Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

It is a penetrating analysis of several hundred years of recent intellectual history to show why people are willing to believe ideas today that every one of our grandparents would have rejected out of hand—without need of argument, evidence, or proof—just two generations ago.

In your hands is the primer every American who cares about a sound anthropology and healthy culture needs to read.

I would summarize the broad arc of his work as an account of how the person became a self, the self became sexualized, and sex became politicized.

Modern man, however, seeks to be “true to himself.” Rather than conform thoughts, feelings, and actions to objective reality, man’s inner life itself becomes the source of truth. The modern self finds himself in the midst of what Robert Bellah has described as a culture of “expressive individualism”—where each of us seeks to give expression to our individual inner lives rather than seeing ourselves as embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws.2 Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm.

This modern self, then, is not accountable to the theologians who preach on how to conform oneself to God but to the therapists who counsel how to be true to oneself—thus giving rise to what Philip Rieff described as the “triumph of the therapeutic.”

But if our sexuality is our deepest and most important inner truth, and politics is about the promotion of the truth, then it was inevitable that sex would be politicized. Whereas cultures used to cultivate the virtues that made family and religion flourish, now the law would be used to suppress these institutions as they stood in the way of sexual “authenticity,” as politics sought to create a world where it was safe—and free from criticism—to follow one’s sexual desires.

Affirmation of the sexualized self is the key to our new politics. And our new language.

Welcome to this strange new world. You may not like it. But it is where you live, and therefore it is important that you try to understand it.

When I use the term self in this book, I am referring not to this commonsense way of using the term but rather to the deeper notion of where the “real me” is to be found, how that shapes my view of life, and in what the fulfillment or happiness of that “real me” consists.

The modern self assumes the authority of inner feelings and sees authenticity as defined by the ability to give social expression to the same. The modern self also assumes that society at large will recognize and affirm this behavior. Such a self is defined by what is called expressive individualism.

Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.1

He specifically connects it to what he dubs “the culture of ‘authenticity,’” which he describes as follows: [The culture of authenticity is one where] each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.2 In short, the modern self is one where authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s inward feelings.

The priority that the LGBTQ+ movement places on sexual desire and inner feelings relative to personal identity is part of this broader accent on the inner, psychological life of Western people that shapes us all.

What marks the modern sexual revolution out as distinctive is the way it has normalized sexual phenomena such as homosexuality and promiscuity and even come to celebrate them.

the sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior. Not at all. Rather, it is the repudiation of the very idea of such codes in their entirety.

If the individual’s inner identity is defined by sexual desire, then he or she must be allowed to act out on that desire in order to be an authentic person.

Again, notice what the sexual revolution has done: it has brought us to the point where sexual acts in themselves are seen as having no intrinsic moral significance; it is the consent (or not) of those engaging in them that provides the moral framework.

So when Taylor directs us to the social imaginary, he is making the point that the way we think about the world is not primarily by way of rational arguments based on first principles. It is much more intuitive than that. And that means that the story of the modern self is not simply the story of big ideas thought by profound thinkers. It is the story of how the way we intuit or imagine the world has come to be. And that involves far more than books and arguments.

Of course, the importance of the social imaginary points us to the fact that, if our world has no simple, single cause, our problems therefore have no simple, single solution.

To respond to our times we must first understand our times. That is my goal.

it is interesting to ask what things wider society already needed to regard as normal in order for this to be first plausible and then normalized.

the granting of decisive authority to inner feelings.

Doctors today, however, grant normative authority in such cases to inner feelings or psychological convictions. We should note that this is not a “scientific” move. It is not the result of “following the science.” Science can study the body and the mind and can describe and analyze how the two connect; but how the relationship between the two is constructed in terms of which has normative authority rests upon evaluative judgments shaped by wider philosophical or cultural commitments.

simply acknowledging this inner dimension of human selfhood is not the same as authorizing it to have a decisive role in identity. The Psalms and Paul look inward but then understand that inward life in terms of the prior authority of the external world as ordered by God.

Augustine moves inward so that he can then move outward to God and to the reality that is prior to and greater than his own feelings and in light of which those feelings are to be understood. The transgender person, by contrast, sees inward, psychological conviction as the nonnegotiable reality to which all external realities must be made to conform. How did the perennial inner life of human beings come to hold such power over our identities?

This conclusion is often summarized in the phrase “I think; therefore, I am.” What is of interest to my narrative is the way this places human thought—a psychological phenomenon—at the very center of the project.

Descartes formulated the notions of mind and body in a way that gave fundamental importance to the former and potentially set the two in opposition. Though it was not Descartes’s intention so to do, establishing this psychological foundation for certainty set in place a conceptual framework that makes transgenderism plausible.

Rousseau is particularly significant to our story because he offers a compelling and influential articulation of two ideas that help us understand the modern notion of the self. First, he locates identity in the inner psychological life of the individual. Feelings for Rousseau are central to who we are. And second, he sees society (or perhaps better, culture) as exerting a corrupting influence on the self. To the extent that society prevents us from acting consistently with our feelings, to that extent it prevents us from being who we really are. In short, society makes us inauthentic.

To know who a person is—in fact, to know oneself—one needs only to have access to their inner thoughts, for it is there that the real person is to be found. With this as his guiding principle, Rousseau offers the world what is in a sense the first modern autobiography.

Of course, autobiography is a self-serving genre. The reader has no guarantee that the psychological narrative is true, and certain events that would shed him in a bad light, such as the abandonment of his children, are dealt with in a remarkably cursory, unemotional manner so as to lessen their significance.

But the truth of the narrative is not the important thing. It is the psychological focus of the narrative, the prioritizing of the inner life, that emerges as a paradigm for later narratives—autobiographical, biographical, and fictional.

But modern society has exalted this notion of authenticity to the point where at times it cuts directly against the value that previous generations placed on restraint and self-control. In the early 1970s, for example, Richard Nixon’s presidency was fatally damaged by the existence on the transcription of the Watergate tapes of the phrase “expletive deleted.” The thought that the president might use foul language in discussions in the privacy of his office was deeply shocking to the American people. Today,

In the story of the modern self, then, Rousseau’s focus on the inner psychological life of the individual as taking us to the heart of who he or she is represents a key development in Western culture, the significance of which still has a profound effect on how we think of our identities today. And inevitably, as societies are made up of individuals, Rousseau’s focus on the inner life stands in positive relation to his view of the impact of our various social arrangements on the individual.

What fascinates him is the inner thought process that led him to commit this crime, and in this context he notes two things. First, the desire to help Verrat avoid going hungry was a good motive for his action. Rousseau was not driven by greed or a desire for personal gain. His sin was thus not the result of him being an intrinsically bad person. On the contrary, it speaks to an extent of his sympathy for another in need. Second, he mentions that he was also lured into committing the crime by Verrat flattering him as a talented young man. It was the fact that he liked to be liked, not that he liked doing evil, that proved his undoing.

No, Rousseau rejects the Christian doctrine of original sin. We human beings are born essentially moral; it is the pressures brought to bear on us by society to conform ourselves to its conventions and demands, and our weakness toward flattery, that explain our corruption. At least in the first instance, sin is really society’s fault, not ours.

As we shall see, later thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, will offer very different, and much darker, accounts of the inner voice of nature in which Rousseau places so much confidence. Environment and culture may shape us, but they do so within boundaries established by the basic moral tendencies of a human nature that tilts toward the dark side.

We also see here the underlying idea behind so much of modern child-centered education. If society is the problem because it perverts and corrupts the individual, then society’s institutions are the tool by which this is accomplished. If we believe this, then that means that we need to revise our understanding of the function of institutions in such a way that they serve the natural individual. In short, they become places of performance, of learning to follow and then to give expression to that inner voice of nature, not places where that inner nature is to be tamed and formed into something else.

In fact, Rousseau’s focus in Confessions on his inner psychology and the idea of the true self that he articulates in the Discourses together represent what we noted in chapter 1 is now known as expressive individualism, the notion that I am most truly myself when I am able to express outwardly what that voice of nature says to me inwardly.

We should also note one other implication of this: If the original, pristine individual is the truly authentic me, then not just institutions but every other person stands in a naturally adversarial relationship to me. Everyone else is first and foremost a potential threat to my authenticity. Again, Rousseau expresses this rather neatly in his work The Social Contract: Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.3

One might therefore respond to Rousseau by saying, “Man is born utterly dependent on others but everywhere tries to persuade himself that such an obvious fact is not actually true.”

Of course, that a sentence is utterly fallacious has never prevented it from being believed by large numbers of people and, on occasion, used as a foundational principle for a comprehensive philosophy of life.

And this ideal, free human is what later writers dubbed Rousseau’s noble savage: the individual in the pristine state of nature, uncorrupted by the demands of civilized society with its hypocrisies and sharp antitheses between outward behavior and that inner voice of nature, is answerable to no one and free to be himself. That is the modern myth of selfhood that now dominates the Western imagination and that underlies the sexual revolution.

It was not a specific club with a formal membership list but more of a cultural ethos, and one that found exemplars across Europe, especially in Germany and Great Britain. Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron were all representatives of its literary expression.

At its heart, Romanticism sought to find authentic humanity in an acknowledgement of, and connection to, the power of nature.

the focus on nature that we find in the Romantics was not simply driven by a desire for a sentimental thrill found contemplating, as in these examples, the sublime vastness of a great mountain or the delicate beauty of a flower. Romanticism saw this contemplation of nature as having a deep ethical impact upon individuals who engaged in such.

We might say, in modern parlance, they made the individual an emotionally healthy, empathetic person.

As nature has an impact upon the emotions, so it forms the person’s moral sentiments or instincts in the right way.

Again, here we see the power of nature (and the passivity of human beings) in truly shaping what it means to be human, and this expressed in deeply religious language. Nature is powerful. And being sensitive to the voice of nature is necessary if one is to be a truly authentic human being.

In short, Wordsworth considers the idiot boy to be a purer, more authentic example of human nature precisely because he is not shaped or influenced by the corrupting nature of sophisticated society. We might say today that he has “no filters” and that with him, “what you see is what you get.” His outward behavior is a precise reflection of his inner life. And he is also one who lives much closer to nature. He is, in fact, an example of that noble savage that is typically seen as the epitome of Rousseau’s ideal human being.

In short, the Romantics grant an authority to feelings, to that inner psychological space, that all human beings possess. And those feelings are first and foremost genuine, pristine, and true guides to who human beings are. It is only society, with its petty rivalries, its competitiveness, and its artificial sophistication, that twists, perverts, and distorts those feelings. That is a key move in the path to the modern self, made more compelling by the fact that it is expressed in an artistic form rather than a philosophical argument.