David Koyzis
The ancient aphorism “Know thyself,” said to be inscribed at the entrance to the oracle at Delphi, has been cited repeatedly over the past more-than-two millennia by philosophers with widely divergent approaches to life. Understanding the world seems to begin with an understanding of the self.
But what is the self? Does it have substantive content? Is the self something enduring, or is it in flux? Traditionally, many philosophers have affirmed the existence of a stable human nature, a sine qua non of our humanity. But in the modern age, beginning with Thomas Hobbes, the self has come to be seen as centred in the desiring ego. This raises a series of issues with which only recently we have come to grapple. For example, how did the statement “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body” come to make sense to large numbers of people, given that the sexual bifurcation of the human race is an otherwise obvious reality? For those of us who grew up as the current phase of the Revolution was taking off in the 1960s, the bewildering overturning of sexual mores that now appears complete has prompted us to re-examine what it means not only to be male and female but to be human.
Carl R. Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, has written an absorbing account of how this came about in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution.1 Trueman divides his book into four major sections: the “Architecture of the Revolution,” the “Foundations of the Revolution,” the “Sexualization of the Revolution,” and the “Triumphs of the Revolution,” followed by a “Concluding Unscientific Prologue.”
In exploring the Revolution’s architecture in part one, Trueman draws on three twentieth-century figures—Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre—whose categories he believes help us to understand recent history. Rieff, whose Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) anticipated current trends, analyzed western history in terms of three successive worlds. The first world is pagan, and its ethic is rooted in myth, such as the predictive power ascribed to the Delphic oracle. Human beings are subject to an impersonal fate that prevents them controlling the outcomes of their lives. Man in a first-world culture is political man (Trueman, 44). The second world is characterized by faith rather than fate—a faith in a God who has revealed himself in specific ways to specific peoples. Human laws are in some sense based on the will of this God, who underpins the customs and mores of entire societies. In a second-world culture, political man gives way to religious man. Both the first and second worlds justify themselves by reference to a transcendent sacred order.
By contrast, the third world is one which denies a sacred order and therefore must justify itself with reference to itself. Because a third-world culture rules out appeal to a higher authority, it has a tendency to anchor its ethic in a consequentialist pragmatism in which psychological well-being becomes the principal norm for action. Religious man yields place to economic man and finally to psychological man (45). A third-world culture, such as that of North America, is thus a therapeutic culture, with therapy understood in a radically subjective way. While traditional therapy aimed at enabling the patient to adjust himself to the ways of the larger community, contemporary therapy aims to help the patient achieve personal authenticity in the face of societally-engendered neuroses. This explains why we hear so often of young people seeking self-esteem and very particular types of safe places in which to nurture it. It’s not that they’ve become fragile “snowflakes,” as some would have it. They have simply imbibed and been shaped by the culture’s notion that psychological satisfaction is the highest good.
Trueman further draws on Charles Taylor’s notion of expressive individualism and the contrast between mimesis and poiesis. According to Taylor, one’s identity is shaped by an ongoing dialogue among persons. “The ‘I’ is necessarily a social being” (56). Yet under expressive individualism the self chooses its own identity, subsequently expecting the larger community simply to recognize and affirm it. In the modern social imaginary, or what others might label a worldview, a poietic mindset has supplanted a mimetic mindset. Mimesis calls for human beings to discover the intrinsic meaning of the world and to conform themselves to its order. Poiesis regards the cosmos as merely raw material on which individuals impose meaning (39). Technological development has done much to effect this shift from mimesis to poiesis. While our forebears were more tied to the natural environment and its yearly cycles, we are better able to manipulate our environment for our own chosen purposes. “Self-creation is a routine part of our modern social imaginary” (42). Small wonder, then, that we assume that we are the sovereign authors of our own identities.
Alasdair MacIntyre has aptly labelled the dominant modern ethic emotivism (82ff). If Rieff is correct that psychological man is the dominant figure in our day, then emotivism’s triumph is the logical outcome. Emotivism holds that all moral judgements flow from mere sentiments or feelings. Truth claims can be reduced to expressions of preference rooted in the desiring individual. Because there are no objective grounds for morality, and because emotivism has become a social theory and not just a moral theory, ethical discussion tends to “degenerate into nothing more than the assertion of incommensurable opinions and preferences” (87).
In a society where emotivism sets the terms, those who would base morality on a firmer metaphysical foundation are not only at a distinct disadvantage; they are increasingly treated as dangerous relics of an oppressive past. In Rieff’s terms, where second-world assumptions still live in the hearts of a significant proportion of what is largely a third-world culture, people talk past each other, unable to conceive how their opponents could think as they do. The contentious issues of abortion and same-sex marriage illustrate this stalemate.
In part two, Trueman probes the Revolution’s foundations. Although one could dig far into the past, the author begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, along with the Romantic poets and artists who extended his influence into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rousseau is a complex figure fully capable of saying one thing in one place and contradicting himself in another. The Rousseau of The Social Contract is a civic republican willing to yield to the sovereign people authority over all of life, thereby paving the way for the totalistic states of the twentieth century. By contrast, the Rousseau of the Confessions and the Discourses champions the authentic self over the supposed corruptions of society, affirming the basic goodness of humanity undisturbed by social conventions. This eighteenth-century “other Genevan” upends Augustine’s Confessions, on which he models his own autobiography, by ascribing evil not to his own sinful heart but to external forces compelling him to conform.
Rousseau’s ethics is grounded in personal sentiment (119) and the desire to alleviate suffering. His debt to the biblical Golden Rule (Matt 7:12) is evident, as for him the “key to basic social ethics is . . . the ability to empathize with others and apply to them the same principles as you apply to yourself” (120). Yet where does this empathy take us? Because our capacity to empathize is limited, it is an unreliable norm for ethical or political life. “There is now no consensus about what it is that should evoke our empathy and sympathy: the baby in the womb or the pregnant teenager whose life will be utterly disrupted by having a child? The transgender teen who wants to become a woman or his parents who fear he is making a terrible mistake?” (122)
The lack of consensus with respect to so central an element in Rousseau’s ethics thus leads to more conflict requiring the intervention of an increasingly omnicompetent political authority. Armed with the conviction that the past is something to live down and that youthful innocence and personal authenticity make for wisdom, governing personnel will decide who is and is not worthy of empathy. This is where Rousseau’s apparent contradictions come together in a statist future.
The primacy of sentiment was picked up by such Romantic poets as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake, who functioned as “unacknowledged legislators of the World” (130) in that they set the agenda for a new age. Romanticism championed the rural over the urban, the natural over the artificial, the emotional over the rational, based on the assumption that the latter poles of these dyads have a corrupting influence on the human person, forcing her to sublimate her sentiments to the demands of society. The Romantic poets saw themselves as the vanguard of a movement to form correctly people’s sentiments through aesthetic means. The poet is thus the midwife of social transformation (145). It is no surprise that the Romantics viewed the church as an obstacle to their goals because it represented an oppressive past from which they sought freedom. They particularly reviled the church’s demand for chastity and lifelong monogamy as unduly constraining the individual.
Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin are the principal players in the drama’s next act, as they paved the way for a concept of humanity that is more plastic than even the Romantics had dreamt. Freedom for Nietzsche entails the death of God and the courage to step beyond conventional morality and to create one’s very self. Marx apparently accepted the existence of human nature but believed it is malleable, always embedded in and affected by the changing economic forces that drive material production. “As the economic conditions and relations in society change, so does the instantiation of human nature” (183). Darwin more evidently denied human nature, completely supplanting it with an historical process rooted in biology. Humanity is no longer the crown of creation, because there is no Creator to put him in this exalted place. All three view the world through the lens of poiesis rather than mimesis.
In part three, Trueman explores the “Sexualization of the Revolution” which took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here the key figures are Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. Freud’s significance lies in giving the expressive self an explicitly sexual meaning. The attainment of happiness, which drives human striving, now entails the achievement of sexual fulfilment. Sex thus moves to the centre of life, with personal identity assuming a sexual meaning. For Freud, “the purpose of procreation is subordinated to the purpose of personal pleasure” (205). Freud is an heir of Rousseau, but with Freud the social contract becomes “a sexual contract, exchanging uninhibited sexual license for sexual restraint” (218), a restraint foundational for civilized existence and its supportive sexual codes. Full happiness is thus impossible within the confines of civilization as we know it.
It fell to Reich and Marcuse to unite Marx and Freud in a “shotgun wedding” (230). While Marxian and Freudian assumptions are mutually incompatible, the proposed marriage of their ideas is based on their shared understanding of the plasticity of the human person and the effect of societal norms in inhibiting human aspirations. Thus, Marx’s concept of oppression could now be joined to Freud’s notion of the repression of sexual desire. Freud’s pessimism would not permit him to assume that this tragic condition could be transcended, while his latter-day followers, emboldened by Marx’s expectation of a liberating final state of humanity, deemed it possible to subvert society’s standards and achieve sexual freedom.
Reich argued that “[s]exual codes are part of the ideology of the governing class, designed to maintain the status quo so as to benefit those in power” (233). If so, then it is possible to abolish these codes and liberate desire from those attempting to curtail it. Marcuse admits the need for some authority to provide order to society and to seek its common good. Nevertheless, norms governing sexual behaviour go beyond what is necessary for this good and serve only to support the domination of one group of people by another. “Taboos and the concept of perversion are means by which the bourgeoisie demonizes any type of sexual behavior that threatens this control” (248). Hence, freeing the person from this domination is what makes the Sexual Revolution not only possible but necessary. Those obstructing this liberation, including church and family, must themselves be suppressed.
In part four, Trueman looks at the “Triumphs of the Revolution,” including the triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the “T” (for transgender). Chapter 8, which deals with pornography, is not an easy read, even for those who have become inured to the ubiquity of sexual images and language in the larger culture. Much as the Sexual Revolution has detached sex from reproduction, so pornography has detached sexual pleasure from its relational significance. In chapter 9, Trueman shows how the “Triumph of the Therapeutic” has affected a range of phenomena, including judicial decisions, Peter Singer’s “Ivy League ethics,” and the campus anticulture threatening freedom of speech. Chapter 10 addresses the odd marriage of convenience between several professed sexual minorities, whose expressed interests often conflict. For example, where gender becomes a fluid boundary, traditional feminist concerns are necessarily demoted, because the latter are necessarily based on women’s embodied experience. Yet once again, where one’s inner psychological state comes to determine one’s identity, the result is a gnostic denial of the body’s significance.
Finally, in Trueman’s “Concluding Unscientific Prologue,” the author looks to the possible futures awaiting us after the Revolution.
We have needed this book for a long time, as it addresses the current crisis of the self with what I would call a spiritual depth analysis—that is, by probing the inner spirit underpinning the current cultural climate. That many will dismiss it as “conservative” is something Trueman anticipates in his introduction: “Every age has had its darkness and its dangers. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and to respond appropriately to them” (30). I agree. Conservatives of all types are generally good at foot-dragging but are less adept at proposing a positive vision for the future. Trueman wisely refrains from lamenting a lost golden age.
My own quibbles with Trueman are fairly minor and do not detract from the book’s argument. For example, his use of the term psychological seems to reflect too narrow a meaning. Does psychological mean emotional? Does one’s inner psychological state consist primarily in one’s mood? Psychology as a discipline generally considers much more than the affective side of the human personality, addressing such phenomena as childhood growth and development, human behaviour, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and so forth. Perhaps for Trueman the psychological has to do with a variety of inner mental states predisposing individuals to view themselves in certain ways relative to other individuals and to the larger community, with the emotional only one aspect of this totality. But this is not altogether clear from his treatment.
As a political scientist, I am especially interested in the political and legal ramifications of the Revolution, which Trueman partially unpacks in chapter 9. Like past revolutions, the current Sexual Revolution and its notion of the plastic self will likely prove incompatible with the rule of law over the long term. Given that people’s mental states are constantly in flux and that their sense of identity changes over time, attempts to anchor the law in something so flimsy will lead to miscarriages of justice, as they are already doing in some cases. Government claims to protect its citizens’ feelings put everyone on shaky legal ground. While compassion towards suffering is often a motivation to see justice done, compassion itself makes an inadequate legal norm because the concrete issues that bring people into conflict generally involve some degree of suffering on both sides, even if that suffering amounts to a mere state of mental unease. Punishment of any kind inflicts suffering on a guilty party. Unless the law is based on firm principles permitting people to know where they stand, injustice will be the likely result.
This is why self-assured activists seeking social justice—quick to judge without adequately examining their own contestable assumptions—are likely inadvertently to perpetrate injustice, especially on those less ideologically attractive to them and less capable of appealing to their subjective sense of compassion. Now that the Revolution seems to be complete, a range of self-defined sexual minorities strive for increasingly favoured legal positions, while the Revolution’s most ardent proponents view those who marry, have children, and sacrifice to raise and educate them within a stable family as real or potential oppressors.2 Detached from a larger normative conception of sexuality and of the principles that make for a flourishing society, human beings become little more than individuals competing with each other for affirmation of their divergent lifestyle choices. The state ostensibly refrains from judging these choices, declining to privilege any one of them over others, yet is expected to enhance the status of those deemed somewhat arbitrarily to have suffered past oppression. This inevitably erodes the principle of equality under the law, putting in doubt our increasingly divided polities’ long-term viability. But this may be the destiny of a third-world culture. As Rieff puts it, “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order” (76).
I must add a word about the publisher, Crossway, which began publishing books in 1979 and produced the widely-read English Standard Version of the Bible in 2001. The publication of this book represents a significant advance for Crossway in terms of both quality and substance. I found only a single typographical error in what is on the whole a well-written and well-edited volume. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is worthy of a university press, and Crossway has proved itself up to the challenge of publishing it.
Finally, while not everyone will agree with the book’s approach and conclusions, the overall argument is compelling and merits a close reading. Trueman’s book may prove to be the definitive treatment of the spiritual and intellectual developments that have shaped the world in which we live.
David T. Koyzis is a Global Scholar with Global Scholars Canada. He holds the Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Political Visions and Illusions (IVP Academic, 2019) and We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God (Pickwick, 2014).
Image: Caravaggio, Narcissus
- Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020).[
] - See, e.g., Samantha Godwin, “Against Parental Rights,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 47, no. 1 (2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2702919.[]