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

by Carl R. Trueman

The New Left that emerges from this synthesis sees oppression as a fundamentally psychological category and sexual codes as its primary instruments.

And that is the intellectual foundation for the first reversal, whereby therapy ceases to serve the purpose of socializing an individual. Instead, it seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual’s ability simply to be herself.

First, it is important to understand that most of us do not think about the world in the way we do because we have reasoned from first principles to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos. Rather, we generally operate on the basis of intuitions that we have often unconsciously absorbed from the culture around us.

these third-world cultures are really just therapeutic cultures, the cultures of psychological man: the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling.

This rejection of second-world practices and beliefs is epitomized by third-world rejection of the past as worthy of respect and as a source of significant wisdom for the present.

This is why arguments about sex that default to statements such as “It is nobody’s business what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home” miss the point. Sex is no longer a private activity because sexuality is a constitutive element of public, social identity. Patterns of private sexual behavior are not simply private; they are public and political because they constitute a significant part of how our culture thinks of identity.

reproduction is the most obvious evidence that there is a clear distinction in function between men and women that is rooted in biology. It also has obvious implications for personal behavior. To put it crudely, men have always been more sexually free than women because they are able to have sex with whomever they please and never run the risk of conception. Promiscuity without penalty has long been a male possibility, which has become available to women only with easy access to the pill and abortion.

But if pornography detaches sex from past narrative context, it also detaches it from future consequences. It could be argued that this is true of abortion and contraception as well and that pornography is thus part of a larger culture of the detachment of sex from any broader context.

“Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education.”40 That, he says, guarantees that this generation will be the first of the new barbarism, committed to the denigration, destruction, and erasure of the past—not only its artifacts but also its values and social practices.