Care, Ovaltine, and Multiplicity

Carl R. Trueman’s new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, is a conservative thinker’s attempt to understand how western society’s attitudes towards sex have shifted so much, so quickly. Trueman is careful to avoid diatribe – this is not a book about how far ‘off-base’ modern society has drifted, or one prone to exaggerated lament at the state of what we’re teaching our children, or similar. He draws on an impressive and wide range of thinkers – from Rousseau and Marx to the modern New Left, to modern conservative philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Having read very few of the texts which Trueman draws on, I can’t really comment on how faithfully he represents them. Suffice it to say that he presents thought from a very long list of thinkers in a way that is not difficult to follow, and what might seem like a very disparate set of parts is actually drawn together into a coherent thread.

Trueman’s basic argument is that ideas from the somewhat insular worlds of academic philosophy and political activism have bled into the popular consciousness through art, protest, and media. Popular conception of welfare is now psychological, such that we incline to think of human flourishing in an individualistic, introspective, subjective way. In parallel, the modern conception of the psyche itself puts great emphasis on sexual expression and fulfillment, the right to which is now seen as an important item on the political agenda. It’s important to Trueman’s argument that, although these things are now instinctive, they are specific to modern culture, and have their roots in lofty philosophy and political radicalism. He doesn’t actually comment much on whether they’re good or bad (though it’s not hard to guess which way he leans), or even how one would go about trying to answer that. In its most basic form, the thesis of this book is that modern attitudes to selfhood place an especial emphasis on sex, personal expression, and subjective feelings of pleasure and fulfillment, compared with other dominant cultural attitudes in the history of the west.

I think it’s hard to argue with that. What’s a little more puzzling to me is the way that I’ve heard the book recommended, as though it’s dynamite – essential reading for ‘cultural engagement’, and a useful starting point for Christians to understand how their friends think about the world. Partly this is puzzling because it’s not really what Trueman says he’s trying to do. In the introduction, he explicitly says that the book ‘is not intended as an exhaustive account of how the present normative understanding of the self has emerged and come to dominate public discourse.’ Rather, he’s trying to show that specifically modern ideas have ‘deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy’ (p29). Partly, it’s an appeal to conservatives and liberals alike to engage in deeper conversation about the historical roots of a modern debate. As such, it might help conservative Christians to speak in more compassionate and understanding ways in the context of identity politics, or across whatever cultural divide exists between conservative Christianity and secular liberalism. But I don’t think it can or should be a ‘starting point’, or required reading ‘to understand the culture’, or similar. Recommending it like this risks fuelling the impression that modern liberalism is all about lawlessness, or despising authority, or destructive individualism, or sexual immorality. This is not actually what Trueman is arguing – but if you were to pick up the book under the impression that it’s a textbook for understanding modern culture, it might be possible to read it this way. And I don’t think that would be particularly helpful.

It’s worth drawing out some of the things which Rise and Triumph leaves unsaid about selfhood and modern culture. I should stress that much of what’s below isn’t really a critique of what Trueman actually writes, so much as gently suggesting why other books are necessary, and perhaps more urgent, for Christians to understand aspects of modern culture.

One obvious point to make is that there are other corners of the popular consciousness than sexual expression, or even personal expression broadly construed. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that one of the fundamental moral dimensions in western liberalism is care/harm – good is that which promotes compassionate and helpful treatment of the vulnerable, and bad is that which exploits and hurts them. (This has an obvious correlate in Rise and Triumph – Trueman would say that liberalism isn’t unique in having this moral axis, but that its interpretation of what is caring/harmful is driven by a unique set of metaphysical assumptions). This is relevant to the above discussion because care/harm necessarily transcends individual fulfillment and aesthetics. If I’m really committed to caring for vulnerable people, and don’t consider myself to be essentially vulnerable, then it follows that, should they ever be in conflict, I should prioritise care of others over my own comfort. I should donate money to a charity promoting racial justice, even if I would rather spend it on a piece of clothing that expresses the ‘authentic me’. If I see my friends expressing ‘ignorant’ and ‘reactionary’ sentiments on social media which mitigate against helpful discourse and just changes, I should call them out even if it makes me nervous about falling out with them. 2020 furnished us with plenty of examples of liberals acting in these ways, or at least the widespread impression that they should. This suggests at the very least that there are important aspects to the popular consciousness in modern liberalism which we won’t understand better by reading about the moral genealogy of the sexual revolution. And I see no strong prior reason why understanding liberal sexual ethics is more urgent, or more fundamental, or more interesting, than understanding the codes of conduct for political engagement, charitable donation, and pursuit of justice and reconciliation.

Secondly, I think that there are other important aspects to the popular consciousness’ attitude towards sex. There are features of its portrayal in media that do not sit easily alongside Trueman’s account of the triumph of the therapeutic (of individual psychological fulfilment). One of the most powerful scenes in Normal People is when Connell’s mother Lorraine berates him for not treating Marianne with respect and generosity outside of their sex lives while they’re sleeping together. We may, as Trueman points out, be expected to laugh at 40-year old virgins, but we’re also invited to snicker at people who don’t satisfy their sexual partners with mutual pleasure, even if the sex they’re having serves a therapeutic purpose for them as an individual (this joke is made in House of Cards, at the expense even of a figure so widely revered by liberals as JFK). There’s also the trope that sex can be disappointing, banal, and not particularly desirable. This is why a character in a Victoria Wood song can raise laughs by responding to a proposition with ‘not me, not my scene: I prefer a game of rummy and an ovaltine’, or wryly remembering ‘I thought that love would be a big adventure; then I saw the spinach on your bottom denture’, or making increasingly improbable excuses (‘my mother sent a note to say “you must excuse me”’, ‘I’m boring! Let me read this catalogue on vinyl flooring’). This humour can be understood in a way that isn’t incompatible with Trueman’s therapeutic framework – if sex is good in general because it supports individual expression, then it can be undesirable in particular when it doesn’t. But I think all of these examples suggest that the modern attitude towards sex is more complex than one of pure liberation and self-expression. Rise and Triumph doesn’t even offer an exhaustive account of the modern attitude towards sex. How then can it be the textbook for engagement with the culture broadly construed?

I think it’s possible that Rise and Triumph overstates the proliferation of liberal assumptions in the therapeutic and sexual worlds. A liberal might read it and wish that they recognised more of the phenomena it describes in real life society! One example of this is the putative removal of stigma around abortion, which has apparently reduced the cost of casual sex. It’s convenient for conservatives to argue that this stigma has disappeared, but I’m not sure that’s consistent with the experience of real people considering or having abortions. More generally, there’s a basic assumption that there is a modern conception of selfhood and sexual freedom which is shared in modern culture in general. Trueman’s arguments are drawn almost entirely from European and American thinkers, and cultural phenomena in the industrialised and liberal west. There’s no sustained attempt to understand multiplicity in liberal understandings of selfhood, ethics, and sex – or even how the multicultural nature of modern America and Europe might require a more nuanced view of ideas ‘with cultural currency’ and how to engage with them. Neither does Trueman say to which subset of world cultures his argument applies. There are two basic mismatches here – the liberal political ideals haven’t transferred across either into the institutional fabric of liberal societies, and neither have they filtered into the ‘social imaginary’ of all groups of modern people. Acknowledging this requires a more nuanced view of modern culture in all of its multiplicity and diversity than is possible for a short book about a couple of ideas. So again this is not necessarily a weakness in Truman’s book as such. Rather, it’s another reason why Rise and Triumph should be read as a book about a few ideas, rather than a cheat code for understanding the 21st century or speaking into it.

A final thought is that Trueman’s approach to accusations of ‘-phobia’ may be useful for the intellectual purpose it serves in the book (tracing emotivism through modern institutions and discourses) but it was frustrating to me that he didn’t acknowledge the plain fact that sometimes the accusations are legitimate. In the darkness of human hearts, there are visceral attitudes which fuel evil prejudice and irrational animus. It’s not indulging in chronological snobbery or liberal hubris to point that out. The discussion of -phobias seemed like a missed opportunity at best – and a fundamental manual for Christians’ cultural engagement would surely have asked the hard questions about whether animus and prejudice have bled into our engagement in ‘culture wars’.