‘The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self’: How We Became Obsessed with Identity
A review of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, by Carl R. Trueman; Crossway, 2020.
I work on the basis that no one is in full possession of the truth, and that therefore everyone, with few exceptions, deserves a fair hearing. For this and other reasons, in my professional life as a journalist I will write for almost anyone, from The Guardian to The Spectator. Perhaps that makes me something of a hired gun (or at least somewhat promiscuous); though I would prefer to think it makes me diplomatic, or ecumenical. Still, publications have a way of imposing themselves on your work. The European Conservative, a title for which I write literary pieces from time to time, revised my review of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy (which is a good book, by the way) to change the word ‘trans’ to ‘trans-identified’. That might reflect its house editorial line, but—to quote Bob Dylan—it ain’t me, babe.
If I tend to think people aren’t problems to be solved but individuals to be understood, then this is almost certainly not the case for Carl Trueman, a theologian and historian of ideas. He begins his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self with the question how ‘I am a man trapped in a woman’s body’ can be thought to make sense. It is clear that this troubles Carl; but he does not mock the idea. Rather, he treats it as symbolic of a change in how we understand ourselves, and sets himself the tricky task of tracing how our notion of identity got to such a point – a point where what we deeply feel to be true is considered the truest expression of who and what we are. Even if Carl isn’t wild about the direction identity has taken, his genealogy of the self is even-handed, fair-minded and thorough. It isn’t elegiac or hand-wringing, and if there is any pearl-clutching, it only really comes towards the end. It has to be said: his take is quite fascinating.
If I tend to think people aren’t problems to be solved but individuals to be understood, then this is almost certainly not the case for Carl Trueman.
According to Trueman, what marks what Charles Taylor called the ‘social imaginary’—our shared understanding and beliefs about society, its values, and how we relate to each other—is that the self is ‘psychological’, that is, inwardly defined and outwardly asserted. He borrows from the sociologist and critic Philip Rieff to describe different types of man over the centuries. There was once ‘political man’, typified in Plato and Aristotle, who acquired his sense of self from his engagement in public life. Then, in the Middle Ages, there was religious man, who found his sense of self through his involvement in religious life. Then came economic man, whose profit-making activity gave him his sense of self. And then, finally, came psychological man, whose identity is chiefly found in the inward quest for happiness. Trueman notes that this model is simplistic. But it gives a rough sketch of the path to modern ‘expressive individualism’, which emphasises personal satisfaction, and so makes the culture highly individualistic. In the end, it relativises all meaning and truth to personal taste.
So how did we get here? Trueman explains that in the wake of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau dismissed the classical and Christian idea that we are flawed, declaring, famously, that ‘man is born free; yet everywhere he is in chains’. Émile Faguet later mocked this unproven metaphysical claim to a kind of natural freedom, saying it was like claiming that ‘sheep are carnivores; yet everywhere they nibble grass’. But the idea caught on: now, man was not the problem, for he was born pure and good: it was society that poisoned his soul. Freedom was not about following reason or slotting into a well-ordered group. It was about being true to yourself. Thus the seed of the expressive self was planted, to be watered by Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley and the other Romantics. These poets reacted to bloodless Enlightenment reason by affirming emotion and imagination. Trueman, I hasten to add, does not attack Rousseau or the Romantics, and in passing says he is fond of Romantic poetry. He describes only how they set the stage for the moral revolution with which he is concerned.
In the wake of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau dismissed the classical and Christian idea that we are flawed, declaring, famously, that ‘man is born free; yet everywhere he is in chains’.
And then along came Nietzsche. Before losing his marbles, Nietzsche perceived in a way no other had that the intellectual children of the Enlightenment philosophes had yet to grasp exactly what their forebears had done by killing God. ‘The Parable of the Madman’ is one of the most haunting and evocative passages in all of Western philosophy. The eponymous lunatic hurries into the marketplace in the ‘bright morning hours’ to confront the people with the consequences of scorching the metaphysical ground on which their culture stood. It is often cited, but it is still worth including here:
‘“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun?”’
‘Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’ … The madman’s point, of course, is that morality, truth, meaning, and order were rooted in a divine source. In the absence of that source, those values and certainties rested on nothing. The people in the marketplace act as if God exists, as if that which flows from belief in Him is true. But it is only a matter of time before, in His absence, they realise that the very assumptions without which no person or society can function are ungrounded. If God is dead, then all that springs from Him is meaningless.
The madman’s point, of course, is that morality, truth, meaning, and order were rooted in a divine source.
You can see were Trueman is going. But we are not at the end of our story yet. Because next up is Karl Marx, who understood human nature as being embedded in and shaped by ‘economic conditions and relations in society’. Religion, marriage, morality, and law—these were the mere trappings of the class with power. They had no objective value. Indeed, they formed the ‘false consciousness’ of the masses who without them would soon throw off their chains of oppression. Marx did believe that there was something essential and unchanging about how we were, but he also thought that as economic conditions and relations changed, so did the ‘instantiation of human nature’. Then Darwin dealt the death-blow. His theory of natural selection abolished the need for intelligent design, and hence an intelligent designer. Evolution was a matter of cause and effect. There was no transcendent end-goal to human life. Humanity was not the crown of creation. The human being was—an accident.
Thus bit by bit, our notion of the self was becoming unmoored from our surroundings. But it took Freud to bind it to sexuality. ‘Before Freud,’ writes Trueman, ‘sex was an activity, for procreation or for recreation; after Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species’. (Freud thought that even kids were sexual.) Although his ideas have been largely discredited, he looms large in the shared imagination because he made sexuality basic to how we see ourselves, and he expressed his ideas in the bloodless, objective language of the scientific idiom. This proved to be hugely persuasive among the intellectual class of his time and trickled down, as ideas do, to the big public. ‘If sex sells, one might add that it is easily sold,’ Trueman writes.
Thus bit by bit, our notion of the self was becoming unmoored from our surroundings. But it took Freud to bind it to sexuality.
Now that the self was psychosexual, it was only a matter of time before it became political. Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse took Marxist ideas around oppression, claims Trueman, and refracted it through the Freudian notion of repression. Thus they psychologised the notion of being subject to unjust treatment, and made sexual repression—thought, even by Freud, to be vital to the creation of culture and civilisation—into something awful. Reich and Marcuse turned Freud on his head, just as Marx had turned Hegel on his head by saying that economic forces, and not ideas, moved the wheels of history. Political liberation came to rest on sexual liberation, and so established the framework for what Trueman calls ‘today’s psychosexual politics’.
Still with me? Trueman, who admirably avoids cluttering up this narrative with his own views, goes on to show how anything that restricts the expression of our identity (which, because of Freud, is bound up with our sexuality) came to be seen as oppressive. On Carl’s view, we now find ourselves in a world in which the self is rooted in nothing but feeling, and public morality is simply a matter of taste. He reflects at the end, in what he calls a ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, on what might happen next, and how Christians of his persuasion might respond. He anticipates a balkanised future without continuity, without certainty, in which selves are constantly bumping up against one another with no objective way of resolving their differences. ‘The church,’ he writes, “must offer a vision of what it means to be human that is deeper and more satisfying than the thin gruel of expressive individualism.’
On Carl’s view, we now find ourselves in a world in which the self is rooted in nothing but feeling, and public morality is simply a matter of taste.
At bottom, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is less about this or that sexual or gender identity, and less still about ‘political correctness’, and more about how our culture has travelled from a place where we shared moral horizons to one marked by inward-looking self-definition. Identity was once rooted in metaphysics and community; now, Trueman writes, it is curated, performed and protected by law and taboo. This is the endgame of a philosophical drift that began centuries ago, and is bound up with the unchaining of the earth from the sun, as Nietzsche put it: from going from what Philip Rieff called first and second worlds, where culture is anchored in a sacred order, (be it pagan or religious) to third world, where culture is grounded in nothing, and thus condemned to instability. Trueman is particularly vexed by what he views as the everyday narcissism that is necessarily mixed up with the modern conception of identity. If the self is something I create, not something I receive or negotiate, then any constraint — biological or moral— is oppression. If this is true, Trueman asks, how can we live together? For to affirm one person’s identity is often to deny another’s.
As I noted above, even if Trueman’s genealogy is contestable, he writes with admirable objectivity about something with which he is clearly quite concerned. He also writes in a lucid style and though you, reader, may feel he barely scratches the surface of what, say, Freud thought, or Marx thought, my view is that he gives just enough space to each member of his rogue’s gallery, from Rousseau to Reich, without straying too far from his path and getting into the weeds. It is also to his credit that he does not seek to stand over and above the fray, and suggest or claim outright that he is immune to changing conceptions of the self. No: Trueman concedes that he and everyone else who has grown up in the modern West sees the self more or less as psychological. He imagines being asked what he likes about his job, and responding that he finds it rewarding to see his students learn. His grandfather, who worked in a factory in the Midlands, would not have understood the question, he says: for 100 years ago, having a job was not about enjoyment but duty.
As I noted above, even if Trueman’s genealogy is contestable, he writes with admirable objectivity about something with which he is clearly quite concerned.
I mentioned Bad Therapy near the beginning of this little essay, and there are interesting connections to make between the rise of the modern self and the rise of psychotherapy and therapeutic language—what Leszek Kołakowski foresaw in the 1970s as a ‘culture of analgesics’. We know from experience, as well as psychology and Buddhism, that thinking about ourselves is a very good way of making ourselves miserable. Hence perhaps we ought not be surprised that, despite our material wealth, technological development, the quality of our healthcare and so on, we are living through what John Vervaeke calls a ‘meaning crisis’, which makes itself plain in the rise of deaths of despair, falling trust in institutions, loss of interest in religious life, and a growing zeal for radical politics. But getting into that is beyond the scope of this review.
Take it all in all, Trueman does a lovely job of charting the slow unravelling of a shared symbolic world. Whether we see this as liberation or loss may depend less on our religious or moral convictions and more on our temperament or individual circumstances. For my part, I distrust tidy histories that link ideas into a neat causal chain; more still: there is poetry in the idea of self-expression. What matters is not whether we express themselves, but how — whether we do it with grace and a sense of limits. So our culture has changed; well, that is what cultures do. Of course there is much in the past that may be of value to our present and our future, and certainly continuity and tradition are essential, (if only to provide us with a shared framework of meaning with which we can make sense of things). But a little more ambiguity need not mark the end of civilisation. The show goes on.
