The Authenticity Hoax

The other week I had the good luck to talk to Andrew Potter about his book The Authenticity Hoax. Potter is personable and quick on his feet and has the kind of nimble mind that runs on novel formulations of you know, this thing is like this other thing, this whole other phenomenon that appears unrelated but isn’t, not at all.

I typed up our conversation for a publication that didn’t end up running the piece. So here it is, here:

“NO LOCAL”

Two weeks ago a friend asked me to proofread a sales brochure for a new condo development being readied for occupancy a few blocks from Manhattan’s bustling Union Square. The condos had everything that he discerning buyer with $500,000 to spend on a one-bedroom could want—Bosch five-burner stoves, quartz countertops, 11-foot ceilings and fourteenth-story views.

The thrust of the sales pitch, however, was neither luxury nor location but local. “We eat local, shop local, and live local,” the hypothetical couple in the Corcoran brochure boasted. The hydrangeas they bought, the lamb shanks they ate, the Long Island Meritage they drank—everything they consumed was purchased within walking distance from their front door.

It seems fair to ask. Once real estate marketing firms are on the bandwagon, has “going local” ceased to be a force for good?

The idea that our love for local has gone to our collective head is one of the driving arguments behind Andrew Potter’s recently released The Authenticity Hoax, a strident call to reexamine one of the defining consumer trends of our times. Plagued by a nagging sense that the current of modern life is taking your further and further from everything that gives life meaning? You’re not alone, Potter argues. Just don’t imagine that greater “authenticity”—whether by going local, buying organic, or foregoing the Sheraton for an eco-resort—will make you whole again.

The quest for greater authenticity is as old as the Romantic movement—and as clichéd as Walden’s pond. Potter argues that today’s variant is particularly insidious because it’s being played out at the nexus of an array of hot-button contemporary issues.

Our culture has wrapped the search for meaning up in environmentalism, the market economy, habit of using consumer products to signal our identities, and topped it off with a heaping spoonful of self-righteousness.

But what is authenticity, exactly? Like obscenity, Potter argues, authenticity is hard to define but you know it when you see it. Out of a thicket of competing claims, there is strong consensus that it can’t be achieved through “the cheap building blocks of consumer goods” alone. Authentic is not just “local” but spontaneous, creative, genuine, commercial-free, and treads lightly on the earth.

Keeping an eye on the planet is all fine and good, Potter claims, but this pursuit all too quickly turns into a status game. To help make this point, he dusts off the sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s classic and cranky critique of conspicuous consumption. What we have today is a conspicuous authenticity, which operates much like the quest to be cool did starting the 1960s. In order for you to be truly authentic, other people need to be less so, or downright inauthentic. And judging from the standards upheld by the “local” movement, inauthentic looks a lot like something you bought at Wal-mart. (Plastic, shipped in from China, and chances are you drove to get it.)

It doesn’t stop there. Now that authentic” and “local” have become fashionable, it has become hard to tell where a true desire to do good ends and oily marketing strategies begin.

“The environmental benefits of local farming are actually highly overstated,” Potter writes. “In the end, moving locally grown produce around in small bundles, by car or truck to dozens of farmers markets or small retailers, is far more wasteful than putting thousands of tons of bananas on a container ship.”

Potter points to how the champions of the 100-mile diet—whose adherents strive not to eat anything grown or produced outside a 100-mile radius from their home—were quickly bested by those touting a 50-mile diet. However well-intentioned—not to mention how aesthetically pleasing small family farms are—the going local ethos is not immune to competitive pressures. Most local stuff is expensive, as is the real estate abutting the shops that sell it.

“There’s no small amount of hypocrisy—if not rank self-delusion—in the growing fetish for all things ‘local.’ We like the idea that we’re eating eggs raised on someone’s rooftop down the street, and we’re happy to tuck into a steak sliced off the ribs of a cow that grazed a few farms over,” Potter elaborated in an email earlier this week. “But the very idea that we would want to return to a time when our cities were filthy with the refuse and exhaust of a truly urban economy is insane. The mirror-image of localism is NIMBYism, and despite all of the chatter about the superior virtues of a local economy, you don’t hear a lot of people pining for the return of the local abattoir.”

But isn’t it good to have people competing to be the most virtuous than to, say, compete to see who can rack up the most frequent flyer miles or wear the biggest shoulder pads? Potter raises an sharp eyebrow at this suggestion. He believes a culture fixated on discerning what’s authentic and what isn’t is easily conned. A socially-conscious consumerism is still consumerism.

It’s an argument that has won Potter some unlikely allies, as The Authenticity Hoax has been picked up by some church-affiliated blogs. So you think modern life is alienating? Can’t find the cure to what ails you at your local farmer’s market? That’s what we’ve been saying all along! For Potter, however, the solution to what he terms “a socially regressive arms race” will come from decoupling the idea that what’s good for you is good for society. In short, we have to stop thinking that what we consume lends us moral credibility.*

But here’s the good news. If you’re worrying about the origins of the $5 pint of raspberries in your hand, Potter suggests, chances are you’re one of the more pleasantly situated human beings to have walked the earth. So maybe one answer lies even closer than the nearest yoga studio. “Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the trick to doing philosophy is knowing when to stop asking the questions that lead us awry,” he concludes. “When it comes to the modern search for authenticity, the irony is that the only way to find what we’re really after might be to stop looking.”

[END]

N.B. For a different take on the not-quite-the-same but related back-to-the-land phenomenon, please read Melanie Rehak’s wonderful “Growing Pains” in the latest edition of Bookforum. In fact, buy the whole issue. It has everything.

*This thought begs to be expanded upon. Someday soon.