Strange New World
Strange New World
Author: Carl R. Trueman
This book scratched an itch I had to put language to, and better understand our cultural moment in the West, with its deep emphasis on expressive individualism.
The author wrote this book after writing a much longer book on the same subject, to make it more readable for casual audiences. I have his other book, and am currently reading a book by Charles Taylor that I believe is a major inspiration of this book. The Charles Taylor book (A Secular Age) is a lot harder to read, so it was nice to have this to get the overview, which gave me good context and language for the more academic, challenging books.
I am going to reserve too much commentary on the subject matter because I would like to put some sort of summary post together with my thoughts on this book, and the others I am reading on the same/similar topic. But I will leave some of the highlights I made while reading.
..known as expressive individualism, the notion that I am most truly myself when I am able to express outwardly what that voice of nature says to me inwardly. Doing that, to use modern parlance, is what makes me authentic.
..and this ideal, free human is what later writers dubbed Rousseau’s “noble savage”: the individual in the pristine state of nature, uncorrupted by the demands of civilized society with its hypocrises and share antitheses between outward behaviour and that inner voie of nature, is answerable to no one and free to be himself. That is the modern myth of selfhood that now dominates the Western imagination and that underlies the sexual revolution.
For Nietzsche, then, the great task facing human beings is to break free of the metaphysical myths that religion weaves and to shatter the moral codes that hinder individuals from being strong, We might express Nietzsche’s thought this way: freed from the burden of being creatures of God, human beings must rise to the challenge of self-creation, of being whoever they choose to be.
In this regard, all three men (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) point to something that is now a basic assumption of our modern cultural imagination: there is little or no moral structure to human nature. To be human is merely to be an intentional thinking agent. What we think and what we do is our business, as we are not answerable to any higher power or even to the authority of our own bodies. We can be whoever we want to be and act however we want to act. Morality, if it features at all, is something that is contextually determined. For example, did that person consent to the sexual act in which the two of us engaged? The act itself has no moral significance beyond that. We shall return to each of these themes later, but it is worth nothing here that the turn to art and self-creation, or self-expression runs deep in contemporary culture. Social media has allowed lives to become acts of public performance. And it is surely remarkable how much slack we allow to artists with regard to personal morality. Prior to #MeToo, Hollywood celebrities made it a virtual annual tradition to complain that Roman Polanski, convicted child rapist, was banned from the United States and this from the Oscars ceremony. We might also note how moral iconoclasm is the standard métier of the creative classes in our society. And that iconoclasm is, as it was for Wilde, frequently and most prominently sexual in character. Which brings us to the topic of our next chapter: the way in which sex and politics became so intertwined in the twentieth century.
Thus, revolution will involve the dismantling of the sexual codes on wihch the bourgeois family is built. In a frank passage Reich declares: “The free society will provide ample room and security for the gratification of natural needs. Thus, it will not only not prohibit a love relationship between two adolescents of the opposite sex but will give it all manner of social support. Such a society will not only prohibit the child’s masturbation but, on the contrary, will probaby conclude that any adult who hinders the development of the child’s sexuality should be severely dealt with.” The point is clear: sexual codes must be shattered if human beings are to be truly free. Those things that inhibit the free sexual expression, even of young children, are oppressive and prevent individuals from truly being themselves. Of course, the question immediately rises of who exactly is going to facilitate this revolution in sexual codes if the family (and later the church) have a vested interest in maintaining the old, oppressive standards of behavior. The answer lies in the last sentence of the above quotation: society will do so, by promoting this sexual freedom and dealing severely with those who oppose it. In short, sex must become a pressing political issue in which the State takes a proactive interest. Reich writes this in the mid-1930’s. No one who lives in the Western world today will find his statement to be anything less than prophetic.
And, according to Reiff, that places us in an unprecedented and highly volatile situation: our cultures must now justify themselves purely on the basis of themselves. As with the collapse of the authority of church, nation, and family, this creates a vacuum of moral authority that is filled with the competing voices of a myriad of new identities and no objective way of adjudicating between them. And that means that society’s moral order defaults to pragmatism and, put crudely, to the matter of who shouts loudest and has the most effective lobby groups.