The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

I had heard a little bit about this book before picking it up, in how that it helps explain our cultural thinking but was surprised to find that this book sough to specifically answer how the phrase "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" is taken seriously and understood today. A phrase like this would make no sense to someone maybe 40 years ago, let alone 100 years. Why is this? What ideas have influenced our thinking in the past for us to arrive here?

Below is quite a long summary of the argument in the book, and even then, it doesn't touch on half the ideas and consequences mentioned in the book.

Leaning on Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, this book uses these influential thinkers to trace how our current society thinks about the individual and the self.

Charles Taylor talks of social imaginary in two different ways or mimesis and poiesis. A mimesis way of thinking sees the world as having an order and a meaning and we humans are caught up in it. Poiesis sees the world made from certain raw materials out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual. In the past, the rural farmer was caught in a natural cycle of the world and had really little control over much of their farming endeavour. Today we can irrigate and control watering systems, boots plants with hormones and use all sorts of chemicals to enhance crop growth and yield. We can manipulate the world around us for our own purpose. With the help of technology and the removal of some transcended system we are in, our view of ourselves can also be seen as a raw material that we can fashion for our own meaning and purpose.

Philip Rieff puts cultures into three different worlds (with nothing to do with the same socio-economic terms we use), the first world was pagan, with the world at the mercy of the gods or "faith", the second world moved to monotheism which moved from faith to faith. Society reinforced virtues based on the transcendent law and morals are based on the character of God himself. Both these two worlds rely on morals outside of themselves, whereas third worlds base their morals, not on anything outside of the self. This removes some tangible foundation to a culture, which Rieff thinks, in the end, will not stand. Rieff also talks about "deathwork" or anti-culture art, on when people produce art to destroy the ideas of the past (second worlds) but do not produce a better standard, idea or beauty to replace it. Porn could be seen as one aspect of deathwork,  Piss Christ another. The bringing down of famous white male statues and replacing them with lesser-known people, or nothing at all could also be seen as something in this category.

Alasdair MacIntyre thinks that our actions should be judged by their outcomes in society, or that ethics only exist in a society. However, in our society is all messed up as there is no community standard by which we can judge peoples actions. MacIntyre sees that our culture primarily now uses a moral framework of emotivism, which sees all moral judgements as one of preference, or an expression of attitude or feeling. This is seen in our weak arguments for morals which today really come down to "it just feels right".

Throughout this book, the ideas from these three are scattered around to help explain the process of how we have come to be where we are. The book looks at the philosophical, psychological and political developments to explain where we are today. Starting back in the 18th century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau seemed to have overturned our concept of self and society. He wrote a Confession and in it, he talked about how he stole some pears that he didn't even need but was peer pressured into it. Rousseau reflects on this and draws out that it is being in a society that corrupts the individual. Being in a community provokes envy, hatred, lying, competition for the other etc. In our own natural state - our free state - we do not feel these things, but when we have to relate to others, that is when restrictions and shame and punishment is put on people. This is the exact opposite of Augustine who wrote in his Confessions how he stole some apples that he did not need with some mates. It is the self who is bad, not society. Rousseau turned this idea upside down and said people are essentially good and need to be free from societies restraints and conventions.

Poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake sought to encourage us back to the beauty of nature and the freedom from societal restraints. The untapped, unaffected, uncivilised nature is where we can feel what it is to be truly human. Who doesn't like to go to the outdoors and see its beauty? This inspiration from nature also overflows into ethics. Society is corrupting, we need to turn to the inward self to find what it is to be truly human. External systems like religion are restrictive on the inward self and limiting what the individual wants to do, without judgement. In the world removed from external morality, everything becomes aesthetic, so everything is really a matter of taste.

Nietzsche saw the problem of killing God and having every man doing what seems right in their own eyes. The moral assumptions of God were still present in Nietzsche's day and the moral checks hadn't bounced yet. However, Nietzsche was crying out for people to be far more consistent in their thinking. When you kill God, you take on his role, you become the creator of your own world, and this will not end well. To him, life becomes all about what brings personal satisfaction. 

Karl Marx comes along and then points out that the history of the world is a history of a struggle between people on all levels of society. People's desires are all influenced by their present historical context. Some people may want money, but that desire only arises in a culture where money exists. If we can shape culture, we can shape desires, and don't look to the church for help as it only offers false happiness in an unhappy world. 

Around this time Charles Darwin's theory of evolution comes into popular view and essentially removes the metaphysical ideas of people as being special in creation. People have no real telos, the world can be explained without a designer. This means we needed to rethink what it means to be human, as Truman says:

all three men offer rationales for a world imagined in terms of poiesis rather than mimesis. Darwin strips the world of intrinsic meaning through natural selection; Nietzsche, through his polemic against metaphysics; Marx, through his rejection of Hegel’s idealism in favor of a radical and consistent materialism. But the net result is the same: the world in itself has no meaning; meaning and significance can thus be given to it only by the actions of human beings, whether through the Nietzschean notion of self-creation and eternal recurrence or through the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism and class struggle. In both cases, meaning is created, not given.

All this turned us from external standards with the rejection of cultural and religious standards to focus on ourselves, or a move from Rieff's second world to his third world. Sigmund Freud helped moved our focus on self in the sexual direction. He helped connect sex to be seen not just as an act or an activity that we do, but something fundamental to who we are. Sex is part of our identity, meeting our sexual desires is the key to human existence. If there is nothing external to us for meaning and purpose we then need to be happy so it makes sense that we seek pleasure as an ultimate goal, and when it comes down to it, ethics is really a matter of (socially constructed) taste with no real objective foundation.

Marx's followers from the Frankfurt School helped mix the development of economic interests of society with the psychological of the individual from Freud. Wilhelm Reich saw society as a product of sexual repression and these sexual codes are used to exploit labor. These moral grounds or repression is first taken up in the (patriarchal) family in the early years of a child's life and is used to maintain the status quo. The family unit needs to be dismantled for us to be really free from this (sexual) oppression. This may not be physical oppression, but the bourgeois who enforce certain sexual acts as taboo are doing harm on those who want to be free. They are being oppressed, as a person should be free to do what they want with their own body, it is none of societies business. Herbert Marcuse made a more nuanced argument about society and allowed for a level of sexual repression to be necessary for society to function properly. 

Simone de Beauvoir helped push feminism away from arguing for equal labour laws and pay for women to show that what it means to be a woman changes over time. Someone isn't born a woman, they become one. Leaning on Freud, it is shown that women have an inner psychologically difference to men. She helped show the difference between gender and sex. One is physical the other is psychological. Leaning on Marx, she showed that women were oppressed by men, especially in regard to sexual freedom because they are the ones who get pregnant. Birth control helps free them from this slavery. Reproduction isn't a fulfilment of being a woman, but an obstacle as the body is something to be overcome and the inner self is to be satisfied. Society will be truly free when men and women can both give birth, sex will not be based around any heterosexual norms, labour itself will be eliminated by the use of technology and the biological family unit will be broken.

You can see how these above arguments have influenced our culture, it is part of our social imagination, in that no one has studied any of the ideas above, but we all kind of just know it. It has tricked down in our thinking. This book then looks at areas in our culture to show the above thinking and how it has played out today.

Porn is pretty prevalent in our society today. It sells you an idea, a concept or fantasy of sexual freedom, something society says is true liberation. Hugh Hefner with Playboy sought to sell this idea to the mainstream and was pretty successful as other trailblazers and the internet, essentially made his stuff tame. Culture today has been grossly influenced by sex, with norms being redefined, men setting expectations for their partners from porn, and music videos and movies selling the idea of sex being the ultimate fulfilment in life.

When it comes to public ethics and what and how we seek fulfilment and express ourselves we need a society and laws mimic this. There was a chapter on the US Supreme Court tracing its ideas on sam sex marriage. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) they found a right to gay marriage in the Constitution. While it did take a few hundred years for this to be clear, the book argues that gay marriage became plausible because society made it plausible (based on its shift in thinking marked above). Trueman argues that the court's decisions are mealy a reflection of society at large. For example, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), an abortion case, was upheld because of the precedent of Roe V. Wade. However, the Supreme Court approved homosexual acts to be legal in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) which overturned its earlier precedent in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). In one case it is ok to uphold precedent, in another isn't. As Trueman points out:

The key issue is not philosophical consistency in the interpretation and application of the law but the therapeutic result that needs to be achieved by any plausible means necessary. If society needs abortion rights to keep women happy, then the law must be made to yield such results. If society requires the affirmation of certain sexual activities and identities to affirm certain classes of individuals, then the law must be made to yield those results—even if the methods used to achieve these two results are inconsistent with each other and perhaps even antithetical.

The chapter goes on to look at the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), to the United States v. Windsor (2013) to finally Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). In the final decision to allow same-sex marriage, it is interesting that the courts pointed to individual autonomy, the tradition of two-person unions, the safeguarding of children and families and the traditional social order for allowing same-sex marriage. Here the judges are able to appeal to the traditional number of people involved in marriage while overlooking the traditional genders involved. Appealing to marriage being fundamental to society is an interesting argument that allows tradition to have great authority, while at the same time in other parts of the ruling where traditional ideas run counter to the current society tastes. Marriage was fundamental to society, but the court fails to see that throughout history it was a certain type of marriage. What Trueman tries to show in this chapter is not the problem of how these rulings were decided and the use of (or lack of consistent) reasoning, but that in general no one seemed to find it problematic at all, society already was in agreement before these rulings.

On the tricky issue of legalised abortions and societies stance on the issue, Peter Singer is introduced as a thinker ahead of this time, like a modern-day Nietzsche, he argues for consistency with abortion arguments. There is a section where Singer dismantles the current liberal arguments for abortion only to suggest we should be able to kill infants up to 2 years old, due to self-conscience being a condition of self, which infants don't and we are happy to kill animals on a regular basis thinking they too aren't self-aware.

The final main chapter deals with the issues of transgenderism and how it has come to be the talking point of culture. Before coming to the present there is a brief history of the unhappy alliance made between the Lesbian and Gay groups. Adrienne Rich points out that the patriarchy is still present in the gay community, for example even in the workplace lesbians are required to act more heterosexual, to come across as attractive to men, while homosexuals aren't pressured to appear more attractive to women. Rich argued that joining Lesbian and Gays together would in the end silence females voices. In the end, the Stonewall riots in 1969 and then later the AIDS crisis in the 1980s helped form an alliance as they were both seen to be victims in society. Later the T joins the LGB group as the stream of expressive individualism in our now therapeutic society kept flowing insisting that the inner self-assessment is paramount to someone's well being.

However, it wasn't smooth sailing. Janice G. Raymond was worried that reducing women to the psychological you are removing women's history altogether. A woman experienced in the world is physical, and you can just ignore or wipe out bodily cycles, the capacity to become pregnant, and life stages. To remove these physical aspects of women is akin to removing skin colour from Black history. Transgenderism also depoliticized matters of being a woman, if being a woman can be prescribed by a doctor. Germaine Greer also points out that transgender surgery "removes the most distinctive elements of the male sexual anatomy; it does not add the critical components of womb and ovaries that provide the experiences that constitute womanhood: menstruation and pregnancy." (Trueman's summary not Greer's words).

The book closes with a few statements on how the church can engage with a bunch of issues raised, although I don't think this was the main point of the book. Mainly this book very helpfully traces where ideas in our culture have come from.

There is much more in this book. There is a bit of engagement with the arguments presented, (like that of Reich's inconsistency between his own views and the oppressor), plus other streams of ideas on victimhood, freedom of speech, sexualisation of children, more examples of "deathworks", the evolution of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and the Yogyakarta Principles which we may hear more about in the future. 

The chapter on Rousseau and The US Supreme Court I thought were the most enlightening. Rousseau because of how he turned everything upside down from the individual being good and society being bad and the long shadow he had over the future. The chapter on Supreme Cout I found fascinating as it showed how inconsistent its rulings were on matters of identity and sexuality.

There is a lot in here, with lots of detail and engagement with primary sources. I think anyone doing some sociological subject at uni or someone who wants to understand how our culture got to where we can understand, accept and praise the line "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" would do well to read this book.