A year or so ago, I heard a talk on authenticity. The speaker told the audience that they knew that they had acted in ways that were disappointing to the community, that they had caused unnecessary trouble, and that they had hurt and offended people but that ultimately, they would do it all over again because they were being authentic to themselves. Some of the people in attendance applauded this speech, affirming this definition of authenticity: being true to who one is. I was appalled by it.
For one, I reject the idea that there’s an essential “I” to be “discovered”. This is why I find personality tests to be meaningless. I don’t agree with the presentation of selfhood that suggests that we’re a fixed self that we need to discover/understand to be happy. While there is much about ourselves that remains consistent over time, there’s also much that remains in constant flux, and we choose (however strong or weak you want to define that word) who we want to become. We don’t discover who we are already. I’ve been influenced by Buddhist and Existentialist accounts of personhood to the point where such ideas about the self—that we are who we are and the best that we can do is discover it and better understand it—seem insensible to me (see “Buddhism, Existentialism, and the Enneagram”).
I find what that speaker called “authenticity” to be contrary to authenticity; I find what that speaker called “authenticity” to be what Existentialists call “Bad Faith”. In her book, How To Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment, Skye C. Cleary defines “Bad Faith” this way (p. 253):
“Self-deception which involves denying our own or others’ freedom. We are in bad faith when we avoid the truth of our life and situation, when we deny we have choices, or when we reject responsibility for our actions.”
The speech that I heard fits the definition of “Bad Faith” ala Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The speaker denied their freedom to reflect and change. They chose to “avoid the truth of” their “life and situation”.
So, what then would I say is “Authenticity”. I return to Cleary (pp. x-xi):
“To become authentic means to create our own essence. It’s the creation that is vital here. We don’t discover ourselves, we make ourselves. Authenticity is a way of expressing our freedom: to realize and accept that we are free; to be lucid about what we can and can’t choose about ourselves, our situation, and others; and to use our freedom as a tool to shape ourselves. Our selves are not the product of a chain of impersonal causes and effects. Creating ourselves is an art form—the act of intentionally choosing who we become.”
Existentialist thinkers say “existence precedes essence”. We exist but we’re not defined yet. We’re born with certain characteristics, yes, and Existentialist call this our “facticity”. But what makes us different from say a rock or a cactus, is that our “facticity” doesn’t completely define us. We can experience “transcendence” as humans where rise above our facticity to give ourselves greater meaning, or to create our “essence”. This “creation” is what makes us authentic.
This is contrary to the talk I heard, or personality tests that help us “discover who we are”. For Existentialist, there’s no permanent “I” to be “true to”; there’s an “I” that continues to create itself. So, when this speaker said they recognized all the wrong they had done but then chose to double-down on it rather than confessing the wrong and declaring a desire to do better, they weren’t being authentic at all; they were acting in Bad Faith thereby creating “bad authenticity” or “authenticity” as it’s understood in the crudest and laziest way possible. If we reject our responsibility for ourselves in the name of letting our “true self” shine, then we’re being inauthentic because we’re denying that we’re making a decision to remain who we’ve been in spite of our awareness of ourselves and how that awareness demands that we change for our sake and the sake of others. We’re being inauthentic in that we’re (in the words of St. Paul) thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, not recognizing that as humans we’re categorically no better than other humans even as we convince ourselves that we are and that we have the right to act in ways that we would never accept from others if they acted that way toward us.
This week, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”. I was struck by one line in particular. It reminded me of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But Sartre’s version is framed existentially. He says (quoting from Macomber’s translation, p. 24), “…in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”
If I understand existentialism, it doesn’t offer forth a strict, structured ethical system by which all must abide. But there is an ethic based in our freedom as humans and our responsibility for our actions. Sartre says that once we’re “cast into this world” against our choice—because we have no choice when it comes to our being born—we are “responsible for everything” we do (p. 29). We can’t blame our actions on others. We do them. Presumably, we do them with a sense of justification. We do them thinking they’re right to do. Sartre is convinced that no one acts thinking that their action is evil. “We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” This isn’t quite Kantian. We’re not making a choice with the Categorical Imperative in mind, explicitly. But we may be abiding by it implicitly. Because we think that if we can do it, humans should be able to do it. And if humans should be able to do it, then in essence, our actions tell everyone around us, whether or not we place them within a concrete ethical framework, that this is what we think is good and right. And whether we would want others to do what we’ve done is secondary to the fact that once we’ve done it, we suggest that humans can and should be able to do it, and if humans can and should be able to do as we’ve done, then this is what we deem acceptable for humans, as a whole. Even if we’re narcissistic enough to say that we alone should be able to act in a certain way, the reality is that we’re a human among humans, so the louder claim of our actions is “this is how humans should act”. We wouldn’t act as we do if we didn’t believe this.
I’m suspicious of personality tests like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. My suspicion is based on a principle. Those tests are understood by many who take it to reveal the static personality-type that you inherited. Whereas I tend to see people as creating the dynamic personality that they want. Or, if you want to propose a more passive way of seeing personality, we are dynamic personalities that are created by realities ranging from our genetic inheritance to our social situatedness.
My views begin with the influence of Buddhism. I’m not Buddhist but I’ve studied enough Buddhism over the years to know that Buddhist concepts of the self—or more precisely the no-self (anattā /anātman)—make a lot of sense to me. Our existence is transient. Our bodies are constantly changing. Yes, there are consistencies in our personalities and appearance over time but consistencies don’t reflect concreteness. Buddhism places a premium on the changing nature of reality, which includes us. When I reviewed Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, I said this about anattā /anātman:
its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.
Or, as K.T.S. Sarao states it (“Anātman“), more succinctly, “the ‘self’ or ‘person’ (Pāli. puggala, Skt. pudgala), conceived as an enduring entity, simply does not exist and that everything is a succession and in flux, there being nothing that is substantial or permanent.”
I’m not saying that I’ve abandoned something like the “soul” or “mind” as an emerging property when I say that I find this Buddhist concept attractive. I’m saying that the Hindu concept of Atman, which can understood to be somewhat static, or the “soul” of Cartesian dualism, seems unsatisfactory. Whatever it is that we experience when we experience metacognition, when we reflect and when we speak of “I,” it seems unlikely that it would be static while everything else about us and our world is dynamic. So, no, I haven’t embraced a more extreme form of anattā /anātman, or the language we hear from philosophers like Daniel Dennett, that consciousness is illusory. But I do want to say that whatever consciousness is, whatever mind is, whatever “soul” is trying to capture, that changes with us like all of us changes. It’s evolving. It’s not static and there to be “discovered”.
The aforementioned personality tests, whether intentionally or not, leave people seeing themselves as something settled. They need to find what that is. Then they can appreciate it and use it to their benefit. Each form of settledness includes strengths to be harnessed and weaknesses to be suppressed.
There are some aspects of Existentialism that align with the Buddhist critique of a static-persona paradigm. Kevin Aho’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Existentialism” is helpful here. First, Aho’s comments about Existentialism’s emphasis on embodiment:
Against the standard “Cartesian account,” the body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object, extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who I am. And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. “The body,” as Sartre puts it, “is lived and not known.”
We aren’t being with bodies; we are bodies. We are a static personality in a dynamic body. All of our existence is dynamic.
Second, Sartre’s comment that “existence precedes essence” is key. Aho summarizes it this way, “there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us, which means that we are always other than ourselves, that we don’t fully coincide with who we are. We exist for ourselves as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold.” At a glance, this may sound like the claim that we’re not limited by our bodies but that’s not the claim at all. Existentialism posits two important concepts: facticity and transcendence. Aho summarizes facticity this way:
Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or “facts” about our situation that limit and constrain us. This is our givenness (or “facticity”), and it includes aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have the capacity to rise above or “transcend” these facts in the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward.
How does facticity relate to our transcendence? Aho notes, “we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question”. We can see what we are but then reinterpret it and even will to reshape it to a degree. This means that we are “free” but as the more mature expressions of Existentialism acknowledge, that freedom is “mediated”. Aho observes of Sarte:
…he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. It failed to engage the social, historical, and material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by the world, by the sociohistorical situation we’ve been thrown into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom “is nonsense. The truth is that existence ‘is-in-society’ as it ‘is-in-the-world’”.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed this insight. Aho summarizes, “In Phenomenology of Perception, for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation ‘before any personal decision has been made.’ The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously self-making and already made.”
Finally, Existentialism emphasizes “Authenticity”. This is the desire to live as ourselves; to avoid the herd-mentality as much as possible. This isn’t being non-conformist for the sake of non-conformity but instead being honest about our likes and dislikes, our desires, tastes, dreams, and ambitions, even when the broader society of which we’re part doesn’t sign off on them. This is where the concept of “bad faith” enters the picture. Aho again:
Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), where we either deny or over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation.
When I hear people say “I did this-or-that because I’m Enneagram 8,” I hear a bad faith comment. We may say this in jest. I joke about being from California or my French heritage when something I do irritates or intrigues people I know, but it’s mostly a joke. I know that being from California isn’t determinative and even less so that a bunch of people in my family tree have French surnames. But there are those who take these identities to be determinative of who they’ll be…no, who they are since being and becoming is incorrect. Personally, I want to say that Buddhism’s emphasize on the transitory nature of all reality and Existentialism’s emphasis on our ability to self-reflect and self-interpret (and to some degree, though limited, self-improve) means that Enneagram-identities are choices. We want to understand ourselves. We want an identity. These are convenient pre-packaged ones. I guess they’re no worse than when I identify with my career or field(s) of study. There’s an urge to say, “that’s me, that’s my ‘type’ and my identity and my place with my people”. But I think in doing this we’re saying this is who we want to be and we’re saying this is the interpretation of ourselves that we like.
I’m finding Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity to be a revelation. As I move from page to page, I encounter ways of saying things that I’ve felt but that I hadn’t been able to articulate, as yesterday’s post “The sub-man and the serious man” exemplifies. Earlier in the book (pp. 28-29 of Bernard Frechtman’s translation will be my focus here), Beauvoir discusses the person who must choose to quit something and how this leaves us with a bitterness. She writes:
“In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency.”
Beauvoir describes something like the “sunk-cost fallacy”. In his article “What is the ‘sunk cost fallacy’? Is it ever a good thing?,” the economist Aaron Nicholas defines this fallacy as “an inability to ignore costs that have already been spent and can’t be recovered.” We continue to invest in something that shows little promise of success because if we step away from it, if we quit, we’ll have wasted the previous investment. The fallacy argues that you may find out that you’ll continue to waste further investments if you continue investing in a failing cause. (On a side note, Ryan Doody argues that the sunk-cost fallacy is not an actual fallacy: see “The Sunk Cost ‘Fallacy’ Is Not a Fallacy”. But that’s something to discuss another day.) It’s not reasonable to keep losing simply because you have lost. The investments may be financial but they can be investments of time and emotion which represent other sacrifices. It’s unfortunate that you lost that money/time in the past but if you stop now, you can save yourself from further loss. The choice to embrace further loss because of past loss is unreasonable.
I was quite close to failing my doctoral program toward the end. I survived though somewhat traumatized. It took me a while before I could return to studying the subject that I had spent a few years researching. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I wanted to move on to something new. I think part of the trauma—which is a word I use cautiously, but one that I think is fitting here—is that I kept asking myself how I could live with myself if I quit. I had dreamt of earning a doctorate since I was an undergraduate. I had sacrificed time with friends. In fact, I had missed the weddings of two of my closest friends. I had invested a lot of time. I had invested a lot of money, both spent and not-earned (being that some of the time dedicated to academia was time not working a job that could’ve been paying me well). I willed myself to complete the program but I wondered “at what cost?” For a few years, it felt like a Pyrrhic victory. I second guessed my myopic approach to life but also I knew that if I would’ve quit, it would’ve lingered with me for a very long time. I needed the sacrifices to get me that piece of paper, if nothing else. This reason could’ve lead others to accuse me of entertaining the sunk-cost fallacy. I was carrying onward, even as it harmed my brain health, because I couldn’t accept that all my past efforts wouldn’t result in reaching their ultimate goal.
There are times when you know you are out of options and you must quit though. As I neared the end of my doctoral program, I was lucky to have been hired by the high school where I work to this day. I had done some adjunct work. I had done a teaching internship. I knew those lifestyles were unsustainable. Also, I knew that there was no path forward toward the dream of teaching religion in a college or seminary setting, so I did something that I had swore to myself that I would never do: went to work with adolescents. It proved to be the right choice but it felt like a dream was dying at the time. I had imagined myself discussing lofty ideas in a graduate school context, or maybe an undergraduate one but not in a high school. I wouldn’t say that it felt like I had failed, per se, but at the time it did seem like the Universe had offered me a consolation prize for my efforts.
Beauvoir comments on this feeling of quitting:
“Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which had engaged in the effort.”
There’s the trope of the man who talks endlessly of when he was a great high school quarterback as if that’s the last time that he had done anything successful. We feel pity for such people. We sense an arrested development. We look at someone who had dreamt of more. “You can be anything you set your mind to,” we lie to kids. As we age, we realize that adulthood is about making decisions. John-Paul Sarte proclaimed that, “man is condemned to be free” (in his speech “Existentialism is a Humanism”). You feel this condemnation as you age. You have to make difficult decisions about relationships, careers, expenses, values, etc. Sometimes you’re stuck in a real lose-lose situation where something you want to keep must be forsaken. We can’t have it all, unfortunately. There’s an exchange, always.
When we look back at perceived failures, we lose that part of our lives. It is “forever frozen in the dead past”. It doesn’t have to be. We’re unable to interpret its value in relation to our current present. When we “succeed” we see those successes as having laid the foundation for our present. Interestingly, we struggle to do the same with “failures”. Yet there are times when successes might lead us down roads that we’ll regret having traveled and there are times when failures force us to go to places that we know we wouldn’t have chosen, though it proved to be for the better.
I don’t know if there’s a universe in which I taught in a seminary or a college instead of where I’ve been for almost eight full years now. But I do know that while I have my frustrations, and I have my irritations, the past eight years have been more good than bad, by far. Most days I’m simultaneously dissatisfied and satisfied with my career but the satisfaction outweighs the dissatisfaction, the wins outnumber the loses, and the perks are more significant than disadvantages. I’m relatively happy with where my life is.
There’s a way to avoid the risk of failure completely. There’s a way to never have to experience resignation. There’s an alternative to sunk-cost. Here’s how Beauvoir describes it:
“We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.”
We can avoid sunk-costs by not investing. We can avoid failure by not trying. We can avoid resignation by not becoming involved in the first place. This is an option. In choosing this option there is a freedom but it’s merely “an abstract notion…emptied of all content and truth”. For Beauvoir, this option is a non-option. We can’t be the people who “are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything.” The freedom to fail is a greater freedom than the freedom to never try anything because we fear failing.
I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté). This morning, I encountered two of her “characters”. The first is the “sub-man” (sous-homme) and the second is the “serious man” (l’homme sérieux). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Beauvoir by Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke (“Simone de Beauvoir”) connects these two as both trying “to refuse to recognize the experience of freedom”. Ethan Hekker (“Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics”) summarizes these characters nicely. He says of the sub-man:
…the sub-man restricts himself as much as possible to the world; in an attempt to perhaps escape his shortcomings, or to excuse any attempt to try anything, he claims that nothing merits effort. Nothing is that meaningful or worthwhile. de Beauvoir says that the most harmful quality of the sub-man is that he is most likely to become one of a mob; ignorant rhetoric appeals easily to the sub-man, since that’s the easiest thing to listen to.
Then of the “serious man,” Hekker writes:
The “serious man” is one who dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good. The serious man stops at nothing to achieve the cause, or embolden the ideology, even if it comes at the detriment of others. To de Beauvoir, the serious man doesn’t necessarily care about the cause as much as he does his ability to get lost in it.
The “sub-man” caught my attention because it presents a picture of what some ideologies aim to do to us as humans. I’ll take my own field of work as an example. In education (and you’ll hear this rhetoric in traditional public, public charter, and various types of private schools), it’s common for higher ups to shame teachers with phrases like, “It’s for the kids!” Why should you accept lower pay? The kids. Why should you avoid self-advocacy in the work place? The kids. Why should you spend your own money on supplies, snacks, etc.? The kids. It’s not uncommon to be reminded that people don’t get into education, “for the money,” and this is true but manipulative. Usually, when teachers complain about their pay it’s not because they’re suddenly in it “for the money”; it’s because they want their basic needs met.
“…the sub-man plays the part of the inessential in the face of the object which is considered as the essential. He suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which, sanctified by respect, appears in the form of a Cause, science, philosophy, revolution, etc. But the truth is that this rue miscarries, for the Cause can not save the individual insofar as he is a concrete and separate existence.”
When I read this, I thought immediately of the teacher who has become the “sub-man”. The “Cause” is “Education,” capital “E”. The sub-man becomes “inessential”. The teacher is exposable if they’re unwilling to sell themselves wholly to “the Cause”. If you Google articles about the rate of teacher resignations in the United States over the past half-decade, you’ll realize that many educators have concluded that they won’t be “inessential”. This is for good reason. Let’s remember that doing it “for the kids,” is rarely a statement made in good faith. The politician, the board member, the administrator, etc., may believe that they believe in what they’re saying to teachers but often, for a variety of reasons, people in the aforementioned roles choose to ignore the systemic failures of education (e.g. teaching to the test, grade inflation, the rat-race of the college admissions process and the portfolio building we’ve hoisted on children). But beyond the bad faith use of manipulative phrases like “do it for the kids,” is the sad reality that if we deconstruct this phrase we’ll realize that (1) it justifies dehumanizing adults who remain humans with their own worlds: wills, wants, emotions, feelings, dreams, identities, etc., and more sinister (2) it does this so that some day “the children” can grow and mature into cogs in the machine themselves! We value the humanity of the children but only in so far as we can anticipate that they’ll be adults one day who can be exploited.
According to Beauvoir, “The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity (p. 49).”
Quick biographical detour. I was raised within a sect of Christianity known as “Oneness Pentecostalism”. My perspective is that it’s an extreme expression of religion that is unhealthy, at best, and downright harmful, at worst. When I became an adult, I left that world behind me. I’ve known people who couldn’t leave. I’ve pitied them but I know they don’t need my pity. Subjectively, who’s to say. It may be as many of them have believed over the years that I, the apostate, need pity. But since I’m writing, let me share another quote from Beauvoir that reminded me of what I had seen time and time again as my contemporaries in my 20s realized all the problems with the Oneness Pentecostal subculture but chose to remain (p. 50):
“Often the young man, who has not, like the sub-man, first rejected existence, so that these questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened to answer them. After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and his teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he represses it.”
This must seem perverse to anyone unfamiliar with the subculture that I’m referencing but I remember being filled with fear when I realized that I didn’t think that I believed much of what I had been taught about things ranging from eternal judgment to how one becomes a “real” Christian (speaking in tongues as the outward evidence of salvation) to how one must appear on the outside (dress and grooming) to be “holy”. I wondered whether I was “backsliding” toward future eternal damnation.
Once this fear had been overcome though, it was freeing. It was freeing to choose to shape my own understanding of Christianity, which has evolved endlessly all the way up to this point in my life. But I knew people who chose to stay in the safety of their small religious communities because they couldn’t risk the “what if”. They worried that they had been taught “the truth,” as you’ll often hear it called in those circles: “the full gospel”. They turned back to the world that they knew; they repressed their doubts.
The serious man “dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good,” as Hekker phrased it. For many of my fellow educators, for many of my former co-religionists, what was used once to demoralize us into accepting our condition (making us sub-people) makes us vulnerable to adopting the ideology so that we can recover ready-made meaning. About this person, Beauvoir says that “he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party (p. 52).” Once we have forsaken our identity as individuals who might change and evolve over time, open to what freedom may offer us, we become the “serious man”. This can be dangerous, as Beauvoir reminds us (p. 53):
“The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is a fanaticism of the Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose a credo, that is, an internal movement, by means of external constraints. It is a fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings. It is the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.”
This may seem dramatic but I’ve watched as underground fantasies of capturing the world “for Christ” have emerged to become legitimate threats to democracy. The Pentecostals who raised me have no problem with Christian Nationalism, or more accurately, Christian Fascism: Google “New Apostolic Reformation” to see what I mean. The educator who has given up on self-advocacy “for the children” may not turn into an extremist but they’ll judge their colleagues who aim for work-life balance, who don’t spend a bunch of their own money funding things that their schools won’t, etc. In doing so, they’re at least agreeing with the “Cause” that the problem isn’t systemic or institutional; the problem is with the teacher.
(I say this as a teacher who works hard. I arrive early to my job. I do find myself irritated by colleagues who seem laissez-faire about their vocations, who seem to lack work ethic. I don’t think I’ve crossed the line yet into reproducing the manipulative, anti-worker language that I see floating around the edu-sphere but I’m aware that my temptation is less “quiet quitting” and more “joining ‘the Cause'”. I’m definitely self-critiquing here as my identity is tied to my job in such a way that I must put effort into leaving work at work.)
Beauvoir understands that sometimes we can’t escape becoming “serious”. There are social factors and demands of all kinds (think keeping a paycheck to pay the bills or to feed your own kids) that lead people to remain in situations that they know aren’t ideal. She writes, “…certain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honestly, for example, those who are denied instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given (p. 51).” I think of people who I know who became clergy, not only in Oneness Pentecostalism but within Evangelicalism. As they aged their views changed. They didn’t believe themselves the “statement of faith” on their church’s website. But to say this out loud would mean the termination of their employment. What do they do then? The fear of loss is great: lost status, a lost paycheck, a loss of community. These are real losses. Some realize that they’re down life’s journey too far to reinvent themselves now, so they self-justify in order to stay where they’re at. They preach from a pulpit every Sunday doctrines that they haven’t believed in years. I don’t judge this. It may not be wrong in a sense. They are serving their community in some way through this inauthenticity. And let’s be honest: all of us must do this to some degree to live in our world with others. The real question is how much inauthenticity is worth it to keep what you have?
The blog of Brian LePort 