Strange New World, Chapters 5-6

Guests: Tim Matthews and Jonathan Teague

 

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

By Carl R. Trueman

 

Strange New World is an abbreviated edition of Dr. Trueman’s longer book titled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

 

In this book, Dr. Trueman is going to examine how a person became a self, the self became sexualized, and sex became politicized.

 

Chapter 5 The Revolt of the Masses

 

Technology also reinforces the focus on the individual, and upon individual satisfactions.

 

To this we might add the observation of Yuval Levin concerning the reversal in the understanding of the purpose of institutions that characterizes our present age:

We have moved, roughly speaking, from thinking of institutions as molds that shape people’s character and habits towards seeing them as platforms that allow people to be themselves and to display themselves before a wider world.

 

We can express this more bluntly: institutions are no longer authoritative places of formation but of performance.

 

Dan - some parents see their role not as an authority figure, but as a facilitator to allow your children be whatever they want to be. Many people don’t regard science/biology as being authoritative in terms of gender and sexuality, just because a “doctor” says you’re a boy, doesn’t make you a boy - that’s the mindset of a growing group today!

 

Dan - difference between reforming institutions and rejecting institutions. If you reject these institutions, what do you replace them with?

 

To use a distinction deployed by philosopher Roger Scruton, pornography is about bodies, not faces. If sex is just about my pleasure, any body will do as a partner. But in a marriage, the specific identity of the sexual partners is critical. The purpose of sex is not to have sex but to make love, to reinforce a relationship with a particular person–or, to use Scruton’s terminology, with a face, not just with a body.

Chapter 6 Plastic People, Liquid World

 

“Contours of the MODERN SELF” - the emphasis on the authority of our inner feelings; the centrality of sexual desire to this; the way in which this is now a political and not merely a personal matter; and the various cultural and technological factors that have also served to promote this way of understanding the self.

 

Plastic people - those who believe they can make and remake themselves at will

 

Liquid world - to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx, all that is solid seems continually to melt into air.

 

This highlights the fact that human beings do not simply wish to be free. We also wish to belong, to be part of a group where we are accepted and affirmed.

 

Now we are free to choose the narrative to which we wish to belong, the imagined community that will provide us with our identity and purpose. We can focus on those narratives that make us feel good and that confirm our chosen view of the world and ignore those that present challenges to this.

Jonathan - if self is god, then my experience becomes my gospel

 

Modern American society is fragmenting because the imagined communities to which people choose to belong lack any shared narrative. Therefore, the terms of recognition that one group wishes to see American society adopt are often antithetical to those of others.