, Esq., lawyer to rich businessmen. “Actually, he wasn’t much of a rail splitter,” noted a curator of the National Museum of American History,” but the “story takes you to the days when political theater was just beginning.” (To Stephen Douglas’s charge that he was “two-faced”–which Lincoln certainly sometimes was–he famously parried that, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”) But authenticity claims, even in 1860, helped Lincoln win.
In 1973, essayist Stephen Miller, writing in the left-wing magazine, Dissent, worried about surging calls for authenticity. Writers then popular with the New Left and the counterculture like Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown argued that the key problem of the day was, quoting Marshall Berman, that “Our society is filled with people who are ardently yearning … who are fighting, desperately and against all odds, simply to preserve, to feel, to be themselves.” Such a view, Miller countered, elevates private anxieties over public concerns like the fate of hard-pressed workers and threatened democratic ideals. Believers in the“private religion of self-realization” dismiss the political realm as a place of falseness and hypocrisy and they are “bored with concrete discussions of particular social and political issues.” They are thus subject to political apathy, to accepting violence as an authentic and therefore legitimate expression of dissent, and to following “the ‘honest’ extremist whether of the Left or the Right—who, they think, at least says what he means.”
Many have noted that displaying authenticity seems to have been especially important in the 2016 election.[4] Both Bernie Sanders as the crotchety old man who bellows blunt truths and Donald Trump as the plain-speaker who will say what “everyone” thinks but fears from political correctness to say out loud benefited by playing against the image of Hillary Clinton as the ultimate inauthentic.
A post-election snap survey showed that Trump voters saw him as more “authentic” than Clinton voters saw her. Moreover, even Trump voters who thought he was telling an untruth–or, especially those who thought he lied–considered him authentic, because, explained the researchers, they saw his lie as a symbolic “screw you” to the over-educated elites. It was the “screw you,” not the specific claim, that displayed authenticity.[5]
Just a couple of weeks before the 2016 election, Republican pollster John Zogby said something similar: “To a large degree Donald Trump is authentic – he is a truly authentic jerk. He is bombastic, narcissistic, egotistical, thin-skinned, self-promoting, and crude. In all of this he is probably genuine because he has never tried to portray himself as anything but all of the above.”
To return to the Kavanaugh example, one might see the rage he expressed when he responded to the charge of sexual assault in the Senate hearings as revealing his true self. To many observers this outburst displayed a self that was, in one reporter’s words, “unhinged.” But, setting aside whether he provided the literal truth (40% of Republicans told a poll that Kavanaugh had not told the whole truth), others saw in Kavanaugh’s outburst an authenticity of righteous indignation, an anger, another “screw you” that any honest man falsely accused would display. Ironically, but consistent with Grazian’s point about performing authenticity, Kavanaugh had to be coached to be authentic in that way, to let loose his presumably real self.[6]
So we arrive at a point in which apparent authenticity trumps (so to speak) seeming hypocrisy even when the latter might serve higher purposes. Seekers of authenticity prefer real native food even if it not not as tasty as colonized versions, prefer frank revelations from the heart even if they might damage a relationship, and prefer the frankness of a bigot than the diplomacy of a peacemaker. Aside from whether the premises of the authenticity search were even valid, we must ask, At what price for others? To thine own self be true, as Polonius really meant it.
NOTES
[1] This trend can be seen in three data sources I examined:
(a) The Google nGram program. Between c. 1900 and c. 2000, the representation in American books of the phrases “true me” and “true self,” increased 75%; “real me” and “real self” 24%; and “authentic me” and “authentic self” 175%. In contrast, “better me” and “better self” dropped in proportional representation by 65%.
(b) I compared the adjectives applied to the nouns “self” and “me” in the New York Times in the 20 years around 1900 to those in the 20 years around 2000. As a proportion of all stories using the word “self,” the modifiers authentic, true, or real rose about 10 percent, while the proportion with the adjective better dropped by over half. The proportion of stories attaching the adjectives authentic, true, or real in front of “me” rose 200 percent, while the proportion attaching better dropped 20 percent.
(c) The phrase “authentic self” appeared in about 1,400 academic articles in the 1980s; 4,000 in the 1990s; 12,000 in the 2000s; and 18,000 so far in the 2010s. The counts for “better self” also rose (as did the number of articles in general) but at a slower rate, 9-fold from 2,200 to 19,600, compared to 13-fold for authentic (calculated from Google Scholar).
[2] E.g., Bjorklund, Interpreting the Self; Wood and Lurcher, The Development of a Postmodern Self; Thomson, In Conflict No Longer; Veroff et al, The Inner American.
[3] E.g., Gino et al, “The Moral Value of Authenticity”; Schlegel and Hicks, “The True Self and Psychological Health”; Hahl, et al, “Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture.”
[4] E.g., here, here, here, and here.
[5] Interestingly, poll data show that viewers of the 2016 debates were as likely or more likely to say that Clinton was more authentic in the debates than Trump (iPoll data from the Roper Center).
[6] From the New York Times: “Had the hearing ended there [after the accuser’s testimony], some senators said, Kavanaugh might not have had a chance. … But [White House Counsel] McGahn … told the judge this was no longer about judicial philosophy. He needed to be authentic [emphasis added]. It was his time to speak, in his own words. Kavanaugh got the message. He walked to the witness table, adjusted his nameplate and — alternating between angry outbursts and stifled sobs — told the committee he was innocent … He’s crushing it, texted one staffer to another. It was risky strategy that created a partisan Rorschach test. Democrats saw Kavanaugh as unhinged, hysterical …. Republicans were thrilled, seeing a counterpunch from a qualified nominee unjustly accused.”
MADE IN AMERICA 