One of the dominant narratives in American culture is the idea that through self-improvement and grit, we can move ourselves forward socioeconomically, that despite our circumstances at birth we can transform our lives by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and become self-made. In Tara Isabella Burton’s latest book, “Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians,” she traces the concept of self-making as it has evolved from the Enlightenment era to today.
Self-making has led to many improvements on both individual and political levels, but Burton raises some concerns and questions about whether self-making can go too far. In a liberal society that exalts individual autonomy and a passion for living our best lives, do we have room for a kind of self-making that fosters individual improvement but also accommodates a sense of rootedness in neighborliness, seeing ourselves as molded by and embedded in community and culture?
What Is Self-Making?
Burton defines self-makers as “people whose personal creative qualities seemed to give them license to mold not just the art (or poetry, or philosophy) they produced but also their public personality and, through it, their destiny.” In addition, “Self-making was always a double act, simultaneously the construction of a self to move through the world and a shaping of that self’s fortune.” A large part of the new wave of self-making involves developing a public personality that can be excessively monetized. Each individual profiled in “Self-Made” embodied and expressed different aspects of self-making, from fashion to fortune. Burton traces the evolution of self-making expressed by figures such as artist Albrecht Dürer, scholars Poggio Bracciolini and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Marquis de Sade, George “Beau” Brummell and Frederick Douglass. She also covers modern-day self-makers such as Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump.
According to Burton, there are two kinds of self-making. The European version, exhibited by the fashionable Brummell and his cohort, is aristocratic. Some people have the special qualities and perhaps the aura to mold themselves into a certain unique class and category; others simply don’t. By contrast, the American version, exhibited by the likes of Frederick Douglass, is very democratic and contains a profound moral drive. Self-making “was not simply something someone could choose to do in the service of personal self-betterment. Rather, it was a political and ethical necessity, the condition that legitimized human freedom in the first place.” In one of Douglass’ speeches, he noted that “Every man has his chance. If he cannot be President he can, at least, be prosperous.” The democratic form of self-making is dominant in the U.S. today, the kind that anyone can—and should—pursue to become great.
The Origins of Self-Making
The Enlightenment emancipated humanity from a previous era when fidelity to religious institutions and authority was high, when religious and monarchical decrees ruled the day. In the post-Enlightenment West, tradition and custom no longer have a strong hold on us. Today, we’re encouraged, in fact nudged, to break, disrupt and dispense with previous paths and trends so we can live our “best lives.” And it makes sense—in fact it’s worth celebrating—that as we’ve progressed, we’ve shed some of our attachments to traditions, particularly those that kept certain people subjugated. Our current age of progress and technological advancement would not have been possible without the principles and values that emerged from the Enlightenment.
Liberation from tradition has driven us toward lives of individual satisfaction, fulfillment and self-discovery. Holding onto freedom as a value, we can choose what to study, whom to marry and where to live. We have the opportunity to pursue scientific and economic endeavors as far as our grit and determination can take us. However, Burton points out that untethering ourselves from the elements of custom not only brought about freedom and self-empowerment, but it created the idea that we are “self-makers.” She says the idea is “encoded into almost every aspect of Western contemporary life” and that we’re all “in thrall to the seductive myth that we are supposed to become our best selves.” Anyone who has spent time on social media can easily recognize this trend: carefully curated images and videos of individuals peddling services or lifestyles derived from someone’s desire to live his or her best life.
What’s Wrong With Self-Making?
Burton’s concern is that self-makers assume our desires “are the truest and most honest parts of ourselves. Where and how we were born, the names, expectations, and assumptions laid upon us by our parents, our communities, and our society at large? All these are at best incidental to who we really are, at worst actively inimical to our personal development.” According to Burton, our “disenchantment with custom” did not just usher in a rebirth of science, the development of political thought, economic advancement and cultural change. It brought us a sense that we as individuals could accomplish anything we desire. And beyond the benign notion of self-discovery toward a sense of fulfillment, our “Enlightenment obsession” cleared away custom in pursuit of fanatical “self-making.”
Regardless of our disenchantment with custom and tradition, we have not simply done away with belief in the divine. As Burton discusses in a previous book, “Strange Rites,” humankind has an innate desire for meaning, purpose, community and the rituals that crystalize our sense of belonging. When we abandon our attachments to religious and other institutions, we seek fulfillment elsewhere, sometimes by customizing our own religious experiences, what she calls religious remixing. Hence, in our quest for self-making, we have simply relocated our belief in the divine from the exterior to the interior. Essentially, we have “placed God within us—more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires.” We’re no longer made in the image of God but in the image of our own wants and preferences.
This wave of self-making has led to a proliferation of self-help books and gurus peddling the notion that we can become anything we desire. Burton’s book raises an important distinction between our benign desire for self-improvement and an obsession with manifesting our deepest desires as the most important thing to pursue. In a conversation with the author about this difference, she explained:
Finding Balance in Self-Making
The question is, how do we know we’ve gone too far with self-making? Burton contends that the story of self-making is really a story humankind has dealt with for thousands of years. In essence, it’s about what it means to be human. It’s the perennial question we pose to ourselves: Who am I?
Burton contends that if our response is “I am whoever I want to be,” that may not lead us down the right path and might perhaps foster a more fragmented society. Who we are isn’t solely whoever we want to be or the sum of our innate desires. What makes us who we are includes our rootedness in community; obligations to family, friends and neighbors; and the different aspects of culture that have formed us and that we may not always be able to separate ourselves from. These considerations would sometimes lead to a place of self-sacrifice rather than self-focus. According to Burton, we need to foster a culture of discernment that gives us a sense of balance.
In a philosophy class many years ago, I encountered a concept called “meta-preferences.” It refers to the ability to step back and question our preferences and desires to assess whether our immediate inclinations are meaningful and worth cultivating. Burton’s caution to be discerning about self-making reminds me of this quest to pursue meta-preferences. As our society becomes more isolated, atomized and polarized, it is worth asking what aspects of our identity and our desires should connect with or be derived from the things that are external to us, such as our diverse communities and cultures.
These questions are perhaps not considered as much as they need to be, but in a liberal society, they will have to be considered on an individual basis. Perhaps Burton’s book will prompt us to reassess our individual places in the world around us, not to abandon the kind of self-making that leads to self-improvement, but to foster an introspection that helps us to be a bit more discerning about how we’re connected to things outside ourselves that we did not personally curate.
