A Review of Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020)
Part II: Critique
My basic critique of the book is that the analysis of Modernity does not go far enough back in history. Why would I say that? After all, Trueman argues in this book that the roots of the sexual revolution, which went mainstream in the 1960s, go back centuries not mere decades. Indeed, one of the most interesting (to me) parts of the book was the brief discussion of where the narrative should begin. Trueman makes a decision to begin with Rousseau and the Romantics, which is understandable given their importance for contemporary culture.
However, the Enlightenment (1650-1800) is itself the culmination of a long process in which the key metaphysical ideas articulated in the magnificent synthesis of Thomas Aquinas were rejected and the pagan, anti-metaphysical ideas that had been rejected by the church fathers were embraced. It is crucial to see that Rousseau and the Romantics did not emerge organically from Western cultural history as one more development in a coherent narrative. Instead, they represent a decisive turning away from the Christian (and Platonic-Aristotelian) history and are an embrace of the pagan, anti-metaphysical thought of figures like Epicurus, Democritus and Lucretius, who had been left behind in the forward march of Western Christendom from Augustine to Aquinas.
The problem with starting with Rousseau is that Modernity has already taken form at this point and therefore can appear inevitable if its radical break with the past is obscured. Certainly, many Enlightenment figures (such as Hume) worked hard to create the impression that modernity is the inevitable result of scientific advancements and these efforts continue to this day in the writings of people like Richard Dawkins. But this association of science and technology with ancient, pagan, anti-metaphysical ideas such as nominalism, mechanism and materialism, rather than Christian metaphysical doctrines such as realism, providence and supernaturalism, is historically indefensible. The fact is that the ancient pagan metaphysics never produced modern science, but Christendom did. Christian metaphysics is the basis of modern science.
Without Platonic realism, for example, there is no reason to think that a mathematical description of physical reality is true and, therefore, that a mathematical description of physical reality in the form of the laws of nature provides a basis for experimental confirmation and technological application. As Pope Benedict XVI writes:
The objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide; the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are identical. In the end it is “one” reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence.[1]
If the human mind simply evolved by random chance and no such thing as universals actually exist, then why should we believe we can have genuine knowledge of the universe by means of natural science? The Enlightenment itself provides no foundation for science (or morality or law) and the history of the twentieth century demonstrates how quickly confidence in truth crumbles when it is detached from the metaphysical framework in which it arose. The history of philosophy since Kant demonstrates this descent of reason from pathway to truth to a mere instrument of the will to power.
So, here we reach the limit of Trueman’s analysis. He explains very well how Modernity developed to this point, given the starting point in Rousseau and the radical French Enlightenment. Here is a quotation that highlights the clarity of his analysis:
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)
Freedom, then, must be freedom from the constraints of nature. If humans are to be free, they must be able to create themselves. Modern politics is thus a revolt against nature. As Trueman says:
Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical philosophy demanded that human beings become self-creators and thereby transcend themselves. (254)
I agree with everything Trueman says here about the significance of transgenderism as the attempt to transcend nature and assume the status of God by creating oneself. This is exactly the heart of the modern project.
But by beginning his narrative with Rousseau Trueman has elided the roots of Modernity and by doing so he has allowed the only possible alternative to Modernity to remain obscured in the mists of the premodern past. I am not saying that this is an intentional attempt to bolster Modernity on his part; for all his even-handedness it is plain that he despises the modern project of the transcendent self as a god-substitute as much as I do. However, my complaint is that his narrative risks leaving the reader with the false impression that Modernity as such is both inevitable and irreversible. And this leads me directly to my second major point of critique.
2. Affirming the Openness of the Future?
The failure to go back far enough in the narrative to show that Modernity constitutes a radical break with the metaphysics that created Western culture appears to close off the possibility of overcoming Modernity.
The coherence of the narrative gives the book focus and makes it convincing. However, it also constitutes the weakness of the book in that it tends to obscure the contingency of history and the openness of the future. Human choices could have been different. Eighteenth century European intellectuals could have found Augustine’s Confessions to be a more plausible depiction of reality than Rousseau’s Confessions. But they did not; and that is a tragedy. At times, the book seems to fly too close to the flame fatalism for comfort by implying that the culture that is currently dominant is somehow inevitable and possibly even permanent. For example, he writes:
The deep-seated nature of our culture of expressive individualism implies that it is unlikely to be radically transformed or overthrown in the near future. (393)
But Western culture did not have to take the path it did. There is nothing necessary about the choice to reject the existence of the Biblical God and to embrace the radical autonomy of the individual as self-creator. There is no logical reason to reject metaphysical realism and embrace nominalism. And, in addition, there is absolutely no reason in the world why Western culture could not repent of all this and bow before God. If the pagan inhabitants of ancient Nineveh could do it, the modern inhabitants of Europe and North America could do so also.
But even if a revival of Biblical Christianity is unlikely and even if the “near future” qualification in the sentence quoted above saves this prediction from being too categorical, it remains the case that as Christians we know that history has a telos that no power in heaven or on earth can prevent from being fulfilled. I find it a striking omission that this book does not consider what sort of human choices and cultural changes might result in a reversal of the deleterious effects of the rise and triumph of the modern self. This omission could leave the reader wondering if any such reversal is even possible in the future. I find this ambiguity odd. From the King of Babylon to Vergil to the Marxist historians of Stalin’s USSR, many have made the mistake of thinking that the present is permanent. But history has buried them all.
Recently, some cultural analysts and historians have fallen into the trap of thinking that we live at what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”[2] or that “the secularization thesis[3]” is irreversible. Peter Berger is an example of a sociologist who has changed his mind about the supposed inevitability of secularization in modern, advanced cultures. Trueman makes extensive use of the thought of Charles Taylor in this book and this may be a point at which that influence is less than salutary. Does Taylor take secularization too seriously? Does Trueman take the “triumph of the modern self” with too much seriousness?
I know that Trueman affirms the contingency of history and the sovereignty of God. But it would have been helpful if he had clarified that a culture that deifies the individual ego is not sustainable in the long run. (See Isaiah 14.) If revival does not come – and soon – then judgment will fall as it has on the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans and so on.
I certainly find the role of cultural optimist to be an ill-fitting suit. Temperamentally, I am more suited for the role of pessimist. Oswald Spengler’s conviction that all cultures rise only to fall seems more plausible to me than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “nothing to fear but fear itself.” However, in my defense, I would only say that, as a Christian, I believe we must be both short-term pessimists and long-term optimists at the same time and this is a matter of walking by faith and not by sight.
To summarize, then, Modernity is not the culmination of the Christian West; it is a deviation from it and a moment of decline. The depth of the decline is chronicled in this book. The future, however, is open in the sense that God may bring revival, or he may bring judgment to our culture. In God’s own good time, however, Jesus Christ will return and bring his eschatological kingdom to its fullness. The one thing we know for certain is that the rise and triumph of the modern self is only a blip in history.
[1] Pope Benedict XVI, “Science, Technology and Theology” in A Reason Open to God: On Universities, Education and Culture ed. J. S. Brown (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 270. [2] See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (The Free Press, 1992). For a time, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to prove that liberal democracy was the permanent future of humanity and that all totalitarian ideologies had failed and would fade. The events of September 11, 2001 exposed the hubris involved in such speculation. [3] The secularization thesis arose in the twentieth century and says that it is a law of history that as society’s become more advanced technologically religion tends to die out. In the second half of the twentieth century, this thesis came under increasing critical scrutiny.