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

by Carl R. Trueman

40-Year-Old Virgin is a comedy. The very idea of someone reaching the age of forty with no experience of sexual intercourse is inherently comic because of the value society now places on sex. To be sexually inactive is to be a less-than-whole person, to be obviously unfulfilled or weird. The old sexual codes of celibacy outside marriage and chastity within it are considered ridiculous and oppressive, and their advocates wicked or stupid or both.

Most significant for my argument in this book, they lead to a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say “feelings” or “intuitions”—for

for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is. To leap ahead, transgenderism provides

Another way of approaching the matter of the self is to ask what it is that makes a person happy. Is happiness found in directing oneself outward or inward? For

put it bluntly: we are all expressive individuals now. Just as some choose to identify themselves by their sexual orientation, so the religious person chooses to be a Christian or a Muslim.

amazed at how swiftly society moved from a position where in the early 2000s a majority of people were broadly opposed to gay marriage to one where, by 2020, transgenderism is well on its way to becoming more or less normalized.

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.

This suspicion about society/culture receives added power and philosophical depth in the work of Nietzsche and Marx, who in different ways argue that the history of society is a history of power and oppression and that even notions such as human nature are constructs designed to reinforce and perpetuate this subjugation. Indeed, along with Darwin, they deal lethal blows,

leaving the latter, as Nietzsche is happy to point out, a matter of mere taste and manipulative power games.

The Romantics grounded ethics in aesthetics, in the cultivation of empathy and sympathy, confident that a universal, shared human nature provided a firm foundation for such. Nietzsche sees such arguments from taste as a manipulative means by which the weak subjugate the strong, and Marx sees them as a means of oppression by the dominant class.

for seeing history as a tale of oppression and for making its victims into the real heroes of the narrative.

part 2 deals with the psychologizing of the self, part 3 deals with the sexualizing of psychology and the politicizing of sex.

Sigmund Freud.

this book is not a lament for a lost golden age or even for the parlous state of culture as we now face it. Lamentation is popular in many conservative and Christian circles, and I have indulged in it a few times myself.

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.

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?

The way this occurred is fairly simple to discern: first, there

was the promiscuous behavior; then there was the technology to facilitate it, in the form of contraception and antibiotics; and, as technology enabled the sexually promiscuous to avoid the natural consequences of their actions (unwanted pregnancies, disease), so those rationales that justified the behavior became more plausible (and arguments against it became less so), and therefore the behavior itself became more acceptable.

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.

we think of it much more as a case of raw material that we can manipulate by our own power to our own purposes.

And this broader context makes intuitive, for example, those philosophical claims of Friedrich Nietzsche, in which human beings are called to transcend themselves, to make their lives into works of art, to take the place of God as self-creators and the inventors, not the discoverers, of meaning.

We learn who we are by learning how to conform ourselves to the purposes of the larger community to which we belong. This

the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign, then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination. Yet this would still leave some questions unresolved, questions that have a particular urgency in our current political climate.

psychological category enforced through sex and gender codes). That is part of the world of psychological man or expressive

individualism, where personal authenticity is found through public performance of inward desires. And as the most powerful inward desires of most people are sexual in nature, so identity itself has come to be thought of as strongly sexual in nature.

That which was previously deemed good comes to be regarded as bad; that which was previously regarded as healthy comes to be deemed sickness. The turn to the psychological self is fundamentally iconoclastic with regard to traditional moral codes as they are now seen to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Emphasis on what we might call the “right to psychological happiness” of the individual will also have some obvious practical effects. For example, language will become

Taylor is here pointing to the fact that who we think we are is intimately connected to those to whom we relate—family, friends, coworkers.

This also connects to another point: the human need to belong. If our identities are shaped by our connection to and interaction with significant others, then identity also arises in the context of belonging.

Individual identity is thus truly a dialogue: how a person thinks of himself is the result of learning the language of the community so that he can be a part of the community. It also explains the basic human need to belong:

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.

Such a person is alienated from the society in which she happens to find herself and is not able to be a proper part of the community. It is only as the traveler acquires the local language that she is able to give expression to her personal identity in a way that is recognized by the locals and that allows her in some sense to belong.

is important to me to have my identity recognized, but the framework and conventions both for expressing my identity and for that identity being recognized are socially constructed, specific to the context in which I find myself.

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence. All

Taylor argues that central to this thinking is the shift from a society based on the notion of honor to that based on the notion of dignity.

Rousseau, for whom society and culture were the problems, the things that corrupted the individual and prevented him from being truly authentic.

Romantics:

the individual is at his most authentic before he is shaped (and corrupted) by the need to conform to social conventions.

the past, a person’s identity came from without, the result of being set within a fixed social hierarchy. One might perhaps say that belonging, or being recognized, was therefore a question of understanding one’s place in that preexisting social hierarchy into which one had been born.

a society where sexuality is foundational to personal identity, mere tolerance of homosexuality is bound to become unacceptable. The issue is not one of simply decriminalizing behavior; that would certainly mean that homosexual acts were tolerated by society, but the acts are only a part of the overall problem.

the latter on the sovereign right of individual self-determination. But they do share this in common: they represent demands for society to recognize the dignity of particular individuals, particular identities, and particular communities in social practices, cultural attitudes, and, therefore, legislation.

“We have moved, roughly speaking, from thinking of institutions as molds that shape people’s character and habits toward seeing them as platforms that allow people to be themselves and to display themselves before a wider world.”

that most of us do not self-consciously reflect on life and the world as we live in it but instead think and act intuitively in accordance with the way we instinctively imagine the world to be.

Why does our social imaginary make sex such a basic marker of identity, and attitudes to sex such a fundamental test for recognition?

Why does the public apparently need to know the sexual orientation of movie stars or their attitude to gay marriage, when neither are particularly relevant to their technical competence to pursue their profession? Why is it so important to educate even elementary school children in the taxonomy of sexual preferences?

Here he introduces the terms first, second, and third worlds, although he does not use this terminology to express what is typically intended by third world—developing

result of prohibitions. The essential culture of a society is determined by the things that it forbids and how it forbids them.

is the loss of this extrinsic justification for moral codes that is so catastrophic for society at large, the narrative of which loss

first and second worlds justify their morality by appeal to something transcendent, beyond the material world.

The appeal is to an order, a sacred order, beyond the social arrangements and pragmatic conveniences of Spartan society. Rieff

Christian faith shaped the cultures of the West in an incalculably deep way. Law codes were rooted in the will of God revealed in the Bible.