Review of Carl R. Trueman, "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self"

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


From whence did "wokeness" arise? What led to the decline of traditional Christian morality among the elite and the acceptance of gay marriage and transgenderism? Carl Trueman locates the reasons for such cultural changes in the acceptance of "expressive individualism" in the modern world. Such individualism is based on psychological expression and the expression of emotion as automatically being the only valid authorities for living one's life. Trueman traces the historical roots of such a view back to the early modern tradition, beginning with Descartes, through Rousseau, the English romantic poets, especially Percy Shelly, and onward to Marx, Darwin, Freud, Marcuse, second and third wave feminism, and postmodernism. He notes that the logical trajectory of expressive individualism is a view of choice in which every choice is considered morally acceptable and even binding on reality; for example, if a man feels he is a woman, then that is the case, and surgery can be used to confirm the results of the feelings that have already created a state of "womanhood" in that person. Sex and gender are separated. Trueman also points out the reasons for the intolerance of traditional ideas an academia, the media, entertainment, and business is that any world view that does not affirm personal choices as ipso facto valid in bigoted and meant to harm those oppressed by such a world view. Now Trueman is coming from an Evangelical Christian point of view, but his purpose is primarily analysis, not judgment, an attempt to have people understand why western society has changed so radically, since around the mid-1960s in the United States. As such, this book is a valuable addition to the library of any person who wants to understand the changes in society that did not only begin with the sexual revolution, but are the results of assumptions hidden in modernity itself.



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