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

by Carl R. Trueman

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.

Things once regarded as obvious and unassailable virtues have in recent years been subject to vigorous criticism and even in some cases come to be seen by many as more akin to vices.

it can seem as if things that almost everybody believed as unquestioned orthodoxy the day before yesterday—that marriage is to be between one man and one woman, for example—are now regarded as heresies advocated only by the dangerous, lunatic fringe.

The generation gap today is reflected not simply in fashion and music but in attitudes and beliefs about some of the most basic aspects of human existence.

Part of the confusion is caused by the fact that so many areas of our lives and world seem to be in flux that there seems very little that is solid or constant by which we can navigate the apparent chaos around us.

there is something that helps to unify the changes we are witnessing and to make them, if not entirely explicable, at least less random than we might be tempted to think. This is the notion of the self. And the self connects to three other concepts of relevance to my narrative: expressive individualism, the sexual revolution, and the social imaginary.

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.

Perhaps this is best expressed by a series of questions. Am I, for example, to be understood primarily in terms of my obligations toward, and dependence upon, others? Does education consist in training me in the demands and expectations of the wider culture and forming me, shaping me into that which will serve the community at large? Is “growing up” a process by which I learn to control my feelings, to act with restraint, and sacrifice my desires to those of the community around me? Or am I to understand myself as born free and able to create my own identity? Does education consist in enabling me to express outwardly that which I feel inwardly? Is growing up a process not of learning restraint but rather of capitalizing on opportunities to perform?

conviction is that the normative self of today—the typical way in which we each think of our identity—is one who answers those las...

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. Su...

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.

authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s inward feelings.

In this book, I do not wish to deny that expressive individualism has aspects that are good and commendable. I am concerned, however, with how its triumph as the normative self has led to some of the strangest and, to many, most disturbing aspects of our modern world.

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. It is not therefore the fact that, for example, modern people engage in gay sex or look at sexually explicit material, while earlier generations did not, that constitutes the sexual revolution. It is that gay sex and the use of pornography no longer involve the shame and social stigma they once did. Indeed, they have even come to be regarded as a normal part of mainstream culture.

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.

Obviously, Western society still has sexual codes and places limits on sexual behavior—pedophilia, for example, continues to be outlawed in the United States—but those limits are increasingly defined not so much by the sex acts themselves as by the issue of whether the parties involved have consented to those acts. 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.

obvious question to ask is: How did this come about, when so few people today have heard of, let alone read, the various thinkers that I discuss?

The answer is that these thinkers do not “cause” the rise of the modern self or the sexual revolution in any simple or direct way, as a ball hitting a window might cause the glass to shatter. Many other factors come into play,

in no sense is the intellectual story I trace here a fully sufficient causal account of how the modern self came to be. As I noted, few if any of us have read their works.

So if people are not reading Rousseau and company, why do so many of their ideas shape the way we think about the world? The answer is that their thinking captures important aspects of what Charles Taylor calls “the social imaginary.” It is an awkward term, using an adjective, imaginary, as if it were a noun. But as it is established in the literature, and as it does convey an important concept, it is nonetheless useful for my project.

But it is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.

human beings do not typically think about themselves and the world they inhabit in consistently self-conscious terms. Rather, we imagine it to be in certain ways—physically and indeed morally.

The reason society thinks about sex the way it does is the result of the confluence of a host of factors.

the picture is clear: a complex set of factors, from philosophy to technology to pop culture, shape the way we intuitively think about sex.

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. The question for us therefore is: Where do those commitments originate?

human beings have always been aware that they have an inner realm of reflection.

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.

What Rousseau proposed as something novel and exciting is now the norm. 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.

In this idea, that society is the problem and not the natural individual, we see the seed of numerous modern tendencies.

Rousseau is not wrong in his claim that environment, or culture, shapes our nature. Our backgrounds do help to form our understanding of what is and is not acceptable behavior, what our moral priorities should be, whether we respect other people’s persons and property.

Where Rousseau is wrong, however, is in seeing the hypothetical pristine nature of human beings as something that is instinctively empathetic and moral.

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.

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 ...

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.

For Rousseau, we are most ourselves when we act outwardly in accordance with that inner, pristine voice of nature because we are naturally free, independent individuals. 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.

Romanticism.

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. Meditating upon the natural wonders of the world served to reshape them morally, to reconnect them with nature and with their own true humanity and that of others. The beautiful in nature inspired delight, the sublime inspired fear and awe. And the experience of the two helped to form appropriate sentiments that shaped the moral intuitions or instincts of the individual. We might say, in modern parlance, they made the individual an emotionally healthy, empathetic person.

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.

the modern self also largely rejects the idea that human nature has any intrinsic moral structure or significance.

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.

The ancient Athenian thought differently from the medieval knight, who thought differently from the Prussian merchants of Hegel’s own day. For Hegel, this process was one driven by ideas. In engaging with each other, humans found that the way they thought was transformed through this interaction.

The real question of human nature goes beyond basic biology; it really demands that we address questions of, say, morality and purpose. Does human nature carry with it a moral structure and a specific end or purpose that remain constant over time and to which we must conform ourselves in order to flourish? Or are we simply the stuff of which we are made and beyond that free to be or do whatever we so choose? Pieces of living playdough attached to a will? Once Hegel placed human self-consciousness at the center and observed how this changes over time, the question of this deeper sense of human nature became far more urgent.

We might summarize Hegel by saying that he saw true, full human nature as something emerging over time, as something to be realized by a historical process that would terminate at some point in the future. This process was one that he characterized as being one of Spirit.

he saw this process of the Spirit as driven by ideas. It was as self-consciousnesses interacted that ways of thinking were changed.

While Hegel is what we call an idealist and interested in the intellectual spirit of the age (i.e., the ideas that gave it its distinctive shape), Marx is a materialist, and that in a twofold sense.

He believes that the world is all that there is, that there is no transcendent realm, no God or gods behind this material universe that might provide a sacred foundation for any moral order. But Marx’s materialism goes further: he believes that the material conditions of life, specifically the economic relations that exist between people, decisively shape how we think of reality.