So, I’m a little late to the party on this one, but better late than never.
In the book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020), Carl Trueman follows the intellectual bread crumbs that lead from the Enlightenment to modern expressive individualism.
When you are done reading the book you will understand how a millennial can say with a straight face, “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body.”
Trueman starts with the premise that man identifies himself in the context of what is most important to him. Therefore, western man’s journey over the past two millennia is described as a transformation from political man (Greeks) to religious man (Middle Ages) to economic man (Enlightenment) to the modern psychological man.
In other words, whereas in The Middle Ages, a person’s identity was defined in the context of his religion, modern man’s identity has become defined by his psychology, and because psychology through Freud became sexual, identity is now defined in the context of sexuality.
My summary though does not do justice to Trueman’s connecting of the dots from Rousseau, to Marx, to Nietzsche, to Freud, and others to the modern millennial. Trueman’s work reminded me of how Alan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, exposed American universities’ abandonment of critical thinking and the pursuit of Truth. As Bloom explained how we were being misled to think about the world, Trueman explains how we’ve been misled to think about ourselves.
The strength of the book is in its intellectual depth and Trueman’s mastery of a broad range of thinkers from economists, to philosophers, to sociologists. He even offers insight from recent Supreme Court opinions showing how our thinking about identity has morphed into the mess it is today.
The book is challenging to read because of the time Trueman spends analyzing the thought and writings of others. The depth of the analyses will likely give Trueman’s book more credibility with intellectuals than, for example, Francis Schaeffer’s, How Should We Then Live? (1976), but what Trueman’s book gains in credibility it will likely sacrifice in popularity.
My biggest criticism is of Trueman’s prognostication at the end of the book because it is profoundly negative. Trueman gives the impression the march into the abyss is inevitable, but if the book demonstrates anything it is that how man has identified himself has changed a number of times over the last 2,000 years.
Moreover, The Carolingian Renaissance, Medieval Renaissance, and Italian Renaissance are all examples of drawing on the thought of the past to transform the culture of the present.
Yes, the present is cause for concern, but the sky is not falling. The inevitable march of thought is not into the abyss of nihilism or the chaos of expressive individualism but to the mountain of the house of the Lord. Isaiah 2:2-3.
Still, this book was well worth the read, and I highly recommend it. GS