The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

At the heart of this book lies a basic conviction: the so-called sexual revolution of the last sixty years, culminating in its latest triumph—the normalization of transgenderism—cannot be properly understood until it is set within the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood.1

What marks the modern sexual revolution out as distinctive is the way it has normalized these and other sexual phenomena. It is not therefore the fact that modern people look at sexually explicit material while earlier generations did not that constitutes the revolutionary nature of our times. It is that the use of pornography no longer carries the connotations of shame and social stigma it once did and has even come to be regarded as a normal part of mainstream culture. The sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior; rather, it involves the abolition of such codes in their entirety.

require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be

seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or...

The use of the term phobia is deliberate and effectively places such criticism of the new sexual culture into the realm of the irrational and points toward an underlying bigotry on the part of those who hold such views.

First, one can so emphasize a universal, metaphysical principle to which one is committed that one fails to understand the particulars of what one is analyzing. Second, one can become so preoccupied with the particulars that one fails to see the significance of the more general context. To illustrate the former point, in teaching history I often begin my courses by asking students the following question: “Is the statement ‘The Twin Towers fell down on 9/11 because of gravity’ true or false?” The correct response, of course, is that it is true—but as my students quickly realize, that answer actually explains nothing of any significance about the tragic events of that day. To do that with any degree of adequacy, one needs to address other factors, from American foreign policy to the rise of militant Islam.

Charles Taylor,

Taylor is extremely helpful both in understanding how the modern notion of the expressive self has emerged and also how this connects to the wider politics of society. His contributions on the dialogical nature of selfhood, on the nature of what he calls “the social imaginary,” and on the politics of recognition allow for answers to the question of why certain identities (e.g., LGBTQ+) enjoy great cachet today while others (e.g., religious conservatives) are increasingly marginalized.

Freud, more than any other figure, who made plausible the idea

that humans, from infancy onward, are at core sexual beings. It is our sexual desires that are ultimately decisive for who we are. And this belief shaped Freud’s own theory of civilization: society/culture is the result of a trade-off between the anarchic sexual drives of human beings and the necessity for them to live together in communities. When Freud’s thought is then appropriated by certain Marxist thinkers, most notably Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, the result is a heady mix of sex and politics.

The task of the Christian is not to whine about the

moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person.

How has the current highly individualistic, iconoclastic, sexually obsessed, and materialistic mindset come to triumph in the West?

Why does the sentence “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” make sense

an oddly Cartesian notion: I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. How did such a strange idea become the common orthodox currency of our culture?

I’m talking about the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc.

theory is often the possession of a small minority,

the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.

sum, the social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it—though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas.3 It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it.

And the question of how the tastes and intuitions of the general public are formed is the question of how the social imaginary comes to take the shape that it does.

A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

Western culture from a predominantly mimetic view of the world to one that is primarily poietic.

And all these developments have served to weaken the authority of the natural world and persuade human beings of their power.

point I am making is that we all live in a world in which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept.

Human nature, one might say, becomes something individuals or societies invent for themselves.

And economic man thus gives way to the latest player on the historical stage, that which Rieff dubs “psychological man”—a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities as was true for the previous types but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness.

far fetched at best. For a start, the apostle Paul’s development of the concept of the will is what facilitates the rise of inner psychological narrative as a means of reflecting on the self. In the fourth century, Paul’s intellectual heir Augustine produced the Confessions, the first great Western work of psychological autobiography, which indicates the existence of life understood in terms of inner mental space long before Freud.

Nevertheless, if the historical scheme is greatly oversimplified, the significance of the rise of psychological categories as the dominant factor in how Westerners think of themselves and who they consider themselves to be is surely a persuasive insight.

understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late eighteenth century, that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.11

Such questions miss an important point. If it were just sexual activity that were at issue, passions would likely not run so deep. But far more than codes of behavior are at stake here. In addressing the behavior that has come to prominence through the sexual revolution, we are actually not so much speaking of practices as we are speaking of identities.

Once society starts to manifest the analytic attitude, there is, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, a transvaluation of values.

That which was previously deemed good comes to be regarded as bad; that which was previously regarded as healthy comes to be deemed sickness.

While earlier generations might have seen damage to body or property as the most serious categories of crime, a highly psychologized era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. And this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech.

One might note a comparatively trivial example of this: the teenager who dresses in a particular way to express her individuality and yet at the same time ends up wearing more or less the same clothes as every other member of her peer group. Her clothing is both a means of self-expression and a means of finding unity with a larger group at one and the same time.

That is a rather convoluted and inelegant way of saying that a human being is most self-conscious when she knows that other people are acknowledging her as a self-conscious being. A trivial example might help elucidate this idea further. Children often play improvised team sports in the schoolyard during recess. Typically team captains—normally a couple of the stronger leadership types in the playground pecking order—take it in turns to select players for their team. The moment of being selected often gives the one chosen a thrill, a feeling of excitement, of satisfaction, and, perhaps more negatively, of superiority relative to those who have not yet been picked.

One of the underlying themes of this book, following Rieff, Taylor, and MacIntyre, is that psychological man and expressive individualism shape the dominant understanding of what it means to be a human self in this present age.

Given this prior consensus on the ends of marriage, the advent of calls for gay marriage are clearly far more significant than simply being demands for the expansion of the category of who the legitimate contracting parties might be. Gay marriage actually demands a fundamental revision of the ends of marriage and therefore of the essence of marriage. The arguments for gay marriage rest on a view that ascribes a different end, a different telos, to marriage because it requires the rejection of the notion that marriage must be the proper context—and indeed, the necessary moral prerequisite—for conception.18 Individuals who disagree about gay marriage might think they are disagreeing merely

about the limits of the legitimate identity of the contracting parties, but their actual differences go much deeper than that. They disagree on nothing less than the very definition of marriage relative to its ends.19

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.

language of personal preference based on nothing more rational or objective than sentiments or feelings.

Thus, the statement Homosexuality is wrong should be understood as I personally disapprove of homosexuality, and you should do likewise. The plausibility of this position rests on the failure of other attempts to find objective grounding for moral claims.

Any greater sense of purpose, any transcendent teleology, is now dead and buried. More negatively, we are all then tempted to use the rhetoric of emotivism to dismiss views with which we disagree as arbitrary prejudices. Emotivism as a theory is that which explains why those with whom we disagree think the way they do, but it is not something we care to apply to ourselves.

cultural iconoclasm and to the overthrow of the beliefs, values, and behaviors of the past—that attitude C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” raised to the level of a basic cultural instinct. Whereas in the first and second worlds, intellectuals and institutions such as universities were the conduits for the transmission and preservation of culture, now the intellectual class is devoted to the opposite—to the subversion, destabilization, and destruction of the culture’s traditions. In fact, so radical and disruptive is this phenomenon that Rieff argues that what these third-world elites are promoting does not even deserve the name of “culture.” Culture is, after all, the name given to those traditions, institutions, and patterns of behavior that transmit the values of one generation to the next. But that is not the way of elites in third worlds. Rather, they are attempting to abolish such transmission and the means by which it would typically take place. They are, in the words of Rieff, creating not a culture but an anticulture,

There is no reference to God, no appeal to any kind of sacred order. These philosophers lived in a predominantly second world, but they had already detached their discourse from that which provided its foundation. The elites, we might say, were already on the move toward third-world culture. The inward turn at the Enlightenment may not initially have killed God, but it did make him in practice an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis. This inward turn, the turn to the individual, gave the individual a value—a dignity—that eventually came to stand as independent of any sacred order or set of divine commands.

And while this antihistorical tendency started as the preserve of a comparatively small section of society, it has grown to be the representative mindset of Western society at large.

All this is predicated on the creation and exploitation of future-oriented desires and therefore serves quietly and perhaps imperceptibly to downgrade the value of the past.

The point is simple: history is one long story of oppression. And when one holds such a view, the usefulness of history is not so much that it is a source of positive wisdom for the present as that it provides warnings about how people are exploited.

For those who see history through this lens, historians will thus fall into one of two camps: reactionaries who use history to justify exploitation and radicals who use history to unmask the exploitation it embodies.