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

by Carl R. Trueman

Singer is a modern version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman, demanding that the polite liberals of his day face up to the dramatic implications of the death of the Christian way of imagining the world.

We might recast this as saying that the aesthetic arguments on which the “birth as dividing line” view rests are based simply on our inability to see the child in the womb, and thus, they are demonstrably arbitrary. This is one of the reasons why sonograms have significantly changed attitudes to abortion: they have not changed the nature of the child in the woman, but they have changed the aesthetic experience of such children by adults. Passing through the birth canal really does not change anything except the immediacy of others’ experience of the child.

Are the metaphysics of personhood and concomitant questions of the sanctity of life to be simply the functions of happenstance regarding where and when the woman conceives?

Something odd but entirely explicable happens when the self is psychologized: things that were previously regarded as unquestioned goods come to be seen as bad and detrimental to society. This is because the changing understanding of selfhood brings with it a changed understanding of what does and does not constitute an assault on the self.

This is the language of subjective emotions, expressive individualism, and the therapeutic ideal that society has been cultivating. It also renders reason irrelevant—or irrelevant until people are attuned to the proper emotions. These Middlebury students might be described as channeling the spirits of Rousseau and Shelley but without their underlying belief in a normative human nature as the universal horizon of engagement. There is no metanarrative of human nature as a whole or a unity here, only that provided by the oppression of certain marginalized groups.

Bill Kraus, a San Francisco politician who was himself to die of AIDS, tried unsuccessfully to promote safe-sex practices by recommending the closure of the city’s bathhouses, focal points for uninhibited gay sexual activity. This idea was compared by one gay opponent of the plan as giving “the Moral Majority and the right wing the gasoline they have been waiting for to fuel the flames that will annihilate us!”15 The rhetoric is interesting: any inhibiting of sexual freedom—even that designed to prevent the transmission of a deadly disease—is considered unacceptable because of its perceived obnoxious moralizing or potential for promoting such. That sentiment is entirely consonant with a therapeutic culture of expressive individualism, in which it is the present moment and individuals’ ability to perform their own selves in whatever way they should choose in that moment that are the only significant ethical concerns.

The short answer is that, as with the alliance between the L and the G, it is a political coalition forged on the basis of a common enemy—a socially and politically enforced heterosexual normativity.

Really, transgenderism was the bane of queer existence until it was politically expedient to add this to the movement. The Stonewall Riot included drag queens, of course, but the moment of clear inclusion was the fall of DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] in 2013. Part of the reason behind this is the warring class and culture differences within the movement. The AIDS crisis (late 1980s until the widespread use of AZT) brought together the L and the G—not because AIDS ever really hit the lesbian community, but because white, middle class, educated men who identified as gay suddenly appeared as victims to us, and that changed everything. While there were a few examples of friendships that crossed lines, most of the distinctive sexual perversions that define the differences within this movement are incommensurable: lesbians eschew penetration, gay men engage in reckless and dangerous penetration, women who want to become transgender men usurp male privilege and turn their backs on women’s empowerment, men who want to become transgender women deny the male privilege that has been their invisible birth right and steal false identifications with victimhood. These were some of the things we said about and to each other before the cameras were rolling. But for the sake of creating a political groundswell, one based on the autonomous, freely choosing individual who finds meaning in no one but himself, all distinctions were put aside. SOGI [Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity] l...

The instant that lesbians decided to make common public cause with gay men, they had in effect decided to prioritize opposition to heterosexual normativity over biological sex. The addition of the trans community to the cause is simply an extension of the principle then established, that marginalization by the heterosexual hegemony was the only thing that really mattered when it came to public campaigning. The price paid by orthodox feminism, however, has been costly, and the status of transgender people is today a matter of acrimonious dispute among those who have campaigned for women’s rights.

In fact, Greer believes, men who transition to become women are simply trying to conform themselves to what they as males think women should be. Ironically, therefore, she sees transgenderism as in some sense profoundly conservative.

No rationale for this right is given, but it seems safe to assume that the authors regard having a family as a key step in normalizing nonheterosexual sexual identities because presumably having a family is a key means of being recognized within society. This in turn points to the function of the family as being primarily therapeutic: it is about the sense of psychological well-being of the parents rather than any broader necessary social function that such marriages would fulfill.

Then there is the fact that the movement claims to be able to bend reality to its will, or, perhaps more accurately, denies the existence of a natural authority and thereby arrogates to itself the right to create that reality. Again, transgenderism is the most radical form of this mentality: my identity is entirely my own creation; to quote from the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 2011, “I claim the right to choose my ultimate gender.”71 Here the move that Charles Taylor notes as characteristic of one major current of modernity—that which makes the world a place of poiesis rather than mimesis—seems to find its most extreme expression to date.

The individualism, the psychologized view of reality, the therapeutic ideals, the cultural amnesia, and the pansexuality of our present age are closely intertwined, and each can be properly understood only when set in the larger context of which the others are a significant part. One cannot, for example, address the issue of gay marriage without understanding the legal judgments that preceded Obergefell. And one cannot understand those without some knowledge of the wider impact of expressive individualism and therapeutic concerns on American society. Nor can one do so without reckoning with the way that sex and psychology have played a role in the framing of political issues since the 1960s. And to do any of these things properly, one must go back to the earlier influence of men such as Rousseau and the Romantics, Marx and Freud.

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...

There are other aspects of the anticulture in which Christians are complicit. The routine use of sarcasm and insult in polemic may not be a monopoly of the present age, but given that such is now profoundly associated with a deeper cultural iconoclasm and cynicism than in the past, we might do well as Christians to think critically about how frequently we resort to it—especially when debating with other Christians. At a very practical level, the way Protestantism has often failed to reflect the historical concerns of the church in its liturgy and practice, most obviously in the megachurch movement and the manner in which it has frequently adopted the aesthetics of the present moment in its worship, is arguably a sign of the penetration of the anticulture into the sanctuary of historic Christianity. Christians today are not opponents of the anticulture. Too often we are a symptom of it.

Protestantism, with its emphasis on the preached word grasped by faith, is perhaps peculiarly vulnerable to downplaying the importance of the physical. But to tear identity away from physical embodiment and to root it entirely in the psychological would be to operate along the same trajectory as transgenderism. A recovery of a biblical understanding of embodiment is vital.17 And closely allied with this is the fact that the church must maintain its commitment to biblical sexual morality, whatever the social cost might be. If, as Rieff claims, sexual codes are definitive of cultures, then an abandonment of Christian sexual morality by the church can be done only on the basis of a rejection of the sacred framework of Christianity and at the cost of the loss of Christianity as a meaningful phenomenon.

In the second century, the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralist society. She was under suspicion not because her central dogmas were supernatural but rather because she appeared subversive in claiming Jesus as King and was viewed as immoral in her talk of eating and drinking human flesh and blood and expressing incestuous-sounding love between brothers and sisters. This is where we are today. The story told in parts 2 through 4 of this book indicates how a pluralist society has slowly but surely adopted beliefs, particularly beliefs about sexuality and identity, that render Christianity immoral and inimical to the civic stability of society as now understood. The second-century world is, in a sense, our world, where Christianity is a choice—and a choice likely at some point to run afoul of the authorities. It was that second-century world, of course, that laid down the foundations for the later successes of the third and fourth centuries. And she did it by what means? By existing as a close-knit, doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness to Christ.