Anxiety about social media has inspired innumerable hand-wringing essays about inauthenticity and group-think, along with much rereading of Hannah Arendt. Arendt thought that part of the background to totalitarianism was modern mass media, which absorbed individuals into the state's obsessions, making individual thought all but impossible. As Blake Smith recently wrote,
The great moral and political insight of Arendt’s work is that there is only a short step from the apparently trivial problem of having inauthentic opinions to the horrors of mass violence.One of Arendt's essays on this problem came in the form of a book review. The book was The Golden Fruits by Nathalie Sarraute (1963), which consists almost entirely of dialogue among readers, critics, and hangers on about a book called The Golden Fruits. This book rises from obscurity to fame and then falls back into obscurity through conversations in which people are too focused on being cool, with it, witty, and brilliant to meaningful engage with the book. Indeed we are left with no real idea of the book at all. Of these critics Arendt wrote,
They cannot share personal experiences of the book with others, because their experiences have been impersonal from the outset, warped by their anxious desire to generate statements about it that will signal both their loyalty to the fashion of the moment and their individual brilliance. A ubiquitous and totalizing media conversation has made it impossible to speak one’s mind because no one thus exposed to the din of so many voices and anxious to join them, can have a mind of their own to speak.
As Smith notes, this seems very much like social media:
These acts of judgment are motivated from the outset by a “mimetic” desire, that is, a longing to have what others seem to want (likes, followers, a fuller participation in the discourse). When we give an opinion on Twitter, we are not inspired by an authentic, personal desire to have our particular relationship to the world enlarged by an encounter with other such relationships, but by a derivative, imitative desire to have the attention that other people seem to enjoy.
Ok, fine. There is a lot of terrible group think on Twitter, a lot of fear of offending the mob.
But I am, among other things, something of an anthropologist, and my question is this: in what sort of society did people ever find it easy to express their own truly personal thoughts? Who has ever had truly authentic opinions?
No human has ever lived who did not have a culture, and the thoughts of everyone who belongs to a culture are very much shaped by it.
You can still find traditional societies around the world in which people will deny flat out that original thought is even possible. The ancestors, they will tell you, laid down the truth about all important matters in the dawn time, and any change we might make would be for the worse. Of course this is not really correct, and the beliefs and institutions of such societies do change over time. But most traditional people would be puzzled by the very notion of having their own authentic opinions about a wide range of topics: marriage, household arrangements, hunting practices, worship, political arrangements, and so on.
In all the societies I know anything about, writing is saturated with convention: ancient Rome, medieval western Europe, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America. You can't read any old book with attention and not be struck by the immense weight of assumptions that lie behind every sentence. The notion of authentic, original thought, unshackled from the past, is a sort of Enlightenment fantasy.
Everyone writes to please some audience or another. To the extent that there was any discussion of this in the past, it was criticism of people who tried too hard to please the great mass of people, rather than writing for their own friends. (Aristocratic friends, it is usually implied.) Socrates did not attack the notion of trying to please anyone, but the notion of trying to please everyone; the really good people, he said, will recognize the virtue of our actions.
Even the boldest and most original thinkers we know of emerged from some kind of society and wrote to please the people they valued within it.
I do recognize that there is a difference between saying what you believe to be true and repeating a popular phrase that you believe to be false. But how does anyone know that the beliefs of ardent Nazis or Bolsheviks were any less "authentic" than yours or mine?
What is an authentic belief anyway? Can you authentically believe things that you were taught as a child, or things that most other people also believe? I would say, yes, you can. I would say that nothing produces more self-delusion than the constant push to be original, the way modern people are always announcing discoveries and revelations that have been discovered and revealed millions of times before.
If it is really a short step from having inauthentic opinions to mass violence, every society has been constantly on the verge of mass violence. Which, come to think of it, might be true. But it is not at all weird for great masses of people to agree about things, and to attack those who disagree. This is the human condition. We were social beings long before we developed philosophy, probably long before we developed language. We are not ever going to shrug off that legacy.
1 comment:
I'm reminded of Mark Twain's autobiography, which he instructed be withheld from publication for a full century after his death.
He explains his choice to the reader thusly: he felt that no moral living person could ever truly speak freely, either aloud in in written text, so long as they feared the possibility of any of their words harming others - whether emotionally, socially, or otherwise. Having one's true thoughts revealed after one died would not be enough - those who survived you could still be harmed by your true feelings unadulterated, or by the impact on one's social standing they might produce among others.
Twain thus reasoned that the only sensible thing to do would be to wait until all parties who might potentially be directly harmed first pass on, before allowing his thoughts to be shared with the world. And so he wrote with that intent, and he claimed he found it immensely liberating - he could tell whatever tale interested him, about whatever party, without concern that it would offend the living, nor even their children (although he stated, perhaps jokingly, that the grandchildren could fend for themselves).
Twain himself, of course, lived in a time of rampant technological progress and a great expansion of communication capabilities. He went from a world where even the fastest messages were carried universally by horseback, railroad, or steamship, to one in which the electric telegraph allowed messages to cross continents in seconds; and then in the later years of his life, to one in which telephones were commonplace and most reasonably well-to-do people could speak to a friend on the other side of the town, county, or even state within mere seconds, from the comfort of their parlor.
As much nostalgia as Twain sometimes had in his writings for the lost halcyon days of his youth, I'm not aware of him ever bemoaning technology as the cause of people being unable to be "authentic" with each other. Incredibly perceptive as he always was, he knew better - the problem has always been with us apes, rather than with our tools and inventions.
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