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

by Carl R. Trueman

For example, representative democracy has proved a keystone of society; therefore, we are going to grant the vote to dogs and cats.

Some of Singer’s views, such as those in favor of infanticide, are ahead of the tastes of contemporary society, but as he argues, they are consistent with arguments he offers for matters with which much of society has little or no problem, such as abortion.

Singer is famous for holding a number of positions that mark him out as controversial, such as his early work on animal rights,

Yet, as he proceeds to comment, birth is still somewhat arbitrary. The fact that children can be born prematurely and survive birth indicates that at some point in the womb they have the same features and the same capacity for awareness and for experiencing pain.15 We might recast this as saying that the aesthetic arguments on which the “birth as dividing line” view rests are based simply on our inability to see the child in the womb, and thus, they are demonstrably arbitrary.

Passing through the birth canal really does not change anything except the immediacy of others’ experience of the child.16

There are numerous contexts in which one person is totally dependent for survival on another in which we do not regard the latter as having the right to kill the former.17

that the pain argument achieves neither what pro-lifers desire (protection of the child from harm from the very moment of conception) nor what pro-choicers desire (because it pushes the boundary for abortion back to the very early stages of pregnancy when the woman might not actually know that she has conceived).18

This notion falls because the very debate about abortion is really a debate about the status of the baby in the womb and thus about whether abortion can therefore be categorized as not involving a victim.20

feminist argument that the fetus is part of the woman’s body, for her to deal with as she chooses. In the cases of rape and incest, this reasoning is particularly powerful: the woman can then argue that she has an alien being in her body, parasitically dependent on her for its existence. Singer rejects this argument on utilitarian grounds:

then the woman has no absolute right to dispose of the child as she chooses, however difficult the situation might be in which she has found herself through no fault of her own.21

He does not deny that the fetus is a human being; rather, he rejects the idea that merely belonging to the species Homo sapiens is sufficient to make one a person and therefore subject to the rights that attach to personhood.

makes a great difference to the wrongness of killing a being is a legacy of religious doctrine that even those opposed to abortion hesitate to bring into the debate.

Given these criteria, it is clear that for Singer a child in the womb is not a person. The child has no consciousness of a past, present, or future; is not autonomous; and has no capacity for rational reflection. In short, for Singer it is not a person and therefore does not possess the rights that personhood entails.

Of course, the implication of Singer’s views of personhood goes beyond the matter of abortion. The same problem of personhood applies to newborn children too. We noted earlier that he (like pro-life advocates) regards the mere act of having passed through the birth canal as irrelevant to the question whether the child should be protected from killing.

Singer does not hesitate to draw the obvious implications for infanticide: I do not regard the conflict between the position I have taken and widely accepted views about the sanctity of infant life as a ground for abandoning my position. These widely accepted views need to be challenged.28

But on what basis, then, would Singer argue that specific cases of infanticide would be deemed legitimate? The answer is straightforward: where the effect on the parents would be a profoundly negative one.

The difference between killing disabled and normal infants lies not in any supposed right to life that the latter has and the former lacks, but in other considerations about killing. Most obviously there is the difference that often exists in the attitudes of the parents. The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents. They have, nowadays, often planned for the child. The mother has carried it for nine months. From birth, a natural affection begins to bind the parents to it. So one important reason why it is normally a terrible thing to kill an infant is the effect the killing will have on its parents. It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities vary, of course. Some are trivial and have little effect on the child or its parents, but others turn the normally joyful event of

birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents and any other children they may have.30

Happiness as an inner sense of psychological well-being is the hallmark of the therapeutic age, and here we see it being deployed as the primary criterion for deciding whether an infant should live or die.

Moreover, although a normal newborn baby has no sense of the future, and therefore is not a person, that does not mean that it is all right to kill such a baby. It only means that the wrong done to the infant is not as great as the wrong that would be done to a person who was killed. But in our society there are many couples who would be very happy to love and care for that child. Hence even if the parents do not want their own child, it would be wrong to kill it.31

like that of Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage, indicates just how deeply the basic pathologies of expressive individualism and

psychological man have come to permeate the social imaginary.

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather:

is systematically formed)—it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness. To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.32

Perhaps the most dramatic example of campus conflict over free speech in recent years involved the invitation of the political scientist Charles Murray to speak to the American Enterprise Club at Middlebury College in March 2017.

Criticism of “snowflakes” by those who themselves live and breathe the atmosphere of expressive individualism is therefore a cause for all of us to engage in self-examination.

The reasons behind our formation are many, but the predominate [sic] one is a feeling of alienation within the campus dialogue—the so-called “free market of ideas” on campus is an illusion, one which exists only to support one strong ideology.

Rather than espousing the idea that all written work in the public eye must be dispassionate, we welcome the fact that our articles will be written with passion, with love, with anger, and overall, with purpose.

We are tired of having to engage with those who repeatedly devalue our experiences and values—by creating our own platform, we are unifying in the face of this intentional disregard, and rejecting the idea that we must conform to the dominant Middlebury narrative.37

Free speech, that which most of us would intuitively regard as a basic social good, is part of the problem, not the solution. And only by restricting speech will the marginalized voices of the oppressed be heard.

speech is a necessary social good may dislike what we read here, but we cannot claim that it does not make sense, given the wider culture within which we all now live. Indeed, it reflects in a radical political form the intuitions of the social imaginary.

The teaching of history, for example, is now dominated in many places by advocates of critical theory and thus preoccupied with categories of power and marginalization.

It is not that queer history is merely supplementing the lacunae in previous historical narratives; its intention is rather to destabilize the received narratives of the past and the alleged power structures in the present that depend on them, and that is a political purpose predicated on the abolition of the prepolitical as a workable category. It is part of the same educational culture that rioted to silence Charles Murray at Middlebury.

For Singer, there is no human essence that makes talk about personhood for a fetus, or even a newborn baby, meaningful, unlike the pro-life advocates whose position he rejects.

free speech is simply a license to oppress others with hateful language and arguments—not, as their opponents would claim, the only means by which bad ideas can be scrutinized and rejected.

consensus. Particularly in the case of the Supreme Court’s claim that religious objections to homosexuality are really driven by animus, it is clear that the idea of emotivism can now function in a polemical set...

are irrational and rooted in emotion; mine are ro...

Emotivism explains why the other side is wrong.

In doing so, it should become clear that the LGBTQ+ alliance represents the latest and most powerful example of an anticulture, a deathwork, and a rejection of nature, underpinned by the aesthetic and emotive ethics that are so typical of a therapeutic age.

the groups represented in the LGBTQ+ do share a number of things in common. From the perspective of my earlier narrative, they are clearly psychological and sexual in terms of their understanding of selfhood.

Central to her argument is the notion that male homosexuality and female lesbianism are radically different phenomena, both in terms of the physical expressions of sexual desire that they involve and in terms of the social behavior of the two groups. Each group experiences, and responds to, the dominant heterosexual culture in different ways.

The lesbian is required to act like a heterosexual, to make herself attractive to men, in order to survive in the workplace, while the homosexual is not required to make himself attractive to women.

In short, the dominant heterosexual and patriarchal structure of society means that there is no equivalence between gays and lesbians; their experience of the world is profoundly different.

I perceive the lesbian experience as being, like motherhood, a profoundly female experience, with particular oppressions, meanings, and potentialities we cannot comprehend as long as we simply bracket it with other sexually stigmatized existences.

important. Put simply, women experience the world differently because they are physically different from men.

Though she is not explicit here, the underlying issue is that male homosexuality is focused on penetrative sex and genital orgasm. For the lesbian, sexual satisfaction is something different.

In Rich’s terms, lesbianism is characterized less by genital activity and more by a deep and erotic emotional relationship.

The whole text, even in its discussion of female homosexuality, is designed to separate the discussion of female experience of the world from any male influence, and the idea that lesbians and gays might have some common cause is never countenanced.

They further argue that it is precisely women’s ignorance of the biology of their reproductive organs that makes them vulnerable to, and victims of, men’s control. A feminism that gives such a place to biology provides a context for a lesbianism that cannot see itself as analogous to male homosexuality precisely because it is male homosexuality.9

Nevertheless, in the 1980s, a united movement for gay liberation, comprising both lesbians and gays, emerged. And the reason for this is quite simple: their shared victimhood as marginalized sexual minorities ultimately proved stronger than the social, economic, biological, and philosophical differences that theorists such as Adrienne Rich noted.