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

by Carl R. Trueman

monotonous grind of city life, particularly the dehumanizing effect of industrial labor,

both blunted human sensibilities and left individuals vulnerable to a craving for the sensational and spectacular in order to enliven their humdrum existence.

Wordsworth declares that we must turn inward.

They are fakes, inauthentic examples of humanity, because they are not true to themselves but rather true to the customs and conventions of the phony world to which they belong.

poetry that focuses on that which is uncorrupted and real. By reflecting on rural life, untouched and unspoiled by the artificiality of urban sophistication, and by representing it in a poetic form designed to arouse the appropriate emotional response, the poet is key to this process whereby people are enabled to grasp once again that which is true, authentic, and universal in human existence.

the result of the forces of nature moving the poet to give them literary or artistic expression.

Shelley exhibits a tendency to see the particulars of all forms of life in general as obscuring real, changeless truths.25

reveal the universal truths that are obscured by the particulars of day-to-day existence.

poetry enables the audience to see beyond the everyday experience of the world—experience that often seems chaotic and in conflict with itself—to the underlying eternal harmony that truly exists. Poetry is, he says elsewhere, a mimetic art.27 We can all

And the key to this experience is not reason but rather the imagination, that human facility that is peculiarly susceptible to the influence of poetry.

purpose of poetry and the pleasure it involves is nothing less than the moral improvement of the audience. And this leads to a further aspect of Shelley’s theory of poetry:

reason does not stir the sentiments or emotions as is necessary for true moral transformation. True morality is always built on a foundation of sentimental morality.35

might perhaps say that the poet is therefore both the creation of his age and the creator of his age. Bad ages produce

disappointment of the French Revolution and who (unlike Shelley) lived long enough to become something of a political reactionary,

Shelley was a political radical until the day he died.

Poetically radicalized sentiments drive radical politics.

arousing of feelings or sentiments that will make human beings better people and thus serve the cause of freedom.

Underlying Shelley’s poetry is, of course, a personal political radicalism that is far more overt and intentional than what we typically find in Wordsworth.

highlighting the oppressed and enslaved position of human beings.

age are resolved and all nature comes to exist in harmonious relationship.

usher in a revolutionary age when oppressors will be no more and freedom will be truly realized.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” because they are the ones who transform people, and therefore the world, through their artistic creations.

that has alienated human beings from their own authentic identity and thus an emphasis on an inward, psychological turn in order to find one’s true self.

attack on institutional religion and his understanding that sexual liberation is central to political liberation.

which religion has historically exerted its power is in the policing of sexual behavior and sexual relationships.

Shelley’s disdain for religion, or, more specifically, Christianity and Judaism,

religion is a means of manipulation by which the powerful keep others subjugated and which is perpetuated primarily by the self-interest of those who have used it to gain the power they enjoy.

between religion, political oppression, and restrictions on sexual activity

it is here that we see an expression of the connection between authenticity and sexual freedom that will become so important

healthy sexual activity is considered a matter to be judged by instinct, then inevitably those institutions that disagree with such will be seen as problematic and as hindering human authenticity and freedom.

And when the primary culprit historically is religion, this means

that re...

target of the sexual reformers. In the West, this specifically...

its most radical forms, this cultural shift on sex involved a vigorous

attack on the institution of marriage and thus on that which constructed and maintained it, that is, Christianity and the church.

Monogamous, chaste marriage is a social construct that runs against the grain of natural human instincts.

And at the center of this distortion lies love and that which forces it into the confines of a lifelong, monogamous relationship. Liberty will never be achieved while the market controls everything and while human love is shackled by traditional Christian views of marriage.

The destruction of marriage, of the sexual codes that justify it, and of the institutions that enforce and police it is therefore central to the liberation of humanity and to the cause of justice.

The passage has a remarkably contemporary logic to it. Shelley believes that the purpose of life is personal happiness, which he defines as “a pleasurable sensation,” or, as we might put it, an inner sense of psychological well-being—the ethic of the therapeutic age.

Marriage is therefore not to be understood as a lifelong monogamous relationship for the purposes of procreation, mutual companionship, and exclusive sexual union.

Rather, it is for the mutual pleasure and satisfaction...

Organized Christianity, with its imposition on humanity of the law code contained in the Bible, is that which has alienated human beings from each other and destroyed true liberty.

Christianity must therefore be destroyed and marriage abolished, or at least dramatically redefined, if human beings are to be truly free and truly happy.

Christian morality not as wrongheaded or benign but as essentially evil.

Christian morality is really immorality dressed up as righteousness.

when Christian moral codes are seen as positively immoral. Calls for chastity are an unrealistic response to promiscuity and lead to cruel sexual repression, an irresponsible lack of proper sex education in schools, and the demonizing of unmarried teenage mothers.

Opposition to homosexuality stirs up prejudice, forces gay people to live a lie, and can even lead to mental illness and suicide.

The idea that Christian sexual codes prevent people from living free and happy lives—from being true to thems...

chapel is a man-made intrusion into the garden of what was once innocence. Its presence is both alien and oppressive, with Blake picking up on the Decalogue’s refrain of “Thou shalt not” as a means of conveying the negative, life-denying nature of Christian morality.

presenting him as sophisticated or at war with himself or as a rebel against society or as a genius engaged in a battle of wits with a detective. In such a context, murder becomes entertaining, intriguing, even attractive in some sense.