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

by Carl R. Trueman

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.