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

by Carl R. Trueman

Rieff’s approach to culture is characterized by a number of ideas.

cultures are primarily defined by what they forbid.

This is a basically Freudian concept: if sexual taboos drive civilization, then civilization is really defined...

It is in communal activities that individuals find their true selves;

the true self in traditional cultures is therefore something that is given and learned, not something that the individual creates for himself.

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.

the culture of political 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. Aristotle, in his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, offers perhaps the classic description of political man.

is deeply immersed in what one might call civic community life.

religious man.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a classic representation of this type of culture.

religious man was eventually displaced by a third type, what he calls economic man.

“psychological man”—a type

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.

expressive individualism,

this kind of self exists in what he describes as a culture of authenticity,

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the results of that for others (i.e., his family) were key to his sense of self.

the issue of feeling is central.

therapy.

Traditionally, the role of the therapist in any given culture was to enable the patient to grasp the nature of the community to which he belonged.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who regarded the community as a hindrance to the full expression of the authentic individual, a point picked up and given artistic expression by the Romantics.

For Marx and for Nietzsche (though for very different reasons), the present community is one that needs to be overthrown in order for humanity to reach its full potential.

the first reversal,

therapy ceases to serve the purpose of socializing an individual. Instead, it seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual’s ability simply to be herself.

second re...

commi...

Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being.

institutions

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.”

This helps explain in part the concern in recent years over making the classroom a “safe place”—that

the hypersensitivity of a generation of “snowflakes,”

the individual is king. He can be whoever he wants to be.

So-called “external” or “objective” truths are then simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and to harm the weak.

the central purpose of educational institutions. They are not to be places to form or to transform but rather places where students can perform.

If the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign, then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination.

What does it matter,

my disagreement with such behavior neither picks their pockets nor breaks their legs, as Thomas Jefferson would say.

far more than codes of behavior are at stake here.

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 ...

The oppressive nature of bourgeois society is built on repressive sexual codes that maintain the patriarchal nuclear family as the norm. As long as this state of affairs holds, there can be no true liberation, political or economic.

Shattering sexual codes is therefore one of the principal emancipatory tasks of the political revolutionary.

But few people have read Reich or Marcuse or Firestone. Fewer still perhaps accept the Marxist-Freudian metanarrative on which their politicized view of sex rests. But some of the ideas of these thinkers and philosophies are now part of the broader social imaginary...

oppression is primarily a psychological category enforced through s...

identity itself has come to be thought of as strongly sexual in nature.

even now in our sexually libertarian world, certain sexual taboos remain in place, pedophilia being perhaps the most obvious.

Whether any given individual notices it or not, society still imposes itself on its members and shapes and corrals their behavior.

Now, while we might hope and pray that things such as pedophilia and incest remain taboo, we cannot be sure that such will be the case because sexual codes have changed so dramatically over the last few decades,