On Authenticity

A former classmate of mine, Matthew Anderson, recently written an article which raises the issue of authenticity. I'm going to take a stab at the subject, but I honestly haven't thought in great detail about the subject, and this is perhaps my first stab at it. Hopefully I'll better understand how authenticity, if a virtue of any sort fits into the ordinary network of duties, values, and virtues after further thought. But here goes - Anderson writes:

Fewer words find more frequent use among young evangelicals than “authentic.” Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee resonated with young evangelicals for the same reason: they appeared authentic in their positions and their mindsets... And while authenticity has a political dimension, it is also a social virtue. Young evangelicals frequently decry the inauthenticity of the mega-church and individualistic evangelical tradition, where people put on a happy face and “played church.” Experiencing “real life together” is the pursuit of the new evangelical small group, where “real life” is always “messy.” Authenticity in social settings is frequently an excuse for sharing sins and problems within a group of people who doubtlessly share the same sins and problems.

Anderson has as his target an issue among a certain group of people, and I don't doubt that he's right about it. My experience has been that this is far from an issue among evangelicals alone. It's a common theme in movies and when I've had deeper conversations with undergraduates and peers outside the academy, it's not infrequently something that comes up. If anything, I suspect that it's currency among evangelicals today has to do with osmosis from the rest of our culture. I suppose that there's an interesting history to the concept - I suspect that it's currency derives from trickle-down existentialism, but I'm far from positive about that - and it really deserves study.

I'm often inclined to get a bit restless when talk of "authenticity" or "being real" comes up. One of the reasons is the nebulousness of the term. I'm never quite sure what qualifies as being authentic. However, there does appear to be some genuine value to authenticity liable both to inflation and deflation.

The sense of the term I have in mind is that one is authentic if one acts honestly. One fails to be authentic if one talks about traditional values but belies those values by the hookers one is secretly meeting with on the side. One fails to be authentic if one hides feelings or desires because of how it will be perceived (being closeted is a failure of authenticity). Part of the concept appears to have to do with not realizing one's desires for the sake of appearance and part of it has to do with publicly speaking of high standards, but actually acting according to a set of lower standards. In brief, one doesn't act honestly. One intentionally acts in a way so that you communicate to others that you are a kind of person that you aren't.

Here's where it's important not to deflate the value of authenticity. The complement of authenticity is a kind of social fraud. Fraud undercuts human relationships extremely effectively, and I'm told that non-familial relationships are paramount for my generation and those following it. Given that virtuous friendships are of great value to having a flourishing life and that social fraud seems to undercut that value, there's something pretty important about authenticity. It may be that if there are such things as "intrinsic goods" of practices (in MacIntyre's), that authenticity is an important precondition for realizing whatever goods are intrinsic to the practice of friendship. Dante seemed to realize this in his placing fraud at the very deepest level of hell. Subverting relationships generated the worst sins in Dante's taxonomy.

However, there's also reason to think that the value of authenticity is often overblown. Firstly, authenticity seems to be mainly a precondition for having other values. If I'm socially honest, then I can participate in enriching relationships with others in a way that I might not otherwise have done. However, authenticity in the sense I'm concerned with is without much value if the person doesn't have many virtues. Authenticity is in some sense a bit cheap. After all, I can be fully authentic without many of the other virtues. An authentic rascal is still a rascal. If he's not authentic, then he's a hypocritical rascal, but removing the hypocrisy doesn't make him less than a rascal. And there does seem to be a bit of a problem here for people like me who are moral realists of some sort or another with authenticity. Authenticity is sometimes the only virtue that undergrads appear to think isn't relative or subjective. In such cases, I get the impression that one can be taken to be socially virtuous so long as one is honest about how deeply bereft one is of other virtues (paradoxically, I suppose that there's a kind of inauthenticity in this).

If the other virtues are whittled away so that only authenticity remains, then one is poor indeed. But, it's also true that adding authenticity to other valuable traits is, as Dante seemed aware of, a precondition for certain sorts of social moral goods.