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2020 by Carl R.
Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that’s why all this has happened.
Ordinary Christians need—desperately need—a more profound and holistic grasp of the modern and postmodern condition. It is the water in which we swim, the air that we breathe. There is no escaping it, but we can figure out how to live in it and through it without losing our faith.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an indispensable guide to how and why men have forgotten God.
Today’s world has reached a state which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!” Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Yes, even Christians. Carl Trueman’s prophetic role is to reveal to the church today how that happened, so that even now, we might repent and, in so doing, find ways to keep the true light of faith burning in this present darkness, which comprehends it not.
The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.”
assumptions. It touches on the connection between the mind and the body, given the priority it grants to inner conviction over biological reality. It separates gender from sex, given that it drives a wedge between chromosomes and how society defines being a man or a woman. And in its political connection to homosexuality and lesbianism via the LGBTQ+ movement, it rests on notions of civil rights and of individual liberty.
the sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West.
Criticism of homosexuality is now homophobia;
The use of the term phobia is deliberate and effectively places such criticism of the new sexual culture into the realm of the irrational and points toward an underlying bigotry on the part of those who hold such views.
To be sexually inactive is to be a less-than-whole person, to be obviously unfulfilled or weird.
The sexual revolution is truly a revolution in that it has turned the moral world upside down.
our sense of individuality.
Charles Taylor,
a focus on inwardness, or the inner psychological life, as decisive for who we think we are; the affirmation of ordinary life that develops in the modern era; and the notion that nature provides us with an inner moral source.
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.
“living a lie”
Another way of approaching the matter of the self is to ask what it is that makes a person happy.
The sexual revolution did not cause the sexual revolution, nor did technology such as the pill or the internet.
in teaching history I often begin my courses by asking students the following question: “Is the statement ‘The Twin Towers fell down on 9/11 because of gravity’ true or false?”
The Christian might be tempted to declare that the reason for the sexual revolution was sin. People are sinful; therefore, they will inevitably reject God’s laws regarding sexuality.
There is a tendency among social conservatives to blame expressive individualism for the problems that they regard as currently putting strain on the liberal Western order, particularly as it manifests itself in the chaos of identity politics.
So true! This is me in Jan 2021
The difficulty with this claim is that expressive individualism is something that affects us all. It is the very essence of the culture of which we are all a part. To put it bluntly: we are all expressive individuals now.
The answer to that is to be found not by simply repeating the phrase “expressive individualism” but by looking at the historical development of the relationship between society at large and individual identity.
Acceptance of gay marriage and transgenderism are simply the latest outworking, the most recent symptoms, of deep and long-established cultural pathologies.
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 t...
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I cannot give an exhaustive account of this causal context, but what I offer in this book is an account of the intellectual shifts, and their popular impact, that have facilitated the revolution in sexual practices and thinking that now dominates key aspects of the public square.
First, this book is not intended as an exhaustive account of how the present normative understanding of the self has emerged and come to dominate public discourse.
My task here is limited: to demonstrate how many of the ideas now informing both the conscious thinking and the instinctive intuitions of Western men and women have deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy that helps explain why society thinks and behaves the way it does.
Second, this book is not a lament for a lost golden age or even for the parlous state of culture as we now face it.
Third, I have written this book with the same principle in mind that I have tried to embody in the classroom for well over a quarter century: my task as a historian is first to explain an action, an idea, or an event in context.
While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person.
That is a profound claim that is arguably unprecedented in history.
Charles Taylor
social imaginary.
It is not so much a conscious philosophy of life as a set of intuitions and practices.
the social imaginary is the way people think about the world,
This is a very helpful concept precisely because it takes account of the fact that the way we think about many things is not grounded in a self-conscious belief in a particular theory of the world to which we have committed ourselves.
a more intuitive fashion
the sexual revolution is simply the latest iteration, must therefore not simply take into account the ideas of the cultural elite but must also look at how the intuitions of society at large have been formed.
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...
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increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
to make their lives into works of art, to take the place of God as self-creators and the inventors, no...
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Self-creation is a routine part of our modern social imaginary.
And a poietic world is one in which transcendent purpose collapses into the immanent and in which given purpose collapses into any purpose I choose to create or decide for myself.
