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The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

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Our culture did not simply wake up one morning and decide to reject sexual mores that have held civilization together for millennia. The sexual revolution that has overthrown basic human and teleological assumptions over the past sixty years has a history. With the adroit skill of an intellectual historian, the patience and humility of a master teacher, and the charity and conviction of a Christian pastor, Carl Trueman offers us this necessary book. We cannot respond appropriately to our times unless we understand how and why our times are defined such as they are. Trueman’s work is a great gift to us in our continuing struggle to live in the world but be not of the world.” Even the bank in my hometown had a solidity to it—made from sandstone, with its magnificent doors framed by imposing Doric pillars. Its message? “I was here before you were born, and I’ll be here after you have gone. You can trust me.” Today, banks (if they have any building at all) tend, in my experience, to be made out of what appears to be cardboard. Their message? “We arrived last week, and we might be gone the day after tomorrow. Trust us at your peril.” Trueman argues that the sexual revolution is just one outworking of a change in our understanding of the self. He defines ‘the self’ as ‘how we think of the purpose of life, the meaning of happiness, and what actually constitutes people’s sense of who they are and what they are for’ (p.23). The four parts of the book help us to understand the progress of this change. Carl Trueman explains modernity to the church, with depth, clarity, and force. The significance of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. . . is hard to overstate.” Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe it. Few of us are qualified to opine on the science. But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight. And when the idea being taught has an intuitive plausibility, it is persuasive.”

The fourth and final part looks at three ‘Triumphs of the Revolution’, each of which offers an illustration of how the changes traced in the previous parts can be seen in modern society. It is here that Trueman speaks of some of the realities of which we may be aware in the world around us, including wide acceptance of pornography, approval of same-sex marriage, and a pro-transitioning response to transgender experience. An impressive achievement The loss of an agreed-upon notion of human nature—of what human beings are for—has meant that ethics has become a matter of competing individual rights, typically judged in terms of whatever the current cultural tastes might be. Claims that things are morally right or wrong are now essentially statements of cultural preference and utilitarianism. Whatever makes individuals happy is the dominant ethical approach. How have the ideas of the sexual revolution come to dominate public discourse in Western civilization and make inroads in the church? If we look at just three institutions—the family, the church, and the nation—it’s clear that each has been transformed. 1. FamilyThe polarization of the United States and the U.K. caused by the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, respectively, indicate that national identity is perhaps losing its ability to provide a unifying framework for political disagreement. Institutional Flux and the Self

Part 1, ‘Architecture of the Revolution’, introduces concepts from three philosophers (Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre) which are used throughout the book. No doubt many readers – myself included – will find that most of these concepts are new to us, but they are very helpful ways of understanding the world we live in, and they also help readers to follow the thread of Trueman’s argument. Adam—“the man, the human”—was meant to be both priest and prince: God’s own vice-gerent, who, in beholding the rest of creation, giving God the glory and calling down God’s blessing, was to have been the instrument of its coming to fulfilment. In a certain sense, even the mountains “become” all that they are in God’s great purpose, when seen and named by Adam. This was a solemn, wonderful, and joyous calling, under God; at the core of what we were meant to be. Additionally: Trueman sets up mimesis (imitation) and poiesis (making) as a dichotomy, with human culture being essentially mimetic until the Romantics came along. But if this is true, how is it that Christian art, from the First Century, all the way until the Renaissance, deliberately departed from more representational, mimetic standards, to embrace the symbolic and figurative (and which invited the subjective experience of the community of viewers)? Or are we simply to lump together the Book of Kells and Andre Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity along with—say—early Twentieth Century German Expressionism into one undifferentiated, catch-all non-mimetic category? Doubt this? Consider the following, all of which demonstrate the point, in various and differing ways: Thomas Traherne, John Donne, Edmund Spenser (The Shepheardes Calendar), Julian of Norwich, William Langland (Piers Ploughman), early Christian monasticism, and classical Hellenism. And for just another example, Shakespeare’s As You Like It? One could easily go on. And on. With each passing year, it can seem that cultural developments are only getting worse. The unending creativity and output of Western debauchery is one of its hallmark industries. “Live Your Truth” and “You Do You” asininities ensure that critical investigation about the goals of human nature are subjugated beneath the hierarchies of nerve endings and atomized “rights.” A rejection of God’s authority over creation explains one reason for our cultural plight. But cultural realities are forged by a complex milieu of ideas, personalities, and artifacts that build on one another in genealogical sequence to get us to where we are today.First, I would imagine that at one time or another we have all asked the question that led Trueman to write this book. How in the world did our culture get to the point where the statement, “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body” makes logical sense? The changes have happened so fast that we can easily become disoriented. But if you have ever been confused, frustrated, or exasperated by the strange logic at work in our culture, this book will at least give you categories to make sense of what is happening.

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? All of the book’s sections build off one another’s arguments, resulting in a moral ecology where “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, therefore, becomes a function of feeling.” Trueman’s analysis here is doubtless accurate and explains other intellectual avenues, such as MacIntyre’s insistence on emotivism being our zeitgeist’s reigning moral grammar. Carl Trueman has written an excellent book: ambitious in its scope yet circumspect in its claims and temperate, even gentlemanly, in its tone. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self will prove indispensable in moving beyond the superficiality of moralistic and liberationist interpretations to a deeper understanding and should be required reading for all who truly wish to understand the times we live in or are concerned about the human future. I very much hope it receives the wide readership it deserves.” The danger, as noted above, is that the religious free market makes us all salespeople, trying to match our product to the demands of the market. And the currency of the contemporary market is the therapeutic. How churches can counter this and yet survive looks, humanly speaking, virtually impossible. Such was the case in the second century. Christianity was utterly marginal. Its members were under suspicion of indulging themselves in immoral shenanigans such as incest and cannibalism. And the same laws that banned fire brigades banned churches from meeting, because such gatherings were seen as seditious and subversive of the common good. There is our historical precedent. Catholic traditionalists might lament for the loss of the 13th century, but those who want to respond to our situation rather than merely indulge in the masochistic pleasures of lament will reflect on the second century and how the church then behaved. 3. The church should form strong communities where Christians care and support one another.

Lest Christians are tempted to use Trueman’s analysis as ammunition for fighting culture wars, or wring our hands at the loss of the “good old days,” Trueman repeatedly makes clear that he intends his work to be neither a lament nor a polemic. This is a caution worth repeating; we may be tempted to separate our culture into “us” and “them,” and to dismiss or criticize “them” for how “they” have accepted culture’s definitions of the self and have acquiesced to expressive individualism. Not so fast, warns Trueman. As he rightly notes, Christians cannot separate ourselves from our culture and point fingers at others. “We are all expressive individualists now,” (386) he observes, and as a pointed example he notes the widespread trend for Christians to prioritize their own choices in denominations, churches, worship styles, and more. Michael Hanby, Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science, Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America Carl Trueman’s gifts as an intellectual historian shine in this profound and lucid book. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self needs to be read by anyone who wants to understand our current cultural distempers.” Michael Hanby , Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science, Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America

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