The Identity Revolution: A Review of Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution, by Carl R. Trueman (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 425 pages
In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman, Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College, argues convincingly that the sexual revolution is actually a revolution in the way we understand human selfhood. “In short, the sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West” (20).
Part 1, “Architecture of the Revolution,” includes two chapters. Of particular importance in these chapters are three philosophers: Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Chapter 1, “Reimagining the Self,” begins with the observation, “While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart what it means to be an authentic person” (35). The theme of authenticity shows up frequently in what follows.
In chapter 2, “Reimagining Our Culture,” Trueman asks, “What are the broader pathologies of our cultural moment that have provided the context for such acrimonious culture wars over sex and identity?” (74). Drawing upon the work of MacIntyre, Trueman argues that the key to understanding the moral judgments of the modern West is emotivism, the idea that our moral judgments are normally expressions of preference, attitude, and feeling. Something is right or wrong because it feels right or wrong. He also introduces the notion of “anticultures” that are ahistorical, iconoclastic, and committed to the subversion of tradition, and “deathworks” that subvert traditional morals by making the old values look ridiculous.
Part 2, “Foundations of the Revolution,” comprises three chapters. Chapter 3, “The Other Genevan,” explores the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau upon the development of the modern self. Central to the discussion is Rousseau’s Confessions, an “implicitly polemical counterpoint” to Augustine’s work by the same title (108). Rousseau’s basic claim is that society decisively shapes individuals, and in so doing corrupts them. We end up living a lie because society restricts our natural desires. For Rousseau, morality is rooted in empathy and pity. “It is the fact that we are naturally empathetic that makes us moral” (119). Rousseau thus lays the groundwork for the rise of emotivism, which in turn has created “rampant ethical subjectivism” (122).
In chapter 4, “Unacknowledged Legislators,” Trueman discusses three Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake. Romanticism helped to proliferate Rousseau’s ideas and later developments of them. Such ideas would move from more elite intellectual circles into the social imaginary of Western culture. Building upon Rousseau, Wordsworth advanced the idea that urban life is a corrupting influence, whereas “rustic” life has not been so corrupted by the expectations and pretensions of polite society. It offers a more authentic form of human existence. Poetry, he believed, could cut through the artifice of polite society and connect us to what is both real and uncorrupted.
Shelley held a similarly idealistic view of poetry. He believed that “for people to be truly good, they must be able to place themselves in the position of other people” (142). Poetry is uniquely suited to help us do this. By contrast, he believed religion to be “a means of manipulation by which the powerful keep others subjugated and which is perpetuated primarily by the self-interest of those who have used it to gain the power they enjoy” (149). It hinders both sexual and political liberation, which are closely connected. “Christianity must therefore be destroyed and marriage abolished, or at least dramatically redefined, if human beings are to be truly free and truly happy” (155). Like Shelley, Blake believed that the world needs a sexual, irreligious revolution and that the church was a corrupting institution.
The chapter ends with a postscript on the literary critic Thomas De Quincey, who argued through the use of irony and humor that sympathy and empathy—the keys to morality for Rousseau and the Romantics—were not really functions of moral law, but aesthetics. Even a murderer, for example, can be portrayed as a sympathetic figure by a writer with some artistic skill. In the modern era we have conflated aesthetics and morality, a mistake with tragic consequences.
Chapter 5, “The Emergence of Plastic People,” deals with Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. By “plastic people,” Trueman refers to the elimination of human nature. We believe we can “make and remake personal identity at will” (164). Nietzsche is key to this discussion because he forced those who rejected belief and obedience to the Christian God to reckon fully with the consequences of doing so. The Nietzschean maxim “God is dead” does not simply mean we have stopped believing in God, but that we have destroyed “the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends” (168). Each of us must accept the godlike responsibility of creating our own worlds of knowledge and ethics.
Under the influence of G.W.F. Hegel, Marx understood history as a dialectical class struggle. Social relations rest on economic relations, and thus all social phenomena are also political phenomena. Nothing is prepolitical. His famous statement that religion is the opiate of the people reflects his belief that people live in an alienated state because of material inequality, and that religion masks this alienation and gives us a false sense of happiness. We must destroy religion, he believed, so that people could find true happiness that remedies these inequalities and “does not alienate the workers from the fruits of their labor” (182). Human nature in this schema is unavoidably shaped by the concrete conditions. As economic conditions change, so does human nature.
The discussion of Darwin is relatively short, but it does touch on a few salient matters. Darwin provided a scientific theory that could support the anti-religious vision of Marx, Nietzsche, and their predecessors. “Darwin’s theory of natural selection effectively made any metaphysical or theological claim concerning the origins of life irrelevant” (186). If there is no divine architect, neither is there any divine telos, an end toward which human nature is directed. We are simply the product of natural selection, just as our progeny will be. It is evident, moreover, that Darwin’s effect upon the Western worldview has been immense.
Part 3 is called “Sexualization of the Revolution” and comprises two chapters. In chapter 6, “Sigmund Freud, Civilization, and Sex,” Trueman notes, “It is arguable that Freud is actually the key figure in the narrative of this book” (203). Freud was an atheist and understood morality as subjective, a matter of “socially conditioned taste” with “no transcendent, objective foundation” (212). He conceived of what it means to be human psychologically. Central to his understanding of humanity are sexual desire and fulfillment. Like Rousseau, Freud saw the goal of life as happiness, and he identified true happiness with sexual satisfaction. He identified sexuality as the most important part of being human. A key element of his psychological legacy is the sexualization of children.
Before Freud, sex was an activity. After Freud, it is an identity constitutive of human existence at both the individual and social level. Whether we like it or not, this idea is pervasive in Western culture. Thus the education of children has become “in some quarters preoccupied with the liberation of children’s sexual instincts and the elimination of any religious influence whatsoever. Today’s education as therapy exhibits these two pathologies: a liberation from traditional sexual codes and (given its role in maintaining traditional sexual codes) liberation from religion” (223).
Chapter 7, “The New Left and the Politicization of Sex,” discusses several philosophers and theorists, including Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Simone de Beauvoir, and Shulamith Firestone. It begins with a discussion of critical theory, which “draws deeply and variously on strands of Marxist thought, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, queer theory, and deconstruction” (225). This may sound complex, but at the heart of critical theory lies a simple conviction: the world consists of those who have power and those who do not. Critical theory attempts to destabilize traditional power structures.
Trueman devotes considerable attention to Reich, who argued that the traditional patriarchal family was a bourgeois instrument of oppression. Political liberation required the obliteration of the traditional family along with its accompanying code of sexual morals. He believed that for a parent to restrict a child’s sexual behavior was a form of abuse and held that the state should intervene in family structures when individuals resisted sexual liberation. In Reich’s schema, abuse and victimhood become psychological categories. To disapprove of certain types of behavior is an abusive, oppressive act, a rejection of that person’s very being. Correlatively, public affirmation of social identities becomes crucial. Sexual behavior is “public and political” because “sexuality is a constitutive element of public, social identity” (239).
Marcuse picked up on the idea of oppression as a psychological category. He went so far as to argue that a just society would suppress the speech of those giving voice to oppressive ideas. He called this “repressive tolerance.” He saw the Western notions of tolerance and freedom of speech as ploys that perpetuate existing oppressive power structures. Some forms of speech must therefore be restricted in order to bring about the right kind of society. Like so many others discussed in this book, Marcuse connected political and sexual liberation, though he never specifies what a sexually liberated society would entail.
Next Trueman takes up de Beauvoir’s deconstruction of the Western understanding of womanhood. De Beauvoir separated gender and sex and argued that to be a woman was to assimilate to what society tells one a woman should be. Put differently, to be a woman is to feel oneself to be a woman. From this perspective, the body is not constitutive of identity, but something to be overcome. Pregnancy and childbirth prevent women from having freedom for economic activity, and as we learn to control procreation, we will give women more freedom from the natural consequences of sexual behavior. To be a woman, then, is not a matter of biology, but psychology.
Firestone built upon these ideas. She argued that we must not only eliminate male privilege, but the very distinction between the sexes. We should create a world in which genital differences make no difference culturally. This would eliminate “the tyranny of the biological family” (261). Like others before her, Firestone targets the family for destruction because she sees the family as an instrument of oppression.
Part 4, “Triumphs of the Revolution,” begins with chapter 8, “The Triumph of the Erotic.” Trueman notes that sex has come to pervade every aspect of life through arts and the media. One artistic form that paved the way for the pervasiveness of sex in our culture is surrealism, the most famous exemplar of which is Salvador Dalí. Surrealism is rooted in the thought of Freud, particularly his emphasis on dreams. In dreams, the dreamer is “able to be whoever or whatever she wants to be in whatever kind of world she chooses to envisage” (275). There is a connection to Rousseau’s notion of the unfettered self here. To be uninhibited by one’s world is to be entirely free.
The real triumph of the erotic, however, came with the mainstreaming of pornography. Hugh Hefner was able to remove the social stigma once attached to pornography by combining erotic photos with interviews of culturally significant people, such as Bob Dylan, Fidel Castro, and Orson Welles. Playboy came to represent “a certain kind of lifestyle—an image of discerning, thoughtful, engaged artistic hedonism” (282). The internet has vastly extended the availability of pornography and made it easier to view anonymously. It has, moreover, left behind any pretense of “thoughtful hedonism” as it raced toward ever new levels of depravity.
Pornography is damaging in several ways. It shapes the sexual expectations and behaviors of its users. It promotes lust. It objectifies women. It is linked to sex trafficking. It often features violence toward women. It conveys a vision of the world in which one’s sexual partner is not an end, but a means to an end. It detaches sex from interpersonal interaction and any real bodily encounter. Nevertheless, many equate happiness with sexual satisfaction and freedom, and pornography is thought to help achieve these. Further, because we often judge the morality of sex therapeutically (based on what one finds psychologically fulfilling) and have detached it from any sacred order, traditional sexual morals now seem ridiculous, even harmful. There is thus less disincentive to view pornography.
Chapter 9 discusses “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” Trueman here takes up the issue of gay marriage, which was made plausible by the gradual transformation of social norms outlined in earlier chapters. In the decision of the Supreme Court case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, we read that each person has the right to define his or her own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (303). Trueman shows how the same logic is present in Obergefell v. Hodges and discusses several aspects of the significance of the Obergefell case. The case of Lawrence v. Texas, however, displays an entirely different, even inconsistent logic with that of Casey. Trueman judges that the key issue here is not philosophical consistency but the necessity of achieving the desired therapeutic end.
Trueman then turns his attention to the ethicist Peter Singer, a vocal and influential opponent of “human exceptionalism.” Singer identifies personhood with consciousness, which involves self-awareness and autonomy. By his rationale, children in the womb, newborn children, and individuals who are seriously mentally impaired are not, in fact, people. As a utilitarian, Singer psychologizes selfhood and believes an action is right or wrong depending on whether or not it promotes happiness. While Singer’s ideas have a home in the Ivy League, other ideas and their proponents have a much harder time getting a hearing. Colleges and universities have commonly adopted a therapeutic vision of learning and morality that entails the repression of “harmful” speech and ideas.
The final chapter is “The Triumph of the T,” or the transgender movement. Trueman here explains how the various groups that make up the LGBTQ+ coalition have collaborated. They are not necessarily natural allies, he argues. Gay men and lesbians often have quite different concerns and there is a history of friction between them. Further, the categories of “gay” and “lesbian” presuppose a fixed notion of gender, whereas “transgender” and “queer” deny this reality. These various groups, however, have made common cause because they share common enemies and suffer marginalization. They share in the goal of destabilizing traditional heterosexual norms. Trueman spends several pages discussing The Yogyakarta Principles, “the foundational text in connecting LGBTQ+ rights to human rights in general” (366).
Some feminists, pejoratively labeled “TERFS” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), have vigorously objected to transgender ideology. They insist that there is a certain experience unique to being a biological woman that is diminished and devalued by the transgender movement. They are fighting an uphill battle. In our desacralized and therapeutic society, it is difficult to argue against a particular type of identity when many have publicly connected this identity to their psychological wellbeing.
In his “Concluding Unscientific Prologue,” Trueman discusses some prospects for the future of the West. He believes that gay marriage is here to stay, while the future of the transgender movement is uncertain. Religious freedom is in an increasingly tenuous position because religion, and particularly Christianity, is not viewed as positively as it once was. Many connect traditional religious morals with oppression and harm. The church, Trueman says, must eschew aesthetically based logic and instead reason from transcendent commitments. We need to cultivate a different self-understanding than the world around us. We must reclaim natural law and a high view of the physical body. The church has been subverted, and she must now be subversive.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is the work of someone who has spent years dissecting, ruminating on, and wrestling with complex philosophical systems and historical developments. The case Trueman makes is elegant, informed, and insightful. He builds his argument step-by-step, in detail, painstakingly demonstrating the ways in which one idea connects to another. He is clear about his philosophical presuppositions and the philosophers on whom he relies (particularly Rieff and Taylor). The narrative he relates is both fascinating and convincing. His thoughts upon the church at the end of the book ring true for me. We cannot derive our sexual ethics—or any other ethics—simply by absorbing the values of the world around us. We cannot allow them simply to be matters of personal taste. In a world that is pervasively under the influence of sin, the church must be a community of difference. We must appeal to our own historic beliefs and sources, particularly to Scripture, as we engage one another, the world around us, and the God we serve.
An interesting follow-up question is the extent to which the values, worldview, and practices of the sexual revolution will take root outside the West. The intellectual history Trueman describes is Western through and through. Most of the major figures he discusses come from Western Europe. What about parts of the world, however, that have different intellectual heritages? Marxism has a large footprint in Asia, but Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and many of the other philosophers Trueman discusses have little influence outside of segments of Western culture. Will the results of the sexual revolution so familiar to us in North America and Western Europe take root in places that do not share in its intellectual history?
For those who don’t want to invest themselves in a four-hundred-page tome, Trueman has produced a shorter version called Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022). If you really want to drill down into the details, however, and understand the sexual revolution—the revolution of selfhood—in its many historical and philosophical particularities, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self will not disappoint.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.