Considering The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Part 1

The first part of Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is fascinating to me. The book is about the road to the sexual revolution and the revolution of the concept of self. As he notes, there is a reason many today don’t bat an eye at the idea that “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”. There is a reason for the increasing polarization of our society. This first portion of his book examines the “architecture” of the revolution.

I must admit the philosophical books tend to be in the “deep end” for me. I’ve only studied enough philosophy in college and seminary to be slightly less ignorant. As I process his arguments it is from a lay man’s perspective, or common sense and in light of what I perceive in the world I live in. Others may have different opinions of the works cited and Trueman’s use of them.

The book begins with a forward by Rod Dreher. He begins with a statement by Solzhenitsyn, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” He was speaking of the “horrors of Soviet communism”. The same can be said of the seismic shifts in our own nation. He argues that the ways we’ve forgotten God matter, as do the how and why. In the Scriptures it is preceded by prosperity that leads to pride (Dt. 8 & Hosea 13). Focusing on changing morals just scratches the surface.

“Carl Trueman’s prophetic role is to reveal to the church today how that happened, so that even now, we might repent and, in so doing, find ways to keep the true light of faith burning in this present darkness, which comprehends it not.”

In his preface we find a variety of people mentioned including Mortification of Spin co-hosts past and present, some RTS professors in Scott Swain and Scott Redd, Rosaria Butterfield and a variety of institutions.

Introduction

In the introduction Trueman explains the sentence “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” would be incoherent to his grandfather. Today many believe it to be meaningful and true. This sentence, he notes, “carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions.” The “connection between mind and the body” is given more weight than biological facts. Gender is separated from sex, and chromosomes no longer define man or woman. His basic assumption is that the sexual revolution is only part of a wider revolution in how people understand the self. Our view of sex has changed because of view of self has changed.

Philosopher Charles Taylor sees a shift in self to the inner psychological life we see developing with Freud. Morality is derived from an inner sense or intuition (I see some possible overlap with Haidt’s moral intuition here). When people deny their inner reality, they feel trapped or that they are living a lie until they “come out” and speak the truth about their inner self. To be authentic, one must pursue that which makes them happy. Trueman will spend plenty of time with Taylor later. We do see the rise of the “expressive individual”. Who you think and feel you are is more important than what society says, and society actually needs to affirm who you think/feel you are.

He will also depend on Philip Rieff and Alasdair MacIntyre to describe the “triumph of the therapeutic, psychological man, the anticulture and deathworks. MacIntyre addresses truth claims finding their source in the inner self which leads to much of the polarization because you are not arguing about objectively true or untrue claims.

Trueman lays out the material in the second part of the book as Rousseau and Romanticism change the face of the world, focusing on the inner life of individuals. Rousseau and a number of Romantics see the individual as good and corruption coming from society, a theme also developed by Marx. The expressive individual ceases to be oppressed by the corrupt and enslaving conventions of society. In the third part of the book he will focus on the sexualization of this larger revolution. Freud advanced the idea that we are sexual beings, not simply sexed beings, from infancy. This explains, in part, the incessant need to push sex ed earlier and earlier. The goal is not simply the expansion, but the abolition, of cultural boundaries. It is an erotic free for all.

He then explores what the book is not. It is not exhaustive of how these ideas gained prominence. The book is “not a lament for a lost golden age” that actually didn’t exist. As Christians we are called to live faithful lives in the midst of various unfaithful societies. He wants us to understand the times so we can live in them with greater faithfulness.

Reimagining the Self

Trueman begins by introducing the social imaginary, or how societies think, as developed by Charles Taylor. It is “that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” It is the things a culture holds in common: narratives, practices, intuitions. It isn’t thought out so much as lived out. There has been a seismic shift in the social imaginary that now affirms what prior generations rejected, soundly.

Connected to this he develops the differences between mimesis and poisis. Surely these are common words in your functional vocabulary. Mimesis “regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human being as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.” This understands there being meaning in life that is objective, not purely subjective. This includes theism, but is not necessarily theistic (though that view would be unstable). The individual conforms to societal norms, to reality.

Poisis “sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.” This is far more existential in nature. There is no objective meaning to life. You create your own meaning. As society embraces this and the expressive individual, we see that society now conforms to individual norms. This has been facilitated by technological changes that change how we think about the world. It is much smaller now as airplanes and the internet shatter our view of geography. Our social imaginary has incorporated self-creation. “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body,” only makes sense in a poietic understanding of the world. In a mimetic view, the person conforms to culture’s view of man and woman. In a poietic society, society is oppressive if it forces its view on the individual. In the mimetic society, the individual who refuses to conform is seen as sick in some way.

Trueman then brings in Philip Rieff and the Nature of Culture. Beginning with Freud, Rieff developed a theory of culture in The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Following Freud, cultures are “primarily defined by what they forbid.” This is a very negative view of culture. Gone is what culture promotes. It all comes back to taboos, how culture limits the individual (building on the views of Rousseau). A culture must have mechanisms to communicate and enforce these taboos from one generation to the next.

Culture directed the individual outward to find their true selves. You found your place in society, lived a given role or function rather than creating your own true sense. The former is what you find in Richard Philip’s The Masculine Mandate, you find yourself in fulfilling your covenantal responsibilities. The latter is what you find in John Eldridge’s Wild At Heart where you get in touch with your inner self, often in nature, rather than in your community. (That is my application/assumption, not Trueman’s.)

From Political Man to Psychological Man

Continuing with Rieff, Trueman traces the path from political man to psychological man in light of his view of culture. This road begins with finding your self by conforming to culture, and ends with culture needing to affirm your self-generated identity. Political man “finds his identity in the activities in which he engages in the public life of the polis.” Rieff sees this in Aristotle. This eventually gave way, at least in Europe, to religious man who “found his primary sense of self in his involvement in religious activities” often in the context of Christendom. Medieval society was structured by the church.

With the industrial revolution we see the rise of economic man who “finds his sense of self in his economic activity.” You are what you do for a living. A job is satisfying if it provides what you need in life, and uses at least some skills you have. This creates self as unstable and temporary for many as technological shifts create job changes and careers. This was something Marx picked up on and exploited.

Economic man, being unstable, is replaced by psychological man who is preoccupied with the inner quest for happiness. He chooses to change jobs looking for satisfaction in what he does, not merely in what it produces. The gaze has shifted from outside of self to into self.

Trueman sees this as far to simplistic to be a historical framework. He does affirm the rise of psychological categories as dominant in how people view themselves in the West. Rieff ends up with a view quite similar to Taylor’s expressive individualism in which we find “our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires.” This produces a culture of authenticity in which you live according to your inner sense of self no matter how little it conforms to society. Marx and Nietzsche introduced the ideas that the culture must be overthrown because of how it oppresses the individual. In the hands of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse this takes a decidedly sexual turn.

In this kind of world, institutions become “places one goes to perform, not to be formed.” Or, as Trueman notes, formed by performing. School becomes more about sports and extracurricular activities, and now about activism instead of reading, writing and arithmetic. This explains the idea of “safe spaces” to escape ideas that may challenge us. School becomes a place to be affirmed, reassured. It affirms and furthers the “inward-directed therapeutic categories over traditional outward-directed educational philosophies.”

What we are discussing here is not simply what people do in their own homes between consenting adults. We are speaking of identities which compel others to accept and affirm. The oppressive codes of conduct of older societies must be shattered to set people free to live as they desire (because apparently all our desires are good). One must be allowed to follow one’s heart in the public arena and be approved by all (and bake that cake, too!).

This doesn’t seem obvious at first glance. The identity and sexual revolutions hasn’t stopped at permission. Traditional culture has been replaced with its reverse. Culture must serve the purposes “of meeting my psychological needs.” We inhabit space with others, and they “must be coerced to be part of our therapeutic world.” Rieff calls this the analytic attitude. Once adopted values are “transvalued”. That which was good is not considered bad, and that which is bad is now considered good.

In this therapeutic nightmare, words cause “psychological harm” and free speech needs to be suppressed because it can be a tool of oppression. This is far more serious than damage to persons and property, so riots are less significant than hate speech. Reich and Marcuse approve of these shifts as the birth of a liberated utopia while Rieff laments them as signs that a culture has died.

What is missing is “why some marginal identities gain mainstream acceptance and others remain (at least for the present) beyond the pale.” He turns to Charles Taylor again for the politics of recognition. Self is no longer limited by Decartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” We know ourselves in dialogue with others. We can’t describe ourselves “without reference to those around” us. This is an agnostic or atheistic version of Calvin’s view of the knowledge of God and self. You can’t know one without knowing the other.

Since we need to belong, and a healthy sense of self comes from belonging we must be acknowledged by others as we are (or want to be). No longer are we accepted because we conform, we must be accepted despite the fact we don’t want to conform. “This idea- that identity requires recognition by another- is a vital insight into the subject I am exploring in this book.” As a result, recognition “becomes a life-and-death struggle.”

Reimagining Our Culture

The second chapter shifts focus from the self to the culture. Some of the same material is covered since you can’t really talk about one without the other. It is more a matter of emphasis. At the end of the first paragraph he says as much.

Here Trueman introduces Rieff’s idea of the West as a third-world culture. This is not a question of economic development but rather the basis of moral authority. For Rieff (again building on Freud’s view of culture/society) first and second world cultures base morality on “something transcendent, beyond the material world.” There is an external authority, not a social construct. First world cultures are pagan. This means their moral codes are rooted in mythology. Stories shape the culture. Appeal is made to these stories. There is much about “fate”, in which your destiny is shaped by an unchangeable, impersonal force.

For a second-world culture, faith rather than fate is the issue. We see this in Christianity (providence is a result of the will of a personal God exercising His perfect knowledge, wisdom, love etc.). Culture is shaped by an understanding (however imperfect) of the character of God, and the laws are intended to reflect God’s concerns.

Both first and second-world cultures have stability because the basis of their morality does not change. They are beyond the people who live in the culture.

Third-world cultures forsake the sacred and establish moral codes within the individual. Traditional morality is seen as a social construct and therefore oppressive. This culture has fallen into the lie of the Garden, wanting to know and decide good and evil for one’s self. Yet people still seem to tell others what to do all the time. Go figure, right? However, Rieff considers these cultures to be “mature”. Morality becomes pragmatic, based on outcomes which are deemed good or bad based on the evaluation of the culture (THIS is the social construct).

Trueman sees parallels with Charles Taylor’s immanent frame. This world is all there is, the result of which is the rejection of any moral discourse rooted in what lies beyond it. Morality is utterly immanent, not transcendent. Where Rieff and Taylor differ is on the process of this shift. Rieff sees it similar to catastrophic: sudden and destructive. Taylor sees a slow process.

The problem with third-world cultures and the immanent frame is that they are inherently unstable, and filled with confusion. The individual may not know what is “in” and what is “out”.

The example that Trueman provides is the abortion debate. Is that fetus a “person with potential or a potential person?” 1st and 2nd-world cultures say the former, and the 3rd-world culture and immanent frame say the latter. Peter Singer pushes personhood even farther out than birth justifying even infanticide until children are capable of self-reflection (I think, therefore I am taken to a logical conclusion that I am not until I think or you think I can think). In this scenario, women can play god with the fetus in their womb. They decide who lives and dies; whose potential may or may not come into reality.

In terms of sex, the morality lies in mutual consent not any particular act. As a result “these third-world cultures are really just therapeutic cultures, the cultures of psychological man.” They are focused on self-actualization, on fulfilling the desires of the individual because there really is nothing else.

Trueman argues that all three of these cultures can exist simultaneously within the same society. This is the root of our polarization in many ways. We can’t talk because we have different sources of authority. Some point to a transcendent moral order which makes no sense to the expressive individual. One points to how culture necessarily restrains our wickedness and weirdness while the other demands that culture affirm their wickedness and weirdness as good. There is no common ground available for fruitful conversation about abortion, war, taxes, sexual deviance, marriage, vaccines …

MacIntyre and Emotivism

Truemen takes a detour into the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre who searched for a ground for morality. His book After Virtue focused on the problems created by the collapse of Marxism. He had been a Marxist and now needed to find a new worldview. He looked to Aristotle and those who built on his work. From the Thomist view he appreciated the teleological view of morality. “He insists that teleology enables individuals to distinguish between what they are and what they should be.” The evaluation of our actions is social embedded since we don’t exist in isolation.

MacIntyre rejected a neutrality from which we can deduce moral principles. Society constructs human relations and morality and studying their ethics gives you a picture what what they value. However, now society has a number of opposing ethical views. “Simply put, modern ethical discourse is chaotic because there is no longer a strong community consensus on the nature of the proper ends of human existence.”

Trueman applies this to a topic MacIntyre didn’t anticipate: same sex marriage. Christian tradition (2nd-world) sees marriage for “lifelong companionship, mutual sexual satisfaction, and procreation.” This necessitates the partnership is between people of the opposite sex. This view was the dominant view in Western civilization for thousands of years.

Same sex marriage called for a revision of the purposes of marriage. It needed at least one telos to change since they are not able to procreate by themselves due to nature, not providence.

This introduces emotivism as a theory of use. It presents one’s preferences as if truth claims. The desire to marry someone of the same sex becomes morally acceptable. This cuts both ways. The claim that homosexuality is wrong becomes disconnected from a transcendent morality and a matter of preference. As a mere preference you are now shamed for that preference that stands in the way of another’s happiness. The emotivist is essentially the expressive individual.

Trueman distinguishes between emotivism as a moral theory and as a social. It does not provide solid ground for ethics: I feel therefore I can. He does note it is a useful rhetorical strategy. All you have to do is label the opposing view as -phobic and you create an identity for your opponent they want to separate themselves from.

Anticultures and Antihistorical

Third-world cultures become anticultures. The elites of third-world cultures promote ideas that are not worthy of the term culture. They focus on destroying the 1st and 2nd-world cultures they want to replace. They tear down symbols of tradition. They undermine institutions connected with worlds they want to destroy (church, family, education, military…). If you look at the BLM website you will see how they view these institutions as oppressive and therefore targets for destruction since they are connected to “whiteness”.

He looks at the debate over slavery to see how a second-world culture can change is views. There was conflict because both sides pointed to (their understanding of) the same transcendent view. “Social orders based on sacred orders are quite capable of internal debate and reform based on the working out in practice of their underlying beliefs.” Change takes place on the basis of the accepted authorities rather than the removal of authorities.

Third-world cultures reject the past as a source for significant wisdom. The past is demonized instead of evaluated. This is connected with Lewis’ cultural snobbery but goes farther to the destruction of the past.

In these third-world cultures we see this play out in technology and fashion. There is the never-ending quest for the new. People eagerly await the new generation of phones or computers. Women (usually?) await the latest fashions and dump the old styles on the unwashed masses.

They use Marx’s materialist philosophy with its subversion of history. History becomes the story of oppression (not the mixed story of failure & success, oppression & freedom, sin & salvation). It is necessarily reductionistic. It is only about how people are exploited. It can only be mined to provide warnings of how people are exploited (except, apparently, how they’ve been exploited by Marxists of various stripes). History is reduced to the victims and victimizers.

Deathworks

Art begins to play a role (developed more fully in chapter 4). These intellectual ideas are communicated, emotively, via art which Rieff calls “deathworks”. “A deathwork, by contrast, represents an attack on established cultural art forms in a manner designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society.” I am a Monty Python fan, but it is hard not to see some of their work as deathwork as they undermined the structure of a rigid British society. This is because deathworks make traditional values look ridiculous. This is what much of Hollywood does these days as they characterize Christians as hypocrites and legalists (Footloose is a popular example). The works of John Irving, like The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, are similar in approach. Forrest Gump treated history in a similar way to undermine our valuing of history and tradition. Religion and traditional morality are portrayed as “distasteful and disgusting.”

Returning to institutions and history we see Trueman discuss forgetfulness. Not only is there the expunging of the public record by removing statues and history books, we also see the renaming of institutions because the honoree failed to live up to our modern standards. These are forms of deathworks.

Trueman returns to abortion. The debates are no longer about when life begins (science settled that!) but when personhood begins (because science can’t settle that and by golly some people just seem to love abortions). Abortion “profanes that which the second world regarded as sacred: human life made in the image of God from the moment of conception.”

Trueman ends by noting these philosophers provide us with helpful categories for understanding the cultural revolution and the revolutions of self and sex that drive it. I also find these helpful and recommend the first part of the book for those who want to think on these things more than a blog post/review can.