The year 2020 will doubtless go down in infamy, but it produced at least one excellent work of lasting value: Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020). Thoughtful Christians who read this admirable volume will find much profit therein.
I have long found it necessary to understand the history of a thing in order to properly understand the thing itself. Looking at “where we are” in terms of a cultural phenomenon is always illuminated by looking at “how we got here.” Trueman’s book helped me to do precisely that. In terms of the current moral revolution, I had recognized that we did not arrive where we are without other things paving the way — but I had not gone back far enough or deep enough. Trueman guides the reader to and through the thought of Rousseau (along with artistic mediators such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake), Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Freud in order to lay out the path which has brought about the present state of things. In doing so, he popularizes (in the best sense of the term) some of the work of sociologist Philip Rieff (1922-2006) and engages the thought of the important philosophers Charles Taylor (1931-) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-).
Trueman appropriates from Taylor the concept of the “social imaginary,” that is, “the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it…. It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it” (37-38). He argues that we have arrived at our current social imaginary, which is bound inextricably with the sexual revolution, in three broad steps which provide a broad summary of his entire work: “The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized” (221). Rousseau is central to the first move; Freud is key to the second; and the third is the purview of the New Left in its engagement of critical theory (with emphasis not only on Marx, but on the seminal work of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse). As Trueman puts it: “To follow Rousseau is to make identity psychological. To follow Freud is to make psychology, and thus identity, sexual. To mesh this combination with Marx is to make identity — and therefore sex — political” (250). In the final section of the work, Trueman highlights certain “triumphs of the revolution,” focusing “on the triumph of the erotic in art and pop culture, on the triumph of expressive individualism and related therapeutic concerns in law, ethics, and education, and on the triumph of transgenderism as the latest logical move in the politics of the sexual revolution” (380). Importantly, “the individualism, the psychologized view of reality, the therapeutic ideals, the cultural amnesia, and the pansexuality of our present age are closely intertwined, and each can be properly understood only when set in the larger context of which the others are a significant part” (380).
There are far more salient insights in this work than a review could set forth. Simply put, Trueman’s work provides an historical and philosophical framework which helps us to understand better why things are the way they are. I particularly appreciated how Trueman emphasized the role of aesthetics in cultivating the sentiments, such that artists are “unacknowledged legislators,” to use Shelley’s phrase (130). I am doubtless expressing the matter too simplistically, but it has long seemed to me that the artistic mediates the philosophical to a broader audience, and that the church has paid too little attention to this in their appropriation from the artistic realm. Also helpfully, Trueman explains why Christian virtues in the realm of sexuality such as modesty and chastity are now seen by moral revolutionaries not merely as outmoded, but actively harmful. He further demonstrates that an antipathy toward the biological (“traditional”) family is a natural consequence of the sexual revolution: “It makes sense, of course, for the family is the primary means by which values are transmitted from generation to generation” (263). Other significant insights abound.
Trueman shows charity to the reader by laying out the book’s entire argument at the outset (26-29). I recommend going back to reread this helpful synopsis once the end of each of the volume’s four major sections is attained. The work is helpful not only in laying out a coherent framework which makes sense of our current cultural moment, but also gives us helpful language and categories in which to express ourselves (“social imaginary,” “deathworks,” “expressive individualism,” “unacknowledged legislators”). This book is not for the average person in the pew, even though Trueman is mediating in clear language the thought of more abstruse thinkers. Pastors and teachers should work through this volume, however, for their own clarity of understanding and so they may in turn mediate its insights to those whom they guide.
I close with two related quotes from the volume’s introduction. “The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them” (30). “Understanding the times is a precondition of responding appropriately to the times. And understanding the times requires a knowledge of the history that has led up to the present” (31). Tolle lege.
(Read, watch, or listen to Al Mohler’s interview of Carl Trueman about the book here.)
My friend Ryan Martin’s dissertation is finally gaining the broader exposure it deserves. Forthcoming in T&T Clark’s Studies in Systematic Theology series, this work highlights the distinction between the notion of the affections that played such a high role in Edwards’s theology, life, and ministry (on the one hand) and (on the other hand) the broader category of “emotions” that is often too quickly equated with the affections.
Orchard Keeper 