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

by Carl R. Trueman

In short, it is those economic relations that have the most profound impact upon our self-consciousness and our identity. This also means that how we think about reality chan...

all forms of human community become political.

Alienation at its simplest refers to that feeling that leaves us at odds with our surroundings.

The result is an unpleasant feeling of what we might describe as psychological or emotional discomfort.

For Marx, alienation is specifically connected (as the first point above would imply) to human beings in relation to economic considerations. A man feels alienation because he is alienated from the fruits of his labor.

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.

Marx picks up on Feuerbach’s critique of religion.

function of alienation,

he sees religion as deriving from economic conditions.

Thus, for Marx, religious morality is really an expression of the economic concerns of the dominant class;

Marx regards religion as a human creation with no transcendent status and no necessarily abiding significance.

At its most positive, religion fills a psychological need: the pain and suffering that economic alienation causes are alleviated by the false hope of a life of eternal bliss hereafter, where all wrongs are righted and peace and justice prevail.

Second, this not only meets the psychological needs of the workers but also works in the interests of the bosses and factory owners because it enables them to bear th...

Third, this means that the demolition of false hope—the debunking of religion—is vital if the working class is to realize the truly desperate nature of its condition and then ta...

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 m...

Further, freedom can be achieved only by the aboli...

We should also notice in closing that Marx’s claim that all human social relations are economic relations has one more significant result: all human social relations must therefore be political because they all serve the status quo.

Nietzsche both assumes that the Enlightenment’s demolition of the Christian faith was decisive and yet is fascinated by the fact that religion persists as a reality in society and in people’s individual lives.

Nietzsche is not simply interested in why religion persists. He is also fascinated by the fact that the influence of religion persists even among those who have come to reject its central claims, such as the existence of God.

We might say that the death of God is also the death of human nature, or at least the end of any cogent argument that there is such a thing as human nature. If there is no God, then men and women cannot be made in his image and are not therefore required to act in accordance with that image. 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.

Nietzsche offers a line of reasoning that is analogous to that of Marx: morality is manipulative, a way of one person or group exerting power over another, covering this manipulation with the veneer of transcendent authority. And typically it is the weak and the despicable—in Nietzsche’s view, those who are unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge of self-creation—that indulge in such things.

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.

Well, at the heart of Nietzsche’s approach is self-creation: if there is no God, then we are our own masters.

analogy of which Nietzsche himself is fond: we are artists and, as such, we are tasked with the art of self-creation.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, a figure to which he points in several works as one who transcends the rather pitiful kind of humanity of Nietzsche’s own day.

The superman is rather the one who engages in dramatic, transgressive self-creation.

Goethe, the great German polymath, probably represents for Nietzsche himself the closest thing to the superman: a free spirit who transcended the spirit of his own age, a man of both intellectual brilliance and significant action.

The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment.

But Christ’s significance for Wilde is not that ascribed to him by orthodox Christianity. Rather, it is the fact that Christ is the supreme individualist, the one who breaks with the social conventions and expectations of his day to tread his own intentional path through the world.

Wilde is striking against the Victorian notion that literature should be morally improving to those who read it. For him, by contrast, the purpose is a purely aesthetic one and, as becomes clear in responses to critical reviews of his book, one that is actually focused merely on the pleasure of the artist, not his audience:

actions cease to have intrinsic moral value; what makes them “moral’” rather is the freedom with which they are performed.

One of the most obvious aspects of modern public life is the central role that sex plays within it. This should strike us as rather odd: the fact that the most private and intimate act between two people has become so important to public life is surely a strange development.

In biblical times or in ancient Greece, sex was regarded as something that human beings did; today it is considered to be something vital to who human beings are.

Sigmund Freud.

his legacy lives on in two important areas: his notion that sex is foundational to human happiness and his theory of civilization.

First, the notion that sex is foundational to human happiness is central to Freud’s thinking.

We might say that for Aristotle, for Christians, and for Jefferson, the question of happiness is central to the question of human ends and central to the notion of human nature. Indeed, it is a vital part of what it means to be human.

With the collapse of the belief in human nature as possessing an intrinsic moral structure, to which Marx’s and Nietzsche’s thought witnessed, the question of happiness becomes a matter of serious contention.

Now, while Freud abandons the notion of human nature as having an intrinsic moral structure, he does believe that human beings still share something in common. Here he builds on a longstanding Enlightenment tradition of seeing pleasure and pain as central to thinking about good and evil, happiness and the lack thereof:

Freud

our identities as human beings are in a very important sense fundamentally defined by our sexual desires.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this move to make sexual desire c...

And the idea that human flourishing is virtually synonymous with sexual fulfillment is a commonplace—in fact, virtually an intuition—of modern Western culture. The fulfilled life is a sexually fulfilled life.

Modern culture’s portrayal of traditional sexual standards—virginity, chastity, modesty, even monogamy—is typically engineered to present these values as somehow inadequate, even oppressive and dehumanizing.

If sex is basic to what it means to be a human being, the question obviously arises: Why, then, does society typically place so many restrictions on sexual behavior? Freud’s answer has two dimensions: he sees morality at root as conventional, as a matter of cultural practices, and not as grounded in some larger, objective moral structure of nature; and he sees moral conventions as serving to create and maintain civilization.

Freud’s argument is rather clever: morality rests on notions of disgust, cultivated in the individual by the wider culture, in order to provoke revulsion at certain behaviors. But the basis for that revulsion is not rational. It is merely that of a social convention. A man might object to using his girlfriend’s toothbrush ostensibly on grounds of hygiene; but he will rather enjoy giving her a passionate kiss that involves the same compromise of his personal cleanliness. And so, Freud argues, morality is really a matter of cultural tastes.

Our very language witnesses here to the collapsing of morality into questions of taste as shaped by the culture that surrounds us.

Throughout history, sex has always been inextricably linked with politics.

The relationship of the two today, however, is more explicit and more omnipresent than in the past.

Wilhelm Reich, a young psychoanalyst who had been part of Freud’s circle in Vienna but whom Freud himself came to regard as too extreme.