21 07 15 the rise and triumph of the modern self
The phrase ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body’ epitomises our arrival at a point in time where public discourse seems to have changed out of all semblance, not only to our past, recent and distant, but even out from a firm anchor in reality itself. This phrase previously would have been considered nonsensical, or as symptom of mental disorder, but now has credence in public life and even controversially in medicine. This has not happened overnight, nor even particularly quickly, but is the most recent manifestation of trends that have been going on for centuries. Trueman in this book describes how we have come to this point, the world of emotivism and the world of deathworks.
He traces the history of thought and assumption to the present construct of the Psychological Man of Phillip Reiff , living out the Expressive Individualism of Charles Taylor, from the Reformation, via Rousseau ; then the Romantics Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake ; and then the overtly political and iconoclastic Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin ; and finally the politicisation of sex, of Freud being appropriated into Marxism by the Gramsci, and then the Frankfurt School firstly by such as Horkheimer and Fromm, and then Reich, Del Noce, and Marcuse . We have arrived to an anti-culture.
What emerges is a history of thought about human nature; a genealogy of the contemporary worldview which currently appears to dominate in so many ways. The present cultural conflicts are in origin presenting issues based upon conflicting world views, each with deep emotional and philosophical roots.
One thing I noticed particularly when reading out loud is that Trueman actually writes well. He shapes sentences carefully, with economy and imagination. There is not spare word in the book. There is no waffle or ambiguity. That also means that much is said, thus requiring careful thought and reflection, making this a demanding but rewarding book to read.
One recurring theme is the agreement, repeatedly, throughout the history of these ideas, of the hatred for family life. Thinkers such as Godwin considered marriage the most odious of all monopolies . The Romantics, such as Shelley, disliked the family as being confining and thus inauthentic . Marx opposed the family as bourgeois and oppressive. The New Left, such as Reich, sees the family as part of the authoritarian state, inculcating the values of the thus embedded status quo . Del Noce sees a problem in parents overseeing the sexual education of their children, since for him this is part of growing political awareness, and thus the province of the state, so the family should be dismantled . Feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, with her loathing of motherhood, and Shulamith Firestone’s desire for universal pansexuality, the polymorphous perversity of Freud , all agree with their predecessors that the tyranny of the family must be abolished. This chimes chillingly with avowed intention of the Black Lives Matter movement to destroy hetero-normativity, and the oppressive patriarchal family.
A salutary warning at the end is that we are all living in conversation with our times and places, as much as fish live in the sea. Our churches become shaped by appeals to emotive personal stories, not historical precedent, nor rigorous theology, nor solid metaphysical foundations for decisions (hence the booing when the Bible was quoted in Synod ); a process very much part of therapeutic culture. But those in theory attempting to avoid such pitfalls can fall into therapeutic and aesthetic ways of thinking all too easily. Churches can reflect such things, even when in theory upholding a mostly orthodox faith.
This is most easily demonstrated by the elements of choice ; we choose to be Christians, then we choose to which church we go; we choose whether to attend locally, or go further afield; we choose by denomination, worship style, preaching, theology, company, or times of events; we can choose a church as if choosing a cat or a meal. Choice is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part . We live in a world where the un-tethering of what it means to be human from any kind of metaphysical framework has rendered the notion of universal human dignity something that threatens to push the West into a kind of totalitarian anarchy .
The church must not simply imitate the world in its zero-sum confrontations, its sarcasm, and ad hominem polemics. Moral and ethical decisions must be soundly founded upon solid thought, not emotive appeals, nor attractive personas. Christianity that is authentic is dogmatic, doctrinal, and assertive, as well as compassionate . The church must function as authentic community . That community must be united in compassion, as well as in dogma, doctrine, and assertion.
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![The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (English Edition) de [Carl R. Trueman, Rod Dreher]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/4137nBK4W+L._SY346_.jpg)
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