Escaping the iron cage

The Ethics of Authenticity, Part 4

Welcome back to our philosophy of technology book club. Today, we’re finishing our discussion of The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. In July, we’re reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Here is the schedule for July:

• July 6: Chapters 1-9

• July 13: Chapters 10-20

• July 17: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• July 20: Chapters 21- 33

• July 26: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• July 27: Chapters 34-End

But don’t forget that our final Zoom call for The Ethics of Authenticity will be on July 5 at 3 PM Eastern.

And if you missed mid-month call, you can find the recording here.

Let me make a brief apology before we get to the main post. My kids have been sick all week; I was sick alongside them, and now I’m writing this while some very strong medications work their way through my bloodstream. So, I don’t know if my thoughts have quite come together this week.

Source

Where do we go from here?

That is a good question to be asking, and not just about The Ethics of Authenticity, but about the subject of this year’s book club as a whole. We’ve now spent six months thinking about technology together, and it’s about time that we started looking for answers rather than questions. It’s fitting, then, that these final two chapters of Charles Taylor are the readings for the last week of June, as Taylor turns his attention toward the future at the end of The Ethics of Authenticity.

Along the way, authenticity seemed to have dropped out of the picture—Taylor is now thinking about all of what he called ‘the modern malaise’ at the beginning of this book. Putting this malaise into my own words (and so recognizing that I’m diverging from Taylor a bit), I would describe the modern malaise as a sense of alienation and powerlessness. We feel radically disconnected from the world around us, and we feel that there is nothing that we can do about it. This, I think, is what Taylor means when he speaks of ‘fragmentation’ at the end of The Ethics of Authenticity.

What gave rise to this fragmentation? We can read Taylor himself here: ‘This fragmentation comes about partly through a weakening of bonds of sympathy, partly in a self-feeding way, through the failure of democratic initiative itself.’¹ Given the way that many of us (particularly in places like the United States and Canada) are governed by large bureaucracies – the sort of things we call faceless – we have a sense that our lives are not really in our control. Fatalism is the risk here: whatever will happen will happen, we think, regardless of how we vote or what actions we take. It is out of our hands. And these institutions are dominated by a particular way of thinking, what Taylor calls instrumental reason.

It is no surprise that we think more and more in instrumental terms. Given that we live in market societies, we are forced to think in these terms at times. But what is interesting, and worrying, is how the institutions that govern us tend to only think in these terms, and our own thinking begins to mirror them. You could make a connection with some of the observations in Nguyen’s The Score: metrics surely facilitate thinking in these instrumental terms.

But we need to be careful here. We can too easily become ‘boosters’ and ‘knockers’ about instrumental reason, just as we might have become boosters or knockers about authenticity. Taylor’s suggestion is that we need to find a way to keep instrumental reason in its place, which means recognizing the moral ideals that motivated the rise of instrumental reason in the first place. Then we might be able to criticize instrumental reason’s role in society from a better place, and we might be able to enframe it in some other way.

There are two issues here. It is easy to run them together because Taylor treats them so briefly, but we need to distinguish them:

1. The role of instrumental reason and the way it has come to dominate other forms of reason.

2. The fragmentation of human life and the way we no longer feel tight bonds with others around us.

These problems are surely related, however. And I think Taylor can help us see a path forward, too. The word that came to mind as I read these final chapters was solidarity. If we are going to put instrumental reason in its place and increase communal bonds, we must cultivate this sense of solidarity. This is what I think Taylor has in mind when he writes of ‘common purpose.’ We need to cultivate a sense that we are all in this together, that we are fighting for a common cause—that cause being, ideally, the betterment of the human condition.

Taylor gives us very little to go on here. But reading this, my mind went to another book by Byung-Chul Han: The Disappearance of Ritual. There, Han writes:

Rituals are…symbolic practices, practices of symbállein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.²

Shared rituals form communities in part because of their symbolic power. (Now that I’ve made this connection with Han on ritual, I'm thinking back to Taylor’s remarks on the medieval correspondences and the abandonment of mimesis.) And I wonder if finding rituals is some way out of what Taylor calls the ‘vicious circle’ of fragmentation (found on page 118). The problem, as Taylor describes it, is:

1. We live in a fragmented world.

2. This fragmentation makes it difficult to come together for political purposes.

3. So, we experience political powerlessness.

4. So, we identify less with our political community, and we become fragmented.

Taylor seems to suggest that some political successes could still be had, and this might turn the vicious circle into a virtuous one. Han, perhaps, shows us another way: rituals as the pre-political practices that enable us to more strongly identify with our community, enabling us to come together for democratic action. Rituals cultivate solidarity and thus fight against fragmentation.

They are also hard to justify on instrumental grounds. Whatever ritual you have in mind – liturgy, festival, etc. – it is difficult to make an argument for it grounded in the cold logic of the market. So, it takes some work to bring these rituals into our lives and to sustain them over time. But perhaps this is one way forward.

The question I will be chewing on for a little bit: what is the relationship between modern technology and, to use Han’s phrase again, the disappearance of ritual? My suspicion: many modern technologies further atomize us, and so they make it harder to participate in rituals. Take the person who records an entire concert on their phone—this is an example that has come up several times in our discussions. One way of understanding this is that the use of your phone takes you out of the collective, ritual experience of live music; now, you’ve digitized the experience, and it will primarily exist as something for you to re-experience in private. The smartphone isn’t just the great atomizer, then; it might also be the great de-ritualizer.

Is this anything? As I said at the beginning of this post, I can feel that my thoughts aren’t quite coming together.

---

Now we’re done with The Ethics of Authenticity. I am certainly glad we read this book — I think it is the best book we’ve read so far this year.

What was particularly striking to me was Taylor’s insistence that we can still treasure the goods of modernity, especially the moral ideals. When we read You & Your Profile, I began to worry that valuing something like authenticity was hopelessly outmoded; perhaps I was destined to become an old man yelling at the clouds, or muttering under my breath, complaining that no one is authentic anymore. Taylor has given me some hope in this regard.

Moreover, he has made me realize that the pursuit of authenticity is not an individual one. It does not make much sense, I would now say, to talk about myself pursuing an authentic life; instead, authenticity is something best pursued together. We all reckon with the push-and-pull of the other, and it is in that push-and-pull that we can be authentic, both individually and collectively.

But how do we do this in our modern technological environment? Well, that is a big question, and we can try to answer it throughout the rest of the year. (Truthfully, this will be a substantial portion of my next book project.) Now that we have a better grasp of authenticity, I think we are better positioned to make progress.

Please let me know your thoughts, takeaways, and outstanding questions down below.

1. Taylor, 113

2. Han, The Disappearance of Ritual, 5