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

by Carl R. Trueman

stand in opposition to contemporary tastes can be dismissed as outmoded or motivated by bigotry or simply ignored. And

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.

places humanity in a different category from that of, say, iguanas or chimpanzees—is highly problematic and confusing,

that of the unique status of humanity.

Singer’s philosophical tradition is that of utilitarianism, with its belief that the rightness or wrongness of a particular course of action is intimately connected to whether it promotes happiness.

Something odd but entirely explicable happens when the self is psychologized: things that were previously regarded as unquestioned goods come to be seen as bad and detrimental to society.

which the self is constructed psychologically and in which the therapeutic is the ethical ideal, we should therefore expect the notion of good and bad, of what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior, to change accordingly.

Murray to speak to the American Enterprise Club at Middlebury College in March 2017.

the reasons why speech itself has come to be considered violence.

is worth noting the language of feeling that permeates the statement and that is assumed to carry tremendous argumentative force: articles will likely be “messy and emotional” because they are connected to “lived experiences”

Second, the statement also assumes that the basic categories of modern identity politics are indisputable. Clearly, anyone who disagrees

the students’ stand on LGBTQ+ rights is going to be dismissed

as wrong but as bigoted. The standard lan...

Free

speech, that which most of us would intuitively regard as a

basic social good, is part of the problem, no...

only by restricting speech will the marginalized voices of 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.

purpose is the destabilization of the discipline, and this all serves to institutionalize the cultural amnesia that is part of our third-world

world anticulture.

purpose of such study is not ultimately the affirmation of the self of the student; rather, it is the transformation of the self of the student through engagement with something external to her that makes demands on her.

transformation of the authority of educational institutions.

unfortunately, once one side in the political debate chooses to politicize an issue, then all sides have to play that game.

the radical individualism of the libertarian Right, as much as the Marxist communitarianism of the Left, tends in this direction, because any corralling of individual behavior can be seen as a political assault on personal sovereignty.

truth is, we now live in a world in which everything is politicized, and we have no choice in the public square but to a...

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 setting as something used to discredit the opposition: “Your views are irrational and rooted in emotion; mine are rooted in reason.”

to campuses, the protests against free speech are part of a much wider educational pathology. The transformation of the humanities into disciplines by which the past is not so much examined as a source of wisdom but rejected as a tale of

oppression is key to this anticultural impulse.

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.

identify oneself by one’s sexual orientation or to identify one’s gender by inner psychological conviction locates the LGBTQ+ within the world of expressive individualism and psychological man.

Two key catalytic moments stand out in the narrative: the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. As to the former,

major public issue occurred in April 2015, when the then Bruce Jenner came out as a trans woman in an interview with Diane Sawyer on the current affairs program 20/20.20 By

Jenner had completed gender reassignment surgery, and Bruce was now Caitlyn. Since then, debates about transgender bathroom policy in schools, about the appropriate use of pronouns, and about the implications for women’s sports have dominated much of the sexual political discussion of the public square.

Bruce [was] always telling a lie. He’s lived a lie his whole life about who he is. And I can’t do that any longer.

Um, yes. For all intents and purposes, I am a woman. People look at me differently.

It’s who I am. I was not genetically born that way. And as of now, [I] have all the male parts, and all that kind of stuff, so in a lot of ways we’re different.

The outward image projected by Bruce was just a performance required by public expectations of him as a macho male, a performance maintained because Jenner did not “want to disappoint people.”

forced a role on him that has made him inauthentic, untrue to himself.

The real Jenner—Caitlyn, not Bruce—is akin to the noble savage, a being whose inward identity matches their outward appearance, but the demands of polite society forced him to play the hypocrite, to be Bruce.

Now, following her inner psychological convictions and breaking free from culturally imposed norms, Caitlyn is free to be herself, to be authentic, to be outwardly who she has always been inwardly, and Joanne has a wonderful sense of inner happiness and peace.

have noted this point numerous times in this book. Where a sense of psychological well-being is the purpose of life, therapy supplants morality—or, perhaps better, therapy is morality—and anything that achieves that sense of well-being is good, as long as it meets the rather weak condition that it does not inhibit the happiness of others, or that of a greater number of others.

as biology is discounted as being one decisive factor of significance for identity, the L, the G, and the B are also destabilized as meaningful categories.

menstruation, conception, pregnancy, and childbirth are all gender performances that yet depend on some kind of prior biological essence, and that hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery also seem to assume the importance of biology for gender identity.

pressing for the abandonment of terms such as lesbian, gay, and bisexual as too rigid to account for the pansexuality and the fluidity of gender that is supposed to characterize the modern world.

If gender is a construct, then so are all those categories based on it—heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.

that is solid is constantly in danger of melting into air—including our

Yogyakarta Principles, named after the Indonesian city where they were formulated in 2006, is a foundational text in connecting LGBTQ+ rights to the concept of human rights in general.

Victimhood is the presenting cause; freedom, equality, and

dignity are the moral presuppositions that carry with them imperatives for action.