The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

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The symptoms of this malaise are all around us. It is surely odd that there is apparently more anxiety today than, say, 50 or 100 years ago. We enjoy considerable material comforts today, not least of which is the most technologically advanced health care to which any generation has ever had access. Unlike my father, my earliest memories do not involve running to the bomb shelter to avoid being killed by a Luftwaffe raid. Life is—outwardly at least—much better. If we look at just three institutions—the family, the church, and the nation—it’s clear that each has been transformed. 1. Family Trueman argues that the sexual revolution is just one outworking of a change in our understanding of the self. He defines ‘the self’ as ‘how we think of the purpose of life, the meaning of happiness, and what actually constitutes people’s sense of who they are and what they are for’ (p.23). The four parts of the book help us to understand the progress of this change. Taken separately, these phenomena would be significant enough. That they coincide and are interconnected means that both our societies and also our own sense of identity are in a state of flux, generating a kind of vertigo that leaves us disoriented and often adrift.

In particular, he has profoundly misunderstood Romanticism, especially English Romanticism; Wordsworth in particular. Trueman’s claim that the Romantics fostered a radically new understanding of humanity that “focused on the inner life of the individual” is so oversimplified to the point of being seriously misleading. To be sure, the Romantics were introspective; focused on the inner life, as did many before them in various ways (including Augustine, Christian monasticism, and the Psalmists, for example, to name just a few). See Psalm 104. When God’s people pray, “O LORD, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all”—and when they proclaim, “May the glory of the LORD endure for ever; may the LORD rejoice in his works”—these are vastly more than mere expressions of personal sentiment. They enact something in God’s purpose. They touch—they bless and transfigure—the things over which they are spoken. When we do so in faith, we are participating, even now, at least to some degree, in the Adamic vocation.Once sex is equated in some deep way with human identity (a very plausible equation, given that sexual desires are for most of us the most powerful things we experience), then laws and customs relating to sexual behavior inevitably become political—because in corralling sexual behavior, they determine who society allows us to be. And sex sells. Movies, TV shows, the internet, and even commercials shape us to think of ourselves in sexual terms, thus reinforcing the political tendency of the sexual revolution. Part 3 turns to Sigmund Freud through whom psychology become sexualized and his followers through whom sexuality became politicized. Freud taught that humans are, at essence, sexual creatures and, therefore, defined by our sexual proclivities. If before Freud sex was a matter of activity, after Freud it was a matter of identity. If before Freud sex was about doing what made you happy, after Freud sex was about being your authentic self. Those who advanced Freudian thought—Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and others—did so through a Marxist framework that saw traditional sexual norms as marks of an oppressive patriarchy bent on maintaining its own power. To resist the patriarchy would require total sexual freedom and self-definition. If through Rousseau identity became psychologized, then through Freud psychology (and thus identity) become sexualized, and through Reich and Marcuse identity (and thus sex) became politicized. What Wordsworth (or Coleridge, or Keats) would never have thought, or said, is that beauty is simply “in the eye of the beholder”; a mere projection of one who is only ostensibly seeing. Such an attitude, of course, in fact nullifies perception, itself, in favor of stand-alone individual “expression.” Those who have embraced this attitude have hurled themselves across a terrible chasm; leaving Romanticism—and humanity, in general, on the other side. Edwin Abbott’s description of “Pointland,” in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, comes to mind. And against this very attitude, C. S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man offers a substantial, and truly prophetic, warning. But this is the critical difference that Trueman misses. Trueman can often be informative and insightful, especially in his discussion of Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and all those then influenced by their thought, often unwittingly (which these days, like it or not, think it good or not, at least to some extent includes almost all of us). The self is closely identified with inner psychological thoughts and feelings (hence, trans ideology has become so plausible), and personhood is equated with self-consciousness (hence, babies in the womb and people suffering with dementia are increasingly thought of in nonpersonal ways and thus as not possessing rights). How has this view informed how the world thinks about ethics?

Carl Trueman explains modernity to the church, with depth, clarity, and force. The significance of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. . . is hard to overstate.” Sometimes there is no clearer way to put it: our culture has gone mad. But while its insanity is irrational, it’s not illogical. Trueman has convincingly shown why we are in the place we are as a culture; the next step is to demonstrate not only the moral absurdity of secular progressivism, but also the moral superiority of Christianity. While secularization and sexualization have been liberating to many, there is an inherent problem with identity becoming something internal: it makes it subjective. This is also the case for our collective sense of ethics: things that used to be objectively good and bad have now moved to the subjective realm of interpretation. This makes it difficult to agree upon collective ideas, fracturing society and creating cultural chaos. The freedom of speech, once a paragon of liberal democracies, has become damaging, because “words become potential weapons.” First, I would imagine that at one time or another we have all asked the question that led Trueman to write this book. How in the world did our culture get to the point where the statement, “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body” makes logical sense? The changes have happened so fast that we can easily become disoriented. But if you have ever been confused, frustrated, or exasperated by the strange logic at work in our culture, this book will at least give you categories to make sense of what is happening. The unprecedented coincidence of our times is that of the plastic, psychological notion of the self and the liquidity, or instability, of our traditional institutions.In this timely book, Carl Trueman analyzes the development of the sexual revolution as a symptom—rather than the cause—of the human search for identity. Trueman surveys the past, brings clarity to the present, and gives guidance for the future as Christians navigate the culture in humanity’s ever-changing quest for identity. When the external markers by which I understand my world disappear or are constantly changing, then I myself am also constantly changing. Restlessness and dissatisfaction are the routine distempers of such an age. Church’s Response David VanDrunen ,Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics, Westminster Seminary California

The polarization of the United States and the U.K. caused by the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, respectively, indicate that national identity is perhaps losing its ability to provide a unifying framework for political disagreement. Institutional Flux and the Self Bruce Riley Ashford, Professor of Theology and Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; coauthor, The Gospel of Our King This is Carl Trueman's starting point. And from it, he draws a straight(-ish) line to our present situation, in which "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" is a coherent, intelligible thought. For, as he himself points out, as little as a generation ago Romanticism’s focus, especially Wordsworth, was on the interplay between the inner life, and an irreducible Other—an Other which had the capacity to enchant, and reinform the self. That Romanticism may not have fully understood that “Other” doesn’t negate the point. If Calvin was the Frenchman who inflicted himself on Geneva (a thing he would have said was always going to happen), then Rousseau — "the other Genevan", as Carl Trueman calls him — was that city's belated revenge on France. And, through France, on the rest of us.Both these weaknesses are unfortunate but understandable given the scope of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. There’s no doubt that Trueman’s book is an incredible achievement and a very important contribution to our understanding of the world we now live in. Transgenderism as an ideology is only the most recent and most extreme form of this to grip the political imagination. That we are now to teach our children that not even their bodies are any authoritative guide to who they are is a dramatic and disturbing development, placing immense responsibility on them—god-like responsibility, one might say—without offering any guide as to how they might respond. Yet for all the novelty of transgenderism, it is but a symptom of the psychological self that has deep and longstanding roots in the Western intellectual tradition.