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

by Carl R. Trueman

For Rousseau, by way of contrast, his natural humanity is fundamentally sound, and the sinful act comes from social pressures and conditioning. He becomes depraved by the pressures

society places on him.

Rather than affirming the inherently civilizing power of the arts and sciences, Rousseau accuses them of lying at the root of modern vices.

human beings had simple desires connected to simple needs that were simply satisfied.

will in reality foster hypocrisy and wickedness because it creates a society where the need to belong and to conform requires individuals to be false to who they really are.

Rousseau is arguing, at a basic level, that it is society and the relations and conditions that society embodies that decisively shape and, in the description above, decisively corrupt individuals.

Sittlichkeit is the term used to refer to the ethical structure of society at large, embodying the code of behavior to which one must conform in order to belong and to be accepted.

To be a member of such society, one must therefore suppress these personal, natural desires and instincts and conform to socially normative canons of behavior. And in the process, one becomes inauthentic, untrue to one’s inner (real) self. To use the modern phrase, one ends up living a lie.

Amour propre, however, is the result of the rivalries and interpersonal competitions and conflicts that society generates.

defines pity as an innate repugnance to the idea of others who belong to the same species suffering.

is empathy that shapes self-love in a manner that makes human beings

moral.

or empathy in the natural state takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue because it naturally moves us toward all...

In the latter scheme, to say that something is good is in reality merely to express a personal emotional preference.

ethical discourse is about personal sentiments—which amounts to the same thing, although he would reject moral relativism as a necessary implication.

There is now no consensus about what it is that should evoke our empathy and sympathy: the baby in the womb or the pregnant teenager whose life will be utterly disrupted by having a child? The transgender teen who wants to become a woman or his parents who fear he is making a terrible mistake? The

For Rousseau, the individual is at his best—he is most truly himself as he should be—when he acts in accordance with his nature.

society, with its temptations and its corruptions, that prevents conscience from being the omnipotent governor of human action. Here

The one who is truly free is the one who is free to be himself.

Alienated from his true self and in bondage to the demands of the society in which he lives, he is consequently less human, less authentic, than the one who acts in accordance with his own nature.

inner life of each person as the most important or distinctive thing about him or her.

is the notion that it is society or culture that is the problem. This idea is perhaps one of the most dominant social and political assumptions today.

society, or nurture, is to blame for the problems individuals have in this world, not the individuals themselves considered in abstraction from their social environment, is virtually an unquestioned orthodoxy, and it influences everything, from philosophies of education to debates about crime and punishment.

notion that the individual is most authentic when acting out in public those desires and feelings that characterize his inner psychological life.

That it is the inner voice, freed from any and all external influences—even from chromosomes and the primary sexual characteristics of the physical body—that shapes identity for the transgender person is a position consistent with Rousseau’s idea that personal authenticity is rooted in the notion that nature, free from heteronomous cultural constraints, and selfhood, conceived of as inner psychological conviction, are the real guides to true identity. Rousseau would no doubt have been surprised at the

there is a perennial human need for social recognition of some kind.

knows that society sets the terms by which individual identity is established and recognized.

key question is how to arrange society in such a way that it sets those terms in a manner consonant with self-love or in a way that does not lea...

The idea of the innate innocence of the hypothetical state of nature presses

toward a cult of childhood and youth.

Whereas in a society based on, say, Confucian ideals, age is to be respected because age brings with it wisdom, the Western world of today generally credits youth with wisdom and see...

children and teenagers lecturing the older generation on everything from healthcare to the environment to matters...

the state of nature is the ideal, and if society corrupts, then the

history of society becomes the history of the corruption and oppression of human nature.

It ceases to be a source of wisdom and becomes rather a...

tendency that will become a hallmark of the modern age, from Marx’s notion of history as class struggle to ...

the recent claims that “being on the right side of history” actually (and somewhat ironically) requires the overthrow of historical definitio...

it is clear that Rousseau is saved from such only by his commitment to the divine origin of conscience and thus to the foundational stability and consistency of a human nature that is separately instantiated in every individual.

The authentic individual is one who behaves outwardly in accordance with this inner psychological nature.

Society and its conventions are the enemy, suppressing desire and perverting the individual in a way that prevents the real, authentic self from being able to express itself.

How did such ideas—ideas originally floated in elite intellectual circles—become not simply the common currency of our society but so deeply embedded in such that most people never reflect on them in any critical or self-conscious way and are apparently convinced that they are simply a natural part of our existence?

Rather, mine is the more narrow aim of noting how certain cultural dispositions were manifested, communicated, and reinforced in the period after Rousseau.

exercise and poets as, in Shelley’s phrase, “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”3

Bysshe Shelley and William Blake between attacks on organized Christianity, notions of political liberation, and the idea of sexual freedom.

important emphasis on sex as the central element of individual authenticity.

emphasis on inward emotion, and second, the priority given to the ordinary and the nondescript, even the rural, as subject matter.

fact, what makes a poet a poet is the ability to recall the powerful emotions caused by the external stimuli of nature and then to express these in a form that enables others to have the same experience.

human beings to that which truly makes them human:

the aftermath of the French Revolution, with the disastrous bloodshed that resulted from the attempt to build a just society on the basis of reason alone, this argument for an aesthetic approach to making men and women moral surely had a renewed urgency.

reason for this proclivity lay in his belief that urbanization had a deleterious effect on human nature. This