This coherent self embodied modern mastery, yet its very coherence was threatened by modernizing tendencies. Modern ways of knowing sliced experience into specialized disciplines. Modern industry removed work experience from primary processes of making and growing. Modern capitalism placed a premium on the manipulation of (often deceptive) appearances. And eventually, modern technology insulated the moderately affluent from much danger and discomfort. Even as Protestants (and later Romantics and Modernists) exalted authentic experience, by the early nineteenth century the forms of modern life made certain encounters more difficult to achieve. The idea of experience became an imagined holistic alternative to disenchanted, fragmented ways of being in the world. Whether seekers of experience located it on the banks of the River Wye or on the streets of Berlin or San Francisco, they imagined it to be full, rich, intense. It eluded quantification and resisted reductionism. It could not be explained in terms of something else. It was what it was, irreducible. Wholeness was all.

Longings to immerse oneself in a flood of unmediated experience energized literary enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic but resonated with special force in America. They animated Whitman's ecstatic merging with the milling crowds on Broadway as well as Thoreau's search for the real in the woods around Walden, and they acquired more somber significance as orthodox faith lost legitimacy. Writers from Melville to Hemingway encountered experience as a looming cosmic plenitude that threatened to engulf human strivings for mastery and to baffle any effort to make sense of it all. The struggle to assert or sustain meaning in a meaningless universe energized a host of literary embodiments of authentic experience: Theodore Dreiser's youthful naïfs on the make, Frank Norris's speculative plungers, Sherwood Anderson's "grotesques" left behind by the locomotive of modernity. William Carlos Williams's slogan "No ideas but in things" epitomized a disdain for abstraction and a desire to re-engage mind with the material world, both emotions at the core of the literary cult of experience.

During and after World War II, the imaginative renovation of experience flourished among Abstract Expressionist painters, neo-orthodox theologians, existentialist philosophers and literary intellectuals with a psychoanalytic bent. In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, there was much to brood about. Brooders like Reinhold Niebuhr and Lionel Trilling wanted a notion of experience that took into account the dark truths of the unconscious or (as the theologians preferred) original sin. They wanted some acknowledgment that, in the end, the imperial self faced the implacable power of fate. And they wanted the pursuit of experience to include awareness of the ultimate experience: death.

This broader midcentury definition of authentic experience informed the early New Left and the antiwar counterculture of the 1960s. The generation of those who cut their political teeth on the Vietnam War grew up in a suburbanizing society that seemed bent on creating a shrink-wrapped, synthetic version of existence; they also confronted a government policy characterized by systematic lies. No wonder they focused on authentic experience as a touchstone of personal and moral worth. As the counterculture became assimilated into commerce, authentic experience became a mass-marketed commodity. Nevertheless, down to the present it preserves a core value as a benchmark--it is what cannot be fabricated, faked or spun into a simulacrum of the real; it is what matters. This is not a theoretical issue. In our mass-mediated image empire, the Bush Administration has constructed its own political reality without regard to evidence, putting radical epistemology in the service of reactionary politics. Under these conditions, old ideas about truth acquire a new luster, and the ideal of authentic experience remains a necessity.

Yet the reverence for the real, especially when it exalts experience as an end in itself, can also have catastrophic consequences. Europeans repeatedly experienced them in the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, from Blake to Rainer Maria Rilke, European songs of experience had recognized the need to supplement spontaneous impulse with sustained reflection. But contemplation was engulfed by cataclysmic ideology. By the early twentieth century, the equation of authentic experience and unthinking action underwrote a politics of regenerative violence. For revolutionaries and reactionaries alike, the decisive (and murderous) deed seemed an irresistible alternative to bourgeois torpor. "What do you believe in?" Freikorps leader Ernst von Salomon was asked. "Nothing besides action," he replied. Fascism (and anarchism) were nothing if not cults of authentic experience.

Americans embraced regenerative violence, too, but usually concealed the lust for combat in clouds of providential rhetoric about their nation's missionary role in the world. Only occasionally have they openly celebrated the cleansing powers of war. At the turn of the last century, Theodore Roosevelt and other patrician ideologues rallied Americans to take up the white man's burden in the Caribbean and the Philippines by singing a song of military experience. Combat was, for Roosevelt, the most exalted form of "the strenuous life," an essential means of preserving manliness amid the feminizing effects of modern civilization. Historians have written of a "crisis of American masculinity" in the 1890s, but in fact American masculinity (like other masculinities) is always in crisis; what changes are the instruments men use to confront the crisis. Roosevelt used the idiom of regeneration through imperial violence.

The sobering impact of two world wars made that sort of talk impermissible in polite company until quite recently, when neoconservative intellectuals began to sing similar songs and the "war on terror" provided legitimacy for them. Consider Michael Ledeen, in-house "expert" on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute: His Machiavelli on Modern Leadership argues that war "provides a real test of character" and "creates a pool of leaders for the nation" while "peace increases our peril, by making discipline less urgent" and "encouraging some of our worst instincts"--dooming us to become one of those "effeminate republics" his hero scorned. We are back in the moral universe of Theodore Roosevelt, and it is not a pretty place. Once again, old men are at their desks and in their clubs, singing the praises of war, while young men are experiencing the exquisite impact of steel on flesh.

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