After Authenticity: For a Conservatism Beyond Nostalgia
By Nathan Kahana
The decline in cultural authenticity is one of the defining characteristics of our moment in history. In the not-so-distant past, communities across the world could exist in relative cultural separation from one another. Each city or town had its own distinctive and unique customs. This particularity enabled a sense of authenticity that has now diminished due to technology like the phone and the internet. Through social media, we can connect to a wider array of people than our ancestors could have possibly imagined. Through our phones we can instantly access a network of people and events across the world. This connectivity, however, flattens individuality and diminishes the particular cultures of different religions, nations, and ethnicities. The omnipresent gaze that technology foists upon us gives us access to the world but eliminates the communal individuality of our predecessors.
Some would argue that by returning to our physical communities, we can reclaim the authenticity which we have lost. But in the digital age, the very idea of community has deteriorated. Nowadays, our communities lack the common set of cultural practices and values which previously defined them. Our communities cannot separate themselves from the omnipresent online network regulated and policed by corporations and governments.
The sense of interconnectivity and the deterioration of authenticity have their foundations in the Enlightenment ideal of freedom. Just as the international transfer of resources integrates decentralized markets into a single global economy, it also supplants local, heterogenous cultures with a universalist globalism.
This internationalization of culture has only been accelerated by the digital age. Nowadays, not only can material objects like toys be exchanged, but also content and ideas through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. American values (and even slang!) are exported across the globe, while our own culture converges towards the international mean. Values and practices that were once separate are thus ultimately diluted.
This relationship between economic and cultural exchange makes economic isolationism seem appealing; by breaking our economic ties to the rest of the world, some imagine, we can reclaim our country’s cultural heritage. Economics therefore becomes a tool through which to obtain cultural and moral goals. For example, Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s trade advisors, has argued that economic isolationism allows us to restore Christian values. Isolationist visions like Navarro’s appeal to us by promising the restoration of an authentic past.
But this argument neglects the fact that isolating oneself is itself a consequence of lost innocence. After all, a society that never lost innocence would never have to pursue policy to reclaim it. The past is, needless to say, irrecoverable. Every action we undertake is in some way influenced by the way things are, even those actions which attempt to reject or deny the present age.1
This argument does not suggest any attempt to defend one’s culture is inherently misdirected. Rather, what we are saying is that ideology cannot avoid the deleterious effects of contemporary social trends. Any view which seeks to reclaim the past is, while anti-modern, nevertheless a product of modernity. To seek to live a life untainted by our globalized world is, for anyone in contemporary society, inherently impossible. An ideology motivated by nostalgia and resentment towards modernity is thus incongruent with its actual objective. This raises the question of what such ideologies actually offer. If they cannot fulfill their promise to restore the cultural authenticity we have lost, then what is their purpose?
When political movements promise a return to the past, what they actually accomplish is the mere simulation of return, the fulfillment of a fantasy of authenticity. In rejecting the modern globalist order, these ideologies allow us to indulge in a self-aggrandizing, purely expressive sense of nostalgia.
Their solution is thus negative; they want to dismantle modern economic systems, but have no vision for what comes after. Of course, the fact that a solution is negative is not in and of itself a problem. It is only a problem because isolationist ideologies implicitly promise a positive solution: the possibility of reclaiming cultural authenticity. By promising what they cannot deliver, such ideologies are thus deceptive.
We want to make clear that the deterioration of cultural heritage is bad. The conservative’s task of preserving our forefathers’ values will always be in tension with globalist ideologies that value freedom or economic progress first and foremost. But a conservatism that, under the guise of reclaiming a lost heritage, harnesses populist dogmas to tear down existing systems cannot remain intellectually defensible. Rather than just dismantling these systems, we should instead strive to reform or create new institutions based on the values of our forefathers.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2022.