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

by Carl R. Trueman

In his 1983 Templeton Prize address, Solzhenitsyn also said, Today’s world has reached a state which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!” Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.2 Yes, even Christians. Carl Trueman’s prophetic role is to reveal to the church today how that happened, so that even now, we might repent and, in so doing, find ways to keep the true light of faith burning in this present darkness, which comprehends it not.

short, to move from the commonplace thinking of my grandfather’s world to that of today demands a host of key shifts in popular beliefs in these and other areas. It is the story of those shifts—or, perhaps better, of the background to those shifts—that I seek to address in subsequent chapters.

The sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior; rather, it involves the abolition of such codes in their entirety. More than that, it has come in certain areas, such as that of homosexuality, to require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or moral deficiency.

The sexual revolution is truly a revolution in that it has turned the moral world upside down.

The mistake such Christians made was failing to realize that broader, underlying social and cultural conditions made both gay marriage and then transgender ideology first plausible and then normative and that these conditions have been developing over hundreds of years. They are therefore by now very deep seated and themselves an intuitive part of life. Acceptance of gay marriage and transgenderism are simply the latest outworking, the most recent symptoms, of deep and long-established cultural pathologies.

The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.

While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person.

mimesis and poiesis. Put simply, these terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world. A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

The point I am making is that we all live in a world in which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept. And this broader context makes intuitive, for example, those philosophical claims of Friedrich Nietzsche, in which human beings are called to transcend themselves, to make their lives into works of art, to take the place of God as self-creators and the inventors, not the discoverers, of meaning. Few people have read Nietzsche, but many intuitively think in Nietzschean ways about their relationship to the natural world precisely because the highly technological world in which we now live—a world in which virtual reality is a reality—makes it so easy to do so. Self-creation is a routine part of our modern social imaginary.

In the fourth century, Paul’s intellectual heir Augustine produced the Confessions, the first great Western work of psychological autobiography, which indicates the existence of life understood in terms of inner mental space long before Freud.

The ancient Athenian was committed to the assembly, the medieval Christian to his church, and the twentieth-century factory worker to his trade union and working man’s club. All of them found their purpose and well-being by being committed to something outside themselves. In the world of psychological man, however, the commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed. Thus, the order is reversed. Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being.

my disagreement with such behavior neither picks their pockets nor breaks their legs, as Thomas Jefferson would say.

Nice saying

In addressing the behavior that has come to prominence through the sexual revolution, we are actually not so much speaking of practices as we are speaking of identities.

Satisfaction and meaning—authenticity—are now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end. Indeed, it must now serve the purpose of meeting my psychological needs; I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic. The refusal to bake me a wedding cake, therefore, is not an act consistent with the therapeutic ideal; in fact, it is the opposite—an act causing me psychological harm.

While earlier generations might have seen damage to body or property as the most serious categories of crime, a highly psychologized era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. And this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech. Once harm and oppression are regarded as being primarily psychological categories, freedom of speech then becomes part of the problem, not the solution, because words become potential weapons. Rieff’s understanding of the current situation thus stands very close to that offered by Reich and Marcuse, who saw oppression as a primarily psychological phenomenon and the demolition of sexual codes and the dispatching of freedom of speech as necessary elements of the political revolution, even as (unlike them) Rieff laments these realities as signifying the death of culture rather than the birth pangs of the coming liberated utopia.

no cake baker is being sued for refusing to bake cakes that glorify incest or the Ku Klux Klan.

This idea—that identity requires recognition by another—is a vital insight into the subject I am exploring in this book. It also points toward the way identity can thus become contentious.

if I meet someone else, the greatest way that my existence can be recognized by him is for me to fight and kill him.

central to this thinking is the shift from a society based on the notion of honor to that based on the notion of dignity.

The desire to be recognized, to be accepted, to belong is a deep and perennial human need, and no individual sets the terms of that recognition or belonging all by himself. To be a self is to be in a dialogical relationship with other selves and thus with the wider social context.

Second worlds are those worlds that are characterized not so much by fate as by faith. The obvious example here is Christianity.6 The Christian faith shaped the cultures of the West in an incalculably deep way. Law codes were rooted in the will of God revealed in the Bible. Aquinas’s theory of law builds his entire moral edifice on the character of God himself. Concepts of justice and mercy were shaped by the Bible’s teaching. Our law courts still reflect that thinking to some degree: witnesses on the stand are traditionally required to place their hands on a sacred text (typically the Bible) and swear to tell the truth. The idea that they—and indeed, the entire proceedings—are in some sense accountable to the sacred is thus dramatically displayed in the very actions that surround the business of the courtroom.

Taylor thus sees the move from Rieff’s second to third world as a somewhat gradual one, whereby the idea of God slowly becomes an unnecessary hypothesis. And Rieff sees this move as one of catastrophic cultural significance and as embodying, or leading to, distinct and damaging cultural pathologies.

One important point to note is that all three cultures—first, second, and third—can exist simultaneously in the same society. This is the reason why society now often feels like a cultural battle zone: it consists of groups of people who simply think about the moral structure of the world in utterly incompatible ways. Third-world cultures operate with a narrative framework that is incommensurable with the other two. The Southern Baptist who believes marriage is defined by the Bible to reflect the relationship of Christ to his church is inevitably going to be in conflict with the secularist who thinks that marriage is a fluid social arrangement designed for the convenience and happiness of the contracting parties and to last no longer than it is conducive to those ends.

When a representative of a second world, however, clashes with a representative of a third world, there is no real argument taking place. There is no common authority on which they might agree to the terms of debate in order to determine exactly what it is they are debating.

Culture is, after all, the name given to those traditions, institutions, and patterns of behavior that transmit the values of one generation to the next. But that is not the way of elites in third worlds. Rather, they are attempting to abolish such transmission and the means by which it would typically take place. 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: Whether our third worlds, as inventions of radically remissive late second world elites, can be called “cultures” takes the answer, I believe, that our thirds should be called “anti-cultures.” Anti-cultures translate no sacred order into social. Recycling fantasy firsts, thirds exist only as negations of sacred orders in seconds.

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.

There is no need for second worlds to be static and to preserve social and cultural institutions and structures unchanged from one generation to the next. Social orders based on sacred orders are quite capable of internal debate and reform based on the working out in practice of their underlying beliefs; the key is that such changes take place on the basis of accepted sacred authorities. What marks the debates of the present day is that there are no 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 order.

The memorable first lines of part 1 of the Communist Manifesto capture this thinking succinctly: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.34 The point is simple: 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. For those who see history through this lens, historians will thus fall into one of two camps: reactionaries who use history to justify exploitation and radicals who use history to unmask the exploitation it embodies. As I argue later, it is the latter model that has come to dominate history as an academic discipline. 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 (as they were in the debates over gay marriage) to argue for the repudiation of established historical norms.

deathwork can be anything that sets itself in opposition to the second-world culture.40 We might take cynicism and irony, for example. These have a tendency to subvert the kind of traditional, vertical structures of authority that characterize second worlds.

Perhaps the quintessential deathwork of our time, and one that has really become far more widespread since Rieff’s death in 2006, is pornography. Of course, as soon as pornography is mentioned, the question of how to define it comes to the fore. A good working definition is provided by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 2354: Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.43

The important thing about deathworks is that they subvert and destroy the sacred order without really having anything with which to replace it. If Nietzsche’s madman unchains the earth from the sun, then we might say that deathworks are instrumental in this exercise, communicating the message of the death of God via aesthetic forms that come to shape the popular imagination—or, to put it in Taylor’s language, to shape the social imaginary.44

Indeed, there is a sense that, as soon as the mind or the will was recognized as separable from the body or as a separate constitutive element of the person, psychological man became a very real conceptual possibility. From this perspective, the apostle Paul and Augustine are central figures. There was only at best a very vague concept of the will in classical philosophy; it is only when Paul offers his psychological account of the Christian’s inner struggle in his first-century New Testament letters, which was then picked up and developed in a deeply personal and elaborate way by Augustine in his Confessions at the end of the fourth century, that we find the basic tools for conceptualizing humans as primarily psychological beings.

the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The choice is not arbitrary. While Christians may instinctively think of John Calvin, for good or for ill, as the most influential figure to be associated with Geneva, it is actually Rousseau who is far closer to the sensibilities of our present age. As one of the key intellectual progenitors of both the French Revolution and Romanticism, he exerted considerable influence on the ideological formation of the modern world. As one of Sigmund Freud’s heroes, his fingerprints can be found even on the rise of the psychoanalytic movement of the late nineteenth century. And as the man whose autobiography sought to find reality by looking within himself, he is in many ways the aboriginal paradigm for psychological man.

Augustine blames himself for his sin because he is basically wicked from birth; Rousseau blames society for his sin because he is basically good at birth and then perverted by external forces.

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

It should, for example, be clear that some such construction of freedom and selfhood as that offered by Rousseau is at work in the modern transgender movement. 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.

The question with which I started, however, remains: 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? To understand that, we need to see how ideas akin to those of Rousseau served to reshape culture more generally. And that brings us to the artistic movement known as Romanticism.

It is in poetry, both in the theoretical reflection on its tasks and in its actual practice, that we find a number of key ideas emerging that prove of immense importance in the long story of the rise of sexual identity politics. First, there is the notion of poetry putting the listeners or readers in touch with an authentic reality that strips away the constructed corruptions of society and connects them to some more universal and authentic nature. Second, there is the related issue of the importance ascribed to aesthetics, or the idea that poetry (and therefore the poet) fulfills a profoundly ethical task in ennobling humanity by cultivating the correct sentiments through the medium of art. Third, there is the connection that emerges from this thinking, of seeing poetry as a political, even revolutionary, exercise and poets as, in Shelley’s phrase, “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”3 And finally, there are the specific connections we see emerging in the poetry and prose of men such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake between attacks on organized Christianity, notions of political liberation, and the idea of sexual freedom. With radical poets such as Shelley and Blake, we begin to see the emergence of the important emphasis on sex as the central element of individual authenticity.

In 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. And here we find Wordsworth arguing that this aim can be achieved through poetry and the genius of the poet.

In his famous essay “On Poetry in General,” Hazlitt, the artist and literary critic, summed up what he saw as the disenchanting impact of the modern world on the state of humanity, an impact he seemed to see as tragically inevitable. Above all, it engendered a spirit alien to that of poetry: It is not only the progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this.11

The poet for Shelley is therefore a person of singular revolutionary political importance. Indeed, to use the phrase with which Shelley closes A Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” because they are the ones who transform people, and therefore the world, through their artistic creations. They bring visions of possible futures into the present, they give hope, they inspire, they create desires for something better; and though they themselves do not necessarily understand the full significance and power of the words that they have been inspired to write, they yet move their audience toward a world of universal love and freedom.41 Man, as Hazlitt says, is “a poetical animal”; Shelley would agree.42

Credit where credit is due: Percy Bysshe Shelley made the case for cultural figures as the key to political revolution over a century before Antonio Gramsci and then the New Left.

Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,

Unchecked chastity? - oxymoron Selfish? More like self sacrificing Dumb

For Godwin, “the abolition of marriage will be attended with no evils” because the institution represents the unreasonable bondage and oppression of the individuals involved.49

How’s that really going for us though??

He identifies the underlying cause of inequality and servitude as the commercial marketplace, which, in a manner anticipating Karl Marx, Shelley sees as determining all social relations and as preventing human beings from being truly free.

Weird because the family unit has existed and been a societal anchor across different economic systems Dumb

Shelley goes further, applying the imperative of happiness to the purpose of marriage as a means of pointing toward how it might be restructured: If happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this separation.55 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 of the consenting parties, and that is all. It is, one might say, a sentimental union, and once the pleasurable sentiments that it stimulates have dissipated, it should be dissolved at the will of the contracting parties. This is the essential rationale of our modern thinking on marriage, defined as it is by the logic of no-fault divorce. We should therefore take note: today’s understanding of marriage is clearly not a recent innovation; it w...

It is therefore clear that the historical connection between expressive individualism, sex, and politics, so typical of our own day, was already beginning to be made by Romantic writers such as Shelley and Blake in the early nineteenth century. That particular aspect of our current cultural times is not a recent innovation brought about by the sixties.

De Quincey is not, of course, advocating murder or really trying to make murder socially acceptable, let alone desirable. But his ironic essays raise an interesting point: once aesthetics is detached from some universal understanding of what it means to be human, from some universally authoritative moral metanarrative, from some solid ground in a larger metaphysical reality, then aesthetics is king. Taste can drive what we think to be right and wrong. Ethically speaking, taste becomes truth.

In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth. And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste become those who exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards. While he would no doubt have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian.

But the nonexistence of God is not like the nonexistence of unicorns or centaurs. Nothing significant has been built on the supposition that those mythological creatures are real. To dispense with God, however, is to destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.