The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution is a superb critical examination of the ideas, traditions, cultural beliefs, and social behaviors that shape contemporary society. His sharp curation and analysis of the historical sources informing our 21^st century worldviews are profoundly impactful. His is the most comprehensive explanation to date of modern society’s insatiable pursuit of individual fulfillment and why and how it has taken its current form. Dispassionately examining every current controversial topic, Trueman seriously considers the arguments of the New Left on their merits. He explains that regardless of whether one agrees with their values and behaviors, the reasoning used to justify their conclusions is valid within the framework that informs their understanding.

Trueman’s penetrating analysis and citation-rich arguments, together with his ability to organize, explain, and reason through the complex ideas that forged our modern sensibilities, provide lay readers accessibility to high intellectual scholarship and equip them to critically examine the values and beliefs of society. Trueman masterfully contextualizes and explains the current prevailing worldviews of Western society, from politics and religion to gender identity and educational philosophies. He connects 19^th century trends in thought to 21^st century norms of behavior by tracing how cultural authority has evolved from a religious to a scientific idiom.

Trueman’s primary concern is why and how the idea of transgenderism has become a normal and accepted cultural phenomenon. He argues that the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s continues today in the normalization of gender flexibility and can only be understood in the historical context of society’s changing understanding of the nature of the self. The book’s subtitle expresses one of its main arguments: that rejecting the authority of the past and prioritizing the expression of one’s identity are prerequisites to the sexual revolution. These radically reimagined ideas of culture and the self remove all boundaries to acceptable sexual behavior.

Trueman sets up this argument by explaining the basic principles and frameworks that society’s values presuppose. These principles include the social imaginary, which Trueman defines as “the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it” (37). He also describes how society has shifted from a mimetic to a poietic worldview whereby human beings evolved from discovering meaning in the natural world to creating meaning through their personal experience. This shift was made possible through technology, which has given humans the ability to assert authority over the natural order. These advancements enable humans to create meaning and truth through their own works, removing human dependence on God as the creator of the sacred order that transcends the self. Next, Trueman draws upon the theories of Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre to show how modern thinking about the nature of humans and the role of society in shaping self-understanding has upended traditional views about the world.

Explaining the ascendancy of the ‘T’ in the LGBT alliance as the most recent symptom of expressive individualism in society, Trueman structures his argument in three phases: the self must first be psychologized, then psychology must be sexualized, and finally sex must be politicized (221). Jean Jacques Rousseau initiated phase one, describing society as a corrupting (rather than a civilizing) influence, and emphasizing that one’s internal thoughts and feelings constitute the authentic self. The Romantics of the 19^th century popularized his ideas through poetry, which they used to connect the individual to the natural self. This in turn produced an individual moral sense that was detached from a universal understanding of the human condition and remade to be a matter of personal taste.

This led to the second phase, of which Sigmund Freud was the central figure. Even though his theories of psychoanalysis and his claim that sexual fulfillment was the primary motivation of human beings from infancy to adulthood have been superseded, his influence is profoundly present in the modern worldview, where sex is no longer merely an activity, but the core of our being, our identity.

Phase three occurred when Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse synthesized the thinking of Freud and Karl Marx in a way that redefined the purpose and identity of the self to be a public/political seeker of private/sexual satisfaction. Concurrently, Friedrich Neitzsche, Marx, and Charles Darwin annihilated the very frameworks of morality and transcendent truth by reframing human nature as something made and remade at will, rejecting any sense of metaphysical teleology. Trueman summarizes these phases accordingly: “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).

Trueman’s concluding section comments on the revolutionary triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the transgender question to explain how contemporary sexuality has become political and mainstream. His claim that the ultimate objective of the sexual revolution is to destroy the family (263) is forcefully insightful. He argues that Western society has replaced all moral systems rooted in some idea external to humans with subjective sentiment. In other words, society now justifies the goodness or badness of everything from law and love to education and entertainment on individual feelings. This unobjective relativism may soon render pedophilia and bestiality mainstream sexual preferences, with but a small nudge of social momentum. This is to say nothing of the rise in mainstream consumption of pornography, casual sex, and redefinitions of marriage that have already occurred. This attempt to rationalize immorality (traditionally understood) via the self is, according to Trueman, inherently unstable and confusing.

Trueman’s book is an incisive evaluation of the origins, development, and implications of reimagining the self and its role in society. Whether you agree with his analysis or not, Trueman has painted a detailed panorama of today’s cultural landscape that brings modern social assumptions to our consciousness, thus preparing readers to navigate the troubling circumstances of the modern intellectual paradigm of self-worship.

Mitch Nelson is a graduate student at Claremont Graduate University.

Mitch Nelson

Date Of Review:

April 22, 2023