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

Product Information

I hope that it clarifies for readers the origins and depths of the revolution in the notion of selfhood that underlies the dramatic changes in Western culture over the last fifty years. The roots are deep, and we are all at some level complicit, so easy fixes—electing the right president, appointing the right judge—are not going to change the situation in substantial ways. What is the modern secular view of self and personhood? The psychological self—the notion that we are who we feel we are and that the purpose of life is inward, psychological contentment or satisfaction—renders identity a highly plastic, malleable thing, detached from any authority greater than personal conviction. Contemporary Politics of Sexual Identity

Even the bank in my hometown had a solidity to it—made from sandstone, with its magnificent doors framed by imposing Doric pillars. Its message? “I was here before you were born, and I’ll be here after you have gone. You can trust me.” Today, banks (if they have any building at all) tend, in my experience, to be made out of what appears to be cardboard. Their message? “We arrived last week, and we might be gone the day after tomorrow. Trust us at your peril.”The origins lie in the suggestion by my friends Rod Dreher, the journalist, and Justin Taylor at Crossway that I write an introduction to the thought of Philip Rieff. As I prepared for that book, it became clear to me that a more interesting and helpful volume might be one that applied Rieff’s thinking to our current context, specifically with reference to the LGBTQ+ movement’s transformation of Western culture. What do you hope this book will accomplish? 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.

David VanDrunen ,Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics, Westminster Seminary California Modern culture is obsessed with identity. Since the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision in 2015, sexual identity has dominated both public discourse and cultural trends—yet no historical phenomenon is its own cause. From Augustine to Marx, various views and perspectives have contributed to the modern understanding of the self. 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.Rosaria Butterfield,former Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Syracuse University; author, The Gospel Comes with a Housekey and Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Additionally: Trueman sets up mimesis (imitation) and poiesis (making) as a dichotomy, with human culture being essentially mimetic until the Romantics came along. But if this is true, how is it that Christian art, from the First Century, all the way until the Renaissance, deliberately departed from more representational, mimetic standards, to embrace the symbolic and figurative (and which invited the subjective experience of the community of viewers)? Or are we simply to lump together the Book of Kells and Andre Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity along with—say—early Twentieth Century German Expressionism into one undifferentiated, catch-all non-mimetic category? But what about Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s idea (much developed in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction) that we “half-create” reality by perceiving it? What’s so unnerving about this narrative describing the shift in our understanding of the self is that the vast majority of people have no idea it has taken place. We are swimming in the cultural water where the self has been psychologized, sexualized, and politicized, and we have no idea what water even is. It’s highly doubtful that the entertainers and politicians spouting cliches about “the real you” and supporting transgender rights have ever read Jean Jacque Rosseau or Sigmund Freud. Yet, they live and breathe expressive individualism and sexual identity politics because this slow-moving revolution has been thoroughly successful and run over everything in its path. In part 4 Trueman spends three chapters showing the connections between the philosophical underpinnings of these changes and the popular expressions of them. Why You Should Read It 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. 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 SelfMan is born free", Rousseau declared, "but is everywhere in chains". What — everywhere? Yes. For his protest was not exclusively against the royalist absolutism of Louis XV, but against the socialising process itself, and the constraints it places upon the sovereign individual. All societies, therefore, come within the purview of his condemnation. Trueman divides the book into four parts. In the first he introduces basic concepts and key figures that will show up time and again. Central to his understanding of society’s changes are three philosophers: Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and to a lesser extent, Alasdair McIntyre. By examining their work he introduces concepts like “the triumph of the therapeutic,” “psychological man,” “anticulture,” and “social imaginary.” Each of these terms shows up again and again, so the reader would do well to read slowly and to jot down definitions. What human beings need is not the therapy that they may desire, but careful exposition and application of the Christian faith. The biblical notion of personhood does not begin with psychological categories or focus on feelings. It focuses on our being made in the image of God. That means, for example, that the baby in the womb does have dignity despite having very limited or (in the early stages of conception) no self-consciousness. The same applies to the person with dementia. And it places dependence therefore at the center of what it means to be a human person: I am conceived and born dependent on others, a state from which I emerge to some extent in life before returning to it in my later years. We are thus not individuals in some radical sense but thinking, dependent creatures. And that makes a huge difference in how we should think of ourselves and of others. What is expressive individualism? What does it get right and what does it get wrong?