If I said, “The ‘The Game’ Theory of Cultural Authenticity”, would you know what I was talking about?
Is that, like, if you think about cultural authenticity, you’re inauthentic?
as soon as you start designing a tradition you’re no longer traditional but traditionalist, however your made up bullshit can become a tradition if you just wait a couple of decades.
you won’t like it when it does, though.
I would not.
I’m going to be pompous anyway, though.
I think the difference between “authentic tradition” and “inauthentic playacting” is actually pretty overblown.
No matter how ancient and unassailable a tradition is, it has to be introduced again and again to people who have never heard of it or done it before, because this is how human education works. Children have some very universal emotions when it comes to the practices of their families, which include things like “Well, my whole family and everybody I know does this, so I guess it must be normal” and, this is key, “I have no idea what this is but I guess everybody is going along with it so I will too.”
If you’re American, did you have strong feelings about, e.g. the pledge of allegiance as a very small child? Did you even know what it meant? How about the Fourth of July, or Halloween, or Sunday morning church service?
I see children in church who are too young to keep quiet or really understand the service. They are not universally seized by the Holy Spirit and given spiritual knowledge, they must be taught what church is and learn how one behaves in it.
The idea of authenticity here says that this can only happen when this learning process happens as a young enough child (And perhaps only to children of a particular race or nationality), and that once one has become old enough, this process can’t actually take place anymore and becomes a useless affectation, and that the experience of someone who tries to learn these things is fundamentally and unalterably different than that of the people who know them, some mysterious outsiders who are having an authentic, unmediated experience of this thing that, for you, is mediated by its unfamiliarity.
The secret that we’re losing is that everything begins as an affectation, and after a while you learn how to do it and it no longer is an affectation, but a habit.
If you are constantly focused on whether you are having an affected or authentic experience, you’ll never be able to begin the work that it takes to become authentic.
Wait, did I understand what you meant after all?
Yeah I think it’s not about whether you learn it late etc., But whether the reason you do it is ‘because I want to do something traditional’ or not. Even if the reason is ‘because everyone else is and I don’t want to make a scene’ that still isn’t the same as 'i want to do something traditional’.
Sort of. But you need to go up a couple of levels of abstraction to understand the relevant distinction here.
It’s not only the self-conscious traditionalist, LARPing at customs that are alien to him for the sake of “being traditional,” whose authenticity (in this sense) is lacking. It’s also the mother who makes her son have a Bar Mitzvah, despite not ever going to synagogue herself, out of some vague guilty sense that he ought to have a “Jewish identity.” It’s the parents who take their kids to church because they hear that kids who go to church are better-behaved. It’s the would-be whiz kid Silicon Valley entrepreneur who participates in an ayahuasca ceremony because he’s heard that it can give you really visionary ideas.
Which is to say – it’s anyone who performs the rite, not for its own sake or its own explicit purposes, but because it’s supposed to come with beneficial knock-on effects. This will never, ever, ever work. Doing something as an affectation is fine, but doing it with cynicism in your heart won’t cause the magic to blossom, and you’re not going to be able to avoid cynicism if you’re mouthing words you don’t believe.
(I have a lot more respect, actually, for people who perform the rite because of some inchoate woo-filled sense that it’s “cool” or that it “seems meaningful.” That kind of motivation is basically empty except for aesthetics, but…we all have aesthetic motivations, and it’s at least the kind of impulse that can lead to genuine engagement if there turns out to be chemistry.)
(That said, there’s a clear sense in which ritual isn’t real for you until it matters in and of itself. As the man said, an boy’s initiation ceremony isn’t done in order for the traditions of the people to be upheld, it’s done in order to make him a man, and either you think that’s meaningful or you don’t.)