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

by Carl R. Trueman

Third worlds, by way of stark contrast to the first and second worlds, do not root their cultures, their social orders, their moral imperatives in anything sacred. They do have to justify themselves, but they cannot do so on the basis of something sacred or transcendent.

central point here is that the abandonment of a sacred order leaves cultures without any foundation.

The culture with no sacred order therefore has the task—for Rieff, the impossible task—of justifying itself only by reference to itself. Morality will thus tend toward a matter of simple consequentialist pragmatism, with the notion of what are and are not desirable outcomes being shaped by the distinct cultural pathologies of the day.

mother’s health, perhaps abortion in many cases becomes a moral imperative.

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.

MacIntyre is best known for his influential work After Virtue (1981), which helped revive serious academic interest in virtue

ethics.

other words, the language of morality as now used

really nothing more than the language of personal preference based on nothing more rational or objective than sentiments or feelings.

Essentially, emotivism presents preferences as if they were truth claims. Thus, the statement Homosexuality is wrong should be understood as I personally disapprove of homosexuality, and you should do likewise.

The expressive individual is the same as the emotivist, the one who (mistakenly) grants his own personal preferences the status of universal moral imperatives.

“It just

feels right,” “I know in my heart it is a good thing,” and other similar stock phrases are familiar to us all, and all point to the subjective, emotional foundation of so much ethical discussion today.

of United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013), which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and characterized religious objections to homosexuality as rooted in animus.

three would argue that an overriding desire for inner personal happiness and a sense of psychological well-being lie at the heart of the modern age and make ethics at root a subjective discourse.

Human beings may still like to think they believe in good and bad, but these concepts are unhitched from any transcendent framework and merely reflect personal, emotional, and psychological preferences.

More negatively, we are all then tempted to use the rhetoric of emotivism to dismiss views with which we disagree as arbitrary prejudices. Emotivism as a theory is that which explains why

those with whom we disagree think the way they do, but it is not something we care to apply to ourselves. It is in reality a social theory that explains all our inability to have meaningful ethical discussion today, but each side in any debate tends to use it polemically as if it were the moral theory to which their opponents are committed.

Perhaps one of the most obvious is the way the cultural elites in third worlds are committed to cultural iconoclasm and to the overthrow of the beliefs, values, and behaviors of the past—that attitude C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” raised to the level of a basic cultural instinct.

Rieff argues that what these third-world elites are promoting does not even deserve the name of “culture.”

They are, in the words of Rieff, creating not a culture but an anticulture, called such because of its iconoclastic, purely destructive attitude toward all that the first and second worlds hold dear:

But a more careful look at the Reformation indicates that the Protestant elites were not committed so much to cultural iconoclasm as to what they considered to be cultural retrieval.

Rather, it is the destruction of history and its replacement with nothing of any significant substance.

such accepted authorities, and so the cultural game is marked by a continual subversion of stability rather than the establishment of greater stability through clarification of the social order in light of the sacred

This inward turn, the turn to the individual, gave the individual a value—a dignity—that eventually came to stand as independent of any sacred order or set of divine commands.

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. And

comparatively small section of society, it has grown to be the representative mindset of Western society at large.32

it is clear that technology plays a role in cultivating an attitude that sees the past as inferior to the present and the present as inferior to that which is to come.

point to culture as corrupting and as inhibiting of the individual’s authenticity.33

history is one long story of oppression. And when one holds such a view, the usefulness of history is not so much that it is a source of positive wisdom for the present as that it provides warnings about how people are exploited.

reactionaries who use history to justify exploitation and radicals who use history to unmask the exploitation it embodies.

Suffice it here to note that this idea is now deeply embedded in our cultural imaginary, where phrases such as “being on the right side of history” are typically deployed

argue for the repudiation of established historical norms.

history is about victimizers and victims, with the former being the villains and the latter the heroes.

Older

narratives that, say, exalted the achievements of great individuals or nations come to be viewed as the propaganda of the powerful, and...

Expressive individualism, the psychologizing of human identity, and the antihistorical tendencies of the anticulture would appear to be very closely connected.

The sacramental is made into the excremental.

art. A deathwork can be anything that sets itself in opposition to the second-world culture.

We might take cynicism and irony, for example.

Satire could also be considered a deathwork. The subtle mockery of established authority that characterizes a satirical TV show or a humorous column in a newspaper could be categorized as a deathwork, slowly but surely undermining the established order of things.

important thing about deathworks is that they subvert and destroy the sacred order without really having anything with which to replace

This in turn means that what Rieff calls “forgetfulness” is one of the hallmarks of third worlds and a dominant trait of modern education. It is not simply that society just happens to be antihistorical

in the way it approaches history. It has a vested interest in the actual erasure of history, of those things that conjure up unpleasant ideas that might disrupt happiness in the present.

For Rieff, it is no surprise to find a third world characterized by the widespread acceptance—even promotion—of abortion.

For him, it is the vandalism that seeks to erase the past, or at least the significance of that past.

It is a barbarism that finds its expression both physically, in the destruction of the artifacts of the past, and metaphysically, in its annihilation of the ideas,

customs, and practices of...

Then there is the graphic image of human identities being flushed away like aborted fetuses.

Augustine, the theft is not the result of a good desire misdirected (as it is for Rousseau) but rather of the sheer sinful delight to be had in breaking the law.