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

by Carl R. Trueman

In short, the major problem with pornography is not what many religious conservatives might understand it to be—its promotion of lust and its objectifying of the participants. It certainly does both of those things, but the problem is also much deeper: it repudiates any notion that sex has significance beyond the act itself, and therefore it rejects any notion that it is emblematic of a sacred order.

Underlying the notion of the deathwork is, as we noted, a basic repudiation of history as a source of authority and wisdom. This in turn means that what Rieff calls “forgetfulness” is one of the hallmarks of third worlds and a dominant trait of modern education. It is not simply that society just happens to be antihistorical in the way it approaches history. It has a vested interest in the actual erasure of history, of those things that conjure up unpleasant ideas that might disrupt happiness in the present.

amour de soi-même (“self-love”) and

In the hypothetical state of nature, human beings simply possess the first, self-love, a point Rousseau makes in part 1 of the Second Discourse. This is basically the desire for self-preservation.

Amour propre is only a relative sentiment, factitious, and born in society, which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, inspires men with all the evils they do one another, and is the genuine source of honor.20

In sum, self-love in the natural state is a good, leading individuals to seek self-preservation.

All these problematic aspects of human behavior come not as a result of some innate perversion that corrupts men and women from birth but rather as that of existing in a social environment with others. It is the alien demands of that environment—to be better than this other person, to be more beautiful than that one—that corrupt individuals and alienate them from who they really are. In this context, conscience (as we will see) acts as a means of reminding the individual of the fact that his best interests are served by empathizing with others and treating them as he would wish to be treated himself.

Rousseau on how humans are corrupted. Based on argument that humans are driven by self love.

In contrast to amour propre, we should note that when Rousseau speaks of “self-love” as applied to the natural state, it is not a form of untrammeled selfishness, as the English translation might suggest. Further, the idea of self-preservation might also tend to imply that selfishness lies at the core of what it means to be human.

Rousseau defines pity as an innate repugnance to the idea of others who belong to the same species suffering. The natural man does not like to see one of his fellows in pain or difficulty and will, if he can, act to alleviate such. All the other social virtues, such as generosity and mercy, flow from this one basic source:

In part, it is surely because Rousseau’s basic point about nature, society, and the authenticity of youthful innocence has become one of the unacknowledged assumptions of this present age. It is part of the social imaginary.

Why children and youth are platformed so readily

My interest is not in establishing the essence (or not) of a putatively unified movement or describing family resemblances with a view to connecting disparate figures and movements in a constructed unity. Rather, mine is the more narrow aim of noting how certain cultural dispositions were manifested, communicated, and reinforced in the period after Rousseau. Thus, it is one particular strand of Romanticism—that of expressivism, and that as manifested in the poetry of the time—that is of interest here.

First, there is the notion of poetry putting the listeners or readers in touch with an authentic reality that strips away the constructed corruptions of society and connects them to some more universal and authentic nature.

Second, there is the related issue of the importance ascribed to aesthetics, or the idea that poetry (and therefore the poet) fulfills a profoundly ethical task in ennobling humanity by cultivating the correct sentiments through the medium of art.

Third, there is the connection that emerges from this thinking, of seeing poetry as a political, even revolutionary, exercise and poets as, in Shelley’s phrase, “...

And finally, there are the specific connections we see emerging in the poetry and prose of men such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake between attacks on organized Christianity, notions of political liberation, and the idea of sexual freedom.

Two aspects of the preface are of particular importance: first, the emphasis on inward emotion, and second, the priority given to the ordinary and the nondescript, even the rural, as subject matter.4

ideas are associated in a state of excitement.”5 He distinguishes his poetry from the conventional poetry of the day by stating that it is the feelings that it arouses that make significant the actions they describe, not vice versa.

It is, therefore, the experience of poetry that is the important element. The phenomena the poem describes are of value only to the extent that the poet is able to present them in a form that calls forth the desired emotional response from the audience.

There is therefore an ethical purpose to poetic aesthetics: it is to reconnect the individual with human nature in general, to make people truly human again by taking them to that which is universal. This is the same kind of note that Rousseau strikes in his reflection on the hypothetical state of nature and the need for individuals somehow to recapture that innocence in order to have the appropriate sentiments, that self-love shaped by and correctly ordered by empathy.

The answer, then, is to return to that experience of rural life and of the natural world to which it is so close. That takes us to the heart of who and what we really are, and that is also a turn inward, from the false sophistication of outward society to the unalloyed and uncorrupted movements of the unspoiled heart.

The poet for Shelley is therefore a person of singular revolutionary political importance. Indeed, to use the phrase with which Shelley closes A Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” because they are the ones who transform people, and therefore the world, through their artistic creations. They bring visions of possible futures into the present, they give hope, they inspire, they create desires for something better; and though they themselves do not necessarily understand the full significance and power of the words that they have been inspired to write, they yet move their audience toward a world of universal love and freedom.41 Man, as Hazlitt says, is “a poetical animal”; Shelley would agree.

Organized Christianity, with its imposition on humanity of the law code contained in the Bible, is that which has alienated human beings from each other and destroyed true liberty. Christianity must therefore be destroyed and marriage abolished, or at least dramatically redefined, if human beings are to be truly free and truly happy.

Shelly sees marriage as opposing happiness. Christianity is what he says is the cause of marriage. Both must be torn down according to him.

The list could be extended, but it is not really a new one. The idea that Christian sexual codes prevent people from living free and happy lives—from being true to themselves—is not of recent vintage.

The message is clear: external, socially constructed constraints are bad and deny us our real humanity. The garden symbolizes a state of childlike innocence, while the chapel represents the alien intrusion of institutional religion, the essence of which is summarized in the statement “Thou shalt not.” Religion is oppressive.

And this suggests that beneath the humorous hyperboles of De Quincey’s sardonic essay lies a serious and perceptive point. Sympathy and empathy are really functions of aesthetics, not moral law.

But his ironic essays raise an interesting point: once aesthetics is detached from some universal understanding of what it means to be human, from some universally authoritative moral metanarrative, from some solid ground in a larger metaphysical reality, then aesthetics is king. Taste can drive what we think to be right and wrong. Ethically speaking, taste becomes truth.

This is the point that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley understood. It was why they used poetry as a means of achieving the moral reformation of individuals and of society. It was also the point that De Quincey pressed to its logical conclusion. In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth. And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste become those who exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards. While he would no doubt have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian.

Psychological man is also plastic person, a figure whose very psychological essence means that he can (or at least thinks he can) make and remake personal identity at will. And for such plastic people to exist and thrive, there must exist both a certain kind of metaphysical framework and a certain kind of society with a particular social imaginary.

Thus, here I want to note the thought of three men who, while very different thinkers, helped shape the way we imagine human nature today: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. All three in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence.

To kill God, either by denying his existence or at least the coherence of claims to knowledge of him (as David Hume arguably did) or by making him nothing more than a necessary presupposition for moral discourse, the Enlightenment effectively tore out the foundations from under the polite bourgeois morality that it wished to maintain. You cannot do this, says Nietzsche. You have unchained the earth from the sun, a move of incalculable significance. By doing so, you have taken away any basis for a metaphysics that might ground either knowledge or ethics. In killing God, you take on the responsibility—the terrifying responsibility—of being god yourself, of becoming the author of your own knowledge and your own ethics. You make yourself the creator of your world.

This is consonant with the madman passage: Nietzsche is demanding that both Christianity and Kant realize that their claims to truth are not ultimately claims about objective reality but claims about how they want the world to be in order to suit their own particular ends. For Christians, that is exalting weakness over strength; for Kant, it is to maintain the universal significance of the categorical imperatives that really only constitute his own personal moral preferences.

What this does is transform the discussion of morality from a matter of discovering the nature of objective virtue or of eternal laws into an analysis of psychology. The pressing question is not, Is this right or wrong, good or bad? but rather, Why do people act this way? And that question points toward a host of more critical questions: Who benefits from arguing that action X is considered morally wrong? In fact, does morality actually have any value?

This point is far reaching and highly subversive. The game in moral discussion ceases to be that of establishing categorical imperatives and is changed into that of exposing the psychology that underlies any such claims.

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.

In short, the basic error human beings have made is to give themselves a nature, to think in terms of a transcendent category that is prior to and greater than any single individual. In doing so, they have enslaved themselves to moral codes and given themselves a heteronomous teleology that they do not intrinsically possess.

Nietzsche on the fundamental human errors.

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.

To understand Marcuse on this matter, it is important to grasp two basic concepts of his thinking: that of the performance principle and that of surplus repression.

This means that words and ideas then come to be the most powerful weapons available—for good and for ill. Thus, it becomes necessary to make sure that good words and ideas are not simply promoted but are, if possible, enforced and given a monopoly in public discourse. Why, after all, would bad words and ideas be allowed when their only purpose is to inflict psychological damage on and cause oppression of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and other victims of the ruling class’s practices of domination?

At the heart of de Beauvoir’s feminism—indeed, at the heart of any system that makes a hard distinction between biology and gender—is a metaphysical (or, perhaps better, antimetaphysical) commitment to denying the authority of the physical body and its significance for personal identity. That is a dramatic move, and as de Beauvoir well knew (and Hanby points out), it can be sustained only on the basis of technological power.

Her book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) draws on both Marx and Reich, among others, to make what might arguably be called the most consistent application of Reichian ideas to a political cause such that even the most basic elements of traditional social organization will be abolished.

Men, heterosexual and gay, could marry women and could not marry men. Women, heterosexual and lesbian, could marry men and could not marry women. So how is it that this can be interpreted as enshrining inequality? 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.

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.

The notion of assault on the person becomes not simply—or even perhaps primarily—a matter that involves damage to the body or to property; it becomes psychological, something that damages the inner self or hinders that sense of psychological well-being that lies at the heart of the therapeutic. In such a context, freedom of speech becomes not so much part of the solution as part of the problem.

This also helps explain the reason why the current disciplinary diversity in the humanities is not simply an expansion or broadening of that which has gone before. It is not that queer history is merely supplementing the lacunae in previous historical narratives; its intention is rather to destabilize the received narratives of the past and the alleged power structures in the present that depend on them, and that is a political purpose predicated on the abolition of the prepolitical as a workable category.

If I am whoever I think I am and if my inward sense of psychological well-being is my only moral imperative, then the imposition of external, prior, or static categories is nothing other than an act of imperialism, an attempt to restrict my freedom or to make me inauthentic.

Yet it is here, in the idea of the equal dignity of all human beings, that one of the problems with the modern political project becomes clear. The idea that all human beings are of equal worth is rooted in the idea that all human beings are made in the image of God. The problem with expressive individualism is not its emphasis on the dignity or the individual value of every human being. That is what undergirded the fight against slavery in the nineteenth century and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, it is the fact that expressive individualism has detached these concepts of individual dignity and value from any kind of grounding in a sacred order.

That is the question that the church needs to ask about sexual identity: Are the categories that society now prioritizes actually ones that are appropriate? If the post-Freud taxonomy represented by the acronym LGBTQ+ rests on a basic category mistake (that sex is identity), should Christians not engage in a thoroughgoing critique of such and refuse to define themselves within its framework? Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that conceding the categories leads to unfortunate confusion.