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

by Carl R. Trueman

Further, all three men offer rationales for a world imagined in terms of poiesis rather than mimesis.

the net result is the same: the world in itself has no meaning; meaning and significance can thus be given to it only by the actions of human beings, whether through the Nietzschean notion of self-creation and eternal recurrence or through the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism and class struggle. In both cases, meaning is created, not given.

Nietzsche and for Marx, however, history and culture are tales of oppression that need to be overthrown and overcome. If

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

The most obvious aspect of this influence is the inward, psychological turn with regard to the nature of the self.

This is where expressive individualism (to use the terminology of Taylor and the later MacIntyre) or psychological man (to use that of Rieff) starts to assert itself as a significant type.

individuals today—be they avid sports fans, shopaholics, or transgender people—place an inner sense of psychological well-being at the heart of how they conceptualize happiness, then they stand in a cultural line that includes Rousseau and the Romantics.

both Nietzsche and Marx, then, sacred order was a sign of psychological sickness.

And Darwin dealt the real death blow: by removing teleology from the story of humankind, he eliminated the notion of human exceptionalism, provided scientific support for Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical stand, and, like Marx, demanded that whatever meaning life might have, had to be considered in purely material terms.

And as Rieff would argue, the death of sacred order ushers in the unstable cultures, or better, “anticultures,” of what he calls third worlds.

These worlds, with nothing beyond themselves by which they can justify their beliefs and practices, are doomed to be volatile, entropic, and self-defeating. Again,

seeds of today’s moral anarchy, where personal emotional preferences are constantly confused with moral absolutes, is thus to be found in the nineteenth century.

If society/culture is merely a construct, and if nature possesses no intrinsic meaning or purpose, then what meaning there is must be created by human beings themselves. Now, the subjugation of nature to human beings was not invented

Rieff’s anticultures exhibit another characteristic that we see emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: they are antihistorical.

This means that history—that which is constitutive of society/culture—must be seen as something that needs to be overcome or transcended or erased if the individual is to be truly who he or she

Both men see power as the key to history. For

What Nietzsche and Marx do is offer a view of history in which the traditional heroes of the story are actually the villains and in which even the narrating of history becomes part of a wider discourse of power that keeps the marginalized

on the margins.

move from understanding sex as an activity to seeing it as absolutely fundamental to identity.

When men such as William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake proposed the dissolution of the traditional idea of marriage as a lifelong, monogamous, chaste bond, they did so because they saw it as restrictive of humanity’s natural sexual instincts.

That myth is the idea that sex, in terms of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what it means to be human.

From art to politics, sex is omnipresent. And thinking of human beings as fundamentally defined by their sexual desire is now virtually intuitive for us all. We are categorized as straight, gay, bi, queer, and so on; and sexual preferences, once considered private and personal, are now matters of public interest, means by which we are recognized, in Taylor’s sense, by the world around us. And

in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he should make genital erotism the central point of his life.

purpose of life, and the content of the good life, is personal sexual fulfillment.

natural authentic self and the civilized inauthentic self specifically

the conflict between natural sexual desires and the sexual restrictions demanded by life in civilized society. And if for Rousseau the natural man was fundamentally good, empathetic, and rational, Freud sees him as dark, violent, and irrational.

Freud not only places sex and sexual gratification at the center of adult human identity, he also extends sexuality back to infancy.

As a result, educational regimes based on the need to crush the enemy within the child slowly gave way to those that emphasized protecting the child from the enemy without.

This was a classic Rousseauesque paradigm, where the purpose of education is less to enforce social conformity and more to encourage the development of natural talents.

experts of the medical profession rather than the churches in matters of child-rearing, something of great social significance down to the present day.

movement of sexual problems from the sphere of morality to the sphere of medicine is one that continues today,

making sex the central element in what it means to be human.

And that means that sex is basically that which constitutes what it means to be human and that which defines the purpose

of life.

There is the id, present from birth, which one might characterize as the basic instinctual drives of the individual. The id is in itself unregulated and disorganized, a dark, unknowable sea of chaotic, irrational desires.

ego, which develops over time and operates as a mediator between the drives of the id and the reality of the world around it.

The ego has the task of satisfying the desires of the id in a manner that brings happiness and not grief to the individual.

Its task is therefore to negotiate a balance between the impulses of the id and the consequ...

there is the superego. The superego is that which over time internalizes the customs, conventions, expectations, and general rules of society such that they become an integral part of the individual.

sees morality as fundamentally irrational and ultimately subjective.

Supreme Court of the United States has in one of its judgments codified the notion that objection to homosexuality and

gay marriage is ultimately rooted in animus—or basic, irrational prejudice—against homosexuals.

phobia as a means of exposing the alleged irrational bigotry of positions of which society does not approve: homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and so on.

certain arbitrary social conventions are transcendent moral imperatives merely because everyone believes and practices them.

feelings of shame and distaste for sexual activity emerge as a potent means of curbing the child’s basic sexual instincts.

actually thinks the social consequences of traditional sexual codes are better than the alternatives.

Rather, he sees them as problematic because of their individual consequences—they inhibit the basic drive for personal sexual satisfaction and therefore preclude the possibility of society allowing individuals to achieve true happiness.

Freud himself was an avowed atheist with a deep disdain for organized religion as any kind of ultimate and true explanation of the world, an attitude he exhibited with some militancy even in his youth.

We might therefore add a noun to the adjective: it is for Freud an infantile neurosis.

scientific respectability to the idea that religious belief represents some form of mental deficiency or emotional immaturity.