Self Made: Creating Our Identities, from Da Vinci to the Kardashians

Welcome to Braver Seminars, the newest addition to Braver U!

Braver Angels will bring together a small group of individuals across the political spectrum for an in-person seminar consisting of three 90-minute sessions over the course of three weeks. Attendees are encouraged to attend all three sessions and become members of Braver Angels.

1. Session I: Tuesday, November 28th from 5:30 to 7 pm.
2. Session II Wednesday, November 29th from 5:30 to 7 pm.
3. Session III: Thursday, October 30th from 5:30 to 7 pm.

There is perhaps no greater aspiration in modern times than to be the best possible version of yourself, and in American culture, there is no more admired character than the self-made man. But this framing contains a double emphasis—on the self as the fundamental unit of identity, and on our ability to, in some meaningful sense, create ourselves according to our own designs.

How many approaches there are to the creation of the self—one finds oneself, one improves oneself, one changes oneself, one loses oneself, and all the rest. In our modern times, stretching back several hundred years and forward into the future, this tense and creative restlessness regarding personal identity has been one of the driving forces of culture, of daily life, and of politics itself. Are we the same person in our different communities, or do we put on masks? Is what one seeks to be meaningfully distinct from what one is? How do the tensions here affect our approaches to each other?

And what does all this mean for culture and politics, anyway? In America, should you chase the same American Dream everyone else is chasing, or should you be a rebel and an individual against the mainstream? Are the rise of niche political ideologies on the internet and the sheer predictability of popular opinions linked together, and in some other sense, to the American individual’s roving need to define themselves according to some higher standard in a world where self-definition is the norm? And how should we citizens in an age of division thus consider the ideologies in politics—each other’s and our own? Join Braver Angels and Dr. Tara Isabella Burton for this insight Braver Seminars series in New York City in October 2023.

Tara Isabella Burton is an author of novels and non-fiction books. Burton's work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, ​Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She received her doctorate in theology from Oxford in 2017.