All my life, I have been fleeing a certain idea from France. According to it, civilisation enchains us: freedom consists in returning to a supposedly idyllic state of nature — or to 'barbarism', as some of us have belatedly come to realise. For by now we are all thoroughly enslaved by this foolish misapprehension and its dire consequences.
If Calvin was the Frenchman who inflicted himself on Geneva (a thing he would have said was always going to happen), then Rousseau — "the other Genevan", as Carl Trueman calls him — was that city's belated revenge on France. And, through France, on the rest of us.
"Man is born free", Rousseau declared, "but is everywhere in chains". What — everywhere? Yes. For his protest was not exclusively against the royalist absolutism of Louis XV, but against the socialising process itself, and the constraints it places upon the sovereign individual. All societies, therefore, come within the purview of his condemnation.
This is Carl Trueman's starting point. And from it, he draws a straight(-ish) line to our present situation, in which "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" is a coherent, intelligible thought. For, as he himself points out, as little as a generation ago, his grandfather "would have burst out laughing and considered it a piece of incoherent gibberish".
This volume is, in my judgment, one of the most important books to have appeared in some years. There. I've said it. Much has been written furiously assailing 'political correctness', 'critical theory', 'identity politics', 'cancel culture', and associated phenomena. But Trueman writes calmly, analytically — and showing the route by which we got here. Far from throwing stones, he makes the enemies' case as powerfully as they would themselves. He shows that he truly does 'get it'. He has no time for chatter about 'snowflakes'. And his riposte is all the more devastating for it.
In Trueman's brilliant exposition, the issue of how perceptions of selfhood have changed from Rousseau to Caitlyn Jenner forms the central strand of his narrative. He teases out, major thinker by major thinker, the route by which we have arrived at the contemporary "expressive individualism" that is today the orthodoxy — the all-powerful "social imaginary" — of the West and, via the osmosis of global westernisation, of many non-Western countries too.
"All-powerful?" I hear you ask. "Orthodoxy?" Yes, yes. For what Rousseau — and, after him, John Stuart Mill — failed to recognise was that there never was, nor ever can be, any possibility of a society without an orthodoxy, or devoid of the means to impose it. The only question is of what that orthodoxy will be. And, after that, of how tight a stranglehold it will impose upon its subjects, and how far it facilitates frictionless cohabitation between numerous individuals who, by the nature of the case, will differ from each other in temperament, interests, and opportunities.
Trueman traces the lineage and expansion of "expressive individualism" over the past two centuries. The journey takes us by way of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Blake, and their excoriation of traditional religion for (as Blake put the matter) "binding with briars my joys and desires”. Morality, especially sexual morality, trammels the free personality; we stand in need of something more in accord with human nature.
Next comes Marx who, as a materialist, thinks that there is no 'human nature' with which to be in accord: we are what we make ourselves. Appeals to a fixed or given 'human nature', as to morality and religion, are mere mists between ourselves and things-as-they-are. By way of Nietzsche, who was certain that Enlightenment thinkers had been too cowardly to confront the consequences of their own dismissal of God, Trueman brings us to Freud, who contended that all civilisations are defined by the behaviours they forbid — and that what they forbid is sexual. For the individual to liberate himself or herself from oppression by society, therefore, we need to embrace the suppressed sexual urges inside ourselves. Trueman contends that Freud's successors, such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, connected the insights of Marx and Freud: the result was the politicisation of sex and the birth of the New Left. From there, the road was clear, over several decades, to stand all the traditional sexual mores on their heads: the old virtues were mere oppression, and so actually wicked; previously stigmatised behaviours, on the other hand, were simultaneously marks of one's victimhood and of one's liberation from it — and so actually virtuous. And — here we are.
Though Trueman writes as a Christian, the average infidel reader will seldom be distracted by that point. Even if the overall argument of the book leaves the religion discarded by Rousseau and his successors looking far preferable to our current sorry state, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self reads less like a work of Christian apologetics than as a rigorous examination of why we are where we are, and how the heck we got here. And it is precisely the non-combative tone of the whole that will make this readable by people of all shades of opinion — even, perhaps, by those whose worldview stands to be desiccated in consequence. Forget the populist angry-head scribblers on the right, who will merely confirm your own indignation: read this instead, and get the bigger picture.
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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.Highlighted by 3,166 Kindle readers- While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person.Highlighted by 2,614 Kindle readers
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From the Publisher
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Carl Trueman traces the historical roots of many hot-button issues such as transgenderism and homosexuality, offering thoughtful biblical analysis.
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"This is without question one of the most important religious books of the decade." —Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative; author of The Benedict Option Excerpt from review in The Wall Street Journal |
"This is the most important book of our moment." —Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus for The Daily Wire; host of The Ben Shapiro Show |
"The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is perhaps the most significant analysis and evaluation of Western culture written by a Protestant during the past fifty years." —Bruce Riley Ashford, Professor of Theology and Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; coauthor, The Gospel of Our King |
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| The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self | Strange New World | Crisis of Confidence | |
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| Price | $19.99 | $13.49 | $25.19 |
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Reviews with images
identity is becoming subjective in our culture...this may be more destructive then we realize
In today’s modern culture, we have come to think about ourselves differently than ever before. Society is more psychological, secular, and sexual than in any other time period from our history. It has been a slow progress of development going back hundreds of years. Our author investigates many contributing philosophers like Nietzsche, Marx, Rousseau and Freud, to name a few. Not only have ideas shaped us, so have modern advancements in science and technology.It is no secret that we have become a society of psychological beings. For previous generations, job satisfaction was “empirical, outwardly directed, and unrelated” to one’s psychological state: if you had a job that could provide for your family, you were happy (or, if you were a woman, if you had healthy children and a happy husband, you were likewise happy). For our generation, “the issue of feeling is central.” We need to feel good and valued in the things we do, otherwise we are unhappy and depressed. Self-expression and individual psychological well-being are now at the heart of what it means to be human.When societies were religious, and we all believed in a God greater than ourselves, we all shared in a system of ethics that guided social behavior. Having an affair was wrong because God decreed it, for example. Now that society has become more secular, we no longer have a shared system of ethics and morals. We used to tell children not to steal because it was a sin in the eyes of God. Now, when our child steals, we still teach them that the behavior is wrong, but there is no further justification for why? The answer all too often given by parents is: because I said so. This is what Nietzsche meant when he famously declared that “God is dead,” because without God, what barometer do we humans have for what is good and what is evil? It has become necessary for us to create a system of ethics ourselves, but without the structure once afforded to us by organized religion, this has been a tough challenge. In a psychological society such as our own, “the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned.” Ethics has become a function of feeling.Another development of our modern society is that everything has become sexualized. A major catalyst for this was the invention of modern birth control, something that gave women control over their bodily reproduction and unlocked them to discover more potential in their lives. This was undoubtedly a great gift to women, and yet, where has it ultimately led us? Marriage rates have been declining while the number of children raised by single-parents have been increasing. Sex used to be something sacred, something that society viewed as a private enterprise between two adults. Our modern view of it, however, has become the inverse, as we now view sexual relationships as recreational and fun. Sex is on display everywhere in our culture, from movies and music to advertisements selling cars and hamburgers. Children are exposed to sexual themes at younger and younger ages, something that has become very controversial for parents. The great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud also contributed to our modern sexualization when he published his discovery that “sexual repression was central to the authority relationship that existed between parent and child.”These culture advancements have all contributed to the changing way we define our identities, the central theme of this book. While yes, all things change as society and culture progress over time, the recent changes in the ways we identify ourselves are newly important: it has transitioned from external to internal. Our identities used to be in relation to others, for example I am the child of Barbara Allen, a waiter at The Cheesecake Factory, and a producer of several albums of hip-hop music. More recently, however, we have began to identify ourselves by our gender and our sexual orientation. He/him, she/her, and they/them; heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual and monogamous/polyamorous.“If the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign,” our author contends, “then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination.” In the United States, the political Right contends that there are only two genders, man and women. The political Left, on the other hand, now believes that gender is a spectrum and is not constrained by numericals. The Right is holding tightly to the past, while the Left has gone too far creating something new. Perhaps we could all agree on three: man, woman, and, for everybody else somewhere in the middle, trans?While secularization and sexualization have been liberating to many, there is an inherent problem with identity becoming something internal: it makes it subjective. This is also the case for our collective sense of ethics: things that used to be objectively good and bad have now moved to the subjective realm of interpretation. This makes it difficult to agree upon collective ideas, fracturing society and creating cultural chaos. The freedom of speech, once a paragon of liberal democracies, has become damaging, because “words become potential weapons.”While the social scaffolding we once had was at times constraining, it also provided structure. We should be wary of tearing this structure down, because societies need structure. Without it, we fall into chaos, and the farther down this rabbit hole we go, where everything in life is internalized and subjective, the more we invite this chaos in.
Top reviews from other countries
Cjbevan
the history of thought and assumption to the present construct
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 15, 2021
IC
A readable, intelligent tracing of the roots of the psychology of the (post)modern mind
Reviewed in Canada on April 14, 2021