Can “authentic experience” be achieved by reviving practices of the past while simultaneously denying the fundamental commitments of their original practitioners?  In T. J. Jackson Lears examination of the American antimodernism movement, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, the answer seems to be an emphatic “No.”  The antimodernism that Lears explores expressed itself in many forms, including the arts and crafts ideology, the martial ideal, a fascination with the medieval, and a Protestant revival of Catholic forms, but each expression was divorced from its original time and place in such a way that it was easily assimilated into the service of emerging corporate capitalism.  Commenting on the eclecticism of the modern environment, Lears observes that, “Uprooting once-sacred symbols from their appropriate time, place, and purpose, the eclectic approach trivialized them” (33).  

The antimodernists seemed to want to protest the positivism, determinism, and progressivist optimism that pervaded the end of the 19^th century.  However, Lears observes a fatal flaw inherent in their various protests—a satisfaction with the products of the modern movement.   The Arts and Crafts movement bought into marketplace capitalism; the Martial Ideal was wedded to corporate imperialism.  Fascination with the medieval period was expressed through art and literature that could be consumed without the religion or the experiences that formed the foundation of the medieval world view.  Catholic forms were introduced with Catholic theology, as liberal Protestantism ran from notions of sin.  Although Lears points out that one of the fears of the Puritan and republican moralists who opposed the modern movement was the erosion of personal moral responsibility, the antimodern movement joined in the avoidance of responsibility by playing at what was once taken seriously. 

As Lears repeatedly observed, many antimodernist Americans shared the modernist assumptions about religion, they enjoyed the comfort that positivist science had provided modern Americans, and even if pessimism sometimes overtook their progressivist optimism, it did not last for long.  Plagued by the meaninglessness (or weightlessness) of modern life, they were searching for a cure to neurasthenia without being willing to give up any of its causes.  They tried to revive a sense of the terror inherent in life by reading about tragedy, to recover a connection with the divine by viewing painting of those who engaged in asceticism to achieve such unity while denying that such practices were necessary.  They wanted to regain a sense of usefulness in work by making products that could be obtained much more cheaply from the very factories they disliked, while acknowledging that “if handmade products could not pass the test of the market, they were not worth producing” (88). 

Those trying to recapture authenticity of experience by grasping at practices from the past while holding on to the larger frameworks of their own time seem doomed to the dissatisfaction that spawned the antimodern movement in the first place.  Lears points out that turn-of-the-century America “lacked resources for creating its own symbols” (33).  It seems that for an antimodern critique to have been successful, it would have needed to either revive the “larger frameworks of meaning” that accompanied these earlier practices, or have developed their own frameworks that were more than scaffolding on the dominant corporate culture.