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

Product Information

Doubt this? Consider the following, all of which demonstrate the point, in various and differing ways: Thomas Traherne, John Donne, Edmund Spenser (The Shepheardes Calendar), Julian of Norwich, William Langland (Piers Ploughman), early Christian monasticism, and classical Hellenism. And for just another example, Shakespeare’s As You Like It? One could easily go on. And on.

What human beings need is not the therapy that they may desire, but careful exposition and application of the Christian faith. 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. Our times are indeed unprecedented in the sense outlined above. But they are not entirely unprecedented, and certainly not in the areas that really matter: the content of the gospel and the nature of the church. However, none of these were invented by the Romantics. Not at all. We could say, rather, that the Romantics, reconnected with already existing streams of value and interest, from which their immediately prior cultural settings had become disconnected.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.

But theologically the church is ultimately a work of the sovereign God; and what human beings need more is not the therapy that they may desire, but careful exposition and application of the Christian faith. The doctrine of creation, anchoring human nature and setting the scene for an understanding of our rebellion against God and need of redemption, needs to be stressed. This is foundational for understanding who we are. And we must press home Christ’s sufficiency in meeting that real need. David VanDrunen ,Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics, Westminster Seminary California 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. Plastic, Psychological Self

In a season of sorrow? This FREE eBook will guide you in biblical lament

Adam—“the man, the human”—was meant to be both priest and prince: God’s own vice-gerent, who, in beholding the rest of creation, giving God the glory and calling down God’s blessing, was to have been the instrument of its coming to fulfilment. In a certain sense, even the mountains “become” all that they are in God’s great purpose, when seen and named by Adam. This was a solemn, wonderful, and joyous calling, under God; at the core of what we were meant to be. The self was psychologized, psychology was then sexualized, and finally sex was politicized. The stage was set for the contemporary politics of sexual identity.

That society seems to have decided that a—perhaps the — major way to achieve this is sex means that any attempt to enforce a code of sexual behavior is an assault on the individual, a means whereby individuals are forced to be inauthentic and, indeed, unhappy. And anyone who therefore tries to enforce sexual codes is oppressive or a “hater,” to use the cheap and lazy means of delegitimizing any critic of the moral mess that is late modernity. Institutions and Their Discontents Rousseau had a somewhat cheerful view of human beings in their natural, uncultured state. Not so his near contemporary, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), who agreed with Rousseau that culture prevents us from being ourselves, but regarded the natural human being as a seething mass of dark and destructive desires. This Sadean appropriation of and reaction to Rousseau found influential expression in the plausible idiom of science in the hands of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Then, to abbreviate the story somewhat, the marriage between aspects of Marxist theory and Freudian anthropology in the work of men such as Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) and (even more so) Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957). The self was psychologized, psychology was then sexualized, and finally sex was politicized. The stage was set for the contemporary politics of sexual identity. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020) None of this should be read as lament or nostalgia. Every age has its maladies, and I for one have no wish to have lived my life in an era when children worked as chimney sweeps or, like my father, grew up in the shadow of the Luftwaffe. We do not choose our time, and we must not waste energy lamenting our time. We need first and foremost to understand our time and then to respond to it with informed wisdom.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.

Lay Vocation before the Reformation: Faith, Reason, and Friendship in the Middle Ages (and Today) July 24, 2023 Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe it. Few of us are qualified to opine on the science. But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight. And when the idea being taught has an intuitive plausibility, it is persuasive.” The third part, ‘Sexualization of the Revolution’, traces two important steps. First, looking at the thought of Freud, Trueman outlines the ‘sexualizing of psychology’. Building on the groundwork of those who had said the inner self is who we are, Freud declares that it is not just our inner self which is the ‘real us’, but our inner sexual self. The second step traced in this part is ‘the politicizing of sex’, in which the concept of society’s oppression is viewed primarily as psychological and is believed to be seen most clearly in restrictive sexual ethics that stop us from expressing our true (sexual) selves. Moderns, especially Christian moderns, wonder how our society arrived at this strange moment when nearly everything about the self and sexuality that our grandparents believed is ridiculed. This genealogy of culture, clearly and elegantly written, will help all of us understand how we got to where we are, so that we can plot our own futures with more clarity and confidence. This book is a must-read for Christians and all others who are disturbed by the dictatorship of relativism that surrounds us.”

Summary of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Part 2 focuses on developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then advancing to a number of prominent poets of the Romantic era. It turns finally to the world-changing ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin who each “in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence.” It is through these men that society’s notion of the self became psychologized. 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). 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? 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