The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

Carl R. Trueman

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781433556364
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Modern culture is obsessed withidentity.

Since the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision in 2015, sexual identity has dominated both public discourse and cultural trends—and yet, no historical phenomenon is its own cause. From Augustine to Marx, various views and perspectives have contributed to the modern understanding of self. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman carefully analyzes the roots and development of the sexual revolution as a symptom, rather than the cause, of the human search for identity. This timely exploration of the history of thought behind the sexual revolution teaches readers about the past, brings clarity to the present, and gives guidance for the future as Christians navigate the culture's ever-changing search for identity.

Part 1

Architecture of the Revolution

1

Reimagining the Self

You see, but you do not observe.

Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

I noted in the introduction that the underlying argument of this book is that the sexual revolution, and its various manifestations in modern society, cannot be treated in isolation but must rather be interpreted as the specific and perhaps most obvious social manifestation of a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self. While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person. That is a profound claim that is arguably unprecedented in history. How that situation comes to be is a long and complicated story, and I can address only a few of the most salient aspects of the relevant narrative in a single volume. And even before I attempt to do so, it is first necessary to set forth a number of basic theoretical concepts that provide a framework, a set of what we might describe as architectural principles, for structuring and analyzing the personalities, events, and ideas that play into the rise of the modern self.

In this task, the writings of three analysts of modernity are particularly useful: Charles Taylor, the philosopher; Philip Rieff, the psychological sociologist; and Alasdair MacIntyre, the ethicist.1 While all three have different emphases and concerns, they offer accounts of the modern world that share certain important affinities and also provide helpful insights into understanding not simply how modern Western society thinks but how and why it has come to think the way that it does. In this chapter and the next, therefore, I want to offer an outline of some of their key ideas that help set the scene for the interpretation of our contemporary world offered in the subsequent account of how the concept of the modern psychologized and sexualized self has emerged.

The Social Imaginary

To return to the questions I posed in the introduction: How has the current highly individualistic, iconoclastic, sexually obsessed, and materialistic mindset come to triumph in the West? Or, to put the question in a more pressing and specific fashion, as I did earlier, Why does the sentence “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” make sense not simply to those who have sat in poststructuralist and queer-theory seminars but to my neighbors, to people I pass on the street, to coworkers who have no particular political ax to grind and who are blissfully unaware of the rebarbative jargon and arcane concepts of Michel Foucault and his myriad epigones and incomprehensible imitators? The statement is, after all, emblematic of a view of personhood that has almost completely dispensed with the idea of any authority beyond that of personal, psychological conviction, an oddly Cartesian notion: I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. How did such a strange idea become the common orthodox currency of our culture?

To make some attempt at addressing the issue, it is useful to take note of a helpful concept deployed by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his analysis of how societies think, that of the social imaginary. Taylor is interesting because he is a philosopher whose work also engages with broader historical and sociological themes. In A Secular Age, he offers a major analysis of the way modern society in general, and not just the intellectual classes, has moved away from being permeated by Christianity and religious faith to the point that such are no longer the default for the majority of people but actually are rather exceptional. In the course of his argument, he introduces the idea of the social imaginary to address the question of how theories developed by social elites might be related to the way ordinary people think and act, even when such people have never read these elites or spent any time self-consciously reflecting on the implications of their theories. Here is how he defines the concept:

I want to speak of “social imaginary” here, rather than social theory, because there are important differences between the two. There are, in fact, several differences. I speak of “imaginary” (i) because I’m talking about the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. But it is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.2

As Taylor describes it here, the social imaginary is a somewhat amorphous concept precisely because it refers to the myriad beliefs, practices, normative expectations, and even implicit assumptions that members of a society share and that shape their daily lives. It is not so much a conscious philosophy of life as a set of intuitions and practices. In sum, the social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it—though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas.3 It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it.

This is a very helpful concept precisely because it takes account of the fact that the way we think about many things is not grounded in a self-conscious belief in a particular theory of the world to which we have committed ourselves. We live our lives in a more intuitive fashion than that. The fact that “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” makes sense to Joe Smith probably has far less to do with him being committed to an elaborate understanding of the nature of gender and its relationship to biological sex than to the fact that it seems intuitively correct to affirm someone in his or her chosen identity and hurtful not to do so, however strange the particulars of that self-identification might have seemed to previous generations. We might perhaps say that, looked at from this angle, the social imaginary is a matter of intuitive social taste. And the question of how the tastes and intuitions of the general public are formed is the question of how the social imaginary comes to take the shape that it does.

Sometimes, as Taylor notes, the theories of the elite do infiltrate these imaginaries.4 For example, the ideas of Luther on church authority came to grip the popular imagination in sixteenth-century Saxony and beyond through myriad popular pamphlets and woodcuts designed to have an impact on everyday people. And one might add that sometimes the theories of the elite have an affinity with elements of the existing social imaginary that reinforces them, that provides them with an idiom by which they might be expressed or justified, or that transforms them. Sexual identity politics might be a good example, whereby sex outside the ideal of monogamous heterosexual marriage has always occurred but has only recently become much easier to transact (with the advent of cheap and efficient contraception). It has also moved from being primarily personal in significance to also being political, given the debates that swirl around abortion, birth control, and LGBTQ+ matters. The way this occurred is fairly simple to discern: first, there was the promiscuous behavior; then there was the technology to facilitate it, in the form of contraception and antibiotics; and, as technology enabled the sexually promiscuous to avoid the natural consequences of their actions (unwanted pregnancies, disease), so those rationales that justified the behavior became more plausible (and arguments against it became less so), and therefore the behavior itself became more acceptable.

Any account of the sexual revolution and of the underlying revolution in the understanding of the self, of which the sexual revolution is simply the latest iteration, must therefore not simply take into account the ideas of the cultural elite but must also look at how the intuitions of society at large have been formed. Ideas in themselves are only part of the story. The notion of the self that makes transgenderism plausible certainly has its theoretical and philosophical rationales. But it is also the product of much wider cultural phenomena that have shaped the intuitions of those who are blissfully unaware of its various intellectual origins and metaphysical assumptions.

Mimesis and Poiesis

A second useful element in Taylor’s work that connects to the social imaginary and to which we will have recourse is the relationship between mimesis and poiesis. Put simply, these terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world. A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

Both of Taylor’s maj...