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

by Carl R. Trueman

To address these questions from a Rieffian perspective, what this present age represents is an anticulture, a repudiation of the various regulations and regulative practices that characterized Western society until recently—particularly, though not exclusively, in the realm of sexual ethics. Behind this repudiation lies a deeper rejection, that of any and every sacred order on which they might be grounded, whether it be that provided by a formal religion, such as Christianity, or a commitment to some broader philosophical metaphysics, such as that found in Immanuel Kant. The result is a world that has accepted the challenge of Nietzsche’s madman, to remake value and meaning in the wake of the death—indeed, the killing—of the Christian God, or, indeed, of any god. The repudiation not only of history but of any authority that might pose a challenge to the present—even the authority of physically determined sex in favor of the fluid concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity—is something that marks all the areas on which I have touched in this last section. And this is not simply a game for intellectuals and artists. Supreme Court judgments affect everybody. Pornography is easily available to all and communicates a powerful philosophy not only of sex but also therefore of relationships and even of what human beings are actually intended for. Peter Singer’s ethics both reflect and shape the wider Sittlichkeit. Only a world that already imagines human beings to be nothi...