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

by Carl R. Trueman

the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept ...

A second pr...

the right to marry is fundamental because it supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importanc...

A third basis for protecting the r...

it safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from related rights of childrearing,...

Fourth and f...

Nation’s traditions make ...

marriage is a keystone of our s...

The first point, that the right to personal choice in marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy, represents the triumph of expressive individualism in society,

This helps explain in part why gay marriage is so plausible: it connects with the prevalent understanding of what it means to be a free individual that pervades modern culture.

second point,

The matter of number has actually been less important than the matter of sex.

While it is still distasteful to argue for polygamy (and hence the normative two-person marriage is an easy position to assume, given that it is less likely to be challenged), it is also distasteful to argue against gay marriage, given that this would involve depriving gay people of the chance of happiness that marriage involves and that they are being denied.

the idea of polygamy as a legitimate lifestyle choice. This is no doubt reinforced in the popular imagination by, among other things, its connotations of Mormon fundamentalism and also the exploitation of women, neither of which will help it gain in popularity, given the general tendency in today’s society to regard religious conservatism in general as something sinister and its abhorrence of anything that might appear to involve male exploitation of women.

third point,

who wants to support what might be seen to undermine families or jeopardize children?

it should go without saying that a gay marriage cannot produce children.

fourth and final point,

the selective use of tradition and the plastic definition of marriage

When tradition can be edited in such a way as to confirm modern taste, then tradition apparently has authority. When tradition runs counter to the exigencies of contemporary taste—for example, when it defines marriage as between a man and a woman—it is to be dismissed

represents a form of nominalism that is as breathtaking in its audacity as it is incoherent in its logic. It uses an appeal to tradition to overthrow key elements of the tradition by fundamentally changing, without sufficient acknowledgment, the very meaning of a key term.

The ruling and its supporting arguments are absolutely connected to, and indeed dependent on, the changes in thinking about selfhood, human nature, sexuality, and the nature of oppression and liberty that we have traced in earlier chapters.

Peter Singer,

Rather, it is his views on abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia that are of interest here.

Singer’s philosophical tradition is that of utilitarianism, with its belief that the rightness or wrongness of a particular course of action is intimately connected to whether it promotes happiness.

Happiness as an inner sense of psychological well-being is the hallmark of the therapeutic age,

Rieff comments, “Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education.”40 That, he says, guarantees that this generation will be the first of the new barbarism, committed to the denigration, destruction, and erasure of the past—not only its artifacts but also its values and social practices.

they are clearly psychological and sexual in terms of their understanding of selfhood.

locates the LGBTQ+ within the world of expressive individualism and psychological man.

unlike the L and the G, the T and the Q are transgressive ideologies in the sense that they aim at the demolition of any construction of reality that takes the idea of male and female as representing something that is at root essential.

their shared victimhood as marginalized sexual minorities ultimately proved stronger than the social, economic, biological, and philosophical differences that theorists such as Adrienne Rich noted.

Two key catalytic moments stand out in the narrative:

the Stonewall riots of 1969

the AIDS crisis of t...

Now Blatant was Beautiful.

AIDS is not a moral crisis to be solved by a moral reformation but a technical one to be addressed with technical solutions:

It was in this context of shared victimhood and oppression at the hands of a heterosexual establishment that lesbians and gays found common cause:

It is the result of sharing the same enemy and suffering similar marginalization.

April 2015, when the then Bruce Jenner came out as a trans woman in an interview with Diane Sawyer on the current affairs program 20/20.20

Since then, debates about transgender bathroom policy in schools, about the appropriate use of pronouns, and about the implications for women’s sports have dominated much of the sexual political discussion of the public square.

For transgenderism to be coherent, the society in which it occurs needs to place a decisive priority on the psychological over the physical in determining identity.

In addition, its credibility is fueled by a powerful individualism and facilitated by the technological ability to manipulate biological realities.

The language is most significant. It is not so much that of psychological confusion as that of the contrast between inner authenticity and outward hypocrisy.

politically constructed nature of the LGBTQ+ alliance. It is one that emerged over time, not as a result of intrinsic affinities between the various groups involved but rather because of a shared sense of victimhood, a common interest in destabilizing society’s heterosexual norms

and therefore a convenient coalition for political and legal lobbying.

For Butler, gender is a performance and possesses no prior ontological status.

Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing,

the deed is everything.”

identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.

But Butler’s argument—that gender is doing, not being—stands in line with the antimetaphysical philosophy that now dominates intellectual life in the humanities.