“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” This statement, says Christian historian Carl Trueman, would have been incoherent even as little as 30 years ago, and yet today it is considered meaningful and praiseworthy. How did this come to be? How did our society get to the point where such a statement makes sense not only within a particular subculture but among everyday people who have never taken college courses on gender theory or read postmodern philosophy?
To answer this question, Trueman wrote The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution. Published in 2020, this 400-page book attempts to trace key ideas which have become commonly accepted in our society, even while the men and women who pioneered them go largely unread by the masses. Who among us have read anything by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, or Sigmund Freud, not to mention more obscure figures like William Reich or Herbert Marcuse? While you may have heard the names of some of these men, very few people in 2022 have ever read their works, and yet their ideas resonate powerfully with millions across the globe, and their influence is seen almost everywhere from Disney to Playboy to your local school district.
“Many Christians were amazed at how swiftly society moved from a position where in the early 2000s a majority of people were broadly opposed to gay marriage to one where, by 2020, transgenderism is well on its way to becoming more or less normalized.” I confess this was true of me. In 2006 the voters of Wisconsin passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage in our state as a relationship between one man and one woman, yet when the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage in 2013, there was virtually no public outcry in our state. How did it happen so quickly?
Trueman explains that this kind of thinking is misguided. “The mistake such Christians made was failing to realize that broader, underlying social and cultural conditions made both gay marriage and then transgender ideology first plausible and then normative and that these conditions have been developing over hundreds of years. They are therefore by now very deep seated and themselves an intuitive part of life.” In other words, the acceptance of gay marriage in 2013 and of transgenderism in the 2020s is not really a recent development. Instead it is the outworking of ideas which have been part of the foundation for our society for so long that most of us do not even recognize them, let alone question them. What are these ideas? And how did they become central to our culture? That is the subject of the book.
The underlying social conditions that made gay marriage and transgenderism normative are by now very deep seated and themselves an intuitive part of life.
Part 1: Architecture of the Revolution
In the first chapter, entitled Reimagining the Self, Trueman discusses how we think about ourselves as individuals. Most of us do not think carefully about ourselves or our world, but instead rely on intuitions that are often simply absorbed from the culture. This is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “the social imaginary.” By this he means the beliefs, practices, expectations, and assumptions that members of a society share and that shape their everyday lives. So when someone today says “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body,” it makes sense to the average person to affirm his or her chosen identity and harmful not to. Not because he has studied and accepted a detailed theory of gender and its relationship to biological sex; it just seems intuitively correct to respond in that way.
Also we do not tend to think of our world as governed by objective authority, but rather as a place where reality can be shaped and molded according to our own desires. We do not live to discover our purpose and life’s meaning but rather we are meant to create meaning and choose our own purpose. Instead of conforming to the nature of real life, we expect to bend reality to our own wills. And in the technological world we inhabit, this is entirely plausible, or at least it seems so.
We do not live to discover our purpose and life’s meaning but rather we are meant to create meaning and choose our own purpose.
A third key shift in our thinking about ourselves is what Taylor calls expressive individualism, that is, “that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires.” We are encouraged to find our own way of expressing ourselves and living out our humanity. This means resisting being shaped by the expectations of society, our parents, religion, or politics. Those institutions exist, not to educate or help us learn to get along in society, but rather to serve the individual and his sense of well-being.
Reimagining Our Culture, Trueman’s second chapter, seeks to describe the influences that have led us to see sex and identity as the battleground for the culture wars of the 21st century. Our culture requires that we conform to certain codes of thought and conduct in order to be accepted, and these codes are increasingly based on personal preference rather than any sort of absolute standard of right and wrong. As Trueman notes: “‘It just feels right,’ ‘I know in my heart it is a good thing,’ and other similar stock phrases are familiar to us all, and all point to the subjective, emotional foundation of so much ethical discussion today.”
We like to think that we believe in good and bad, but these ideas have been detached from any sort of definite moral standard. Good is good because it feels good to us, and bad is bad because it makes us feel bad. If our view of self is determined to a great extent by the affirmation and acceptance of society, and if society’s ethical standard by which we will be accepted or rejected is merely based on preference, it is not difficult to see that we are adrift in an ever-changing sea. As the cultural mood changes, so does the measure of what is good and bad and so must our view of ourselves, if we hope to be approved of by society.
How did we get here? What thinkers and ideas have led to this place? That discussion begins in Part 2: Foundations of the Revolution.