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

by Carl R. Trueman

prior to his complete and permanent mental breakdown,

Didn’t know about nietzche mental breakdown- need to learn more about that

In short, we might say that while for a man like David Hume Christianity is epistemologically indefensible, for Nietzsche it is morally repugnant. Hume dismantles Christianity by analyzing how human beings know things; Nietzsche dismantles it by asking what ulterior motivation lies behind it. Hume might laugh at the claims of the Christian faith; Nietzsche is nauseated by them. With Nietzsche we see clearly two pathologies of our present age receiving philosophical explication: the tendency to be suspicious of any claims to absolute moral truth and a rejection of religion as distasteful.

Nietzsche does not appear to present this notion, that of the eternal return or eternal recurrence, as an actual physical reality, whereby everything will happen again and again. Rather, it appears to be a rhetorical ploy designed to elicit an existential reaction: If this were true, how would you live? Would it make a difference to you? Nietzsche is challenging individuals to affirm the life they have and to live every moment as if it possessed eternal significance. This is an important point for this study for two reasons. First, it is a useful reminder that popular characterizations of Nietzsche as a nihilist are typically misplaced. Simply because he rejects the idea that life has any ultimate transcendent meaning does not mean that he believes life is not worth living. The person who thinks every moment is to be treated as if it had eternal significance is no true nihilist.

personal satisfaction, the basic element of the therapeutic ideal, is there in Nietzsche’s conception of what it means to truly live.

Thus, as for Nietzsche, morality for Marx has a genealogy—a specifically economic one but a genealogy nonetheless.

Francis Ayala sums up Darwin’s distinctive contribution as follows: It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. The origin and adaptations of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science.45 In other words, Darwin’s theory of natural selection effectively made any metaphysical or theological claim concerning the origins of life irrelevant. One could, if one wished, believe that a divine hand guided the process, but the process itself could be adequately explained without the need of any such supernatural hypothesis.46

This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.

Coming from earlier species by way of an immanent process of natural selection, they cease to be the crown of creation and to enjoy some kind of special, God-given status among (and above) other creatures. And having no God-given destiny, they have no transcendent ethical standards, either laws or virtues, to which they need to conform themselves. What Nietzsche did through his iconoclastic approach to the Enlightenment, and Marx did by turning Hegel upside down, Darwin did through observation and scientific theorizing.

The science may have proved far more complicated than Darwin ever imagined, but the basic idea is easy to grasp. And it has come to shape the way many people who are quite incompetent to assess the science have come to imagine the world.

Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe it. Few of us are qualified to opine on the science. But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight. And when the idea being taught has an intuitive plausibility, it is persuasive.

The average twelve-year-old girl attending an Ariana Grande concert may never even have heard of Nietzsche, but the amoral sexuality of the lyrics she hears preach a form of (albeit unwitting) Nietzscheanism.

In light of this, the words that Nietzsche applied to himself in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, might easily be applied to all three: 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.48

What a cocky guy

Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. Ecclesiastes 1:10

The therapeutic society did not originate with the 1960s. Its origins go back centuries.

For 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.

The movement of sexual problems from the sphere of morality to the sphere of medicine is one that continues today, as society’s strong preference for technical, rather than moral, approaches to everything from AIDS to teenage pregnancies indicates. But stripping sex of its moral fabric did not begin with the pill or HIV treatments; it began in earnest in the nineteenth century with attitudes to childhood masturbation.

Indeed, the result of work such as Moll’s was that by 1900 masturbation was no longer considered by the medical profession to be either a moral or even a medical problem. It had come to be seen simply as a harmless childhood activity, a perfectly natural, if infantile, form of sexual behavior. And it was in this context that Freud articulated his theory of childhood sexuality.

id

ego,

superego.

In terms of the overall argument of this book, Freud occupies a pivotal position. In the introduction, I stated that the rise of the sexual revolution was predicated on fundamental changes in how the self is understood. The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized. The first move is exemplified by Rousseau and his Romantic heirs. The second is the signal achievement of Sigmund Freud. Of critical importance to the modern age is his development of both a theory of sexuality that places the sex drive at the very core of who and what human beings are from infancy and the theories of religion and of civilization that he connects to that theory—and that he does so through the scientific idiom of psychoanalysis, an idiom that makes his theories, like those of Darwin, inherently plausible in a modern social imaginary in which science has intuitive authority. And the result is that, before Freud, sex was an activity, for procreation or for recreation; after Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species.

There is one final point worth noting in Freud’s Future of an Illusion. It is where his convictions on infant sexuality and on the infantile nature of religion come together in one rhetorical question that, in retrospect, has a particularly portentous ring to it: Is it not true that the two main points in the programme for the education of children today are retardation of sexual development and premature religious influence?41 In pinpointing these two aspects of education in his day, Freud anticipates the emphases that emerge in the late twentieth century by way of reaction and reversal, and that are now at the heart of today’s educational philosophies. Contemporary education has become in some quarters preoccupied with the liberation of children’s sexual instincts and the elimination of any religious influence whatsoever. Today’s education as therapy exhibits these two pathologies: a liberation from traditional sexual codes and (given its role in maintaining traditional sexual codes) liberation from religion.

Yikes

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. John Milton, Paradise Lost

Further, the rise of Fascist and Nazi parties in Italy, Germany, and central and eastern Europe and the clear appeal of these movements to the working classes indicated that the dialectics of history were not operating quite as smoothly as Marx and his followers had once hoped.

What Reich does here is adopt Freud’s basic point about civilization/culture—that it is the product of sexual repression—while refusing to make this a transcendent truth, preferring to relativize it. Sexual codes are part of the ideology of the governing class, designed to maintain the status quo so as to benefit those in power. To be specific: the present shape of this civilization-happiness trade-off involves preventing children from engaging in sexual self-expression, but this particular historical form of moral prescription is not in itself a necessary absolute and could well be configured differently. The question therefore emerges as to how and why the current sexual codes, specifically here relating to children, have come to be the way they are. More generally, why is a culture or civilization built on such specific forms of repression considered necessary, and by whom?

Reich strikes a note that will be of great significance in Marxist thinking (and, one might argue, eventually across the political spectrum in general): the traditional patriarchal family is a unit of oppression. This is a function of both Freud’s belief in childhood sexuality and his understanding of how sexual repression connects to the culture of civilization. In the hands of Reich it becomes a potent starting point for reflecting on what political revolution and liberation might look like and how these might be accomplished. By implication, those who argue for the traditional family as a societal good are really lackeys, witting or unwitting, of the current oppressive status quo.

Morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later.20 This connection between the family and political oppression is of lasting significance for left-wing politics: the dismantling and abolition of the nuclear family are essential if political liberation is to be achieved.

When oppression comes to be thought of as primarily psychological, then victimhood becomes a potentially much broader—and much more subjective—category.

It is clear that what today is called the left fights less and less in terms of class warfare, and more and more in terms of “warfare against repression,” claiming that the struggle for the economic progress of the disadvantaged is included in this more general struggle, as if the two were inseparable.29

Today, those basic economic categories of oppression still exist, but they are generally eclipsed in the media by discussions of psychologically oppressive actions: the refusal to bake a cake for a gay wedding, for example, does not push the gay couple into starvation or any other form of economic hardship; rather, it offends against their dignity and inflicts psychological harm by refusing to recognize them on their own terms. And that is regarded as very serious because it is politically oppressive in a world in which psychological categories have come to dominate discussion.

This is why arguments about sex that default to statements such as “It is nobody’s business what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home” miss the point. Sex is no longer a private activity because sexuality is a constitutive element of public, social identity.

Why pedophilia would be outlawed as neurotic and antisocial is not at all evident from Reich’s thinking.

If the issue is consent, then the first obvious objection is that children are often made to do things to which they do not consent, from receiving immunizations and eating their vegetables to attending kindergarten and having to go to bed at a certain time. Why should sex be privileged as requiring consent? Further, how does Reich know that his own objection to pedophilia is not simply a holdover from the sexual mores of the capitalist society he so despises, with its need to keep children carefully corralled within the oppressive structure of the traditional family? Could Reich’s own objection here not be based simply on his own false sexual consciousness, a vestige of bourgeois morality determined by the times in which he lives? Conveniently, Reich does not care to parse the issue at all but simply roots his objection in the age difference of the participants and their status relative to the process of puberty.

Just a few lines later he makes this dramatic statement: The existence of strict moral principles has invariably signified that the biological, and specifically the sexual, needs of man were not being satisfied. Every moral regulation is in itself sex-negating, and all compulsory morality is life-negating. The social revolution has no more important task than finally to enable human beings to realize their full potentialities and find gratification in life.

As with Reich, Marcuse views Freud as failing to see the historically conditioned nature of forms of repression because he lacked the Marxist insight into the impact of socioeconomic relations on how people think and act.

Marcuse offers a more nuanced view of the sexual liberation of humanity than that of Reich. Some level of sexual repression is necessary for the maintenance of society. The problem is that the sexual mores of late capitalism, focused as they are on the maintenance of monogamy and the patriarchal family, are actually no longer as necessary as they once were. Thus, their continuation has more to do with the bourgeoisie controlling the proletariat than with the rational organization of society. Taboos and the concept of perversions are means by which the bourgeoisie demonizes any type of sexual behavior that threatens this control.46 And behavior deemed by bourgeois society to be perverted or deviant is therefore by inference actually part of the subversive protest against the status quo. Sex focused on procreation and family is the repressive weapon of bourgeois capitalist society. And free love and untrammeled sexual experimentation are a central part of the revolutionary liberation of society.

The notions that political freedom is sexual freedom and that shattering heterosexual norms is a vital part of transforming society for the better are now intuitive cultural orthodoxies.

Reich and Marcuse’s assault on sexual codes as constitutive of bourgeois tyranny find their counterpart in de Beauvoir’s assault on the idea that biological differences between men and women should exert decisive influence on their respective roles. Everything, even the male-female binary, must be revised in the world of the psychologized self.

This distinction between gender and sex is now a basic element of contemporary notions of identity. The whole transgender question depends on it, for if sex and gender are inextricably connected, then a mismatch between what one is biologically and who one is psychologically must inevitably be regarded as a dysfunction of the mind. Once the two are detached from each other—something that can only really be plausible in a world in which psychology rather than biology is seen as fundamentally determinative of identity—then the problem becomes one of the body, to be treated with medication and surgery. Technology therefore makes the whole claim plausible. Technology, one might even say, defines ontology.

And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality—Freud’s “polymorphous perversity”—would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.

yikes

The most interesting aspect of the statement, however, comes at the very end: the purpose of this revolution is to abolish the “tyranny” of the biological family. Firestone targets the same enemy as Godwin, Shelley, Reich, Marcuse, and de Beauvoir: the sexual revolution ultimately has one great goal, the destruction of the family. It makes sense, of course, for the family is the primary means by which values are transmitted from generation to generation. From a Marxist perspective, that makes the family the means by which false consciousness is passed on and replicated over time. Its demolition is thus essential. And the means to this demolition are, for Firestone, to be found in the tools provided by technology.

The concept now dubbed emotivism allows one to explain and dismiss the moral claims of anyone with whom one happens to disagree. Emotivism for thee, but not for me.

Finally, one point of great importance is that in the post-Auschwitz, postcolonial world of the latter half of the twentieth century, victimhood came to possess huge cachet in the Sittlichkeit of the West. At the same time, the psychologizing of oppression by the New Left massively expanded the potential number of victims. One did not need to be in a concentration camp or a gulag or to be subject to segregation or even to have experience of serious poverty to claim such status. Now one could point to other forms of nonrecognition as constituting victimization—not having one’s sexual preferences positively affirmed by wider society, for example, or not being allowed to marry a same-sex partner. And merely tolerating certain sexual proclivities and activities would not be enough, for tolerance is not the same as recognition. Indeed, it actually implies a degree of disapproval, of nonrecognition by society. Only full equality before the law and in the culture at large can provide that. When the political struggle became a psychological struggle, it also became a therapeutic struggle. In sum, in the work of the New Left one finds philosophical justification for what are now intuitive commonplaces of our culture: to be free is to be sexually liberated; to be happy is to be affirmed in that liberation. Our narrative has therefore reached the point at which the basic philosophical elements behind the modern social imaginary are in place.

This message—that sex is all about the individual and what personal satisfaction and pleasure he or she can derive from it without reference to the other—is consonant with what we have noted concerning the rise of psychological man and the therapeutic society, in which happiness is an inwardly directed sense of personal psychological well-being. One does not have to read Freud and Reich to be persuaded of that view of life. One can simply watch porn—or, indeed, the myriad sexual plotlines of countless movies, sitcoms, soap operas, and even commercials. If freedom and happiness are epitomized in sexual satisfaction, then pornography becomes a medium, perhaps the obvious and certainly the easiest and least personally costly medium, of liberation and fulfillment.

Within such a framework, the relationship between a husband and wife is unique precisely because it is the only relationship they each have that is marked, or sealed, by sexual intimacy. And that sexual intimacy therefore possesses significance because of its ongoing context. It is the one thing that makes the friendship of a husband and wife unique compared to any of the other relationships and any of the other interpersonal narratives that shape their identities. The traditional Anglican wedding vows—for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part—bear witness to this distinguishing quality. The sexual encounters between a husband and wife find their deeper meaning not in the personal pleasure of the moment but in the way those encounters are intended to strengthen and reinforce the unique relationship that exists between the two partners, one shaped by a shared past and present and open to a shared future. Again, pornography, with its message that sex is about personal satisfaction, focuses on the pleasure of the present moment, without reference to past or future. It promotes a view of sex as being the activity of the sempiternal orgiast, the one who lives for sexual pleasure in the here and now with no thought about the future. It presents a view of sex whereby the participants move effortlessly from one encounter in the present to the next without any significant consequences. In this sense, it is continuous with the countless movie, soap ope...

Sex in marriage vs trivialized, pornified sex

What is striking about this claim is that it effectively denies that there is any rational basis for defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

It would seem that such a judgment can be understood only in a situation in which equality is defined as the ability of every individual to redefine marriage in the manner in which he or she chooses. This notion is presumably not what the Supreme Court was consciously trying to achieve, but there are some obvious questions to ask about the ruling in this regard. Why can marriage not be between one man and two or more women? Why should marriage be restricted to a relationship that is exclusively human? Could the case not be made that to refuse to recognize polygamy or a marriage between a man and a dog would marginalize in turn the polygamous and zoophilic communities?

in the wake of these three rulings, it is hard to believe that there was ever any doubt about how the court would rule in Obergefell v. Hodges.

But the concept of marriage that polygamy assumes is one of the relationship between different sexes, typically a man and two or more women. So why does the traditional view of the number of parties involved enjoy the status of a normative, rational position while the traditional notion of the sex of the persons involved does not? The answer is surely that the canons of reason that are operative here are determined not by the definition of marriage but rather by the contemporary tastes of the wider culture.

But what is really interesting is not that the reasoning is problematic; we noted before the flexible, even contradictory, use of precedent in the rulings that provide the background to Obergefell v. Hodges. Rather, it is the fact that such reasoning is not considered problematic at all. That it proved plausible—more than that, that the court majority believed it to be a sound argument and actually quite compelling—speaks eloquently of the ethical logic of the society within which it was formulated. It is emotivism. Those parts of tradition that support contemporary tastes are proof positive of the correctness of the opinion; those that are not useful to supporting the desired conclusion or that stand in opposition to contemporary tastes can be dismissed as outmoded or motivated by bigotry or simply ignored. And the court can safely do this because it is speaking to a society at large that thinks in precisely the same way.