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

by Carl R. Trueman

I noted in the introduction that the underlying argument of this book is that the sexual revolution, and its various manifestations in modern society, cannot be treated in isolation but must rather be interpreted as the specific and perhaps most obvious social manifestation of a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self.

In fact, I might press this point further: institutions cease to be places for the formation of individuals via their schooling in the various practices and disciplines that allow them to take their place in society. Instead, they become platforms for performance, where individuals are allowed to be their authentic selves precisely because they are able to give expression to who they are “inside.”

Incredible!

For such selves in such a world, institutions such as schools and churches are places where one goes to perform, not to be formed—or, perhaps better, where one goes to be formed by performing.

This is MacIntyre’s key observation: emotivism is a theory not of meaning but of use; it is about how we use moral concepts and moral language. Stated most negatively, it is a way of granting those attitudes or values that we happen to prefer a kind of transcendent, objective authority. Essentially, emotivism presents preferences as if they were truth claims.

Emotivism as a theory is that which explains why those with whom we disagree think the way they do, but it is not something we care to apply to ourselves. It is in reality a social theory that explains all our inability to have meaningful ethical discussion today, but each side in any debate tends to use it polemically as if it were the moral theory to which their opponents are committed.