Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Once one experiences authenticity in themselves or others, one knows it is special. It is deeper and more transformative than, say, the new model iPhone. Ooooh, how I love both the concept and experience of authenticity! As Neil Young would say, it keeps me searching for a “heart of gold.” It keeps me articulating and re-articulating it. It keeps me trying to live it in practice. 

In my teens and twenties, I encountered people in their rawest forms – vulnerable, defiant, and romantic. I had read the 19th-century philosophers Nietzsche and Kierkegaard who were enamored with the project of becoming who you are (as was a key preoccupation of many 19th-century thinkers, I later learned). These were years when the combination of a person’s ethical struggles and their deepest aspirations seemed to converge in daily interactions and conversations – at least in my experience.  Deep connections were formed and forged. These relationships happened under the shelter of home, church, and university – but I had not realized how these institutions empowered and enabled the appearance of authentic people and interactions, and provided the spaces and opportunities that actually fostered authenticity. 

However, in hindsight, how these experiences of authenticity happened makes much more sense now than when I was first experiencing them. I had originally thought that authentic people and experiences were ways God miraculously broke into the automatic process of the everyday world. In other words, authenticity and authentic moments happened infrequently enough to seem “miraculous”.  

Since I was introduced to Charles Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity in a second-year Social and Political Philosophy class in the early 1990s, I have been in love with authenticity – and coming to know and live it well became a life project for me. It is the spiritual language of Western societies. As I read Taylor, I came to understand that authenticity is our deepest moral ideal – our most meaningful shared moral aspiration as a society. Further, Taylor helped me understand two more closely related occurrences: 1) the emergence of issues of identity as core to our individual development [in contrast to simply being part of a tribe], and 2) that our identities as individuals are formed and shaped in dialogue with significant others [in contrast to the idea of the self-made person]. Now, to be clear, the moral aspiration to authenticity as it exists in the early 21st century is, in fact, hotly contested (and often inarticulate) between the extremes of the radical individualism of being self-made and the social relationships of the individual. But it essentially gets to the core of our human condition by taking on the age-old question of social-political education: what is the relationship between the individual and the community?

I have experienced the universality of this question in uniquely different contexts in the Middle East, northern Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia. I have noticed that certain positions in the contest of individual and community get mapped onto particular local environments and cultures. Some generalized understandings – tropes, if you like – of culture get trotted out. You know the type: Eastern cultures are more communal; Western cultures are more individualistic. These bits of so-called wisdom have been understood to need more nuance, and there are a plethora of counter-examples for anyone who has done their obligatory month of backpacking in continental Southeast Asia.  More appropriately, we can understand that certain cultures under the influence of globalization have not only imported McDonald’s but also certain concepts of what it means to be an authentic person. These domestic cultures encountered colonial and linguistic influences as well. 

For example, in South Korea, the rather rugged ideal of the self-made individual was a heroic model for a generation of young adult Koreans after the Asian financial crisis in 1997. They have tried to weave it with a combination of Korean nationalism and Confucian family values with varying degrees of success. However, certain demographic imbalances in Korean society have begun to emerge, such as a plummeting birth rate, an increasing suicide rate, and a growing population of elderly who are destitute. As my Korean friend, Tae-hoon, recently told me in a conversation: “The idea of the liberal individual has eroded the real freedom [Koreans] experienced in the 1980s to 2000s.” The vulgarity of McDonald’s and the self-made individual are now felt quite deeply.

Another variant example of individualism is the statist individualism of Norway, which structures the coming-of-age support to things like post-secondary education, housing, or early childhood care. In Norway, the needed support to foster authentic individuals who can author their own lives is provided by the state instead of by non-state actors… like parents. An adult individual who has material or emotional dependence on parents and birth families is simply seen as immature. Such dependencies are weened as soon as possible. 

These two examples show how the universal concern with the relationship between the individual and the community has radical – and incommensurable – differences depending on cultural environments; apparently, unique instances of authenticity cannot be translated. Even different regions of a large country seem to carry non-translatable conceptions of maturity as Ryan Hamilton, the comedian of Happy Face, expresses:

Ryan Hamilton Drags New Yorkers | Netflix

But what if authenticity had a structure that cultures, religions, and regions have to account for to arrive at their particular versions of this deep moral aspiration? What if a structure to being authentic was woven into the human condition so that it anchors authenticity? That would be something. This has been my life project, and through my many writings, I have tried to articulate what the stuff of authenticity is. Why? Because I think we are struggling through so many debased and destructive variants of authenticity – all of which want to causally explain their vices under the banner of “being authentic” or “true to myself”.

If we think about authenticity as have an infrastructure, then it helps to explore the architecture of this infrastructure. A couple of years ago, I gave a talk on friendship covenants. “Covenant” is an older and richer term than “promise.” However, uncovering and articulating the infrastructure of authenticity helps to see the fundamental commitments to the human condition. A commitment is a serious promise. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has described, “Commitment means falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.” It isn’t a promise that can be made without much thought. It is more formative than that.

The challenge for us in the West is that we live in a largely commitment-averse society.

Authenticity is a counter-cultural pressure within Individualism

Discerning what authenticity really is, amidst the false narratives of authenticity, turns out to be both key to being authentic, and to resisting the excessive and extremist pressures of individualist cultures. It requires articulation and re-articulation. Otherwise, one is tempted to smuggle concepts and beliefs that, ironically, undercut authentic living. One such example is “Performative Authenticity.” However, we don’t have to look far to find living examples. In high school, I remember talking to my buddy who would go out for a smoke at the “smoking doors” (when they were still a thing), and I asked him why he did it. He always said smoking was an act of defiance against “judgmental Christians.” He thought of it as an important moment of differentiation. Ironically, he has become a statistic for Health Canada – an avatar of sociology.

As a society, being commitment-averse tends to produce all kinds of processes, thought patterns, and devices designed to help us be unencumbered – exactly the opposite of people who make, and are held by commitments. The internet, our watches, our phones … how does one make a lifelong commitment if attention can’t be held for more than 30 seconds? From my experience teaching in colleges and universities, we have a culture of “fear of missing out” (FOMO); if you commit to one thing you’ll miss all the other goodies down the road. We also have a culture of fear. Many people are paralyzed by indecision because they’re afraid of making the wrong commitment. We have a culture of autonomy, i.e., we should be self-contained creatures true to our inner selves – the little “steely ball” self that magically sits inside us (which we can’t see or touch, but is located somewhere between the brain and the heart – the “punctual self” as Charles Taylor has named it). We think freedom means keeping options open – living an unencumbered life and preserving room for future choices. What we’ve consistently fostered is a state of being in harried multitasking. In my experience, keeping your options open leads to an impotent, fragmented life. You’ll wander about in the indeterminacy of your own passing feelings and changeable heart moving through a series of temporary moments.

A person lacking commitment will never be “all in” for anyone or any path because our eyes will always wander to another possibility. Our powers are wasted by scattering them in all directions. The effect of having a society filled with these people is a fragmented and isolated society – living at arm’s length of their commitments. I will spare you an enumerated list of social ills which are planted with the seed of de-commitment. Effectively making commitments in this culture requires one to be countercultural, at least to a degree. One needs to aspire to a higher freedom that comes from chaining oneself to a political or cultural cause, a particular group of people, or a philosophy or faith.

It is our restraints that liberate us. In other words, our commitments are the spirit of our authenticity. They structure and shape our identities.

Making and Sustaining Commitments

So, what kind of commitments should we make, and what motivates and disciplines these commitments to be sustainable? We should remember that commitments are more stable and significant than simple promises and have the necessary mechanics for nurturing the moral ideal of authenticity. 

In The Human Condition (free download), Hannah Arendt outlines two features of free and authentic action that act as practical guarantees for both the appearance of authenticity in the public world and the actual preservation of that public space: forgiving and promising. Both are put forward as specifically worldly acts. For our purposes here, Arendt believes that promising is a liberation from the predicament of the actor’s chaotic unpredictability. When people come together and pledge themselves to a course of action, they make mutual authenticity and a common political achievement possible. The superiority of those capable of promising over ”those who are unbound by any promises and unkept by any purpose” is that they can “dispose of the future as though it were present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective.” Deprived of the ability to make promises, we would be without a stable individuality and would lack the ability to join others in contributing to the world.

In other words, promising and making commitments are what form our character into something stable; they give particular and unique shapes of our true selves – our authentic identities. And as such, they have more than instrumental significance. Commitments are more than promises because they are iterative. We fall in love with something and then build a structure of behavior around it for when love falters. Commitments have moral significance. While commitment-honoring can have religious overtones, Arendt thinks that promising (and forgiving, for that matter) are very worldly activities. Commitments are important because they stretch over a long time and act as types of buffers and infrastructure that protect us from the equivocations of the human heart. And it is this very real experience of the equivocal human heart that commitments mitigate.

Let’s consider four possible commitments that authentic people make: we commit ourselves to a partner (spouse) and family; we commit ourselves to a vocation; we commit ourselves to a faith or spirituality, and we commit ourselves to a specific community. 

How these commitments manifest in one’s daily life will have a highly individual quality; i.e. it will be unique to each person. On my part, I have made each of these commitments, but each has shadings and colors of the particular experiences and circumstances in which they occurred. First, I am re-married and my current wife and I have two children. I am committed to them, and my relationships with them hold me when I, periodically, am not in love with them. In my first marriage, that was more of a promise, not a commitment. More specifically, I fell in love deeply with my current spouse at the beginning of our relationship. In getting married, we each built patterns of behavior that held us together when being in love wasn’t motivating us. Second, vocationally, the same basic process held: I had experimented with other jobs (as a businessman, as a DJ, as a laborer) but had fallen in love with helping others overcome social barriers to life through teaching. I have followed many patterns of behavior since then that hold me in times when being in love with teaching wasn’t happening. Third, my spiritual commitment has also outlasted any particular promises I have had with churches, although there is some overlap here with the particular communities I am committed to. But as a faith, my relationship with God that could properly be labeled as Christian has fostered patterns of behavior that have carried me, even when my heartfelt connection to a particular congregation faltered. It even carried me as I ventured outside of traditional Christian practices and studied Zen Buddhist meditation, and then Theravada Buddhism. These Buddhist studies and practices actually centered me more on the Christ of the Christian religion, the wisdom of its scriptures, and the life and teaching of Jesus. What has endured through all these instances and learnings is a direct connection of a central relationship with God. Lastly, I have committed to particular communities. But, for those who know me, this will sound a little strange since I have lived in so many. I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, and have lived in Winnipeg; Windsor, Ontario; Binghamton, New York; Gimhae and Busan, South Korea; Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Rayong, and Kamphaengphet, Thailand; Jubail, Saudi Arabia; and have ended up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As I have gotten older, this last commitment is the last one to really solidify. But I have now settled in Edmonton and have chosen this as my particular community. But that does not make me less loyal to the friendships I have from each of those places.

These four commitments – to faith, spouse, community, and vocation – hold us, and especially hold us when we change our minds. But they do more than hold us; they shape and form us.

The Discipline of Commitments

Numerous examples of how our commitments shape us abound. Let me explain two. In marriage, the lifelong and very particular commitment refines us. This kind of love is private and it is particular. Its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctiveness of this spirit and that flesh. This love prefers deep to wide and here to there. It prefers the grasp over the reach. When the day is done and the lights are out, there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face to assist in repelling one’s demons or in greeting one’s angels. But it reveals our vulnerability and it humbles us. When I got married, it was a leap of faith, because I did not know how it would change me. In my vocation, too, I ventured. I did not know what the result would be as I chose to teach, specifically, to help others cross social boundaries to thrive. But on those days when I was winging it, I still fell back on the learned way of lesson planning, and the normal accounting to other teachers and administrators when my passion for teaching seemed absent. Their eyes, and those patterns, shaped me to have some of the best classes ever. The authenticity of my students emerged because the committed patterns of behavior created a space where authenticity could make its appearance. 

Teaching also shaped me in the company I keep. Although I am an English-speaking, white, heterosexual, Christian male living in Canada, most of my friends now do not look like me. Some are gay or lesbian, most are non-white, most don’t speak English as their first language, and many are not Christian. And this meta-community of people has shaped me into someone very different than I was when I was 20.

In the end, several things discipline us to make and keep commitments. It can be craft, as I mentioned about teaching, that holds us to our commitments and shapes us as individuals. Sometimes, teaching is really hard and, if I am to be a teacher, I must let my craft drive me forward through moments when I am not in love with it. It can be the eyes of others who hold us to account for our commitments. It can also be an experienced truth that holds us to our commitments.

But the unique feature of these type of commitments is that in making them, we are not in control of how they shape us. Philosophers call this the vampire problem. Would you like to be a vampire, flying around and having eternal life on the requirement that it requires feeding on human beings? Possibly… but we just don’t know. These commitments are always a hypothetical. We don’t know what we want 20 – 50 years from now.

What motivates commitment

So while we may be motivated, in post-adolescence, by falling in love or having a spark in connection with a partner, a vocation, a faith, or a community, we tend to be motivated differently once we hit middle age.

In middle age, an increasingly persistent hunger motivates us, which is not so much falling in love as it is a moral hunger. Our moral aspirations start to emerge and they begin to drive us much more. If we never feel such a spiritual hunger, we end up dry and twisted. But there is something in us that yearns for transcendence, unconditional love, and justice. It is the part of us that has no care for social recognition or Facebook likes, and calls us to account for our lives in terms of our highest good, and our purpose.

And this says something about the kind of reasoning and framework that is appropriate for making these types of commitments. Imagine, for a moment, someone who asks about their marriage, their faith, or their community and asks, “What’s in this for me?” If both sides of that relationship both ask it, you can imagine quickly how the commitment will fall apart. Instead, the one who will make commitments that will nurture one’s own authenticity, who commits to something that forms and shapes them in unpredictable ways is NOT asking “What’s in this for me?” They are asking, “What’s life asking of me?”

The people who take on a moral lens will consistently be able to make and keep commitments. My father prayed at my first wedding, “Lord, help them to realize more and more that it is not they who will keep their vows, but that it will be the vows that keep them.” I was too foolish to realize the truth of these words at that time. But today, in the struggle for authenticity, I realize that my true freedom resists the urge to follow de-commitment mechanisms and advice, and it commits to that infrastructure that empowers authenticity to make its appearance.