Why does the statement “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” make sense? Why do ordinary people accept those words as meaningful? The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is Carl Trueman’s attempt to answer that question. Trueman—a professor, historian, and Christian—explains that the sexual revolution did not arise in a vacuum; it has a context, a historical backstory, and a philosophical beginning.
When it comes to understanding our present milieu, Trueman warns against two common failures: Overgeneralization, (e.g. that the sexual revolution is the result of sin) may well be true, but fails to explain why the sexual revolution took the form it did, at this time, and in this way. The other ditch treats gay marriage or divorce as unrelated particulars and misses their connection as symptoms of a broader cultural sickness.
At 400 pages, this book is not a quick read. Trueman writes with skill and efficiency, but many of the philosophical ideas which he handles with scholarly ease required digestion and Wikipedia detours from me.
The book is divided into four parts: In part one, Trueman introduces us to several key philosophers whose insights help describe our postmodern world. Part two traces the modern concept of selfhood back to the Enlightenment, specifically to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed man is innately good, but corrupted by societal restrictions. If Rousseau set the stage for modern selfhood, Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin showed that the enlightenment has no basis for morality or metaphysical meaning now that “God is dead.”
Part three turns to Sigmund Freud, who theorized that sex is the root of all human desires. “Before Freud, sex was an activity,” says Trueman, but now “sex is definitive of who we are” (221). After the failure of Marxism, the New Left joined Freud to Marx; sex, not economics, became the focus of the revolution.
Having established the basis of the sexual revolution, part four returns to examine its consequences in the present. The pornification of culture leads to “the trivialization of sex” (291). The triumph of transgenderism brings, eventually, “the end of all stable categories” (362). (Even the categories of homosexuality and radical feminism cease to have any significance when gender vanishes.)
It’s worth quoting at length here:
The long-term implications of this revolution are significant, for no culture or society that has had to justify itself by itself has ever maintained itself for any length of time. Such always involves cultural entropy, a degeneration of the culture, because, of course, there really is nothing worth communication from one generation to the next. (381)
How should the Christian respond? Trueman admits that a detailed Christian response is, understandably, beyond this book’s scope. Nevertheless, “the task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment . . . but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them” (30).