Over half of American children and young adults report wanting to become a social media influencer. As a society, we’ve succeeded in making a career out of “being famous for being famous,” a dream many consider to be vapid beyond belief and yet one others hope and strive for.
How on earth did we get here?
In Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, Tara Isabella Burton provides a compelling explanation. Her goal in Self-Made is to explain the influence and history of this contemporary impulse: “We not only can but should customize and curate every facet of our lives to reflect our inner truth” (2).
Competing Stories of the West
Burton’s explanation of our cultural moment enters a crowded field; both popular and scholarly books are regularly appearing to tell us the Big Story of the West. These Big Stories can be understood as broad histories of ideas in Western culture—each in its own way trying to explain why we are the way we are—as opposed to class history books on a single topic like the American Civil War. Think of Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World, Charles Taylor’s Sources of Self and A Secular Age, or Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
These are Big Stories of the West, and they don’t all tell the same tale. Burton, a visiting fellow at George Mason University, is aware of this field. As she notes in her introduction, her book is in active conversation and at various levels of agreement with other works. Burton shows no fear as she jumps in. For example, she agrees with Taylor and says that “expressive individualism dominates how we think about ourselves in modern life” (5). Yet she has the confidence to reject his thesis that this shift is a move from a fundamentally religious worldview to a secular one.
Self-Made is, in part, a follow-up to Burton’s excellent book Strange Rites [read TGC’s review], which showed that Westerners are as fervently religious as ever. As a Christian, she’s alert to the religious and spiritual energy that illuminates every part of Western culture. By the time she makes sense of Kim Kardashian at the end of the book, it’s much easier to understand why Kardashian’s “famous for being famous” is a spiritual condition and not merely a vapid distraction from real life.
Balanced Approach
For those drawn to Big Stories of the West, Burton’s entry is a must-read because she intentionally seeks to fill in the gaps in the literature. Burton offers open-minded consideration of cultural trends without belittling. She seeks to understand before critiquing. It’s something any evangelical who wants to engage his neighbors should emulate.
Burton seeks to understand before critiquing. It’s something any evangelical who wants to engage his neighbors should emulate.
Burton’s engagement doesn’t keep her from expressing her evaluation that “our history of self-creation is not an inspiring tale of unremitting progress” (8). And yet she immediately adds, “I do not think it is a tragic narrative about cultural decline and the dangers of modernity, such as we have seen in the accounts of recent cultural critics from Philip Rieff to Carl Trueman” (8).
Her history travels through the Big Story via a series of little stories. Each chapter features at least one exemplar of the ideas of self-expression and self-creation as those ideas developed and deepened in the modern period.
While no history can be fully expressed by individuals, Burton’s lively storytelling and choice of exemplars keep the book engaging as she traces multiple threads in her cultural analysis.
Dangers on All Sides
Most crucially, Self-Made demonstrates that the popular bogeymen of both the left and the right deserve equal attention. They feed each other.
Some social critics want to isolate how destructive expressive individualism is, especially in its sexual manifestations. Others want to isolate the evils of racism, sexism, and classism. Burton agrees that both are problematic and uses a wide-angle lens to examine together the many varieties of evil at play. She points out their similarities and the damage they do to individuals and society.
For example, Burton argues that, ironically, the supposed equity of expressive individualism creates a new caste system. If you feed this philosophy to a society, declaring you have a moral duty to become a true and authentic self, you cannot help but create an underclass out of the humans who couldn’t or didn’t achieve this self and thus are despised.
Ironically, the supposed equity of expressive individualism creates a new caste system.
This shows up in the horrific sexual vision of Marquis de Sade, who saw other humans as objects to be used and discarded. It appears in the vision of the Western distinction between Europeans and “savages.” It’s revealed in the degradation of women. And it bubbles up in the disdain for normal people who, as a class, “began to be described in two distinct ways: as a single, shapeless mass and as mere inanimate machines” (117). Individualist self-creation became the pattern for authentic personhood.
To varying degrees, we’ve witnessed some of these attitudes within orthodox, evangelical circles. Burton’s treatment of the problem with our self-expressive culture is important for evangelical Christians to read because it demonstrates that, tragically but truly, there isn’t an us versus them but an all of us, caught up a tide.
Diagnosis Without Prescription
“Who am I, really?” When Western society tries to answer this question, Burton reports, the answer is whoever I want to be (235). She chastises this Western understanding of “self-expression [as] not just a moral requirement but a teleological one” for three main reasons (233).
First, as discussed above, expressive individualism has created two classes within society based on success at self-expression. Second, it’s impossible to be truly independent. Even our desires, now deemed the most authentic parts of our beings, are often significantly shaped by others (234–35). Third, the Western story obscures how social we are as a species; we truly need each other.
Burton masterfully exposes the cracks in the system, but she doesn’t fill them. Though she’s a professing Christian with a background in theology, she fails to provide a prescription for what ails us. Seeing both the promise and the perils of self, she shrugs and basically says, “We’re only human.”
Her three complaints only have their true solutions in the gospel: the good news of a God who insists all are created in his image. These solutions arise from the truth that his Word is more freeing than our deceitful hearts. And, ultimately, we’re made not only for each other but for God as the Father of this human family.
Self-Made is an important and urgent though incomplete tale. Burton writes that we’re “caught between facticity and freedom, trying imperfectly to work out how to relate ourselves to both” (236). It’s this condition of modernity that, rightly illuminated, could lead us straight to the gospel, because we already ache for it.
