mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity Charles Lindholm1 1Boston University Published on: Jan 01, 2007 Updated on: Aug 12, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY- NC 4.0) mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity The Social Origins of Authenticity WHAT ACTUAL CIRCUMSTANCES favored the rise of authenticity as a vital goal in today’s society? Lionel Trilling attempted to answer this question when he described the growth of authenticity out of the simpler and more modest virtue of sincerity, which itself arose in response to the momentous shift out of feudalism.1 According to Trilling, the concept of sincerity first emerged as a precursor to authenticity in the 16th century as a result of the gradual breakup of the face-to-face relationships of traditional European society. As was the case in many other pre-modern traditional societies around the world, the highly personalized universe of Medieval Europe was held together by a taken-for- granted social order that provided its members with secure positions in a divinely sanctioned hierarchy. Local authorities served church and state, and were served in turn by their vassals. The family replicated this order, with the father exercising a sacralized authority. This stratified and sanctified worldview validated the daily lives of the faithful. For most of those living in this cosmically ordained system, there was little or no travel away from their locality, and little or no social mobility within it. Under these circumstances individuals were constrained by the obligations entailed in their predestined social roles. What mattered was not personal sincerity and purity of intent, but only whether persons were able to live up to their obligations to the neighbors and kinsmen they had known and who had known them all their lives. This stable world was transformed utterly by the breakup of the feudal system and the massive movement of individuals out of the countryside and into mixed urban environments. Henceforth, people were no longer quite sure where they belonged, what their futures held for them, or who their neighbors were. They had begun the irreversible plunge into modernity, which can be succinctly defined as the condition of living among strangers. In this new, desacralized and unpredictable environment it became possible for some ambitious men and women to break out of their prescribed roles and pursue secular dreams of wealth, power, and fame. But the pleasures and possibilities of social mobility coincided with feelings of alienation and meaninglessness, as well as the potential for guile and deceit. Former inferiors could now pretend to be better than they actually were; origins could be hidden and high status positions claimed without any legitimate basis; neighbors could cheat and betray one another and vanish into the anonymous urban wilderness. It is not surprising that the original definition of the villain was the dissembler, a lowly person who rises by cunning.2 In this ambiguous milieu it is also not surprising that sincerity, doing what one says one will do, became a desired trait. The erosion of a sacred hierarchy, the fragmentation of roles and the sense of a loss of significance were met by the sincere person’s reliance on inner integrity to establish trusting and meaningful relationships. As Polonius advises his son: “To Thine own self be true and it follows as the night the day that thou canst not be false to any man.” 2 mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity This shift was supported by the dogmas of a newly rising Protestant bourgeoisie who had begun to transform the moral climate of Europe. The Protestants asserted that all persons are ultimately responsible for their own salvation. According to their doctrine, no one could intervene between the worshipper and God; no priest could interpret the confessions of the faithful and absolve them of their sins or sell them guarantees against damnation. Instead, the members of the congregation had to become worthy of redemption on their own. This could only be accomplished by scrutinizing their souls to uncover and root out any evil impulses. Since they were required to practice self-interrogation and purification, the Protestant faithful tended to became urgently concerned about their own motivations: for them, it was not enough to act morally, they now had to be certain that the intent behind the act was also wholesome. As a result, sincerity became a defining virtue among this vanguard population. The rise of sincerity also correlated with the radical egalitarianism that was practiced and preached by Protestants, who not only defined themselves in opposition to the hierarchies of the Catholic church, but also against the formalities of a remote and increasingly illegitimate courtly society. Instead of an ostentatious display of silks and jewels, they self-consciously wore plain clothing and appeared without adornment, revealing themselves in public ‘as they really were.’ Similarly, they made a practice of simple speech that did not employ any of the flattery and rhetorical flourishes of the gentry. But the requirements of modesty and sincerity had paradoxical consequences. The first was the ambiguity of representation. How could persons thrown back on their own interpretations of themselves and their duties be certain that the appearance of sincerity was not actually the result of self-delusion and pride? Couldn’t the unpretentious man actually be sinfully proud of his modesty, couldn’t the believer persuaded of his sincerity actually be the worst of hypocrites, capable of lying even to himself? The second was the relation between the perception of inner truth and the demands of the social order. Couldn’t being true to one’s own intuition of right and wrong be more important than conforming to what is required by society? Because their doctrine considered all human beings to be spiritual equals in the eyes of God, the most extreme Protestants even believed they could and should speak to aristocrats without honorifics or etiquette. That this might lead to dire consequences did not matter to them; they would be rewarded in heaven. Their critical attitude toward authority easily spread to self—questioning. How are we to know what we are really like, and what God really demands of us? Many Protestants tormented themselves with internal debates about these knotty matters of conscience, self-deception, and duty, as we know from the diaries and autobiographies that proliferated as an outlet for their spiritual anxieties.3 As a result, they were passionately concerned to discover an ultimate and absolute truth, outside of social norms and emotionally compelling. This moved them away from the social virtue of 3 mediastudies.press • Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader The Theory and History of Authenticity sincerity and toward the more solipsistic goal of finding a guiding inner light—that is, of achieving authenticity. […] The gradual triumph of capitalism and the predominance of wage labor provided another impetus toward development of the modern ideal of authenticity. In the old system, a worker’s inner feelings and sense of self were irrelevant, since each person was locked into an occupation that would last a lifetime. It was enough that the role was enacted properly. But when work in the open market was no longer hereditary or connected to any larger meaning system, labor began to lose its capacity to define identity. Instead there was increasing alienation from work that seemed meaningless and, worse, destructive of the worker’s eternal soul. Revulsion was especially directed toward the obligation to act obsequiously in order to please employers. Previously, subservience was part of a larger cosmic order of deference; now it stood athwart the new ideal of equality.4 Workers had become capable of imagining something better for themselves, but they also knew they could be dismissed for expressing resistance; as a result, for many their occupation was no longer a calling demanded by God, but rather became the enforced imposition of unwanted inferiority by an increasingly alien and antagonistic authority. As a result of all these factors, the early Protestant distaste for aristocratic artifice was easily extended to become a generalized contempt for role-playing in general. As one writer put it: “Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?”5 To balance out the perceived distortion and repression of newly discovered individual personalities and universal souls in the competitive open marketplace, people began to believe that their common humanity demanded free sharing of genuine (that is, authentic) feelings when among intimates. […] The social consequences of the new emphasis on personal authenticity were profound. Protestants throughout Europe began to declare that they were no longer obliged to follow whatever rules were handed down from above; instead, one’s duty was to make a personal judgment as to whether those rules were moral and equitable. These judgments could be made by referring to one’s inner light—that is, to the authentic moral truth emanating from within, and not by obedience to the conventions attached to social roles. Soon enough, this critical attitude spread beyond the church. In the same fashion as a Protestant church member had a duty to leave the congregation and find another more in tune with his or her values, thinking men and women in Europe and later in America began to make personal decisions as to whether the state deserved their loyalty. If not, the citizen had an obligation to stand up in opposition to the injustice and, in the extreme case of France, to overturn the state and establish a new one that would offer them an authentic community, envisioned in a way not very different from a covenanted Protestant congregation.