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

by Carl R. Trueman

What Reich does to bring the two together, however, is use Marx’s notion that human nature is an historical construct to make Freud’s insights useful for Marxist thought.

Reich is a Marxist, so when he examines the sexual codes of his day, he is particularly sensitive to what he sees as the class interests that are protected or reinforced by sexual codes. In short, he views them as maintaining not simply civilization in general but specifically the kind of bourgeois, middle class, capitalist culture that German life embodies.

In 1930s Germany, Reich sees these codes as reinforcing an institution that serves to cultivate a mindset with a tendency to follow authoritarian leadership figures.

Reich belongs to a long-standing tradition of suspicion or criticism of the traditional family as a norm.

The point is clear: sexual codes must be shattered if human beings are to be truly free. Those things that inhibit the free sexual expression, even of young children, are oppressive and prevent individuals from truly being themselves.

Of course, the question immediately rises of who exactly is going to facilitate this revolution in sexual codes if the family (and later the church) have a vested interest in maintaining the old, oppressive standards of behavior. The answer lies in the last sentence of the above quotation: society will do so, by promoting this sexual freedom and dealing severely with those who oppose it.

No one who lives in the Western world today will find his statement to be anything less than prophetic.

this is Rousseau with a sexual twist: the authentic person is the sexual being, the one guided by the inner voice of (sexualized) nature, and the role of education is not to repress that for the purpose of personal formation but to liberate it for the purpose of self-expression.

The sexual revolution did not redefine modesty; it overthrew it completely. Even to raise such questions as to the modesty of bikinis or skirt length today will likely elicit at best laughter and at worst some rebuke for daring to tell somebody else how to dress. 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.

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.

The term recognition is important here. By recognition, I mean not simply the commonsense notion of realizing that some claim to a particular identity exists; that, say, David claims to be gay. Rather, I mean that society does not simply tolerate David’s identity while not really approving of it but actively affirms, supports, and encourages it. 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.

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.

How have the thoughts and ideas of thinkers whose books and even names may be unknown to the majority of people today come to inform the intuitions of the man and woman in the street? How have we moved from the arguments of a few elite thinkers to the instincts of the masses?

A necessary precondition is something that must be true prior to something else.

these figures were not the only influential thinkers in their day and generation. In fact, in the cases of Marx and Nietzsche, it is arguable that they were not particularly influential at all in their own day. Marx died in virtual penury, Nietzsche after a decade of insanity. And the latter’s work attracted little serious interest in his own lifetime. The question of why these nineteenth-century thinkers became so influential in the subsequent century is therefore an intriguing one.

a number of other factors that come into play in the twentieth century that serve to show why the revolution of the self, particularly in its sexualized form, is a plausible development.

the notion of the self with which we now intuitively operate in the West—that of something plastic that we believe we can shape in any way we wish—is arguably simply one example of a much broader view of the whole of reality.

If I had been born in England in the fourteenth century, I would have lived in a world that I would have considered stable and fixed.

In short, my world would have been very fixed and very stable.

Our world is very different. Mass transportation, migration, education, social mobility, technology, science, medicine: all of these things and more have served to make the world a much more plastic place than it was in 1400.

To put it bluntly, the modern cultural imagination sees the world as raw material to be shaped by the human will. Perhaps the most important factor in shaping this has been technology.

Technology also reinforces the focus on the individual, and upon individual satisfactions.

Traditional Christianity in particular is now commonly viewed as connected to imperialism, racism, and hatred of minorities, covering its own hypocrisy in these areas with the language of unctuously self-righteous piety.

If the last century has been brutal in its effect on institutional religious authority, a similar story can be told about the traditional family.

family. As to the notion of the nation, this too is now under severe strain.

Religious institutions, family, and nation have even in the recent past been three fundamental external anchors for identity. They provided much of the fixity, and thus stability and authority, of the early modern world. In answer to the question, “Who am I?” each could give an answer: You are Carl Trueman, a Christian who is the son of John and English by birth. Once those three lose their authority or become problematic or even sources of shame, the question of my identity needs to find other anchors. And the question is: Where can I do so? Shorn of such external markers, the turn inward gains yet more momentum.

institutions are no longer authoritative places of formation but of performance.

A second element in the question of the plasticity of reality relates to the matter of sacred order.

cultures have traditionally justified their moral orders—the set of values by which they organize themselves and regulate behavior—by appealing to a sacred order and the traditions rooted in that order. In other words, they regard their moral codes as having authority because they are grounded in something beyond this immediate world—the flow of Fate or the will of the gods or of God.

something beyond itself, to a sacred order.

In today’s Western world, however, the notion of a sacred order has been largely abandoned.

that places us in an unprecedented and highly volatile situation: our cultures must now justify themselves purely on the basis of themselves.

with the loss of the sense of sacred order, morality tends to default to a form of pragmatism, of what works and what does not. Arguments based on the authority of God’s law or the idea that human beings are made in the image of God no longer carry any significant weight in a world devoid of the sacred.

To use a distinction deployed by philosopher Roger Scruton, pornography is about bodies, not faces. If sex is just about my pleasure, any body will do as a partner. But in a marriage, the specific identity of the sexual partners is critical. The purpose of sex is not to have sex but to make love, to reinforce a relationship with a particular person—or, to use Scruton’s terminology, with a face, not just with a body.

If we are honest, Freud was touching on a significant truth: sex and sexual desires do shape who we are in fundamental ways.

In short, we might perhaps say that human identity tilts in a sexual direction; and when external anchors of identity are weakened or even collapse, then the ideas of Freud, the availability of contraception, and the proliferation of easily accessible pornography can all find receptive soil in which to grow and make that tilt something obvious in the way our societies think and behave.

What is perhaps important here is that which political scientist Jacob Blakely calls “the double hermeneutic effect” of social sciences. This is the idea that “an interpretation of the world [offered by a social science] actually shapes the very interpretations that comprise it.”

this means that the models we use to explain the world do not so much reflect the way the world is as impose a particular shape upon the world.

In short, the tradition of seeing the world as driven by sex that Kinsey’s reports inaugurate is responsible for the fact that we now see the world as driven by sex.

We might say that we find the world to mean what we expect it to mean. And when those with authority (such as scientists) tell us what we should expect it t...

The fields of politics, art, education, and corporate business are now all marked by an aggressive negativity toward the past and its values and beliefs. The political drive on the left to overthrow traditional notions of sexual morality and human identity and that on the populist right, with its rhetoric of contempt for traditional democratic institutions, both witness to a deep commitment to tearing down the values of the past. Burn the past to the ground is the underlying mantra of political radicals on both sides.

our culture is one marked by plastic people who believe they can make and remake themselves at will;

there is a sense in which I could be defined in terms of the various chemical compounds that make up my body—water, salt, fats.

And yet if I am asked who I am, it is very unlikely that I am going to respond by telling the inquirer my genetic code.

human beings do not simply wish to be free. We also wish to belong, to be part of a group where we are accepted and affirmed.

It is not a movement bound together by a set of intrinsic commonalities shared by its constituent groups,

it is a marriage of convenience, created by uniquely particular circumstances.

its different constituent members are actually divided over the very thing upon which an outsider might assume they are agreed: the nature and status of sex.

the coalition arose out of a shared sense of victimhood.