Why are we so interested in what’s really real?
Meriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 was ‘authentic’. On the one hand, this tells you that a lot of people were probably confused about something very basic while reading about deepfakes for the first time last year. On the other hand, it’s also some evidence that there’s a cultural fascination with the idea right now.
It would actually be surprising if there weren’t. The internet is awash with AI-generated trash. The average American adult spends 2.5 hours a day on social media (while the average American 17-year old spends more than twice that), a fake social landscape where influencers perform staged lives and algorithms feed us what they “think” will keep us scrolling. Most US adults have changed communities at least once in their life. The amount of time Americans are spending with friends per week has dropped in the last decade—from 6.5 hours per week down to just 2.75 hours per week. Our connection, both perceived and actual, to the real world has been steadily shrinking for quite some time, and the rate at which we’re alienating ourselves is growing.
As Carl Trueman points out in his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this is all taking place against a backdrop of a culture that has long bought into the ideology of expressive individualism, the narrative according to which “each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires.” (p. 46) Trueman borrows the nomenclature from Charles Taylor, who (according to Trueman) places the expressive idealist “in what he describes as a culture of authenticity,” according to which “each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.” (p. 46) A culture of authenticity is a culture of uniqueness and special self-discovery. It’s a culture in which everyone really is a special and unique snowflake. It’s a culture in which it makes sense that every individual can wish upon a star and expect that his particular dream will come true. Moreover, it’s a culture in which this uniqueness is du jour, constantly re-discovered with a continual and willful rebellion against adherence to tradition. According to both Taylor and Trueman (and I would agree on this point) we’ve been steeped in this kind of culture narrative for a while now. (How else was Walt Disney able to monetize the myth of wish-fulfillment so successfully beginning in the 40s and 50s?) Trueman places the blame at the feet of some Enlightenment philosophes and Romance poets—a point on which I would quibble—but whatever the source, the description of the culture of authenticity and the expressive individualism it has borne is spot on.
Pretend for a second that there was a species that was created to live in community. This particular species even did so (albeit imperfectly) for millenia. They lived in small, tightly knit communities, each generation largely accepting the cultural imprint passed on by previous generations. Then, with the discovery of new ideas and the subsequent introduction of new technologies, they began moving from place to place, concentrating in large urban areas, this process culminating in the large scale dissociation of most people from their cultural and regional heritage, along with the ability—mediated by digital technologies—to stay mostly indoors. Even though the “communities” were larger than ever, no one had to look anyone in the face or even be with others if they didn’t want to. Imagine the people of that species becoming more and more self-interested and beginning to wonder about what’s authentic, what’s really real, what’s true. It doesn’t sound surprising, does it?
Authenticity Online
As
points out in one article, this fascination with authenticity is easily taken advantage of by marketers. Every company and its parent is trying to increase sales by persuading you that buying their products will unlock the authentic self you’ve always had just beneath the surface. The tactic is cheap and obvious. It takes advantage of our fundamental desire to feel that our life is meaningful, along with the underlying narrative we’ve been peddled—life will only be meaningful when you’ve unlocked the real you.Moreover, the marketing spin on authenticity takes advantage of the medium by which most people have come to pursue and curate their authentic selves: the internet. The internet is the dimension where most of us primarily, reflexively pursue both self-fulfillment and self-actualization today—whether through cultivating the appearance of a self on social media (while mimicking others’ cultivated appearances), shopping online for ways to change our lives, or satisfying carnal desires via the experiences we curate.
As Marshall McLuhan warned us 60 years ago, however, “the medium is the message.” When you go about primarily trying to cultivate your sense of authenticity—clarifying and communicating to both yourself and others your idea of who you fundamentally are—online, the medium itself sets certain parameters about what the answer can be. A contrast here helps: if your primary vehicle for clarifying and communicating your sense of self is through voting (or other political behavior), then the “authentic self” you cultivate will turn out to be essentially social and political. That doesn’t determine whether it will be left or right, populist or elitist. It just determines the main lines of self-expression you’re bound to engage in (and those you’re not). Likewise, if your primary vehicle for clarifying and communicating your sense of self is prayer, then you will have a hard time ignoring the bodily, the spiritual, the moral elements of your self in your self-ideation. Moreover, the primary audience with whom you’re developing and communicating your sense of self in prayer should turn out to be God.
Returning to the medium of the internet, it should be clear that someone who uses the internet as his primary vehicle for clarifying and communicating his sense of self will be led by that medium to some very hard-to-resist tendencies in how he thinks about himself. The question, is what will the tendencies be?
Probably there are many such tendencies (all of which could collectively help explain the characteristic neuroses of our era). However, there are two clear tendencies of internet-based self-articulation that I want to focus on:
Cartesianism: He will cultivate his sense of self primarily in terms of his experiences, desires, and ideas. He will tend to see himself as essentially a mental, not a physical being.
Compartmentalism: He will see himself as essentially an individual unit, connected to others only as mediated by those experiences, desires, and ideas.
Cartesianism is the explicit view of Descartes among many others that the self is entirely a mental substance with a special kind of relationship to the body. Internet self-cultivation reinforces this self-conception because the devices, apps, windows, etc. we have to attend to in order to engage with the online “world” stimulate some sensory experiences (sights and sounds) at the noticeable exclusion of others (physical touch, tastes, and smells). Along with the way most internet experiences are built around the sharing of ideas or the satisfaction of desires, this encourages a certain kind of Cartesian view of the self as a bundle of experiences, ideas, and desires. Moreover, because we never directly encounter other people in community online, but only encounter them through the mediation of those visual and auditory experiences, Compartmentalism is encouraged.
To be clear, I think these are tendencies, not necessities. Moreover, it’s not as if these attitudes are held explicitly by everyone (or even most) who uses the internet. Caveats aside, when people most of their time articulating their sense of who they are on a screen, alienated from embodied community, they will tend to cultivate their self-image fundamentally in terms of the faculties that are stimulated by the screen. And clearly the internet most ably stimulates our faculties to desire, to ideate (especially in a mimetic sort of way), and to have experiences that are sensory but that neglect the use of the body in a robust way.
Cultivation vs. Confession
Cartesianism and Compartmentalism are really just reinforcing a particular way of living out the story of expressive individualism, as it turns out. The story of expressive individualism is longer and more complicated (and Cartesianism and Compartmentalism are tendencies that pre-date the internet), but internet media are ratcheting up the tendency those with an expressive individualist mindset to attempt to cultivate their own understanding of their nature without regard for any universal understanding of human nature, or any connection to the communities or traditions that might inform an answer to what an authentic human looks like.
A fundamental problem with the story of expressive individualism—the story according to which each human is the creator and curator of his own nature—is that it necessarily encourages the idea that we have to curate an authentic self. The idea of curation—of, as we saw Charles Taylor put it above, “find[ing] and liv[ing] out one’s own” way of realizing humanity—turns out to lead necessarily to inauthenticity.
Every human being is unique, but no human is so unique as to possess a human nature distinct from any other human who has ever lived. (As an aside, this is one reason it’s enthralling to study the humanities: while recognizing the uniqueness in Homer and his culture, we can also see just by reading him that they are humans, the same as we are.) When we attempt to step outside that lineage of human nature, and the communal understanding and articulation of it, we’re bound to construct an artificial fascade instead of anything truly human.
My brother-in-law
recently published a book that dwells on the typically human problem of constructing artificial versions of our self to share with those around us. His book, Acting Human, is an engaging read that weaves together story and thoughtful reflection in a way that’s incredibly hard to do. It’s very worth reading. Throughout the book, Jason struggles with the question of how we should deal with hypocrisy, both in ourselves and in others.One chapter in particular focuses on the story of Dorothy Day, who is known in particular for her care for the poor through her Houses of Hospitality. As Jason points out, however, Day habitually doubted and often questioned her own motivations. In considering whether such doubts make Day a hypocrite, Jason points to two kinds of vulnerability.
Vulnerability is certainly in vogue today. However, as San Fransisco writer Laura Turner explains, the style of vulnerability we’ve learned to employ is what she calls “curated imperfection.” Turner identifies how spiritual influencers in particular have taught us to cultivate personas of faux authenticity that play up minor imperfections for the sake of being relatable. Relatability sells and makes people like us. So “even the ‘messy’ pictures…are adorable, so maybe it doesn’t matter whether [they’re] wearing sweatpants or a designer brand so much as that [their] audience believes it’s real. Authetic. Sincere. Is that dishonest? What is honesty when your life is your brand?” True vulnerability is not about curation. It’s about confession.
Here I take it talk of vulnerability is standing in for talk about authenticity. Vulnerability is “showing who you really are.” Jason’s insight, which I found to be crucial, comes in that last line (emphasis mine): true vulnerability is not about curation. It’s about confession. Curation is the impulse of the expressive individualist, but curation is always just a way of building a wall between one’s true self and everyone who could be in contact with that self (including oneself).
Confession, on the other hand, involves opening up without pretense, and it involves the self-accusation and skepticism about one’s own motivations that Jason observes in the story of Dorothy Day.
Importantly, confession also requires recognizing there’s something about our humanity that is broken and needs fixing. We see this acknowledgement beautifully portrayed in the story of Saint Veronica, the woman with an issue of blood, whose feast day is celebrated today by many Orthodox Christians:
So Jesus went with him, and a great multitude followed Him and thronged Him.
Now a certain woman had a flow of blood for twelve years, and had suffered many things from many physicians. She had spent all that she had and was no better, but rather grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came behind Him in the crowd and touched His garment. For she said, “If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well.”
Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction. And Jesus, immediately knowing in Himself that power had gone out of Him, turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My clothes?”
But His disciples said to Him, “You see the multitude thronging You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’ ”
And He looked around to see her who had done this thing. But the woman, fearing and trembling, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth. And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.” (Mark 5:24-34)
St. Veronica’s encounter with Christ left her a more whole and authentic version of herself. It required her faith that Christ—not her own ideas, or those of the doctors, or her material wealth—must be the source of her whole humanity. It required bodily contact with the one who made her, a person both soul and body. And it required confession, fear, trembling, falling down, and telling the truth to the who had already saved her.
There are many other things one could write about this topic, but if we want to get past a culture of curated selves, the ground floor has to be an experience of confession. If we want to heal from the walls we’ve built in an attempt to make our own version of humanity, we need a direct encounter with the one who designed the humanity each and every one of us shares.
Demons. I laughed out loud at the Ryan Gosling comment. It’s a good example though. There’s a kind of consumptive approach to movies on display there where one tries to find oneself in a character that seems cool and transgressive. But that’s definitely lacking the confessional approach to self-articulation, which is decidedly less cool and more painful on the front end.
1. When discussing how we were designed to live in community, you were /this/ close to talking about demons - I could feel it!
2. The concept of confession as authenticity is such a foreign concept to our social media minds. When we confess to one another, we are showing off the worst parts of ourselves, instead of the best. I will be chewing on this for some time.
Like Stories of Old's most recent video is about how many modern films are focused on "relatability" and I think there's more discussion to be had on relating to Homer's Odyssey vs. relating to the people you see on social media (the "messy influencer). I do think there's a major difference between finding meaning in the larger story of humanity and feeling like Ryan Gosling's character in Drive is "literally me".