E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
Trueman Strange New World
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7933-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution
E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7933-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is a contributing editor at First Things, an esteemed church historian, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including Strange New World; The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; and Histories and Fallacies. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
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Introduction
If we take the most dramatic developments of the sexual revolution—say, the legitimation of transgenderism—it is interesting to ask what things wider society already needed to regard as normal in order for this to be first plausible and then normalized. The sentence “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” would have been nonsense to my grandfather. Had it been uttered by a patient to a doctor in the mid-twentieth century, the doctor would almost certainly have responded that the patient had a psychiatric problem and that his mind needed to be treated so as to bring its feelings into line with his physical body. Today, the doctor is more likely to respond that the problem is such that the patient’s body needs to be brought into alignment with those inner feelings. Indeed, were a doctor to respond in the earlier fashion today, he might well find himself subject to legal action. What has changed in our society and in the social imaginary to bring this new situation about?
This question can be adequately answered only when a range of phenomena, from ideas to technology, are considered. In this chapter, however, I want to focus on one particular element in this story: the granting of decisive authority to inner feelings. A moment’s reflection indicates that the doctor in the mid-twentieth century who saw what we now call gender dysphoria as a problem with the mind was working within a social imaginary that granted normative authority to the physical body. The body was decisive for answering the question of whether a person was a man or a woman, the few cases of biologically intersex people notwithstanding. Doctors today, however, grant normative authority in such cases to inner feelings or psychological convictions. We should note that this is not a “scientific” move. It is not the result of “following the science.” Science can study the body and the mind and can describe and analyze how the two connect; but how the relationship between the two is constructed in terms of which has normative authority rests upon evaluative judgments shaped by wider philosophical or cultural commitments. The question for us therefore is: Where do those commitments originate?
The story of the granting of such authority to inner feelings or psychological states is a long and complex one. Of course, human beings have always been aware that they have an inner realm of reflection. The Psalms are full of introspection and emotion. The great tragedies of ancient Greece offer fascinating glimpses into human feelings such as love, anger, hatred, and revenge. Paul’s New Testament letters offer glimpses into the inner conflict of the human heart. And Augustine’s Confessions present the great bishop’s autobiography as a prayer informed by extended reflection on his inner life. Yet simply acknowledging this inner dimension of human selfhood is not the same as authorizing it to have a decisive role in identity. The Psalms and Paul look inward but then understand that inward life in terms of the prior authority of the external world as ordered by God. The Greek tragedies are tragic in large part because of the moral dilemmas and challenges of the external moral order in which the protagonists are caught up. Augustine moves inward so that he can then move outward to God and to the reality that is prior to and greater than his own feelings and in light of which those feelings are to be understood. The transgender person, by contrast, sees inward, psychological conviction as the nonnegotiable reality to which all external realities must be made to conform. How did the perennial inner life of human beings come to hold such power over our identities?
René Descartes
One obvious source for this authorization of feelings, of the inner psychological space of human beings, is the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes made significant contributions to the field of mathematics, but his significance to this narrative lies in his philosophy. In the wake of the fragmentation of the institutional church at the Reformation, he sought to find a basis for certain knowledge. In his Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy, he set himself the task of doubting everything. He realized, however, that this path of radical skepticism still required the existence of a doubting subject. In doubting one’s own existence, for example, one actually had to concede one’s own existence as the doubting subject. This conclusion is often summarized in the phrase “I think; therefore, I am.” What is of interest to my narrative is the way this places human thought—a psychological phenomenon—at the very center of the project. Thinking is the ground of certainty. This is reinforced by Descartes’s dualism, articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy, that posited a distinction between the mind and the body. We might say, from the vantage point of current developments, that Descartes formulated the notions of mind and body in a way that gave fundamental importance to the former and potentially set the two in opposition. Though it was not Descartes’s intention so to do, establishing this psychological foundation for certainty set in place a conceptual framework that makes transgenderism plausible.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Of more significance, given his much broader impact on culture, is the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Rousseau was a strange but brilliant man. Self-taught and multitalented, he wrote novels and plays, tried his hand at musical composition, worked as a civil servant, and developed philosophies of society and education that continue to influence modern discussions of these topics. His thought was also an inspiration for both the French Revolution and the artistic movement now known as Romanticism. He was also a rather obstinate, nasty, and at times paranoid man. He famously fell out with the contemporary Scottish philosopher David Hume and notoriously sent all five of his children to an orphanage (and thus to almost certain early death) shortly after each was born.
Rousseau is particularly significant to our story because he offers a compelling and influential articulation of two ideas that help us understand the modern notion of the self. First, he locates identity in the inner psychological life of the individual. Feelings for Rousseau are central to who we are. And second, he sees society (or perhaps better, culture) as exerting a corrupting influence on the self. To the extent that society prevents us from acting consistently with our feelings, to that extent it prevents us from being who we really are. In short, society makes us inauthentic.
Identity and the Inner Life
In his autobiography, Confessions, Rousseau sets forth his purpose in writing as follows:
I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself. . . . The particular object of my confessions is to make known my inner self, exactly as it was in every circumstance of my life. It is the history of my soul that I promised, and to relate it faithfully I require no other memorandum; all I need do, as I have done up until now, is to look inside myself.1
To us, this is likely to sound unexceptional, even somewhat passé. We are raised on a diet of cultural products, from confessional-style talk shows through to classics of modern literature such as To the Lighthouse, that focus on inner feelings and our psychological lives. But in Rousseau’s day, it was radical and explosive. Indeed, that we consider this to be such a nondescript statement is itself a testimony to the incredible success of this idea in shaping the social imaginary. What Rousseau proposed as something novel and exciting is now the norm. To know who a person is—in fact, to know oneself—one needs only to have access to their inner thoughts, for it is there that the real person is to be found.
With this as his guiding principle, Rousseau offers the world what is in a sense the first modern autobiography. As Rousseau recounts events from his life—an early act of theft, a lie that led to the dismissal of a maid at a house where he was employed, his loves, his career in the civil service, the events that shaped his philosophy—his focus is on his feelings, his motivations, and his emotional responses. Of course, autobiography is a self-serving genre. The reader has no guarantee that the psychological narrative is true, and certain events that would shed him in a bad light, such as the abandonment of his children, are dealt with in a remarkably cursory, unemotional manner so as to lessen their significance. But the truth of the narrative is not the important thing. It is the psychological focus of the narrative, the prioritizing of the inner life, that emerges as a paradigm for later narratives—autobiographical, biographical, and fictional.
This inward move helps to explain some of the characteristics of modern society. Take, for example, the notion of authenticity. This is the idea that the genuine person is the one who acts outwardly in a manner consistent with how they think or feel inside. In a sense, we all can agree this is a good thing. We have pejorative terms for those whose outward behavior stands at odds with what...
