The modern self seeks to give expression to our individual inner lives, rather than seeing ourselves as embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws. Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm. 

The following is adapted from the foreword to Carl R. Trueman’s new book Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. Used with permission of Crossway Books.

In 2020, while the world was on lockdown due to COVID-19, Carl Trueman published one of the most important books of the last several decades. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Trueman built on the insights of contemporary thinkers such as Philip Rieff and Alasdair MacIntyre to show how modern thinkers and artists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Percy Shelley, and William Blake gave expression to a worldview—what Charles Taylor called a “social imaginary”—that made possible and plausible the arguments of the late-modern theorists who shaped the postmodern sexual revolution, people like Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. It is a penetrating analysis of recent intellectual history that shows why people are willing to believe ideas today that our grandparents would have rejected out of hand—without need of argument, evidence, or proof—just two generations ago.

The only problem? The book is over 400 pages long. And most people have never heard of many of the names I listed above. I knew that many of Carl’s potential readers would not have the time or appetite to wade through so many of his finer, nuanced discussions. So I emailed Carl, praising the book as essential reading. But I also suggested that he consider writing a shorter, more accessible version of the basic argument for non-specialists. Carl has now produced that volume with Strange New World, and it sparkles on every page. It is the primer for every American who cares about a sound anthropology and healthy culture.

At the risk of oversimplifying what Trueman accomplishes, I would summarize the broad arc of his work as an account of how the person became a self, how the self became sexualized, and how sex became politicized. Of course the narrators of the psalms, of St. Paul’s epistles, and of St. Augustine’s Confessions were also “selves” in the sense of having interior lives. But the inward turn of the biblical tradition was at the service of the outward turn toward God. The “self” that Western civilization cultivated was what Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel has described as an “encumbered” self, in contrast to modernity’s “unencumbered” self. The person was a creature of God, who sought to conform himself to the truth and objective moral standards in pursuit of eternal life. Modern man, however, seeks to be “true to himself.” Rather than conform thoughts, feelings, and actions to objective reality, modern man regards his inner life as the source of truth. The modern self finds himself in what Robert Bellah has described as a culture of “expressive individualism”—where each of us seeks to give expression to our individual inner lives, rather than seeing ourselves as embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws. Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm.

Read More