Here is a really well-written op-ed piece from the Sunday New
York Times, entitled “The Gospel According to Me”:
The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow
of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American
optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity
deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt
through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be
connected! Achieve well-being!
Guilt and alienation must be eliminated, most notably
through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.
Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular
age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have
merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular,
omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind
and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a
personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not
make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad
conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.
Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s
experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a
postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you
are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish
conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth,
mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required
extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity
have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture
of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not
feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must
be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of
mind-numbing work.
In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the
primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective
project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself.
The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really
require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might
transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline
well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma.
Whereas the American dream used to be tied to external
reality — say, America as the place where one can openly practice any religion,
America as a safe haven from political oppression or America as the land of
opportunity where one need not struggle as hard as one’s parents — now, the
dream is one of pure psychological transformation.
This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an
appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism. Authenticity is its dominant
contemporary expression. In a seemingly meaningless, inauthentic world awash in
nonstop media reports of war, violence and inequality, we close our eyes and
turn ourselves into islands. We may even say a little prayer to an obscure but
benign Eastern goddess and feel some weak spiritual energy connecting
everything as we listen to some tastefully selected ambient music.
Authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation
of history. The power of now.
At the heart of the ethic of authenticity is a profound
selfishness and callous disregard of others.
This ideology functions prominently in the contemporary
workplace, where the classical distinction between work and nonwork has broken
down. Work was traditionally seen as a curse or an obligation for which we
received payment. Nonwork was viewed as an experience of freedom for which we
pay but that gives us pleasure.
But the past 30 years
or so has ushered in an informalization of the workplace where the distinction
between work and nonwork is harder and harder to draw. With the rise of
corporations like Google, the workplace has increasingly been colonized by
nonwork experiences to the extent that we are not even allowed to feel
alienation or discontent at the office because we can play Ping-Pong, ride a
Segway, and eat organic lunches from a
menu designed by celebrity chefs. If we do feel discontent, it must mean that
something is wrong with us rather than with the corporation.
With the workplace
dominated by the maxim of personal authenticity — Be different! Wear your
favorite T-shirt to work and listen to Radiohead on your iPhone while at your
desk! Isn’t it nifty? — there is no room for worker malaise. And contrary to
popular belief, none of this has assuaged the workplace dynamics of guilt, bad
conscience and anxiety, which are more rampant than ever. In fact, the blurring
of the boundary between work and nonwork in the name of flexibility has led to
an enormous increase in anxiety — a
trend well-documented in the work of Peter Fleming, a professor of work, organization
and society at the University of London. Women in particular feel totally
inadequate for not being able to have it all — climb the ladder at work, make
the same wages as men, have a family, have a voluminous sex life, still look
attractive and act as if they are having a great time through all of it.
Work is no longer a
series of obligations to be fulfilled for the sake of sustenance: it is the
expression of one’s authentic self. With the extraordinary rise of internships
— not just filled by college students anymore, but more and more by working-age
adults — people from sufficiently privileged backgrounds are even prepared to work without pay because it allows them to “grow” as persons.
Every aspect of one’s existence is meant to water some fantasy of growth.
But here’s the rub:
if one believes that there is an intimate connection between one’s authentic
self and glittering success at work, then the experience of failure and forced
unemployment is accepted as one’s own fault. I feel shame for losing my job. I
am morally culpable for the corporation’s decision that I am excess to
requirements.
To take this one step
further: the failure of others is explained by their merely partial
enlightenment for which they, and they alone, are to be held responsible. At
the heart of the ethic of authenticity is a profound selfishness and callous
disregard of others. As New Age interpreters of Buddha say, “You yourself, as
much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
A naïve belief in
authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal
success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness
that insists on success at any cost. Cynicism, in this mode, is not the
expression of a critical stance toward authenticity but is rather the runoff of
this failure of belief. The self-help industry itself runs the gamut in both
directions — from “The Power of Now,” which teaches you the power of meditative
self-sufficiency, to “The Rules,” which teaches a woman how to land a man by
pretending to be self-sufficient. Profit rules the day, inside and out.
Nothing seems more American than this forced choice between
cynicism and naïve belief. Or rather, as Herman Melville put it in his 1857
novel “The Confidence Man,” it seems the choice is between being a fool (having
to believe what one says) or being a knave (saying things one does not
believe). For Melville, who was writing on the cusp of modern capitalism, the
search for authenticity is a white whale.
This search is an
obsession that is futile at best and destructive at worst. The lingering
question for Melville, on the brink of poverty as he wrote “The Confidence
Man,” is: what happens to charity? When the values of Judeo-Christian morality
have been given a monetary and psychological incarnation — as in credit, debt,
trust, faith and fidelity — can they exist as values? Is the prosperous self
the only God in which we believe in a radically inauthentic world?
As usual, the Bard of
Avon got there first. In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare puts the mantra of authenticity
into the mouth of the ever-idiotic windbag Polonius in his advice to his son,
Laertes: “To thine own self be true.” This is just before Polonius sends a spy
to follow Laertes to Paris and tell any number of lies in order to catch him
out.
And who, finally, is more inauthentic than Hamlet? Ask
yourself: is Hamlet true to himself, doubting everything, unable to avenge his
father’s murder, incapable of uttering the secret that he has learned from the
ghost’s lips, and unwilling to declare his love for Ophelia whose father he
kills? Hamlet dies wearing the colors of his enemy, Claudius. We dare say that
we love “Hamlet” not for its representation of our purportedly sublime
authenticity, but as a depiction of the drama of our radical inauthenticity
that, in the best of words and worlds, shatters our moral complacency.
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Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at The New School
for Social Research, and Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst, are the authors of
“Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine.”
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Correction: July 3, 2013
An earlier version of this essay referred imprecisely to a
saying of Buddha. In a famous meditation, Buddha (whose teachings were
committed to writing centuries after his death) said that before extending
loving-kindness to others, one should first extend it to oneself. The
expression, "You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe,
deserve your love and affection" does not appear in Buddhist scripture,
though it is often attributed to him in self-help literature.
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