Authenticy anyone?

The virtues of mad men
What about Faye?
If there are Don haters and Betty lovers there are also the people who wanted Don to marry Dr. Faye Miller. These don't hate him the way the Betty-lovers do because it isn't Faye herself that attracts them but what she represents.

And what she represents for them is authenticity. Authenticity is a romantic ideal. It was an idea that sprung up to replace sincerity.

A short version might go like this: the central moral problem in life is not being who you really are (sincerity) but resisting all the temptations to be something other than what you are (authenticity). People who believe in authenticity think that being true to yourself is like trying to see the bottom of muddy puddle. The more you stir the puddle, the muddier it gets. But if you just let the puddle alone, the mud will settle and the water becomes clear.

Being sincere, on the other hand, is a constant struggle be something. To say you sincerely love someone is to wake up every day and make yourself love them. Sincerity says, "You promised to clean the kitchen so now you have to do it!" Because you aren't sincere if you don't follow through. Sincerity is fresh challenge every day and defenders of sincerity might answer Trilling's arguments against sincerity by paraphrasing Chesterton and saying that sincerity has not been tried and found wanting but that it has been has been found difficult and left untried.

What does authenticity offer us that sincerity does not?
Here are a couple of examples of what the authenticity crowd likes about the Don-Faye relationship. First here is Santiagio Ramos writing on a site that promises to balance "Religion and spirituality with faith":

Faye Miller (Cara Buono), the market research consultant who becomes Don’s lover midway through the season, offers him not only the affection and stability he needs, but also the truth about what he should do. Don is able to confess his secrets to her, and she returns with calm and with reality: You need to become a normal, real person.

Here is another version of the argument from Heather Havrilesky of Salon.

"He fell in love with Faye, a woman who dared him, from the start, not to feed her lines, not to play the dashing hero, not to woo her with a façade. She wanted the real Don Draper, and when she found out that Don was really Dick Whitman, she didn't skip a beat. She embraced Dick and urged him to show the world who he really was. From her angry phone calls to her awkwardness around children, Faye always presented the upsides and downsides of the authentic life.

There is nothing stupid or ridiculous about either of those positions. Authenticity is a common enough idea and we are familiar with the moral claims that go with it. Havrilesky even opens the door, at the end of the bit I have quoted, to the admission that authenticity is not a ticket to happiness.

The people who flog authenticity don't promise that our lives will become easy. They tell us that we will always struggle but that the struggle will be impossible if we are not authentic. If we are not authentic then everything is in flux and we never know where we really are. Authenticity is one of many attempts to provide us with a still point in the middle of a turning world.

For fans of authenticity, the big selling point for their pet virtue is honesty. To be authentic, they promise us, is to wipe away the delusions and lies and live ... well to live authentically. (And it should bother us a little that arguments for authenticity are circular.)

Can sincerity do the same thing? No it can't because sincerity is tied so closely to the idea of truth telling. Faking it, even for a second, is the destruction of sincerity.

And the fact that we must tell lies—even if they are only little white lies and fibs—leaves the person committed to sincerity always to face the haunting fear that they are only playing a role. Sarah gets angry with her husband and for a few moments she hates him; forever after she must worry if maybe the real her really loves David or is she just fooling herself into playing the role.

The question, however, is not whether sincerity is a virtue (it isn't) but whether authenticity  is any better. And this is where the Faye Miller fans such as Ramos and Havrilesky fail to deliver.

What would an authentic Don Draper be like?
It's not at all clear what Don joining Faye in authenticity would mean. Would he start calling himself Dick Whitman or would he simply have somewhere to go where he could really be himself part time as Faye Miller seems to want for herself?

Just to try and state what an authentic Don Draper would be like raises problems.

Don't be the hero? But he is the hero.

He is the hero in the trivial sense that he is the hero of the show and no one would want to watch a show without a hero. He doesn't have to succeed at being great but he has to always be striving for greatness.

But he is also a hero in that he is trying to be his own hero. Yes there is part of Don Draper that is always ready to run away but that part of him is precisely the part that is Dick Whitman. It's always Dick that runs. Don Draper is the hero who deals with things not just for us but for himself.

Dick Whitman is not the solution to Don's problems. Nor is it the solution to any man's problems. A Dick is what a man tries not to be.

An authentic Don Draper would be a contradiction in terms.

Classicist modernism and Romantic modernism
The style of Mad Men is modernism and modernism, at least at first, looks like an answer to the challenges of being authentic. The problem is that modernism promptly heads off in two contradictory directions. You can see the problem if you consider that both Mondrian

and Modigliani

are modernists (both images courtesy of Wikipedia).

You could say that there is a neo-classical variety of modernism as we see in Mondrian and that there is a neo-Romantic variety that we see in Modigliani. One seems to give us formalism and the other an unabashed human sensuality. (If you don't like the pairing I give above there are others: Le Corbusier and Gaudi, Stravinsky and Schoenberg,  Francis Picabia and Max Ersnt, for example.)

Don Draper is very much in the neoclassical school of modernism. That is why he fits in the high modernist office buildings where his two offices are and not in the Colonial home in the suburbs that he and Betty owned. His whole life is about the exterior order and not some private still point that the rest of his life revolves around.

I thought the telling point this year was the conversation between Peggy and Don during the episode called "The Suitcase". Peggy tells him that everyone thinks they slept together. Although her own motives are not necessarily clear to her at the start it soon becomes obvious that part of her reason in bringing this up is to ask Don why he never pursued her sexually. Don's answer is that he has to have rules about these things. Peggy, of course, knows that he did sleep with another one of his secretaries and she challenges him on this. And Don says, "People do things."

That's an interesting answer, not least of all because it is true. A person, any person, is not a unity. We are bundles of desires, hates, fears, jealousies that don't necessarily have to add up to anything. As long as we are a living body, it matters little if we are any other kind of unity.

Unity can only exist in the thing we are trying to be. That is why authenticity is a dead end and always will be. Don Draper has to want to be the guy who has rules and tries to keep them if he is to be anything at all.

Next week, Megan!