I was talking to my friend Bryan today about “authenticity” as expressed by hipsterism and punk rock culture. And it occurred to me that, in a way, such authenticity is deeply conservative. Per Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations, conservatives are greatly concerned by both tradition and purity. This seems to me to be well expressed by hipsterism’s obsession with lost arts and crafts and punk rocks desperate revulsion for “selling out” and adulterating music with fame and fortune.
Every hipster who takes up blacksmithing or craft gin distilling is trying to preserve a tradition that they feel is at risk of being lost. That desire for preservation (if honest, which is a seperate question) is not so different from the protective adoration felt by Catholics or other old faiths for their traditions and rituals. One of the few conservative parts of my character is the love I have for the Catholic rituals of my youth.
Similarly, the punk rock ethos (as well-articulated by John Roderick in an infamous essay) is premised on the flawed idea that “selling out” irredeemably sullies one’s artistic life work. Of course, here, “selling out” means taking any positive step towards popular or commercial success. Punk rock culture is inherently nihilistic (in the life-denying sense of the term) in that it axiomatically assumes that anyone who makes it has polluted themselves and all their work. Cf. the tortuously negative morality of Born Again Christianity and this obsession for musical purity seems to me to be the epitome of ideological conservatism.
These are just some random thoughts, and I greatly welcome feedback. I’m interested how this conservative view of authenticity might contrast with the general garden-variety progressivism common to both hipsters and punks (though, admittedly, punk culture seems more politically anarchic and admitting of variation than does hipsterism). Any comments or points to further reading would be most welcome.
