Carl Trueman (Dudley, UK, 1967) is an evangelical professor of Biblical & Religious Studies at Grove City College (USA), with a background in history and classical studies at the English universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge. In 2022 he published Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, which is a condensed version of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, published two years earlier.
According to Trueman, the radical and rapidly ongoing transformation of sexual attitudes and behaviors ‘cannot be properly understood until it is set within the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood. […] The sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West’ (20). Its deep philosophical and historical roots are analyzed in the book.
In the author’s opinion, since the middle of the 18th century, with Rousseau (1712–1778) – who gave a psychological expression to the epistemology of Descartes – a new understanding of the human being has been developing, leading to a conception of man finding personal meaning by giving expression to his own feelings and desires, seeing them accepted and recognized by others. Man with his own feelings and desire at the center of everything – and attributing to himself properties that used to belong to God, to the point that his will and his desire lead him to decide what things are, independently of external reality. Man with absolute freedom, rooted in his emotions and feelings, capable of deciding his own ultimate end, detached from God, and capable of being the ultimate source of knowledge, of good and evil for him, capable of deciding the role that sexuality plays in human life: an essentially good being, who must follow his natural instincts, and who must be prevented from being corrupted by the social or religious models of the context where he lives because he has a decisive power and a freedom over himself that are absolute.
As a basis for his analysis, in the first part of the book (‘Architecture of the Revolution’) Trueman exposes some basic notions about the way the human being, the self, the selfhood and the resulting culture have been reimagined and recreated. To this purpose he draws from the conceptual categories developed by Philip Rieff (the anti-culture, the role of deathworks and the triumph of the therapeutic and psychological man), Charles Taylor (the dialogical character of the individual, the social imaginary and the modern notion of expressive self) and Alasdair MacIntyre (the issues posed by incommensurable narratives to the modern ethical discourse). These categories ‘form the framework for understanding exactly what is at stake in the contemporary manifestation of the revolution of the self, of which the sexual revolution is only the most obvious part’ (102).
In the second part (‘Foundations of the revolution’), Trueman identifies and shows how the thought of some prominent authors generated a philosophical, literary and allegedly scientific revolution contributing to the creation of the contemporary social imaginary by which modern man is now understood: a being closed to transcendence and to God, whose identity and the morality of whose actions are changeable. To this end, he presents the thought of Rousseau (his focus on the inner life and the responsibility of society for the corruption of the goodness of man in his Primeval State of Nature), Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake (‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’ since they are ‘the ones who transform people, and therefore the world, through their artistic creations’ [Trueman, 147–148]), and – as to be expected – Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin, whose ideas still permeate the social imaginary through, among other things, a general criticism for metaphysics, a deep suspicion for religion and any traditional authority, an attitude of living for the present moment, the removal of any teleology and the view of the past as a history of oppression.
The third part (‘Sexualization of the Revolution’) shows how the ideas of Freud and Marx were combined and sheds light on the roots of many of the contemporary political debates as, for example, the sexualizing of children, the psychologizing of oppression and the criticism toward free speech. With Freud – who expressed his theory in a scientific language very compelling to the modern intellectual elites – the revolution around the conception of the modern individual underwent a process of sexualization: sex and sexual desires – from infancy – started to be seen not only as the engine of personal satisfaction, but as ‘definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species’ (221). In this context, moral norms (social or religious) are seen as forms of repression of the original natural desires, the sense of guilt as an obstacle to personal fulfillment, and religion as nothing more than ‘the carrying over of childish hopes and fears into adulthood’ (215).
If Freud contributed to the sexualization of the self, Reich would intellectually unite Freud and Marx, offering a synthesis of both to revolutionary politicians, going so far as to affirm that ‘Every moral regulation is in itself sex-negating, and all compulsory morality is life-negating. The social revolution has no more important task than finally to enable the human beings to realize their full potentialities and find gratification in life’ (Reich’s Sexual Revolution, quoted by Trueman on 242). It is also in Reich that actual ideas such as the need for the abolition of the nuclear family and the punishment of families dissenting from the proposed sexual liberation can be found: ‘The sexual education of the child is simply of too much social and political consequence to be left to the parents’ (239). With Reich the category of oppression was transformed from material terms to one focusing on the well-being of the mind, and – as can be very well noticed today – ‘once oppression becomes primarily psychological, it also becomes somewhat arbitrary and subjective’ (237). Marcuse shares some concepts with Reich, criticizes the consumer society (in his book One-Dimensional Man, 1964), and gives social and political form to Freud, since he identifies the constituted civilization with sexual repression. His thought has been very influential for the development of censoring on campuses (‘The restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions’ [Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, quoted by Trueman on 251]) and leads, as Trueman points out, to the issues around free speech we are witnessing today: ‘In a world in which psychology perverted by false consciousness is the key problem, oppression becomes a psychological category. This means that words and ideas then come to be the most powerful weapons available – for good and for ill’ (251–252).
Sartre’s existentialism would help to disintegrate the foundation of an external objective reality for the human being and would influence the thinking of another important figure who would be for a while his sentimental partner: Simone de Beauvoir. Building on Sartre’s thought and the psychologized conception of the self with The Second Sex (1949), she would analyze the meta-narratives of the notion of woman (biologically, psychologically, economically and historically) to reach the conclusion that it evolved and changed over time (having clear continuities with today’s issue of transgenderism): ‘One is not born but rather becomes woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine’ (De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, quoted by Trueman on 256). She goes on claiming that the biological dimension is a tyranny because men are sexually freer than women and, for this reason, she thinks that birth control is essential and that someday technology will make it possible not only to avoid births, but also through artificial reproduction make it possible for both men and women to give birth, regardless of biological sex.
These concepts were taken one step further with the sexual revolution in the 1960s, by the parties of the so-called New Left. They synthesized some Marxist and Freudian concepts, transforming the class struggle into a struggle against political power and the moral norms established by patriarchal and bourgeois society. Sex was transformed into politics, as we can still see today: from a private to a public issue. Trueman notes that it makes little sense to speak of sexual morality if it is not understood to be an implication of what is meant by the concept of being human: ‘Discussions of what does and does not constitute legitimate sexual behavior cannot be abstracted from that deeper question. On that point, the thinkers of the New Left are correct. One may disagree with their conclusions – and I do vehemently – but one must give them credit for understanding that when we address matters of sexual morality, we are actually addressing questions about the nature and purpose of human beings, the definition of happiness, and the relationship between the individual and wider society and between men and women’ (264). From the generic philosophical ideas of three centuries earlier, we arrive in our times at concrete behaviors that cannot be understood, nor changed, if an anthropological and philosophical analysis is not carried out.
The fourth part of the book (‘Triumphs of the Revolution’) presents three aspects of the triumph of that sexual revolution: the triumph of the erotic, of the therapeutic and of the T (in the acronym LGBT+). Trueman shows the importance of deepening their historical and philosophical roots in order to fully grasp their significance and development, continuously referring to the previous parts of the book and thus giving unity to the whole work. The author argues that surrealism helped to give artistic expression to the subconscious, being this one of the factors that would help the pornification of Mainstream Culture.
‘The triumph of the Therapeutic’ was used also by Rieff as part of the title of a book (1966) to explain how selfhood and human fulfillment have become essential in society: while therapy was in the past a way of helping the individual to adjust to a society, now it is society that has to avoid oppression and adjust to the individual; institutions are no longer a place of formation but of individual performance. Three such examples presented by Trueman are the Supreme Court finding the way to introduce homosexual marriage into the constitution, the Ivy League ethics of Peter Singer justifying the views of assisted suicide and infanticide or the current pressure on freedom of speech on college campuses (336): ‘All three are functions of a notion of selfhood that places self-expression and individual psychological well-being at the heart of what it means to be human’.
Finally, the triumph of the T (Transgender) in the acronym LGBT+, has ended up dissolving the L (Lesbian) and the G (Gay), which tried to expand concepts (such as marriage) and initially had a precise meaning, without realizing that the inclusion of more acronyms sealed incoherence and self-destruction. To make room for the T, female experience tied specifically to the female body has to be set aside as an irrelevance to what it means to be a woman. The main casualty in this is traditional feminism, as it shows the violent rhetoric surrounding the TERF label: Trans-exclusionary radical feminist (374).
The book takes readers on a captivating intellectual journey both from a chronological and conceptual point of view, generating ideas that allow us to go deeper philosophically in the present moment and reflect on possible answers to the challenges we are facing. It is well written, profound, mentions a wide variety of authors and uses primary sources with references to specific texts, thus enriching the argumentation. Trueman makes a reasoned and coherent critique explaining the inconsistencies into which the various authors fall. The abridged edition of the book has an outreach purpose and is offered with some didactic contents complementing it that can help students of the last years of high school or at the beginning of their university studies to reflect on the subject.
The author is aware of having left aside some topics of modern society for the sake of brevity and to focus more on the purpose of the book: social media, the crisis of confidence in the nation-state in a world where individualism corrodes older notions of national identity, art and architecture… (379–80). The same could be said about why he quotes some authors and not others, but it seems legitimate to us.
Perhaps the weakest part is the presentation of the triumph of the erotic and the therapeutic, in the fourth part of the book (271–338): very interesting ideas – such as the influence surrealism and pop culture have had on the eroticization of modernity – appear, but developed unevenly and in some cases very descriptively, probably because they are phenomena very close in time and the possibilities of analysis are fewer.
A final observation is that this social evolution would perhaps not have been possible without a series of cultural battles, funding and social action strategies of specific pressure groups that, since the 1960s, have powerfully influenced governments and international bodies, as Noelle Mering points out in Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 2021). Philosophical and cultural ideas alone would probably not have been as influential without militant activism. Trueman, however, probably wanted to focus more on the philosophical part.
It is an interesting book that also raises at least two thought-provoking questions: What will be the next step in the development of the self? Will there be an alternative philosophical current in the future that returns to the realism that bases the greatness of humankind on its created condition?
School of Church Communications, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, Italy
Matteo Frondoni
School of Theology, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, Italy
[email protected]