Anyone who’s paid attention in the last year or two has noticed that a shift is happening in the Western world, most pronounced in the anglophone countries.
There is talk of many having realised that they, on serious reflection, don’t actually accept the ideals they’ve lived for the last decade. Or, seen from another perspective, some have recognised that their rejection of specific ideas was too hasty; too thoughtless and self-centered. Somehow the experiences of the last five to six years have forced a rethink.
Seemingly out of nowhere, there is widespread talk of transcendence, beauty, personal responsibility, faith, and religion. Those who were advocating for such values even against the tide of the Zeitgeist for many years woke up one morning to find that our society’s seemingly perpetually worsening, twisting, self-consuming cultus had, like a phoenix, burnt into ashes and been born again.
Of course, I’m discussing a trend here, and there are naturally plenty of exceptions. Our society is still deeply divided in a tragic way, and this article is intended to be a contribution to understanding what underlies these divisions. Nor is the new “awakening” itself without its flaws or fringe elements.
The trend, however, is real. Whether we’re talking about high profile conversions to Christianity, well-known writers rejecting the “official narrative” and attributing it to the institutional response to COVID-19, the Catholic Eucharistic revival happening in the US, large movements for banning cell-phone usage among young children, or the rise of “populism” in virtually all western countries1, it’s clear something has shifted in the deep places of heart and mind. Even the “soft middle”2 which is less ideologically opinionated seems to have recognised that something in the air we’ve been breathing isn’t quite right; that it’s growing unchecked, and that it does not bode well for the future.
But what precisely is it? Some have suggested general terms to encapsulate it all: “wokism”, “neo-marxism”, “critical theory”, “radical individualism”, etc. But these are unsatisfactory. None of these terms capture the central element of what’s gone wrong, as they only describe downstream symptoms. They do not articulate the true nature of the problem for which many have suggested only transcendence can provide the answer. This is what we’re going to talk about in the present and following articles.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Carl R. Trueman, in his outstanding book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self has some tremendous and mind-expanding insights to offer anyone interested in understanding the new modern western world’s ideological origins.
His theory goes back further than most would suspect. Not back to the Dawkinsian new Atheism of the 2010’s, or even the general slow turn away from religion in the western world ongoing since the last half-century. Nor back to the sexual revolution, as is often posited. It’s even further back in history.
Rather, around the beginning of the 1800’s, just after the enlightenment, we see the seeds being sown and the ground well tilled for the “blossoming” of a completely new societal understanding of the “ultimate good” as well as of the nature of humanity itself.
In this series I’ll be going over the major ideas presented in Trueman’s book. Note that this is just an overview, and the meaty content of this book is absolutely worth the time, if you have it.
That being said, let’s jump in.
Trueman first interacts with the sociological observations of the late Philip Rieff, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. Rieff’s ideas are central here in portraying a bird’s eye view of the transformations humanity has experienced in the last 200 years.
Culture as prior to the Individual
Rieff argued that the traditional understanding of culture was a function of society which draws an individual out of themself and that in this drawing out, a person comes to understand who he truly is.
Culture existed as a reality prior to the individual. Not in the temporal sense that the culture exists temporally before the individual as parents exist before their children, but rather that in the hierarchy of reality, the culture came first, and the individual second. The individual was actualised and found himself in being directed out into the institutions and mores of culture.
This is an important point: culture directs individuals outward. It is greater than, prior to, and formative of the individual. We learn who we are by learning how to conform ourselves to the purposes of the larger community to which we belong. 3
This, according to Rieff, could be illustrated by sketching a progression of representative person-types which have appeared throughout history.
Stages of Culture Epitomised by Representative Types
The first stage is typified by the political man as idealised by the thought of Plato and Aristotle - the individual who engages in the public life, attends the assembly and discusses the deeper questions of life, and engages in his civic duties. In this stage, the individual found themselves precisely in this engagement in society and politics.
The second stage is then typified by the religious man, most obviously exemplified by the culture of medieval catholic Europe. The individual is actualised in commitment to the Church and its statutes, going on pilgrimages, being in mass regularly, practicing religious morality and using religious language, and so on. This characterises not just the thoughts of the culture, but also the landscapes: Cathedrals looming over every cityscape, wayside shrines at every corner, churches in every village, crucifixes on every door threshold, and so on.
As the religious began to decline through the enlightenment and the new, mechanistic view of the world incited interest for discovery, then lust for profit and invention, the economic man was born. The economic man finds his identity by engaging in economic activities, making money, starting businesses, engaging in scientific research, putting food on the table, etc.
Trueman himself does not go into the extent to which capitalist propaganda was developed in the USA and used against the masses in the 20th century. The primary aim was to promote the idea of self-realisation through the purchase of products that not only fulfilled needs but also provided an inner sense of authenticity. Business leaders and ‘propaganda specialists’ like Edward Bernays encouraged a lifestyle of buying your way to self-actualisation: ‘scratching that itch’ would truly make you whole. They succeeded magnificently in doing so. Not just in America, but slowly throughout the Western world, including Europe and Germany, albeit later.
But capitalism is destabilising by its very nature, and at the mid-point of the 20th century the economic opportunists’ search for ever new ways to produce need to keep up with growing businesses’ remarkable production capacities began to reshape society. The economic man did not last very long, and gave way to the only kind of archetypal personality that a culture focused on buying one’s way into authenticity can create: The Psychological Man.
The Psychological Man and the New Culture
For Rieff, the psychological man represents not just a new stage of culture but a new kind of stage. For the psychological man is not actualised in being directed out of himself by culture, but rather by being directed more authentically into himself via personal happiness. Here arose a profound discovery and embrace of a very specific understanding of authenticity. The psychological man has not truly become actualised until he has authentically expressed himself and his own subjective longings. His ultimate fulfillment as an individual was found in an internal sense of therapeutic well-being.
This represents a striking contrast to previous stages as the fundamental source of identity was completely inverted. Whereas previously it was the world outside the individual’s direct feelings which provided identity, the Psychological man’s internal, subjective feelings provide the new sense of self and identity.
Now, Rieff's stages here don't at all appear to be meant to be a scientific description of definite categories of society throughout time, for as Trueman himself points out, exceptions can be found in any of these ages. But the general trend rings doubtlessly true. And it will likely not surprise the reader that the last stage I've described is the one Rieff sees as characteristing the modern age — so you and me. 4
The Cultural Implications
It is fruitful here to explore the implications of this shift for culture itself. These are, of course, largely my own thoughts and not Rieff's or Trueman's: I believe that the logical endpoint of a society in which the psychological man is the representative individual is the destruction of culture (this, Rieff also claims). For culture is by definition the consensus among a group of people about certain things which are more important than (prior to) the individual's sense of pleasure and self-actualisation.
Indeed, culture is, in the age of the psychological man, no longer prior to the individual, but the individual prior to culture. Metanarratives, sexual mores, religious belief, and societal conventions which prevent the authentic expression of the self fall pray to an iconoclastic religious fervor for which the liberation of the authentic self the highest value. They no longer represent the way for an individual to find himself, but rather schemes of control devised by the powerful to oppress the masses and prevent them from being who they truly are. Trueman expressed it well in describing that the new fundamental paradigm of personal problem solving (therapy) "...ceases to serve the purpose of socialising an individual. Instead, it seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual’s ability simply to be herself."
In light of this, the institutions of culture, in order to maintain relevance, must shift to primarily facilitate the self-actualisation and internal sense of well-being of the individual rather than drawing the individual out of themselves to be caught up into something bigger.
Yet some institutions, like the Church, by the very nature of their ideological DNA, cannot shift to accept the reigning ideology without failing to be the Church. Sadly, even many modern Christians are unaware of the fact that the Church's existence is predicated upon a specific view of human nature, namely that life is not about the self but about mystical knowledge of God, and that we as humans were created with the psychological and intellectual hardware to enable the possibility of deep, lifechanging holiness, the joy of which is so strong and powerful, that it leaves the self in complete forgottenhood.
The modern world tends to entertain a rather cynical view of human nature which is a direct result of naturalistic assumptions: namely, that everything which one calls human morality is reducible to emotive sentiments explained by the brutal realitise of evolutionary psychology, and that humans have no true conscious knowledge of transcendental ethics or virtues such as justice, joy or humility.
To adopt this view of the world is quite complementary to the ideology of the psychological man, because it implies that the "consumptive self" is really all there is available to us as in our nature as humans. “Facades” of holiness and morality are just complex expressions of creaturely need and want. And nothing more.
Through this lens we can also begin to understand the backdrop of plausibility which objections against the Church "oppressing the individual", particularly regarding sexual morality enjoy. The Church is to be rejected not primarily because its fundamental idea about the world is false, but because the Church denies the highest good of the psychological man in claiming that holiness, not mere pleasure is the highest end of humanity. The Church's rejection of certain ways of life as not reflecting the proper end of human nature is not understood to be a genuine reflection of serious conviction, but rather completely reducible to prejudice and power mechanisms.
Yet the widely misunderstood reality is that the (genuinely) Christian Church requires a capitulation, a joining of a new Kingdom - one which from the outside looks very ugly to the psychological man, but from the inside is transcendental joy itself.
Now, I don't want to be understood to argue here that any one "age" of humanity has the whole truth. There are undoubtedly many things which the Church has learned from such teachers as Kant concerning authenticity and self-determination (though his teachings do not support the ideology of the psychological man). What we should be capable of, however, is recognising the subtle philosophical errors which accompany each age and protect ourselves against them with sound reasoning.
If you feel the terms here are defined somewhat vaguely and want more precision, don’t worry. That’s what the rest of the series is about. After all, what precisely is authenticity? What is the self? And most fundamentally, what is most fundamentally our true nature as humans? These and more questions we will cover soon.
The term “populism”, like the term “fascism” in Europe, has become more of a shifting boogey-man term, which carries some vague connotations of being unintelligent and incapable of understanding the nuance of “the educated elite”, and wanting to force one’s lack of intelligence on other people, tear down existing political systems, and introduce chaos and racism. I, on the other hand, would define it as a justified general discontentment with elites (who characterise culture and policy) having completely lost touch with reality due to having adopted questionable philosophical ways of seeing the world.
“Soft middle” refers to the section of society that is ideologically unreflective and tends to adopt whatever the mainstream views of its culture dictates.
All quotes are taken from Ch. 1 of Trueman's book.
Another important point to emphasise here is that the observations about the “Psychological Man” can’t possibly be forced into a religious vs non-religious, liberal vs conservative, box, as if one were “infected” by it, an the other not. Everyone is affected by this, even the most conservative and religious among us.