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

by Carl R. Trueman

Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that’s why all this has happened.

In short, the sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West. And it is only as we come to understand that wider context that we can truly understand the dynamics of the sexual politics that now dominate our culture.

When I use the term sexual revolution, I am referring to the radical and ongoing transformation of sexual attitudes and behaviors that has occurred in the West since the early 1960s.

The old sexual codes of celibacy outside marriage and chastity within it are considered ridiculous and oppressive, and their advocates wicked or stupid or both. The sexual revolution is truly a revolution in that it has turned the moral world upside down.

For me to be a self in the sense I am using the term here involves an understanding of what the purpose of my life is, of what constitutes the good life, of how I understand myself—my self—in relation to others and to the world around me.

Most significant for my argument in this book, they lead to a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say “feelings” or “intuitions”—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is. To leap ahead, transgenderism provides an excellent example: people who think they are a woman trapped in a man’s body are really making their inner psychological convictions absolutely decisive for who they are; and to the extent that, prior to “coming out,” they have publicly denied this inner reality, to that extent they have had an inauthentic existence. This is why the language of “living a lie” often appears in the testimonies of transgender people.

the changes we have witnessed in the content and significance of sexual codes since the 1960s are symptomatic of deeper changes in how we think of the purpose of life, the meaning of happiness, and what actually constitutes people’s sense of who they are and what they are for. The sexual revolution did not cause the sexual revolution, nor did technology such as the pill or the internet. Those things may have facilitated it, but its causes lie much deeper, in the changes in what it meant to be an authentic, fulfilled human self. And those changes stretch back well before the Swinging Sixties.

there is a tendency to do one of two things. First, one can so emphasize a universal, metaphysical principle to which one is committed that one fails to understand the particulars of what one is analyzing. Second, one can become so preoccupied with the particulars that one fails to see the significance of the more general context.

The basic principle is this: no individual historical phenomenon is its own cause. The French Revolution did not cause the French Revolution. The First World War did not cause the First World War. Every historical phenomenon is the result of a wide variety of factors that can vary from the technological to the political to the philosophical. Without the development of atomic technology, there could have been no bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Without the Second World War, there would have been no reason to drop a bomb on Hiroshima. And without a certain philosophy of war, there would have been no justification for dropping a bomb on Hiroshima.

Concept applies to UX design too. Knowing context explains a phenomenon.

I want to speak of “social imaginary” here, rather than social theory, because there are important differences between the two. There are, in fact, several differences. I speak of “imaginary” (i) because I’m talking about the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. But it is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.

A second useful element in Taylor’s work that connects to the social imaginary and to which we will have recourse is the relationship between mimesis and poiesis.

A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

Parmenides - Whatever is, is. Heraclitus - Whatever is, is changing.

This insight allows us to connect the thinking of Rieff to that of Charles Taylor in a constructive manner, via the affinity that exists between Rieff’s concept of psychological man and Taylor’s concept of the expressive individual.

This is an important point: culture directs individuals outward. It is greater than, prior to, and formative of the individual. We learn who we are by learning how to conform ourselves to the purposes of the larger community to which we belong. This is of great significance for understanding Rieff, since it is this emphasis on culture as that which directs the individual outward toward communal purposes that underlies his schematization of human history in terms of representative types, figures whom he regards as embodying the spirit of their age.

In contrast to the idiotic man (literally, the private man), the political man is the one who finds his identity in the activities in which he engages in the public life of the polis.

Rieff's first man, the political man. This is where he finds his true selfc, by outward interaction

The man of the Middle Ages was precisely such a person, someone who found his primary sense of self in his involvement in religious activities: attending mass, celebrating feast days, taking part in religious processions, going on pilgrimages.

Rieff's second man.

Economic man is the individual who finds his sense of self in his economic activity: trade, production, the making of money. Rieff himself saw economic man as an unstable and temporary category, and given Karl Marx’s perceptive observations on the dramatic way that capitalism constantly revolutionizes society’s means of production, this would seem to be a reasonable assumption.

Rieff's 3rd man

And economic man thus gives way to the latest player on the historical stage, that which Rieff dubs “psychological man”—a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities as was true for the previous types but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness.

Rieff's fourth man

The difference is stark: for my grandfather, job satisfaction was empirical, outwardly directed, and unrelated to his psychological state; for members of mine and subsequent generations, the issue of feeling is central.

Thus, the order is reversed. Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being. 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.”

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 could also be described, using Taylor’s terminology, as the triumph of expressive individualism and of poiesis over mimesis. If education is to allow the individual simply to be himself, unhindered by outward pressure to conform to any greater reality, then the individual is king.

But far more than codes of behavior are at stake here. In addressing the behavior that has come to prominence through the sexual revolution, we are actually not so much speaking of practices as we are speaking of identities. And when we are speaking of identities, the public, political stakes are incredibly high and raise a whole different set of issues.

The era of psychological man therefore requires changes in the culture and its institutions, practices, and beliefs that affect everyone. They all need to adapt to reflect a therapeutic mentality that focuses on the psychological well-being of the individual. Rieff calls this societal characteristic the analytic attitude.

While earlier generations might have seen damage to body or property as the most serious categories of crime, a highly psychologized era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. And this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech. Once harm and oppression are regarded as being primarily psychological categories, freedom of speech then becomes part of the problem, not the solution, because words become potential weapons.

If our identities are shaped by our connection to and interaction with significant others, then identity also arises in the context of belonging. To have an identity means that I am being acknowledged by others. To wander through a town and to be ignored by everyone I encounter would understandably lead me to question whether they considered me to be a nonperson or at least a person unworthy of acknowledgment.

Individual identity is thus truly a dialogue: how a person thinks of himself is the result of learning the language of the community so that he can be a part of the community. It also explains the basic human need to belong: the idea of the isolated Rousseauesque man of nature, living all by himself and for himself, may be superficially attractive, but a moment’s reflection would indicate how strange, if not completely absurd, it would be.

One might note a comparatively trivial example of this: the teenager who dresses in a particular way to express her individuality and yet at the same time ends up wearing more or less the same clothes as every other member of her peer group. Her clothing is both a means of self-expression and a means of finding unity with a larger group at one and the same time.

Sittlichkeit refers to the moral obligations I have to an ongoing community of which I am part. These obligations are based on established norms and uses, and that is why the etymological root in Sitten is important for Hegel’s use. The crucial characteristic of Sittlichkeit is that it enjoins us to bring about what already is. This is a paradoxical way of putting it, but in fact the common life which is the basis of my sittlich obligation is already there in existence. It is in virtue of its being an ongoing affair that I have these obligations; and my fulfilment of these obligations is what sustains it and keeps it in being. Hence in Sittlichkeit there is no gap between what ought to be and what is, between Sollen and Sein.31

In short, there is a need for the expressive individual to be at one with the expressive community.

What is vital to notice is that recognition is therefore a social phenomenon. It is important to me to have my identity recognized, but the framework and conventions both for expressing my identity and for that identity being recognized are socially constructed, specific to the context in which I find myself.

According to Rieff, first and second worlds justify their morality by appeal to something transcendent, beyond the material world.4

Their moral codes are based in myths. We might think of Lycurgus, legendary ruler of Sparta, whose laws were given authority by receiving the approval of the oracle at Delphi. However intrinsically wise or pragmatically beneficial his laws might have been, it was the sacred myth, the stamp of supernatural approval, that gave them their real authority.

First worlds

Second worlds are those worlds that are characterized not so much by fate as by faith. The obvious example here is Christianity.6 The Christian faith shaped the cultures of the West in an incalculably deep way. Law codes were rooted in the will of God revealed in the Bible.

First and second worlds thus have a moral, and therefore cultural, stability because their foundations lie in something beyond themselves.

Third worlds, by way of stark contrast to the first and second worlds, do not root their cultures, their social orders, their moral imperatives in anything sacred. They do have to justify themselves, but they cannot do so on the basis of something sacred or transcendent. Instead, they have to do so on the basis of themselves.

No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order.

Charles Taylor has a parallel concept to the third world in what he calls the immanent frame. Prior ages were characterized by a transcendent frame, a belief that this world stood under the authority of a reality that transcended its mere material existence. Rieff’s third worlds are the worlds of Taylor’s immanent frame, where this world is all that there is, and so moral discourse cannot find its justification or root its authority in anything that lies beyond it.

One important point to note is that all three cultures—first, second, and third—can exist simultaneously in the same society. This is the reason why society now often feels like a cultural battle zone: it consists of groups of people who simply think about the moral structure of the world in utterly incompatible ways.

Put simply, there is no common ground on which the denizens of third worlds can engage in meaningful dialogue with those of the first or second.

MacIntyre’s commitment to teleology involves two further elements of great importance. First, he insists that teleology enables individuals to distinguish between what they are and what they should be. Second, he argues that the process by which we evaluate the end of human actions needs to be understood as one that is socially embedded. In short, individuals do not exist in isolation; they exist in society, in specific communities; and understanding their ends requires understanding that they are constituted by that society or those specific communities.

This also pushes him to develop a further point of great significance: ethics can exist only within a tradition. The idea of a neutral standpoint from which some absolute ethical principles can be deduced is for MacIntyre a myth. Therefore, we might add, the study of a society’s ethics takes you to the very heart of how a society thinks about itself, how it constructs social relations, and why the people it contains think the way they do.

This has obvious affinities with the Freud-Rieff notion that cultures are defined by their interdicts and taboos. In both cases, ethics takes one to the very heart of what a culture or society is.

If, as MacIntyre claims, every set of moral values presupposes a set of social assumptions, then what are the major social assumptions that he sees as dominant in the West? The key one for MacIntyre is what he calls emotivism, which he defines as follows: Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.20

In his Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016), it is noteworthy that MacIntyre moves from using the language of emotivism to that of expressivism, a point that is useful for bringing his insights into fruitful relation to those of Charles Taylor by making the connection between ethics and Taylor’s normative type of self.

It is also worth noting how emotivism is useful as a rhetorical strategy. When it comes to moral arguments, the tendency of the present age is to assert our moral convictions as normative and correct by rejecting those with which we disagree as irrational prejudice rooted in personal, emotional preference. That is precisely what underlies the ever-increasing number of words ending in -phobia by which society automatically assigns moral positions out of accord with the dominant Sittlichkeit to the category of neurotic bigotry.

But a more careful look at the Reformation indicates that the Protestant elites were not committed so much to cultural iconoclasm as to what they considered to be cultural retrieval.

But how did the intellectual iconoclasm of those such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hume come to be the cultural taste of people at large? The answer for Rieff comes via what he calls “deathworks.” He defines this concept as an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture. Every deathwork represents an admiring final assault on the objects of its admiration: the sacred orders of which their arts are some expression in the repressive mode.37

Yet Rieff also notes that deathworks are not all as obvious in their assault on authority as Piss Christ, nor can they be restricted exclusively to the category of works of art. A deathwork can be anything that sets itself in opposition to the second-world culture.

This definition brings out neatly the deathwork aspect of pornography. It is a cultural artifact that takes human sexual activity and divorces it from any moral content. We might add that it also divorces it from any larger narrative or historical context. The sex in pornography is presented as an end in itself. Yet sexual activity in a second world has a sacred significance as part of a relationship, as part of a personal history, as something that—given its connection to reproduction—links past to future, and as the necessary precondition for culture.