The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (published 2020) by Carl R. Trueman
Book Review by JD Warren
Audience in Mind
Trueman has multiple audiences in mind with this book: The primary audience is meant for American evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox; very broadly, orthodox Christians in the West. Trueman has stated that he wrote it in a way that even those who are the Triumphant Sexual Revolutionaries would be able to agree with his account, even if they don’t agree with his critiques of the Modern Self.
The Goal of the Book
Trueman writes on p.19 “The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.’” Elsewhere he says he seeks to explain the world to the church. He goes on to write on p.20 that “At the heart of this book lies a basic conviction: the so-called sexual revolution of the last sixty years, culminating in its latest triumph – the normalization of transgenderism – cannot be properly understood until it is set within the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood. The sexual revolution is as much a symptom as it is a cause of the culture that now surrounds us everywhere we look, from sitcoms to Congress.”
In his introduction, he lays out his goal along with a structure. He lays out his intention to clarify what happened in the Sexual Revolution and the factors that have contributed to the shift, up to and including certain technological advancements such as the pill and anonymity on the internet. He goes on to say that this revolution is interested in the abolition of any codes of morality entirely; Nietzsche and Freud will be his main foils in this. In addition to this, he says he will move on to clarify the use of the term self; not merely as being self-aware but understanding who we are and who we are in relation to others and the world around us. Charles Taylor is his primary source highlighting 3 key developments: focus on inwardness as decisive of our self; affirmation of ordinary “modern” life; how nature provides us with an inner moral source. This will lead to the idea of “coming out” due to previously living an inauthentic life; and now our society has come to the point where the basic underlying assumptions of the inner psychological life that led to that statement making sense, that we have now come to the point where saying “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” is due to “living a lie” or “not living as my true, authentic self.”
*At this point Trueman gives some cautions to those who are committed to strong religious views in their approach to the revolution of the self: be careful not to focus more on the transcendent metaphysical principles to not understand the particulars, AND we must be careful not to focus so much on the particulars we neglect the broader context. His example is 9/11. In a broad sense, gravity brought the towers down. In a very narrow sense, it was Islamic terrorists that ran airplanes into the tower. He seeks to use this as an analogy to properly balance some things in mind: American foreign policy had changed since WW2 and there was also a rise in militant Islam. He then demonstrates there is a tendency for some to blame the other for the problem, but he cautions us to understand that we participate in this society as well. He says on p 25 that “we are all expressive individualists now.” One could quibble with that a bit, I suppose, but the point should be taken that some identify themselves by their sexual orientation, yet others identify themselves as a Christian or a Muslim. His goal for the person reading this book to be careful to set things in their proper context. From developments in philosophy, political theory, and the Industrial Revolution, this gives a shape to why certain attitudes on a popular level are the way they are.
Structure and Argument of the Book
Along with his Introduction and a Concluding Unscientific Prologue, there are 4 parts to the book –
Part 1: Architecture of the Revolution, Chapters 1-2; the triumph of the therapeutic, psychological man, the anticulture, deathworks, and the “social imaginary”
Part 2: Foundations of the Revolution, Chapters 3-5; Rousseau, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin (Psychologizing of the Self)
Part 3: Sexualization of the Revolution, Chapters 6-7; Freud, the New Left (Sexualization of the Self)
Part 4: Triumphs of the Revolution, Chapters 8-10; the Triumphs through art, Supreme Court decisions, abortion ethics, the LGBTQ+ movement (Politicization of the Self)
Recommended Reading Methods
Due to the density, importance, and academic content of the book I would recommend a couple of different methods.
For those who have some level of understanding of some of the academic contents and limited time, I heartily recommend the intro, conclusion, and epilogue to each Part. Trueman does a great job of not letting each section spill over into the other, and each Part could be published stand-alone; he compartmentalizes very well.
For the skimmer, it’s edited well enough that you could reasonably read the intro and conclusion of each chapter to get a sense of the book as a whole as well.
For others, I highly encourage everyone to simply take the time and move it to the top of your reading list and do the work of reading the book. Trueman makes some critical analysis and could make connection points sensible to most readers. Whether it’s explaining philosophical thought of major thinkers from Rousseau to Freud to Surrealist Artists, analyzing Supreme Court decisions, walking through the abortion ethics of Peter Singer and the pro-life/pro-choice clashes, or explaining Critical Theory and its culmination in the Indonesian Yogyakarta Principles – Trueman shows how academic ideas make their way down to a popular level application of the ideas.
For those who may have limited understanding of the academic and limited time, I would say begin with the introduction and skip to the Concluding Unscientific Prologue. Let me mention here what Trueman states his goal of the book is NOT and where he intends to end his assertions. First, he doesn’t intend on this being a comprehensive analysis (p 29). Second, this is certainly no lament nor is it a polemic: we are not Pharisees looking at the tax collector thanking God we’re not like that guy while we long for a day on this earth where there will be no more tax collectors. There is no Golden Age. Third, he’s a historian doing the work of a historian presenting the history. He seeks to help Christians interpret this history and use his work as a prolegomenon in discussion of how the Church in the West can respond biblically. He concludes with a fantastic “prologue.”
Part 1: Architecture of the Revolution
Chapter 1 – Reimagining the Self (p 35-71)
Here, Trueman begins to introduce us to 3 20th century social analysts: Charles Taylor, a philosopher; Philip Rieff, a sociologist emphasizing psychology; and Alasdair MacIntyre, the ethicist.
He begins with Charles Taylor and his concept of a “social imaginary.” Now this is different than a worldview, in that a worldview is a set of ideas; whereas a 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” (p 37, also see footnotes). One of the reasons the LBTGQ+ phenomena, and specifically the T, is because the social imaginary was such that the basic assumptions of the wider culture already adopted the belief that could lead to the plausibility. Add to that the technology being such that made it even more materially plausible, and here we are.
The next idea Trueman presents that comes from Charles Taylor is 2 worldviews: Mimesis and Poiesis beginning on p 39. Mimesis “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 (p 39). Poiesis “sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.” This will be important when we get to Nietzsche as he calls for the polite bourgeoisie to wake up to the fact that the earth has been unchained from the sun, and that a new moral order must be developed. One of the other effects this has is a “society moves from a view of the world possessing intrinsic meaning, so it also moves from a view of humanity as having a specific and given end.” Teleology moves from having an objective end to a subjective one. Think about the formerly agrarian calendar where seeds had to be sown at a specific time and harvest time for individual crops only came about once in the year. Now, we can go down to the grocery store and buy blueberries, bananas, strawberries, all kinds of stuff. One of the reasons was due to the development of irrigation, etc. to allow for this to happen. Essentially, we move from having to conform ourselves to the given order of nature to now being able to conform nature to our purposes. Same with our medical technology, we have developed the technology where certain diseases from the past were death sentences to now it not being so. Childbirth, diabetes, the bubonic plague and so on. We’re living through the development of a technology that has a poietic worldview behind it. All this to say is we now live in a world in which “self-creation is a routine part of our social imaginary” AND “Human nature…becomes something individuals or societies invent for themselves.” (p 42) The individual is now expressive.
Trueman moves us on to Philip Rieff. Rieff is the thinker that launched Trueman to begin to write this book as Rod Dreher mentions in the foreword. Rieff wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and we can see the obvious play Trueman has on this for his final part of the book with his 3 “Triumphs.” Trueman points us to the key concepts of cultural theory first “his notion that cultures are primarily defined by what they forbid [as part of their social imaginary {my addition}]. This is a basically Freudian concept: if…taboos drive civilization, then civilization is defined at its base by a negative idea. (p 43, see Rieff’s expression and accompanying foot note)
Secondly, Rieff says that culture has historically directed the individual outward, in communal activities being the place individuals would find their true selves. Now, the individual is the one creating purpose for themselves. Here is where Trueman begins to piece some things together with the expressive individual and Rieff’s psychological man (p 44 ff). Rieff has 4 historical archetypal men: political man of Plato and Aristotle who finds his identity in attendance at the Areopagus, the assembly (of the senate), and civic and community life in the polis; giving way to religious man of the Middle Ages who finds his identity by participation in sacred activities like mass, pilgrimages, following the liturgical recommendation for worship; this is followed by economic man who is involved in trade, production, and the making of money. These three are all outwardly directed archetypes, which gives way to the fourth: psychological man – “a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities…but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness (p 45 also see footnote 13 on p 46). This is the connection to Taylor’s “expressive individual” as also Rieff’s “psychological man.”
On p 47, Trueman notes that Rieff sees two historic reversals underlying this new world of psychological man. First, a transformation of therapy. In the 3 previous archetypal ages, the therapist helped the individual grasp the nature of the community to which he belonged; whereas the role for the therapist in a psychological archetype is to protect the individual from any neuroses the community may impose on an individual. Second, the orders are reversed in relation to institutional commitments. The Athenian to the assembly, the medieval Christian to the church, the factory worker to the trade union. Now, institutions are in service to the individual and his sense of well being (p 48-49). The individual becomes performative – they are able to be their “authentic, true selves.”
Trueman then pauses to ask a couple of questions regarding human identity over human behavior: Why is it important that identity is publicly acknowledged, and why is it important the public acknowledgement of some identities is compulsory and of others is forbidden? Why can someone sell baked goods to homosexuals, but when the baker decides to not bake a cake for a gay wedding cause such consternation? This is where the outward, social dimension to my psychological well-being demands others acknowledge my inward, psychological identity. This is the analytic attitude. Here Trueman connects Rieff once again to Taylor and the politics of recognition on p 57 by quoting Taylor write in Sources of the Self (p35) that “One is only a self among other selves.” We don’t point to our DNA or gender to identify ourselves, we point out our societal relation. This means that human beings need to belong. Trueman doesn’t mention this, but we know that “it’s not good for man to be alone” AND “be fruitful and multiply” connotes a society as part of the good of how God made us. We are social animals. There’s much more Trueman touches on regarding Hegelianism, but we need to move on to how this shift in society continues with technological changes and intellectual changes as regarding social hierarchies built on honor: samurai, feudal lords, Hindu caste system, etc. Here he begins to reach back further to point out the emphasis on dignity of the individual as developed by Rousseau’s statement “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” The importance of this is that it dignifies the individual before society denigrates him.
Chapter 2 – Reimagining Our Culture (p 73-102)
Here Trueman introduces more thoughts by Rieff and adds MacIntyre into the picture as our culture is now being reimagined. Rieff speaks of first, second, and third worlds. But he doesn’t do so economically, he does so regarding morality. First worlds are marked by myth and fate. The story of the gods and the authority coming from the oracle of Delphi is an example. Second worlds are marked by faith with the primary example being Christianity with its moral codes coming from the God who is revealed in the Bible. Trueman reminds us again that societies are marked by what they forbid, yet First and Second worlds have an appeal to a transcendent order. Third worlds do not have stability since there’s nothing transcendent that will give stability, and because of this anything coming from a first or second world is discarded. This is where “cultural amnesia” resides. They’re ahistorical and iconoclastic. Taylor calls this an immanent frame rather than a transcendent frame, where this world is all there is (See p 77 for Taylor’s description). At this point, Trueman calls our attention to how 3rd worlds view personhood in juxtaposition to 1st and 2nd worlds with the example of abortion (p 78):
“A prohibition on abortion really depends on the notion of personhood. Is an embryo a person with potential or a potential person?”
This brings us to MacIntyre’s work on ethics and the modern ethic of emotivism. Where there’s a teleology one can distinguish between what individuals are and what they should be. So what are the social assumptions of our 3rd world West now? MacIntyre calls it emotivism: the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and…all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference…attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character (p 85). In other words, our 3rd world West doesn’t understand the statement that homosexuality is wrong because of something transcendent. Rather our 3rd world West can only understand that one personally disapproves of homosexuality, and you should do likewise. This will be codified in US v. Windsor which we will get to later. Thus 3rd worlds are Anticultures, chronological snobs, and devoted to the subversion, destabilization, and destruction of a 1st or 2nd world’s traditions. They are also antihistorical.
It’s at this point, we need to jump forward to Trueman’s calling our attention back to Rieff and his term “deathworks.” Anticultures use Deathworks to subvert and destroy the previous culture. The way this is done is by making something look ridiculous rather than beautiful. This is typically done through art, and we have the example of Piss Christ: a crucifix placed in a jar submerged in an artist’s urine. In effect, the sacramental is turned into something excremental. There’s no assertion of something being untrue, rather it’s made distasteful; and since our society operates on emotivism, whatever doesn’t suit one’s tastes should be jettisoned as something unvaluable. At this point, Trueman mentions pornography as the quintessential Deathwork. Not only does it promote lust and the objectification of the participants – it repudiates any idea that sex has any significance beyond the act itself. Trueman elsewhere calls those involved in this Deathwork (whether the producer or consumer) as sempiternal orgiasts. He writes on p 99 “The important thing about deathworks is that they subvert and destroy the sacred order without really having anything with which to replace it. If Nietzsche’s madman unchains the earth from the sun, then we might say that deathworks are instrumental in this exercise, communicating the message of the death of God via aesthetic forms that come to shape the popular imagination – or, to put it in Taylor’s language, to shape the social imaginary.”
Trueman then moves on to discuss forgetfulness and the subtle ways we forget the significance of the past. We just toss it in the trash bin. And he says Rieff makes a connection between this and abortion as another Deathwork. The issue isn’t over when personhood begins, as most debates center there; the issue is over personhood. And takes the most sacred thing in the social order and simply treats it as excrement. It’s antihistorical because it erases any physical consequences of the sex act between a man and woman. It also sterilizes the act.
Part 2: Foundations of the Revolution
Chapter 3 – The Other Genevan: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Foundations of Modern Selfhood (p 105-128)
At this point, Trueman moves us along to one of Freud’s heroes: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century French social philosopher. He highlights not his most famous work, The Social Contract. Rather, he highlights Rousseau’s Confessions, Two States of Nature, and Two Loves.
The Confessions contain a story of theft that parallels Augustine’s story of pear-thievery. Rousseau stole his mother’s asparagus not because it was evil or sin in a way Augustine would posit. Rousseau says he stole it because someone forced him to. He was upset that someone imposed their will over him and caused him to do something that violated his autonomous will.
Trueman then moves on to discuss Rousseau’s concept of Primeval and Hypothetical states of nature. Just previous to this, there is the highlight of Rousseau’s encounter with a prostitute and his experience of her with a deformity that he initially thought led to her prostitution. She was beautiful in every way, except for this one thing that came about due to some inner depravity; or so Rousseau initially thought. He went on to posit that it was actually her social circumstances that led to it. He moved the blame from something individual to something societal. Rousseau says the arts and sciences led to society’s ills and imposed morality on individuals to the extent they were actually at the root of modern vices. Society impedes on one’s ability to be in a hypothetical state of nature, one where the individual could have perfect self-love and be free from society inflaming pride and competition. In order to advance in society, one had to compete with others and create inequality. Trueman shows that Rousseau understands the individual can’t live in isolation from others, but the individuals in the society had a responsibility to pursue self-love rather than an inflamed love that diminishes the dignity of the individual and creates inequality. He writes this where Trueman quotes him on p 120: “I would show that justice and goodness are not merely abstract words – pure moral beings formed by the understanding – but are true affections of the soul enlightened by reason, are hence only an ordered development of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, independent of conscience, no natural law can be established; and that the entire right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the human heart.”
No law of nature as foundational, rather the human heart. This is where we have the redefinition of the “golden rule” to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Ethics moves from the community to the individual; the community empathizes with the individual and apply to yourself the same principles you would apply to them. This becomes a form of emotivism or sentimentalism. Trueman asks how this applies to education: “if human beings in the state of nature have naturally correct sentiments, then the purpose of education in the real, actual world in which we live becomes not what it was traditionally conceived as being: the training of individuals in the intellectual, social, and moral competencies necessary for being a member of society. On the contrary, education is about allowing the person to mature in a manner that protects her from precisely those cultural influences that traditional schooling is designed to cultivate and inflame amour propre. These serve only to alienate her from who she really is, making her inauthentic.”
Chapter 4 – Unacknowledged Legislators: Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake (p 129-161)
Here, Trueman moves us forward in the history to the Romantic period of the arts and wants to highlight 4 things. First, the notion that poetry is able to strip away societal constructions and corruptions and connect them to something more authentic. Second, the poet and poetry uses the aesthetics of the artistic medium to properly ground the reader by cultivate the correct sentiments. Third, poetry becomes political and revolutionary; the poet becomes what Shelley calls “an Unacknowledged Legislator of the World.” Fourth, the emerging attack on Christianity as that which constrains and corrupts the individual; the desire is to bring about political liberation and sexual freedom. Let me end this section by skipping forward to Trueman’s summary of the Romantics thought that personal happiness is the purpose of life. This is inherently psychological and is the goal of the therapist in a therapeutic age. Poetry and art serve the role of therapy. Add to this the attack on marriage and monogamy traditionally understood to be for procreation, mutual companionship, and exclusive sexual union. The idea that any institution exists for the happiness of the individual applied to the Romantic understanding of marriage and you get merely individual consent being the only ethic for marriage. And when one no longer consents, you move on. And this is the rationale behind our modern understanding of marriage and no-fault divorce. Shelley also likens marriage to religious creeds – so there’s an attack on confessionalism and its requirement that people conform to it. I think this is why so many now won’t conform to confessional statements – they’re expressive individualists and the creeds and confessions should conform to their tastes and notions of what they believe the Bible to teach. I would invite you to read Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley’s, quite famous classic gothic horror Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
Time keeps me from discussing it in detail, but revisit it with so many of these themes in mind. Please get the revised version Shelley published in 1832 (?).
Chapter 5 – The Emergence of Plastic People: Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin (p 163-192)
Here, I want to highlight Nietzsche’s theory of morality as it relates to Christianity representing the instincts of the weakest and most oppressed, and embodying in his mind the very hatred of life and living. It devalues what makes the individual strong and natural. Nietzsche views Christianity as morally repugnant, asking what’s the ulterior motive behind it, is made sick by the Christian claims of truth. In Nietzsche we have a suspicion of an absolute/transcendent/teleological moral truth, and a rejection of Christianity as distasteful. It moves into the realm of emotivism. Trueman also highlights Nietzsche’s assertion that absent any transcendent notion of humanity, one should make themselves; in other words, self-creation and performance lie at the core of personhood. Not nihilism, but self-creation and “living every moment as if it was your last.”
Trueman moves on to Marx and his dialectical materialism. He believes that the process by which history moves forward between individuals and societies is not intellectual, but is material and economic. In so doing, Marx creates a “plastic” view of human nature. It molds and shapes to the society it’s in, including morality and ethics. Due to this plasticity, human nature is always in a state of flux. Add to that the specific place humans found themselves in with the industrial revolution, Marx saw the importance of technology continuing to change human nature and their relation to economic circumstances. He writes: “The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex (p 183).” Prescient words indeed that technological advancements will blur or even erase the lines of age and sex. We will have a flattening of men and women as they relate to one another in the workplace as well as the home.
In his treatment of Darwin, Trueman briefly points out that his theory of natural selection only made the theological claim of origins of life irrelevant. There was no telos in his theory, just an ongoing change.
Epilogue to Part 2 – Reflections on the Foundations of the Revolution (p 193-197)
Part 3: Sexualization of the Revolution
Chapter 6 – Sigmund Freud, Civilization, and Sex (p 201-223)
It’s at this point Trueman begins to move on from man becoming psychologized man to now becoming sexualized psychological man and points us to Freud. The main takeaways are that Freud created a myth that has come to inhabit the social imaginary that sexual desire and fulfillment is the key to human existence and happiness. If happiness is the goal, for Freud the pleasure principle lay in the quest for sexual gratification. He “reorients thinking on the purpose of sex… procreation is subordinated to… personal pleasure” (p 205). In doing this, we have Freud focusing on the conflict between the natural authentic self and its natural desires and the civilized inauthentic self and its repressed desires. Freud also is asserting that this is essential to human nature, and since people are humans from birth, then he sexualizes infants and children. Add to this the shift in seeing the society as corrupting people, the decline in the belief of original sin, and the need to protect the child from the enemy without, there was also a shift in education. Trueman looks to the issue of masturbation as shifting from being a moral problem to a medical one. It was called “self-abuse” because of the concern that it would lead to deviancy later. But you see the shift in it being a psychological problem rather than a moral one.
Freud based his theory on “scientific” research done in Berlin that dismissed any connection of masturbation to as a moral or medical problem. It was normal according to Freud, and to be truly human is to be sexual, so let the child masturbate all he wants. Now we see this applied in childhood sex education and the shift of education creating a space where the child can be their authentic selves.
The next shift Trueman points out Freud contributes to is the thought that religion was a psychological issue. It has its purpose when one is young, but then this can continue to be a source of creating psychological problems and repression that doesn’t allow the person to be their authentic selves. He sees it as an infantile neurosis, and used scientific jargon to make his assertions. So he continues in the line of Marx and Nietzsche in dismissing it on an emotivistic level. He also sees it as illusory and one that won’t be proved by rational refutation, but emotional ones. However, Freud writes later that discontentedness is inevitable to being civilized and there’s an exchange that is necessary. One would have to sublimate sexual happiness for the sake of relation to society. The pleasure principle and repression would have to find an outlet, and he says that science and art are those outlets.
Chapter 7 – The New Left and the Politicization of Sex (p 225-264)
Trueman walks us through the “shotgun wedding of Marx and Freud” as the sexualized psychological man now becomes the political sexualized psychological man: the Modern Self by Critical Theorists Horkheimer, Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich. Reich picks up on the theme of repression and charges patriarchy and a “sex-negating” church as guilty of denying true authenticity to individuals. Reich goes further and says that sexual codes are connected to the exploitation of labor. In sum, the monogamous patriarchal family has an economic unit that doesn’t serve society at large, but rather serves only the family. The male head of the family uses women and children as chattel to advance their own economic strength at the expense of the woman and children. In other words, women and children aren’t allowed to be their true authentic selves unless they can be public in their participation in society. In addition, patriarchy reinforces and advances notions of a pliant and submissive individual to the needs of the authority figure and its society. It’s a conflict between a poietic worldview and a mimetic worldview. Anyone who represses women and children from any form of happiness should be severely dealt with as immoral and disgusting.
Trueman connects this line of thinking with Marcuse and his idea that tolerance still serves the status quo of those in power. Tolerance is still a 2nd world idea. Marcuse then moves to reject the idea that free speech should be valued. He says “the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the education institutions… (p 251).” Political consciousness must be awakened by restricting anything that oppresses the individual’s ability to be their authentic self.
Trueman also adds Simone du Beauvoir here as an important person because of her work on feminism. Specifically, she moves the idea of one’s lived experience as what constitutes who they really are. She writes “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine (p 256).” Not only does a human become who they are, they’re also defined by their social relations, AND she separate biology from that which constitutes human nature.
Gender is a social construct and just because someone has a certain female sex organ doesn’t make them truly a woman. It’s performative and Nietzschean. It’s Marxist, Rousseaunean, and Romantic in that no external power structure can define one’s womanhood, not Christian morality or monogamous marriage.
Epilogue to Part 3 – Reflections on the Sexualization of the Revolution (p 265-268)
Part 4: Triumphs of the Revolution
Chapter 8 – The Triumph of the Erotic (p 271-300)
Here, Trueman walks us through how surrealism, pornography, feminism all culminate and find their ideas advanced through pop culture and uses Ariana Grande’s lyrics and the focus on youth being the priority of the primary target of those seeking to throw off sexual repressions. He also demonstrates that the difference in the pornography of the Greek Gods and the Kama Sutra is that they still sought to demonstrate a transcendent ideal for normative patterns of behavior. Now, the priority is on the immanent frame. Modesty is immoral because it suppresses the individual’s right to express themselves in an authentic way. It’s a joke that a person would be a 40-year-old virgin because that person is less than human is missing out on the sempiternal joys of sex.
Chapter 9 – The Triumph of the Therapeutic (p 301-337)
Trueman has hit on absolute gold here in his analysis of how the social imaginary has become so inculcated with these views of the modern self, that they have become key parts of our constitutional order through decisions of the Supreme Court.
Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992) was a hopeful opportunity to overthrow Roe v Wade by several pro-life Republican appointees to the court. Its decision demonstrated its commitment to the Poietic Social Imaginary of the Modern Self by stating “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the State (p 303).”
Lawrence v Texas (2003) demonstrates the Supreme Court’s shift to the society no longer viewing homosexual activity as immoral and that their decision would be unpopular if they ruled on the same grounds as a previous decision. They moved from a mimetic worldview in which morality was based on something transcendent to a poietic worldview in the focus on the individual and their relation to the society at large.
United States v Windsor (2013) overturned DOMA based on some disapproval, stigma, or animus on the part of one class (the heteronormative patriarchal religious people) against another class.
Obergefell v Hodges (2015) states: “A first premise of the Court’s relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy… A second principle… is that the right to marry is fundamental because it supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals…A third basis for protecting the right to marry is that it safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from the related right of childrearing, procreation, and education…Fourth and finally, this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order.”
So you immediately see the individual trumping history and the notion of choice and consent.
Trueman then goes on to discuss abortion ethics and discusses the various ways in which the abortion debate has taken shape on either side of the debate on p 317-319. He points out Singer denies human exceptionalism on Darwinian grounds. Humans aren’t sacred, so killing a human at any point of viability isn’t wrong per se. Consciousness is his primary grounds for doing so, which roots personhood in a psychological category, and then says abortion and infanticide is wrong only when the happiness of the birth parents or potential adoptive parents is jeopardized.
He then concludes the chapter with the psychologized language of college campuses not allowing certain people to speak at their college because their words will bring damage. Now before we call them snowflakes, understand that the social imaginary is such that sticks and stones breaking bones isn’t NEARLY as bad as words hurting the minds of individuals because the inner person is more constitutive of who someone TRULY is. Any imposition on that is the denial of someone being their authentic selves.
Chapter 10 – The Triumph of the T (p 339-378)
In his history of the LGBTQ+ alliance, Trueman essentially connects all of these groups together as a victimized class of people who have been suppressed from being who they truly are by society at large with their repressions and patriarchy. It wasn’t until the AIDS crisis that created an alliance between the LG, and the B doesn’t really fit either. The one thing marking them apart is their commitment to a binary. The T simply fits in there because of them being an oppressed class of people and victimized by society at large. We can see how it’s tearing feminism apart.
Trueman then points to the Yogyakarta Principles (p 366-378) as the explicit summation of all the ingredients in the social imaginary from victimhood, to freedom, to equality, to dignity.
Epilogue to Part 4 – Reflections on the Triumphs of the Revolution (p379-382)
Concluding Unscientific Prologue
This Secular Age
Choice is one of the underlying ideas in our age. We choose to be Christians today in a way no one did in Western Europe before 1517. We choose our Christian identity based on our personal choices. The advent of the car has exacerbated this as well. We can actually drive to the church we identify with. Even to be Roman Catholic today involves a choice in a way it didn’t a couple of hundred years ago.
Understanding the Anticulture
We’re broken from the past and most of our institutions are cut off from anything transcendent that would hold them together. We’re free floating in the present with our only purpose lying on an immanent frame such as Huxley’s Brave New World where sterile sex, drugs, alcohol, and entertainment were all that truly mattered. And where being unhappy was illegal. These are Deathworks. Personal stories tend to have a huge emotional impact on people’s religious lives and inform them on decisions to attend a particular church. We even have the Catechism revised to our chief end being the enjoyment of God having priority over the glorifying of God.
Understanding the Debate about LGBTQ+ Issues
We do need to be careful to understand the social imaginary when discussing the Gospel and Christianity with LGBTQ+ and not simply dismiss their understanding of who they are out of hand. These are real anxieties and we should treat them with grace and care, yet firmly rooted in transcendence and a sacred moral order.
Possible Futures
SEXUAL MORALITY
GAY MARRIAGE
TRANSGENDERISM
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Whither the Church? (3 marks of the church in the future)
The precedent: the second century where the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralist society.
Book Review by JD Warren
Audience in Mind
Trueman has multiple audiences in mind with this book: The primary audience is meant for American evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox; very broadly, orthodox Christians in the West. Trueman has stated that he wrote it in a way that even those who are the Triumphant Sexual Revolutionaries would be able to agree with his account, even if they don’t agree with his critiques of the Modern Self.
The Goal of the Book
Trueman writes on p.19 “The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.’” Elsewhere he says he seeks to explain the world to the church. He goes on to write on p.20 that “At the heart of this book lies a basic conviction: the so-called sexual revolution of the last sixty years, culminating in its latest triumph – the normalization of transgenderism – cannot be properly understood until it is set within the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood. The sexual revolution is as much a symptom as it is a cause of the culture that now surrounds us everywhere we look, from sitcoms to Congress.”
In his introduction, he lays out his goal along with a structure. He lays out his intention to clarify what happened in the Sexual Revolution and the factors that have contributed to the shift, up to and including certain technological advancements such as the pill and anonymity on the internet. He goes on to say that this revolution is interested in the abolition of any codes of morality entirely; Nietzsche and Freud will be his main foils in this. In addition to this, he says he will move on to clarify the use of the term self; not merely as being self-aware but understanding who we are and who we are in relation to others and the world around us. Charles Taylor is his primary source highlighting 3 key developments: focus on inwardness as decisive of our self; affirmation of ordinary “modern” life; how nature provides us with an inner moral source. This will lead to the idea of “coming out” due to previously living an inauthentic life; and now our society has come to the point where the basic underlying assumptions of the inner psychological life that led to that statement making sense, that we have now come to the point where saying “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” is due to “living a lie” or “not living as my true, authentic self.”
*At this point Trueman gives some cautions to those who are committed to strong religious views in their approach to the revolution of the self: be careful not to focus more on the transcendent metaphysical principles to not understand the particulars, AND we must be careful not to focus so much on the particulars we neglect the broader context. His example is 9/11. In a broad sense, gravity brought the towers down. In a very narrow sense, it was Islamic terrorists that ran airplanes into the tower. He seeks to use this as an analogy to properly balance some things in mind: American foreign policy had changed since WW2 and there was also a rise in militant Islam. He then demonstrates there is a tendency for some to blame the other for the problem, but he cautions us to understand that we participate in this society as well. He says on p 25 that “we are all expressive individualists now.” One could quibble with that a bit, I suppose, but the point should be taken that some identify themselves by their sexual orientation, yet others identify themselves as a Christian or a Muslim. His goal for the person reading this book to be careful to set things in their proper context. From developments in philosophy, political theory, and the Industrial Revolution, this gives a shape to why certain attitudes on a popular level are the way they are.
Structure and Argument of the Book
Along with his Introduction and a Concluding Unscientific Prologue, there are 4 parts to the book –
Part 1: Architecture of the Revolution, Chapters 1-2; the triumph of the therapeutic, psychological man, the anticulture, deathworks, and the “social imaginary”
Part 2: Foundations of the Revolution, Chapters 3-5; Rousseau, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin (Psychologizing of the Self)
Part 3: Sexualization of the Revolution, Chapters 6-7; Freud, the New Left (Sexualization of the Self)
Part 4: Triumphs of the Revolution, Chapters 8-10; the Triumphs through art, Supreme Court decisions, abortion ethics, the LGBTQ+ movement (Politicization of the Self)
Recommended Reading Methods
Due to the density, importance, and academic content of the book I would recommend a couple of different methods.
For those who have some level of understanding of some of the academic contents and limited time, I heartily recommend the intro, conclusion, and epilogue to each Part. Trueman does a great job of not letting each section spill over into the other, and each Part could be published stand-alone; he compartmentalizes very well.
For the skimmer, it’s edited well enough that you could reasonably read the intro and conclusion of each chapter to get a sense of the book as a whole as well.
For others, I highly encourage everyone to simply take the time and move it to the top of your reading list and do the work of reading the book. Trueman makes some critical analysis and could make connection points sensible to most readers. Whether it’s explaining philosophical thought of major thinkers from Rousseau to Freud to Surrealist Artists, analyzing Supreme Court decisions, walking through the abortion ethics of Peter Singer and the pro-life/pro-choice clashes, or explaining Critical Theory and its culmination in the Indonesian Yogyakarta Principles – Trueman shows how academic ideas make their way down to a popular level application of the ideas.
For those who may have limited understanding of the academic and limited time, I would say begin with the introduction and skip to the Concluding Unscientific Prologue. Let me mention here what Trueman states his goal of the book is NOT and where he intends to end his assertions. First, he doesn’t intend on this being a comprehensive analysis (p 29). Second, this is certainly no lament nor is it a polemic: we are not Pharisees looking at the tax collector thanking God we’re not like that guy while we long for a day on this earth where there will be no more tax collectors. There is no Golden Age. Third, he’s a historian doing the work of a historian presenting the history. He seeks to help Christians interpret this history and use his work as a prolegomenon in discussion of how the Church in the West can respond biblically. He concludes with a fantastic “prologue.”
Part 1: Architecture of the Revolution
Chapter 1 – Reimagining the Self (p 35-71)
Here, Trueman begins to introduce us to 3 20th century social analysts: Charles Taylor, a philosopher; Philip Rieff, a sociologist emphasizing psychology; and Alasdair MacIntyre, the ethicist.
He begins with Charles Taylor and his concept of a “social imaginary.” Now this is different than a worldview, in that a worldview is a set of ideas; whereas a 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” (p 37, also see footnotes). One of the reasons the LBTGQ+ phenomena, and specifically the T, is because the social imaginary was such that the basic assumptions of the wider culture already adopted the belief that could lead to the plausibility. Add to that the technology being such that made it even more materially plausible, and here we are.
The next idea Trueman presents that comes from Charles Taylor is 2 worldviews: Mimesis and Poiesis beginning on p 39. Mimesis “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 (p 39). Poiesis “sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.” This will be important when we get to Nietzsche as he calls for the polite bourgeoisie to wake up to the fact that the earth has been unchained from the sun, and that a new moral order must be developed. One of the other effects this has is a “society moves from a view of the world possessing intrinsic meaning, so it also moves from a view of humanity as having a specific and given end.” Teleology moves from having an objective end to a subjective one. Think about the formerly agrarian calendar where seeds had to be sown at a specific time and harvest time for individual crops only came about once in the year. Now, we can go down to the grocery store and buy blueberries, bananas, strawberries, all kinds of stuff. One of the reasons was due to the development of irrigation, etc. to allow for this to happen. Essentially, we move from having to conform ourselves to the given order of nature to now being able to conform nature to our purposes. Same with our medical technology, we have developed the technology where certain diseases from the past were death sentences to now it not being so. Childbirth, diabetes, the bubonic plague and so on. We’re living through the development of a technology that has a poietic worldview behind it. All this to say is we now live in a world in which “self-creation is a routine part of our social imaginary” AND “Human nature…becomes something individuals or societies invent for themselves.” (p 42) The individual is now expressive.
Trueman moves us on to Philip Rieff. Rieff is the thinker that launched Trueman to begin to write this book as Rod Dreher mentions in the foreword. Rieff wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and we can see the obvious play Trueman has on this for his final part of the book with his 3 “Triumphs.” Trueman points us to the key concepts of cultural theory first “his notion that cultures are primarily defined by what they forbid [as part of their social imaginary {my addition}]. This is a basically Freudian concept: if…taboos drive civilization, then civilization is defined at its base by a negative idea. (p 43, see Rieff’s expression and accompanying foot note)
Secondly, Rieff says that culture has historically directed the individual outward, in communal activities being the place individuals would find their true selves. Now, the individual is the one creating purpose for themselves. Here is where Trueman begins to piece some things together with the expressive individual and Rieff’s psychological man (p 44 ff). Rieff has 4 historical archetypal men: political man of Plato and Aristotle who finds his identity in attendance at the Areopagus, the assembly (of the senate), and civic and community life in the polis; giving way to religious man of the Middle Ages who finds his identity by participation in sacred activities like mass, pilgrimages, following the liturgical recommendation for worship; this is followed by economic man who is involved in trade, production, and the making of money. These three are all outwardly directed archetypes, which gives way to the fourth: psychological man – “a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities…but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness (p 45 also see footnote 13 on p 46). This is the connection to Taylor’s “expressive individual” as also Rieff’s “psychological man.”
On p 47, Trueman notes that Rieff sees two historic reversals underlying this new world of psychological man. First, a transformation of therapy. In the 3 previous archetypal ages, the therapist helped the individual grasp the nature of the community to which he belonged; whereas the role for the therapist in a psychological archetype is to protect the individual from any neuroses the community may impose on an individual. Second, the orders are reversed in relation to institutional commitments. The Athenian to the assembly, the medieval Christian to the church, the factory worker to the trade union. Now, institutions are in service to the individual and his sense of well being (p 48-49). The individual becomes performative – they are able to be their “authentic, true selves.”
Trueman then pauses to ask a couple of questions regarding human identity over human behavior: Why is it important that identity is publicly acknowledged, and why is it important the public acknowledgement of some identities is compulsory and of others is forbidden? Why can someone sell baked goods to homosexuals, but when the baker decides to not bake a cake for a gay wedding cause such consternation? This is where the outward, social dimension to my psychological well-being demands others acknowledge my inward, psychological identity. This is the analytic attitude. Here Trueman connects Rieff once again to Taylor and the politics of recognition on p 57 by quoting Taylor write in Sources of the Self (p35) that “One is only a self among other selves.” We don’t point to our DNA or gender to identify ourselves, we point out our societal relation. This means that human beings need to belong. Trueman doesn’t mention this, but we know that “it’s not good for man to be alone” AND “be fruitful and multiply” connotes a society as part of the good of how God made us. We are social animals. There’s much more Trueman touches on regarding Hegelianism, but we need to move on to how this shift in society continues with technological changes and intellectual changes as regarding social hierarchies built on honor: samurai, feudal lords, Hindu caste system, etc. Here he begins to reach back further to point out the emphasis on dignity of the individual as developed by Rousseau’s statement “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” The importance of this is that it dignifies the individual before society denigrates him.
Chapter 2 – Reimagining Our Culture (p 73-102)
Here Trueman introduces more thoughts by Rieff and adds MacIntyre into the picture as our culture is now being reimagined. Rieff speaks of first, second, and third worlds. But he doesn’t do so economically, he does so regarding morality. First worlds are marked by myth and fate. The story of the gods and the authority coming from the oracle of Delphi is an example. Second worlds are marked by faith with the primary example being Christianity with its moral codes coming from the God who is revealed in the Bible. Trueman reminds us again that societies are marked by what they forbid, yet First and Second worlds have an appeal to a transcendent order. Third worlds do not have stability since there’s nothing transcendent that will give stability, and because of this anything coming from a first or second world is discarded. This is where “cultural amnesia” resides. They’re ahistorical and iconoclastic. Taylor calls this an immanent frame rather than a transcendent frame, where this world is all there is (See p 77 for Taylor’s description). At this point, Trueman calls our attention to how 3rd worlds view personhood in juxtaposition to 1st and 2nd worlds with the example of abortion (p 78):
“A prohibition on abortion really depends on the notion of personhood. Is an embryo a person with potential or a potential person?”
This brings us to MacIntyre’s work on ethics and the modern ethic of emotivism. Where there’s a teleology one can distinguish between what individuals are and what they should be. So what are the social assumptions of our 3rd world West now? MacIntyre calls it emotivism: the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and…all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference…attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character (p 85). In other words, our 3rd world West doesn’t understand the statement that homosexuality is wrong because of something transcendent. Rather our 3rd world West can only understand that one personally disapproves of homosexuality, and you should do likewise. This will be codified in US v. Windsor which we will get to later. Thus 3rd worlds are Anticultures, chronological snobs, and devoted to the subversion, destabilization, and destruction of a 1st or 2nd world’s traditions. They are also antihistorical.
It’s at this point, we need to jump forward to Trueman’s calling our attention back to Rieff and his term “deathworks.” Anticultures use Deathworks to subvert and destroy the previous culture. The way this is done is by making something look ridiculous rather than beautiful. This is typically done through art, and we have the example of Piss Christ: a crucifix placed in a jar submerged in an artist’s urine. In effect, the sacramental is turned into something excremental. There’s no assertion of something being untrue, rather it’s made distasteful; and since our society operates on emotivism, whatever doesn’t suit one’s tastes should be jettisoned as something unvaluable. At this point, Trueman mentions pornography as the quintessential Deathwork. Not only does it promote lust and the objectification of the participants – it repudiates any idea that sex has any significance beyond the act itself. Trueman elsewhere calls those involved in this Deathwork (whether the producer or consumer) as sempiternal orgiasts. He writes on p 99 “The important thing about deathworks is that they subvert and destroy the sacred order without really having anything with which to replace it. If Nietzsche’s madman unchains the earth from the sun, then we might say that deathworks are instrumental in this exercise, communicating the message of the death of God via aesthetic forms that come to shape the popular imagination – or, to put it in Taylor’s language, to shape the social imaginary.”
Trueman then moves on to discuss forgetfulness and the subtle ways we forget the significance of the past. We just toss it in the trash bin. And he says Rieff makes a connection between this and abortion as another Deathwork. The issue isn’t over when personhood begins, as most debates center there; the issue is over personhood. And takes the most sacred thing in the social order and simply treats it as excrement. It’s antihistorical because it erases any physical consequences of the sex act between a man and woman. It also sterilizes the act.
Part 2: Foundations of the Revolution
Chapter 3 – The Other Genevan: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Foundations of Modern Selfhood (p 105-128)
At this point, Trueman moves us along to one of Freud’s heroes: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century French social philosopher. He highlights not his most famous work, The Social Contract. Rather, he highlights Rousseau’s Confessions, Two States of Nature, and Two Loves.
The Confessions contain a story of theft that parallels Augustine’s story of pear-thievery. Rousseau stole his mother’s asparagus not because it was evil or sin in a way Augustine would posit. Rousseau says he stole it because someone forced him to. He was upset that someone imposed their will over him and caused him to do something that violated his autonomous will.
Trueman then moves on to discuss Rousseau’s concept of Primeval and Hypothetical states of nature. Just previous to this, there is the highlight of Rousseau’s encounter with a prostitute and his experience of her with a deformity that he initially thought led to her prostitution. She was beautiful in every way, except for this one thing that came about due to some inner depravity; or so Rousseau initially thought. He went on to posit that it was actually her social circumstances that led to it. He moved the blame from something individual to something societal. Rousseau says the arts and sciences led to society’s ills and imposed morality on individuals to the extent they were actually at the root of modern vices. Society impedes on one’s ability to be in a hypothetical state of nature, one where the individual could have perfect self-love and be free from society inflaming pride and competition. In order to advance in society, one had to compete with others and create inequality. Trueman shows that Rousseau understands the individual can’t live in isolation from others, but the individuals in the society had a responsibility to pursue self-love rather than an inflamed love that diminishes the dignity of the individual and creates inequality. He writes this where Trueman quotes him on p 120: “I would show that justice and goodness are not merely abstract words – pure moral beings formed by the understanding – but are true affections of the soul enlightened by reason, are hence only an ordered development of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, independent of conscience, no natural law can be established; and that the entire right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the human heart.”
No law of nature as foundational, rather the human heart. This is where we have the redefinition of the “golden rule” to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Ethics moves from the community to the individual; the community empathizes with the individual and apply to yourself the same principles you would apply to them. This becomes a form of emotivism or sentimentalism. Trueman asks how this applies to education: “if human beings in the state of nature have naturally correct sentiments, then the purpose of education in the real, actual world in which we live becomes not what it was traditionally conceived as being: the training of individuals in the intellectual, social, and moral competencies necessary for being a member of society. On the contrary, education is about allowing the person to mature in a manner that protects her from precisely those cultural influences that traditional schooling is designed to cultivate and inflame amour propre. These serve only to alienate her from who she really is, making her inauthentic.”
Chapter 4 – Unacknowledged Legislators: Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake (p 129-161)
Here, Trueman moves us forward in the history to the Romantic period of the arts and wants to highlight 4 things. First, the notion that poetry is able to strip away societal constructions and corruptions and connect them to something more authentic. Second, the poet and poetry uses the aesthetics of the artistic medium to properly ground the reader by cultivate the correct sentiments. Third, poetry becomes political and revolutionary; the poet becomes what Shelley calls “an Unacknowledged Legislator of the World.” Fourth, the emerging attack on Christianity as that which constrains and corrupts the individual; the desire is to bring about political liberation and sexual freedom. Let me end this section by skipping forward to Trueman’s summary of the Romantics thought that personal happiness is the purpose of life. This is inherently psychological and is the goal of the therapist in a therapeutic age. Poetry and art serve the role of therapy. Add to this the attack on marriage and monogamy traditionally understood to be for procreation, mutual companionship, and exclusive sexual union. The idea that any institution exists for the happiness of the individual applied to the Romantic understanding of marriage and you get merely individual consent being the only ethic for marriage. And when one no longer consents, you move on. And this is the rationale behind our modern understanding of marriage and no-fault divorce. Shelley also likens marriage to religious creeds – so there’s an attack on confessionalism and its requirement that people conform to it. I think this is why so many now won’t conform to confessional statements – they’re expressive individualists and the creeds and confessions should conform to their tastes and notions of what they believe the Bible to teach. I would invite you to read Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley’s, quite famous classic gothic horror Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
Time keeps me from discussing it in detail, but revisit it with so many of these themes in mind. Please get the revised version Shelley published in 1832 (?).
Chapter 5 – The Emergence of Plastic People: Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin (p 163-192)
Here, I want to highlight Nietzsche’s theory of morality as it relates to Christianity representing the instincts of the weakest and most oppressed, and embodying in his mind the very hatred of life and living. It devalues what makes the individual strong and natural. Nietzsche views Christianity as morally repugnant, asking what’s the ulterior motive behind it, is made sick by the Christian claims of truth. In Nietzsche we have a suspicion of an absolute/transcendent/teleological moral truth, and a rejection of Christianity as distasteful. It moves into the realm of emotivism. Trueman also highlights Nietzsche’s assertion that absent any transcendent notion of humanity, one should make themselves; in other words, self-creation and performance lie at the core of personhood. Not nihilism, but self-creation and “living every moment as if it was your last.”
Trueman moves on to Marx and his dialectical materialism. He believes that the process by which history moves forward between individuals and societies is not intellectual, but is material and economic. In so doing, Marx creates a “plastic” view of human nature. It molds and shapes to the society it’s in, including morality and ethics. Due to this plasticity, human nature is always in a state of flux. Add to that the specific place humans found themselves in with the industrial revolution, Marx saw the importance of technology continuing to change human nature and their relation to economic circumstances. He writes: “The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex (p 183).” Prescient words indeed that technological advancements will blur or even erase the lines of age and sex. We will have a flattening of men and women as they relate to one another in the workplace as well as the home.
In his treatment of Darwin, Trueman briefly points out that his theory of natural selection only made the theological claim of origins of life irrelevant. There was no telos in his theory, just an ongoing change.
Epilogue to Part 2 – Reflections on the Foundations of the Revolution (p 193-197)
Part 3: Sexualization of the Revolution
Chapter 6 – Sigmund Freud, Civilization, and Sex (p 201-223)
It’s at this point Trueman begins to move on from man becoming psychologized man to now becoming sexualized psychological man and points us to Freud. The main takeaways are that Freud created a myth that has come to inhabit the social imaginary that sexual desire and fulfillment is the key to human existence and happiness. If happiness is the goal, for Freud the pleasure principle lay in the quest for sexual gratification. He “reorients thinking on the purpose of sex… procreation is subordinated to… personal pleasure” (p 205). In doing this, we have Freud focusing on the conflict between the natural authentic self and its natural desires and the civilized inauthentic self and its repressed desires. Freud also is asserting that this is essential to human nature, and since people are humans from birth, then he sexualizes infants and children. Add to this the shift in seeing the society as corrupting people, the decline in the belief of original sin, and the need to protect the child from the enemy without, there was also a shift in education. Trueman looks to the issue of masturbation as shifting from being a moral problem to a medical one. It was called “self-abuse” because of the concern that it would lead to deviancy later. But you see the shift in it being a psychological problem rather than a moral one.
Freud based his theory on “scientific” research done in Berlin that dismissed any connection of masturbation to as a moral or medical problem. It was normal according to Freud, and to be truly human is to be sexual, so let the child masturbate all he wants. Now we see this applied in childhood sex education and the shift of education creating a space where the child can be their authentic selves.
The next shift Trueman points out Freud contributes to is the thought that religion was a psychological issue. It has its purpose when one is young, but then this can continue to be a source of creating psychological problems and repression that doesn’t allow the person to be their authentic selves. He sees it as an infantile neurosis, and used scientific jargon to make his assertions. So he continues in the line of Marx and Nietzsche in dismissing it on an emotivistic level. He also sees it as illusory and one that won’t be proved by rational refutation, but emotional ones. However, Freud writes later that discontentedness is inevitable to being civilized and there’s an exchange that is necessary. One would have to sublimate sexual happiness for the sake of relation to society. The pleasure principle and repression would have to find an outlet, and he says that science and art are those outlets.
Chapter 7 – The New Left and the Politicization of Sex (p 225-264)
Trueman walks us through the “shotgun wedding of Marx and Freud” as the sexualized psychological man now becomes the political sexualized psychological man: the Modern Self by Critical Theorists Horkheimer, Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich. Reich picks up on the theme of repression and charges patriarchy and a “sex-negating” church as guilty of denying true authenticity to individuals. Reich goes further and says that sexual codes are connected to the exploitation of labor. In sum, the monogamous patriarchal family has an economic unit that doesn’t serve society at large, but rather serves only the family. The male head of the family uses women and children as chattel to advance their own economic strength at the expense of the woman and children. In other words, women and children aren’t allowed to be their true authentic selves unless they can be public in their participation in society. In addition, patriarchy reinforces and advances notions of a pliant and submissive individual to the needs of the authority figure and its society. It’s a conflict between a poietic worldview and a mimetic worldview. Anyone who represses women and children from any form of happiness should be severely dealt with as immoral and disgusting.
Trueman connects this line of thinking with Marcuse and his idea that tolerance still serves the status quo of those in power. Tolerance is still a 2nd world idea. Marcuse then moves to reject the idea that free speech should be valued. He says “the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the education institutions… (p 251).” Political consciousness must be awakened by restricting anything that oppresses the individual’s ability to be their authentic self.
Trueman also adds Simone du Beauvoir here as an important person because of her work on feminism. Specifically, she moves the idea of one’s lived experience as what constitutes who they really are. She writes “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine (p 256).” Not only does a human become who they are, they’re also defined by their social relations, AND she separate biology from that which constitutes human nature.
Gender is a social construct and just because someone has a certain female sex organ doesn’t make them truly a woman. It’s performative and Nietzschean. It’s Marxist, Rousseaunean, and Romantic in that no external power structure can define one’s womanhood, not Christian morality or monogamous marriage.
Epilogue to Part 3 – Reflections on the Sexualization of the Revolution (p 265-268)
Part 4: Triumphs of the Revolution
Chapter 8 – The Triumph of the Erotic (p 271-300)
Here, Trueman walks us through how surrealism, pornography, feminism all culminate and find their ideas advanced through pop culture and uses Ariana Grande’s lyrics and the focus on youth being the priority of the primary target of those seeking to throw off sexual repressions. He also demonstrates that the difference in the pornography of the Greek Gods and the Kama Sutra is that they still sought to demonstrate a transcendent ideal for normative patterns of behavior. Now, the priority is on the immanent frame. Modesty is immoral because it suppresses the individual’s right to express themselves in an authentic way. It’s a joke that a person would be a 40-year-old virgin because that person is less than human is missing out on the sempiternal joys of sex.
Chapter 9 – The Triumph of the Therapeutic (p 301-337)
Trueman has hit on absolute gold here in his analysis of how the social imaginary has become so inculcated with these views of the modern self, that they have become key parts of our constitutional order through decisions of the Supreme Court.
Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992) was a hopeful opportunity to overthrow Roe v Wade by several pro-life Republican appointees to the court. Its decision demonstrated its commitment to the Poietic Social Imaginary of the Modern Self by stating “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the State (p 303).”
Lawrence v Texas (2003) demonstrates the Supreme Court’s shift to the society no longer viewing homosexual activity as immoral and that their decision would be unpopular if they ruled on the same grounds as a previous decision. They moved from a mimetic worldview in which morality was based on something transcendent to a poietic worldview in the focus on the individual and their relation to the society at large.
United States v Windsor (2013) overturned DOMA based on some disapproval, stigma, or animus on the part of one class (the heteronormative patriarchal religious people) against another class.
Obergefell v Hodges (2015) states: “A first premise of the Court’s relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy… A second principle… is that the right to marry is fundamental because it supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals…A third basis for protecting the right to marry is that it safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from the related right of childrearing, procreation, and education…Fourth and finally, this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order.”
So you immediately see the individual trumping history and the notion of choice and consent.
Trueman then goes on to discuss abortion ethics and discusses the various ways in which the abortion debate has taken shape on either side of the debate on p 317-319. He points out Singer denies human exceptionalism on Darwinian grounds. Humans aren’t sacred, so killing a human at any point of viability isn’t wrong per se. Consciousness is his primary grounds for doing so, which roots personhood in a psychological category, and then says abortion and infanticide is wrong only when the happiness of the birth parents or potential adoptive parents is jeopardized.
He then concludes the chapter with the psychologized language of college campuses not allowing certain people to speak at their college because their words will bring damage. Now before we call them snowflakes, understand that the social imaginary is such that sticks and stones breaking bones isn’t NEARLY as bad as words hurting the minds of individuals because the inner person is more constitutive of who someone TRULY is. Any imposition on that is the denial of someone being their authentic selves.
Chapter 10 – The Triumph of the T (p 339-378)
In his history of the LGBTQ+ alliance, Trueman essentially connects all of these groups together as a victimized class of people who have been suppressed from being who they truly are by society at large with their repressions and patriarchy. It wasn’t until the AIDS crisis that created an alliance between the LG, and the B doesn’t really fit either. The one thing marking them apart is their commitment to a binary. The T simply fits in there because of them being an oppressed class of people and victimized by society at large. We can see how it’s tearing feminism apart.
Trueman then points to the Yogyakarta Principles (p 366-378) as the explicit summation of all the ingredients in the social imaginary from victimhood, to freedom, to equality, to dignity.
Epilogue to Part 4 – Reflections on the Triumphs of the Revolution (p379-382)
Concluding Unscientific Prologue
This Secular Age
Choice is one of the underlying ideas in our age. We choose to be Christians today in a way no one did in Western Europe before 1517. We choose our Christian identity based on our personal choices. The advent of the car has exacerbated this as well. We can actually drive to the church we identify with. Even to be Roman Catholic today involves a choice in a way it didn’t a couple of hundred years ago.
Understanding the Anticulture
We’re broken from the past and most of our institutions are cut off from anything transcendent that would hold them together. We’re free floating in the present with our only purpose lying on an immanent frame such as Huxley’s Brave New World where sterile sex, drugs, alcohol, and entertainment were all that truly mattered. And where being unhappy was illegal. These are Deathworks. Personal stories tend to have a huge emotional impact on people’s religious lives and inform them on decisions to attend a particular church. We even have the Catechism revised to our chief end being the enjoyment of God having priority over the glorifying of God.
Understanding the Debate about LGBTQ+ Issues
We do need to be careful to understand the social imaginary when discussing the Gospel and Christianity with LGBTQ+ and not simply dismiss their understanding of who they are out of hand. These are real anxieties and we should treat them with grace and care, yet firmly rooted in transcendence and a sacred moral order.
Possible Futures
SEXUAL MORALITY
GAY MARRIAGE
TRANSGENDERISM
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Whither the Church? (3 marks of the church in the future)
- Reflect long and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practice
- Be a community
- Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body
The precedent: the second century where the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralist society.
Great for Study Courses
As a Baptist you will not agree with everything in this book, but the author is well versed in the subject about which he writes and is quite prolific. He presents the five points well and shows how they are understood differently by Evangelicals. A companion study of the 1689 Baptist Confession could certainly be beneficial because it gives the Baptist a better understanding of baptism, the key disagreement we have with Michael Horton, who is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. Over all, the book is not for beginners, but great for the growing Christian.
You may find the forward odd but hospitable, since it is written by Roger Olson, Professor of Theology at George W. Truett Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, and author of Against Calvinism.
For Calvinism is published by Zondervan.
As a Baptist you will not agree with everything in this book, but the author is well versed in the subject about which he writes and is quite prolific. He presents the five points well and shows how they are understood differently by Evangelicals. A companion study of the 1689 Baptist Confession could certainly be beneficial because it gives the Baptist a better understanding of baptism, the key disagreement we have with Michael Horton, who is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. Over all, the book is not for beginners, but great for the growing Christian.
You may find the forward odd but hospitable, since it is written by Roger Olson, Professor of Theology at George W. Truett Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, and author of Against Calvinism.
For Calvinism is published by Zondervan.
We recommend Psalms and Hymns of Reformed Worship
This is virtually the same hymnal used by Charles Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. It has been updated into 738 Psalms and Hymns. It "follows Spurgeon in allocating the first 150 hymn numbers to versions of the Psalms." It also retains "Spurgeon's title for this section - Spirit of the Psalms - because it perfectly describes the 'new song' approach which is taken in this selection. This is in the tradition of Isaac Watts and a host of other writers who produced...renderings of the Psalms."
This hymnal is available at the Metropolitan Tabernacle bookshop on the web.
This hymnal is available at the Metropolitan Tabernacle bookshop on the web.
1689 Baptist Confession of Faith
Solid Ground Christian Books has leather-bound editions of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith as well as the more common paperback.
They offer many puritan classics and a wide variety of commentaries. They have John Calvin, John Owen, Thomas Manton, John Gill, John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon.
Solid Ground has Boyce, Broadus, and Wayland. They have children's books, classics and commentaries. We think you will find them a delightful source for your study guides.
Don't take our word for it. Look at their website: www.solid-ground-books.com or P.O. Box 660132, Vestavia Hills, AL 35266 (205)443-0311
They offer many puritan classics and a wide variety of commentaries. They have John Calvin, John Owen, Thomas Manton, John Gill, John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon.
Solid Ground has Boyce, Broadus, and Wayland. They have children's books, classics and commentaries. We think you will find them a delightful source for your study guides.
Don't take our word for it. Look at their website: www.solid-ground-books.com or P.O. Box 660132, Vestavia Hills, AL 35266 (205)443-0311
