Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) may presently be the most widely read book written by an Evangelical on cultural matters. As its subtitle suggests, it covers a broad spectrum, from the philosophical sources of what he calls “expressive individualism” to the contemporary debates about sexual identity and public discourse. Given Trueman’s own body of work (not to speak of his own stated “middle ground” position on politics) and given the reluctance of well known Reformed thought leaders to weigh in on genuine controversies, it would be tempting to demand too much of this book. The author himself gives an early signal that his account is not meant to probe everything relevant (26, 29). 

For all of that, what he does cover is impressive in both its depth and breadth. He roots our present confusions in a broader historical trend. It is this more deep-rooted trend that he calls “the Modern Self” or else “expressive individualism.” No monocausal account will make sense of these phenomena, though some thinkers are more foundational than others: principally Rousseau, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, de Beauvior, and the Frankfurt School.

Because Trueman’s approach never departs from historical reconnaissance tour, it is difficult to break apart his thesis into separate sections on narrative versus causal analysis, or either of those versus present-day implications. That said, my own review will be divided into just two main parts: a tracing out of Trueman’s account and then my own critique. 

FROM ROUSSEAU’S NOBLE SAVAGE TO THE ‘CAMPUS SNOWFLAKE’

Almost as if a parable, Rousseau travelled the path opposite to that of Calvin, from Geneva to France. His thinking would do the same. Unlike Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s work by that name located the self’s rest in the mirror. For him, civilization itself is the corruption of man. There is a state of nature (not literally historical, but theoretical) in which man is born good and free, each satisfied with what he has. Even with the advent of civilization, natural sentiment is the source of sound morality. 

When it comes to Romanticism, it is one particular strand in the poetry of the generation after Rousseau that Trueman sees as noteworthy. This is especially the case with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake. Poetry was now the vehicle to cultivate right sentiments (aesthetics), to get the reader in touch with his true self (expressivism), and to affect political opinions in ways that further delegitimize traditional Christian morality (130-31). 

Marx translated Hegel’s rational-idealist dialectic of history into the same form but with material-economic class conflict. Religion, marriage, morality, and law were all recast as props of the class with power. They form the “false consciousness” of the masses who would otherwise throw off their chains of oppression. Here we can see with perfect clarity that two sides of Marx that Trueman struggles to disentangle (as if that could be done). Marx has a view of man that is materialistic, but a view of history (or social analysis) that is, well, salvageable?

It is not that man doesn’t have an essential nature, but that this nature is essentially material; and his identity is linked to his relationship to the means of production. With the rise in industrial division of labor comes the closing of the gap between men and women in demand for their labor, and so capitalism strains the traditional roles (183).

His section of Darwin is abbreviated. But here is the important contribution: Prior theories of evolution still retained teleology, whereas Darwin’s theory of natural selection removed intelligent design. First causes were reduced to matter; final causes were eliminated altogether. With the loss of transcendent ends which are designed for us, the options remaining are relentless domination schemes for those with power, and cynically living for the present for those without power. Darwinism thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating two classes, one of which will weed out the other via modern bread and circuses. 

Nietzsche, says Trueman, “calls the bluff of the Enlightenment.” Their polite atheists are represented by the first shallow crowd that the madman meets in The Gay Science. The madman presumably represents the prophet of nihilism that Nietzsche saw himself as. So the madman comes with his lantern, demanding, “Where is God?” and is first mocked by the crowds. “But here is the rub,” Trueman comments, “Enlightenment philosophers have failed to draw the necessary, broader metaphysical and moral conclusions from this notion. In fact, we might say that they have neither the intellectual acumen nor the courage to do so” (168).

What was his damage assessment in moving from Rousseau to Nietzsche? While the Romantics “had confidence that nature itself possessed an intrinsic, sacred order on which an ethical life could be built if only the hypocritical accretions of civilized society could be stripped away,” the more cynical reductionisms of Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche dissolved the sacred and the ethical as even being valued commodities. As Trueman remarked about the latter state of thought, “sacred order was a sign of psychological sickness” (194).

Enter Sigmund Freud. He began with the axiom of the modern Self, that its chief end is to be happy; yet he recasts this is in essentially sexual terms. Like Darwin’s biological scheme, Freud “provided the West with a compelling myth” (204) where a tension between sexual desire and repression is central to all else. As psychology began to be viewed in more empirical terms, all that was in its purview was transferred from the sphere of morality to that of science. Hence questions moved from one’s pastor to one’s physician, and increasingly to “specialists.”

There is a clear logic to Freud’s contribution. If one begins by (1) defining ethics down to sentiment, and the chief of those sentiments as one’s own happiness; and if one (2) defines happiness down to sexual gratification, then one has defined ethics down to sexual gratification. Freud’s psychology provided the theoretical schema for drawing the conclusion. It remained for others to make applications. 

Three more implications follow. They are of the sort that would not usually have been openly spoken in a typical Psychology 101 course in university times past. First, in elevating sexual gratification to the purpose of the individual, the purpose of sex was also altered. Trueman notes, “the purpose of procreation is subordinated to the purpose of personal pleasure” (205). That part may not seem very new. But notice what follows. Second, since (1) this is universal of human nature, and since (2) children are humans, then it follows that this is true of children from the start (206-09). Third, since the repression of such gratification is contrary to nature, any resistance to such was destined to become a mental disorder and constitutes a danger to children.

What will follow from this is that the traditional family becomes the quintessential form of sexual abuse. 

Once Trueman is done with his survey of Freud in Chapter 6, he is ready to zoom the lens out from the century of Rousseau to Freud, to the larger movement from early Modernity to the present. He does so with a concise summary statement: “The self must be first psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized” (221). 

Many things could be said about the Frankfurt School, but it is the “shotgun wedding,” as Trueman called it, between Marx and Freud that is most relevant to the thesis. These intellectuals who migrated from Hitler’s Third Reich to the shores of American academia became the seed bed for critical theory. Their convictions were driven by their adherence to Marxism, but also their disappointment that the revolutionary eschatology did not pan out after World War I. Trueman summarizes these convictions:

“the world is to be divided up between those who have power and those who do not; the dominant Western narrative of truth is really an ideological construct designed to preserve the power structure of the status quo; and the goal of critical theory is therefore to destabilize this power structure by destabilizing the dominant narratives that are used to justify—to ‘naturalize’—it” (226).

The principal vehicle for this was “culture” (rather than the economic analysis of original Marxism) and the principal targets for demolition were marriage and family. 

One of their architects, William Reich, devised the concept of the “sex economy.” It answers the problem of first-stage Marxism: “Why do members of a certain class act against their own class interest?” The “vulgar Marxist” has no answer. By transforming Freud with Marx, it turns out that the proletariat won’t budge because they are holding out for sex: the only kind of sex that present forms will allow (marriage). But what if this form is blown open? The upshot is clearer in his later work, The Sexual Revolution (1936), that early childhood sexual identity can undermine the “authoritarian” norming of the family’s influence in those early childhood years.

Herbert Marcuse would also synthesize Marx and Freud in his Eros and Civilization (1955) and make a critique of consumer society, in One-Dimensional Man (1964).  Marcuse saw genuine political aspirations “defused by a surfeit of consumer goods” (249), so that the Huxleyan “drug” effect was actually being administered by the “Right.” 

Although the formula that existence precedes essence, in Heidegger or Sartre, did not usher in revolutions of sexual nature in any explicit way, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) would draw this line. She argued that womanhood was an ideological construct, not an essential nature (255). Biology is included in this construct, becoming in her rhetoric “a form of tyranny” (259). What is more foundational is the separation between gender and sex, the former psychological and the latter biological. The upshot is this: “If human nature is not something we are given but something we do or something we determine for ourselves via our free decisions and actions, why should we tie gender identity to an objective physiological basis” (257).

TRUEMAN’S TAKE ON THE REVOLUTION: A CRITICAL EVALUATION

The first compliment that should be given to Trueman is something that may have been lost in the shuffle over the past decade of cultural controversies. Ideas matter. Worldview matters. There was backlash over a decade ago against the “big idea” thesis. We may recall Francis Schaeffer’s “staircase” model, “water” trickling from philosophy, down the stairs of the sciences, then down to the arts, then down to the man on the street. That kind of thinking has been anathematized as part of the same phenomena that Trueman is discussing. To trace back ideas to their “problems” is to assign dastardly motives and so forth. Trueman elicits the help of contemporary philosophers like Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre, to do just such a retracing from the immediate public discourse to its assumptions. 

Taylor spoke of the social imaginary, in which “most of us do not self-consciously reflect on life and the world as we live in it but instead think and act intuitively in accordance with the way we instinctively imagine the world to be” (73). The place that Trueman’s historic flow of thought empties out is the air that our generation breathes. Unless one drifts off to the banned book list section of the library, and peaks back into the past, one cannot see up onto the “upper stairs.” The most outrageous falsehoods comprise an unquestionable orthodoxy. 

All of this talk of group deception and intellectual intention brings me to the beginning of my wish that Trueman would have pushed further. There are two clearer reasons, I suggest, that he did not, and one other reason that may be possible. The first is his historian’s instinct to avoid the monocausal. That is positive in and of itself. But there is a flattening effect that can occur in historical analysis when we press the instinct to not privilege any one explanation over others. In fact, some historical figures, events, ideas, and forces just do “peak” higher than others, and indeed may form universals from which many particulars derive their meaning. 

That brings up the second hindrance to Trueman. The leading taboo of all monocausal accounts is the dreaded “conspiracy theory.” Another of Trueman’s books, Histories and Fallacies, gives a respectable debunking of a few of those. Not many want to be pegged as a conspiracy theorist, not least if one is an academic historian. And yet a moment’s reflection will show that history is made up of little else.

History is the story of all of the conspiracies that actually worked. Individuals and groups acted for certain ends, and presumably had to talk amongst themselves in the process. Those who failed to do that as well as others did were defeated and thus forgotten.

Trueman’s foray into the Frankfurt School, especially, may have raised the eyebrows of the reader at exactly this point. The hesitation toward the monocausal and the conspiratorial is a species of the larger human tendency to save face, even if we have “gospel centered” cover for what really amounts to the same failure of nerve.  

This raises the third potential stumbling block for Trueman in pressing explanations further. What does an academic, who from all accounts studied Marx himself, and who clearly understands political economy in at least a Keynesian mode—how does he see Marxism as a revolutionary, collectivist ideology relating to this developing modern Self? At points he seems to read Marx in a one-dimensional manner. For instance, where Marx focuses on that stage of the historical class conflict in which industrialization has dislocated the older authorities and ways of life, he sees Marx offering a genuine lament (179).

On the other hand Trueman acknowledges that Marx's commitment to materialism is total (176-78). And he also seems to acknowledge that it is Marx's analysis (his reductionism of all to the economic) that lends itself to the politicization of human nature (179-80). So one would think that the bulk of the analysis would break through the dam of respectable academic silence and begin tracing thick lines from Frankfurt School to, well, our schools, and our churches.

As a parallel, such lines would also seem to warrant prophetic condemnation of any political program which, as clear as the noonday sun, does the bidding of this collectivist revolution. But Trueman has an individualistic story to tell. 

One of his views into Marx must ordinarily give way; but Trueman is still in his own personal shift away from Statist ideology and cannot force himself to see that the aforementioned displacement dimension of Marx’s writing was a rhetorical ploy. We see this especially with Trueman’s “more than meets the eye” approach with respect to Marx’s view of religion. Yes, he viewed it as “the opiate to the masses,” but, Trueman insists, Marx also possessed a “more sympathetic understanding, if not of religion as a phenomenon, then at least of the religious themselves” (180). That this “sympathy” could itself be an exploitation of the “simple,” Trueman does not bother to entertain.

This in turn brings me to a predictable sort of criticism that the “classical liberal” would lodge against Trueman. I refer not only to the libertarian type, but the multitudes from that most alienated class from the church of the last two decades, those who were vaguely under the impression that the “natural rights” of individuals were to be rooted in the image of God and (thus conceived) constituted a biblical non-negotiable. That is the criticism that cries out from the title itself.

Will Trueman indeed suggest that the present unreasonableness from the Left is to be laid at the feet of “individualism,” radical or otherwise, or will he not also give an account of how collectivism at least utilizes the passions of the individual in its radicalized form? I myself had that question as I set out. Trueman’s focus on the use of sexual identity by “the revolution” does much to balance things out. However, one is still in the dark about how the natural rights of life, liberty, and property are to be conceived as anything much greater than the sort of “dignity” that was prized by the modern Self. 

Modern individualism and modern collectivism rose together, yet those who move societal institutions have fundamentally a collective program in view. Where they find individualism a convenient means to a collective ends, no doubt such perversions of the individual will be happily pressed.

While Trueman sees the symmetry between these two, he clearly favors expressive individualism as the real impetus for both the sexual revolution and identity politics of today (150). In one sense, that is the more fruitful analysis. There is the intention of deconstruction—the architects, or should I say, the anti-architects—and then there is the deconstruction proper in its blueprint form. Without a synthesis of both, the picture is incomplete. 

It is when Trueman gets down into the details on present-day effects that he is most helpful. The section on the divorce between gender and sex, in other words, that biology itself is an oppressor to the psychologized self, is particularly instructive. Here it would have been useful to say more about natural law. He does get around to it, but only a passing recommendation in his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” saying: “Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body. Some will immediately object that natural law will not persuade the wider world to change its opinions about anything. I would concede that. My concern here is not primarily for the outside world but for the church herself. She needs to be able to teach her people coherently about moral principles” (405). 

As to one last random note, Trueman brings up a helpful point about an oft-repeated and shallow tactic. The traditional argument against this or that sexual perversion is commonly met with the retort that consensual acts do not harm anyone, or that, in short, consent is the great attribute that makes or breaks moral permissibility. Trueman’s evaluation here, though simple, is a bit more probing than telling a non-Christian that he doesn’t have a moral basis for any of his views. That is true, of course, but remains general.

So consent is what makes the difference between x new arrangement and the heinous act that we can all agree is unthinkable? Trueman’s reply is “that children are often made to do things to which they do not consent, from receiving immunizations and eating their vegetables to attending kindergarten and having to go to bed at a certain time. Why should sex be privileged as to having consent?” (242)

Such an argument would not have to be made ten years ago. In fact, the argument that “homosexual marriage” would only prefigure the more heinous abominations, would more likely have earned the retort: “That’s an outrage!” or “That’s different!” But given the premises of the politicization of sex—that is, sex’s role in destabilizing the family for the purpose of the revolution—it would seem that the public commodification of children of every age for sex is an inevitable necessity. So I bring up this otherwise elementary point because it leads us to consider where it is all headed. The consent of children will not be difficult to obtain.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Trueman is certainly to be commended for “coming out” as a one who names the revolution for what it is. I join the ranks of many who struggled picking up this book: knowing that it will not be lacking in profound historical analysis, yet puzzled at the author’s relative silence over the past decade as many without his credentials have said essentially all of the same things only to be outcast for their troubles. Trueman is a top-notch historian, and especially a historian of ideas, and there may be a real sense of development in his own views that prevented him from admitting all of this to himself until it could no longer be explained in any other way.

Trueman’s momentary defense of Tim Keller against the “charge” of Marxism, his more recent defense of Grove City College for allowing Woke ideas in without so much as a faculty footnote, or his lambasting the same groups of “keyboard warriors” for sloppy uses of terms like “Cultural Marxism,” can strike one at first as a needed scholarly rebuke for Christians to “do better” in their polemics. Or else it can reasonably strike us all as disallowing anyone from bringing to light what only those with Trueman’s pedigree are permitted to discuss.

On behalf of many who have come to Christ through the gateway of Western Civilization, we beg your pardon Mr. Trueman for having insisted on all of these things and more for over two decades. It would be good to have Trueman on the team, but not so as to counter a revolution with more ambiguities.