Metastasizing the Modern Self
Did expressive individualism banish God?
As a child, growing up in a religiously conservative community, it seemed like I heard a lot about “moral relativism.” That’s less of a thing now. The new hated foe is “expressive individualism,” and though I’m pretty sure these villains are consanguineous, it’s interesting to think about what changed across those decades. Both are firmly contra natura (opposed to nature). Both have something to do with the moral chaos that, it often seems, perpetually threatens to overwhelm our civilization. At the core of each is the declaration, “Not Thy will, but mine be done!” Still, there are some differences.
I think in the 80s and 90s though, conservatives worried that morality was becoming optional. This was the era of “defining deviancy down” and Broken Windows Theory. Conservatives looked at the world and saw people cheerfully chucking moral standards and obligations whenever it suited them: getting divorced too much and for trivial reasons, skipping church to watch football, heading back to work while their children became “latchkey kids.” This was offensive, but not especially confusing. It just looked like people were allowing their baser impulses to take over their lives.
Today’s world is zanier. Now religious conservatives wonder: Have most people even heard of moral standards? Are there reasons for the insane things they do, or has the public square just devolved into a frenzied cultural mosh pit? What is even happening right now?
We moved from moral disapproval to incredulous gaping. It’s very relevant, of course, that the world became much more online in this period, which in general made people weirder, more performative, and hungrier for attention and novelty. Familiar, garden-variety failings like extramarital affairs were replaced by males winning girls’ athletic competitions, a robust community of “furries,” a booming “SatanCon.”
Today’s post is on expressive individualism, because I’d hate to be out of date. Don’t get complacent, though, Moral Relativism! I’ve got my eye on you too. Traditionalists have been watching this problem for awhile.
This is autopsy week, in which we consider different explanations for the death of Christendom. So let’s call this “the cancer diagnosis.” Rebellion against nature is a problem that’s been with us (and perhaps growing?) for awhile. It’s not a sudden shock, like the sexual revolution, though the sexual revolution may be among its evil fruits. That at any rate is clearly the opinion of today’s primary witness, Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Trueman’s book traces the West’s slow slide from “morally serious and grounded in objective truth” to the fantastical funhouse that we live in today. For him, this is primarily a philosophical journey, starting in the 18th and 19th centuries with Rousseau and the Romantic poets, prophets of “authenticity” and the search for the inner self. Next he covers Darwin and Marx, who dismantled Aristotelian-Thomist teleology and replaced it with a reductive, materialist paradigm. Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” and urged people to reinvent meaning and morality on their own terms. Then Freud and the Frankfurt School elevated sexual identity to the forefront of the modern imagination, paving the way to gender ideology but also teaching people to view psychological validation and subjective well-being as life’s primary goals. At this point, the old Christian paradigm is so far behind us that people can’t even really make sense of it.
Trueman doesn’t incline to “death of Christendom” language, but his narrative is easily mapped onto that template. He takes it that the pre-modern world had a kind of internal cohesion and integrity, which has been lost today with catastrophic effects. The book is offered as an explanation of how that happened. The “Christendom” of this view has a strong metaphysical element. Trueman does make use of Charles’ Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary,” the widely-shared assumptions that shape our experience of the world. But the crucial shift seems to happen first and foremost on the level of metaphysics (or rather, metaphysical beliefs). At the core of modern pathologies is the denial of objective realities: truth, family, the body, nature, God.
This has deep implications for identity politics, which is clearly one of the things Trueman is most anxious to explain. People’s identities used to be rooted in ties of blood and objective moral requirements handed to them by the Church. Today they venture forth on adventures of self-discovery and decide that their men trapped in women’s bodies. Objective reality has left the building, leaving us at the mercy of malevolent ideologies and our own fevered imaginations.
Trueman’s book is subtle and interesting; my rapid gloss certainly doesn’t do it justice. He engages thinkers seriously, making careful and sincere efforts to understand their concerns. He has a gift for making hard concepts understandable to a general audience. And it’s clear that his diagnosis has much merit. Modern people do have a way of treating truth as an optional thing, very much to their own detriment. The connections Trueman draws to gender ideology and identity politics are plausible. And yet.
Trueman’s Rise and Triumph does have a significant shortcoming, relevant to our purpose here at Christendom Reborn. Throughout the book he tightly connects the search for the self with the flight from reality, juxtaposing the “my will” of the benighted modern with the “Thy will” of the faithful Christian (grounded in truth, tradition, and the Almighty). Much of what he says about this seems right, but I still find myself with a rather important question. Don’t Christians also believe that individuals are precious and unique? That God loves us in that uniqueness, and may have specific work for us as individuals, not per se derived from our bloodline, class, sex, race, or other readily discernible characteristic or earthly connection?
Trueman suggests that pre-modern humans didn’t need expressive individualism because they comfortably drew their identities from connections of blood, soil, tribe. But now remind me: Who was it that called for us to “hate” our father, mother, spouse, children, and even life itself? Was that Freud? Nietzsche? Oh wait, no. That was Jesus.
If we keep tracing expressive individualism back past the eighteenth century, past the Middle Ages, back into the ancient world, we may find ourselves pointing the finger at… Christians. In a very real sense Christianity created this “problem.” It’s one of those things that can happen when you start telling people that God is love.
The moral here is not that expressive individualism is really healthy and fine. Much of it is deeply pathological, especially in its modern “expressive” form, which does very much trend towards novelty and self-invention. Trueman supplies valuable insight into those pathologies. And of course, he’s not wrong. Many of the moderns do want to expunge God from the picture and re-invent the world in their own image.
But it might still be true that the self is genuinely complex and interesting, that plumbing those depths is sometimes worthwhile, and more generally that what we perceive as “flights from objective truth” may really be, or be a consequence of, a sincere effort to understand realities that are more complex than previously understood.
If that’s true, it might be that effective solutions will require better and more complete answers to the relevant questions.
All right, Moral Relativism. You can come out of the corner and play for a few minutes, but let’s have no funny business! I’m still watching.
Come back tomorrow for a discussion of liberalism and its attendant evils.