How Demanding is Self-Authorship?

On the podcast, I had a conversation with political theorist Jacob T. Levy about liberalism and pluralism. I brought up a topic I talk about often when making not just the moral case for liberalism, but when discussing the relationship between liberalism (as a system of values in addition to a set of rules for political institutions) and wellbeing and the good life.

Jacob pushed back by noting that self-authorship, as a standard, is effectively too demanding. I gave a stab at an answer to Jacob’s concern in the podcast, and I encourage you to listen to it, but I wanted to raise another way to think about what self-authorship means, and hopefully one that makes it seem considerably less demanding than it sometimes gets presented.

We can think about “too demanding” in this case as meaning both of two somewhat distinct things. First, self-authorship is too demanding in that it asks more of many of us than we are capable of. This is the sense in which taking calculus when you haven’t yet learned algebra, or competing in Olympic breakdancing when you barely begun to internalize the craft, demands too much of you. Even if you want to do well, you lack the internal capacity to achieve that.

The second way is to shift the focus to the act of “demanding” itself. I might demand you do something that you’re capable of—that you have the capacity to accomplish—but you don’t want to do it. Maybe it’s not your jam, and you’ve got other things you’d rather put your time into. Or maybe you have external constraints, such as prior commitments, that interfere, and that you aren’t willing to trade off. Even if you have the internal capacity to achieve it, you lack the willingness to do so.

Some time ago, I listened to an interview with a philosopher about the idea of alienation. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the philosopher’s name, or where the interview was, so I can’t track it down now. But the idea that stood out to me—or at least the idea as I now recall it, which might be somewhat different from what was expressed—was this: A choice we make in our lives can be said to be self-authored or freely chosen if, upon looking back on it at some future date and with full knowledge of everything that went into us making that decision, we don’t feel alienated from it.

Imagine you’ve live for decades what you might label a “traditional” lifestyle, or a religious fundamentalist one, or as a committed Marxist-Leninist. This feels, to you, like who you are. You don’t feel alienated from yourself, because being trad or fundamentalist or Marxist-Leninist feels natural. But then imagine you discover that, from an early age, you’d actually been brainwashed into this perspective. You’d been given drugs that made you more malleable to indoctrination. Each time you’d shown any disinclination to continue this lifestyle, you’d been beaten or drugged again or cut off from all sources of alternative ways of being—and your memories of those interventions somehow suppressed. You discover all of this, in an indisputable way. There’s a good chance your reaction would be anger, but it would be anger informed in part by a sense of alienation from the person you thought you were. That person would suddenly feel inauthentic.

Now imagine that you’ve lived that sort of lifestyle and always wondered if it was really who you are. And then you instead receive confirmation, whatever it happens to look like, you in fact had opportunities to try other ways of being, or to explore other perspectives, and each time you decided to stick with what you already had, and that sticking with it was a fully informed, fully conscience, fully authentic choice. In that case, you might wonder what you life might’ve been like if you’d opted to forge yourself into someone other than who you are today, but you wouldn’t feel alienated from the person you are.

When we talk about self-authorship in a liberal society, and contrast its lack in less liberal societies, we shouldn’t frame it as “the business of constant self-recreation about everything,” as Jacob put it. It’s not a demand of self-authorship in the second sense above. Rather, liberal self-authorship is a means to avoid the alienation of discovering who you’ve been isn’t really who you are, or who you’d have liked to have been if you’d had the choice. And so it’s not like the first sense, either. Because liberal self-authorship doesn’t ask of you something you can’t do. Rather, it says, if you can and if you want to, you should have the option to, and society should support you in that.