Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, Wheaton: 2020).
Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, Wheaton: 2022).
Sic et Non (Yes and No)
Carl Trueman has emerged, in the last few years, as a rather popular thinker and commentator on our late modern and postmodern versions of the ideology of liberalism. A couple of his early books (The Creedal Imperative & Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom) kept him safely confined in a more insulated religious ethos, but with the publishing of the more demanding The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) and the more readable version of the larger tome, Strange New World (2022), Trueman has positioned himself well as an interpreter of our contemporary ills and the roots and genealogy of such a cultural disease. How should Trueman’s read of our present malaise be engaged, and how should his read of its origins be accepted or questioned?
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is divided into 5 Parts: 1) Architecture of the Revolution, 2) Foundations of the Revolution, 3) Sexualization of the Revolution, 4) Triumphs of the Revolution, and 5) Concluding Unscientific Prologue. Rod Dreher wrote the “Foreword,” and each Part has a handy “Epilogue”. There can be no doubt that the notion of the “self” (and its protean-like meanings and interpretations) has been a focus in the West for the past 500 years (not as Trueman seems to think since Rousseau and tribe forward). Trueman does draw from Taylor’s comprehensive Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) in his approach to the topic, but Trueman lacks the comprehensive breadth and depth of Taylor. There is no doubting the fact, though, that there is, from a certain perspective, a definite and decided inward turn to the subject and inner self within the West as a part of the quest for meaning and the search for a meaningful identity—such is the journey of identity politics. Taylor recognizes in such a turn, there can be an indulgent and narcissistic view of the self, but there are, in such a turn, possibilities for a more authentic self to emerge—how is the difference to be discerned?
There are four substantive points that need to be noted when reviewing both The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and Strange New World.
First, Trueman has legitimate and valid concerns about a form of indulgent individualism that is at the heart and core of the culture wars that dominate and polarize many at the present time. It is, indeed, in many ways, a strange new world, and such a world is fragmented and at odds with one another, progressives and conservatives rarely listening to one another, extremes canceling and silencing speech. In short, the content of expressive individualism permeates much in public debates, education, religion, politics, and the media. Trueman is right to note this and name the variations that so aggressively insist on "my will be done”.
Such tendencies can be found in both the personal and political realms, listening and mature introspection a lost art. So, a grateful nod to Trueman for naming the acute reality that shapes and dominates the uncivilized behavior in our ethos.
Second, I find the next three points more troubling about the underlying thesis of Trueman as he claims to trace and track the historic origins of our contemporary challenges. Trueman tends to see the source of our problems in thinkers, as mentioned above: Rousseau, Wordsworth and the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, New Left, etc. Is it even fair, legitimate, or intellectually honest, for example, to link Wordsworth with Rousseau? I have lingered long with the High Romantics of England (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey), spent time at their homes, and the distinction between High Romanticism and Low Romanticism (which Trueman does not seem to know or understand) is one he needs to delve much deeper into. Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are Low Romantics (and they do have substantive differences), and some have affinities with Trueman’s thinking, but the sheer lack of nuance in Trueman’s thesis would have been easily netted at a BA level—not sure why he has not understood this. And, Rousseau and Wordsworth are hardly on the same page in their mature thinking. Trueman, also, fails to unpack why and how a certain type of Christianity birthed and created Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, New Left, and others—a needful and necessary task rather than moving names around like pawns on an intellectual chess board, stick and stock figures not helpful in deeper understanding and cultural comprehension.
Third, the notion that questioning and turning against God is the reason for our current malaise, a malaise justified by the thinkers and activists mentioned above fails to recognize why such thinkers and activists took the position they did. History is replete with many lessons of those who claim to take God with some seriousness but do nasty, violent, and pernicious things in the name of serving and honouring God---the reformation in its Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation was thick and dominated by religious wars and horrendous treatment of those who differ with various Sanhedrins. The implicit thesis of Trueman is that if the nasty distorters of the Western Tradition could be seen through, possibilities abound for a renewal and revival of the West, a return to some form of Protestantism refound, the path forward. Needless to say, such a thesis, more on the religious right, does breed serious problems. As mentioned above, Trueman seems to suffer from his own form (as do many conservatives) of cultural amnesia. Many have been the arguments (books aplenty on the topic) that have highlighted that the notions of liberty, expressive individualism, equality, agency, choice, contract, etc, are children of the Reformation. It was, in fact, the reformation that opened the pandora’s box and released the genii from the bottle. So, Trueman (given his prejudices and amnesia) has failed to see that, perhaps, his tribe might be responsible for the strange new world. Ideas do have consequences, and some consequences take centuries to fully unfold in culture and public life.
Fourth, there has been a significant renewal of catholic and patristic Christianity in the last few decades. I find it somewhat interesting that Trueman rarely taps into this mother lode, ressourcement heritage, and tradition. Some of the deeper sources he is looking for might be found there, and Milbank and the Radical Orthodox are an essential primer and key in the ignition beginning. Or, in the Canadian context, the High Tory political philosopher, George P. Grant, a needful person to visit, his Philosophy in the Mass Age going to genealogical depths Trueman does not go. I suspect Trueman knows not Grant or much of the Anglo-Canadian memory makers that would and do approach the issues raised in a more rigorous and historically nuanced manner. Perhaps a turn to the fullness and polyphonic nature of the Great Tradition might make Trueman’s ideas and efforts more convincing rather than narrowly reactionary.
It is quite possible to offer a hesitant Sic to The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and Strange New World, but if deeper dives are ever going to be made for historic pearls of great price, a more solid Non is imperative. Trueman is a rather trendy thinker of the more thoughtful and conservative religious right these days, and, as such, we need to be gadflies and midwives to such a worldview while avoiding a reactionary genuflecting to a trendy progressivism. Sadly so, Trueman’s two books fail to see how the very sources he turns to are the beginnings of our strange new world and, immersed as he is in a form of protestant amnesia that birthed expressive individualism.
Ron Dart
Comments