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February 5 - April 16, 2023
What was once simply self-evident, that a boy should grow up to be a man to become a husband and assume the responsibilities of a father, now entails a search to discover an inner truth about “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” based on emotions and will rather than nature and reason.
the push to redefine marriage legally was
never really about joint tax returns and hospital visitation but about forcing churches to update their doctrines and bakers to affirm same-sex relationships.
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.
In short, the modern self is one where authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s inward feelings.
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 dramatic changes and flux we witness and experience in society today are related to the rise to cultural normativity of the expressive individual self, particularly as expressed through the idioms of the sexual revolution. And the fact that the reasons for this are so deeply embedded in all aspects of our culture means that we all are, to some extent, complicit in what we see happening around us.
explanatory. To respond to our times we must first understand our times. That is my goal. And with that having been said, let the story of the modern self begin.
A moment’s reflection indicates that the doctor in the mid-twentieth century who saw what we now call gender dysphoria as a problem with the mind was working within a social imaginary that granted normative authority to the physical body.
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.
Rather like the wind chimes that are so popular today, the Aeolian harp made music when the wind blew over it and caused the strings to sound. It is the perfect image for the idea that human beings are but instruments that play as they should when moved by the power of nature.
they represent an impulse in the modern world that tends to see sophisticated society as corrupting and to regard instinct, or that inner voice of nature, as possessing significant authority. This may be an intuition in contemporary society, something we simply feel rather than upon which we consciously reflect.
All of this derives from authorizing—indeed, valorizing—that inner voice of nature and then expecting or even demanding that the outside world, from the public square to the individual’s body, conform to this.
The idea that merely being a human carries an intrinsic morality and moral purpose is seen as a fiction, and often regarded as one confected in order to justify the exploitation of one group by another.
One implication of this understanding of human identity and relationships is that all forms of human community become political. Everything, from the village sports team to trade unions, draws its ultimate significance from the role it plays in the economic (and thus political) nature of society.
What Feuerbach is saying here is that religious talk about God—talk that a believer thinks is referring to God as an objective being—is really just talk about humanity, an ideal version but humanity nonetheless, projected onto an idea that has no real existence. We might put this in more accessible terms by saying that God-talk really represents wishful thinking on humanity’s part.
Religion may make claims about something spiritual and other-worldly, but it is really this world that is its primary concern.
Philosophers like Feuerbach merely describe the world; for Marx, the purpose of philosophy is to change it. To put it bluntly: if religion is one major means by which the current unjust set of economic relations is maintained, then at the heart of any drive to transform society must lie a pungent and effective criticism of religion.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
In short, Marx lays the groundwork for some of the most basic of our culture’s contemporary intuitions: Religion is a sign of intellectual weakness in its adherents and a means of social oppression for its proponents. Further, freedom can be achieved only by the abolition of religion. Above all, the idea that human nature is to be morally framed by theological claims such as the notion that men and women are made in the image of God is to be repudiated.
There is nothing in this world where human beings can relate to each other that is not a potential arena of political conflict, because all areas of life connect to the overall economic structure of society and thus to society’s inequalities and injustices; and Marx should be given much of the credit for laying the theoretical foundations of that.
And if men and women are not made in God’s image, to what absolute moral standard must they submit themselves? To none, says Nietzsche, for the very idea of an absolute moral standard becomes meaningless in a world that is intrinsically of no significance beyond the matter from which it is made.
For Nietzsche, then, the great task facing human beings is to break free of the metaphysical myths that religion weaves and to shatter the moral codes that hinder individuals from being strong. We might express Nietzsche’s thought this way: freed from the burden of being creatures of God, human beings must rise to the challenge of self-creation, of being whoever they choose to be. Put perhaps even more bluntly: be whoever or whatever works for you. You should feel no obligation to conform to the standards or criteria of anybody else.
The rebellious Nietzschean impulse is found in three particular aspects of Wilde’s life and thought. First, the artist is the greatest exemplar of how life should be lived because the artist creates and performs; he does not simply conform to the crowd or, as Nietzsche might have expressed it, to “the morality of the herd.”6 As Wilde declares, Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.7
The second Nietzschean element we find in Wilde is the notion that art should be detached from any kind of moral code.
This leads to the third aspect of Wilde that is Nietzschean: ethics is really aesthetics, or a matter of taste.
As Wilde says, all that matters is whether a person “realizes the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and life is wrong.”12
a basic assumption of our modern cultural imagination: there is little or no moral structure to human nature. To be human is merely to be an intentional thinking agent. What we think and what we do is our business, as we are not answerable to any higher power or even to the authority of our own bodies. We can be whoever we want to be and act however we want to act. Morality, if it features at all, is something that is contextually determined. For example, did that person consent to the sexual act in which the two of us engaged? The act itself has no moral significance beyond that.
Sexual codes are now the material of political policy making in a way that the average Westerner in 1950 would have found incomprehensible, let alone the denizen of the world of Paris, Mark Antony, or Henry VIII.
Such a development was hardly surprising once the thinking of Freud took hold. If we are at root defined in large part by our sexual desires—if sexual desire (or “orientation,” as we now say) is who we are—then sex must be political because rules governing sexual behavior are rules that govern what is and is not considered by society to be legitimate as an identity.
Reich continues, Morality’s aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. Thus, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later.8
The implications of this are dramatic.
The sexual revolution did not redefine modesty; it overthrew it completely.
In short, the very concept of modesty is now considered to be repressive, an oppressive assault upon individual authenticity.
For the sexual revolution, as for Reich, the existence of moral principles indicates that sexual needs are not being met. And in a world where sexual needs are foundational to identity, that means identities are being suppressed or denied. The game, therefore, is not to change those principles or merely loosen them. It is to abolish them in their entirety.
Whereas in the nineteenth century, the big questions were those of economic inequality, by the 1930s Reich sees them as shifting into the psychological domain. We might say that the big question is now whether society will allow people to be themselves—which in Reich’s mind is the same as “give support and affirmation to individuals as they express their sexual desires in their social context.”
“warfare against repression,”
In other words, it is not enough to say to David that society will allow him to behave as he wishes in private without fear of prosecution. That is mere tolerance. Society must also affirm that his identity is as valid as that of anybody else, lest he feel marginalized through psychological oppression. This is a matter we will discuss further in chapter 6.
It is not the act but the desire, or the orientation of that desire, that defines the person. This changes everything.
We can now see that once identity is psychologized, anything that is seen to have a negative impact upon someone’s psychological identity can potentially come to be seen as harmful, even as a weapon, that does serious damage. This includes those words and ideas that stand over against those identities that society chooses to sanction. This has clear implications for traditional freedoms: religion and speech.
necessary preconditions for our current situation, not sufficient preconditions.
A necessary precondition is something that must be true prior to something else. Thus, for apples to fall from trees, there must be some force that we call gravity pulling them down. Gravity is here a necessary precondition. But for a particular apple to fall from a particular tree at a particular time, there has to be a particular cause—say, the farmer shaking the tree or a bird pecking at the apple’s stalk. In these latter cases, we have sufficient preconditions. These explain the particularities of a specific incident of an apple falling.
where once the world was fixed and therefore I needed to find my place within it (a place that was itself rather fixed), now its lack of fixity inclines me to think that the world can actually be shaped to my will.
It changes the fundamental relationship of human beings to their environment and to each other.
Technology
Technology also reinforces the focus on the individual, and upon individual satisfactions.
We no longer think of ourselves as subject to the world’s fixed nature, or of it as having an objective authority or meaning. We are the ones with power, and we are the ones who give the world significance.
Black Lives Matter—a quintessentially American movement rooted in a distinctively American narrative—has so easily been exported around the world is also indicative of this.
institutions are no longer authoritative places of formation but of performance.
