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

by Carl R. Trueman

In other words, Darwin’s theory of natural selection effectively made any metaphysical or theological claim concerning the origins of life irrelevant. One could, if one wished, believe that a divine hand guided the process, but the process itself could be adequately explained without the need of any such supernatural hypothesis.

The science may have proved far more complicated than Darwin ever imagined, but the basic idea is easy to grasp. And it has come to shape the way many people who are quite incompetent to assess the science have come to imagine the world.

Darwin is likely the most influential. Setting aside the question whether evolution—or, to be more precise, one of the numerous forms of evolutionary theory that looks back to Darwin’s work as an initial inspiration—is true, there is no doubt that vast numbers of people in the West simply assume that it is so.

But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society.

Descent from a prior species excludes special creation of man and woman, and natural selection renders teleology unnecessary as a hypothesis.

his genealogical approach to morals carries with it a basic historicist relativism and a deep suspicion of any claims to traditional authority.

living for the present.

When teleology is dead and self-creation is the name of the game, then the present moment and the pleasure it can contain become the keys to eternal life.

from struggle and from triumphing over adversity),

he also presents moral codes as manipulative, as reflecting the economic and political status quo and therefore designed to justify and maintain the same.

history is the history of oppression.

he abolishes the prepolitical, that notion that there can be forms of social organization that stand apart from, and prior to, the political nature of society.

all forms of social organization are political because all of them connect to the economic structure of society. By Marx’s account, the family and the church exist to cultivate, reinforce, and perpetuate bourgeois values.

the world in itself has no meaning; meaning and significance can thus be given to it only by the actions of human beings, whether through the Nietzschean notion of self-creation and eternal recurrence or through the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism and class struggle. In both cases, meaning is created, not given.

history and culture are tales of oppression that need to be overthrown and overcome.

“The change in general taste is more powerful than that of opinions. Opinions, along with all proofs, refutations, and the whole intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms of the change in taste and most certainly not what they are still often supposed to be, its causes.”

see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone. . . . A celebrated author and divine has written to me that ‘he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.’”

For both Nietzsche and Marx, then, sacred order was a sign of psychological sickness.

Darwin dealt the real death blow: by removing teleology from the story of humankind, he eliminated the notion of human exceptionalism, provided scientific support for Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical stand, and, like Marx, demanded that whatever meaning life might have, had to be considered in purely material terms.

death of metaphysics also connects to Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that moral discourse today is so fruitless because it lacks any commonly accepted basis on which moral differences can be discussed and assessed.

If society/culture is merely a construct, and if nature possesses no intrinsic meaning or purpose, then what meaning there is must be created by human beings themselves.

nineteenth century

intuitively placed human beings as the sovereigns at the center of a universe

The idea that religion, specifically Christianity, is a corrupt ideology used by hypocritical religious leaders to hinder human beings from being truly happy is a commonplace today.

philosophical expression

Nietzsche an...

seeds of Rieff’s anticulture:

defined by those sexual behaviors that they forbid, then those who seek to overthrow all sexual taboos or who regard “Thou shalt not” as intrinsically life denying and wicked, are offering not an alternative culture but an anticulture.

they are antihistorical.

history—that

needs to be overcome or transcended or erased if the individual is to be truly who he or she is.

power

key to history.

Christian society is the result of the manipulative use of religious ideas by the wea...

Marx, history is the story of class struggle

Morality is simply the ideology by which the ruling class keeps its subjects in a state of submission.

see the early emergence of critical philosophies of history that turn things on their head, make the villains and victims into the true heroes, and make the purpose of history that of overcoming and transcending history.

the abolition of the prepolitical.

Marx makes all intentional human activity political.

There is no private, prepolitical space in Marx’s world.

When men such as William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake proposed the dissolution of the traditional idea of marriage as a lifelong, monogamous, chaste bond, they did so because they saw it as restrictive of humanity’s natural sexual instincts.

Marriage was simply one aspect of the way society unnaturally restricted human desire and forced people to live inauthentic lives. The development of sexuality as identity was not part of their thought world.1

genius of Freud,

articulate the kind of notions we noted

in a scientific idiom that carries rhetorical power i...

the fusion of elements of Marxist and Freudian thought is central to the rise of the so-called New Left in the twentieth century.

goal of human existence was to be happy. But Freud gave this idea of happiness a specifically sexual turn in identifying it with genital pleasure.

sexual satisfaction is promoted as one of the key components of what it means to be living the good life.

Freud has, in fact, provided the West with a compelling myth—not in the sense of a narrative that everybody knows is false but in the sense of a basic idea by which we can understand the world around us, regardless of whether it is “true” in the commonsense way of understanding the word.

sex,